Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

‘Well,’ he says, raising his glass, ‘what shall we drink to?’

‘How about something we both love? The army.’

‘Very well,’ he agrees. We touch glasses: ‘The army!’

He downs his tumbler in one, tops up mine then refills his own. He sips it, staring at me over the rim. His small eyes are a muddy colour, and opaque: I can’t read them. ‘So — things seem to be in a bit of a mess back at the office, Colonel, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘I’ll have that cigarette after all, if I may.’ He pushes his cigarette case across the table towards me. ‘And whose fault is that, do you think?’

‘I point no fingers. I’m just saying, that’s all.’

I light my cigarette and toy with my glass, moving it around the table as if it is a chess piece. I feel a curious desire to unburden myself. ‘Man to man, I never wanted to be chief of the section, did you know that? I had a horror of spies. I only achieved the position by accident. If I hadn’t known Dreyfus, I wouldn’t have been involved in his arrest, and then I wouldn’t have attended the court martial and the degradation. Unfortunately, I think our masters have got the entirely wrong idea about me.’

‘And what would the right idea be?’

Henry’s cigarettes are very strong, Turkish. The back of my nose feels as if it’s on fire. ‘I’ve been having another look at Dreyfus.’

‘Yes, Gribelin told me you’d taken the file. You seem to have stirred things up.’

‘General Boisdeffre was convinced the dossier no longer existed. He said that General Mercier ordered Colonel Sandherr to get rid of it.’

‘I didn’t know that. The colonel just told me to keep it nice and safe.’

‘Why did Sandherr disobey, do you think?’

‘You’d have to ask him that.’

‘Perhaps I shall.’

‘You can ask him all you want, my Colonel, but you won’t get much of an answer.’ Henry taps the side of his head. ‘He’s under lock and key in Montauban. I went all the way down to visit him. It was pitiful.’ He looks mournful. He suddenly raises his glass. ‘To Colonel Sandherr: one of the best!’

‘To Sandherr,’ I respond, and pretend to drink his health. ‘But why did he retain the file, do you think?’

‘I suppose because he thought it might be useful — it was the file that convicted Dreyfus after all.’

‘Except you and I both know that Dreyfus is innocent.’

Henry’s eyes open wide in warning and alarm. ‘I wouldn’t talk like that too loudly, Colonel, especially not in here. Some of the fellows wouldn’t like it.’

I look around. The bar is beginning to fill. I lean in closer and lower my voice. I’m not sure whether I’m seeking a confession or offering one, only that some kind of absolution is required. ‘It wasn’t Dreyfus who wrote the bordereau ,’ I say quietly. ‘It was Esterhazy. Even Bertillon says his writing is a perfect match. That’s the central part of the case against Dreyfus demolished right there! As for your secret file of evidence-’

A gust of laughter from the neighbouring table interrupts me. I glance at them in irritation.

Henry says, very seriously now, studying me intently, ‘What were you going to say about the secret file?’

‘With the best will in the world, my dear Henry, the only thing in it that points to Dreyfus is the fact that the Germans and the Italians were receiving plans of fortifications from someone with the initial “D”. I’m not blaming you, incidentally: once Dreyfus was in custody, your job was to make the most convincing case you could. But now that we have the facts about Esterhazy, it changes everything. Now we know that the wrong man was condemned. So you tell me: what are we supposed to do in the light of that? Simply ignore it?’

I sit back. After a long silence, during which he continues to scan my face, Henry says, ‘Are you asking me for my advice?’

I shrug. ‘By all means, if you have any.’

‘You’ve mentioned this to Gonse?’

‘I have.’

‘And Boisdeffre, and Billot?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what do they say?’

‘They say drop it.’

‘Then for God’s sake, Colonel,’ he hisses, ‘drop it!’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m just not made that way. It’s not what I joined the army to do.’

‘Then you’ve chosen the wrong profession.’ Henry shakes his head in disbelief. ‘You have to give them what they want, Colonel — they’re the chiefs.’

‘Even though Dreyfus is innocent?’

‘There you go, saying it again!’ He looks around. Now it’s his turn to lean over the table and talk quietly. ‘Listen, I don’t know whether he’s innocent or guilty, Colonel, and quite frankly I don’t give a shit, if you’ll excuse me, either way, and neither should you. I did as I was told. You order me to shoot a man and I’ll shoot him. You tell me afterwards you got the name wrong and I should have shot someone else — well, I’m very sorry about that, but it’s not my fault.’ He pours us both another cognac. ‘You want my advice? Well here’s a story. When my regiment was in Hanoi, there was a lot of thieving in the barracks. So one day my major and I, we laid a trap and we caught the thief red-handed. It turned out he was the son of the colonel — God knows why he needed to steal from the likes of us, but he did it. Now my major — he was a bit like you, a little bit of the idealistic type, shall we say — he wanted this man prosecuted. The top brass disagreed. Still, he went ahead and brought the case anyway. But at the court martial it was my major that was broken. The thief went free. A true story.’ Henry raises his glass to me. ‘That’s the army we love.’

The following morning when I go into the office, the Dreyfus file is on my desk — not the secret dossier but the Colonial Office record, which continues to be sent over regularly for my comments.

There have been two security scares about Dreyfus in recent weeks. First there was the English newspaper report that the prisoner had escaped. Then there was a letter addressed to him posted in the rue Cambon and signed with a name that looked like ‘Weiler’ that contained a message supposedly written in invisible ink: Impossible to decipher last communication. Return to the former procedure in your answer. Indicate precisely where the documents are and how the cupboard can be unlocked. Actor ready to move immediately. Dreyfus’s guards were ordered to observe him closely after he was handed this letter. He merely frowned and put it aside. Manifestly he had never heard of ‘Weiler’. Both we and the Sûreté were in agreement that this was just a malicious hoax.

Yet as I turn the pages of the file I see that the episodes have been used by the Colonial Ministry as a pretext to make Dreyfus’s confinement much harsher. For the past three weeks he has been clapped in irons every night. There is even an illustration of the contraption shipped over from the penal colony in Cayenne that is used to restrain him. Two U-shaped irons are fixed to his bed. His ankles are put into these at sundown. A bar is then inserted through the irons and padlocked. He is left in this position until dawn. In addition, a double perimeter fence of heavy timber is being erected around his hut to a height of two and a half metres. The inner fence is only half a metre from his window. Therefore his view of the sea is entirely cut off. And during the day he is no longer allowed access to the island beyond the second perimeter fence. The bare narrow space of rock and scrub between the two walls, in which there are no trees or shade, is now the entirety of his world.

As usual, the file contains an appendix of Dreyfus’s confiscated writings: