Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

‘Prisoner, follow me.’

La Santé is built according to the latest scientific principles on a hub-and-spoke design — the prisoners’ cells form the spokes, the governor and his staff occupy the hub. I follow the warder all the way down the long corridor towards the administrative block at the centre. He unlocks a door then conducts me around a curving passage to a small windowless visitors’ room with a steel grille set in the wall. He stays outside but leaves the door open.

From behind the grille a voice says, ‘Picquart?’

The light is dim. It’s hard for me to make him out at first. ‘Labori? What’s going on?’

‘Henry has been arrested.’

‘My God. For what?’

‘The government has just put out a statement. Listen: “Today in the office of the Minister of War, Colonel Henry admitted that he was the author of the document of 1896 in which Dreyfus was named. The Minister of War immediately ordered his arrest and he was taken to the fortress of Mont-Valérien.”’ He pauses for my reaction. ‘Picquart? Did you hear that?’

It takes me a moment to absorb it. ‘What made him confess?’

‘Nobody knows yet. This only happened a few hours ago. All we have is the statement.’

‘And what about the others? Boisdeffre, Gonse — do we know anything about them?’

‘No, but all of them are finished. They staked everything on that letter.’ Labori leans in very close to the grille. Through the thick mesh I can see his blue eyes bright with excitement. ‘Henry would never have forged it purely on his own initiative, would he?’

‘It’s unimaginable. If they didn’t directly order it, then at the very least they must have known what he was up to.’

‘Exactly! You do realise now we’ll be able to call him as a witness? Just let me get him on the stand! What a prospect! I’ll make him sing about that and everything else he knows — all the way back to the original court martial.’

‘I would love to know what made him admit it after all this time.’

‘No doubt we’ll discover in the morning. Anyway, there it is — wonderful news for you to sleep on. I’ll come back again tomorrow. Good night, Picquart.’

‘Thank you. Good night.’

I am taken back to my cell.

The animal noises are particularly loud that night, but it isn’t those that keep me awake — it is the thought of Henry in Mont-Valérien.

The next day is the worst I have ever spent in prison. For once I cannot even concentrate to read. I prowl up and down my tiny cell in frustration, my mind constructing and discarding scenarios of what might have happened, what is happening and what could happen next.

The hours crawl past. The evening meal is served. The daylight begins to retreat. At around nine o’clock the warder unlocks my door again and tells me to follow him. How long that walk is! And the curious thing is, right at the very end of it, when I am in the visiting room, and Labori turns his face to the grille, I know exactly what he is going to say, even before I have registered his expression.

He says, ‘Henry’s dead.’

I stare at him, allowing the fact to settle. ‘How did it happen?’

‘They found him this afternoon in his cell at Mont-Valérien with his throat cut. Naturally they’re saying he killed himself. Strange how that seems to keep happening.’ He says anxiously, ‘Are you all right, Picquart?’

I have to turn away from him. I am not sure why I am weeping — out of tiredness, perhaps, or strain; or perhaps it is for Henry, whom I never could bring myself to hate entirely, despite everything, understanding him too well for that.

I think of Henry often. I have little else to do.

I sit in my cell and ponder the details of his death as they emerge over the weeks that follow. If I can solve this mystery, I reason, then perhaps I can solve everything. But I can only rely on what is reported in the papers and the scraps of gossip that Labori picks up on the legal circuit, and in the end I have to admit that probably I will never know the full truth.

I do know that Henry was forced to admit that the ‘absolute proof’ document was a forgery during a terrible meeting in the Minister of War’s office on 30 August. He could not do otherwise: the evidence was irrefutable. It seems that in response to my accusation of forgery, Cavaignac, the new Minister of War, supremely confident of his own correctness in all matters, ordered that the entire Dreyfus file be checked for authenticity by one of his officers. It took a long while — the file had by now swollen to three hundred and sixty items — and it was while this process was going on that I met Henry for the last time in Fabre’s chambers. I understand now why he seemed so broken: he must have guessed what was coming. Cavaignac’s aide did something that apparently no one else in the General Staff had thought to do in almost two years: he held the ‘absolute proof’ under a strong electric lamp. Immediately he noticed that the heading of the letter, My dear friend , and the signature, Alexandrine , were written on squared paper, the lines of which were bluish-grey, whereas the body of the letter — I have read that a deputy is going to ask questions about Dreyfus. . — was on paper whose lines were mauve. It was obvious that a genuine letter that had been pieced together earlier — in fact in June 1894 — had been disassembled and then put back together with a forged central section.

Summoned to explain himself, in the presence of Boisdeffre and Gonse, Henry at first tried to bluster, according to the transcript of his interrogation by Cavaignac released by the government:

HENRY: I put the pieces together as I received them.

CAVAIGNAC: I remind you that nothing is graver for you than the absence of an explanation. Tell me what you did.

HENRY: What do you want me to say?

CAVAIGNAC: To give me an explanation why one of the documents is lined in pale violet, the other in blue-grey.

HENRY: I cannot.

CAVAIGNAC: The fact is certain. Reflect on the consequences of my question.

HENRY: What do you wish me to say?

CAVAIGNAC: What you have done.

HENRY: I have not forged papers.

CAVAIGNAC: Come, come! You have put the fragments of one into the other.

HENRY: [After a moment of hesitation] Well, yes, because the two things fitted admirably, I was led to this.

Is the transcript accurate? Labori thinks not, but I have little doubt. Just because the government lies about some things, it doesn’t mean they lie about everything. I can hear Henry’s voice rising off the page better than any playwright could imitate it — bombastic, sulky, wheedling, cunning, stupid.

CAVAIGNAC: What gave you the idea?

HENRY: My chiefs were very uneasy. I wished to pacify them. I wished to restore tranquillity to men’s minds. I said to myself, ‘Let us add a phrase. Suppose we had a war in our present situation.’

CAVAIGNAC: You were the only one to do this?

HENRY: Yes, Gribelin knew nothing about it.

CAVAIGNAC: No one knew it? No one in the world?

HENRY: I did it in the interest of my country. I was wrong.

CAVAIGNAC: And the envelopes?

HENRY: I swear I did not make the envelopes. How could I have done so?

CAVAIGNAC: So this is what happened? You received in 1896 an envelope with a letter inside, an insignificant letter. You suppressed the letter and fabricated another.

HENRY: Yes.

In the darkness of my cell I play out this scene again and again. I see Cavaignac behind his desk — the overambitious young minister: the fanatic with the temerity to believe he could end the affair once and for all and who now finds himself tripped up by his own hubris. I see Gonse’s hand trembling as he smokes and watches the interrogation. I see Boisdeffre by the window staring into the middle distance, as immutably aloof as one of the stone lions that no doubt guarding the gate of his family chateau. And I see Henry occasionally looking round at his chiefs in mute appeal as the questions rain down on him: help me! But of course they say nothing.