I arrive back in Paris just before noon the following day, a Saturday, and decide against going into the office. It is therefore not until Monday, four days after my last conversation with Lauth, that I return to the section. Even as I am climbing the stairs I can hear Major Henry’s voice, and when I reach the landing I see him along the corridor, just emerging from Lauth’s room. He is wearing a black armband.
“Colonel Picquart,” he says, coming up to me and saluting. “I am reporting for duty.”
“It’s good to have you back, Major,” I reply, returning his salute, “although naturally I am very sorry for the circumstances. I do hope your mother’s passing was as peaceful as possible.”
“There aren’t many easy ways out of this life, Colonel. To be frank, by the end, I was praying for it to be over. From now on I intend to keep hold of my service revolver. I want a good clean bullet when my own time comes.”
“That’s my intention, too.”
“The only problem is whether one will still have the strength to pull the trigger.”
“Oh, I expect there will be plenty around who will be only too happy to oblige us.”
Henry laughs. “You’re not wrong there, Colonel!”
I unlock my door and invite him in. The office has the cold, stale feel of a room that has not been used for several days. He takes a seat. The spindly wooden legs creak under his weight.
“So,” he says, lighting a cigarette, “I hear you’ve been busy while I’ve been away.”
“You’ve spoken to Lauth?” Of course, I might have guessed Lauth would have told him: those two are very thick together.
“Yes, he’s filled me in. May I see the new material?”
I feel a certain irritation as I unlock my safe and hand him the file. I say, conscious of sounding petty, “I had assumed I would be the one to brief you first.”
“Does it matter?”
“Only to the extent that I asked Lauth not to mention it to anyone.”
Henry, with his cigarette clamped between his lips, puts on his spectacles, and holds up the two documents. He squints at them through the smoke. “Well,” he mutters, “perhaps he doesn’t regard me as just ‘anyone.’ ” The cigarette wobbles as he speaks, showering ash into his lap.
“Nobody is suggesting you are.”
“Have you done anything about this yet?”
“I haven’t told anyone in the rue Saint-Dominique, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s probably wise. They will only start flapping.”
“I agree. I want us to make our own inquiries first. I’ve already been to Rouen—”
He peers at me over the top of his spectacles. “You’ve been to Rouen?”
“Yes, there’s a major in the Seven-four—Esterhazy’s regiment—who’s an old friend of mine. He was able to give me some personal information.”
Henry resumes reading. “And might I ask what this old friend told you?”
“He said that Esterhazy is in the habit of asking a lot of suspicious questions. That he’s even paid for himself to go on artillery exercises, and had the firing manuals copied afterwards. Also that he’s desperate for money and isn’t a man of good character.”
“Really?” Henry turns the petit bleu over to examine the address. “He seemed fine when he worked here.”
I have to give him credit for the aplomb with which he delivers this bombshell. For a moment or two I simply stare at him. “Lauth never mentioned that Esterhazy was employed here.”
“That’s because he didn’t know.” Henry sets the documents down on my desk and takes off his spectacles. “It was long before Lauth’s time. I’d only just been posted here myself.”
“When was this?”
“Must be fifteen years ago.”
“So you know Esterhazy?”
“I did once, yes—slightly. He wasn’t here long—he worked as a German translator. But I haven’t seen him for years.”
I sit back in my chair. “This raises the matter to a whole new level.”
“Does it?” Henry shrugs. “I’m not sure I follow. Why?”
“You seem to be taking this very calmly, Major!” There is something mocking about Henry’s studied indifference; I can feel my anger rising. “Obviously it’s more serious if Esterhazy has received some training in our intelligence techniques.”
Henry smiles and shakes his head. “If I may offer you some advice, Colonel, I wouldn’t get too dramatic about it. It doesn’t matter how many gunnery courses he’s been on. I don’t see how Esterhazy can have had access to anything important, stuck out in Rouen. And in fact that letter from Schwartzkoppen tells us plainly that he didn’t, because the Germans are threatening to break off relations with him. They wouldn’t do that if they thought they had a valuable spy.
