An Officer and a Spy

by Robert Harris

  ‘That was an oversight. May I?’ Henry takes them from me with fumbling hands. In his clumsiness he almost drops one of the bottles. ‘I’ll see they get returned to him.’

  I can’t resist saying, ‘Mercury, extract of guaiacum and potassium iodine . . . You do know what these are normally used to treat, don’t you?’

  ‘No. I’m not a doctor . . .’

  I decide not to pursue it. ‘I want a full report of what the Dreyfus family are up to – who they’re seeing, whatever they might be doing to help the prisoner. I also want to read all of Dreyfus’s correspondence, to and from Devil’s Island. I assume it’s being censored, and we have copies?’

  ‘Naturally. I’ll tell Gribelin to arrange it.’ He hesitates. ‘Might I ask, Colonel: why all this interest in Dreyfus?’

  ‘General Boisdeffre thinks it might turn into a political issue. He wants us to be prepared.’

  ‘I understand. I’ll get on to it at once.’

  He leaves, cradling Sandherr’s medicines. Of course he knows exactly what they’re prescribed for: we’ve both hauled enough men out of unregistered brothels in our time to know the standard treatment. And so I am left to ponder the implications of inheriting a secret intelligence service from a predecessor who is apparently suffering from tertiary syphilis, more commonly known as general paralysis of the insane.

  That afternoon I write my first secret intelligence report for the General Staff – a blanc, as they are known in the rue Saint-Dominique. I cobble it together from the local German newspapers and from one of the agents’ letters that Sandherr has elucidated for me: A correspondent from Metz reports that, for the past few days, there has been great activity among the troops in the Metz garrison. There is no noise and alarm in the city, but the military authorities are pushing the troops intensively . . .

  I read it over when I’ve finished and ask myself: is this important? Is it even true? Frankly, I have not the faintest idea. I know only that I am expected to submit a blanc at least once a week, and that this is the best I can do for my first attempt. I send it over the road to the Chief of Staff’s office, bracing myself for a rebuke for crediting such worthless gossip. Instead, Boisdeffre acknowledges receipt, thanks me, forwards a copy to the head of the infantry (I can imagine the conversation in the officers’ club: I hear on the grapevine that the Germans are up to something in Metz . . .), and fifty thousand troops in the eastern frontier region have their lives made slightly more miserable by several days of additional drills and forced marches.

  It is my first lesson in the cabalistic power of ‘secret intelligence’: two words that can make otherwise sane men abandon their reason and cavort like idiots.

  A day or two later, Henry brings an agent to my office to brief me about Dreyfus. He introduces him as François Guénée, of the Sûreté.1 He is in his forties, yellow-skinned with the effects of nicotine or alcohol or both, with that manner, at once bullying and obsequious, typical of a certain type of policeman. As we shake hands I recognise him from my first morning: he was one of those who were sitting around smoking their pipes and playing cards downstairs. Henry says, ‘Guénée has been running the surveillance operation on the Dreyfus family. I thought you’d want to hear how things stand.’

  ‘Please.’ I gesture and we take our places around the table in the corner of my office. Guénée has a file with him; so has Henry.

  Guénée begins. ‘In accordance with Colonel Sandherr’s instructions, I concentrated my enquiries on the traitor’s older brother, Mathieu Dreyfus.’ From the file he extracts a studio photograph and slides it across the table. Mathieu is handsome, even dashing: he is the one who ought to have been the army captain, I think, rather than Alfred, who looks like a bank manager. Guénée continues, ‘The subject is thirty-seven years old, and has moved from the family home in Mulhouse to Paris with the sole purpose of organising the campaign on behalf of his brother.’

  ‘So there is a campaign?’

  ‘Yes, Colonel: he writes letters to prominent people, and has let it be known he is willing to pay good money for information.’

  ‘You know they’re very rich,’ puts in Henry, ‘the wife of Dreyfus even more so. Her family are the Hadamards – diamond merchants.’

  ‘And is the brother getting anywhere?’

  ‘There’s a medical man from Le Havre, a Dr Gibert, who is an old friend of the President of the Republic. Right at the start he offered to intercede on the family’s behalf with President Fauré.’

