An Officer and a Spy (30 page)

I don’t return to the office: I cannot face it. Instead I go back to my apartment and lie on my bed and smoke cigarette after cigarette with a relentlessness that would impress Gonse, even if nothing else about me does.

The thing is, I have no wish to destroy my career. Twenty-four years it has taken me to get this far. Yet my career will be pointless to me—will lose the very elements of honour and pride that make it worth having—if the price of keeping it is to become merely one of the Gonses of this world.

Res judicata!

By the time it is dark and I get up to turn on the lamps, I have concluded that there is only one course open to me. I shall bypass Boisdeffre and Gonse and exercise my privilege of unrestricted access to the hôtel de Brienne: I shall lay the case personally before the Minister of War.

Things are starting to stir now—cracks in the glacier; a trembling under the earth—faint warning signs that great forces are on the move.

For months there has been nothing in the press about Dreyfus. But on the day after my visit to Gonse, the Colonial Ministry is obliged to deny a wild rumour in the London press that he has escaped from Devil’s Island. At the time I think nothing of it: it’s just journalism, and English journalism at that.

Then on the Tuesday
Le Figaro
appears with its lead story, “The Captivity of Dreyfus,” spread across the first two and a half columns of the front page. The report is an accurate, well-informed and sympathetic account of what Dreyfus is enduring on Devil’s Island (“forty to fifty thousand francs a year to keep alive a French officer who, since the day of his public degradation, has endured a death worse than death”). I presume the information has come from the Dreyfus family.

It is against this background that the next day I go to brief the minister.

I unlock the garden gate and make my way, unseen by any curious eyes in the ministry, across the lawn and into the rear of his official residence.

The old boy has been on leave for a week. This is his first day back. He seems to be in good spirits. His bulbous nose and the top of his bald head are peeling from exposure to the sun. He sits up straight in his chair, stroking his vast white moustaches, watching with amusement as yet again I bring out all the paperwork associated with the case. “Good God! I’m an old man, Picquart. Time is precious. How long is all this going to take?”

“I’m afraid it’s partly your fault, Minister.”

“Ah, do you hear him? The cheek of the young! My fault? And pray, how is that?”

“You very kindly authorised your staff to show me these letters from the suspected traitor, Esterhazy,” I say, passing them over, “and then I’m afraid I noticed their distinct similarity to this.” I give him the photograph of the
bordereau
.

Once again I am surprised by how quick on the uptake he is. Ancient he may be—a captain of infantry before I was even born—yet he looks from one to the other and grasps the implications immediately. “Well I’ll be blessed!” He makes a clicking sound with his tongue. “You’ve had the handwriting checked, I presume?”

“By the original police expert, Bertillon, yes. He says it is identical. Naturally I’d like to get other opinions.”

“Have you shown this to General Boisdeffre?”

“Yes.”

“What’s his opinion?”

“He referred me to General Gonse.”

“And Gonse?”

“He wants me to abandon my investigation.”

“Does he, indeed? Why’s that?”

“Because he believes, as do I, that it would almost certainly set in train a process that would lead to an official revision of the Dreyfus affair.”

“Heavens! That would be an earthquake!”

“It would, Minister, especially as we would have to reveal the existence of this …”

I hand him the secret file. He squints at it. “ ‘D’? What the hell is this?” He has never even heard of it. I have to explain. I show him the contents, item by item. Once again he goes straight to the heart of the matter. He extracts the letter referring to “that lowlife D” and holds it close to his face. His lips move as he reads. The backs of his hands are flaking like his scalp, and mottled with liver spots: an old lizard who has survived more summers than anyone could believe possible.

When he gets to the end he says, “Who’s ‘Alexandrine’?”

“That’s von Schwartzkoppen. He and the Italian military attaché call each other by women’s names.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because they are buggers, Minister.”

“Good God!” Billot pulls a face. He holds the letter gingerly between finger and thumb and passes it back to me. “You have a pretty tawdry job, Picquart.”

“I know that, General. I didn’t ask for it. But now I have it, it seems to me I must do it properly.”

“I agree.”

