An Officer and a Spy (42 page)

I set down my pen and read the letter through. It seems to me very stilted. But then how inhibiting it is to know that one’s love letters will by steamed open and read by men in offices, and copied and placed on file.

I don’t sign it or write her name on the envelope, and I pay a soldier a franc to post it for me.

Leclerc receives me in his office at the end of the day. His garden is in darkness. He looks weary. He has a stack of telegrams on one side of his desk and a pile of newspapers on the other. He invites me to sit. “I have a list of questions I have been instructed to ask you, Colonel, sent to me by the Minister of War. Such as: have you ever given any secret information to a person or persons outside the army?”

“No, General.”

He makes a note.

“Have you ever forged or otherwise altered any confidential documents?”

“No, General.”

“Have you ever asked a subordinate, or subordinates, to forge or alter confidential documents?”

“No, General.”

“Have you ever allowed a woman access to secret documents?”

“A woman?”

“Yes. Apparently this Major Esterhazy has claimed he was passed secret information by an unknown woman wearing a veil.”

A veiled lady! Another du Paty touch …

“No, General, I have not shown documents to a woman, veiled or unveiled.”

“Good. I shall telegraph Paris accordingly. In the meantime I am to inform you that the Minister of War has ordered an internal inquiry into this whole affair, under General de Pellieux, Military Commander of the Département of the Seine. You are instructed to return to France to give evidence. An official from the Colonial Ministry will escort you.” He closes the file. “And that, I think, concludes our business together, Colonel.”

He stands. I follow suit.

He says, “I wouldn’t describe it as having been a pleasure exactly to have you under my command, but it has certainly been interesting.” We shake hands. He puts his arm around my shoulders and escorts me to the door. He smells strongly of eau de cologne. “I was talking to Colonel Dubuch the other night. He says this Esterhazy character is a thoroughly bad lot. He was out here in ’82 and was charged with embezzlement in Sfax. There was a board of inquiry, but somehow he got off.”

“It doesn’t surprise me, General.”

“You must be up against some pretty desperate opposition, Picquart, if they’re willing to tie themselves to a character like that. May I give you some advice?”

“Please.”

“Don’t stand too close to the railings on the ship back to France.”

The passage across the Mediterranean in November is much rougher than in June. One moment the porthole shows grey sky, the next grey waves. My Russian books slide off my little table and splay out on the floor. As before, I keep mostly to my cabin. Occasionally I am visited by my escort, Monsieur Périer of the Colonial Ministry, but he is very green and prefers to keep to his own quarters. On my rare excursions above decks I follow Leclerc’s advice and keep well away from the edge. I enjoy the lash of the sea across my face, the smell of the coal smoke mingled with the salt spray. Occasionally I am aware of some of the other passengers staring at me, but I am not sure whether they are police agents, or have merely heard that a person whose name is in the news is aboard.

We leave Africa on the Tuesday. On the Thursday afternoon the coast of France comes into view—a watery line in the mist. I have just finished packing when someone knocks on my door. I pick up my revolver and call out, “Who’s there?”

A voice replies, “It’s the captain, Colonel Picquart.”

“Just a moment.” I slip the gun into my pocket and open the door.

He’s a morose-looking fellow in his early fifties; a drinker to judge by the filigree of blood vessels in his eyes: I should guess that plying back and forth between Tunis and Marseille three times a week must become tedious after a while. We exchange salutes. He says, “Arrangements have been made to take you and Monsieur Périer off the ship before we dock.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“Apparently there’s a crowd of reporters on the quayside, and some protesters. The Ministry of War feels it would be safer to transfer
you to a tug while we’re still at sea and then land you ahead of us in a different part of the harbour.”

“What an absurd idea.”

“Maybe so,” replies the captain with a shrug, “but those are my orders.”

A half-hour later the throb of the engines ceases and we heave to. I climb up to the deck carrying my suitcase. We have come to a stop about a kilometre outside the harbour entrance. A tugboat lies alongside us. The weather is cold and squally but that doesn’t deter several dozen passengers from lining the rails in sullen silence to watch me depart. It is my first experience of my new celebrity, and a singularly uncomfortable one. There is a strong swell on the sea and the two vessels pitch against each other, their decks rising and falling in opposite directions. My suitcase is taken from me, flung down into the tug and caught, and then I am lowered after it. Strong arms stretch up to lift me aboard. Behind me I hear someone shout an insult; the word “Jew” is whipped away in the wind. Monsieur Périer is handed down along with his luggage. He staggers to the other side of the tug and throws up. The ropes are cast off and we pull clear.

We pass behind the harbour wall and swing to port, moving between the towering hulls of a pair of anchored ironclads, towards the western end of the harbour. Over the tug’s stern, gathered in the place where the ferries berth, I can see a crowd of people, at least a hundred or two. And this is the instance when I realise the hold that the Dreyfus affair is beginning to exert on the imagination of my fellow countrymen. The tug manoeuvres alongside a military dock, where a cab is waiting. Next to it stands a young officer. As the crew jump off to tie up the boat, he steps forward and takes my suitcase. He passes it up to the taxi driver, then offers his hand to help me ashore.

He salutes. His manner is cold but impeccable. In the back of the cab, facing me and Périer, he says, “If I might make a suggestion, Colonel, it would perhaps be advisable to crouch down as low as possible, at least until we are some distance clear of the port.”