“It’s always an easy mistake to make,” continues Henry, “if you’re new to this game, to think that the first dodgy fellow you come across is a master spy. It’s seldom the case. In fact you can end up doing a lot more damage by overreacting than the so-called traitor has caused in the first place.”
“You are not suggesting, I hope,” I reply stiffly, “that we just leave him to carry on supplying information to a foreign power, even if it may be of little value?”
“Not at all! I agree absolutely we should keep an eye on him. I just think we should keep it in proportion. Why don’t I ask Guénée to start sniffing around, see what he can find out?”
“No, I don’t want Guénée handling this.” Guénée is another member of Henry’s gang. “I want to use someone else for a change.”
“As you wish,” says Henry. “Tell me who you’d like and I’ll assign him.”
“No, actually, thank you for the offer, but I’ll assign him.” I smile at Henry. “The extra experience will do me good. Please …” I indicate the door. “And again: welcome back. Would you mind telling Gribelin to come down and see me?”
What is particularly galling about Henry’s pious little sermon is that I can see the truth in it. He’s right: I have allowed my imagination to build Esterhazy up into a traitor on the scale of Dreyfus, whereas in fact, as Henry says, all the evidence indicates that he hasn’t done anything very much. Still, I am not going to give him the satisfaction of letting him take over the operation. I shall keep this one to myself. Thus when Gribelin comes to see me, I tell him I want a list of all the police agents the section has used recently, together with their addresses and a brief service history. He goes away and comes back half an hour later with a dozen names.
Gribelin is an enigma to me: the epitome of the servile bureaucrat; an animated corpse. He could be any age between forty and sixty and is as thin as a wraith of black smoke, the only colour he wears. Mostly he closets himself alone upstairs in his archive; on the rare occasions he does appear he creeps along close to the wall, dark and silent as a shadow. I could imagine him slipping around the edge of a closed door, or sliding beneath it. The only sound he emits occasionally is the clinking of the bunch of keys that is attached to his waist by a chain. He stands now with perfect stillness in front of my desk while I scan the list. I ask him which of the agents he would recommend. He refuses to be drawn: “They are all good men.” He doesn’t ask me why I need an agent: Gribelin is as discreet as a papal confessor.
In the end I select a young officer with the Sûreté, Jean-Alfred Desvernine, attached to the police division at the gare Saint-Lazare. He’s a former lieutenant of the dragoons from the Médoc, risen through the ranks, obliged to resign his commission because of gambling debts, but who has made an honest fist of his life since: if anyone has a chance of prising open the secrets of Esterhazy’s addiction, I reckon it will be him.
After Gribelin has slunk away, I write Desvernine a message asking him to meet me the day after tomorrow. Rather than inviting him to the office, where Henry and Lauth will be able to see him, I propose a meeting at nine in the morning outside the Louvre museum, in the place du Carrousel. I tell him I shall be in civilian dress, with a frock coat and a bowler hat, and with a red carnation in my buttonhole and a copy of Le Figaro under my arm. As I seal the envelope, I reflect how easily I am slipping into the clichés of the spying world. It alarms me. Already I trust no one. How long before I am raving like Sandherr about degenerates and foreigners? It is a déformation professionnelle: all spymasters must go mad in the end.
On Wednesday morning, suitably accoutred, I present myself outside the Louvre. From the lines of tourists suddenly emerges a keen-looking, fresh-faced man with a salt-and-pepper moustache, who I take to be Desvernine. We exchange nods. I realise he must have been watching me for several minutes.
“You’re not being followed, Colonel,” he says quietly, “at least not as far as I can tell. However, I suggest we take a walk into the museum, if that’s agreeable, where it will look more natural if I need to make notes.”
“Whatever you advise: this sort of thing is not my line.”
“Quite right too, Colonel—leave it to the likes of me.”