“And in my view, that means investigating Esterhazy thoroughly for the crimes he’s committed. And if it transpires that we have to fetch Dreyfus back from Devil’s Island—well, I say it’s better for us in the army to rectify our own mistake rather than be forced to do it by outside pressure later.”

Billot stares into the middle distance, his right thumb and forefinger smoothing down his moustaches. He grunts as he thinks. “This secret file,” he says after a while. “Surely it’s against the law to pass evidence to the judges without letting the defence have a chance to challenge it first?”

“It is. I regret having been a party to it.”

“So whose decision was it?”

“Ultimately, it was General Mercier’s, as Minister of War.”

“Ha! Mercier? Really? I suppose I might have guessed he’d be in there somewhere!” The staring and the moustache-smoothing and the grunting resume. Eventually he gives a long sigh. “I don’t know, Picquart. It’s a devil of a problem. You’re going to have to let me think about it. Obviously, there would be consequences if it turned out we had locked up the wrong man for all this time, especially having made such a public spectacle out of doing it—profound consequences, for both the army and the country. I’d have to talk to the Prime Minister. And I can’t do that for at least a week—I’ve got the annual manoeuvres in Rouillac starting on Monday.”

“I appreciate that, General. But in the meantime do I have your permission to continue my investigation of Esterhazy?”

The massive head nods slowly. “I should think so, my boy, yes.”

“Wherever the investigation leads me?”

Another heavy nod: “Yes.”

——

Filled with renewed energy, that evening I meet Desvernine in our usual rendezvous at the gare Saint-Lazare. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since the middle of August. I am slightly late. He is already sitting waiting for me in a corner seat, reading
Le Vélo
. He has stopped drinking beer, I notice, and gone back to mineral water. As I slip into the chair opposite him, I nod to his newspaper. “I didn’t know you were a cyclist.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Colonel. I’ve had a machine for ten years.” He folds the paper up small and stuffs it into his pocket. He seems to be in a bad mood.

I say, “No notebook today?”

He shrugs his shoulders. “There’s nothing to report. Benefactor’s still on leave at his wife’s place in the Ardennes. The embassy’s quiet, half shut up for the summer—no sign of either of our men for weeks. And your friend Monsieur Ducasse has had enough and gone to Brittany for a holiday. I tried to stop him but he said if he stayed in the rue de Lille much longer he’d go crazy. I can’t say I blame him.”

“You sound frustrated.”

“Well, Colonel, it’s been five months since I started investigating this bastard—if you’ll excuse me—and I don’t know what else we’re supposed to do. Either we pick him up and sweat him for a bit, see if we can make him admit something, or we suspend the operation: that would be my proposal. Either way, the weather’s turning colder and we ought to pull those speaking-tubes out within a day or two. If the Germans decide to light a fire, we’ll be in trouble.”

“Well, for once let
me
show
you
something,” I say, and pass the photographs of Esterhazy’s letters face-down across the table. “Benefactor is trying to get a position on the General Staff.”

Desvernine looks at the letters and immediately his expression brightens. “The bastard!” he repeats happily, under his breath. “He must owe more than we thought.”

I wish I could tell him about the
bordereau
and Dreyfus and the secret file, but I daren’t, not yet—not until I have official clearance from Billot to broaden the scope of my inquiry.

Desvernine says, “What do you propose to do about him, Colonel?”

“I think we need to become much more active. I’m going to suggest to the minister that he actually agrees to Benefactor’s request and gives him a position on the General Staff, in a department where we can monitor him round the clock. We should let him believe he has access to secret material—something apparently valuable, but which we’ve forged—and then we should follow him and see what he does with it.”

“That’s good. And I’ll tell you what else we could do, if we’re indulging in a little forgery. Why don’t we send him a fake message from the Germans inviting him to a meeting to discuss the future? If Benefactor turns up, that’s incriminating in itself. But if he turns up carrying secret material, we’ll have caught him red-handed.”

I think this over. “Is there a forger we could use?”

“I’d suggest Lemercier-Picard.”

“Is he trustworthy?”

“He’s a forger, Colonel. He’s about as trustworthy as a snake. His real name is Moisés Lehmann. But he did a lot of work for the section when Colonel Sandherr was there, and he knows we’ll come looking for him if he tries to pull any tricks. I’ll find out where he is.”