  ‘Has he done so?’

  Guénée consults his file. ‘The doctor met the President for breakfast at the Élysée on February twenty-first. Afterwards Gibert went straight to the hôtel de l’Athénée, where Mathieu Dreyfus was waiting – one of our men had followed him there from his apartment.’

  He gives me the agent’s report. Subjects were seated in lobby and appeared greatly animated. Positioned myself at adjoining table and heard B remark to A the following: ‘I’m telling you what the President said – it was secret evidence given to judges that secured conviction, not evidence in court.’ Same point repeated with emphasis several times . . . After departure of B, A remained seated in state of obvious emotion. A paid bill (see copy attached) and left hotel at 9.25.

  I look at Henry. ‘The President has revealed that the judges were shown secret evidence?’

  Henry shrugs. ‘People talk. It was bound to come out one day.’

  ‘Yes, but the President . . .? You’re not concerned?’

  ‘No. Why? It’s just a bit of legal procedure. It doesn’t alter a thing.’

  I brood on this; I’m not so sure. I think of how my lawyer friend Leblois might react if he heard about it. ‘I agree it doesn’t alter Dreyfus’s guilt. But if it were to become widely known that he was convicted on the basis of secret evidence that he and his lawyer never even saw, then some will certainly argue he didn’t get a fair trial.’ Now I start to understand why Boisdeffre scents political trouble. ‘How are the family planning to use this information, do we know?’

  Henry glances at Guénée, who shakes his head. ‘They were all very excited about it at first. There was a family conference in Basel. They brought in a journalist, a Jew called Lazare. He moves in anarchist circles. But that was four months ago; since then, they’ve done nothing.’

  ‘Well, they have done one thing,’ says Henry, with a wink. ‘Tell the colonel about Madame Léonie – that’ll cheer him up!’

  ‘Oh yes, Madame Léonie!’ Guénée laughs and rummages through his report. ‘She’s another friend of Dr Gibert.’ He hands me a second photograph, of a plain-faced woman of about fifty, staring straight at the camera, wearing a Norman bonnet.

  ‘And who is Madame Léonie?’

  ‘She’s a somnambulist.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Absolutely! She goes into a clairvoyant sleep and tells Mathieu facts about his brother’s case which she claims to get from the spirit world. He met her in Le Havre and was so impressed he brought her to Paris. He’s given her a room in his apartment.’

  ‘Can you believe it?’ Henry roars with laughter. ‘They are literally stumbling around in the dark! Really, Colonel, we have nothing to worry about from these people.’

  I lay the photographs of Mathieu Dreyfus and Madame Léonie side by side and I feel my uneasiness begin to lift. Table-tapping, fortune-telling, communing with the dead: these are all the fashion in Paris at the moment; sometimes one despairs of one’s fellow men. ‘You’re right, Henry. It shows they’re getting nowhere. Even if they have discovered there was a secret file of evidence, they obviously realise that on its own it means nothing. We just need to make sure it stays like that.’ I turn to Guénée. ‘How are you handling the surveillance?’

  ‘We have them very tightly surrounded, Colonel. Madame Dreyfus’s nanny reports to us weekly. The concierge in Mathieu Dreyfus’s apartment building in the rue de Châteaudun is our informant. We have another who works as his wife’s maid. His cook and h
er fiancé keep an eye out for us. We follow him wherever he goes. All the family’s communications are diverted here by the postal authorities, and we make copies.’

  ‘And this is the correspondence of Dreyfus himself.’ Henry holds up the file he has brought with him and hands it over to me. ‘They need it back tomorrow.’

  It is tied with black ribbon and stamped with the official seal of the Colonial Ministry. I unfasten it and flick open the cover. Some of the letters are originals – the ones the censor has decided not to let through and which therefore have been retained in the ministry – others are copies of the correspondence that was cleared. My dear Lucie, I ask myself in truth how I can go on living . . . I put the letter back and take out another. My poor Fred darling, what anguish I felt as I parted from you . . . It jolts me. It’s hard to think of that stiff, awkward, chilly figure as ‘Fred’.

