An Officer And A Spy Part 13

"And did he say anything else of interest?"

Lauth meets my gaze and holds it. "No. We just went over the same old ground again and again. He left at six to catch the train back to Berlin."

"He left at six?" I can no longer suppress my exasperation. "You see, gentlemen, this just doesn't make any sense to me. Why would a man risk travelling seven hundred kilometres to a foreign city to meet intelligence officers from a foreign power in order to say almost nothing? In fact to say less than he'd already told us in Berlin?"

Henry says, "It's obvious, surely? He must have changed his mind. Or he was lying in the first place. What a fellow blurts out when he's drunk at home at night with someone he knows is different to what he might say in the cold light of day to strangers."

"Well why didn't you take him out and get him drunk then?" I bang my fist down on the desk. "Why didn't you make some effort to get to know him better?" Neither man answers. Lauth looks at the floor, Henry stares straight ahead. "It seems to me that you both couldn't wait to get back on that train to Paris." They start to protest but I cut them off. "Save your excuses for your report. That will be all, gentlemen. Thank you. You may leave."

Henry halts at the door and says, with quivering and affronted dignity, "No one has ever questioned my professional competence before."

"Well I'm very surprised to hear it."

After they have gone, I lean forward and put my head in my hands. I know that a decisive moment has just been reached, in terms of both my relations.h.i.+p with Henry and my command of the section. Are they telling the truth? For all I know, they might be. Perhaps Cuers really did clam up when he got into their hotel room. Of one thing I am sure, however: that Henry went to Switzerland determined to wreck that meeting, and succeeded, and that if Cuers told them nothing it was because Henry willed it to be so.

Among the files demanding my attention that day is the latest batch of censored correspondence of Alfred Dreyfus, sent over as usual by the Colonial Ministry. The minister wishes to know if I have any observations to make "from an intelligence perspective." I untie the ribbon and flick open the cover and begin to read: A gloomy day with ceaseless rain. The air full of tangible darkness. The sky black as ink. A real day of death and burial. How often there comes to my mind that exclamation of Schopenhauer at the thought of human iniquity: "If G.o.d created the world, I would not care to be G.o.d." The mail from Cayenne has come, it seems, but has not brought my letters! Nothing to read, no avenue of escape from my thoughts. Neither books nor magazines come to me anymore. I walk in the daytime until my strength is exhausted, to calm my brain and quiet my nerves ...

The quotation from Schopenhauer leaps out at me from the file. I know it; I have used it often. It never occurred to me that Dreyfus might read philosophy, let alone harbour a blasphemous thought. Schopenhauer! It is as if someone who has been trying to attract my attention for a long while has finally succeeded. Other pa.s.sages catch my eye: Days, nights, are all alike. I never open my mouth. I no longer ask for anything. My speech used to be limited to asking if my mail had come or not. But I am now forbidden to ask even that, or at least, which is the same thing, the guards are forbidden to answer even such commonplace questions. I wish to live until the day of the discovery of the truth, that I may cry aloud my grief at the torture they inflict on me ...

And again: That they should take all possible precautions to prevent escape, I understand; it is the right, I will even say the strict duty, of the administration. But that they bury me alive in a tomb, prevent all communication with my family, even via open letters-this is against all justice. One would readily believe one is thrown back several centuries ...

And on the back of one intercepted and retained letter, written out several times as if he is trying to commit it to memory, is a quotation from Shakespeare's Oth.e.l.lo: Who steals my purse steals trash. 'Tis something, nothing: 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands.

But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him And makes me poor indeed.

As I turn the pages, I feel as if I am reading a novel by Dostoyevsky. The walls of my office seem to melt; I hear the ceaseless crash and roar of the sea on the rocks beneath his prison hut, the strange cries of the birds, the deep silence of the tropical night broken by the endless clumping of the guards' boots on the stone floor and the rustle of the venomous spider crabs moving in the rafters; I feel the saturating furnace of the humid heat and the raw itch of the mosquito bites and ant stings, the doubling-over stomach cramps and blinding headaches; I smell the mouldiness of his clothes and his books destroyed by damp and insects, the stink of his latrine and the eye-watering clinging pale smoke of the cooking fire built from wet green wood; above all I am hollowed by his loneliness. Devil's Island is twelve hundred metres long by four hundred wide at its maximum point; it has a surface area of just one-sixth of a square kilometre. It wouldn't take long to map it. I wonder if he remembers what I taught him.

After I have finished reading the file, I take up my pen and write a note to the Colonial Minister informing him that I have no comments to make.

