An Officer And A Spy Part 10

"Filthy b.u.g.g.e.rs!" mutters Desvernine.

I wonder if Madame de Weede knows of her lover's predilections-it's possible, I suppose: nothing much surprises me now.

Finally the laughter on the pavement opposite dwindles to smiles. Panizzardi's face expresses a shrug and the two men lean forward and embrace, first one side and then the other. To my left, the camera clicks as Desvernine takes a photograph; he winds the film. Observed casually by someone pa.s.sing in the street, the embrace would seem no more than a social gesture between good friends, but the pitiless magnification of the telescope reveals how each man whispers into the ear of the other. The clinch is broken. They stand apart. Panizzardi raises his hand in farewell, turns and moves out of vision. Schwartzkoppen remains stationary for several seconds watching him go, a half-smile hovering on his lips, before pivoting on his heel and heading into the emba.s.sy courtyard. As he walks, he fans out the tails of his frock coat behind him-a rather magnificent gesture: strutting, virile-then thrusts his hands deep into his trouser pockets.

I take my eye away from the lens and step back in astonishment. The German and Italian military attaches! "And you say they use the apartment downstairs to meet?"

" 'Meet' is one word for it!" Desvernine has draped a black cloth over the back of the camera and is removing the canister of exposed film.

"How are the photographs turning out?"

"Good, as long as the subject doesn't move suddenly. That last one will be a blur, unfortunately."

"Where do you develop the pictures?"

"We have a darkroom in the second bedroom."

"Is the arrangement of the apartment on the ground floor the same as it is up here?"

Duca.s.se says, "As far as I can tell."

Desvernine asks, "What are you thinking, Colonel?"

"I'm thinking how good it would be to be able to hear what they're actually saying." I cross to the fireplace and run my hands over the plasterwork above the chimneypiece. "If the layout is the same, then presumably the flue from their fireplace would run next to ours?"

Desvernine agrees: "It would."

"Then what if we were to take out a few bricks and lower a speaking-tube down it?"

Duca.s.se laughs nervously. "Good heavens, Georges, what an idea!"

"You disapprove?"

"They'd be certain to discover it."

"Why?"

"Well ..." He casts around for reasons. "Supposing they light a fire ..."

"The weather's warmer. They won't be lighting fires until the autumn."

"It might be possible," agrees Desvernine, nodding slowly, "although it wouldn't be anything like the same quality as if they were actually talking into it."

"Maybe not, but it would be an improvement on what we're picking up now."

Duca.s.se persists: "But how could you install a speaking-tube in the first place? At the very least you'd need to gain access to their apartment. You'd be breaking the law ..."

I look at Desvernine, the policeman among us. "It could be arranged," he says.

Reluctant as I am to involve the General Staff, even I recognise that I will need to have Gonse's authority to embark upon an operation as fraught with risk as this, so the next morning I go to see him in his office with a memorandum outlining my plan. I sit opposite him watching as he reads it with his usual infuriating thoroughness, lighting a fresh cigarette from the old one without lifting his eyes from the page. Nowhere in my memo do I mention Esterhazy: I still want to keep Benefactor to myself for the time being.

"You come to me seeking my approval," says Gonse, looking up with irritation when he finishes reading, "but you've already rented the apartment and equipped it."

"I needed to move quickly, while the lease was still available. It was a rare opportunity."

Gonse grunts. "And what do you think we'll get out of it?"

"It will help us discover whether Schwartzkoppen is running any other agents. And it might enable us to turn up the extra evidence about Dreyfus that General Boisdeffre requested."

"I don't think we need to worry about Dreyfus anymore." Gonse starts reading again. His inability to reach a decision is legendary. I wonder how long I will have to sit here until he makes up his mind. His tone softens. "But is it really worth the risk, my dear Picquart? That's what I ask myself. It's quite a provocation to set up shop on the Germans' doorstep like this. If they find out, they will kick up the devil of a fuss."

