Declare

interrupt, so he went on in a fast whisper, “You know what a summons to Moscow means; you know what it meant for your friend Maly, in spite of his filthy clochard rhythms. ‘Retired’ is right. Listen, in the entire rest of your natural life you’ll surely be able to do something for the Communist cause, something you wouldn’t be able to do if you let them kill you now. Cassagnac said that this generation of the Soviet secret services will be killed in their own turn before long, and that the next lot is likely to be more reasonable. Wait for them, with me. I love you. Come to England with me.” His voice was shaking, and for the first time in three months he thought of her again as Lot’s wife. “Don’t look back.”
    Now tears spilled down her cheeks; she cuffed them away. “ ‘Come to England’! You might find it difficult getting to England yourself, as Marcel Gruey the embusqué Swiss student. Answer me honestly, once and for all: will you come with me?”
    “I won’t go to Moscow.” He tried to sound confident when he added, “I really think you won’t either.”
    Tears still streaked her face, but her expression was blank. “I would sooner try to… live on the river bottom, and breathe water like the fishes, than disobey my masters. If it is their will that I be shot in the Lubyanka cellars in Moscow, then that is my will too. You and I will not see each other again, I think.”
    “Elena,” he burst out, “the jump from the house to the pension roof was too far—I would have fallen into the alley, but”—he took a deep breath and looked away from her—“Cassagnac’s damned belt— didn’t fall. It kept moving in a straight line, like a gyroscope resisting a sideways pull. Your radio was going mad, right?” He was sweating. “Something was paying attention to us ten minutes ago, something like what burned the floor of the garret in the house by the Panthéon. If you go to Moscow, you’ll be getting more deeply involved in this, this God-damned stuff!”
    She was pale, and her head swung back and forth wearily. “Moscow found it efficacious to ally herself with Germany,” she said, “for a while. If realpolitik requires that she ally herself with other abominable forces now, it is not my place to be… scrupulous, fastidious.”
    Put it off, Hale thought. “Very well.” He sighed shakily. “But we can travel a little way together. To hell with Marcel Gruey—I can travel with you, as far as Lisbon, as Philippe St.-Simon the cork wholesaler. He’s an established business traveler, a collaborator, traveling with his sister—he’ll have no problems.”
    Her momentary control broke, and now she was sobbing softly. “Oh, Marcel!—Lot—but you should have lied to me, pretended to be willing to obey the order, and then just run away from me in Lisbon. Now I cannot possibly give you the St.-Simon passport.”
    He stared at her, his mouth open. Her determination was as obviously genuine as her distress. It didn’t even occur to him to be angry—he had known from the first that she was as deeply committed to communism as he was to England, as he had once been to Roman Catholicism.
    “What chance,” he asked slowly, watching his pulse jog his relaxed hand on the brandy glass, “do you think Marcel Gruey has of getting a flight to Lisbon?”
    The padded shoulders of her sweater jerked up and down in a shrug. “He’s a citizen of a neutral country, wanting to visit another. Buy a round-trip ticket, it will look better, if you are able to afford it. You’ve studied your Swiss cover well enough to get through any interrogation they’re likely to bother with. At worst, you’ll have to stay in France—live with your clochards until Russia defeats the fascists.” She brushed splinters of roof shingle from her hair onto the tabletop, and her blue eyes stared at him miserably. “You’re a bad man, I think—no, a good man but a bad agent, a bad Communist—but nevertheless I hope you don’t hate me.”
    He drained his glass, hoping that the alcohol would maintain a perspective that he feared he wouldn’t have when he was sober. “I love you, Elena,” he said hoarsely when he had clanked the glass back down. “And I’m— glad that I didn’t lie to you.” About that one thing, at least, he thought.
    She nodded, and stirred herself to pull the old mirror out of her pocket. She turned it toward him and asked softly, “Do you want to see a monkey?” The glass had