I place it in my out-tray. I sink back in my chair and think about Dreyfus.

I became professor of topography at the ecole Superieure de Guerre in Paris when I was thirty-five. Some friends thought I was mad to take the post-I was already a battalion commander in Besancon-but I saw the opportunity: Paris is Paris, after all, and topography is the fundamental science of war. Could a battery at A bring fire to bear on N? Would the churchyard, village Z, be under fire of a battery at G? Could a picket be posted in the fields immediately east of N, unseen by an enemy's vedette at G? I instructed my students in how to measure distances by counting their paces (the more rapid, the more accurate); how to survey terrain using a plane table or a prismatic compa.s.s; how to sketch the contours of a hill in red pencil using a Watkins clinometer or Monsieur Fortin's mercurial barometer; how to bring the sketch alive by mixing in green or blue chalk sc.r.a.ped from a pencil in imitation of a flat wash of watercolour; how to use a pocket s.e.xtant, a theodolite, a sketching protractor; how to make an accurate representation from the saddle under fire. Among the students to whom I taught these skills was Dreyfus.

However hard I try, I cannot recall our first meeting. I looked down from the lecture podium week after week at the same eighty faces and only gradually did I learn to distinguish his from the others: thin, pale, solemn, myopic in his pince-nez. He was barely thirty but his lifestyle and appearance made him seem much older than his contemporaries. He was a husband among bachelors, a man of means among the perennially hard up. In the evenings when his comrades went out drinking he returned home to his smart apartment and his wealthy wife. He was what my mother would have called "a regular Jew," by which she meant such things as "new money," pus.h.i.+ness, social climbing and a fondness for expensive ostentation.

Twice Dreyfus tried to invite me to social functions: on the first occasion to dinner at his apartment on the avenue du Trocadero and on the second to what he called "some top-cla.s.s shooting" he had rented out near Fontainebleau; on both occasions I declined. I didn't much care for him, even less so when I discovered that the rest of his family had elected to remain in occupied Alsace, and that Germany was where his money came from: blood money, I thought it. At the end of one term, when I failed to award him the high marks for cartography he believed he deserved, he actually confronted me.

"Have I done something to offend you?" His voice was his least attractive feature: nasal and mechanical, with a grating trace of Mulhouse German.

"Not at all," I replied. "I can show you my marking scheme if you like."

"The point is, you are the only one of my tutors who has given me a low mark."

"Well," I said, "perhaps I don't share your high opinion of your own abilities."

"So it's not because I'm a Jew?"

The bluntness of the accusation took me aback. "I am scrupulous not to let any personal prejudices affect my judgement."

"Your use of the word 'scrupulous' suggests it might be a factor." He was tougher than he looked. He stood his ground.

I replied coldly, "If you are asking, Captain, whether I like Jews particularly, the honest answer I suppose would be no. But if you are implying that because of that I might discriminate against you in a professional matter, I can a.s.sure you-never!"

That concluded the conversation. There were no more private approaches after that; no further invitations to dinner or to shooting, top-cla.s.s or otherwise.

At the end of three years' teaching, my gamble paid off and I was transferred from the ecole to the General Staff. There was talk even then of sending me to the Statistical Section: the skills of topography are a useful grounding for secret intelligence. But I fought hard to avoid becoming a spy. Instead I was made deputy chief of the Third Department (Training and Operations). And here I ran across Dreyfus again.

Those who graduate in the highest places from the ecole Superieure are rewarded by a two-year attachment to the General Staff, consisting of six months in each of the four departments. It was part of my job to supervise the placement of these stagiaires, as they are called. Dreyfus had pa.s.sed out ninth in his year. Therefore he was fully ent.i.tled to come into the Ministry of War. It fell to me to determine where he should go. He would be the only Jew on the General Staff.

It was a time of growing anti-Semitic agitation within the army, whipped along by that poisonous rag La Libre Parole, which alleged that Jewish officers were being given preferential treatment. Despite my lack of sympathy towards him, I took some care to try to protect Dreyfus from the worst of it. I had an old friend, Armand Mercier-Milon, a major in the Fourth Department (Movement and Railways), who was entirely free of prejudice. I had a word with him. The upshot was that Dreyfus went to the Fourth for his initial placement at the start of 1893. In the summer he moved on to the First (Administration); then at the beginning of 1894 to the Second (Intelligence); and finally in July he came to my department, the Third, to complete his rotation on the General Staff.