  I say, ‘From now on, I’d like to be copied in to all their correspondence as soon as it arrives at the Colonial Ministry.’

  ‘Yes, Colonel.’

  ‘In the meantime, Monsieur Guénée, you should continue the surveillance of the family. As long as their agitation is confined to the level of clairvoyance, there is nothing to concern us. However, if it starts to go beyond that, we may have to think again. And at all times be on the lookout for something that might suggest an additional motive for Dreyfus’s treason.’

  ‘Yes, Colonel.’

  And with that, the briefing ends.

  At the end of the afternoon, I put the file of correspondence into my briefcase and take it home.

  It is a still, warm, golden time of day. My apartment is high enough above the street to muffle most of the city’s noise; the rest is deadened by the book-lined walls. The floor space is dominated by a grand piano – an Erard – miraculously salvaged from the rubble of Strasbourg and given to me by my mother. I sit in my armchair and tug off my boots. Then I light a cigarette and gaze across at the briefcase sitting on the piano stool. I am supposed to change and go straight out again. I should leave it until I return. But my curiosity is too strong.

  I sit at the tiny escritoire between the two windows and take out the file. The first item is a letter sent from the military prison of Cherche-Midi dated 5 December 1894, more than seven weeks after Dreyfus’s arrest. It has been neatly copied out by the censor on lined paper:

  My dear Lucie,

  At last I am able to write you a word. I have just been informed that my trial takes place on the 19th of this month. I am not allowed to see you.

  I will not describe to you all that I have suffered; there are no terms in the world strong enough in which to do so.

  Do you remember when I used to say to you how happy we were? All life smiled upon us. Then suddenly came a terrible thunderclap, from which my brain is still reeling. I, accused of the most monstrous crime that a soldier could commit! Even now I think I am the victim of a terrible nightmare . . .

  I turn the page and scan the lines rapidly to the end: I embrace you a thousand times, for I love you, I adore you. A thousand kisses to the children. I dare not speak more to you of them. Alfred.

  The next letter, again a copy, is written from his cell a fortnight later, the day after his conviction: My bitterness is so great, my heart so envenomed, that I should already have rid myself of this sad life if the thought of you had not stayed me, if the fear of increasing your grief still more had not withheld my hand.

  And then a copy of the reply from Lucie on Christmas Day: Live for me, I entreat you my dear friend; gather up your strength, and strive – we will strive together until the guilty man is found. What will become of me without you? I shall have nothing to link me with the world . . .

  I feel grubby reading all this. It is like hearing a couple making love in the next-door room. But at the same time I cannot stop myself reading on. I leaf through the file until I come to Dreyfus’s description of the degradation ceremony. When he writes of the glances of scorn cast upon me by his former comrades, I wonder if he has me in mind: It is easy to understand their feelings; in their place, I could not have restrained my contempt for an officer who, I was assured, was a traitor. But alas! that is the pity of it; there is a traitor, but I am not the man . . .

  I stop and light another cigarette. Do I believe these protestations of innocence? Not for an instant. I have never met a scoundrel in my life who hasn’t insisted, with exactly this degree of sincerity, that he is the victim of a miscarriage of justice. It seems to be a necessary part of the criminal mentality: to survive captivity, one must somehow convince oneself one is not guilty. Madame Dreyfus, on the other hand, I do feel sorry for. It is obvious she trusts in him entirely – no, more than that, she venerates him, as if he is some kind of holy martyr: The dignity of your demeanour made a deep impression upon many hearts; and when the hour of rehabilitation comes, as it will come, the remembrance of the sufferings that you endured on that terrible day will be graven in the memory of mankind . . .

  With some reluctance I have to break off here. I lock the file inside the escritoire, shave, change into a clean dress uniform, and set off to the home of my friends the comte and comtesse de Comminges.

  I have known Aimery de Comminges, baron de Saint-Lary, since we were stationed in Tonkin together more than a decade ago. I was a young junior staff officer; he an even younger and more junior lieutenant. For two years we fought the Vietnamese in the Red River delta and knocked around Saigon and Hanoi, and when we returned to France our friendship prospered. He introduced me to his parents and to his younger sisters, Daisy, Blanche and Isabelle. All three women were musical, single, high-spirited, and gradually a salon arose, consisting of them and their friends and those army comrades of Aimery’s who took – or, for the sake of meeting the sisters, pretended to take – an interest in music.

