Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

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 any more. 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”.’