Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

The moment she has gone, I stand and walk to the place where I left the money. Henry impressed on me not to waste any time. Tucked beneath the chair is a cone-shaped paper sack. It rustles alarmingly as I tug it out and stuff it into my briefcase. I leave the basilica in a hurry, through the doors and down the steps, striding along the dark and empty streets that surround the ministry. Ten minutes after collecting the sack, euphoric with success, I am tipping the contents over the desk in my office.

There is more than I expected: a cornucopia of trash — paper torn and crumpled and dusted with cigarette ash, paper white and grey, cream and blue, tissue and card, tiny pieces and large fragments, handwritten in pencil and ink, typewritten and printed, words in French and German and Italian, train tickets and theatre stubs, envelopes, invitations, restaurant bills and receipts from tailors and taxi cabs and bootmakers. . I run my hands through it all, scoop it up and let it trickle through my fingers — mostly it will be rubbish, I know, but somewhere within it there may be gold. I experience a prospector’s thrill.

I am beginning to enjoy this job.

I write to Pauline twice, but guardedly, in case Philippe opens her letters. She does not reply and I don’t try to seek her out to discover if anything is wrong, principally because I don’t have the time. I have to devote my Saturday nights and Sundays to my mother, whose memory is worsening, and most evenings I am required to stay at the office late. There are so many things to keep an eye on. The Germans are laying telephone cables along the eastern frontier. There is a suspected spy at our embassy in Moscow. An English agent is said to be offering to sell a copy of our mobilisation plans to the highest bidder. . I have to write my regular blancs . I am fully absorbed.

I still go to the de Comminges salons, but ‘your sweet Madame Monnier’, as Blanche likes to call her, is never there, even though Blanche insists she always makes a point of inviting her. After one concert I take Blanche out to dinner, to the Tour d’Argent, where we are given a table overlooking the river. Why do I choose this particular restaurant? For one thing it’s a convenient walk from the de Comminges house. But I am also curious to see where Colonel von Schwartzkoppen entertains his mistress. I look around the dining room; it is almost entirely filled with couples. The candlelit booths are made for intimacy — je suis à toi, toujours à toi, toute à toi. . The latest police agent’s report describes Hermance as ‘early thirties, blonde, petite, in cream-coloured skirt and jacket trimmed in black’. ‘At times their hands were not visible above the table.’

Blanche says, ‘What are you smiling at?’

‘I know a colonel who brings his mistress here. They take a room upstairs.’

She stares at me, and in that instant the thing is settled. I have a word with the maître d’hôtel, who says, ‘My dear Colonel, of course there is a room available,’ and after we have eaten our dinner we are shown upstairs by an unsmiling young man who takes a large tip without acknowledgement.

Later, Blanche asks, ‘Is it better to make love before dinner or after it, do you think?’

‘There’s a case for either. I think probably before.’ I kiss her and get out of bed.

‘I agree. Let’s do it before next time.’

She is twenty-five. Whereas Pauline at forty undresses in the darkness and drapes herself languorously with a sheet or a towel, Blanche stretches naked on her back under the electric light, smoking a cigarette, her left knee raised, her right foot resting on it, examining her wriggling toes. She flings out her arm and flicks ash in the vague direction of the ashtray.

‘Surely,’ she says, ‘the correct answer is both.’

‘It can’t be both, my darling,’ I correct her, ever the tutor, ‘because that would be illogical.’ I am standing at the window with the curtain wrapped around me like a toga, looking across the embankment to the Île Saint-Louis. A boat glides past, ploughing a glossy furrow in the black river, its deck lit up as if for a party but deserted. I am trying to concentrate on this moment, to file it away in my memory, so that if anyone ever asks me, ‘When were you content?’ I can answer, ‘There was an evening with a girl at the Tour d’Argent. .’

‘Is it true,’ asks Blanche suddenly from the bed behind me, ‘that Armand du Paty had some kind of hand in the Dreyfus business?’

The moment freezes, vanishes. I don’t need to turn round. I can see her reflection in the window. Her right foot is still describing its ceaseless circle. ‘Where did you hear that?’

‘Oh, just something Aimery said tonight.’ She rolls over quickly and stabs out her cigarette. ‘In which case, it means of course that the poor Jew is bound to turn out to be innocent.’

This is the first time anyone has suggested to me that Dreyfus might not be guilty. Her flippancy shocks me. ‘It’s not a subject to joke about, Blanche.’

‘Darling, I’m not! I’m absolutely serious!’ She thumps the pillow into shape and lies back with her hands clasped behind her head. ‘I thought it was odd at the time, the way he had his insignia torn off publicly and was marooned on a desert island — all a little too much, no? I should have guessed Armand du Paty was behind it! He may dress like an army officer, but beneath that tunic beats the heart of a romantic lady novelist.’

I laugh. ‘Well, I must bow to your superior knowledge of what goes on beneath his tunic, my dear. But I happen to know more than you about the Dreyfus case, and believe me, there were many other officers involved in that inquiry apart from your former lover!’

She pouts at me in the glass; she doesn’t like being reminded of the lapse of taste that was her affair with du Paty. ‘Georges, you look exactly like Jove standing there. Be a Good God and come back to bed. .’

The exchange with Blanche unsettles me very slightly. The tiniest speck of — no, I shall not call it doubt , exactly — let us say curiosity lodges in my mind, and not so much about Dreyfus’s guilt as his punishment. Why, I ask myself, do we persist in this absurd and expensive rigmarole of imprisonment, which requires four or five guards to be stranded with him in silence on his tiny island? What is our policy? How many hours of bureaucratic time — including mine — are to be tied up in the endless administration, surveillance and censorship his punishment entails?

I keep these thoughts to myself as the weeks and months pass. I continue to receive reports from Guénée on the monitoring of Lucie and Mathieu Dreyfus; it yields nothing. I read their letters to the prisoner ( My good dear husband, What endless hours, what painful days we have experienced since this disaster struck its stunning blow. . ) and his replies, which are mostly not delivered ( Nothing is so depressing, nothing so exhausts the energy of heart and mind as these long agonising silences, never hearing human speech, seeing no friendly face, nor even one that shows sympathy. . ). I am also copied into the regular dispatches from the Colonial Ministry’s officials in Cayenne, monitoring the convict’s health and morale: The prisoner was asked how he was. ‘I am well for the moment,’ he replied. ‘It is my heart that is sick. Nothing. .’ and here he broke down and wept for a quarter of an hour. (2 July 1895)

The prisoner said: ‘Colonel du Paty de Clam promised me, before I left France, to make enquiries into the matter; I should not have thought that they could take so long. I hope that they will soon come to a head.’ (15 August 1895)

On receiving no letter from his family, the prisoner wept and said, ‘For ten months now I have been suffering horrors.’ (31 August 1895)