I saw very little of Dreyfus throughout that summer and autumn of 1894-he was often away from Paris-although we would nod civilly enough to each other if we happened to pa.s.s in the corridor. From the reports of his section chiefs I knew that he was regarded as hardworking and intelligent but uncongenial, a loner. Some also spoke of him as cold and arrogant to his equals and obsequious to his superiors. During a General Staff visit to Charmes he monopolised General Boisdeffre over dinner and took him off for an hour to smoke cigars and discuss improvements in artillery, much to the annoyance of the more senior officers present. Nor did he make any effort to disguise his wealth. He had a wine cellar built in his apartment, employed three or four servants, kept horses in livery, collected pictures and books, hunted regularly and bought a Hamerless shotgun from Guinard & Cie on the avenue de l'Opera for five hundred and fifty francs-the equivalent of two months' army salary.

There was something almost heroic in his refusal to play the part of the grateful outsider. But looking back, one can see it was a foolish way to behave, especially in that climate.

A regular Jew ...

Operation Benefactor languishes in the August heat. There are no fresh sightings of Esterhazy in the rue de Lille. Schwartzkoppen seems to be away on leave. The Germans' apartment is shuttered up for the summer. I write to Boisdeffre on his estate in Normandy asking for permission to obtain a sample of Esterhazy's handwriting, in case it matches any sc.r.a.p of evidence retrieved by Agent Auguste. My request is turned down on the grounds that this would represent "a provocation." If Esterhazy has to be removed from the army, Boisdeffre reiterates that he wants it done quietly, without a scandal. I raise it with the Minister of War. He is sympathetic, but on this issue he refuses to overrule the Chief of the General Staff.

Meanwhile the atmosphere inside the Statistical Section is as noxious as the drains. Several times when I step out of my office I hear doors close along the corridor. The whispering starts up again. On the fifteenth there is a small party in the waiting room to say goodbye to Bachir, who is retiring as concierge, and to welcome his successor, Capiaux. I say a few words of thanks: "The building will not be the same without the presence of our old comrade, Bachir," to which Henry remarks into his gla.s.s, just loud enough for everyone to hear, "Well why did you get rid of him then?" Afterwards the others all go off to continue drinking at the Taverne Royale, a favourite bar nearby. I am not asked to go with them. Sitting alone at my desk with a bottle of cognac, I remember Henry's remark on his return from Basel: Whoever he is, he was never very important and he's no longer active. Have I caused all this ill feeling in pursuit of an agent who in any case was never much more than a chancer and a fantasist?

On the twentieth, Henry departs on a month's leave to his family's home on the Marne. Normally before he goes away he puts his head round my door to say goodbye. On this occasion, he slips away without a word. In his absence the building sinks even further into the August torpor.

And then, on the twenty-seventh, a Thursday afternoon, I receive a message from Billot's orderly Captain Calmon-Maison asking if he might have a word with me as soon as is convenient. I have cleared my in-tray so I decide I might as well walk over right away: through the garden and up the stairs and into the office of the minister's secretariat. The windows are open. The room is light and airy. Three or four young officers are working together congenially. I feel a stab of envy: how much better to be here than across the street in my dank and rancorous warren! Calmon-Maison says, "I have something here that General Billot thinks you ought to see." He goes to a filing cabinet and takes out a letter. "It came in yesterday. It's from Major Esterhazy."

The letter is handwritten, addressed to Calmon-Maison, dated Paris two days earlier. It is a request to be transferred to the General Staff. The implications of this. .h.i.t me with a force that is almost physical. He's trying to get into the ministry. He's trying to get access to secret material he can sell ...

Calmon-Maison says, "My colleague Captain Thevenet has received a similar appeal."

"May I see it?"

He gives me the second letter. It is couched in almost identical terms to the first: I am writing to request an immediate transfer from the headquarters of the 74th Infantry Regiment in Rouen ... I believe I have demonstrated the qualities necessary for work on the General Staff ... I have served in the Foreign Legion and in the intelligence department as a German translator ... I would be most grateful if you could bring this request to the attention of the appropriate authority ...

"Have you replied?"

"We've sent him a holding letter-'your request is being considered by the minister.' "

"Can I borrow these?"

Calmon-Maison responds as if reciting a legal formula: "The minister has asked me to tell you that he can see no objection to your making use of these letters as part of your inquiry."

Back in my office, I sit at my desk with the letters in front of me. The writing is neat, regular, well s.p.a.ced. I am almost sure I have seen it before. At first I think it must be because the script is quite similar to that of Dreyfus, whose correspondence I have spent so many hours studying lately.

