Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

The passenger ferry for Marseille is scheduled to leave Tunis at noon the next day. A clerk at the steamship company’s office tells me (‘with profound regret, my Colonel’) that the list is already full; I have to bribe him twice — first to allot me a tiny two-berth cabin all to myself, and then to keep my name off the passenger manifest. I stay overnight in a pension near the docks and go aboard early, dressed in civilian clothes. Despite the sweltering African midsummer I can’t linger on deck and risk being recognised. I go below and lock my door, strip naked and lie on the lower bunk, dripping sweat. I am reminded of Dreyfus and his description of his warship anchoring off Devil’s Island: I had to wait nearly four days in this tropical heat, shut close in my cell, without once going upon deck. By the time the engines start, my own metal cell is as hot as a Turkish bath. The surfaces vibrate as we slip our moorings. Through the porthole I watch the coast of Africa recede. Only when we are out at sea and I can see nothing except the blue of the Mediterranean do I wrap a towel around my waist, summon the steward and ask him to bring me some food and drink.

I have packed a Russian-French dictionary, and a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground , which I set to work translating, propped up on my bunk bed, the two books balanced on my knees, my pencil and paper beside me. The work soaks up the time and even the heat. To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. .

At midnight, when the vessel seems quiet, I venture up the iron staircase and step cautiously out on to the deck. The momentum of the ship provides a warm northerly breeze of thirteen knots. I walk to the prow and raise my face to it, drinking it in. There is blackness ahead and to either side. The only light is above: a wash of stars and a moon that scuds in and out of cloud and seems to be racing us. A male passenger stands nearby, leaning over the rail, talking quietly to one of the crew. Behind me I hear footsteps and turn to see the glowing red tip of a cigar approaching. I move on quickly, down the other side of the ship to the stern, where I watch our wake for a while, flickering like a comet’s tail. But when I see the cigar again, disembodied in the dark, I go below and make my way along the passageway to my cabin, where I stay for the remainder of the voyage.

We dock in Marseille in the late afternoon of the following day in a summer downpour. It seems an ominous welcome home. I hurry straight to the gare Saint-Charles and buy a ticket on the first available train to Paris, conscious that this is my moment of maximum vulnerability. I must assume that Savignaud has reported my visit to Tunis, and also by now my subsequent failure to return to Sousse. Therefore it’s possible that Gonse and Henry will have worked out that I am on my way back to Paris. All they need to do is ask Leclerc. If I were Henry, I would have telegraphed the Prefécture of Police in Marseille and asked him to keep watch at the station, just in case.

I linger under the station clock with my head buried in a newspaper until just before seven, when I hear the whistle blow and the Paris train begins to move. I grab my suitcase, run through the ticket barrier, weave past the guard, who tries to stop me, and sprint along the platform. I wrench open the rearmost door of the train, feeling the strain on my arm socket as the locomotive gathers momentum. I throw in my suitcase, increase my pace and narrowly manage to scramble aboard and slam the door behind me. I lean out of the window and look back. There is a man fifty metres behind on the platform, a thickset, bare-headed fellow in a brown suit, who has just missed the train and is leaning forward with his hands on his knees, recovering his breath, being reproached by the guard. But whether he is an ordinary passenger who arrived too late or an agent of the Sûreté who was on my tail I have no way of knowing.

The carriages are crowded. I have to walk almost the entire length of the train to find a compartment where I can squeeze into a corner seat. My fellow passengers are businessmen, mostly, and a priest, and an army major who keeps glancing in my direction, even though I am not wearing my uniform, as if he recognises a fellow soldier. I don’t stow my suitcase overhead but keep it on my lap as a precaution should I fall asleep. And indeed, despite my nervous tension, as the day fades, lulled by the motion of the train, I do drop off, only to be jerked awake repeatedly throughout the night whenever we pull into a gas-lit station or someone enters or leaves the compartment. Eventually it is the early June daybreak that rouses me, the light falling drab and grey, like a film of ash spread over the southern outskirts of the city.

I move towards the very front of the train, so that at five in the morning, as we pull into the gare de Lyon, I am the first to disembark. I hurry across the deserted concourse, my eyes darting in all directions, but all I can see are a few ragged men, les ramasseux de mégots , gathering cigarette butts in order to sell the tobacco. I tell the taxi driver, ‘16, rue Cassette,’ and sink down low in my seat. A quarter of an hour later we are skirting the Jardin du Luxembourg and turning into the narrow street. As I pay the fare, I glance in either direction: no one is about.

On the second floor I knock on the apartment door: loudly enough to wake the occupants but not so loud, I hope, that I terrify them. Unfortunately no one can be roused from their bed at five-thirty in the morning without experiencing dread. I see it in my sister’s eyes the moment she opens the door, clutching her nightdress to her throat, and finds me there exhausted and engrimed with the dust and smell of Africa.

Jules Gay, my brother-in-law, boils a kettle to make coffee while Anna fusses around in the children’s old bedroom, making it fit for me to sleep in. They are a couple on their own together now, pushing sixty; I can tell they are glad to take me in, to have someone to look after.

Over coffee I say, ‘I’d prefer it if no one knew I was here, if that’s all right with you both?’

They exchange glances. Jules replies, ‘Of course. We can be discreet.’

‘If anyone comes to the door asking for me, you should tell them you don’t know where I am.’

Anna says, only half jokingly, ‘Good heavens! You haven’t deserted, have you, Georges?’

‘The one person I do need to see is Louis Leblois. Would you be kind enough to take a message to him, asking if he could call round as soon as possible? But tell him he mustn’t mention to anyone that I’m here.’

‘So you only want to talk to your lawyer?’ Jules laughs. ‘That’s not a good sign.’ It’s the closest he comes to an expression of curiosity.

After breakfast he goes off to work, and then later Anna leaves to find Louis. I prowl around the apartment, examining its contents — the crucifix above the marital bed, the family bible, the Meissen porcelain figures that used to belong to my grandmother in Strasbourg and which somehow survived the siege. I peer out of the windows at the front of the apartment, which overlook the rue Cassette, and then at the rear where there is a public garden: that is where I would station a man if I were watching the house — with a small pocket telescope he could record every movement. I am unable to sit still. The most quotidian sounds of Parisian life — children playing in the park, the clip-clop of traffic, the cry of a hawker — seem charged with menace.

Anna returns and says that Louis will come as soon as he can get away from court. She cooks me an omelette for lunch and I tell her about life in Sousse as if I have been on some exotic grand tour — the narrow stone alleyways of the old Arab town unaltered since the days of the Phoenicians, the hot stink of tethered sheep on the street corners waiting to be slaughtered, the foibles of the tiny French community, only eight hundred souls out of nineteen thousand. ‘No culture,’ I complain. ‘No one to talk to. Nothing Alsatian to eat. My God, how I hate it!’