An Officer and a Spy (22 page)

“I didn’t hear you coming up the stairs, Colonel.”

I hand him the photograph of the
bordereau
. “I think you should be in charge of this.”

He blinks at it in surprise. “Where did you find it?”

“Colonel Sandherr had it in his safe.”

“Ah yes, well, he was very proud of it.” Gribelin holds the photograph at arm’s length to admire it. His tongue moistens his top lip as if he’s studying a pornographic print. “He told me he would have had it framed, and hung it on his wall, if regulations had allowed.”

“A hunting trophy?”

“Exactly.”

Gribelin unlocks the bottom left-hand drawer of his desk and fishes out his immense bunch of keys. He carries the
bordereau
across to a heavy old fireproof filing cabinet, which he opens. I look around. I hardly ever venture up here. Two large tables are pushed together in the centre of the room. Laid out across the scuffed brown leather surfaces are half a dozen stacks of files, a blotting pad, a strong electric lamp, a rack of rubber stamps, a brass inkstand, a hole-puncher and a row of pens—all precisely aligned. Around the walls are the locked cabinets and safes that contain the section’s secrets. There is a map of France, showing the
départements
. The three windows are narrow, barred and dusty, their sills encrusted with the excrement of the pigeons I can hear cooing on the roof.

“I wonder,” I say casually, “do you keep the original
bordereau
up here?”

Gribelin does not turn round. “I do.”

“I’d like to see it.”

He glances over his shoulder at me. “Why?”

I shrug. “I’m interested.”

There is nothing he can do. He unlocks another drawer in the cabinet and retrieves one of his ubiquitous manila files. He opens it, and with some reverence retrieves from it the
bordereau
. It is not at all what I expected. It weighs almost nothing. The paper is flimsy onionskin, semitransparent, written on both sides, so that the ink from one bleeds through and shows on the other. The most substantial thing about it is the adhesive tape holding together the six torn pieces.

I say, “You’d never guess it looked like this from the photograph.”

“No, it was quite a process.” Gribelin’s normally astringent tone is softened by a touch of professional pride. “We had to photograph both sides and then retouch them, and then stick them together and finally rephotograph the whole image. So it came out looking like a continuous sheet of writing.”

“How many prints did you make?”

“Twelve. It was necessary to disguise its original state so that we could circulate it around the ministry.”

“Yes, of course. I remember.” I turn the
bordereau
back and forth, marvelling once again at Lauth’s skill. “I remember it very well.”

It was the first week of October 1894 when word began to spread that there might be a traitor in the Ministry. All four chiefs of department were required to check the handwriting of every officer in their section, to see if anyone’s matched the photograph. They were sworn to secrecy, allowed only to tell their deputies. Colonel Boucher devolved the job to me.

Despite the restricted circle, it was inevitable that news would leak, and soon a miasma of unease infiltrated the rue Saint-Dominique. The problem lay in that five-point list of the documents betrayed, which set us all chasing our own tails. A “note on the hydraulic brake of the 120” and the “draft Field Artillery Firing Manual” suggested the spy must be in the artillery. But the “new plan” mentioned in point two was the very phrase we used in the Third Department for the revised mobilisation schedule. Of course, the “new plan” was also being studied by the railway timetable experts in the Fourth, so the spy could work there perhaps. But then the “note on the change to artillery formations” was most likely to have come from the First. Whereas the plan to occupy Madagascar had been worked on by the intelligence officers in the Second …

Everyone suspected everyone else. Old incidents were dredged up and picked over, ancient rumours and feuds revived. The ministry was paralysed by suspicion. I went through the handwriting of every officer on our list, even Boucher’s; even mine. I found no match.

And then someone—it was Colonel d’Aboville, deputy chief of the Fourth—had a flash of inspiration. If the traitor could draw on current knowledge of all four departments, wasn’t it reasonable to assume that he had recently worked in all four? And unlikely as it seemed, there
was
a group of officers on the General Staff of whom that was true: the
stagiaires
from the École Supérieure de Guerre—men who were relative strangers to their long-serving comrades. Suddenly it was obvious: the traitor was a
stagiaire
with a background in artillery.

