An Officer and a Spy (15 page)

“Thank you, but I can’t.”

“Why not?”

I want to say: “Because I can’t begin to tell you what’s on my mind, or what I do all day, and when there’s no longer a possibility of unguarded intimacy, social life becomes a fraud and a strain.” Instead I merely remark blandly, “I fear I am poor company these days.”

“We’ll be the judge of that. Come. Please.”

He’s so good and honest that I have no option except to surrender. “Well, I would like that very much,” I say, “but only if you’re sure Martha won’t mind.”

“My dear Georges, she will be absolutely delighted!”

Their apartment could scarcely be closer, literally just across the boulevard Saint-Germain, and Martha does indeed seem pleased
to see me, throwing her arms around me the moment I enter their apartment. She is twenty-seven, fourteen years our junior. I was the best man at their wedding. She goes everywhere with Louis, I presume because they have no children. But if that is a source of sadness, they do not let it show; neither do they demand to know when I am going to get married, which is also a great relief. I pass three happy hours in their company, talking about the past and politics—Louis is deputy mayor of the local arrondissement, the seventh, and takes a radical view on most issues—and the evening ends with my playing their piano while they sing. As he shows me out, Louis says, “We should do this every week. It might just keep you sane. And remember, whenever you’re working late, you know you can always come back here to sleep.”

“You’re a generous friend, dear Lou. You always have been.” I kiss him on the cheeks and lurch off into the night, humming the tune I have just been playing, slightly the worse for drink but much the better for company.

The following Thursday evening, at seven precisely, I sit in a corner of the cavernous yellow gloom of the platform café of the gare Saint-Lazare, sipping an Alsace beer. The place is packed; the double-hinged door swings back and forth with a squeak of springs. The roar of chat and movement inside and the whistles and shouts and percussive bursts of steam from the locomotives outside make it a perfect place not to be overheard. I have managed to save a table with two seats that gives me a clear view of the entrance. Once again, however, Desvernine surprises me by appearing at my back. He is carrying a bottle of mineral water, refuses my offer of a beer, and is pulling out his little black notebook even as he sinks into his place on the crimson banquette.

“He’s quite a character, your Major Esterhazy, Colonel. Big debts all over Rouen and Paris: I have a list here for you.”

“What does he spend the money on?”

“Mostly gambling. There’s a place he goes to in the boulevard Poissonnière. It’s a sickness that’s hard to cure, as I know to my
cost.” He passes the list across the table. “He also has a mistress, a Mademoiselle Marguerite Pays, aged twenty-six, a registered prostitute in the Pigalle district, who goes by the name of ‘Four-Fingered Marguerite.’ ”

I can’t help laughing. “You’re not serious?”

Desvernine, the earnest former noncommissioned officer turned policeman, does not see the humour. “She’s from the Rouen area originally, daughter of a Calvados distiller, started work in a spinning factory when she was a kid, lost a finger in an accident and her job with it, moved to Paris, became an
horizontale
in the rue Victor-Masse, met Esterhazy last year either on the Paris–Rouen train or at the Moulin Rouge—there are different versions depending on which of the girls you speak to.”

“So this affair is common knowledge?”

“Absolutely. He’s even set her up in an apartment: 49, rue de Douai, near Montmartre. Visits her every evening when he’s in town. She’s furnished it, but the lease is in his name. The girls at the Moulin Rouge call him ‘the Benefactor.’ ”

“That kind of life can’t come cheap.”

“He’s working every racket he can think of to keep it going. He’s even trying to join the board of a British company in London—which is a rum thing for a French officer to do, when you think about it.”

“And where is his wife during all this?”

“Either on her estate at Dommartin-la-Planchette in the Ardennes or at the apartment in Paris. He goes back to her after he’s finished with Marguerite.”

“He seems to be a man to whom betrayal is second nature.”

“I’d say so.”

“What about the Germans? Any links there?”

“I haven’t got anywhere on that yet.”

“I wonder—perhaps we could follow him?”

“We could,” says Desvernine doubtfully, “but he’s a wary bird from what I’ve seen. He’d soon get wise to us.”

“In that case, we can’t risk it. The last thing I need is to have a well-connected major complaining to the ministry that he’s being harassed.”