Desvernine leaves looking much happier than he did when I arrived. I stay to finish my drink, then take a taxi home.

The next day it suddenly starts to feel like autumn—a threatening dark grey sky, windy, the first leaves blowing off the trees and chasing down the boulevards. Desvernine is right: we need to get those sound-tubes out of the apartment in the rue de Lille as soon as possible.

I arrive at the office at my usual time and quickly scan the day’s papers laid out ready for me by Capiaux on my table.
Le Figaro
’s description of Dreyfus’s conditions on Devil’s Island has stirred up the sediment of opinion again, and everywhere Dreyfus is widely denounced: “Make him suffer even more” seems to be the collective view. But it is a story in
L’Éclair
that brings me up short—an anonymous article headlined “The Traitor” which alleges that Dreyfus’s
guilt was proved beyond doubt by “a secret file of evidence” passed to the judges at his court-martial. The author calls on the army to publish the contents in order to put an end to the “inexplicable sense of pity” surrounding the spy.

This is the first time the existence of the secret file has been mentioned in the press. The coincidence that it should happen now, of all times, just as I have taken possession of the dossier, makes me uneasy. I march down the corridor to Lauth’s office and drop the newspaper on his desk. “Seen this?”

Lauth reads it and looks up at me, alarmed. “Somebody must be talking.”

“Find Guénée,” I order him. “He’s supposed to be monitoring the Dreyfus family. Tell him to come over here now.”

I walk back to my office, unlock my safe and take out the secret file. I sit at my desk and make a list of everyone who knows about it: Mercier, Boisdeffre, Gonse, Sandherr, du Paty, Henry, Lauth, Gribelin, Guénée; to these nine, thanks to my briefing yesterday, can now be added Billot—that’s ten; and then there are the seven judges, starting with Colonel Maurel—seventeen—and President Fauré, and the President’s doctor, Gibert—that’s nineteen—who was the man who told Mathieu Dreyfus—who makes twenty; and after that—who knows how many more Mathieu has told?

There is no such thing as a secret—not really, not in the modern world, not with photography and telegraphy and railways and newspaper presses. The old days of an inner circle of like-minded souls communicating with parchment and quill pens are gone. Sooner or later most things will be revealed. That is what I have been attempting to make Gonse understand.

I massage my temples, trying to think it through. The leak ought to vindicate my position. But I suspect it is more likely to make Gonse and Boisdeffre panic and strengthen their determination to limit the investigation.

Guénée arrives in my office towards the end of the morning, jaundice-yellow as usual and smelling like the inside of an old tobacco pipe. He has brought with him the Dreyfus surveillance file. He looks around nervously. “Is Major Henry here?”

“Henry’s still on leave. You’ll have to deal with me.”

Guénée sits and opens his file. “It’s the Dreyfus family who are behind it, Colonel, almost certainly.”

“Even though the tone of the
L’Éclair
article is hostile to Dreyfus?”

“That’s just to cover their tracks. The editor, Sabatier, has been got at by them—we’ve monitored him meeting both Mathieu and Lucie. This is part of a pattern of increased activity by the family lately—you may have noticed. They’ve hired the Cook Detective Agency in London to dig for information.”

“And have they got anywhere?”

“Not that we know of, Colonel. That may be why they’ve changed their tactics and decided to become more public. It was a journalist employed by the detective agency who planted the false story that Dreyfus had escaped.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I suppose, to get people talking about him again.”

“Well then, I’d say they’ve succeeded, wouldn’t you?”

Guénée lights a cigarette. His hands are shaking. He says, “You remember a year ago, I told you about a Jewish journalist the family were talking to—Bernard Lazare? Anarchist, socialist, Jewish activist?”

“What about him?”

“He now seems to be writing a pamphlet in defence of Dreyfus.”

He searches through the file and gives me a photograph of a heavyset, youngish man in pince-nez with a huge balding forehead and a heavy beard. Clipped to it is a selection of newspaper cuttings authored by Lazare: “The New Ghetto,” “Anti-Semitism and Anti-Semites,” a series of recent articles in
La Voltaire
attacking Drumont of
La Libre Parole
(
you are not invulnerable, neither you nor your friends …
).