I do as he asks. And so, like a hunted criminal, I return to France.

——

At the railway station, a first-class compartment at the rear of the train has been reserved for our exclusive use. Périer pulls down the blinds on the doors and the windows and refuses to allow me out to buy a newspaper. If I so much as visit the lavatory he insists on accompanying me and standing outside the door until I have finished. Occasionally I wonder what he would do if I disobeyed his orders, which invariably are delivered in a nervous, embarrassed, almost pleading tone. But in truth I am afflicted by a curious fatalism. I surrender myself to events, and to the rocking cocoon of our journey, which begins in the darkness of Marseille at five in the afternoon and ends in the darkness of Paris at five in the morning.

I am asleep when we arrive at the gare de Lyon. The jolting of the compartment awakens me and I open my eyes to see Périer peering around the edge of the window blind. He says, “We shall wait here, Colonel, if you don’t mind, until the other passengers have disembarked.” Ten minutes later we step down onto the deserted platform. A porter wheels our cases ahead of us and we walk the length of the train to the ticket barrier, where a dozen men are waiting, holding notebooks. Périer warns me, “Don’t say anything,” and we hold on to our hats and hunch forward slightly, as if stepping into a headwind. Their shouted questions all come at once so that it is impossible to distinguish more than a few words: “Esterhazy …? Dreyfus …? Veiled lady …? Search …?” There is a brilliant lightning flash and the
whumph
of a magnesium tray igniting, but we are hurrying too fast, I am sure, for any photograph to be usable. Ahead of us a couple of railway officials have their arms outstretched and they steer us into an empty waiting room and close the door. Inside, my old friend Armand Mercier-Milon, now a colonel, salutes me very formally.

“Armand,” I say, “I cannot tell you how pleased I am to see you,” and I hold out my hand, but instead of offering me his, he merely gestures me towards the door.

“There’s a motorcar waiting,” he says. “We need to leave before they run round to the front of the station.”

Drawn up outside is a big modern vehicle in the livery of the Compagnie Paris–Lyon Méditerranée. I am squeezed onto the back seat between Périer and Mercier-Milon. The luggage is stowed and the car pulls away just as the reporters come pouring out of the station towards us. Mercier-Milon says, “I have a letter here for you from the Chief of Staff.”

It is awkward to open the envelope in the cramped space.
Colonel Picquart, I order you very strictly not to communicate with anyone until you have given your evidence to General de Pellieux’s inquiry. Boisdeffre
.

We pass quickly and in silence through the darkened, rainy streets. There is no traffic at this hour; hardly anyone is about. We head west along the boulevard Saint-Martin and I wonder if they might be taking me back to my apartment, but then suddenly we turn off north and pull up on the rue Saint-Lazare outside the giant hôtel Terminus. A porter opens the door. Périer gets out first. He says, “I’ll go in and register us.”

“Am I staying here?”

“For now.”

He disappears inside. I haul myself out of the car and contemplate the vast facade. It occupies an entire city block—five hundred bedrooms: a temple of modernity. Its electric lights glisten in the rain. Mercier-Milon joins me. Out of earshot of anyone else for the first time he says, “You are a bloody fool, Georges. What can you have been thinking of?” He speaks quietly but with force and I can tell he’s been bursting to say this since we left the railway station. “I mean, I feel sorry for Dreyfus myself—I was one of the few prepared to defend him at that charade of a court-martial. But you? Passing secret information to an outsider, so that he can use it against your own commanders? That’s a crime in my book. I doubt you’ll find a soldier in the whole of France who’ll defend what you’ve done.”

His vehemence both shakes and angers me. I say coldly, “What happens next?”

“You go to your room and change into your uniform. You speak to no one. You write to no one. You open no letters. I’ll wait in the lobby. At nine I’ll come and fetch you and escort you to the place Vendôme.”

Périer appears in the doorway. “Colonel Picquart? Our room is ready.”

“
Our
room? You mean we are to share one?”

“I am afraid so.”

I try to make light of this humiliating arrangement—“Your devotion to your duties really is exemplary, Monsieur Périer”—but that is when I realise that of course he is not an official of the Colonial Ministry at all; he is a secret policeman of the Sûreté.

The only time he lets me out of his sight is when I take a bath. Lying in the tub I listen to him moving around in the bedroom. Someone knocks on the outer door and he lets them in. I hear low male voices and I think how vulnerable I would be if two men were to enter quickly and grab my ankles. A simple case of drowning in the bath: it would be over in minutes with barely a mark to show.

Périer—if that is his name—calls through the door, “Your breakfast is here, Colonel.”

I step out of the bath, dry myself and put on the sky-blue tunic and the red trousers with grey stripe that make up the uniform of the 4th Tunisian Rifles. In the mirror it seems to me that I cut an incongruous figure—the colours of North Africa in the winter of northern Europe. They have even dressed me up to look a motley fool.
I doubt you’ll find a soldier in the whole of France who’ll defend what you’ve done
. Well then. So be it.

I drink black coffee. I eat
tartine
. I translate another page of Dostoyevsky.
What makes a hero? Courage, strength, morality, withstanding adversity? Are these the traits that truly show and create a hero?
At nine, Mercier-Milon comes to collect me and we ride down in the lift to the lobby without exchanging a word. Outside on the pavement the pack of journalists surges towards us. “Damn it,” says Mercier-Milon, “they must have followed us from the station.”