He has a sportsman’s open shoulders and rolling walk. I follow him towards the nearest pavilion. It is early in the day, and therefore not yet crowded. In the vestibule there is a cloakroom by the entrance, stairs straight ahead, and galleries to our left and right. When Desvernine turns right, I make a protest: “Do we have to go in there? That’s the most awful rubbish.”
“Really? It all looks the same to me.”
“You handle the police work, Desvernine; leave the culture to me. We’ll go in here.”
I buy a guidebook and in the Galerie Denon, which has the smell of a schoolroom, we stand together and contemplate a bronze of Commodus as Hercules—a Renaissance copy from the Vatican. The gallery is almost deserted.
I say, “This must remain between the two of us, understood? If your superiors try to discover what you’re doing, refer them to me.”
“I understand.” Desvernine takes out his notebook and pencil.
“I want you to find out everything you can about an army major by the name of Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.” My voice echoes even when I whisper. “He sometimes calls himself Count Esterhazy. He’s forty-eight years old, serving with the Seventy-fourth Infantry Regiment in Rouen. He’s married to the daughter of the marquis de Nettancourt. He gambles, plays the stock market, generally leads a dissolute life—you’ll know where to look for such a character better than I.”
Desvernine flushes slightly. “When do you need this done?”
“As quickly as possible. Would it be possible to have a preliminary report next week?”
“I’ll try.”
“One other thing: I’m interested in how often Esterhazy goes to the German Embassy.”
If Desvernine finds this last request surprising, he is too professional to show it. We must make an odd couple: I in my bowler and frock coat, apparently reading the guidebook and holding forth; he in a shabby brown suit, taking down my dictation. But nobody is looking at us. We move along to the next exhibit. The guidebook lists it as Boy Extracting a Thorn from His Foot.
Desvernine says, “We should meet somewhere different next time, just as a precaution.”
“What about the restaurant at the gare Saint-Lazare?” I suggest, remembering my trip to Rouen. “That’s on your patch.”
“I know it well.”
“Next Thursday, at seven in the evening?”
“Agreed.” He writes it down then puts away his notebook and stares at the bronze sculpture. He scratches his head. “You really think this stuff is good, Colonel?”
“No, I didn’t say that. As so often in life, it’s just better than the alternative.”
Not all my time is devoted to investigating Esterhazy. I have other things to worry about—not least, the treasonable activity of homing pigeons.
Gribelin brings me the file. It has been sent over from the rue Saint-Dominique, and as he hands it to me I detect at last a faint gleam of malicious pleasure in those dull eyes. It seems that pigeon-fanciers in England are in the habit of transporting their birds to Cherbourg and releasing them to fly back across the Channel. Some nine thousand are set loose each year: a harmless if unappealing pastime which Colonel Sandherr, in the final phase of his illness, decided might pose a threat to national security and should be banned, for what if the birds were used to carry secret messages? This piece of madness has been grinding its way through the Ministry of the Interior for the best part of a year, and a law has been prepared. Now General Boisdeffre insists that I, as chief of the Statistical Section, must prepare the Ministry of War’s opinion on the draft legislation.
Needless to say, I have no opinion. After Gribelin has gone I sit at my desk, reviewing the file. It might as well be written in Sanskrit for all the sense I can make of it, and it occurs to me that what I need is a lawyer. It further occurs to me that the best lawyer I know is my oldest friend, Louis Leblois, who by a curious coincidence lives along the rue de l’Université. I send him a bleu asking if he could call round to see me on his way home to discuss a matter of business, and at the end of the afternoon I hear the electric bell ring to signal that someone has entered. I am halfway down the staircase when I meet Bachir coming up, carrying Louis’s card.
“It’s all right, Bachir. He’s known to me. He can come to my office.”
Two minutes later, I am standing at my window with Louis, showing him the minister’s garden.
