Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

‘It won’t take long.’

‘Nevertheless. .’

‘I’ll wait.’ I resume my place on the red leather banquette.

He looks at me dubiously. ‘Perhaps I’d better go and have another word with the minister.’

‘Perhaps you should.’

He clatters off up the marble staircase, and shortly afterwards calls down to me, his voice echoing off the stone walls. ‘Colonel Picquart!’

Billot is sitting behind his desk. ‘Picquart,’ he says, wearily raising his hand, ‘I’m afraid I’m very busy’ — although there is no sign of any activity in his office, and I suspect he has simply been staring out of the window.

‘Forgive me, Minister. I shan’t detain you. But in the light of the newspaper stories this week, I feel the need to press you now for a decision about the Esterhazy investigation.’

Billot peers at me warily from beneath his bushy white brows. ‘A decision about what aspect of it, exactly?’

I begin to describe the idea I have devised with Desvernine, of luring Esterhazy to a meeting by means of a message purporting to come from Schwartzkoppen, but he cuts me off very quickly. ‘No, no, I don’t like that at all — that’s far too crude. In fact, you know, I’m starting to think that the quickest way to deal with this swine is actually not to prosecute him at all but to pension him off. Either that, or send him somewhere a long way away — Indochina or Africa: I don’t know — preferably somewhere he can contract a very nasty local disease, or take a bullet in the back without too many questions being asked.’

I’m not sure how to respond to this suggestion, so I ignore it. ‘And what do we do about Dreyfus?’

‘He’ll just have to stay where he is. The law has pronounced and that’s an end of it.’

‘So you’ve reached a final decision?’

‘I have. I had the opportunity before the parade in Châteauneuf to discuss the matter privately with General Mercier. He motored over specially from Le Mans to talk about it.’

‘I bet he did!’

‘Be careful, Colonel. .!’ Billot points a warning finger at me. Up till now he has always encouraged me to tiptoe to the edge of insubordination: it has amused him to play the indulgent paterfamilias. Clearly, like access to his garden, that privilege has been withdrawn.

Still, I can’t stop myself. ‘This secret file — you do know that it proves nothing against Dreyfus? That it may even contain downright lies?’

Billot puts his hands over his ears. ‘There are things I shouldn’t hear, Colonel.’

He looks absurd, in the way that stubborn old men sometimes do: a sulky child in a nursery.

‘I can shout quite loudly,’ I warn him.

‘I mean it, Picquart! I mustn’t hear it!’ His voice is sharp. Only when he is satisfied that I won’t pollute his ears any further does he lower his hands. ‘Now don’t be such an arrogant young fool and listen to me.’ His voice is conciliatory, reasonable. ‘General Boisdeffre is about to welcome the Tsar to Paris in a diplomatic coup that will change the world. I have a six-hundred-million-franc budget estimate to negotiate with the Finance Committee. We simply can’t allow ourselves to be distracted from these great issues by the sordid matter of one Jew on a rock. It would tear the army to pieces. I would be hounded out of this office — and rightly so. You must keep the whole matter in proportion. Do you understand what I’m saying, Colonel?’

I nod.

He rises from behind his desk with surprising grace and comes round to stand in front of me. ‘Calmon-Maison tells me we’ve had to change the locks on the garden. It’s such a bore. I’ll make sure you get a new key. I do so greatly value your intelligence, dear boy.’ He offers me his hand. His grip is hard, dry, calloused. He clamps his other hand around mine, imprisoning it. ‘There’s nothing easy about power, Georges. One needs the stomach to take hard decisions. But I’ve seen all this before. Today the press is Dreyfus, Dreyfus, Dreyfus; tomorrow, without some new disclosure, they’ll have forgotten all about him, you’ll see.’

Billot’s prediction about Dreyfus and the press proves correct. As abruptly as they took him up again, the newspapers lose all interest in the prisoner on Devil’s Island. He is replaced on the front pages by stories about the Russian state visit, in particular by speculation about what the Tsarina will be wearing. But I do not forget him.

Although I have to tell Desvernine we will not be requiring the services of Monsieur Lemercier-Picard, and that our request to lay a trap has been refused, I continue to pursue my investigation of Esterhazy as best I can. I interview a retired non-commissioned officer, Mulot, who remembers copying out portions of an artillery manual for the major; I also meet Esterhazy’s tutor at gunnery school, Captain le Rond, who calls his former pupil a blackguard: ‘If I met him in the street I would refuse to shake his hand.’ All this goes into the Benefactor file, and occasionally at the end of the day as I leaf through the evidence we have so far collected — the petit bleu , the surveillance photographs, the statements — I tell myself that I will see him in prison yet.

But I am not offered a new key to the garden of the hôtel de Brienne: if I want to see the minister, I have to make an appointment. And although he always receives me cordially, there is an unmistakable reserve about him. The same is true of Boisdeffre and Gonse. They no longer entirely trust me, and they are right.

One day towards the end of September, I climb the stairs to my office at the start of the morning and see Major Henry standing further along the corridor, deep in conversation with Lauth and Gribelin. His back is to me, but those broad and fleshy shoulders and that wide neck are as recognisable as his face. Lauth glances past him, notices me and darts him a warning look. Henry stops talking and turns round. All three officers salute.

‘Gentlemen,’ I say. ‘Major Henry, welcome back. How was your leave?’

He is different. He has caught the sun — like everyone else apart from me — but he has also changed his haircut to a short fringe so that he looks less like a sly farmer and more like a crafty monk. And there’s something else: a new energy in him, as if all the negative forces that have been swirling around our little unit — the suspicion and disaffection and anxiety — have coalesced in his capacious frame and charged him with a kind of electricity. He is their leader. My jeopardy is his opportunity. He is a danger to me. All this passes through my mind in the few seconds it takes him to salute, grin and say, ‘My leave was good, Colonel, thank you.’

‘I need to brief you on what’s been happening.’

‘Whenever you wish, Colonel.’

I am on the point of inviting him into my office, and then I change my mind. ‘I tell you what, why don’t we have a drink together at the end of the day?’

‘A drink?’

‘You look surprised.’

‘Only because we’ve never had a drink before.’

‘Well, that is a poor state of affairs, is it not? Let us rectify it. Shall we walk somewhere together? Let us say at five o’clock?’

Accordingly at five he knocks on my door, I pick up my cap and we go out into the street. He asks, ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘Wherever you like. I don’t frequent the bars round here very often.’

‘The Royale, then. It saves us from having to think.’

The Taverne Royale is the favourite bar of the General Staff. I haven’t been in it for years. The place is quiet at this hour: just a couple of captains drinking near the door, the barman reading a paper, a waiter wiping down the tables. On the walls are regimental photographs; on the bare wooden floor, sawdust; the colours are all brown and brass and sepia. Henry is very much at home. We take a table in the corner and he orders a cognac. For want of a better idea I do the same. ‘Leave us the bottle,’ Henry tells the waiter. He offers me a cigarette. I refuse. He lights one for himself and suddenly I realise that an odd part of me has actually missed the old devil, just as one occasionally grows fond of something familiar and even ugly. Henry is the army, in a way that I, or Lauth, or Boisdeffre will never be. When soldiers break ranks and want to run away on the battlefield, it is the Henrys of this world who can persuade them to come back and keep fighting.