An Officer and a Spy (6 page)

“Yes, Major!”

“Bachir, this is
Colonel
Picquart …”

We step into the dimly lit interior and Henry throws open a door to reveal four or five seedy-looking characters smoking pipes and playing cards. They turn to stare at me, and I just have time to take the measure of the drab sofa and chairs and the scaly carpet before Henry says, “Excuse us, gentlemen,” and quickly closes the door again.

“Who are they?” I ask.

“Just people who do work for us.”

“What sort of work?”

“Police agents. Informers. Men with useful skills. Colonel Sandherr takes the view that it’s better to keep them out of mischief here rather than let them hang around on the streets.”

We climb the creaking staircase to what Henry calls “the inner sanctum.” Because all the doors are closed, there is almost no natural light along the first-floor passage. Electricity has been installed, but crudely, with no attempt to redecorate where the cables have been buried. A piece of the plaster ceiling has come down and been propped against the wall.

I am introduced to the unit one by one. Each man has his own room and keeps his door closed while he works. There is Major Cordier, the alcoholic who will be retiring shortly, sitting in his shirtsleeves, reading the anti-Semitic press,
La Libre Parole
and
L’Intransigeant
, whether for work or pleasure I do not ask. There is the new man, Captain Junck, whom I know slightly from my lectures at the École Supérieure de Guerre—a tall and muscular young man with an immense moustache, who now is wearing an apron and a pair of thin gloves. He is opening a pile of intercepted letters, using a kind of kettle, heated over a jet of gas flame, to steam the glue on the envelope: this is known as a “wet opening,” Henry explains.

In the next-door room, another captain, Valdant, is using the “dry” method, scraping at the gummed seals with a scalpel: I watch for a couple of minutes as he makes a small opening on either side of the envelope flap, slides in a long, thin pair of forceps, twists them around a dozen times to roll the letter into a cylinder, and extracts it deftly through the aperture without leaving a mark. Upstairs, M. Gribelin, the spidery archivist who had the binoculars at Dreyfus’s degradation, sits in the centre of a large room filled with locked cabinets, and instinctively hides what he is reading the moment I appear. Captain Matton’s room is empty: Henry explains that he is leaving—the work is not to his taste. Finally I am introduced to Captain Lauth, whom I also remember from the degradation ceremony: another handsome, blond cavalryman from Alsace, in his thirties, who speaks German and ought to be charging around the countryside on horseback. Yet here he is instead, also wearing an apron, hunched over his desk with a strong electric light directed onto a small pile of torn-up notepaper, moving the pieces around with a pair of tweezers. I look to Henry for an explanation. “We should talk about that,” he says.

We go back downstairs to the first-floor landing. “That’s my office,” he says, pointing to a door without opening it, “and there is where Colonel Sandherr works”—he looks suddenly pained—“or used to work, I should say. I suppose that will be yours now.”

“Well, I’ll need to work somewhere.”

To reach it, we pass through a vestibule with a couple of chairs and a hatstand. The office beyond is unexpectedly small and dark. The curtains are drawn. I turn on the light. To my right is a large table, to my left a big steel filing cupboard with a stout lock. Facing me is a desk; to one side of it a second door leads back out to the corridor; behind it is a tall window. I cross to the window and pull back the dusty curtains to disclose an unexpected view over a large formal garden. Topography is my speciality—an awareness of where things lie in relation to one another; precision about streets, distances, terrain—nevertheless, it takes me a moment to realise that I am looking at the rear elevation of the hôtel de Brienne, the minister’s garden. It is odd to see it from this angle.

“My God,” I say, “if I had a telescope, I could practically see into the minister’s office!”

“Do you want me to get you one?”

“No.” I look at Henry. I can’t make out whether he’s joking. I turn back to the window and try to open it. I hit the catch a couple of times with the heel of my hand, but it has rusted shut. Already I am starting to loathe this place. “All right,” I say, wiping the rust off my hand, “I’m clearly going to rely on you a great deal, Major, certainly for the first few months. This is all very new to me.”

“Naturally, Colonel. First, permit me to give you your keys.” He holds out five, on an iron ring attached to a light chain, which I could clip to my belt. “This is to the front door. This is to your office door. This is your safe. This: your desk.”

