“No.”
“Cartridge is 7.65. You still want it?”
“We’re buying a thousand rounds per gun.”
“Yes, but after that, pfft.”
“That’s our problem.”
“A hundred and fifty American dollars for each. Ninety thousand dollars. Three million six hundred thousand in French francs-premium sixty percent if you want to pay that way. Four hundred fifty thousand Swiss. We prefer.”
“What about ammunition?”
“Six hundred thousand rounds-a box of two hundred is three American, so nine thousand dollars, forty-five thousand Swiss. Still good?”
“Yes.”
“For guns, all paid before we ship.”
“All?”
“Yes. You want figs, or shoes, it’s different.”
“All right. Agreed.”
“You sell to somebody?”
“No.”
“Four hundred ninety-five thousand Swiss. It’s made?”
“Yes. When can it be done?”
“These guns are in Syria. In the armories of the French Occupation force. We bring them in caique-fishing boat. Two tons, a little more. You know Mediterranean?”
“Well-”
“It eat ships. And sailors. So then, we give back half.”
“All right.”
“Any chance you pay gold?”
“No.”
“Will discount.”
“It will have to be Swiss francs.”
“All right. We deliver to Marseilles, the lawyer will give you a few days’ notice. It will be at warehouse, maybe on dock. We’ll let you know.”
“Money to the lawyer?”
“Yes. When you bring?”
“A few days.”
“We start then.” He made a spitting noise toward his hand, thrust it out and Casson shook it. “Done,” Vasilis said.
Isidor Szapera didn’t really recover from being shot during the attempted robbery at Aubervilliers. He couldn’t run-he dragged a foot when he walked-and he had almost no strength at all in one hand. At night, his back ached where he’d been wounded and it was hard to sleep. They’d taken him to a home for retired railroad workers out in Saint-Denis, where a doctor had removed some of the bullet, but not all of it. When he could walk again, the party had offered to hide him with a family in the south, but he’d turned them down. “I can do something,” he’d said.
They trained him to operate a wireless telegraph-they suffered constant losses in radio operators, were always recruiting for that position. He worked hard hours, late into the night. He missed Eva Perlemere, and was angry at himself for having lost her. She haunted his dreams, sometimes he saw her undressing, sometimes he saw her face, eyes closed, as they were making love. The dreams woke him up.
Another loss, he thought, the Germans would have to pay for. He practiced on the dummy telegraph key until his hand throbbed. By late December he was ready to go to work and they stationed him in the attic of a house in Montrouge, just outside Paris.
He was assigned a liaison girl, Sylvie. Skinny and somber, eighteen, a pharmacy student at the Sorbonne. Her job was to maintain a clandestine apartment and telephone, to accept and relay messages, to deliver wireless transmissions as they came in from Russia, to take the answers back to the W/T operator for encryption and transmission. Liaison girls tended to last a few months, not much longer.
Szapera liked Sylvie because she was all business. La Vierge, they called her when she wasn’t around, the virgin. Some of the FTP men had tried to seduce her, but she wasn’t interested. That was fine with Szapera. When Germany was in flames it would be time enough for such things to begin again.
By late December, after the Japanese attack on the USA, the wireless traffic between the Center in Kuibyshev and the Paris stations had gone wild. Everything had changed. Comrade, went one message to an FTP commander, this is no longer a twenty-year war, this is now a two-year war, and we must act accordingly. Order- of-battle information about the Wehrmacht went east-this unit in Normandy, that divisional insignia seen on a train-along with production norms from French arms factories, diplomatic gossip, intelligence gathered from photographed papers and stolen maps, a vast river of coded signals.
In return, the Kuibyshev Center kept demanding more. They sent orders, instructions, requests for clarification, questionnaires for spies, directions of all kinds: you will find out, you will watch, you will photograph, you will obtain. The radio operators could transmit safely for fifteen minutes, but the Center kept them at it for hours.
German signal detection units worked around the clock. Vans with rotating antennas cruised the streets, listening for transmissions, working up and down the scale of the wireless frequencies. The radio operators were assigned lookouts at both ends of the street, to watch for trucks. The Germans knew it, and started to use men carrying suitcases with receiving sets packed inside.
It snowed on the night of 30 December. Just after midnight, a long message came in from the Center. Reception was difficult- somewhere between Kuibyshev and Paris there was an electrical storm, the airwaves crackled and hissed, the Russian operator’s dots and dashes disappeared into sudden bursts of static. Please repeat. Szapera turned the volume on the receiver up to ten, the end of the dial, played with the tuning device- trying to find clear air on the edge of the frequency, then pressed his hands against the headphones.
At 1:20 the transmission ended. A signal indicated further transmission in fifteen minutes, change of frequency to 3.8 megacycles. Szapera rubbed his eyes, started to decode the previous message. For M20, Comrade Brasova, eight questions for the agent code-named GAZELLE.
The phone rang. Once. Sylvie looked up from her textbook, Szapera stopped writing. “Signal,” she said.
“Have a look,” Szapera said.
She went to the window, edged the blackout curtain aside. The wet snow melted as it hit the pavement. The building across from her was dark and silent. She raised the window an inch and listened. Slowly, a car drove down the street, turned the corner, and disappeared into the night.
“A car,” she said.
“What kind?”
“Some old kind of car, I don’t know which model.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
Probably a false alarm. Szapera went back to work-after all, he was only in danger when he was transmitting. Final assignment for Brasova’s agent: Have her record the serial number stamped in the margin of the document. The next section of the transmission was for J42. Weiss, he thought. Item one: At the Lille railway freight office on the rue Cheval…
Again, the telephone.
“Something’s going on,” Szapera said.
“Yes.”
Szapera looked at the small coal stove in the corner, the edges of the firebox door glowed bright orange. He could start burning papers if he felt it was necessary. There was a revolver on the table beside the wireless.
“Who are the lookouts tonight?” he asked.
“There is only one, Fernand. The other is in the hospital.”