“Georges,” he says, “this is a most remarkable building. I’ve often passed it and wondered who it belonged to. You do appreciate what it used to be, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Before the revolution it was the hôtel d’Aiguillon, where the old duchess, Anne-Charlotte de Crussol Florensac, used to have her literary salon. Montesquieu and Voltaire probably sat in this very room!” He wafts his hand back and forth in front of his nose. “Are their corpses in the cellar, by any chance? What on earth do you do here all day?”
“I can’t tell you that, although it might have amused Voltaire. However, I can put some work your way, if you’re interested.” I thrust the carrier pigeon file into his hands. “Tell me if you can make head or tail of this.”
“You want me to look at it now?”
“If you wouldn’t mind: it can’t leave the building, I’m afraid.”
“Why? Is it secret?”
“No, otherwise I wouldn’t be showing it to you. But I have to keep it here.” Louis hesitates. “I’ll pay you,” I add, “whatever it is you would normally charge.”
“Well, if I’m actually going to extract some money from you for once in my life,” he laughs, “then naturally I’ll do it,” and he sits at my table, opens his briefcase, takes out a sheaf of paper and starts reading the file while I return to my desk. “Neat” is the word for Louis: a dapper figure, exactly my age, with neatly trimmed beard and neat little hands that move rapidly across the page as he sets down his neatly ordered thoughts. I watch him fondly. He works with utter absorption, exactly as he did when we were classmates together at the lycée in Strasbourg. We had both lost a parent at the age of eleven, I my father and he his mother, and that made us a club of two, even though what bound us was never spoken of, then or now.
I take out my own pen and begin composing a report. For an hour we work in companionable silence until there is a knock at my door. I shout, “Come!” and Henry enters, carrying a folder. His expression on seeing Louis could not have been more startled if he had caught me naked with one of the street girls of Rouen.
“Major Henry,” I say, “this is a good friend of mine, Maître Louis Leblois.” Louis, deep in concentration, merely raises his left hand and continues writing, while Henry looks from me to him and back again. “Maître Leblois,” I explain, “is writing us a legal opinion on this absurd carrier pigeon business.”
For a few moments Henry seems too choked with emotion to speak. “May I have a word outside a moment, Colonel?” he asks eventually, and when I join him in the corridor, he says coldly: “Colonel, I must protest. It is not our practice to allow outsiders access to our offices.”
“Guénée comes in all the time.”
“Monsieur Guénée is an officer of the police!”
“Well, Maître Leblois is an officer of the courts.” My tone is more amused than angry. “I have known him for thirty years. I can vouch for his integrity absolutely. Besides, he is only looking at a file on carrier pigeons. They are hardly classified.”
“But there are other files in your office which are highly secret.”
“Yes, and they are locked up out of sight.”
“Even so, I wish to register my strong objection—”
“Oh really, Major Henry,” I interrupt him, “don’t be so pompous, please! I am the chief of this section and I shall see whoever I like!”
I turn on my heel and return to my office, closing the door behind me. Louis, who must have heard every word, says, “Am I causing you a problem?”
“Not at all. But these people—honestly!” I drop into my chair and sigh and shake my head.
“Well, this is finished in any case.” Louis stands and gives me the file. On top of it are several pages of notes in his meticulous hand. “It’s very straightforward. Here are the points you need to make.” He looks down at me with concern. “Your glittering career is all very well, Georges, but you know, none of us ever sees you anymore. One needs to keep one’s friendships in good repair. Come home with me now and have some supper.”
“Thank you, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
I want to say: “Because I can’t begin to tell you what’s on my mind, or what I do all day, and when there’s no longer a possibility of unguarded intimacy, social life becomes a fraud and a strain.” Instead I merely remark blandly, “I fear I am poor company these days.”
“We’ll be the judge of that. Come. Please.”
He’s so good and honest that I have no option except to surrender. “Well, I would like that very much,” I say, “but only if you’re sure Martha won’t mind.”
“My dear Georges, she will be absolutely delighted!”
