An Officer and a Spy (35 page)

So there it is. “D” is not Dreyfus; he is Dubois.

You order me to shoot a man and I’ll shoot him …

I have made a careful note of where every document and folder originated and now I start the laborious process of putting each one back in its proper place. It takes me perhaps ten minutes to return it all exactly to where it was, to lock up the filing cabinets and wipe down the table surfaces. By the time I finish it is just after ten. I replace Gribelin’s keys in his desk drawer, kneel, and set about the tricky business of locking it again. I am conscious of the minutes
passing as I try to manipulate the two thin metal tools. My hands are clumsy with tiredness and slippery with sweat. For some reason it seems much harder to close a lock than open one, but at last I manage it. I turn off the lights.

My only remaining task is to relock the door to the archive. I am still on my knees in the corridor fiddling with the tumblers when I think I hear the front door slam downstairs. I pause, straining to hear. I can’t pick out any suspicious noises. I must be imagining things. I resume my frustrating efforts. But then comes the definite creak of a footstep on the first-floor landing and someone begins to mount the stairs to the archive. I am so close to shifting the final tumbler I am reluctant to abandon the attempt. Only when I hear a much louder creak do I realise I am out of time. I dart across the passage, try the nearest door—locked—and then the next one—open—and slip inside.

I listen to the slow, deliberate tread of someone approaching along the corridor. Through the gap between the door and the jamb I see Gribelin come into view. My God, is there anything in this wretched man’s life apart from work? He stops outside the entrance to the archive and takes out his key. He inserts it in the lock and tries to turn it. I can’t see his face, but I see his shoulders stiffen. What is this? He tries the handle and opens the door cautiously. He doesn’t go in but stands on the threshold, listening. Then he throws the door wide open, turns on the light and moves inside. I can hear him checking his desk drawers. A moment later he returns to the corridor and glances up and down it. He ought to be an absurd little figure—a small dark-suited troll. But somehow he isn’t. There is a malevolence about him as he stands there, alert and suspicious—he is a danger to me, this man.

Finally—satisfied presumably that he must have made a mistake in locking up—he goes back into the archive and closes the door. I wait another ten minutes. Then I take off my shoes and creep past his lair in my stockinged feet.

On my walk back to my apartment I stop in the middle of the bridge and drop the roll of lock-picking tools into the Seine.

——

Over the next few days the Tsar tours Notre-Dame, names a new bridge after his father, banquets in Versailles.

While he goes about his business, I go about mine.

I walk over the road to see Colonel Foucault, who has come back from the Berlin embassy to witness the Imperial visit. We exchange a few pleasantries and then I ask him, “Did you ever hear anything from Richard Cuers after that meeting we arranged in Basel?”

“Yes, he came and complained about it bitterly. I gather you fellows decided to give him some rough treatment. Who on earth did you send?”

“My deputy, Major Henry; another of my officers, Captain Lauth; and a couple of policemen. Why? What did Cuers say?”

“He said he’d made the journey in good faith, to reveal what he knew about the German agent in France, but when he got to Switzerland he felt he was treated as if he was a liar and a fantasist. There was one French officer in particular—fat, red-faced—who merely bullied him: interrupted him all the time; made it clear he didn’t believe a word of what he was saying. That was a deliberate tactic, I assume?”

“Not that I’m aware of; not at all.”

Foucault looks at me in consternation. “Well, whether it was intentional or not, you won’t be hearing from Cuers again.”

I go to see Tomps at the headquarters of the Sûreté. I tell him, “It’s about your trip to Basel.” Immediately he looks anxious. He doesn’t want to land anyone in any trouble. But it’s clear the episode has been preying on his mind.

“I won’t quote you,” I promise him. “Just tell me what happened.”

He doesn’t take much prompting. He seems to be relieved to get it off his chest.

