At dusk they took their pleasure; they sat in the window, high above the street, peering down on Parisian heads, drifters crossing from the Boul Mich, gazing and dawdling, revellers—Paris seemed not to be without them on any night of the week—and customers of the brothel below, some indistinguishable from anyone else, others so obviously nervous.
Over a bottle of Chablis she raised the Russians again.
“What are they waiting for?”
“Oh, there are a few things for you to learn. Nothing quite as difficult or as important as our masters think. Spy nonsense. Basic encoding. How to use a dead-letter box . . .”
“How do you use a dead-letter box?”
“Just like an ordinary letter box, only you look both ways as though you were entering a brothel not posting a letter, thereby seeming completely shifty and attracting the maximum attention . . .”
As he spoke a man below did exactly that. He’d said it just to make her giggle.
“And, of course, we’re waiting for the war to end. France is quite convinced it ended last August but we know better, don’t we?”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not taking this seriously?”
“Because one cannot take it seriously. There are things to be done; of course, there are things to be done, and things you must know before they send you on to London, but perhaps there are other things, more important things, things seemingly unconnected to the nuts and bolts of the cloaks and daggers.”
“Things? Such as?”
Serge said nothing to this. Merely stretched out his arm, grabbed the bottle of Chablis, and topped her up, smiling as he did so.
“How many know?” she said.
“How many know what?”
“About you.”
“None, I hope. I have appeared as fickle and woolly minded as every other Parisian, with a bit of effort. Not pro-Vichy, that would be too great an illusion and utterly unpalatable to me, but I have supported the Communists at times when everyone supported the Communists and seemed no more than the laziest of fellow travellers. Picasso actually joined the party quite recently. I could have done that, published a statement as romantic, self-centred, and innocent as his, and next winter I could leave as he will surely do with some equally self-centred, romantic denunciation.”
“And your friends?”
“Such as?”
“Zozo and Zeke?”
“Not friends, lovers.”
“Your lovers?”
“And each other’s.”
“But they’re brother and sister.”
“No, that’s just their . . . game.”
“Serge, is that all this is, a game? Is it all about just beating the system? (pause) What exactly is it you do for Mother Russia?”
Serge shrugged the way Zeke did, every inch the Frenchman while speaking as a Russian.
“As I was saying, there really are things you need to learn while you’re here. Now . . . let me be the one to change the subject. You have not played your cello yet. It has been here a day and a half. You have tuned up, I heard you, but you play nothing. Why so?”
He seemed to have a way of getting to the heart of a matter. The question deserved an answer.
“I’m scared,” she said. “Scared shitless.”