Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

Lady Piddle did not summon de Vèze, she bumped into him in town, as the saying goes, she was very nice to him, she looked like an unmade bed, we’ve got a lot of problems just now, she didn’t ask anything of him, she talked about people with experience, ones you could still, thank God, count on, right?

At what point did people really start to be afraid of Lady Piddle? when she got the scalp of a minister, a blabbermouth, confidential documents — no, not top-secret defence documents, papers from Cabinet meetings, yes, one set per minister, and some of it very sensitive — documents which often made a public appearance on the front page of a certain large-circulation evening newspaper.

Little Miss Chagrin was endlessly patient, low-ranking and high-powered, it took almost a whole parliamentary session, she made small changes in the figures in selected files which were handed out to Cabinet members, doctoring the set of figures given to this or that minister, just one set, not all of them, a small alteration after the decimal point, she did it each time she switched her attention to a new suspect, until one day a figure she had lightly modified found its way into the columns of a well-known evening paper, even so that proved nothing in itself, a minister may have a score of close colleagues who have sight of the same documents as their chief, Chagrin didn’t get excited, she multiplied the opportunities for temptation, one day she circulated three pages of a draft general budget to all ministers.

The minister under suspicion happened to be ill that day, the file was sent to him at home by motorcycle messenger, in it one of the figures that had been changed just for him, he got it a quarter of an hour before the leading daily was put to bed, and the figure in question was published on page one in the early afternoon edition, with the small alteration, the Lady went to see the President, very well, Chagrin, tell him I want to see him and you shall be present at the interview, you’ll be there with the correct version of the file. No need to get unduly worked up, this sort of thing never goes to court, a month later the minister resigned, entered a clinic, he’d known the President for a quarter of a century, it was such a stupid thing to do, so why did he do it?

Illusions about the power of the press? or maybe the newspaper had something on him, or maybe for the fun of it, you’d never guess how many people do this sort of thing for the hell of it, I know a secret, I mustn’t circulate it, if I circulate it I run the risk of being publicly disgraced, real Russian roulette, click, no one saw, didn’t get caught, and I’m king of the castle, actually no one ever did find out what the minister’s reasons were, it was even suggested that he was the Russian mole, a charge of culpable intelligence with the enemy could have been made to stick, but he didn’t know enough, and besides the mole didn’t stop digging.

And it was for this that de Vèze had been obliged to leave in his bed a woman who will never forgive him for the coarse words which had passed her lips, so there was a mole at the top, or in a major embassy, as seemed very likely.

A major embassy? could it be mine? Was all this designed to promote a few plumbers? The Americans had already tried the same thing under de Gaulle in ’66, de Vèze remembers it well, it was a year after the famous evening in Singapore, the Americans and the ‘porous’ French! They claimed to have names.

At least at the time we didn’t allow ourselves to be taken in by silly stories, no one believed that guff about having the names of dodgy individuals, they did it to pay us back for a speech de Gaulle had just made, in Asia, at Phnom Penh, a hundred thousand people, interminable ovations especially when he said that the Americans were facing ‘a national resistance’, that they should pledge to send their troops home, wild cheering, and then the best part, yes, it guaranteed everlasting hatred, that there was ‘no way the people of Asia would ever submit to the rule of foreigners who came from the other side of the Pacific’, Charles the Great, the Americans were purple with rage, a Moscow agent couldn’t have done better, we’ll teach you ‘rule of foreigners’, de Gaulle is just an agent for Moscow, Peking, any country that’s coloured red, a radical act of betrayal, he never liked us, never forgave us for Yalta nor for our support for Algerian independence, no, that’s not paying us back in our own coin, the domino effect, it’s not the same, we’ll explain it to you some day if you want to hear it, for the moment we’ll destabilise you, there’s a mole in de Gaulle’s entourage, a hefty rumour, totally spurious, the Americans came clean about it much later, if you get the message, a load of codswallop, it was all part of the game.

But now, in ’78, there’s a full quarantine, it’s already lasted more than a year, the counter-espionage people are very frustrated, they’ve been through all the biographies, pulled skeletons out of cupboards, set these people against those people, all hands on deck, plus a hunt for queers, like in England, suicides of a handful of men with wives and children, they also interviewed former members of the Normandie-Niémen squadron, why did you go to the USSR at that time?

‘To have the pleasure of taking orders from a general who is a traitor!’

The same treatment meted out to old friends who had worked alongside communists during the Resistance, Guillaume, he’d told them straight:

‘Go ahead, I’m used to it!’

And he pointed to his finger-tips. At the end of six months they’d had to tell the other African light cavalryman to call off his dogs, real moles aren’t easy to catch, true, but we’ve still got this damned quarantine to deal with, rumours, echoes of echoes, and even the Italians seem to be keeping things from us.

It was so good, before, in the desert, ‘de Vèze, you lead’ and away they went, ‘you’ll link up with Amilakhvari and his Foreign Legion brigade, he’s got six hours to make it, before sunrise’, and away we went, over sand and shale Bir Hakeim or Qdret-el-Himeimat, 1942, an adventure on sand and shale against Rommel.

Then one day, much later, a formal dinner in Singapore, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’, some guffawing jester with big ears shouts these words at you, old but sprightly, had a way with him, shady type, like Scapin in the play who never lets anyone put anything across him, everyone around the table found it hilarious, and it takes de Vèze nearly fifteen years to realise that the jester was right, it took until the day the companions who’d shared the Great Adventure started refusing to have dinner with him because the morons in counterespionage were busy setting up tradecraft here there everywhere.

Now if de Vèze has understood correctly, the Minister is asking him to take the strutting cockerel to Moscow, in his diplomatic bag, it’s a provocation, stay calm, they’re trying to force you into a wrong move.

De Vèze becomes engrossed in his scrutiny of the large brass inkstand which occupies the left-hand side of the Minister’s desk, it must be a good thirty centimetres tall, two horses rearing up on hind legs over two hooded urns, two riders, one holding a drawn sabre, the other a lance, de Vèze wonders when this object might date from, it could be Second Empire, but are they cuirassiers? They don’t have breastplates, hussars? no, these have helmets with a crest and slung over the flank of one of the horses there’s a rifle, so they’re dragoons, Third Republic then, but before 1914, when some people still pretended to believe in lance and sabre charges, grand-scale heroics, or the very first days of the Great War, charging at the Hun with sabres drawn before the statisticians at HQ had worked out that as a tactic it meant large losses for small gains.