An Officer And A Spy Part 24

"No, but precautions are always wise." I kiss her hand and press it to my cheek.

"Maman!" shrills a voice behind her.

"You'd better go," I say.

I take a cab to the boulevard Saint-Germain and ask the driver to wait. By now it is dark and the lights of the great house are bright in the November gloom; there is an atmosphere of activity: Blanche will be holding one of her musical soirees later in the evening. "Stranger!" she greets me. "You're far too early."

"I won't come in," I say. "I'm afraid I have to leave Paris for a few days." I repeat the instructions I've just given Pauline: if she needs to get in touch she should do so via the ministry, but she should try to be discreet. "Give my love to Aimery and Mathilde."

"Oh, Georges!" she cries in delight, pinching my cheek and kissing the tip of my nose. "You are a mystery!"

When I climb back into my cab, I see her in the downstairs window, showing the musicians where to set up. I retain one final impression of chandeliers and a profusion of indoor plants, of Louis XIV chairs covered in rose-pale silk and of light gleaming on the polished spruce and maple of the instruments. Blanche is smiling at one of the violinists, pointing out where he should sit. The cabman flicks his whip and this vision of civilisation jerks out of sight.

My final call is on Louis Leblois. Again the driver waits; again I do not go in but stay on the landing to say my goodbyes. He has only just returned from court. He sees my anguish immediately.

"I suppose you can't talk about it?"

"I fear not."

"I'm here if you need me."

As I get back into the cab, I glance along the rue de l'Universite to the offices of the Statistical Section. The building is a patch of gloom even in the darkness. I notice that a taxi has parked about twenty paces behind us with the yellow light of the Poissonniere-Montmartre depot. It pulls away as we do, and when we arrive at the gare de l'Est, it stops a discreet distance away. I guess I must have been followed ever since I left my apartment. They aren't taking any chances.

On a Morris column outside the station, amid the adverts and the multicoloured playbills of the Opera-Comique and the Comedie-Francaise, is a poster showing the facsimile of the bordereau from Le Matin beside a sample of Dreyfus's writing: placed together the two look very different. Mathieu has already paid for these posters to be plastered all over Paris. That was quick work! "Where Is the Proof?" demands the headline. A reward is offered for anyone who recognises the original.

He is not going to give up, I think, not until his brother is either free or dead. As I stow my suitcase in the overhead rack and settle into my seat on the crowded eastbound train, that thought, at least, gives me some hope.

16.

The Sousse Military Club looks out from behind a screen of dusty palms across an unpaved square, past a modern customs shed to the sea. The glint from the Gulf of Hammamet is particularly fierce this afternoon, like sunlight on tin: I have to s.h.i.+eld my eyes. A boy in long brown robes pa.s.ses, leading a goat on a length of rope. The glare melts both figures into tarry black silhouettes.

Inside its heavy brick walls, the Military Club's decor makes no concession to North Africa. The wooden panelling, stuffed armchairs and ta.s.selled standard lamps are of the type that might be seen in any garrison town in France. As is my custom after lunch, I am seated alone beside the window while my brother officers of the 4th Tunisian Rifles play cards or doze or read the four-day-old French newspapers. n.o.body approaches me. Although they are always careful to treat me with the deference owed to my rank, they keep their distance-and who can blame them? After all, there must be something wrong with me-some unspeakable disgrace must have ruined my career: otherwise why would the youngest colonel in the army have been transferred to a dump like this? Against the sky-blue tunic of my new regiment, the scarlet ribbon of my Legion of Honour draws their fascinated eyes like a bullet wound.

As usual, at about three o'clock, through the high gla.s.s-panelled door comes a young orderly carrying the afternoon's post. He is a pretty boy in a rough street-urchin sort of way, a musician in the regimental band who goes by the name of Flavian-Uband Savignaud. He arrived in Sousse a few days after I did: dispatched, I am fairly sure, by the Statistical Section, with orders from Henry or Gonse to spy on me. It is not the spying I resent as much as the incompetence with which he goes about it. "Look," I want to tell him, "if you're going to search my belongings, make sure you put them back as you found them: try to make a mental picture in your mind before you start. And if your job is to ensure my mail is intercepted, at least go through the pretence of putting it in the box normally rather than handing it direct to the post office official-I have followed you twice now and observed your sloppiness on both occasions."

