Declare

aerial again, and plugged in the radio set—but though they braced themselves for another bout of wind and scorched floors and idiotically accelerated signal, or contrarily for the disappointment of finding that the set had been wrecked, in fact it was a session just like the ones he had experienced during the last ten days in the Rue le Regrattier house—the radio worked perfectly, but his call-sign drew no response from Centre.
    Elena composed a note to the agent Cassagnac, proposing a meeting, and she went off by herself to put it in what she called a dubok , which she told Hale could be any agreed-upon space that was not likely to be disturbed—a gap behind a loose brick in a quiet alley, a knothole in a remote tree, a flap of loose carpet in a cinema. Duboks were generally used only once, and the recipient often hired some random passerby to walk ahead and make the pickup. The best duboks , she told him, were often to be found in the ornate, dusty vestibules of churches, which led Hale to believe that wherever the security-minded girl was going to put the note, it would not be in a church.
    At the end of the week they moved again, and on the following Monday morning they went to meet with the agent Cassagnac. When Hale asked how she had learned where and when to meet the man, he was told that of nine broken windows in an abandoned convent in Montparnasse, three had been repaired with cardboard.
    To meet Cassagnac they bought an electric torch and then passed through a low door in the Rue de la Harpe, which Elena said was the oldest street in Paris; and when by the torch’s beam they had picked their way down a zigzag succession of worn stone stairs, their hair fluttering in the cold clay-scented breeze from below, they found themselves in a cavernous chamber lit only in sections by paraffin lanterns hung on pillars that flanked gaping arches. The yellow glow of the lanterns disappeared far overhead in stray gleams on a concave stone ceiling, and wooden tables were arranged on the broad flags of the floor.
    A man’s voice spoke—“Et Cetera!”—and in spite of the echoes Hale was able to locate a figure sitting at one of the farther tables. The man went on, in French, “And Monsieur Lot.” He pronounced it Low , which nettled Hale. “Join me, please.”
    Hale and Elena shuffled forward across the uneven floor, and from the cold drafts Hale got the impression that a number of tunnels extended out of this chamber, perhaps even under the river—and he was sure that this floor was Roman architecture, if not older. Catching a nimble fugitive down here would be impossible.
    A bottle sat on the man’s table, and after they had sat down on a bench opposite him, he poured two glasses full of what proved to be a vaporously aromatic cognac. He appeared to be about forty, with graying brown hair curled back over his ears and falling onto his forehead, and his lean face was lined with Gallic humor and melancholy. He wore a gray sweater under a battered dark jacket.
    “You are adrift,” he said, “and the relocation apparat isn’t working.”
    “Centre seems to be abandoning us,” Elena said, and she told him about their address having been broadcast insecurely, and described the disorder at the place of conspiracy in front of St.-Sulpice. Hale noted that she did not mention the weirdly accelerated signals and the burned floor of a week ago.
    “Call it a testing,” Cassagnac said, “or a distillation. Survival of a few, which will include an increased percentage of the most genuinely committed. Before he himself was executed, Yezhov of the NKVD used to say, ‘Better that ten innocent people should die than that one traitor should go undetected.’ ”
    “I met Theo Maly,” Elena said in a cautious voice, “the Hungarian illegal agent, the ex-Catholic priest. He knew he was going to his death, when he obeyed the NKVD summons back to Moscow.”
    “You were a child, and Maly had great charm.” Cassagnac sipped his brandy. “Charm, wit—intelligence, even—these are I think preliminary catalysts, like picture books for children: useful ladder rungs for awakening people, but not things for the people to cling to, once they’ve been awakened. I believe Russia has a… a primitive guardian angel, which must be denied at every turn; and those who persist in loving the angel, and merit her special assistance, must be killed—ideally after they have given their full measure of acceptable benefits to the