Eight captains of artillery on the
stagiaire
programme fitted that particular bill, but only one of them was a Jew: a Jew moreover who
spoke French with a German accent, whose family lived in the Kaiser’s Reich and who always had money to throw around.

Gribelin, watching me, says, “I’m sure you remember the
bordereau
, Colonel.” He gives one of his rare smiles. “Just as I remember that you were the one who provided us with the sample of Dreyfus’s handwriting that matched it.”

It was Colonel Boucher who brought me the request from the Statistical Section. Normally he was loud and cheerfully red-faced, but on this occasion he was sombre, even grey. It was a Saturday morning, two days after we had started hunting for the traitor. He closed the door behind him and said, “It looks like we might be getting close to the bastard.”

“Really? That’s quick.”

“General Gonse wants to see some handwriting belonging to Captain Dreyfus.”

“Dreyfus?” I repeated, surprised.

Boucher explained d’Aboville’s theory. “And so,” he concluded, “they’ve decided the traitor must be one of your
stagiaires
.”

“One of
my stagiaires
?” I did not like the sound of that!

I had skimmed through Dreyfus’s file the previous day and eliminated him as a suspect. Now I pulled it out again and compared the handwriting of a couple of his letters to the
bordereau
. And on second glance, looking at them more closely, perhaps there were similarities: the same small lettering; the same slope to the right; similar spacing between both words and lines … A terrible feeling of certainty began to seize hold of me. “I don’t know, Colonel,” I said. “What do you think?” I showed the letters to Boucher.

“Well, I’m no expert either, but they look pretty much alike to me. You’d better bring them along.”

Ten minutes earlier, Dreyfus had been no more of a suspect to me than anyone else. But the power of suggestion is insidious. As the colonel and I walked together along the corridors of the ministry, my imagination began to fill with thoughts of Dreyfus—of his family still living in Germany, of his solitariness and cleverness and arrogance,
of his ambition to enter the General Staff and his careful cultivation of senior officers—so much so that by the time we reached General Gonse’s office I had all but convinced myself:
Of course he would betray us, because he hates us; he has hated us all along because he isn’t like us, and knows he never will be, for all his money; he is just …

A regular Jew!

Waiting for us, along with Gonse himself, were Colonel d’Aboville, Colonel Fabre, the chief of the Fourth Department, Colonel Lefort, head of the First, and Colonel Sandherr. I laid Dreyfus’s letters out on Gonse’s desk and stepped back while my superiors crowded around to look. And from that huddle of uniformed backs arose a growing exclamation of shock and conviction: “Look how he forms the capital ‘s’ there, and the ‘j’ … And the small ‘m’ and the ‘r,’ do you see? And the gap between the words is exactly the same … I’m no expert, but … No, I’m no expert either, but … I’d say they’re identical …”

Sandherr straightened and slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I should have known! How many times have I seen him loitering round, asking questions?”

Fabre said, “I predicted exactly this in my report on him, do you remember, Major Picquart?” He pointed at me. “ ‘An incomplete officer, lacking the qualities of character necessary for employment on the General Staff …’ Were those not my very words?”

“They were, Colonel,” I agreed.

Gonse said to me, “Where is Dreyfus exactly?”

“He’s at infantry camp outside Paris until the end of next week.”

“Good.” Sandherr nodded. “Excellent. That gives us some time. We need to get all this to a handwriting expert.”

Gonse said: “So you really think it’s him?”

“Well, if not him—who?”

No one responded. That was the nub of it. If the traitor wasn’t Dreyfus, then who was it? You? Me? Your comrade? Mine? Whereas if it was Dreyfus, this debilitating hunt for an enemy within would come to an end. Without saying it, or even thinking it, collectively we willed it to be so.

Gonse sighed and said, “I’d better go and tell General Mercier.
He may have to speak to the Prime Minister.” He glanced at me, as if I were the one responsible for introducing this contagion into the ministry, and said to Boucher, “I don’t think we need detain Major Picquart any longer, do you, Colonel?”

Boucher said, “No, I don’t believe so. Thank you, Picquart.”

“Thank you, General.”

I saluted and left.

