Declare

illegal basis—with the left hand, at arm’s length, unacknowledged and deniable. If you stay out of the action in this current wave of purges, Centre will certainly go on using you … for at least another couple of years. And if by then you are alert enough to see the next purge coming, you may hide through that one as well. I am one of the old illegals, reduced now to working in my own country; but I hope to live to see real communism achieved in the world, and to that end I disappear from time to time, and I see to it that my skills are never indispensable—it is the indispensable agents who are always the first to be purged, because their very existence proves an inadequacy in the Party as a homogenous whole.”
    Hale blinked at the man. “You’re saying don’t trust the Party,” he said levelly, hoping Elena was paying attention and that her faith in her corporate “husband” might be shaken.
    “Not at all, comrade, don’t misquote me. I’m saying the Party can be trusted absolutely to do what’s best for humanity—and if you can find no way within the rules to avoid a deathsentence, you should trust the Party to be doing the best thing, and cooperate. Maly agreed with this, and obediently assented to his own death.”
    “That’s right,” said Elena slowly, nodding. “If I’m to die for the Party, I would prefer that it be at the Party’s hand. So Lot and I will be obedient but not evident for a while.”
    Hale realized that he couldn’t run back to England now, and abandon poor idealistic Elena in this insane chess game. “I’m glad to understand you correctly,” he said. “That’s what we’ll do.” But he drained his brandy and poured himself another full glass, understanding for the first time in his life something of what drunkards sought in alcohol.
    Cassagnac rapped the table with his knuckle, and he said abruptly to Elena, “Thistles, flowers—plants; did Maly ever talk about such things with you, my dear?”
    She stared at him. “I don’t think so. He cooked a dinner for us once, he might have talked about herbs.”
    Cassagnac crinkled his eyes and nodded, then turned his penetrating gaze on Hale. “You were recruited in a garden. Why were you there?”
    “I was in Piccadilly Circus—oh! the woman, before that. The botanical garden at Oxford.” I was naked, and I hid myself , he thought. “I don’t know. It was across the road from my college.” He wondered helplessly if a new secret chemical weapon were based on a plant extract, the way some medicines were; he had read that aspirin was derived from willow bark.
    Cassagnac stared from one of them to the other for a few seconds, then exhaled a laugh and tossed back his head. “Forgive me, I was instructed weeks ago to ask you both this at the earliest opportunity. And now I have.” He pulled an envelope from inside his jacket and slid it across the table to Elena. “I have received no other instructions regarding you,” he said, “so I certainly have no reason not to give you this lot of American dollars and French francs and deutschmarks; it should sustain you for several weeks. When I may next be in contact with Centre, I will relay your ignorance of botanical matters, and your request for instructions, and no doubt I will at that time be given orders having to do with you.”
    “I think it would be best if we—did not meet with you again,” said Hale.
    Cassagnac shrugged and smiled. “The arch directly to your right will lead you up a set of stairs to the basement of an ironmonger’s shop in the Rue de Savoie. No one will be surprised to see you appear. Buy a belt there, before you go out onto the street. You won’t forget?”
    Through steamy windows at the back of the shop, Hale could see that it was raining outside, and water plunked into pails on the wooden floor. Hammers and shovels and tool kits crowded most of the racks under the dim electric bulbs, but when Hale asked about belts he was directed to a bin up by the street windows, next to a stack of rusty lightning rods. Elena lifted a belt from the bin and handed it to him.
    Aside from pictures of the Egyptian looped cross in history books, this black iron belt buckle was the first ankh that Hale had ever seen. It looked too crude and bohemian even for his neglected embusqué cover, but it was the only sort of belt the shop sold, so he obediently bought it; and he wasn’t pleased to look at it out in the lowering gray daylight and see that a