“And this?”

“That lets you into the garden of the hôtel de Brienne. When you need to see the minister, that’s the way you go. General Mercier presented the key to Colonel Sandherr.”

“What’s wrong with the front door?”

“This way’s quicker. And more private.”

“Do we have a telephone?”

“Yes, it’s outside Captain Valdant’s room.”

“What about a secretary?”

“Colonel Sandherr didn’t trust them. If you need a file, ask Gribelin. If you need help copying, you can use one of the captains. Valdant can type.”

I feel as if I have wandered into some strange religious sect, with obscure private rituals. The Ministry of War is built on the site of an old nunnery, and the officers of the General Staff on the rue Saint-Dominique are nicknamed “the Dominicians” because of their secret ways. But already I can see they have nothing on the Statistical Section.

“You were going to tell me what Captain Lauth was working on just now.”

“We have an agent inside the German Embassy. The agent supplies us regularly with documents that have been thrown away and are supposed to go to the embassy furnace to be burned with the trash. Instead they come to us. Mostly they’ve been torn up, so we have to piece them together. It’s a skilled job. Lauth is good at it.”

“This was how you first got onto Dreyfus?”

“It was.”

“By sticking together a torn-up letter?”

“Exactly.”

“My God, from such small beginnings …! Who is this agent?”

“We always use the code name ‘Auguste.’ The product is referred to as ‘the usual route.’ ”

I smile. “All right, let me put it another way: who is ‘Auguste’?” Henry is reluctant to reply, but I am determined to press him: if I am ever to get a grip on this job, I must know how the service functions from top to bottom, and the sooner the better. “Come now, Major Henry, I am the head of this section. You will have to tell me.”

Reluctantly he says, “A woman called Marie Bastian; one of the embassy cleaners. In particular she cleans the office of the German military attaché.”

“How long has she been working for us?”

“Five years. I’m her handler. I pay her two hundred francs a
month.” He cannot resist adding boastfully, “It’s the greatest bargain in Europe!”

“How does she get the material to us?”

“I meet her in a church near here, sometimes every week, sometimes two—in the evenings, when it’s quiet. Nobody sees us. I take the stuff straight home.”

“You take it home?” I can’t conceal my surprise. “Is that safe?”

“Absolutely. There’s only my wife and me, and our baby lad. I sort through it there, take a quick look at whatever’s in French—I can’t understand German: Lauth handles the German stuff here.”

“I see. Good.” Although I nod in approval, this procedure strikes me as amateurish in the extreme. But I am not going to pick a fight on my first day. “I have a feeling we are going to get along very well, Major Henry.”

“I do hope so, Colonel.”

I look at my watch. “If you’ll excuse me, I shall have to go out soon to see the Chief of Staff.”

“Would you like me to come with you?”

“No.” Again I am not sure if he is being serious. “That won’t be necessary. He’s taking me to lunch.”

“Splendid. I’ll be in my office if you need me.” Our exchange is as formal as a
pas de deux
.

Henry salutes and leaves. I close the door and look around me. My skin crawls slightly; I feel as if I am wearing the outfit of a dead man. There are shadows on the walls where Sandherr’s pictures hung, burns on the desk from his cigarettes, ring marks on the table from his drinks. A worn track in the carpet shows where he used to push back his chair. His presence oppresses me. I find the correct key and unlock the safe. Inside are several dozen letters, unopened, addressed to various places around the city, to four or five different names—aliases presumably. These, I guess, must be reports from Sandherr’s agents that have been forwarded since he left. I open one—
Unusual activity is reported in the garrison at Metz …
—then close it again. Espionage work: how I loathe it. I should never have taken this posting. It seems impossible to imagine that I will ever feel at home.

Beneath the letters is a thin manila envelope containing a large photograph, twenty-five centimetres by twenty. I recognise it immediately from Dreyfus’s court-martial—a copy of the covering note, the famous
bordereau
, that accompanied the documents he passed to the Germans. It was the central evidence against him produced in court. Until this morning I had no idea how the Statistical Section had got its hands on it. And no wonder. I have to admire Lauth’s handiwork. Nobody looking at it could tell it had once been ripped into pieces: all the tear marks have been carefully touched out, so that it seems like a whole document.

