Waltenberg

  Since his clean-up in Rome, he had been given full authority to sweep diplomatic premises abroad, the only thing they’d come up with was an uncle who admired Maurras and had been saved from the chimneys of Buchenwald by the camp’s communist network, that’s where analysts in the barracks at Mortier reckoned it all started, all his holidays as a boy and a teenager were spent with this uncle in Normandy, no doubt in hearing all about Stalingrad and the great struggle against barbarism in between fishing for trout, collecting mushrooms and setting a few snares, not everyone agreed that what followed started there.

  Berthier will never speak again, and the uncle died in 1970, a poor man.

  In the end, they’d had to face it: it was Berthier himself who had installed the bugs he claimed he’d discovered.

  Why? Because the Russians had needed to make the French think that the leaks were coming from their own Embassy in Moscow, and to do that they’d risked blowing the cover of a specialist plumber it had taken them almost fifteen years to plant there.

  The conclusion of the first security flatfoot on the scene: the aim was to protect someone they believed was even more important to them than Berthier, someone who’d been there for a long time. The most plausible hypothesis: a mole, operational since the mid-sixties, so the whole damn thing must have been set up nearly fifteen years ago.

  When de Vèze was told, it struck him that this more or less coincided with the period he’d spent in Asia, when he’d been Ambassador in Rangoon, those were good times too, he pictures himself once more during a trip to Singapore playing croquet one evening on a lawn on some island which would still belong for a few months longer to the British Empire, he was waiting for someone he admired to arrive, killing time talking to an elderly man with big ears and a young woman in a yellow dress who wasn’t wearing a slip.

  In the world of counter-espionage, the Berthier affair at least produced one certainty: the mole was not a rumour.

  Then began a new round of break-ins, they’d try anything, at the DST, the Ministry of Internal Security one of the senior managers decided to go to extreme lengths in the use of the ultimate capacities of the human mind: he imported a dowser, who waved his bent twig over lists of names of top civil servants, with a view to coming up with an astral link, the results were interesting.

  They had another go at the veterans of the Second World War, especially the ones who had got on in life, next thing you knew ministers’ offices were full of enraged people, throwing their Liberation medals on the floor, a torrent of foul-mouthed abuse, then the Gaullists kicking up a stink again, followed by a second visit by their leader and his colleagues to the Élysée, and one of them, with strong Corsican accent, told the President stories about patriots ‘and not the puppets of international finance’.

  The President remained firm, the investigations went on, everyone felt naked.

  Then small newspapers, the kind which are delivered in sealed envelopes, began carrying stories dating from the time of rumour, fury, and reports from the far-right nationalist OAS of attempts on de Gaulle’s life.

  And of how young junior ministers had very probably handed the would-be killers the timetable of the movements of the man they called the Great Zohra, the specifics weren’t easy to check but they were detailed and looked accurate, but what on the other hand was checkable were the photocopies of the founder of the OAS, General Salan as presented to the Special Court, it contained minutes of Cabinet meetings and had been discovered among General Salan’s papers the day he was arrested, no comment was added, readers were allowed to work it out for themselves: who could have passed on to the head of the OAS details of what went on in Cabinet meetings? A hot potato, a dangerous dossier for everybody, it couldn’t be checked out, the President cooled things down.

  Actually, the whole thing eventually settled down, the President started saying and ordering officials to say niet to the Russians at every turn, a section of the Soviet Embassy was expelled, Pravda described France as ‘jittery’, then the Russians suddenly seemed less well-informed, the Americans seemed less aggressive, France’s external intelligence agency the SDECE and military security went on turning up nothing, and the DST kept waving dowsers’ twigs.

  And de Vèze was made to pay for the Berthier business and the electronic listening devices, there are such things as counter-espionage procedures, you don’t give a man like Berthier, even if he has full authority, a free run of the most sensitive areas of an embassy, with a soldering iron up his jumper.

