Eric Ambler: Epitaph for a Spy

I gaped at him.

“Is this a joke? The only other photographs on that spool are some I took in Nice of a carnival that was held the day before I left.”

“You admit taking the photographs on this film?” he said deliberately.

“I have already said so.”

“Good. Please look at them.”

I took the negative, held it up to the light and ran it slowly through my fingers. Lizards, lizards, lizards. Some of the shots looked promising. Lizards. More lizards. Suddenly I stopped. I looked up quickly. Both of them were watching me.

“Go on, Vadassy,” said the Commissaire ironically; “don’t trouble to look surprised.”

Unable to believe my eyes, I looked at the negative again. There was a long shot of a section of coastline partly obscured by what looked like a twig close to the lens of the camera. There was something on the coastline-a short gray strip. Another shot, closer this time and from a different angle, of that same gray strip. There were things that looked like trap-doors along one side of it. More shots. Two of them were from the same angle; another had been taken looking down and nearer still. Then came three almost wholly obscured by a dark mass in front of the camera. The edge of the mass was blurred and very faintly patterned like a piece of cloth. Then there was one of what looked like a concrete surface out of focus and very near to the camera. The last of them was overexposed, but only one corner of it was obscured. It was taken from one end of what looked like a wide concrete gallery. There were some curious arrangements of highlights. They puzzled me for a moment. Then at last I understood. I was looking at the long, sleek barrels of siege guns.

The formalities of my arrest were attended by the examining magistrate, a harassed little man who, prompted by the fat detective, subjected me to a perfunctory interrogation before instructing the Commissaire to charge me. I was, I learned, charged with espionage, trespassing in a military zone, taking photographs calculated to endanger the safety of the French Republic, and of being in possession of such photographs. After the charges had been read out to me and I had signified that I had understood them, I was deprived of my belt (lest, presumably, I should hang myself) and the contents of my pockets, and taken, clutching my trousers, to a cell at the rear of the building. There I was left alone.

After a bit, I began to think more calmly. It was ridiculous. It was outrageous. It was impossible. Yet it had happened. I was in a police cell under arrest on a charge of espionage. The penalty, should I be convicted, would be perhaps four years’ imprisonment-four years in a French prison and then deportation. I could put up with prison-even a French one-but deportation! I began to feel sick and desperately frightened. If France expelled me there was nowhere left for me to go. Yugoslavia would arrest me. Hungary would not admit me. Neither would Germany or Italy. Even if a convicted spy could get into England without a passport he would not be permitted to work. To America I would be merely another undesirable alien. The South American republics would demand sums of money that I would not possess as surety for my good behavior. Soviet Russia would have no more use for a convicted spy than would England. Even the Chinese wanted your passport. There would be nowhere I could go, nowhere. And after all, what did it matter? What happened to an insignificant teacher of languages without national status was of no interest to anyone. No consul would intervene on his behalf; no Parliament, no Congress, no Chamber of Deputies would inquire into his fate. Officially he did not exist; he was an abstraction, a ghost. All he could decently and logically do was destroy himself.

I pulled myself together sharply. I was being hysterical. I was not yet a convicted spy. I was still in France. I must use my brains, think, find the very simple explanation that must exist for the presence of those photographs in my camera. I must go very carefully over the ground. I must cast my thoughts back to Nice.

I had, I remembered, put the new spool in the camera and taken the photographs of the carnival on Monday. Then I had gone back to my hotel and put the camera in my suitcase. It had still been there when I packed later that night. It had remained in my suitcase until I had unpacked at the Reserve on Tuesday evening. While I had been in Toulon the suitcase had been in the consigne at the station. Could anyone have used it during the two hours I was walking about Toulon? Impossible. The suitcase was locked and no one could break it open in the consigne, steal the camera, take those dangerous-looking photographs, and restore the camera to the suitcase in two hours. Besides, why put the camera back again? No, that would not do.

Then another thought struck me. The photographs I was supposed to have taken were the first ten on the spool. They must have been, for my last lizard shot had been number thirty-six. Now you can’t turn a roll of film backwards, and there were no double exposures on the film. Therefore, as I had started a spool at the carnival in Nice, a new spool must have been put in before the Toulon photographs were taken.

I jumped up in my excitement from the bed on which I had been sitting, and my trousers sagged down. I rescued them and, with my hands in my pockets, marched up and down the cell. Of course! I remembered now. I had been slightly surprised to notice when I had started on the lizard experiments that the exposure counter on the camera had registered number eleven. I had thought that I had made only eight exposures at Nice. But it is very easy to forget odd shots, especially when there are thirty-six exposures on the spool. Yes, the spool had certainly been changed. But when? It couldn’t have been done before I arrived at the Reserve, and I had started on the lizards the following morning after breakfast. It came to this, then: that between 7 p.m. Tuesday and 8.30 a.m. (breakfast-time) Wednesday, somebody had taken my camera from my room, put a new spool of film in it, gone to Toulon, penetrated a carefully guarded military zone, taken the photographs, returned to the Reserve and restored my camera to my room.

It didn’t sound possible or probable. Quite apart from any other objections, there was the simple question of the light. It was practically dark by eight o’clock, and as I had not arrived until seven, that disposed of Tuesday. Even supposing that the photographer had gone by night and started work at sunrise, he would have to be very quick and clever to get my camera back into my room while I was lying in bed looking out of the window. And, anyway, why return it to me with the spool still inside it? How had the police got into the business? Had the taker of the photographs told them anonymously? There was, of course, the chemist. The police had obviously been in ambush for the owner of the negative. Perhaps the chemist had been caught with the photographs and sworn that they had belonged to me. But then, that didn’t account for their being with my experimental shots. There had been no sign of a join in the negative. It was hideously puzzling.

I was feverishly going over the ground for the third time when there was the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside and the door of my cell opened. The fat man in the tussore suit came in. The door closed behind him.

For a moment he stood wiping the inside of his collar with his handkerchief, then he nodded to me and sat down on the bed.

“Sit down, Vadassy.”

I sat down on the only other piece of furniture in the room, an enamelled iron bidet with a wooden lid on it. The small, dangerous eyes surveyed me thoughtfully.

“Would you like a bowl of soup and some bread?”

This I had not expected.