  Six years on the salon persists, and it is to one of these musical soirées that I am bidden tonight. As usual, for purposes of fitness as much as economy, I walk to the party rather than take a cab – and walk briskly at that, for I am in danger of being late. The de Comminges’ family hôtel stands, ancient and massive, on the boulevard Saint-Germain. I can tell it from a distance by the carriages and cabs drawn up to drop off guests. Inside I am greeted with a friendly salute and a warm double handshake by Aimery, now a captain on the staff of the Minister of War, and then I kiss his wife, Mathilde, whose family, the Waldner von Freundsteins, is one of the oldest in Alsace. Mathilde is the mistress of this house now, and has been for a year, ever since the old comte died.

  ‘Go on up,’ she whispers, her hand on my arm. ‘We’ll be starting in a few minutes.’ Her method of playing the charming hostess – and it is not a bad one – is to make even the most commonplace remark sound like an intimate secret. ‘And you’ll stay to dinner, won’t you, my dear Georges?’

  ‘I would love to, thank you.’ In truth, I had been hoping to get away early, but I submit without demur. Bachelors of forty are society’s stray cats. We are taken in by households and fed and made a fuss of; in return we are expected to provide amusement, submit with good grace to occasionally intrusive affection (‘So when are you going to get married, eh, Georges?’), and always agree to make up the numbers at dinner, however short the notice.

  As I move on into the house, Aimery shouts after me, ‘Blanche is looking for you!’ and almost at the same moment I see his sister dodging through the crowded hall towards me. Her gown, with matching headdress, contains a great number of feathers dyed dark green, crimson and gold.

  ‘Blanche,’ I say, as she kisses me, ‘you look like a particularly succulent pheasant.’

  ‘Now I hope you are going to be a Good God this evening,’ she replies chirpily, ‘and not a Horrid God, because I have prepared a nice surprise for you,’ and she takes my arm and leads me towards the garden, in the opposite direction to everyone else.

  I offer token resistance. ‘I think Mathilde wants us all to go upstairs . . .’

  ‘Don’t be silly! It’s ba
rely seven!’ She lowers her voice. ‘Is this a German thing, do you suppose?’

  She marches me towards the glass doors that open on to the tiny strip of garden, separated from its neighbours by a high wall strung with unlit Chinese lanterns. Waiters are collecting discarded glasses of orangeade and liqueurs. The drinkers have all left to go upstairs. Only one woman stands alone, with her back to me, and when she turns I see it is Pauline. She smiles.

  ‘There,’ says Blanche, with a strange edge to her voice, ‘you see? A surprise.’

  It is always Blanche who arranges the concerts. Tonight she presents her latest discovery, a young Catalan prodigy, Monsieur Casals, only eighteen, whom she found playing second cello in the theatre orchestra of the Folies-Marigny. He begins with the Saint-Saëns cello sonata, and from the opening chords it is clear he is a marvel. Normally I would sit rapt, but tonight my attention wanders. I glance around the audience, arranged against the walls of the grand salon, facing the players in the centre. Out of sixty or so spectators, I count a dozen uniforms, mostly cavalrymen like Aimery, half of whom I know for a fact are attached to the General Staff. And after a while it seems to me that I am attracting some sidelong looks myself: the youngest colonel in the army, unmarried, sitting beside the attractive wife of a senior official of the Foreign Ministry, and no sign anywhere of her husband. For a colonel in a position such as mine, to be caught in an adulterous affair would be a scandal that could ruin a career. I try to put it out of my mind and concentrate on the music, but I am uneasy.

  In the interval Pauline and I return to the garden, Blanche walking between us, clasping each of us by the arm. A couple of officers, old friends of mine, come over to congratulate me on my promotion, and I introduce them to Pauline. ‘This is Major Albert Curé – we were in Tonkin together with Aimery. This is Madame Monnier. And this is Captain William Lallemand de Marais—’

  ‘Also known as the Demigod,’ interrupts Blanche.