He stops beside my chair and salutes. "Your mail, Colonel. Do you have anything to send?"

"Thank you. Not yet."

"Is there anything else at all I can do for you, Colonel?" The remark carries a hint of suggestion.

"No. You may go."

He sways slightly at the waist as he walks away. One of the younger captains puts down his paper to watch him pa.s.s. This is something else I resent: not the fact that Henry and Gonse think I might be tempted to go to bed with a man, but that I'd be tempted to go to bed with a man like Savignaud.

I inspect my mail: a letter from my sister and another from my cousin Edmond; both have been opened by the Statistical Section and then resealed with telltale over-firmness using glue. Like my fellow exile Dreyfus, I suffer the intrusion of having my correspondence monitored-although not, as in his case, actually censored. There are a couple of agents' reports of the type that continue to be forwarded to me as part of the fiction that I am only temporarily seconded from my job; these too have been opened. And then there is a letter from Henry: his schoolroom handwriting is familiar-we have exchanged messages often since I left Paris more than half a year ago.

Until recently the tone of our correspondence has been friendly (Here, the sky is blue and the heat is sometimes too much in the afternoons; it is certainly nothing like Paris). But then in May I was ordered by the High Command in Tunis to take the regiment to Sidi El Hani for three weeks and instruct them in target practice. This entailed a day's march southwest to pitch camp in the desert. The native troops were difficult to teach, and the heat and the boredom of the featureless stony landscape stretching in every direction, and above all the constant presence of Savignaud, combined to wring from me at last a cry of protest: My dear Henry, Let it be publicly admitted once and for all that I have been relieved of my duties. I have no reason to be embarra.s.sed by that fact; what embarra.s.ses me are all the lies and mysteries that have been spread about me in the course of the last six months.

I a.s.sume Savignaud has brought me Henry's reply. I open it quite casually, expecting the usual soothing rea.s.surances that I shall be returning to Paris very soon. Instead, the tone could not be colder. He has the honour to inform me that "an inquiry" within the Statistical Section has concluded that the only "mysteries" I can be referring to in my letter are the three I perpetrated, to wit: (1) running an illicit operation "unconnected to the service"; (2) suborning false testimony from serving officers "that a cla.s.sified doc.u.ment had been seized at the post office and came from a known individual"; and (3) "the opening of a secret dossier and examination of its contents, leading to certain indiscretions taking place." Henry ends with sarcasm: As for the word "lies," the investigation was unable to determine where, how and to whom this word should be applied. Yours respectfully, J. Henry.

And this man is supposed to be my subordinate! The letter is dated a week ago, Monday, 31 May. I check the envelope for the postmark: Thursday, 3 June. I guess at once what will have happened: Henry will have written this letter and then sent it over the road to Gonse for his approval before dispatching it. So his clumsy threat almost certainly carries behind it the force of the General Staff. I feel a momentary chill on my skin, despite the African heat. I read the letter again. But then my anxiety slowly vanishes and in its place a tremendous feeling of anger begins to build within me (Yours respectfully?), reaching such a level of intensity that it is all I can do not to cry out loud and kick the furniture. I stuff my mail into my trouser pocket, jam my cap back on my head, and stride towards the door with such fury that I am aware of a sudden silence and of heads turning to follow my progress.

I clump across the wooden veranda, almost knocking aside two majors who are smoking cigars, down the club steps, past the flaccid tricolour, across the wide boulevard and into the Marine Garden, where every Sunday afternoon the regimental band plays familiar melodies to the French expatriate community in a tuneless parody of home. Here I pause to gather myself. The two majors are staring after me from the veranda in open bewilderment. I turn and walk on through the little park towards the sea, past the bandstand and the broken fountain, and along the harbour front.

