An Officer and a Spy

by Robert Harris

  I keep these thoughts to myself as the weeks and months pass. I continue to receive reports from Guénée on the monitoring of Lucie and Mathieu Dreyfus; it yields nothing. I read their letters to the prisoner (My good dear husband, What endless hours, what painful days we have experienced since this disaster struck its stunning blow . . .) and his replies, which are mostly not delivered (Nothing is so depressing, nothing so exhausts the energy of heart and mind as these long agonising silences, never hearing human speech, seeing no friendly face, nor even one that shows sympathy . . .). I am also copied into the regular dispatches from the Colonial Ministry’s officials in Cayenne, monitoring the convict’s health and morale: The prisoner was asked how he was. ‘I am well for the moment,’ he replied. ‘It is my heart that is sick. Nothing . . .’ and here he broke down and wept for a quarter of an hour. (2 July 1895)

  The prisoner said: ‘Colonel du Paty de Clam promised me, before I left France, to make enquiries into the matter; I should not have thought that they could take so long. I hope that they will soon come to a head.’ (15 August 1895)

  On receiving no letter from his family, the prisoner wept and said, ‘For ten months now I have been suffering horrors.’ (31 August 1895)

  The prisoner was taken with a sudden burst of sobbing, and said, ‘It cannot last long; my heart will end by breaking.’ The prisoner always weeps when he receives his letters. (2 September 1895)

  The prisoner sat for long hours today not moving. In the evening he complained of violent heart spasms, with frequent paroxysms of suffocation. He requested a medicine chest in order to make an end of his life when he could stand it no longer. (13 December 1895)

  Gradually over the winter I discern that we do in fact have a policy with regard to Dreyfus, it has simply never been explained to me in so many words, either verbally or on paper. We are waiting for him to die.

  6

  THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of Dreyfus’s degradation comes and goes on 5 January 1896 with little comment in the press. There are no letters or petitions, no demonstrations for him or against. He seems to have been forgotten on his rock. Come the spring, I have been in charge of the Statistical Section for eight months, and all is calm.

  And then, one morning in March, Major Henry asks to see me in my office. His eyes are pink and swollen.

  ‘My dear Henry,’ I say, laying aside the file I have been reading. ‘Are you all right? What is the matter?’

  He stands in front of my desk. ‘I’m afraid I need to ask for some urgent leave, Colonel. I have a family crisis.’

  I tell him to close the door and take a seat. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘There isn’t anything that can be done, Colonel, I’m afraid.’ He blows his nose on a large white handkerchief. ‘My mother is dying.’

  ‘Well, I’m extremely grieved to hear that. Is anyone with her? Where does she live?’

  ‘In the Marne. A little village called Pogny.’

  ‘You must go to her at once, and take as much leave as you need. Get Lauth or Junck to cover for your work. That’s an order. Each of us only has one mother, you know.’

  ‘You’re very kind, Colonel.’ He stands and salutes. We shake hands warmly; I ask him to pay my respects to his mother. After he has gone, I wonder briefly what she must be like, this pig farmer’s wife on the flatlands of the Marne, with her noisy soldier-son. It can’t have been an easy life, I imagine.

  I don’t see my deputy again for about a week. But then late one afternoon there is a knock at my door and Henry enters carrying one of the bulging brown paper cones that signifies a delivery from Agent Auguste. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Colonel. I’m in a rush between trains. I just wanted to drop this off.’

  I can feel at once from the weight of it that there is more than usual. Henry notices my surprise. ‘I’m afraid because of Mother I missed the last meeting,’ he confesses, ‘so I arranged for Auguste to make the drop today, during daylight hours for a change. That’s where I’ve just come from. I’ve got to get back to the Marne.’

  It is on the tip of my tongue to issue a reprimand. I ordered him to hand his duties over to Lauth or Junck: surely someone else could have made the pickup, and done it in the darkness as usual, when there would have been less risk of our agent being seen? Besides, isn’t it a golden rule of intelligence – as he has often impressed upon me – that the faster information is processed, the more useful it is likely to prove? But Henry looks so haggard, having barely slept for a week, that I make no comment. I simply wish him bon voyage and lock the cone away in my safe, where it remains overnight until Captain Lauth comes in the next morning.