I have been silent for a while. Suddenly I am aware of Gribelin, still staring at me.

“Strange,” I say, flourishing the
bordereau
. “Curious how it brings it all back.”

“Yes, I can imagine.”

And that might well have been the end of it, as far as my own involvement was concerned. But then to my surprise, a week later I received a telegram at my apartment summoning me to a meeting in the office of the Minister of War at six o’clock on the evening of Sunday, 14 October.

I presented myself at the hôtel de Brienne at the appointed time. I could hear voices as I climbed the stairs, and when I reached the first floor I discovered a small group waiting in the corridor to go in: General Boisdeffre, General Gonse, Colonel Sandherr and a couple of men I didn’t recognise—a corpulent, claret-faced major who, like me, wore the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour, and a superintendent from the Sûreté. There was one other officer. He was standing further along the passage next to the window, rather self-importantly wearing a monocle and flicking through a file, and I realised it was Colonel du Paty de Clam, Blanche’s former lover. He saw me looking at him, closed his file, removed his monocle, and strutted towards me.

“Picquart,” he said, returning my salute. “What an appalling business this is.”

“I didn’t know you were involved in it, Colonel.”

“Involved!” Du Paty laughed and shook his head. “My dear Major, I’ve been put in charge of the entire investigation! I’m the reason you’re here!”

I always found something disconcerting about du Paty. It was as if he were acting the central part in a play for which no one else had been shown the script. He might laugh abruptly, or tap his nose and adopt an air of great mystery, or disappear from a room in the middle of a conversation without explanation. He fancied himself a detective in the modern scientific manner and had made a study of graphology, anthropometry, cryptography and secret inks. I wondered what role in his drama he had chosen for me to play.

I said, “May I ask how the investigation is going?”

“You are about to hear.” He patted the file and nodded to the minister’s door, which at that moment was being opened by one of his staff officers.

Inside, Mercier was seated at his desk, signing a pile of correspondence. “Please, gentlemen,” he said in that quiet voice of his without looking up, “take a seat. I shan’t be a moment.”

We arranged ourselves around the conference table in order of rank, leaving the place at the head free for Mercier, with Boisdeffre to the right and Gonse to the left, then Sandherr and du Paty facing each other, and finally we three junior officers at the far end.

“Henry,” said the burly officer, leaning across the table to extend his hand to me.

“Picquart,” I replied.

The commissioner from the Sûreté also introduced himself: “Armand Cochefort.”

For a minute we sat in awkward silence while the minister finished signing his papers, then gave them to his aide, who saluted and left.

“So,” said Mercier, taking his seat at the table, and placing a sheet of paper in front of him, “I have informed the President and the Prime Minister of where things stand, and this is the warrant for Dreyfus’s arrest; all it needs is my signature. Have we received the results of the handwriting expert? I gather the first man, from the Banque de France, concluded that the writing wasn’t Dreyfus’s after all.”

Du Paty opened his file. “We have, Minister. I have consulted Alphonse Bertillon, head of the identification branch of the Préfecture of Police. He says the
bordereau
contains strong elements of Dreyfus’s handwriting, and where it differs, the discrepancies are deliberate. If I might spare you the technical detail and just read you his conclusion: ‘It appears clear to us that it was the same person who wrote the various items submitted and the incriminating document.’ ”

“So one says yes and one says no? That’s experts for you!” Mercier turned to Sandherr. “Is Dreyfus back in Paris yet?”

Sandherr said, “He’s having dinner with his wife’s parents, the Hadamards: his father-in-law is a diamond merchant—you know how they specialise in portable property. We have the building under watch.”

Boisdeffre interrupted: “Isn’t it quite tempting, Colonel, if we know where he is, simply to have him arrested tonight?”

“No, General,” replied Sandherr, shaking his head emphatically, “with the greatest respect, absolutely not. You don’t know these people as well as I do. You don’t know the way they operate. The moment they discover we have Dreyfus in custody, the whole force of upper Jewdom will swing into action to agitate for his release. It’s essential that he simply disappears with the minimum of fuss and we have him to ourselves for at least a week. I think Colonel du Paty’s plan is a good one.”