  De Vèze had taken Berthier to Moscow, de Vèze was responsible for him, reservations were expressed about the way he had handled the matter, but the Minister had defended him, with all the inflated eloquence of a junior counsel, the occasion was used as an excuse for recalling de Vèze to Paris, a spell in central administration before another ambassadorial posting, but de Vèze knows there’ll be no other embassy for him, he won’t be thrown on the scrap heap of course, he’ll be offered unacceptable postings and get saddled with a reputation for being picky whereas we are all servants of France, he is no longer untouchable, at last they can forget all about Bir Hakeim, the minefield, the discreet green ribbon with black edging, draw a line under three decades of being upstaged.

  One day in the Quai d’Orsay, de Vèze pens a note for the Minister, he tells him he feels that he has been the victim of a plot, his embassy could not have been selected at random, the investigators should have gone further back in time, they should have allowed him to remain in his post and prowled around him, waiting and watching. If he gets shunted into touch, whoever set him up will drop him and target somebody else, we need to start again from the beginning, he is ready to collaborate, to trawl through his past with the investigators, he’s sure he must have crossed the path of the mole at some point in his career, everything would have to be cross-checked, meticulously, he is thinking of Singapore.

  In his letter, he also tries to tell the Minister he has seen through his little game, he knows that in politics the biggest bastard is the man who speaks out warmly in defence of an opponent thus giving himself a clean bill of health so that he can shift the blame elsewhere when it suits him, you defended me like a lightning conductor, you directed the thunderbolts down on me as a way of covering the fact that it was you who saddled me with Berthier, you are a minister, you drop bricks so you can pick them up again later, it gives you a feeling of power, you ride on the backs of others.

  De Vèze realises that his sentences are too complicated, two and a half pages, he feeds them into the shredder and settles for a three-line letter of resignation, it’s the answer to everything, he drops his letter in the internal mail and leaves the building, giving the porter a doll as a present for his little girl who is sick.

  He is alone, nothing seems to mean much, Jug Ears was right when he’d said ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ more than ten years ago. Today, there are only lies, and it’s the laughter of Jug Ears in Singapore parodying the man de Vèze had come to meet, it is that old laughter which now has the colour of truth.

  De Vèze decides to walk upriver along the quais of the Seine, as far as Notre-Dame, he passes the Pont de la Concorde, goes down the steps to the river bank to escape the traffic, he has plenty of time now, he can travel, follow his nose, or not, it’s too late, he should have started earlier, he’ll give it a go, buy a sailing boat or become an ethnologist, just take off somewhere, is he still fit enough for it? Or maybe write a book to escape the pack, to get away from the bastards, a bit late for that too, writing, de Vèze has missed out on so much, it’s not easy to start telling stories when all your pen has under its belt is thirty years of diplomatic report-writing, and people like jovial Jug Ears from Singapore who could have stepped out of a stage farce and tell you with a laugh that it’s all over, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ people who mess up their lives and then give you the benefit of their failures.

  ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ De Vèze walks under the Palais Royal bridge, sharp smel
ls, there’s no one around, he shouts so he can hear the echo bounce back off the arch of stone and girders, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ and in the echo he seems to hear once more the voice of Jug Ears, like the crack of a whip, just like that first time.

  Resigning wasn’t a very clever move, it’s what they expected him to do, by handing in his resignation he has allowed a page to be turned, poor de Vèze, a casualty of the Berthier affair, and anyway it was his own fault, his wandering prick, in this profession you can’t be too careful.

  The trap had been laid a long time before, Moscow, it was no accident, he’d been fingered, and he must have met the man who’d fingered him. One day, a note had been made about him: a man who puts it about a lot, that’s how it must have started, a ladies’ man, plenty to say for himself, already in a senior post, a track record which will ensure that he’ll go even higher, a juicy target, de Vèze would very much like to meet up again with the man who’d fingered him.

  He’s enjoying this walk along the Seine, a corridor, with a wind blowing along it chasing all that city smog away, de Vèze has now reached the Pont des Arts, he can see the île de la Cité, the statue of Henri IV on his horse, it’s de Vèze’s favourite, he halts for a moment in front of it.