  My relations with Lauth have not moved on from the first day we met: professional but cool. He is only a couple of years younger than I, clever enough, a German-speaker from Alsace: we ought to get on better than we do. But there is something Prussian about his blond good looks and stiffly upright figure that stops me warming to him. However, he is an efficient officer, and the speed with which he reconstructs these torn-up documents is phenomenal, so when I take the cone to his office I am polite as usual: ‘Would you mind attending to this now?’

  ‘Of course, Colonel.’

  He dons his apron, and while he fetches his box of equipment from his cupboard, I empty the paper sack over his desk. Immediately my eye is caught by a sprinkling among the white and grey of several dozen pale blue fragments, like patches of sky on a cloudy day. I poke a couple with my forefinger. They are slightly thicker than normal paper. Lauth picks one up with his tweezers and examines it, turning it back and forth in the beam of his powerful electric lamp.

  ‘A petit bleu,’ he murmurs, using the slang expression for a pneumatic telegram card. He looks at me and frowns. ‘The pieces are torn up smaller than usual.’

  ‘See what you can do.’

  It must be four or five hours later that Lauth comes to my office. He is carrying a thin manila folder. He winces with distress as he offers it to me. His whole manner is anxious, uneasy. ‘I think you ought to look at this,’ he says.

  I open it. Inside lies the petit bleu. He has done a craftsman’s job of sticking it back together. The texture reminds me of something that might have been reconstructed by an archaeologist: a fragment of broken glassware, perhaps, or a blue marble tile. It is jagged on the right-hand side, where some of the pieces are missing, and the lines of the tears give it a veined appearance. But the message in French is clear enough:

  Monsieur,

  Above all, I await a more detailed explanation than the one you gave me the other day of the matter in hand. I ask that you supply it to me in writing so that I may decide whether or not to continue my association with the house of R.

  C

  Puzzled, I glance up at Lauth. His manner when he came in suggested something sensational; this doesn’t seem to warrant his agitation. ‘“C” being Schwartzkoppen?’

  He nods. ‘Yes. It’s his preferred code name. Now turn it over.’

  On the reverse side is the web-work of tiny strips of transparent adhesive paper that holds the postcard together. But again the writing is perfectly legible. Beneath the printed word ‘TELEGRAMME’, and above the word ‘PARIS’, in the space left for the address, is written:

  Major Esterhazy

  27, rue de la Bienfaisance

  I don’t recognise the name. Even so I feel as shocked as if I had just seen an old friend listed in a deaths column. I tell Lauth, ‘Go and talk to Gribelin. Ask him to check if there’s a Major Esterhazy in the French army.’ There’s just a chance, I think, a slim hope that given the surname he might be Austro-Hungarian.

  ‘I already have,’ says Lauth. ‘Major Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy is listed with the 74th Infantry.’

  ‘The Seven-Four?’ I’m still trying to take it in. ‘I have a friend in that regiment. They’re garrisoned in Rouen.’

  ‘Rouen? “The house of R”?’ Lauth stares at me, his pale blue eyes widening with alarm, for it all now points in onl
y one direction, and his voice drops to a whisper. ‘Does this mean there’s another traitor?’

  I don’t know how to answer him. I re-examine the seven lines of the message. After eight months of reading Schwartzkoppen’s notes and drafts I am familiar with his handwriting, and this regular and formal script is quite unlike it. In fact it’s too regular and formal to be anyone’s normal hand. This is the kind of lettering one sees on an official invitation; this writing has been disguised. And naturally so, I think: if one was an officer of a foreign power communicating with an agent through the open mail of a host country, one would take the minimal precaution of concealing one’s hand. The tone of the message is irritated, peremptory, urgent: it suggests a crisis in relations. The pneumatic tube network follows the Paris sewers and can deliver a telegram so quickly Esterhazy would have it in his hands within an hour or two. But still it’s a risk, which perhaps is why Schwartzkoppen, having laboriously copied out his communication – and wasted a pre-paid fifty-centimes telegram card on it – in the end decided not to send it, but shredded it into the tiniest pieces he could manage and dropped it into his waste-paper basket.

