Declare

squatting on the grass farther away, passing a bottle of white wine back and forth. All of them looked younger and healthier than the fishermen and clochards Hale had seen so far.
    He turned to Elena and said, in a loud and irritated voice, “Very well! I love you! God!”
    Elena stared at him in surprised embarrassment, then shook her head. “Oh, you are a beast!” She began snuffling and turned back toward the broad lanes of the Pont-Neuf.
    Hale turned too and strode after her, not glancing back at the men. “Did I misunderstand you, somehow? God knows I’m trying to be cooperative here! I—”
    She took his arm and shook it as they hurried below the statue of Henri IV. “That’s enough,” she said quietly. “And that was clever, very naturally in media res —we couldn’t simply have turned in our tracks and walked away without a word after we saw them, and the rudeness of it was a completely convincing touch.” She smiled at him, again looking very young. “You are angry that I love the Soviet State, and not you.”
    “You love the Soviet State more than you love me,” said Hale, “was how I understood it.” He shrugged. “Actually.”
    “We must try to get another wireless set,” she said. “It’s likely that the local Communist Party has at least a couple that they are afraid to use, or even admit to. I wish I still had the automobile.” She was snapping her fingers as she thought. “I must assume that my own agents are sound. I will get black market passports for us, the clumsy things known as gueules cassées , worthless to show the Gestapo but good enough to fool the concierge at a pension somewhere, so that we can get rooms; we don’t dare try to get good new passports, for I believe all the networks have used the pass-apparat services of Raichman”—she glanced at Hale—“another man from Palestine, and our best cobbler of forged passports and supporting cover documents—and he might be the agent who has gone over to the Germans.”
    Hale nodded and helped himself to some of the nuts in the newspaper sheaf she carried. “And we must find some lunch,” he said.
    She shook her head. “Breakfast was too expensive, now, and I have to buy two gueules cassées , and we can’t be certain of my meeting the courier with our pay tomorrow. We’ll eat after sundown—cheaply.”
    Elena found rooms for them in the attic of a house in the Latin Quarter, on a street that, at least for the moment, had continuous electrical current. She made Hale wait in the empty, slant-ceilinged chambers while she went out to meet the courier and then try to establish contact with the Communist Party—she knew the names of two Party members and where they lived, and she was confident that she could get a radio through them if they knew of one to be had.
    Hale sat on the gable windowsill overlooking the medieval street, scanning the roof and gutters and chimney pots for good places to string an aerial and an earth wire, and late in the afternoon he saw her appear in the apricot sunlight for a moment from around the corner by the Panthéon, then come striding forward into the shadow of the ranked housefronts as she forced a perambulator over the cobblestones rapidly enough to scramble the brains of any baby in it; but he was bleakly sure that it concealed a new radio, and he hoped she was breaking the filaments and leads by shaking it up. He hurried down to the street door to help her carry the baby carriage up the four flights of stairs.
    There was indeed a new radio in the carriage—along with, somehow, a Dutch book on architecture—but there was also bread and cheese and a bottle of Italian grappa, and Elena sat down on the room’s bare floorboards and pulled the cork out of the bottle and took several deep swallows before she spoke.
    “I got our money, right at the first meeting place,” she gasped, holding the bottle out toward him, “but it was a different courier— and he spoke to me.”
    Hale took several gulps of the brandy himself. “So?” he said, exhaling. “Don’t they usually speak?”
    “Not more than the password phrases. He gave me that book and said it contains some messages that need to be sent off to Moscow immediately. The money courier isn’t supposed to have any access to intelligence. And when he gave the book to me it was wrapped in bright red paper!”
    “Ah!” The book wasn’t wrapped now, and of course the colored paper would have been a vivid aid for any