Their apartment could scarcely be closer, literally just across the boulevard Saint-Germain, and Martha does indeed seem pleased to see me, throwing her arms around me the moment I enter their apartment. She is twenty-seven, fourteen years our junior. I was the best man at their wedding. She goes everywhere with Louis, I presume because they have no children. But if that is a source of sadness, they do not let it show; neither do they demand to know when I am going to get married, which is also a great relief. I pass three happy hours in their company, talking about the past and politics—Louis is deputy mayor of the local arrondissement, the seventh, and takes a radical view on most issues—and the evening ends with my playing their piano while they sing. As he shows me out, Louis says, “We should do this every week. It might just keep you sane. And remember, whenever you’re working late, you know you can always come back here to sleep.”
“You’re a generous friend, dear Lou. You always have been.” I kiss him on the cheeks and lurch off into the night, humming the tune I have just been playing, slightly the worse for drink but much the better for company.
The following Thursday evening, at seven precisely, I sit in a corner of the cavernous yellow gloom of the platform café of the gare Saint-Lazare, sipping an Alsace beer. The place is packed; the double-hinged door swings back and forth with a squeak of springs. The roar of chat and movement inside and the whistles and shouts and percussive bursts of steam from the locomotives outside make it a perfect place not to be overheard. I have managed to save a table with two seats that gives me a clear view of the entrance. Once again, however, Desvernine surprises me by appearing at my back. He is carrying a bottle of mineral water, refuses my offer of a beer, and is pulling out his little black notebook even as he sinks into his place on the crimson banquette.
“He’s quite a character, your Major Esterhazy, Colonel. Big debts all over Rouen and Paris: I have a list here for you.”
“What does he spend the money on?”
“Mostly gambling. There’s a place he goes to in the boulevard Poissonnière. It’s a sickness that’s hard to cure, as I know to my cost.” He passes the list across the table. “He also has a mistress, a Mademoiselle Marguerite Pays, aged twenty-six, a registered prostitute in the Pigalle district, who goes by the name of ‘Four-Fingered Marguerite.’ ”
I can’t help laughing. “You’re not serious?”
Desvernine, the earnest former noncommissioned officer turned policeman, does not see the humour. “She’s from the Rouen area originally, daughter of a Calvados distiller, started work in a spinning factory when she was a kid, lost a finger in an accident and her job with it, moved to Paris, became an horizontale in the rue Victor-Masse, met Esterhazy last year either on the Paris–Rouen train or at the Moulin Rouge—there are different versions depending on which of the girls you speak to.”
“So this affair is common knowledge?”
“Absolutely. He’s even set her up in an apartment: 49, rue de Douai, near Montmartre. Visits her every evening when he’s in town. She’s furnished it, but the lease is in his name. The girls at the Moulin Rouge call him ‘the Benefactor.’ ”
“That kind of life can’t come cheap.”
“He’s working every racket he can think of to keep it going. He’s even trying to join the board of a British company in London—which is a rum thing for a French officer to do, when you think about it.”
“And where is his wife during all this?”
“Either on her estate at Dommartin-la-Planchette in the Ardennes or at the apartment in Paris. He goes back to her after he’s finished with Marguerite.”
“He seems to be a man to whom betrayal is second nature.”
“I’d say so.”
“What about the Germans? Any links there?”
“I haven’t got anywhere on that yet.”
“I wonder—perhaps we could follow him?”
“We could,” says Desvernine doubtfully, “but he’s a wary bird from what I’ve seen. He’d soon get wise to us.”
“In that case, we can’t risk it. The last thing I need is to have a well-connected major complaining to the ministry that he’s being harassed.”
“Our best bet would be to put a watch on the German Embassy, see if we can catch him there.”
“I’d never get authorisation for that.”
“Why not?”
“It would be too obvious. The ambassador would complain.”
