Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

The prisoner was taken with a sudden burst of sobbing, and said, ‘It cannot last long; my heart will end by breaking.’ The prisoner always weeps when he receives his letters. (2 September 1895)

The prisoner sat for long hours today not moving. In the evening he complained of violent heart spasms, with frequent paroxysms of suffocation. He requested a medicine chest in order to make an end of his life when he could stand it no longer. (13 December 1895)

Gradually over the winter I discern that we do in fact have a policy with regard to Dreyfus, it has simply never been explained to me in so many words, either verbally or on paper. We are waiting for him to die.

The first anniversary of Dreyfus’s degradation comes and goes on 5 January 1896 with little comment in the press. There are no letters or petitions, no demonstrations for him or against. He seems to have been forgotten on his rock. Come the spring, I have been in charge of the Statistical Section for eight months, and all is calm.

And then, one morning in March, Major Henry asks to see me in my office. His eyes are pink and swollen.

‘My dear Henry,’ I say, laying aside the file I have been reading. ‘Are you all right? What is the matter?’

He stands in front of my desk. ‘I’m afraid I need to ask for some urgent leave, Colonel. I have a family crisis.’

I tell him to close the door and take a seat. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘There isn’t anything that can be done, Colonel, I’m afraid.’ He blows his nose on a large white handkerchief. ‘My mother is dying.’

‘Well, I’m extremely grieved to hear that. Is anyone with her? Where does she live?’

‘In the Marne. A little village called Pogny.’

‘You must go to her at once, and take as much leave as you need. Get Lauth or Junck to cover for your work. That’s an order. Each of us only has one mother, you know.’

‘You’re very kind, Colonel.’ He stands and salutes. We shake hands warmly; I ask him to pay my respects to his mother. After he has gone, I wonder briefly what she must be like, this pig farmer’s wife on the flatlands of the Marne, with her noisy soldier-son. It can’t have been an easy life, I imagine.

I don’t see my deputy again for about a week. But then late one afternoon there is a knock at my door and Henry enters carrying one of the bulging brown paper cones that signifies a delivery from Agent Auguste. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Colonel. I’m in a rush between trains. I just wanted to drop this off.’

I can feel at once from the weight of it that there is more than usual. Henry notices my surprise. ‘I’m afraid because of Mother I missed the last meeting,’ he confesses, ‘so I arranged for Auguste to make the drop today, during daylight hours for a change. That’s where I’ve just come from. I’ve got to get back to the Marne.’

It is on the tip of my tongue to issue a reprimand. I ordered him to hand his duties over to Lauth or Junck: surely someone else could have made the pickup, and done it in the darkness as usual, when there would have been less risk of our agent being seen? Besides, isn’t it a golden rule of intelligence — as he has often impressed upon me — that the faster information is processed, the more useful it is likely to prove? But Henry looks so haggard, having barely slept for a week, that I make no comment. I simply wish him bon voyage and lock the cone away in my safe, where it remains overnight until Captain Lauth comes in the next morning.

My relations with Lauth have not moved on from the first day we met: professional but cool. He is only a couple of years younger than I, clever enough, a German-speaker from Alsace: we ought to get on better than we do. But there is something Prussian about his blond good looks and stiffly upright figure that stops me warming to him. However, he is an efficient officer, and the speed with which he reconstructs these torn-up documents is phenomenal, so when I take the cone to his office I am polite as usual: ‘Would you mind attending to this now?’

‘Of course, Colonel.’

He dons his apron, and while he fetches his box of equipment from his cupboard, I empty the paper sack over his desk. Immediately my eye is caught by a sprinkling among the white and grey of several dozen pale blue fragments, like patches of sky on a cloudy day. I poke a couple with my forefinger. They are slightly thicker than normal paper. Lauth picks one up with his tweezers and examines it, turning it back and forth in the beam of his powerful electric lamp.

‘A petit bleu ,’ he murmurs, using the slang expression for a pneumatic telegram card. He looks at me and frowns. ‘The pieces are torn up smaller than usual.’

‘See what you can do.’

It must be four or five hours later that Lauth comes to my office. He is carrying a thin manila folder. He winces with distress as he offers it to me. His whole manner is anxious, uneasy. ‘I think you ought to look at this,’ he says.

I open it. Inside lies the petit bleu . He has done a craftsman’s job of sticking it back together. The texture reminds me of something that might have been reconstructed by an archaeologist: a fragment of broken glassware, perhaps, or a blue marble tile. It is jagged on the right-hand side, where some of the pieces are missing, and the lines of the tears give it a veined appearance. But the message in French is clear enough:

Monsieur,

Above all, I await a more detailed explanation than the one you gave me the other day of the matter in hand. I ask that you supply it to me in writing so that I may decide whether or not to continue my association with the house of R.

C

Puzzled, I glance up at Lauth. His manner when he came in suggested something sensational; this doesn’t seem to warrant his agitation. ‘“C” being Schwartzkoppen?’

He nods. ‘Yes. It’s his preferred code name. Now turn it over.’

On the reverse side is the web-work of tiny strips of transparent adhesive paper that holds the postcard together. But again the writing is perfectly legible. Beneath the printed word ‘TELEGRAMME’, and above the word ‘PARIS’, in the space left for the address, is written:

Major Esterhazy

27, rue de la Bienfaisance

I don’t recognise the name. Even so I feel as shocked as if I had just seen an old friend listed in a deaths column. I tell Lauth, ‘Go and talk to Gribelin. Ask him to check if there’s a Major Esterhazy in the French army.’ There’s just a chance, I think, a slim hope that given the surname he might be Austro-Hungarian.

‘I already have,’ says Lauth. ‘Major Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy is listed with the 74th Infantry.’

‘The Seven-Four?’ I’m still trying to take it in. ‘I have a friend in that regiment. They’re garrisoned in Rouen.’

‘Rouen? “The house of R”?’ Lauth stares at me, his pale blue eyes widening with alarm, for it all now points in only one direction, and his voice drops to a whisper. ‘Does this mean there’s another traitor?’

I don’t know how to answer him. I re-examine the seven lines of the message. After eight months of reading Schwartzkoppen’s notes and drafts I am familiar with his handwriting, and this regular and formal script is quite unlike it. In fact it’s too regular and formal to be anyone’s normal hand. This is the kind of lettering one sees on an official invitation; this writing has been disguised. And naturally so, I think: if one was an officer of a foreign power communicating with an agent through the open mail of a host country, one would take the minimal precaution of concealing one’s hand. The tone of the message is irritated, peremptory, urgent: it suggests a crisis in relations. The pneumatic tube network follows the Paris sewers and can deliver a telegram so quickly Esterhazy would have it in his hands within an hour or two. But still it’s a risk, which perhaps is why Schwartzkoppen, having laboriously copied out his communication — and wasted a pre-paid fifty-centimes telegram card on it — in the end decided not to send it, but shredded it into the tiniest pieces he could manage and dropped it into his waste-paper basket.