“Our best bet would be to put a watch on the German Embassy, see if we can catch him there.”

“I’d never get authorisation for that.”

“Why not?”

“It would be too obvious. The ambassador would complain.”

“Actually, I think I know a way we can do it without them discovering.” He produces his pocket book and passes me a tiny square of carefully snipped-out newsprint. It is an advertisement for an apartment to rent in the rue de Lille, the same street as the hôtel de Beauharnais, which houses the German Embassy. “It’s on the first floor, almost directly opposite the Germans. We could set up an observation post, and monitor everyone entering and leaving.” He looks at me, proud of his initiative, willing me to approve. “And here’s the best part: the apartment underneath is already being rented by the embassy. They use it as a kind of officers’ club.”

The idea attracts me at once. I admire the audacity of it, but not only that: it would be an operation independent of Henry.

“We’d need a tenant with a plausible cover story,” I say, thinking it over, “to avoid arousing suspicion—someone who might have reason to be inside all day.”

“I wondered about a night-shift worker,” suggests Desvernine. “He could arrive home every morning at seven, and not leave for work until six in the evening.”

“How much is the rent on this apartment?”

“Two hundred a month.”

I shake my head. “No night-shift worker could afford such an amount. It’s a fashionable street. A more likely tenant, surely, would be some wealthy young layabout with a private income—out all hours of the night and sleeping it off inside during the day.”

“I’m not sure I move in those circles, Colonel.”

“No. But I do.”

I send a
bleu
to a young man of my acquaintance and arrange to meet him late on Sunday afternoon in a café on the Champs-Élysées. I watch him eat hungrily, as if he hasn’t seen food for a day or two, and afterwards we go for a stroll in the Tuileries Garden.

Germain Ducasse is a sensitive, cultured, gentle soul in his thirties, with dark curly hair and soft brown eyes, popular with elderly bachelors and with married ladies who need a knowledgeable escort to the opera of whom their husbands will have no cause for jealousy. I have known him for more than a decade, ever since he completed his military service under my command in the 126th Line Regiment at Pamiers, in Ariège. I encouraged him to study modern languages at the Sorbonne, and from time to time I take him along to soirées at the de Commingeses’. Nowadays he scratches a shabby-genteel living as a translator and secretary, and when I mention that I may be able to put some work his way, his gratitude is almost painful.

“I say, Georges, that’s awfully handsome of you. Look at this.” He holds my arm and lifts his foot to show me a hole in his shoe. “You see? It’s shaming, isn’t it?” His hand stays on my arm.

“That must be a bore for you.” Gently, I disengage his grip. “I should say right away that the job I have in mind is unorthodox and boring. It’s also full-time, and I shall need your assurance before I go any further that you won’t mention it to anyone.”

“How mysterious! Naturally you have my word. What is it?”

I don’t answer until I have found a bench for us to sit on, away from the Sunday afternoon crowds.

“I want you to go tomorrow morning and rent this apartment.” I give him the newspaper advertisement. “You’ll offer the agents three months’ money in advance. If they ask for references, use the de Commingeses—I’ll clear it with Aimery. Say you want the place immediately: that afternoon if possible. The day after you move in, a man will come to visit you. He’ll introduce himself as Robert Houdin. He works for me and he’ll tell you what you have to do. Basically it involves watching the building opposite all day. The evenings will be your own.”

Ducasse studies the advertisement. “I must say, this sounds very thrilling. Am I becoming a spy?”

“Here is six hundred francs for the deposit on the apartment,” I continue, counting out the banknotes I have withdrawn from the special fund in my safe the previous evening, “and here is another
four hundred for you. That’s two weeks’ pay in advance. Yes, you are becoming a spy, but you are never to mention it to a living soul. From now on, we mustn’t be seen together. And for heaven’s sake, my dear Germain, before you go to the property agency, buy yourself some decent shoes: you’re supposed to look like a man who can afford to live in the rue de Lille.”

