An Officer and a Spy (16 page)

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 passing 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 embassy 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 attachés! “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?”

Ducasse 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?”

Ducasse 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.”

Ducasse 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 God, I couldn’t possibly countenance that! Von Schwartzkoppen is a gentleman. It would be contrary to all our traditions.”

I anticipated 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 assumptions—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.”

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. Ducasse 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 Ducasse 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 Sûreté 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 glass. 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 embassy 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 lycée, 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?