“Actually, I think I know a way we can do it without them discovering.” He produces his pocket book and passes me a tiny square of carefully snipped-out newsprint. It is an advertisement for an apartment to rent in the rue de Lille, the same street as the hôtel de Beauharnais, which houses the German Embassy. “It’s on the first floor, almost directly opposite the Germans. We could set up an observation post, and monitor everyone entering and leaving.” He looks at me, proud of his initiative, willing me to approve. “And here’s the best part: the apartment underneath is already being rented by the embassy. They use it as a kind of officers’ club.”
The idea attracts me at once. I admire the audacity of it, but not only that: it would be an operation independent of Henry.
“We’d need a tenant with a plausible cover story,” I say, thinking it over, “to avoid arousing suspicion—someone who might have reason to be inside all day.”
“I wondered about a night-shift worker,” suggests Desvernine. “He could arrive home every morning at seven, and not leave for work until six in the evening.”
“How much is the rent on this apartment?”
“Two hundred a month.”
I shake my head. “No night-shift worker could afford such an amount. It’s a fashionable street. A more likely tenant, surely, would be some wealthy young layabout with a private income—out all hours of the night and sleeping it off inside during the day.”
“I’m not sure I move in those circles, Colonel.”
“No. But I do.”
I send a bleu to a young man of my acquaintance and arrange to meet him late on Sunday afternoon in a café on the Champs-Élysées. I watch him eat hungrily, as if he hasn’t seen food for a day or two, and afterwards we go for a stroll in the Tuileries Garden.
Germain Ducasse is a sensitive, cultured, gentle soul in his thirties, with dark curly hair and soft brown eyes, popular with elderly bachelors and with married ladies who need a knowledgeable escort to the opera of whom their husbands will have no cause for jealousy. I have known him for more than a decade, ever since he completed his military service under my command in the 126th Line Regiment at Pamiers, in Ariège. I encouraged him to study modern languages at the Sorbonne, and from time to time I take him along to soirées at the de Commingeses’. Nowadays he scratches a shabby-genteel living as a translator and secretary, and when I mention that I may be able to put some work his way, his gratitude is almost painful.
“I say, Georges, that’s awfully handsome of you. Look at this.” He holds my arm and lifts his foot to show me a hole in his shoe. “You see? It’s shaming, isn’t it?” His hand stays on my arm.
“That must be a bore for you.” Gently, I disengage his grip. “I should say right away that the job I have in mind is unorthodox and boring. It’s also full-time, and I shall need your assurance before I go any further that you won’t mention it to anyone.”
“How mysterious! Naturally you have my word. What is it?”
I don’t answer until I have found a bench for us to sit on, away from the Sunday afternoon crowds.
“I want you to go tomorrow morning and rent this apartment.” I give him the newspaper advertisement. “You’ll offer the agents three months’ money in advance. If they ask for references, use the de Commingeses—I’ll clear it with Aimery. Say you want the place immediately: that afternoon if possible. The day after you move in, a man will come to visit you. He’ll introduce himself as Robert Houdin. He works for me and he’ll tell you what you have to do. Basically it involves watching the building opposite all day. The evenings will be your own.”
Ducasse studies the advertisement. “I must say, this sounds very thrilling. Am I becoming a spy?”
“Here is six hundred francs for the deposit on the apartment,” I continue, counting out the banknotes I have withdrawn from the special fund in my safe the previous evening, “and here is another four hundred for you. That’s two weeks’ pay in advance. Yes, you are becoming a spy, but you are never to mention it to a living soul. From now on, we mustn’t be seen together. And for heaven’s sake, my dear Germain, before you go to the property agency, buy yourself some decent shoes: you’re supposed to look like a man who can afford to live in the rue de Lille.”
I open an active case file. I decide to call it Operation Benefactor, “Benefactor” being our code name for Esterhazy, borrowed from the girls of Pigalle. Ducasse rents the apartment without difficulty and moves in with a few personal belongings; the following afternoon Desvernine, posing as Houdin, visits him to explain the nature of his work. A delivery van unloads sealed packing cases containing optical and photographic equipment and the chemicals required for a darkroom; the men in leather aprons who carry them upstairs are from the technical department of the Sûreté. A few days later, I arrange to make an inspection for myself.