And then I remember the bordereau-the covering note that was retrieved from Schwartzkoppen's wastepaper basket and that convicted Dreyfus of treason.

I look at the letters again.

No, surely not ...

I rise from my seat like a man in a dream and take the few steps across the carpet to the safe. My hand shakes very slightly as I insert the key. The envelope containing the photograph of the bordereau is still there, where Sandherr left it: I have been meaning for months to take it upstairs to Gribelin so he can file it away in his archive.

The bordereau, in facsimile, is a column of thirty narrow lines of handwriting-undated, unaddressed, unsigned: I am forwarding to you, sir, several interesting items of information ...

1. A note on the hydraulic brake of the 120 and how that part performed 2. A note on covering troops (several modifications will be introduced by the new plan) 3. A note on the change to artillery formations 4. A note concerning Madagascar 5. The draft Field Artillery Firing Manual (14 March 1894) The last paragraph explains that the Ministry of War will not permit individual officers to keep possession of the Field Artillery Firing Manual for very long, therefore if you would like to take from it what interests you and afterwards leave it at my disposal, I will collect it. Otherwise I can copy it verbatim and send you the copy. I am off to manoeuvres.

The leading handwriting expert in Paris swore that this was written by Dreyfus. I carry the photograph over to my desk and place it between the two letters from Esterhazy. I stoop for a closer look.

The writing is identical.

10.

For several minutes I sit motionless, holding the photograph. I might be made of marble, a sculpture by Rodin: The Reader. What really freezes me, even more than the matching handwriting, is the content-the obsession with artillery, the offer to have a manual copied out verbatim, the obsequious salesman's tone-it is Esterhazy to the life. Briefly, just as I did when the pet.i.t bleu came in, I consider marching over to the minister's office and laying the evidence in front of him. But again I know that would be folly. My four golden principles are more important now than ever: take it one step at a time; approach the matter dispa.s.sionately; avoid a rush to judgement; confide in n.o.body until there is hard evidence.

I pick up the two letters, straighten my tunic and walk along the corridor to Lauth's office. For a moment I hesitate outside his door, then I knock and go straight in.

The captain of dragoons is leaning back in his chair, long legs outstretched, eyes closed. There is something quite angelic about that blond head in repose. No doubt he is a success with women, although he has a young wife, I believe; I wonder if he has affairs. I am on the point of leaving when suddenly he opens his blue eyes and sees me. And in that unguarded instant something flickers in them that is beyond surprise: it is alarm.

"I'm sorry," I say. "I didn't mean to disturb you. I'll come back when you're ready."

"No, no." Embarra.s.sed, Lauth scrambles to his feet. "Pardon me, Colonel, it's just so infernally hot, and I've been indoors all day ..."

"Don't worry, my dear Lauth, I know precisely how you feel. This really is no life for a soldier, to be trapped in an office day after day. Sit, please. I insist. Do you mind if I join you?" And without waiting for a reply I pull up a chair on the other side of his desk. "I wonder: could you do something for me?" I push the two letters towards him. "I'd like to have these both photographed, but with the signature and the name of the addressee blocked out."

Lauth examines the letters then glances at me in shock. "Esterhazy!"

"Yes, it seems our minor spy has ambitions to become a major one. But thank goodness," I can't resist adding, "we had our eye on him, otherwise who knows what damage he might have done."

"Indeed." Lauth gives a reluctant nod and s.h.i.+fts in his seat uncomfortably. "Might I ask, Colonel, why you need photographs of the letters?"

"Just photograph them, if you don't mind, Captain." I stand and smile at him. "Shall we say four prints of each by first thing tomorrow? And just for once let's try to keep this strictly between ourselves."

Upstairs, Gribelin has only recently returned from his annual leave-not that you would think it to look at him. His face is pallid; his eyes, beneath a green celluloid eyeshade, carry dark pouches of exhaustion. His only concession to the summer heat is s.h.i.+rtsleeves rolled back to his bony elbows, exposing arms as thin and white as tubers. He is bent over a file as I enter, and quickly closes it. He takes off his eyeshade.

"I didn't hear you coming up the stairs, Colonel."

I hand him the photograph of the bordereau. "I think you should be in charge of this."

He blinks at it in surprise. "Where did you find it?"

"Colonel Sandherr had it in his safe."

"Ah yes, well, he was very proud of it." Gribelin holds the photograph at arm's length to admire it. His tongue moistens his top lip as if he's studying a p.o.r.nographic print. "He told me he would have had it framed, and hung it on his wall, if regulations had allowed."