"On the contrary: if they find out, they won't say a word. It would make them look like fools. Besides, Schwartzkoppen will be terrified we'll expose him as a pansy, which we could-you know it carries a sentence of five years' imprisonment in Germany? That would pay him back for employing Dreyfus."

"Good G.o.d, I couldn't possibly countenance that! Von Schwartzkoppen is a gentleman. It would be contrary to all our traditions."

I antic.i.p.ated his objections, and I have come prepared. "Do you remember what you told me when you first offered me this job, General?"

"What's that?"

"You said that espionage was the new front line in the war against the enemy." I lean forward and tap my report. "Here we have an opportunity to push that front line right into the heart of German territory. In my view this sort of audacious enterprise is very much in the tradition of the French army."

"My goodness, Picquart, you really hate the Germans, don't you?"

"I don't hate them. They're just occupying my family's home."

Gonse sits back and regards me through his cigarette smoke-a long, evaluating look, as if he is recalculating all his previous a.s.sumptions-and for a few moments I wonder if I have gone too far. Then he says, "Actually, I do remember when I appointed you, Colonel; I remember it very well. I was worried by your reluctance to accept. I feared you might be too scrupulous for this kind of work. It seems I was wrong." He stamps my memorandum, signs it and holds it out to me. "I won't stop you. But if it all goes wrong, the blame will rest with you."

8.

We decide that if we are going to install one listening-tube, we might as well put in a second, in the bedroom, where Schwartzkoppen and Panizzardi are more likely to discuss their most intimate matters. Desvernine has to smuggle in the necessary equipment: the tubes, a saw, cutters, a hammer and chisel, sacks for the rubble. The work of breaking into the chimney flues can only be undertaken when the ground-floor apartment is empty, usually at night. Duca.s.se is also worried about the couple who live upstairs, who have already started to ask him suspicious questions about the noises they can hear, and what he does all day. So the work must be undertaken with agonising slowness: a ringing blow from the hammer, and then a pause; a blow from the hammer, another pause. Loosening a single brick can take all night. There is a constant risk of dislodging a fall of soot into the Germans' fireplaces. It is also filthy work. Nerves become strained. Desvernine reports that Duca.s.se is starting to drink heavily: another occupational hazard of the spying business.

There is also the problem of gaining access to the Germans' premises. Desvernine first suggests that we simply break in. He comes to my office with a small leather tool roll, which he opens out on my desk. It contains a set of steel lock-picking instruments, designed for the Srete by a master locksmith. They look like a surgeon's scalpels. He explains what they do: double-ended picks for various types of locks-trunk, wafer, bit key and disc tumbler; rakes for loosening tumblers that are stuck ... The very sight of them, and the thought of one of our agents getting caught while burglarising a property rented by the Germans, makes me feel queasy.

"But it's very simple, Colonel," he insists. "Look. Show me anything here that's locked."

"Very well." I indicate the top right-hand drawer of my desk.

Desvernine kneels, inspects the lock and selects a couple of his tools. "You need two, do you see? You insert your tension tool to put pressure on the racking stump, like this ... Then you insert the pick and you feel for the first tumbler and raise that to the unlocking position ..." He grimaces with concentration. "Then you do the same for any other tumblers ... And then ..." He smiles and opens the drawer. "It's done!"

"Leave them with me," I say. "Let me think about it."

After he's gone, I lock the tools in my desk. From time to time I take them out and look at them. No, I decide: it's too risky, too criminal. Instead I come up with a plan of my own, one that has the merit of being perfectly legal. I put it to Desvernine a day or two later.

"All we need is access to their fireplaces, correct?"

"Yes."

"And this is exactly the time of year when fires are no longer needed and chimneys are swept, is it not?"

"Yes."

"Then why don't you simply disguise a couple of your men as chimney sweeps, and have them offer to clean the Germans' flues?"