“Well, Colonel,” he says, “you remember our original plan? It worked to the letter. I followed Cuers from the German railway station to the cathedral, saw him make contact with my colleague Vuillecard, then followed the pair of them to the Schweizerhof, where Major Henry and Captain Lauth were ready for him upstairs. After that I went back to the bar at the station to wait. I guess it must have been about three hours later that Henry suddenly came in and ordered a drink. I asked him how it was going and he said,
‘I’ve had enough of this bastard’—you know how he talks—‘there’s nothing we can learn from him, I’ll bet a month’s salary on it.’ I said, ‘Well, what are you doing back here so early?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I played Mr. Big, pretended to get angry and finally walked out of there. I left him with Lauth: let the young fellow have a try!’ Obviously I was disappointed with the sound of how this was going, so I said, ‘You know I’m an old acquaintance of Cuers? You know he likes a lot of absinthe? He really loves a drink. That might have been a better approach. If Captain Lauth can’t get anywhere, do you want me to have a try?’ ”

“And what did Major Henry say to that?”

Tomps continues his passable impersonation of Henry. “ ‘No,’ he says, ‘it’s not worth the trouble. Forget it.’ Then at six, when Captain Lauth had finished his session and turned up at the station, I asked Henry again: ‘Listen, I know Cuers well. Why don’t you let me take him out for a drink?’ But he just repeated what he’d said before: ‘No, it’s useless. We’re wasting our time here.’ So we caught the night train to Paris and that was that.”

Back in my office, I open a file on Henry. That Henry is the man who framed Dreyfus I have no doubt.

Code-breaking isn’t the province of the Statistical Section, or even the Ministry of War. It is run out of the Foreign Ministry by a seven-man team whose presiding genius is Major Étienne Bazeries. The major is famous in the newspapers for having broken the Great Cipher of Louis XIV and revealed the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask. He conforms to every cliché of the eccentric prodigy—unkempt, abrupt, forgetful—and is not an easy man to get to see. Twice I visit the quai d’Orsay on the pretext of other business and try to find him, only to be told by his staff that no one knows where he is. It is not until the end of the month that I track him to his office. He is in his shirtsleeves, bent over his desk with a screwdriver and a cylindrical enciphering device which lies all around him in pieces. In theory I am his superior officer, but Bazeries doesn’t salute or even stand; he has never believed in rank, just as he doesn’t believe in
haircuts or shaving or even, to judge by the atmosphere in his office, washing.

“The Dreyfus affair,” I say to him. “The telegram from the Italian military attaché, Major Panizzardi, sent to the General Staff in Rome on the second of November 1894.”

He squints up at me through greasy spectacles. “What about it?”

“You broke it?”

“I did. It took me nine days.” He resumes tinkering with his machine.

I take out my notebook and open it to a double page. On one side is the coded text that I copied down from the file in the archive, on the other the solution as written out by Gonse:
Captain Dreyfus has been arrested. The Ministry of War has evidence of his dealings with Germany. We have taken all necessary precautions
. I offer it to Bazeries. “Is this your solution?”

He glances at it. Immediately his jaw tenses with anger. “My God, you people don’t give up, do you?” He pushes back his chair, strides across the office, throws open his door and shouts, “Billecocq! Bring me the Panizzardi telegram!” He turns to me. “Once and for all, Colonel, that is not what it says, and wishing it did will not make it otherwise.”

“Wait,” I say, holding up my hand to pacify him, “there’s obviously some history here that I’m not aware of. Let me be clear: you’re telling me that this is not an accurate transcription of the decoded telegram?”

“The only reason it took us nine days to arrive at the solution was because your ministry kept refusing to believe the facts!”

A young, nervous-looking man, presumably Billecocq, arrives bearing a folder. Bazeries snatches it off him and flicks it open. “Here it is, you see—the original telegram?” He holds it up for me to see. I recognise the Italian attaché’s handwriting. “Panizzardi took it to the telegraph office on the avenue Montaigne at three o’clock in the morning. By ten, thanks to our arrangement with the telegraph service, it was here in our department. By eleven, Colonel Sandherr was standing exactly where you are now demanding we decipher
it as a matter of extreme urgency. I told him it was impossible—this particular cipher was one of great complexity, which we’d never before managed to break. He said, ‘What if I could guarantee you that it contained a particular word?’ I told him that would be a different matter. He said that the word was ‘Dreyfus.’ ”

“And how did he know that Panizzardi would mention Dreyfus?”

