An Officer and a Spy

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 Seventy-fourth 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 only 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 reexamine 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 prepaid 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, a 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 ex-soldier, in which local civilians are not encouraged to drink. The 74th 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 farther 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 Commingeses’ 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.”

“How long are you in town?”

“Only a couple of hours. I’ll get the evening train back to Paris.”

“This calls for a drink.” He opens a drawer in his desk and takes out a bottle of cognac and a pair of tumblers. He fills them to the brim. We toast the army. He fills them again and we toast my promotion. But I sense that somewhere, deep beneath the congratulations, the narrowest of gaps has opened between us. Not that anyone walking in would have guessed it. Curé pours a third round. We unbutton our tunics and loll back in our chairs, smoking, our feet on his desk. We talk of old comrades and old times. We laugh. A brief silence falls and then he says, “So what exactly is it you’re doing in Paris these days?”

I hesitate; I am not supposed to mention it.

“I have Sandherr’s job, running secret intelligence.”

“Do you, by God?” He frowns at his empty glass; this time he doesn’t suggest another toast. “So you’re up here snooping?”

“Something like that.”

A flicker of his former mirth returns. “Not into me, I hope!”

“Not this time.” I smile and put down my glass. “There’s a major with the Seven-four called Esterhazy.”

Curé turns to me. His expression is unreadable. “There is indeed.”

“What is he like?”

“What has he done?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Curé nods slowly. “I thought you’d say that.” He pulls himself to his feet and starts buttoning his tunic. “I don’t know about you, but I need to clear my head.”

Outside the wind is bracing, edged sharp by the sea. We stroll around the perimeter of the parade ground. After a while Curé says, “I understand you can’t tell me what this is about, but if I could give you a piece of advice, you want to be careful how you approach Esterhazy. He’s dangerous.”

“What, you mean physically dangerous?”

“In every way. How much do you know about him?”

“Nothing. You’re the first person I’ve come to.”

“Just bear in mind he’s well connected. His father was a general. He calls himself ‘Count Esterhazy,’ but I think that’s merely an affectation. Be that as it may, his wife is the daughter of the marquis de Nettancourt, so he knows a lot of people.”

“How old is he?”

“Oh, he must be nearly fifty, I should think.”

“Fifty?” I glance around the barracks. It’s the end of the afternoon. Soldiers, pasty-faced and with grey shaven heads, are leaning out of their dormitory windows, like prison inmates.

Curé follows my gaze. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Do you?”

“Why, if he’s fifty and the son-in-law of a marquis, is he stuck in a dump like this? Certainly it’s the first thing I’d want to know.”

“Well then, since you bring it up, why is he?”

“Because he has no money.”

“Even with all these connections?”

“He gambles it away. Not just at the table, either. On the racetrack and the stock market.”

“Surely his wife must have some capital?”

“Ah, but she’s got wise to him. I heard him complain that she’s even put the country house in her name, to protect herself from his creditors. She won’t let him have a sou.”

“He also has an apartment in Paris.”

“You may be sure that’s hers as well.”

We walk on in silence. I’m remembering Schwartzkoppen’s letter. That was all about money. Your conditions too harsh for me … “Tell me,” I say, “what kind of an officer is he?”

“The worst.”

“He neglects his duties?”

“Entirely. The colonel’s stopped giving him anything to do.”

“So he’s never here?”

“On the contrary, he’s always here.”

“Doing what?”

“Getting in the way! He likes to hang around and ask a lot of damn fool questions about things that have nothing to do with him.”

“Questions about what?”

“Everything.”

“Gunnery, for example?”

“Definitely.”

“What does he ask about gunnery?”

“What doesn’t he ask! He’s been on at least three artillery exercises, to my certain knowledge. The last one the colonel absolutely refused to assign him to, so he ended up paying for the trip himself.”

“I thought you said he didn’t have any money?”

“True, that’s a point.” Curé halts in his tracks. “Now I think about it, I happen to know he also paid a corporal in his battalion to copy the firing manuals—you know we’re not allowed to keep them for more than a day or two.”

“Did he give a reason?”

“He said he was thinking of suggesting some improvements …”

We resume walking. The sun has dipped behind one of the dormitory blocks, casting the parade ground into shadow. The air is suddenly chilly. I say, “You mentioned earlier that he was dangerous.”

“It’s not easy to describe. There’s a kind of … wildness about him, and also cunning. And yet he can be quite charming. Put it this way: despite the way he acts, nobody wants to cross him. He also has a quite extraordinary appearance. You’d need to see him to understand what I mean.”