I open an active case file. I decide to call it Operation Benefactor, “Benefactor” being our code name for Esterhazy, borrowed from the girls of Pigalle. Ducasse rents the apartment without difficulty and moves in with a few personal belongings; the following afternoon Desvernine, posing as Houdin, visits him to explain the nature of his work. A delivery van unloads sealed packing cases containing optical and photographic equipment and the chemicals required for a darkroom; the men in leather aprons who carry them upstairs are from the technical department of the Sûreté. A few days later, I arrange to make an inspection for myself.

It is a late afternoon on a balmy day in April, the trees in blossom, the birds singing in the minister’s garden: it seems to me that Nature mocks my occupation. I am in civilian dress with the brim of my hat tilted slightly downwards to obscure the upper part of my face. The German Embassy is barely two hundred metres from our front door—all I have to do is turn left out of our office, turn right and immediately I am walking down the narrow rue de Lille: I can see the hôtel de Beauharnais directly ahead on the left, at number 78. A high wall separates it from the road but the big wooden doors are wide open, giving access to a paved courtyard with a couple of parked motorcars. On the far side of the courtyard is an imposing five-storey mansion with a pillared portico. Red-carpeted steps lead up to the entrance; the German Imperial Eagle droops from the flagstaff.

The apartment we have taken is opposite, in number 101. I let myself in and walk towards the stairs. I can hear guttural male German voices from behind the closed door of the ground-floor flat; one says something in a tone of rising hilarity and abruptly they all burst
out laughing together. The masculine roar pursues me up the stairs to the first floor. I knock four times; Ducasse opens the door a crack, sees it is me and opens it wider so I can enter.

Inside the apartment the air is stuffy. The windows are all shuttered, the electric lights are lit. The sound of the Germans below is still audible, but more muffled. Ducasse, who is in his stockinged feet, puts his finger to his lips and beckons me through to the drawing room. The carpet has been rolled up against the wall. Desvernine lies flat on his stomach on the bare floorboards, shoeless, with his head in the fireplace. I start to say something but he holds up a warning hand for silence. Suddenly he withdraws his head and scrambles to his feet.

“I think they’re finished,” he whispers. “It’s damnably frustrating, Colonel! They’re sitting right by the hearth and I can almost make out what they’re saying, but not quite. Would you mind taking off your shoes?”

I sit on the edge of a chair to tug off my boots and glance around, admiring the thoroughness with which he has set up this hide. There are three sets of closed shutters with spyholes bored through them looking across the street to the embassy. One is occupied by the latest model of camera, a modified Kodak bought in London for eighteen pounds sterling, with a film-roll canister and a set of variable lenses, mounted on a tripod; another aperture has a telescope pushed up against it; beside the third stands the desk at which Ducasse logs the times of visitors entering and leaving the embassy. Pinned to the walls are studio photographs of various characters of interest to us, including Esterhazy, von Schwartzkoppen, Count Münster, the elderly German ambassador, and the Italian military attaché, Major Panizzardi.

Desvernine, looking out through the third spyhole, signals to me to join him at the window, then stands aside to let me see. Four men, elegantly dressed in frock coats, are crossing the street below. They have their backs to us, walking away. They pause at the embassy gates and two of them shake hands with a third before strolling on into the courtyard: German diplomats, presumably. The two who are left on the pavement watch them go, then turn away to continue their conversation.

Ducasse, who is focusing the telescope, says, “That’s Schwartzkoppen on the left, Georges; the one on the right is the Italian, Panizzardi.”

“Use the telescope, Colonel,” suggests Desvernine.

Viewed through the lens, the two men loom shockingly close—I might almost be standing with them. Schwartzkoppen is slim, fine-featured, attractively animated, beautifully tailored: a dandy. He throws back his head as he laughs, showing beneath his wide moustache a row of perfect white teeth. Panizzardi has his hand on his shoulder and seems to be telling him a funny story. The Italian is handsome in a different way—rounder-faced, with curly dark hair swept back off a wide forehead—but there is the same lively amusement in his features. Another gust of laughter seizes them. Panizzardi’s hand is still on the German’s shoulder. They are staring straight into each other’s eyes, oblivious to the world.

“My God,” I exclaim, “they’re in love!”

Ducasse simpers, “You should have heard them the other afternoon, in the bedroom downstairs.”

“Filthy buggers!” mutters Desvernine.