“Well, that was very clever, I must concede. Sandherr said that the previous day he had arranged for the name to be leaked to the newspapers as the identity of the man arrested for espionage. He reasoned that whoever was employing Dreyfus would panic and contact their superiors. When Panizzardi was followed to the telegraph office in the middle of the night, naturally Colonel Sandherr was sure his tactic had worked. Unfortunately, when I succeeded in breaking the cipher, the text of the message was not as he wished. You can read it yourself.”

Bazeries shows me the telegram. The solution is written out neatly under the numerals of the encoded text:
If Captain Dreyfus has had no dealings with you it would be appropriate to instruct the ambassador to publish an official denial in order to avoid comments by the press
.

I read it through twice to make sure I understand the implications. “And so what this suggests is that Panizzardi was actually in the dark about Dreyfus—the direct opposite of what Colonel Sandherr believed?”

“Exactly! Sandherr wouldn’t accept it, though. He insisted we must have got a word wrong somewhere. He took it to the highest levels. He even arranged for one of his agents to feed Panizzardi some fresh information about an unrelated matter, so that he would be obliged to send a second cipher message to Rome incorporating certain technical terms. When we broke that as well, we demonstrated beyond doubt that this was the correct decryption. Nine days this whole procedure took us, from beginning to end. So please, Colonel—don’t let us go over it again.”

I perform the calculation in my head. Nine days from 2 November takes us to 11 November. The court-martial began on 19 December. Which means that for over a month before Dreyfus even stood trial, the Statistical Section were aware that the phrase “that lowlife D” could not possibly refer to Dreyfus, because they knew Panizzardi
had never even heard of him—unless he was lying to his superiors, and why would he do that?

“And there is no doubt, is there,” I ask, “that at the end of the whole process you provided the correct version to the Ministry of War?”

“No doubt at all. I gave it to Billecocq to hand-deliver.”

“Can you remember who you gave it to?” I ask Billecocq.

“Yes, Colonel, I remember it very well, because I gave it to the minister himself. I gave it to General Mercier.”

When I get back to the Statistical Section, I can smell cigarette smoke emanating from my office, and when I open the door, I find General Gonse sitting at my desk. Henry is resting his ample backside against my table.

Gonse says cheerfully, “You’ve been out a long time.”

“I didn’t know we had an appointment.”

“We didn’t. I just thought I’d drop by.”

“You’ve never done that before.”

“Haven’t I? Perhaps I should have done it more often. What a separate little operation you have running over here.” He holds out his hand. “I’ll take that secret file on Dreyfus, if I may.”

“Of course. Might I ask why?”

“Not really.”

I’d like to argue. I glance at Henry. He raises his eyebrows slightly.

You have to give them what they want, Colonel—they’re the chiefs
.

Slowly I bend to unlock my safe, searching my brain for some excuse not to comply. I take out the file marked “D.” Reluctantly I hand it over to Gonse. He opens the flap and quickly thumbs through the contents.

I ask pointedly, “Is it all there?”

“It had better be!” Gonse smiles at me—a purely mechanical adjustment of his lower face, devoid of all humour. “Now then, we need to make a few administrative changes, in view of your imminent departure on your tour of inspection. Henceforth, Major Henry will bring all the Agent Auguste material direct to me.”

“But that’s our most important source!”

“Yes, so it’s only right that it comes to me, as head of the intelligence department. Is that all right with you, Henry?”

“Whatever you wish, General.”

“Am I being dismissed?”

“Of course not, my dear Picquart! This is simply a reshuffle of responsibilities to improve our efficiency. Everything else remains with you. So that’s settled then.” Gonse stands and stubs out his cigarette. “We’ll talk soon, Colonel.” He clasps the Dreyfus file to his chest with crossed arms. “I’ll look after our precious baby very well, don’t you worry.”

After he has gone, Henry looks at me. He shrugs apologetically. “You should have taken my advice,” he says.

I have heard it claimed by those who have attended the public executions in the rue de la Roquette that the heads of the condemned men after they have been guillotined still show signs of life. Their cheeks twitch. Their eyes blink. Their lips move.

I wonder: do these severed heads also briefly share the illusion that they are alive? Do they see people staring down at them and imagine, for an instant or two before the darkness rushes in, that they can still communicate?