For months I have been going into the Military Club at lunchtime and scanning the stale newspapers in the hope of finding fresh revelations about the Dreyfus affair. In particular I have counted on the likelihood that sooner or later someone will recognise Esterhazy's handwriting from the bordereau and approach the Dreyfus family direct. But there has been nothing: the case is not even mentioned anymore. As I walk past the fis.h.i.+ng boats, my head down and my hands clasped behind me, I reproach myself furiously for my cowardice. I have left it to others to do my duty. And now Henry and Gonse believe I am so broken down by exile, so crushed by their ruthlessness, that they can intimidate me into complete submission.

There is a fish market on the dockside at the southern end of the quay, close to the walls of the old Arab city, and I stop for a minute to watch as a catch is brought in and tipped over the counter: red mullet, sea bream, hake, mackerel. In a nearby pen are half a dozen turtles, their jaws tied shut with string, still alive, but blinded to prevent them escaping. They make a noise like cobbles being cracked together as they clamber over one another, desperate to regain the water they can sense but no longer see.

My quarters are in the military camp on the other side of the medina-a single-storey brick-built hut on the edge of the parade ground, with two rooms, their windows blanked by mosquito mesh, and a veranda with two chairs, a table and a kerosene lamp. In the torpid heat of the late afternoon the parade ground is deserted. Satisfied that I am un.o.bserved, I drag the table to the edge of the veranda, climb up onto it, and reach up to push aside a loose rafter. The great advantage of being watched by an incompetent spy, and the reason I haven't asked for Savignaud's removal, is that he misses things, such as this. I move my fingers in the empty s.p.a.ce until they encounter metal-an old cigarette tin.

I pull out the tin, replace the rafter, drag the table back to its original place, and go into my quarters. The larger room serves as a sitting roomc.u.moffice; the curtains are drawn against the sun. I pa.s.s through this into my bedroom, sit on the edge of my narrow iron cot, and open the tin. It contains a photograph of Pauline taken five years ago and a bundle of letters from her: Darling Georges ... My dearest Georges ... I yearn for you ... I miss you ... I wonder how many hands they have been through; not as many as the Dreyfuses' correspondence, but doubtless quite a few.

I have visited your apartment several times. All is well. Mme Guerault tells me you are on a secret mission! Sometimes I lie on your bed and your smell is still on the pillow and I imagine where you are and what you are doing. That is when I want you most. In the afternoon light I could scream with wanting you. It is a physical pain ...

I don't need to read them again; I know them off by heart.

Also in the tin is a photograph of my mother, seven hundred francs in cash and an envelope on which I have written: In case of the death of the undersigned, please deliver this letter to the President of the Republic, who alone should know of its contents. G. PICQUART. Inside is a sixteen-paragraph report of my investigation into Esterhazy, written in April. It goes through all the evidence in detail, relates the attempts of Boisdeffre, Gonse and Billot to block my researches, and comes to three conclusions: 1. That Esterhazy is an agent for Germany.

2. That the only tangible facts blamed on Dreyfus are attributable to Esterhazy.

3. That the trial of Dreyfus was handled in an unprecedentedly superficial manner, with the preconceived idea that Dreyfus was guilty, and with a disregard for due legal forms.

From the minarets of the Arab town comes the wail of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. It is Asr, the time when a man's shadow is twice his height. I slip the letter into the inside pocket of my tunic and go back out into the heat.

Early the following morning, Savignaud brings me hot water in my bedroom as usual so that I can shave. Naked above the waist, I bend to my mirror and lather my face. Instead of leaving, he lingers, watching me from behind.

I look at him in the mirror. "Yes, soldier? What is it?"

"I understand you've made an appointment to see General Leclerc in Tunis, Colonel."

"Do I need your permission?"

"I wondered if you wanted me to accompany you."

"It's not necessary."

"Will you be back in time for dinner?"

"Go away, Savignaud."

He hesitates, salutes and sidles out of the room. I return to my shaving, but with greater urgency: I have little doubt that he has gone off to telegraph Paris the news of my trip to Tunis.