  The French continued to look for the mole, without creating as much upheaval, but they didn’t give up, the mole must have been part of an estimated circle of three hundred people, this was judged too small, so it was extended to six hundred.

  One day, the Americans sent Paris a copy of a Russian document brought out of Moscow by a defector, an excellent survey of ten years of friction between France and her allies, very methodical, with high-grade information on NATO which should never have gone outside the family, one of the deputy directors of the CIA flew specially to Paris to discuss this document, a man named Walker, Richard F. T. Walker, a man who put his questions casually:

  ‘Is what the Russians claim you’re saying about us true? Is that really what you think of us? Or is it what the Russians would like you to think about us and you do genuinely think about us? Or is it what you say when you know the Russians are listening, so that we get the idea that you’re doing it on purpose and we finally start trusting you? It’s an amusing game, but you’ve got to come clean and tell us once and for all, because it’s bizarre that the Russians think that you aren’t a very easy ally to have, even though you’ve broken with Gaullist foreign policy, as your President has confirmed several times, personally, to ours.’

  Walker, very Princeton, all tweed and corduroy:

  ‘You know, what we can’t figure out in this Russian document, yes, it’s authentic, we checked it out, it cost two or three lives, notably the defector’s father, anyway what’s bugging us isn’t the general political anecdotal material, no, but in it there is also intelligence about France’s view of the weakness of NATO’s southern flank, those shoot-outs between the Greeks and the Turks, the detail is too specific, the cliché of the nation of talkers, did you really say those things? You need to keep tabs on your military, otherwise we’ll have to start looking up their asses, back home there’s some of our people think we should take a closer look at your President, but they’re neanderthals.’

  Assurances were made to the Americans, they were given guarantees, more strenuous efforts were made to investigate the military, and the military began looking at the non-military, the whole business started up again, out of control, some slack had to be put into the loop.

  To complicate matters, there were two suicides in the circle of the six hundred, they kept a lot of people busy for very little return, the first one had wearied of counting his multiplying malignant tumours and the other had almost certainly suffered some terrible blow, the sort that makes you shake and sob before making the most anodyne of phone calls, and you chew your fingernails down to the quick and you promise that starting tomorrow you’ll leave your nails alone, you cry, you swallow a dose of Optalidon. Everything, except a lead.

  They couldn’t see a thing, like owls at noon, so the other hypothesis was revived, that there was no mole, that the mole was an invention of the paranoid minds who ran counter-espionage, people who dreamed of spies the way other paranoid persons imagine that their child has been killed so that they can unleash on the killers all the tortures they’ve been dreaming of ever since they stopped being children, a phantom mole which did ten times more damage than a real one, in any case he wasn’t called a mole any more, they called him a traitor, someone lived behind his name just as he existed behind an unsilvered mirror.

  He’d been a traitor since at least the start of the 1960s, they said ‘mole’ in English, their way of using a word to cover the slime of the thing, as if it were a cartoon, good-natured large bulldog, gleaming tan coat, who slips a stick of dynamite in a hole in the lawn and waits, and the little grey mole pops up out of another hole with the dynamite in its jaws and puts it down with a tee-hee just behind the bulldog, and the bulldog goes up with a ‘Bang!’, falls back down to earth, is flattened, then sets off in even hotter pursuit of the mole over five keys of a piano, it’s one gag after another, the bulldog is so angry, turns red in the face, digs hundreds of holes in the lawn to chase the mole away then his master returns and lays about the bulldog who turns grey, and in the end the mole offers the bulldog, now a great big placid sleepyhead, a safe shelter at the bottom of the garden, ‘that’s all, folks!’, a rather effective metaphor.

  In Paris, no one used metaphors now, they said plain ‘traitor’, and twelve bullets were heard, whistling in the wind.