In the middle of May, Desvernine comes to see me in my office wearing a rare smile. It turns out that a friend of his wife's brother knows a chimney sweep, a patriot, who happened to be in the same regiment of dragoons when Desvernine was a sergeant. It was the pleasure of this man, whose father was killed in '70, to do something to help the Republic, no questions asked. That lunchtime, says Desvernine, when the Germans were drinking before sitting down to eat, he knocked on the door of the ground-floor apartment, announced himself as the sweep, and was admitted without a question being asked. Under the very noses of those stiff-necked Prussians, he went back and forth to the first floor, lowering the tubes while pretending to clean the flues, and then secured both in place. At the end, when he left his card, one of the Germans actually gave him a tip.

"And can you hear much?" I ask.

"Plenty, especially if whoever is speaking is sitting or standing near to the fireplace. Well, let's put it this way-you can get the sense of a conversation."

"That's good work. Well done."

"And there's something else, Colonel."

From his pocket, Desvernine produces an envelope and a magnifying gla.s.s. Inside the envelope is a photograph, ten centimetres by thirteen. I take it over to the window, for the light.

Desvernine says, "It was exposed yesterday afternoon, just after three o'clock."

Without magnification the figure of a man leaving through the emba.s.sy gates is difficult to distinguish, and even with it one has to concentrate hard: his forward momentum has slightly blurred the image; the shadow cast behind him by the bright May sun is sharper. However, a prolonged examination leaves little doubt. On this occasion the distinctive round eyes and the extravagant ram's-horn moustache prove to be the traitor's own betrayers: it is Esterhazy.

On the Friday of that week Bachir comes creaking and gasping up the stairs to my office with a personal telegram addressed to me care of the ministry. It has taken a while to reach me, and even before he hands it over I have a premonition that it concerns my mother, which can only mean bad news. In some private corner of our minds, from the moment we first become conscious of mortality, are we not all waiting secretly for our parents' deaths? Or is this constant state of dread unique to those of us who have already been bereaved in childhood? In any case, the telegram is from Anna, my sister, and announces that our mother has fallen and broken her hip. To reset the joint, the doctors have decided to anaesthetise her, to spare her the pain and distress. "She is bewildered and hysterical. If possible, please come at once."

I walk along the corridor and tell Henry. He offers friendly sympathy: "I know exactly how you feel, Colonel. Don't worry about things here. I'll make sure the office runs efficiently in your absence." His warmth is clearly genuine, and I feel an unexpected pang of affection for the old brute. I say I shall let him know how long I'll be away. He wishes me luck.

By the time I reach the hospital in Versailles, the operation has been done. Anna is sitting at Maman's bedside with her husband, Jules Gay. Both are more than ten years older than I am: good family people, capable, with two grown-up children and two still teenaged. Jules is a professor at a Paris lycee, a booming, red-faced Lyon man, devoutly Catholic and conservative, who, by all the laws of logic, I should dislike and yet who, by some strange alchemy, for over a quarter of a century I have always loved. Even as they rise to greet me, I can tell from their faces things are not good.

"How is she?"

In reply, Anna moves aside so I can see the bed. My mother is shrunken, tiny, grey. Her face is turned away from me. The lower side of her body is encased in plaster, which seems weirdly bigger and more substantial than she is. She looks like a sickly fledgling, halfway out of its egg.

"When will she come round from the chloroform?"

"She has come round, Georges."

"What?" At first I don't understand. I put my hand gently under her cheek and turn her head towards me. "Maman?" Her eyes are indeed open, but watery and vacant; they peer into mine without a sign of recognition. It is not uncommon, the doctor tells me, for patients in her condition, if given anaesthetic, to leave part of their minds behind in sleep. I start to shout at him-"Why didn't you tell us that before?"-but Anna calms me: what alternative did we have?

The following day we take her home. On Sunday morning the bells of Saint-Louis ring for Ma.s.s, but if she hears them she no longer knows what they mean. She even seems to have forgotten how to eat.