“I’d like to. The trouble is, I can’t risk letting him see me. Is there a place I might get a glimpse of him, without him realising it?”

“There’s a bar near here he goes to most nights. It’s not certain, but you could probably spot him there.”

“Could you take me?”

“I thought you were getting out on the evening train?”

“I can stay until the morning. One night won’t hurt. Come on, my friend! It will be like old times.”

But Curé seems to have had enough of the “old times” routine. His glance is hard, appraising. “Now I know it must be serious, Georges, if you’re willing to give up a night in Paris for it.”

Curé presses me to come back to his quarters and wait with him for nightfall, but I prefer not to linger within the confines of the barracks in case I’m recognised. There is a small hotel for commercial travellers close to the station which I remember passing; I walk back and pay for a room. It is a stale-smelling, dingy place, without electricity; the mattress is hard and thin; whenever a train passes, the walls shake. But it will do for a night. I stretch out on the bed: it’s short; my feet hang over the edge. I smoke and contemplate the mysterious Esterhazy, a man who appears to possess in abundance the very thing that Dreyfus so singularly lacked: motive.

The day fades in the window. At seven, the bells of Our Lady of Rouen begin to peal—heavy and sonorous, the noise rolls across the river like a barrage, and when it stops, the sudden silence seems to hang in the air like smoke.

It is dark by the time I rouse myself to go downstairs. Curé is already waiting for me. He suggests I wrap my cape tight around my shoulders to hide the insignia of my rank.

We walk for five or ten minutes through the shuttered back streets, past a couple of quiet bars, until we reach a cul-de-sac filled with the shadows of people, soldiers mostly, and a few young women. They are talking quietly, laughing, hanging around a long, low building with no windows that looks like a converted warehouse. A painted sign proclaims: “Folies Bergère.” The hopelessness of this provincial aspiration is almost touching.

Curé says, “Wait here. I’ll see if he’s in yet.”

He moves off. A door opens, briefly silhouetting his figure against a purplish oblong gleam; I hear a snatch of noise and music and then he is swallowed up by darkness. A woman baring a large expanse of cleavage, white as gooseflesh in the cold, comes up to me holding an unlit cigarette and asks for a light. Without bothering to think I strike a match. In the yellow flare she is young and pretty. She peers at me short-sightedly. “Do I know you, my darling?”

I realise my mistake. “I’m sorry. I’m waiting for someone.” I blow out the flame and walk away.

She calls after me, laughing: “Don’t be like that, sweetheart!”

Another woman says: “Who is he, anyway?”

And then a man yells drunkenly: “He’s just a stuck-up cunt!”

A couple of soldiers turn to stare.

Curé appears in the doorway. He nods and beckons. I walk over to him. “I ought to leave,” I say.

“One quick look, then go.” He takes my arm and steers me ahead of him, along a short passage, down a few steps, through a heavy black velvet curtain and into a long room, misty with tobacco smoke, packed with people sitting at small round tables. At the far end a band is playing, while on stage half a dozen girls in corsets and crotchless knickers hoist their skirts and kick their legs listlessly at the clientele. Their feet thump against the bare boards. The place smells of absinthe.

“That’s him.”

He nods to a table less than twenty paces away, where two couples share a bottle of champagne. One of the women, a redhead, has her back to me; the other, a brunette, is twisted round in her seat looking towards the stage. The men face each other, talking in a desultory way. There is no need for Curé to tell me which it is he has brought me to see. Major Esterhazy reclines with his chair pushed well back from the table, his tunic unbuttoned, his pelvis thrust forward, his arms hanging down either side almost to the floor; in his right hand he holds casually at an angle, as if it is barely worth considering, a glass of champagne. His head in profile is flattish and tapers like a vulture’s to a great beak of a nose. His moustache is large and swept back. He seems to be drunk. His companion notices us standing by the door. He says something, and Esterhazy slowly turns his head in our direction. His eyes are round and protuberant: not natural, but crazy, like glass balls pressed into the skull of a skeleton in a medical school. The overall effect, as Curé warned, is unsettling. My God, I think, he could burn this entire place down and everyone in it, and not care a damn. His glance settles on us briefly, and for a second I detect a hint of curiosity in the tilt of his head and the narrowing of his gaze. Fortunately, he is befuddled by drink, and when one of the women says something his attention wanders vaguely back to her.

Curé touches my elbow. “We should go.” He pulls aside the curtain and ushers me away.