  *

  ‘Whatever happens,’ Lilstein tells you, ‘there’s no risk, there is no record, no phone number, no address, no go-between, no dead-letter box, they know nothing, they’re leaving no stone unturned but it’s as if they were trying to make holes in marble with a spoon. And as for having agreed eight years ago to become the secretary of the Waltenberg Forum, why, my boy, it was a stroke of genius!

  ‘You can come from Paris whenever you like, only the two of us know that we’ll be together, excellent thing this forum, makes me feel younger despite the bulldozers and the heliport. Nobody knows a thing, when they look, they always look in the direction of the Russians, and in Moscow no one’s ever asked me to name my sources, or, more accurately, when some of them wanted me to give names, I asked ‘who to?’, that created ructions between the various departments and after a while no one ever brought the subject up again, I always gave the impression that my information came from several sources simultaneously and that I was the only one able to cross-check them.

  ‘The only thing a defector could ever say about me is that there’s someone somewhere in Berlin who can see a long way, and they’ve not even got to that stage yet, so you’ve nothing to fear except your own reactions, a defector could finger some of my agents, but no one could blow your cover because you do not exist in any agency file, which means you do not exist at all, oh yes, I know the current state of play, the French are starting to put some very competent people on the job, but they won’t find anything, no tracks, so we don’t even need to scatter pepper to hide our trail.

  ‘You have just one thing to fear, your own anxious French self,’ Lilstein adds. ‘If that’s our only problem, everything will go swimmingly.’

  His face goes slack, he asks if there’s anything you still believe in.

  ‘Because speaking for myself,’ he says, ‘I’ve had it up to here with them, our dogs of war have got the mange, I really feel like retiring, we’d leave the key under the door, you could stay on in your capacity as an organiser of this world forum, that would give you an influential role of your own if, that is, acting as doorman for a great banker ranks as an influential role, it’s not really funny, only now am I beginning to understand what a German or Austrian aristocrat must have felt in 1918, or a revolutionary in 1935 around the time of the Moscow show trials, end of a world, a new world dawning in which there isn’t a place for you, think I’m being morbid? So tell me instead h
ow you’re getting on these days with that female, Chagrin, aka Lady Piddle, it’ll do us good to talk about something else.’

  A few years back, there’d been a lively exchange of views about this woman between Lilstein and yourself when she began rising up through the ranks of the President’s inner circle at the Élysée, you thought the safest thing was to handle her with kid gloves, talk things over with her, but Lilstein had disagreed.

  ‘Make her curious, she has to suspect you, all the suspicions she had at the start will turn out in the end to be your salvation, I’ve always said it: don’t try to be purer than the average man in the street.’

  You disagreed with Lilstein, you told him he had no idea what the atmosphere inside the Élysée was like, and in the end you agreed to temporise, nor were you ever one of those who systematically called her Lady Piddle, furthermore you were never part of the President’s inner circle, you don’t work for him, you’re an after-hours visitor, an unofficial adviser, wondrously rambling discussions about culture, politics, strategy, you never hesitate to ruffle his feathers, Chagrin was always trying to arrange to bump into you in the corridors completely as it were by chance, what she got was your cold shoulder.

  ‘Always remember, young gentleman of France,’ Lilstein had said, ‘to be contemptuous, people like her can never be put in their place too often.’

  One day the President himself told you that you should have a talk now and then with Chagrin, she’d like that, you could have said nothing but you said you found her irritating, that you didn’t much care for ostentatiously virtuous people who are anything but virtuous. The President laughed.

  And then Chagrin turned on you, it was in the President’s antechamber, a room which preceded the Antechamber proper, Chagrin came in just as you were leaving, she’d arranged it deliberately, or maybe she hadn’t, in any case she was sufficiently near the President’s office for you to be unambiguously reminded of her importance but sufficiently distant for her to attack you, and savage you she did, the President must have had a word with her about your irritation, she attacked you although two security men were on duty in the room, Chagrin’s words weren’t meant for them, but they heard you being bawled out like some minion, Chagrin had a lot of pull, she was feared.