"A hunting trophy?"

"Exactly."

Gribelin unlocks the bottom left-hand drawer of his desk and fishes out his immense bunch of keys. He carries the bordereau across to a heavy old fireproof filing cabinet, which he opens. I look around. I hardly ever venture up here. Two large tables are pushed together in the centre of the room. Laid out across the scuffed brown leather surfaces are half a dozen stacks of files, a blotting pad, a strong electric lamp, a rack of rubber stamps, a bra.s.s inkstand, a hole-puncher and a row of pens-all precisely aligned. Around the walls are the locked cabinets and safes that contain the section's secrets. There is a map of France, showing the departements. The three windows are narrow, barred and dusty, their sills encrusted with the excrement of the pigeons I can hear cooing on the roof.

"I wonder," I say casually, "do you keep the original bordereau up here?"

Gribelin does not turn round. "I do."

"I'd like to see it."

He glances over his shoulder at me. "Why?"

I shrug. "I'm interested."

There is nothing he can do. He unlocks another drawer in the cabinet and retrieves one of his ubiquitous manila files. He opens it, and with some reverence retrieves from it the bordereau. It is not at all what I expected. It weighs almost nothing. The paper is flimsy onionskin, semitransparent, written on both sides, so that the ink from one bleeds through and shows on the other. The most substantial thing about it is the adhesive tape holding together the six torn pieces.

I say, "You'd never guess it looked like this from the photograph."

"No, it was quite a process." Gribelin's normally astringent tone is softened by a touch of professional pride. "We had to photograph both sides and then retouch them, and then stick them together and finally rephotograph the whole image. So it came out looking like a continuous sheet of writing."

"How many prints did you make?"

"Twelve. It was necessary to disguise its original state so that we could circulate it around the ministry."

"Yes, of course. I remember." I turn the bordereau back and forth, marvelling once again at Lauth's skill. "I remember it very well."

It was the first week of October 1894 when word began to spread that there might be a traitor in the Ministry. All four chiefs of department were required to check the handwriting of every officer in their section, to see if anyone's matched the photograph. They were sworn to secrecy, allowed only to tell their deputies. Colonel Boucher devolved the job to me.

Despite the restricted circle, it was inevitable that news would leak, and soon a miasma of unease infiltrated the rue Saint-Dominique. The problem lay in that five-point list of the doc.u.ments betrayed, which set us all chasing our own tails. A "note on the hydraulic brake of the 120" and the "draft Field Artillery Firing Manual" suggested the spy must be in the artillery. But the "new plan" mentioned in point two was the very phrase we used in the Third Department for the revised mobilisation schedule. Of course, the "new plan" was also being studied by the railway timetable experts in the Fourth, so the spy could work there perhaps. But then the "note on the change to artillery formations" was most likely to have come from the First. Whereas the plan to occupy Madagascar had been worked on by the intelligence officers in the Second ...

Everyone suspected everyone else. Old incidents were dredged up and picked over, ancient rumours and feuds revived. The ministry was paralysed by suspicion. I went through the handwriting of every officer on our list, even Boucher's; even mine. I found no match.

And then someone-it was Colonel d'Aboville, deputy chief of the Fourth-had a flash of inspiration. If the traitor could draw on current knowledge of all four departments, wasn't it reasonable to a.s.sume that he had recently worked in all four? And unlikely as it seemed, there was a group of officers on the General Staff of whom that was true: the stagiaires from the ecole Superieure de Guerre-men who were relative strangers to their long-serving comrades. Suddenly it was obvious: the traitor was a stagiaire with a background in artillery.

Eight captains of artillery on the stagiaire programme fitted that particular bill, but only one of them was a Jew: a Jew moreover who spoke French with a German accent, whose family lived in the Kaiser's Reich and who always had money to throw around.

Gribelin, watching me, says, "I'm sure you remember the bordereau, Colonel." He gives one of his rare smiles. "Just as I remember that you were the one who provided us with the sample of Dreyfus's handwriting that matched it."

It was Colonel Boucher who brought me the request from the Statistical Section. Normally he was loud and cheerfully red-faced, but on this occasion he was sombre, even grey. It was a Sat.u.r.day morning, two days after we had started hunting for the traitor. He closed the door behind him and said, "It looks like we might be getting close to the b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Really? That's quick."

"General Gonse wants to see some handwriting belonging to Captain Dreyfus."

"Dreyfus?" I repeated, surprised.