I sit at the desk and unlock it. Despite the slow progressive nature of his illness, Sandherr seems to have ended up vacating the premises in a hurry. A few odds and ends have been left behind. They roll about when I pull open the drawers. Pieces of chalk. A ball of sealing wax. Some foreign coins. Four bullets. And various tins and bottles of medicine: mercury, extract of guaiacum, potassium iodine.

General de Boisdeffre gives me lunch at the Jockey Club to celebrate my appointment, which is decent of him. The windows are all closed, the doors are shut, bowls of freesias and sweet peas have been placed on every table. But nothing can entirely dispel the sweetly sour odour of human excrement. Boisdeffre affects not to notice. He orders a good white burgundy and drinks most of it, his high cheeks gradually flushing the colour of a Virginia creeper in autumn. I drink sparingly and keep a tiny notebook open beside my plate like a good staff officer.

The president of the club, Sosthènes de La Rochefoucauld, duc de Doudeauville, is at the neighbouring table. He comes across to greet the general. Boisdeffre introduces me. The duc’s nose and cheekbones look as delicately ridged and fragile as meringues; his handshake is a brush of papery skin against my fingers.

Over potted trout the general talks about the new tsar, Nicholas II. Boisdeffre is anxious to be informed of any Russian anarchist cells that may be active in Paris. “I want you to keep your ears open wide for that one; anything we can pass on to Moscow will be valuable
in negotiations.” He swallows a morsel of fish and goes on: “An alliance with Russia will solve our inferiority vis-à-vis the Germans with one diplomatic stroke. It is worth a hundred thousand men, at least. That is why half my time is devoted to foreign affairs. At the highest level, the border between the military and the political ceases to exist. But we must never forget the army must always be above mere party politics.”

This prompts him to reminisce about Mercier, no longer Minister of War but now seeing out the years before his retirement as commander of the 4th Army Corps at Le Mans. “He was right to foresee that the President might fall, wrong to believe that he stood any chance of replacing him.”

I am so surprised I stop eating, my fork poised midway to my mouth. “General Mercier thought that he might become president?”

“Indeed, he entertained that delusion. This is one of the problems with a republic—at least under a monarchy no one seriously imagines he can become king. When Monsieur Casimir-Perier resigned in January, and the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies convened at Versailles to elect his successor, General Mercier’s ‘friends’—as it would be delicate to call them—had a flyer circulated, calling on them to elect the man who had just delivered the traitor Dreyfus to the court-martial. He received precisely three votes out of eight hundred.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I believe it was what our English friends call ‘a long shot.’ ” Boisdeffre smiles. “But now of course the politicians will never forgive him.” He dabs at his moustache with his napkin. “You’ll have to think a little more politically from now on, Colonel, if you’re going to fulfil the great hopes we all have of you.” I bow my head slightly, as if the Chief of Staff is hanging a decoration round my neck. He says, “Tell me, what do you make of the Dreyfus business?”

“Distasteful,” I reply. “Squalid. Distracting. I’m glad it’s over.”

“Ah, but is it, though? I am thinking politically here, rather than militarily. The Jews are a most persistent race. For them, Dreyfus sitting on his rock is like an aching tooth. It obsesses them. They won’t leave it alone.”

“He’s an emblem of their shame. But what can they do?”

“I’m not sure. But they’ll do something, we may count on that.” Boisdeffre stares over the traffic in the rue Rabelais and falls silent for a few moments. His profile in the odiferous sunlight is immensely distinguished, carved in flesh by centuries of breeding. I am reminded of the effigy of a long-suffering Norman knight, kneeling in some Bayeux chapel. He says thoughtfully, “What Dreyfus said to that young captain, about not having a motive for treason—I think we ought to be ready with an answer to that. I’d like you to keep the case active. Investigate the family—‘feed the file,’ as your predecessor used to say. See if you can find a little more evidence about motives that we can hold in reserve in case we need it.”

“Yes, of course, General.” I add it to the list in my notebook, just beneath “Russian anarchists”: “Dreyfus: motive?”

The
rillettes de canard
arrive and the conversation moves on to the current German naval review at Kiel.