An Officer and a Spy (39 page)

“Well, if you’re quite certain.” I press my thumbs on the locks and open the suitcase. “It’s difficult to know where to start. You remember I came to see you in the middle of November, to tell you I was going away?”

“Yes, for a couple of days or so you said.”

“It was a trap.” From a false compartment at the bottom of the case I take out a wedge of papers. “First of all I was sent by the General Staff to Châlons to inspect intelligence procedures in the Sixth Corps. Then I was told I would have to go straight on to Nancy to write a report on the Seventh as well. Naturally I asked for permission to return to Paris, for a few hours at least, just to pick up some clean clothes. That was turned down flat by telegram—you see?” I hand it over. “All these letters I’ve kept are from my immediate superior, General Charles-Arthur Gonse, ordering each move—there are fourteen. From Nancy I was sent to Besançon. Then to Marseille. Then to Lyon. Then to Briançon. Then back to Lyon again, where I fell ill. This is the letter I received from Gonse while I was there:
I’m sorry that you are suffering, but I hope that after resting in Lyon you will regain your strength. Meanwhile prepare yourself to depart for Marseille and Nice …
”

“And all this time you were not permitted to return to Paris, not even for a day?”

“See for yourself.”

Louis takes the handful of letters and scans them, frowning. “But this is ridiculous …”

“I was told I would be meeting the Minister of War over Christmas in Marseille, but he didn’t turn up. Instead I was ordered to sail directly for Algeria—that was at the end of last year—to reorganise intelligence. And then a month after I got to Algeria I was ordered to Tunisia. Once I was in Tunisia I was transferred out of my old regiment and into a native outfit. Suddenly it wasn’t an inspection trip anymore: it was a permanent posting to the colonies.”

“You must have complained, I assume?”

“Of course. Gonse simply wrote back telling me to stop sending him so many letters:
You just have to let things go and gain satisfaction from serving a regiment in Africa
. Effectively, I’d been exiled.”

“Did they give you a reason?”

“They didn’t have to. I knew what it was. I was being punished.”

“Punished for what?”

I take a breath. It still feels almost sacrilegious to say it aloud. “For having discovered that Captain Dreyfus is innocent.”

“Ah.” Louis looks at me, and for once even his mask of professional detachment seems to crack very slightly. “Ah, yes, I can see that would do it.”

I hand Louis the envelope that is to be delivered to the President in the event of my death. He pulls a face as he reads the inscription. I suppose he considers it melodramatic, the sort of device one might encounter in a railway “thriller.” I would have felt the same until a year ago. Now I have come to see that thrillers may sometimes contain more truths than all Monsieur Zola’s social realism put together.

I say, “Go ahead.” I light a cigarette and watch his expression as he takes out the letter. He reads the opening paragraph aloud:
“I, the undersigned Marie-Georges Picquart, Lieutenant Colonel with the 4th Colonial Infantrymen, formerly head of the secret intelligence service at
the Ministry of War, certify on my honour the accuracy of the following information, which in the interests of truth and justice it is impossible to ‘stifle,’ as has been attempted …”
His voice trails off. He frowns, and then glances at me.

I say, “There’s still time to stop, if you don’t want to get involved. I wouldn’t blame you for a moment. But I warn you: if you continue beyond that paragraph, you will be in the same predicament I am.”

“Well now you make it sound quite irresistible.” He continues reading, but silently, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth as he scans the lines. When he’s finished, he blows out his cheeks in a sigh, then leans back in his chair and closes his eyes. “How many copies of this letter exist?”

“Only that one.”

“God! Only this? And you carried it all the way from Tunisia?” He shakes his head in dismay. “Well, the first thing you’ll have to do is to copy it out at least twice more. We shall need three copies as an absolute minimum. What else do you have in that old suitcase of yours?”

“There’s this,” I say, giving him my original report to Boisdeffre: “Intelligence Service note on Major Esterhazy, 74th Infantry.” “And there are these”—my earlier exchange of letters with Gonse, after I had been out to see him in the country, in which he urges me not to extend my inquiries from Esterhazy to Dreyfus. “There’s also this”—the letter from Henry revealing the existence of an inquiry into my behaviour as chief of the Statistical Section.

Louis reads them quickly and with complete absorption. When he has finished, he sets them aside and looks at me with great seriousness. “The question I ask all my clients at the outset, Georges—and that is what you are now, by the way, although heaven knows how I’m ever going to be paid—the question I always ask my clients is: what do you want to achieve from this?”

“I want to see justice done—that above all. I’m anxious that the army should emerge from this scandal with as little damage as possible: I still love the army. And on a selfish note, I’d like to have my career restored.”

“Ha! Well, you might conceivably achieve one of those, or by a
miracle two, but three is quite impossible! I assume there’s no one in the military hierarchy who would take up the struggle alongside you?”

“That’s not the way the army works. Unfortunately, we are dealing with four of the most senior officers in the country—the Minister of War, the Chief of the General Staff, the Head of Military Intelligence and the Commander of the Fourth Army Corps—that’s Mercier’s command these days—and all four of them are implicated in this affair to a greater or lesser extent, not to mention the entire secret intelligence section. Don’t misunderstand me, Louis. The army isn’t completely rotten. There are plenty of good and honourable men in the High Command. But if it came to it they would all put the interests of the army first. Certainly none of them is going to want to bring the temple crashing down around their ears, just for the sake of a—well …” I hesitate.

“A Jew?” suggests Louis. I make no response. “Well,” he continues, “if we can’t approach someone in the army with the facts, then what else can we do?”

I am about to reply when there is a loud knocking at the door. Something about the force of it, the implied sense of entitlement, warns me this is official: police. Louis opens his mouth to speak, but I hold up a silencing hand. I walk quietly over to the sitting-room door, which is glass-paned with lace curtains, and peer round the edge, just as Anna, smoothing her skirts, walks down the passage from the kitchen. She catches my eye, nods to show she knows what she has to do, then opens the front door.

I can’t see who is standing there, but I can hear him—a heavy male voice: “Excuse me, madame, is Colonel Picquart here?”

“No. Why would he be? This isn’t his apartment.”

“Do you happen to know where he is?”

“The last letter I had was posted in Tunisia. And who are you, may I ask?”

“Forgive me, madame—I’m just an old army friend.”

“Do you have a name?”

“Let’s just leave it at that, shall we? You can tell him ‘an old army friend’ was looking for him. Goodbye.”

Anna closes the door and locks it. She glances at me. I smile. She has done well. I turn to Louis. “They know I’m in Paris.”

Louis leaves soon afterwards, taking with him all my papers apart from the letter to the President, which he tells me to copy out twice. I stay up late after Jules and Anna have gone to bed, sitting at the kitchen table with pen and ink—the anarchist again, assembling his bomb.
The trial of Dreyfus was handled in an unprecedentedly superficial manner, with the preconceived idea that Dreyfus was guilty, and with a disregard for due legal forms …

Louis returns the following day at the same time, late in the afternoon. Anna shows him into the sitting room. I embrace him and then go over to the window and peer down into the street. “Do you think you might have been followed?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

I crane my neck to look up and down the rue Cassette. “I can’t actually see anyone watching the house. But these people are good, unfortunately. I think it would be wise to assume that you were.”

“I agree. Now, my dear friend, did you make those copies of your letter? Excellent.” He takes them from me and puts them in his briefcase. “One copy can remain in my safe and the other can go to a safe deposit box in Geneva.” He smiles at me. “Cheer up, my dear Georges! Now, even if they kill you and then go on to kill me, they’ll still have to invade Switzerland!”

But another day cooped up in my sister’s apartment has not put me in the mood for jokes. “I don’t know, Louis. I wonder if the safest course isn’t just to give everything to the newspapers and have done with it.”

“Oh no, no, no!” replies Louis in great alarm. “That would be fatal—both for yourself and for Dreyfus. I’ve been doing some hard thinking about the whole matter. This letter from Major Henry,” he says, pulling it out, “is really very interesting, you know—very cunning, actually. They’ve obviously prepared contingency plans in case you make public what you know, but not only that—they want you to understand broadly what those contingency plans are.”

“In order to frighten me off?”

“Yes, it’s good logic, if you think about it. Their primary objective is that you should do nothing. Therefore they want to show you how unpleasant they are willing to make your life if you
do
try to do something.” He studies the letter. “As I understand it, Major Henry is alleging here, in effect, that you conspired to frame Esterhazy: first by mounting an illegal operation against him, secondly by attempting to suborn from your associates false testimony about the incriminating evidence, and thirdly by leaking classified information to undermine the case against Dreyfus. Clearly, that will be their line of defence if you go to the newspapers: that you have been working for the Jews all along.”

“Absurd!”

“Absurd, I agree. But a great many people will be eager to believe it.”

I can see the truth of this. “Well then,” I say, “if I don’t go openly to the newspapers, perhaps I should go privately to the Dreyfus family, and at least give them the name of Esterhazy?”

“I have thought about that as well. Plainly the family are admirably loyal to their unfortunate captain. But I have to ask myself, as your lawyer, would they feel a similar loyalty to you? To have the name of Esterhazy would of course be immensely useful to their cause. But the real prize for them would be the fact that his name came to them from you—from the chief of the secret intelligence service himself.”

“You think they would reveal me as their source?”

“If their objective is to free their brother, they would be almost bound to. And I wouldn’t blame them if they did, would you? In any case, even if they didn’t release your name themselves, I’m sure it would leak within a day or two. You are being watched and so are they. And unfortunately, once your name is known, it will provide the General Staff with all the evidence they need to convince most people that you have been conspiring to free Dreyfus all along. That is why I say this letter of Henry’s is very cunning.”

“So I’m trapped?”

“Not entirely. We must think tactically. What do you soldiers
call it when you go around the side of your opponent rather than charging him head-on?”

“Outflanking?”

“Outflanking—exactly—we need to outflank them. You should not talk to anyone: that only plays into their hands. You should leave all that to me. I shall take your information and give it not to the newspapers or to the Dreyfus camp, but to a public figure of unimpeachable integrity.”

“And who might this paragon be?”

“I spent a good part of last night thinking about exactly that, and this morning while I was shaving the answer came to me. With your permission, I shall go and see the Vice President of the Senate, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner.”

“Why him?”

“To begin with, he’s an old family friend—my father taught him mathematics—so I know him. He’s a man of Alsace, which is always reassuring. He’s rich, which gives him independence. But above all, he’s a patriot. He’s never done a sordid or selfish thing in his life. Let your friend Major Henry try to smear old Auguste as a traitor!”

I sit back and consider this. The other advantage of Scheurer-Kestner is that he is a member of the moderate left but with plenty of friends on the right. He is by temperament emollient but determined. “And what will the senator do with the information?”

“That will be up to him. Knowing his instinct for compromise, I would guess he’ll approach the government to begin with, and try to sort it out that way. He’ll only go to the press if the authorities won’t listen. But one thing I’ll absolutely insist on beforehand is that your name is not to be mentioned as the source of the information. No doubt the General Staff will guess you’re behind it, but they’ll be hard pushed to prove it.”

“And what about me? What shall I do during this process?”

“Nothing. You will return to Tunisia and lead a blameless life—let them follow you all they want: they will observe nothing untoward. That alone will drive them mad. In short, my dear Georges, you just sit in the desert and wait for things to happen.”

On the final day of my leave, after Jules has gone to work and my suitcase is packed ready for the evening train, there is another knock on the door—but softer this time, and tentative. I put down my book and listen as Anna lets in the visitor. A moment later the sitting-room door opens and there is Pauline. She looks at me without speaking. Behind her, Anna is putting on her hat. “I have to go out for an hour,” she says briskly, before adding, with a mixture of fondness and disapproval, “and
only
for an hour, mind you.”

We make love in the children’s bedroom, under the watchful eyes of a row of my nephew’s old toy soldiers. Afterwards, lying in my arms, she says, “You were really going to go back to Africa without trying to see me?”