An hour later, suitcase in hand, I wait beside the railway line in the central town square. A mining company has recently laid the track from Sousse to Tunis. There is no station: the locomotive simply pa.s.ses through the streets. The first sign of its approach is a column of black smoke which I see rising in the distance above the flat roofs against the brilliant blue sky. A steam whistle shrieks nearby and a crowd of children erupts around the corner, scattering in all directions, screaming with excitement, pursued by an engine pulling two flatbed trucks and three carriages. It slows to a crawl until its momentum expires altogether in a loud exhalation of steam. I heave my suitcase into the carriage and clamber up the ladder after it, glancing over my shoulder to check if I am followed. But there is no sign of men in uniforms, just Arabs and Jews and a lot of livestock-chickens in crates, a sheep and a small goat with its hooves tethered, which its owner crams beneath his seat.

We pull away, gathering speed until our escort of excited children is left behind. Dust blows through the open sides of the carriage as we rattle out into the monotonous landscape-olive groves and hazy grey mountains to the left of us, the flat glare of the Mediterranean to the right. Every quarter of an hour or so we stop to pick up figures, always accompanied by animals, who seem to rise out of nowhere, s.h.i.+mmering up ahead beside the tracks. I slip my hand inside my tunic and feel the sharp edges of my posthumous letter to the President.

When at last we arrive in Tunis, around the middle of the afternoon, I push my way across the crowded platform to the taxi rank. The heat in the city feels almost solid. The air holds soot and spices-c.u.min, coriander, paprika-and tobacco and horse dung in a humid suspension. Beside the taxis a boy is selling La Depche tunisienne, which for five centimes offers an overnight compilation of the previous day's news as telegraphed from Paris. I skim it on the drive to army headquarters. Yet again there is nothing about Dreyfus. But it is within my power to change all that. For the twentieth time I touch the letter, like an anarchist checking his dynamite.

Leclerc is too busy to see me, so I am left to sweat in an anteroom for half an hour. Then an aide approaches me: "The general would like to know what this is about."

"It's a personal matter."

He goes away and comes back a couple of minutes later. "The general suggests you discuss all personal issues with General de Chizelle." De Chizelle is the senior officer of the 4th Tunisian Rifles, my direct superior.

"I am sorry, but this is a personal matter that I can only disclose to the Supreme Commander."

Once again he withdraws, but this time he is only gone for a few moments. "The general will see you now."

I leave my suitcase and follow him.

Jerme Leclerc is on the veranda of his office, in his s.h.i.+rtsleeves, seated at a portable card table, working his way through a pile of letters. An electric fan above his head lifts the edges of the pages, which are weighted down by his revolver. He is in his middle sixties, square-jawed and -shouldered; he has been in Africa so long his skin is almost the same light brown as the natives'.

"Ah," he says, "the exotic Colonel Picquart: our very own man of mystery, sent to us under cover of darkness!" The sarcasm is not entirely unfriendly. "So tell me, Colonel, what is the latest secret about you that can't be divulged to your commanding officer?"

"I would like permission to go on leave to Paris."

"And why can't you make this application to General de Chizelle?"

"Because he would refuse it."

"And how do you know that?"

"Because I have reason to believe there is a standing instruction from the War Ministry that I should not be allowed to leave Tunisia."

"If that is true-and I am not confirming that it is-then why have you come to me?"

"Because I believe you are more likely to ignore an order from the General Staff than General de Chizelle."

Leclerc blinks at me for a moment, and I wonder if he might have me thrown out, but then abruptly he laughs. "Yes, well, that's probably true. I'm past caring. But I'd need a d.a.m.ned good reason, mark you. It can't just be that there's some woman in Paris you want to see."

"I have unfinished business there."

"Do you, by G.o.d!" He folds his arms and tilts back in his chair and looks me up and down a couple of times. "You're a funny fish, Colonel Picquart. I don't know what to make of you. I'd heard you were supposed to be the next Chief of the General Staff but four, and instead suddenly you're out here in our little backwater. Tell me, what did you do? Embezzle funds?"

"No, General."

"Screw the minister's wife?"

"Certainly not that."

"Then what?"

"I can't tell you."

"Then I can't help you."

He sits back straight in his chair and picks up a sheaf of papers. I feel a sudden desperation. "I'm in a kind of imprisonment out here, General. My mail is read. I'm followed. I'm not allowed to leave. It's really very effective. If I protest, it's been made clear to me I'll be disciplined on trumped-up charges. Short of desertion, I'm not sure how I can escape. And of course if I do desert I really would be finished."

"Oh no, don't desert-if you desert I'd have to shoot you." He gets up to stretch his legs-a big, lithe man, despite his years. A fighter, I think, not a desk man. He prowls up and down the veranda, frowning, and then stops to look out across the garden. I can't name all the flowers-jasmine I recognise, and cyclamen, and dianthus. He notices me looking. "You like it?"

"It's very fine."

"I planted it myself. Prefer this country to France now, oddly. Don't think I'll go back when I retire." He falls silent and then says fiercely, "You know what I can't stand, Colonel? I can't abide the way the General Staff dump their rubbish out here. No offence to you, but every malcontent and deviant and well-bred cretin in the army gets sent my way, and I can tell you that I'm just about sick of it!" He taps his foot on the wooden boards, thinking things over. "Do you give me your word that you've done nothing criminal or immoral-that you've simply fallen foul of those desk generals in the rue Saint-Dominique?"

"On my honour."

He sits down at his desk and starts writing. "Is a week enough?"

"A week is all I need."

"I don't want to know what you're up to," he says, still writing, "so don't let's talk about it. I shan't inform the ministry that you've left Tunisia. If and when they find out, I propose to tell them that I'm a soldier, not a gaoler. But I won't lie, you understand?" He finishes his writing, blows on the ink and hands the letter to me. It is official permission for Lieutenant Colonel Picquart of the 4th Tunisian Rifles to leave the country on compa.s.sionate leave, signed by the General Officer Commanding, Tunisia. It is the first official help I have been offered. I have tears in my eyes, but Leclerc affects not to notice.

-- The pa.s.senger ferry for Ma.r.s.eille is scheduled to leave Tunis at noon the next day. A clerk at the steams.h.i.+p company's office tells me ("with profound regret, my Colonel") that the list is already full; I have to bribe him twice-first to allot me a tiny two-berth cabin all to myself, and then to keep my name off the pa.s.senger manifest. I stay overnight in a pension near the docks and go aboard early, dressed in civilian clothes. Despite the sweltering African midsummer I can't linger on deck and risk being recognised. I go below and lock my door, strip naked and lie on the lower bunk, dripping sweat. I am reminded of Dreyfus and his description of his wars.h.i.+p anchoring off Devil's Island: I had to wait nearly four days in this tropical heat, shut close in my cell, without once going upon deck. By the time the engines start, my own metal cell is as hot as a Turkish bath. The surfaces vibrate as we slip our moorings. Through the porthole I watch the coast of Africa recede. Only when we are out at sea and I can see nothing except the blue of the Mediterranean do I wrap a towel around my waist, summon the steward and ask him to bring me some food and drink.

I have packed a RussianFrench dictionary, and a copy of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, which I set to work translating, propped up on my bunk bed, the two books balanced on my knees, my pencil and paper beside me. The work soaks up the time and even the heat. To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things ...

At midnight, when the vessel seems quiet, I venture up the iron staircase and step cautiously out onto the deck. The momentum of the s.h.i.+p provides a warm northerly breeze of thirteen knots. I walk to the prow and raise my face to it, drinking it in. There is blackness ahead and to either side. The only light is above: a wash of stars and a moon that scuds in and out of cloud and seems to be racing us. A male pa.s.senger stands nearby, leaning over the rail, talking quietly to one of the crew. Behind me I hear footsteps and turn to see the glowing red tip of a cigar approaching. I move on quickly, down the other side of the s.h.i.+p to the stern, where I watch our wake for a while, flickering like a comet's tail. But when I see the cigar again, disembodied in the dark, I go below and make my way along the pa.s.sageway to my cabin, where I stay for the remainder of the voyage.