We hire a nurse to look after her during the day, and from now on every evening I leave the office early and return to Versailles to sleep in the spare bedroom. I am not alone in this vigil, of course. Anna and Jules travel out from Paris most days. My cousin Edmond Gast and his wife, Jeanne, drive over from Ville-d'Avray. And one night I arrive back later than usual to find Pauline by the bed reading aloud a novel to her unresponsive audience. When she puts down the book and rises to embrace me, I hold on to her.

I say, "This time I don't think I'm ever going to let you go."

"Georges," she whispers primly, "your mother ..."

We glance down at her. She is lying on her back with her eyes closed. The muscles of her face have relaxed; her expression is impa.s.sive, almost regal in its indifference; she is beyond all convention now, I think, all stupid narrow morality ...

I say, "She can't see us, and if she could, she'd be delighted. You know she could never understand why we weren't married."

"She is not alone in that ..."

She says it wryly. She has never reproached me. We grew up together in Alsace. We survived the siege together. We clung to each other when we were both in exile, when everything else had gone. I was her first lover. I should have proposed to her before I left to join my regiment in Algeria. But I always thought there would be plenty of time for that later. As it was, when I finished my foreign soldiering and came home from Indochina, she had given up on me, and had already produced one daughter and was pregnant with a second. I didn't even mind very much, especially as we soon resumed our love affair where we had left it. "We have something better than a future together," I used to tell her. "We have the past." I'm not sure I entirely believe it anymore.

"You realise," I say, taking her hand, "that we've been together, in one way or another, for more than twenty years? It practically is a marriage."

"Oh Georges," she says wearily, "I can a.s.sure you this is nothing like a marriage."

The front door opens, we hear my sister's voice, and immediately she pulls away her hand.

My mother lingers on in this state for a month. It is astonis.h.i.+ng how long the body can last without nourishment. Occasionally, as I jolt back and forth on the crowded Versailles train, I remember Henry's remark: There aren't many easy ways out of this life ... Her path, though, seems to be a smooth and gentle descent into oblivion.

Henry is solicitous throughout. One day he asks me if I might have a moment to step down to the waiting room to meet his wife, who has something for me. I have never before considered what sort of a woman Henry might be married to; I a.s.sume she will be a female version of him-large, red-faced, loud, coa.r.s.e. Instead I find a tall and slender young woman, barely half his age, with thick dark hair, a clear complexion and lively brown eyes. He introduces her as Berthe. Like Henry, she has the accent of the Marne. In one hand she proffers a bunch of flowers, which she has brought for me to pa.s.s on to my mother; with the other she is holding on to a boy of two or three, dressed in a sailor suit. It seems strange to see a child in this gloomy building. Henry says, "This is my boy, Joseph." "h.e.l.lo, Joseph." I pick him up and whirl him around for a bit while his parents look on smiling (we bachelors learn to be good with children). Then I set him down and thank Madame Henry for the flowers. She lowers her eyes flirtatiously. As I walk back upstairs, I reflect that Henry may be a more complex character than I appreciated. His pride in his pretty young wife is understandable, and I can see why he wants to show her off; but in Madame Henry I sense ambition, and I wonder what that does to him.

My mother receives the last rites on the afternoon of Friday, 12 June 1896. It is a hot summer's day outside, full of the noise of the street; the sunlight, fierce beyond the drawn curtains, beats down on the gla.s.s regardless as if demanding entrance. I watch as the priest anoints her ears, eyes, nostrils, lips, hands and feet while he intones his Latin spells. His handshake when he leaves is moistly repulsive. She dies in my arms that night, and when I kiss her goodbye, I taste the residue of his oil.

The event has long been antic.i.p.ated; the arrangements are all in place; but the shock is somehow as great as if she had dropped dead out of the blue. After the requiem Ma.s.s in Saint-Louis's and the interment in a corner of the cemetery, we walk back to her apartment for the wake. It is an uncomfortable occasion. The weather is too warm; the tiny rooms are too crowded and full of tensions. My sister-in-law, Helene, widow of my brother, Paul, has turned up: for some reason she has always disliked me, and we take pains to avoid each other-no easy feat in that cramped s.p.a.ce-so much so that in the end I find myself in my mother's old bedroom, its mattress stripped, talking to, of all people, Pauline's husband.