  I say to Lauth, ‘It’s obviously important. So if he didn’t send this, what did he send?’

  ‘Another card?’ suggests Lauth. ‘A letter?’

  ‘Have you checked the rest of the material?’

  ‘Not yet. I concentrated on the bleu.’

  ‘Very well. Go through it now and see if there’s another draft of something else.’

  ‘And what shall we do about the pneumatic telegram?’

  ‘Leave it with me. Don’t mention it to anyone else. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, Colonel.’ Lauth salutes.

  As he leaves, I call after him, ‘Good work, by the way.’

  After Lauth has gone I stand at my window and look across the garden to the minister’s residence. I can see the light burning in his office. It would be an easy matter to walk over and alert him to what we have discovered. Or at least I could go and see General Gonse, who is supposed to be my immediate superior. But I know that if I do that I will have lost control of the investigation before it has even started: I shall not be able to make a move without clearing it with them first. And then there is the risk of a leak. Our suspect may be a humble major with an unfashionable regiment in a garrison town, but Esterhazy is a grand name in central Europe: perhaps someone on the General Staff might feel it his duty to alert the family. I decide that for now it would be wiser to play this one close to my chest.

  I replace the petit bleu in its folder and lock it in my safe.

  The next day, Lauth comes to see me again. He has worked late into the night and pieced together another draft letter. Unfortunately, as often happens, Auguste has not managed to retrieve every scrap of paper: words, maybe even half-sentences, are missing. Lauth watches me as I read.

  To be delivered by the concierge

  Sir,

  I regret not speaking personally . . . about a matter which . . . My father has just the . . . funds necessary to continue . . . in the conditions which were stipulated . . . I will explain to you his reasons, but I must begin by telling you straight away . . . your conditions too harsh for me and . . . the results that . . . of the trip. He proposes to me . . . tour concerning which we might . . . the relations I have . . . for him up until now out of proportion . . . I have spent on the trips. The point is . . . to speak to you as soon as possible.

  I am returning to you with this the sketches you gave me the other day; they are not the last.

  C

  I reread the document several times. Even with its gaps, the sense is clear. Esterhazy has been handing over information to the Germans, including sketches, for which he has been paid by Schwartzkoppen; now the German attaché’s ‘father’, presumably a euphemism for some general in Berlin, is objecting that the price is too high for the value of the intelligence they are getting.

  Lauth says, ‘It could be a trap, of course.’

  ‘Yes.’ I have already thought of this. ‘If Schwartzkoppen has discovered we’re reading his rubbish, he might well decide to use that knowledge against us. He could easily plant material in his own waste basket to send us off on a false trail.’

  I close my eyes and try to put myself in his shoes. It seems unlikely somehow that a man so reckless in his love affairs, so slapdash in his handling of documents, would suddenly become that devious.

  ‘Does it really make sense for him to go to those lengths,’ I muse aloud, ‘if one recalls how violently the Germans reacted when we exposed them employing Dreyfus? Why would Schwartzkoppen want to risk another embarrassing espionage scandal?’

  ‘Of course, none of this is evidence, Colonel,’ says Lauth. ‘We could never use this document or the petit bleu as a pretext to arrest Esterhazy, because neither was ever sent to him.’