It is a late afternoon on a balmy day in April, the trees in blossom, the birds singing in the minister’s garden: it seems to me that Nature mocks my occupation. I am in civilian dress with the brim of my hat tilted slightly downwards to obscure the upper part of my face. The German Embassy is barely two hundred metres from our front door—all I have to do is turn left out of our office, turn right and immediately I am walking down the narrow rue de Lille: I can see the hôtel de Beauharnais directly ahead on the left, at number 78. A high wall separates it from the road but the big wooden doors are wide open, giving access to a paved courtyard with a couple of parked motorcars. On the far side of the courtyard is an imposing five-storey mansion with a pillared portico. Red-carpeted steps lead up to the entrance; the German Imperial Eagle droops from the flagstaff.
The apartment we have taken is opposite, in number 101. I let myself in and walk towards the stairs. I can hear guttural male German voices from behind the closed door of the ground-floor flat; one says something in a tone of rising hilarity and abruptly they all burst out laughing together. The masculine roar pursues me up the stairs to the first floor. I knock four times; Ducasse opens the door a crack, sees it is me and opens it wider so I can enter.
Inside the apartment the air is stuffy. The windows are all shuttered, the electric lights are lit. The sound of the Germans below is still audible, but more muffled. Ducasse, who is in his stockinged feet, puts his finger to his lips and beckons me through to the drawing room. The carpet has been rolled up against the wall. Desvernine lies flat on his stomach on the bare floorboards, shoeless, with his head in the fireplace. I start to say something but he holds up a warning hand for silence. Suddenly he withdraws his head and scrambles to his feet.
“I think they’re finished,” he whispers. “It’s damnably frustrating, Colonel! They’re sitting right by the hearth and I can almost make out what they’re saying, but not quite. Would you mind taking off your shoes?”
I sit on the edge of a chair to tug off my boots and glance around, admiring the thoroughness with which he has set up this hide. There are three sets of closed shutters with spyholes bored through them looking across the street to the embassy. One is occupied by the latest model of camera, a modified Kodak bought in London for eighteen pounds sterling, with a film-roll canister and a set of variable lenses, mounted on a tripod; another aperture has a telescope pushed up against it; beside the third stands the desk at which Ducasse logs the times of visitors entering and leaving the embassy. Pinned to the walls are studio photographs of various characters of interest to us, including Esterhazy, von Schwartzkoppen, Count Münster, the elderly German ambassador, and the Italian military attaché, Major Panizzardi.
Desvernine, looking out through the third spyhole, signals to me to join him at the window, then stands aside to let me see. Four men, elegantly dressed in frock coats, are crossing the street below. They have their backs to us, walking away. They pause at the embassy gates and two of them shake hands with a third before strolling on into the courtyard: German diplomats, presumably. The two who are left on the pavement watch them go, then turn away to continue their conversation.
Ducasse, who is focusing the telescope, says, “That’s Schwartzkoppen on the left, Georges; the one on the right is the Italian, Panizzardi.”
“Use the telescope, Colonel,” suggests Desvernine.
Viewed through the lens, the two men loom shockingly close—I might almost be standing with them. Schwartzkoppen is slim, fine-featured, attractively animated, beautifully tailored: a dandy. He throws back his head as he laughs, showing beneath his wide moustache a row of perfect white teeth. Panizzardi has his hand on his shoulder and seems to be telling him a funny story. The Italian is handsome in a different way—rounder-faced, with curly dark hair swept back off a wide forehead—but there is the same lively amusement in his features. Another gust of laughter seizes them. Panizzardi’s hand is still on the German’s shoulder. They are staring straight into each other’s eyes, oblivious to the world.
“My God,” I exclaim, “they’re in love!”
Ducasse simpers, “You should have heard them the other afternoon, in the bedroom downstairs.”
“Filthy buggers!” mutters Desvernine.
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.”