Monnier is a decent enough sort, devoted in his way to his wife and daughters. If he were a brute, our deception would be easier. Instead he is simply dull. Professionally, his role in the Foreign Ministry, as far as I can make out, seems to be that of the senior bureaucrat brought in to pick holes in the bright ideas of younger colleagues. Socially, he has the bore's trick of seeking one's opinion on something-in this case he asks my view of the impending state visit of the Russian tsar-and listening to it with barely disguised impatience, until he is at last able to interrupt and launch into his own prepared monologue. It turns out he has been appointed to the Franco-Russian planning commission for the trip-apparently His Imperial Highness's official train, at four hundred and fifty tons, is two hundred tons heavier than our railways can cope with, and he has had to speak firmly to the amba.s.sador on the matter ...

Over his shoulder I can see Pauline talking to Louis Leblois. Her gaze meets mine. Monnier glances behind him, irritated not to have my complete attention, then resumes his speech.

"As I was saying, it's not so much a question of protocol as of basic good manners ..."

I try to concentrate on his diplomatic plat.i.tudes; it seems the least I can do.

Throughout this time, Operation Benefactor has continued running like an untended machine, churning out intelligence, almost all of it useless: stacks of blurry photographs and lists of visitors to the rue de Lille (unidentified male, mid-fifties, walks with slight limp, ex-military?) and fragmentary transcripts of conversations (I saw him at the manoeuvres in Karlsruhe and he offered [unintelligible] but I told him we already had [unintelligible] from our source in Paris). By July I have spent thousands from the secret fund bequeathed to me by Sandherr, risked a serious diplomatic crisis, concealed a potential traitor from my superiors, and I have nothing of tangible value to show for it except that one picture of Esterhazy leaving the emba.s.sy.

And then, quite unexpectedly, all of this changes, and with it my life and career and everything else.

It is a broiling summer's evening. I am out of Paris for once, accompanying General Boisdeffre on a staff tour in the Burgundy region. Our advance scouts have found us a good restaurant beside a ca.n.a.l in Venarey-les-Laumes, and we dine out of doors, to the sound of bullfrogs and cicadas, washed by the scent of the citronella candles that are driving away the mosquitoes. I am seated a little way down the table from Boisdeffre, beside his orderly officer, Major Gabriel Pauffin de Saint Morel. Moths dart in and out of the gleam of the lanterns; stars have just started to appear above the hillside vineyards to the east. What could be more agreeable? Pauffin is an exquisitely handsome, vaguely dim aristocrat, exactly my age, give or take a couple of weeks, who I have known since we were cadets at Saint-Cyr. His profile in the candlelight is flushed with the effects of the wine and the heat, and he is in the act of spooning some soft and pungent epoisses de Bourgogne onto his plate when suddenly quite out of the blue he says, "Oh, by the way, I'm sorry, Picquart, I clean forgot-the chief wants you to have a word with Colonel Foucault when we get back to Paris."

"Yes, of course I will. Do you know what it's about?" Foucault is our military attache in Berlin.

Still concentrating on his cheese, without lowering his voice or even turning to look at me, Pauffin replies, "Oh, I believe he's picked up some story in Berlin about the Germans having another spy in the army. He sent the chief a letter about it."

"What?" I set down my gla.s.s with enough force to spill some wine. "My G.o.d, when was this exactly?"

The tone of my voice causes him to glance in my direction. "A few days ago. Sorry, Georges. Slipped my mind."

There is nothing I can do that evening, but the following morning I seek out Boisdeffre over breakfast in the chateau where we are staying and ask permission to return at once to Paris to interview Colonel Foucault.

Boisdeffre takes a corner of his napkin and wipes a speck of egg from his moustache. "Why the urgency? You think there might be something in it?"