  ‘That’s true.’ I open the safe and take out the manila folder. I put the draft letter inside, along with the petit bleu. On the file I write ‘Esterhazy’. Here, I reflect, is the paradox of the spy’s world. These are significant documents only if one knows where they come from. And as the very fact of where they come from can never be revealed, because that would blow our agent’s cover, legally they are worthless. I am reluctant to show them even to the Minister of War or the Chief of the General Staff in case one of their junior officers should see them and start gossiping: they are so obviously reconstructed rubbish. ‘Is there any way,’ I ask Lauth, taking out the petit bleu again, ‘that you could photograph this and somehow cover up the tear marks so that it looks as if we just intercepted it in the mail, as you did with the Dreyfus document?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he says doubtfully. ‘But that was only in six pieces, whereas this is in about forty. And even if I could, the side with the address, which is the most vital part of the evidence, isn’t franked, so anyone examining it for half a minute would know it had never been delivered.’

  ‘Maybe we could get it franked?’ I suggest.

  ‘I don’t know about that.’ Lauth looks even more dubious.

  I decide not to press it. ‘All right,’ I say. ‘Let’s just keep these documents between ourselves for the present. In the meantime, we should investigate Esterhazy and try to discover what other evidence there may be against him.’

  I can tell that Lauth is still unhappy about something. He frowns; he chews his lip; he seems on the point of making a remark but then changes his mind. He sighs. ‘I wish Major Henry were here, and not on leave.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I reassure him. ‘Henry will be back soon enough. Until then, you and I can deal with this.’

  I send a telegram to my old comrade from Tonkin, Albert Curé, major with the 74th Infantry Regiment in Rouen, telling him I’ll be in the area the next day, and asking if I can drop by and see him. I receive a one-word reply: ‘Delighted.’

  The following morning I eat an early lunch in the buffet of the gare Saint-Lazare and catch the Normandy train. Despite the gravity of my mission, as we leave the suburbs and head into open country I feel a surge of exhilaration. I am away from my desk for the first time in weeks. It is a spring day. I am on the move. My briefcase sits unopened beside me while the rural scenes slide past my window in a pastoral diorama – the brown and white cows like shiny lead toys in their lush green meadows, the squat grey Norman churches and red-roofed villages, the brightly coloured barges on the placid canal, the sandy lanes and the high hedges just coming into leaf. It is the France for which I fight – if only by piecing together the garbage of a priapic Prussian colonel.

  Just under two hours later we are pulling into Rouen, chugging at walking pace alongside the Seine towards the great cathedral. Seagulls swoop and cry over the wide river; I always forget how close the Norman capital is to the English Channel. I set off on foot from the station towards the Pélissier barracks, through a typical garrison district with its dreary chandleries and bootmakers and that certain kind of grim-looking bar, invariably owned by an e
x-soldier, in which local civilians are not encouraged to drink. The Seven-Four occupies three large triple-storeyed buildings of alternating stripes of red brick and grey stone peeping over the top of a high wall. It could be a factory or a lunatic asylum or a prison for all one can tell from the outside. At the gate I show my credentials and an orderly leads me between the two dormitory blocks, across the parade ground with its flagpole and tricolour, its plane trees and water troughs, towards the administration building on the far side.

  I climb the nail-studded stairs to the second floor. Curé is away from his office. His sergeant tells me he has just started a kit inspection. He invites me to wait. The room is bare apart from a desk and a couple of chairs. The high, small-paned window is slightly ajar, letting in the spring breeze and the sounds of the garrison. I hear the ring of horses’ hooves on the cobbles of the stable block, the rhythmic tramp of a company marching in from the road, and further in the distance a band rehearsing. I might be at Saint-Cyr again, or back as a captain at divisional HQ in Toulouse. Even the smells are the same – horse dung, leather, canteen food and male sweat. My sophisticated friends in Paris express amazement that I can stand it year after year. I never try to explain the truth: that it’s rather the unchanging sameness that attracts me.

  Curé bustles in full of apologies. First he salutes me, then we shake hands, and finally awkwardly – on my initiative – we embrace. I haven’t seen him since the de Comminges concert last summer, when I got the impression something was needling him. Curé is an ambitious man, a year or two older than I. It would only be human for him to feel a little envy of my new rank.

  ‘Well,’ he says, standing back and looking at me, ‘Colonel!’

  ‘It does take some getting used to, I agree.’