We dock in Ma.r.s.eille in the late afternoon of the following day in a summer downpour. It seems an ominous welcome home. I hurry straight to the gare Saint-Charles and buy a ticket on the first available train to Paris, conscious that this is my moment of maximum vulnerability. I must a.s.sume that Savignaud has reported my visit to Tunis, and also by now my subsequent failure to return to Sousse. Therefore it's possible that Gonse and Henry will have worked out that I am on my way back to Paris. All they need to do is ask Leclerc. If I were Henry, I would have telegraphed the Prefecture of Police in Ma.r.s.eille and asked him to keep watch at the station, just in case.

I linger under the station clock with my head buried in a newspaper until just before seven, when I hear the whistle blow and the Paris train begins to move. I grab my suitcase, run through the ticket barrier, weave past the guard, who tries to stop me, and sprint along the platform. I wrench open the rearmost door of the train, feeling the strain on my arm socket as the locomotive gathers momentum. I throw in my suitcase, increase my pace and narrowly manage to scramble aboard and slam the door behind me. I lean out of the window and look back. There is a man fifty metres behind on the platform, a thickset, bare-headed fellow in a brown suit, who has just missed the train and is leaning forward with his hands on his knees, recovering his breath, being reproached by the guard. But whether he is an ordinary pa.s.senger who arrived too late or an agent of the Srete who was on my tail I have no way of knowing.

The carriages are crowded. I have to walk almost the entire length of the train to find a compartment where I can squeeze into a corner seat. My fellow pa.s.sengers are businessmen, mostly, and a priest, and an army major who keeps glancing in my direction, even though I am not wearing my uniform, as if he recognises a fellow soldier. I don't stow my suitcase overhead but keep it on my lap as a precaution should I fall asleep. And indeed, despite my nervous tension, as the day fades, lulled by the motion of the train, I do drop off, only to be jerked awake repeatedly throughout the night whenever we pull into a gas-lit station or someone enters or leaves the compartment. Eventually it is the early June daybreak that rouses me, the light falling drab and grey, like a film of ash spread over the southern outskirts of the city.

I move towards the very front of the train, so that at five in the morning, as we pull into the gare de Lyon, I am the first to disembark. I hurry across the deserted concourse, my eyes darting in all directions, but all I can see are a few ragged men, les rama.s.seux de megots, gathering cigarette b.u.t.ts in order to sell the tobacco. I tell the taxi driver, "Sixteen, rue Ca.s.sette," and sink down low in my seat. A quarter of an hour later we are skirting the Jardin du Luxembourg and turning into the narrow street. As I pay the fare, I glance in either direction: no one is about.

On the second floor I knock on the apartment door: loudly enough to wake the occupants but not so loud, I hope, that I terrify them. Unfortunately no one can be roused from their bed at five-thirty in the morning without experiencing dread. I see it in my sister's eyes the moment she opens the door, clutching her nightdress to her throat, and finds me there exhausted and engrimed with the dust and smell of Africa.

Jules Gay, my brother-in-law, boils a kettle to make coffee while Anna fusses around in the children's old bedroom, making it fit for me to sleep in. They are a couple on their own together now, pus.h.i.+ng sixty; I can tell they are glad to take me in, to have someone to look after.

Over coffee I say, "I'd prefer it if no one knew I was here, if that's all right with you both?"

They exchange glances. Jules replies, "Of course. We can be discreet."

"If anyone comes to the door asking for me, you should tell them you don't know where I am."

Anna says, only half jokingly, "Good heavens! You haven't deserted, have you, Georges?"

"The one person I do need to see is Louis Leblois. Would you be kind enough to take a message to him, asking if he could call round as soon as possible? But tell him he mustn't mention to anyone that I'm here."