Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ De Vèze walks under the Palais Royal bridge, sharp smells, there’s no one around, he shouts so he can hear the echo bounce back off the arch of stone and girders, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ and in the echo he seems to hear once more the voice of Jug Ears, like the crack of a whip, just like that first time.

Resigning wasn’t a very clever move, it’s what they expected him to do, by handing in his resignation he has allowed a page to be turned, poor de Vèze, a casualty of the Berthier affair, and anyway it was his own fault, his wandering prick, in this profession you can’t be too careful.

The trap had been laid a long time before, Moscow, it was no accident, he’d been fingered, and he must have met the man who’d fingered him. One day, a note had been made about him: a man who puts it about a lot, that’s how it must have started, a ladies’ man, plenty to say for himself, already in a senior post, a track record which will ensure that he’ll go even higher, a juicy target, de Vèze would very much like to meet up again with the man who’d fingered him.

He’s enjoying this walk along the Seine, a corridor, with a wind blowing along it chasing all that city smog away, de Vèze has now reached the Pont des Arts, he can see the île de la Cité, the statue of Henri IV on his horse, it’s de Vèze’s favourite, he halts for a moment in front of it.

The French continued to look for the mole, without creating as much upheaval, but they didn’t give up, the mole must have been part of an estimated circle of three hundred people, this was judged too small, so it was extended to six hundred.

One day, the Americans sent Paris a copy of a Russian document brought out of Moscow by a defector, an excellent survey of ten years of friction between France and her allies, very methodical, with high-grade information on NATO which should never have gone outside the family, one of the deputy directors of the CIA flew specially to Paris to discuss this document, a man named Walker, Richard F. T. Walker, a man who put his questions casually:

‘Is what the Russians claim you’re saying about us true? Is that really what you think of us? Or is it what the Russians would like you to think about us and you do genuinely think about us? Or is it what you say when you know the Russians are listening, so that we get the idea that you’re doing it on purpose and we finally start trusting you? It’s an amusing game, but you’ve got to come clean and tell us once and for all, because it’s bizarre that the Russians think that you aren’t a very easy ally to have, even though you’ve broken with Gaullist foreign policy, as your President has confirmed several times, personally, to ours.’

Walker, very Princeton, all tweed and corduroy:

‘You know, what we can’t figure out in this Russian document, yes, it’s authentic, we checked it out, it cost two or three lives, notably the defector’s father, anyway what’s bugging us isn’t the general political anecdotal material, no, but in it there is also intelligence about France’s view of the weakness of NATO’s southern flank, those shoot-outs between the Greeks and the Turks, the detail is too specific, the cliché of the nation of talkers, did you really say those things? You need to keep tabs on your military, otherwise we’ll have to start looking up their asses, back home there’s some of our people think we should take a closer look at your President, but they’re neanderthals.’

Assurances were made to the Americans, they were given guarantees, more strenuous efforts were made to investigate the military, and the military began looking at the non-military, the whole business started up again, out of control, some slack had to be put into the loop.

To complicate matters, there were two suicides in the circle of the six hundred, they kept a lot of people busy for very little return, the first one had wearied of counting his multiplying malignant tumours and the other had almost certainly suffered some terrible blow, the sort that makes you shake and sob before making the most anodyne of phone calls, and you chew your fingernails down to the quick and you promise that starting tomorrow you’ll leave your nails alone, you cry, you swallow a dose of Optalidon. Everything, except a lead.

They couldn’t see a thing, like owls at noon, so the other hypothesis was revived, that there was no mole, that the mole was an invention of the paranoid minds who ran counter-espionage, people who dreamed of spies the way other paranoid persons imagine that their child has been killed so that they can unleash on the killers all the tortures they’ve been dreaming of ever since they stopped being children, a phantom mole which did ten times more damage than a real one, in any case he wasn’t called a mole any more, they called him a traitor, someone lived behind his name just as he existed behind an unsilvered mirror.

He’d been a traitor since at least the start of the 1960s, they said ‘mole’ in English, their way of using a word to cover the slime of the thing, as if it were a cartoon, good-natured large bulldog, gleaming tan coat, who slips a stick of dynamite in a hole in the lawn and waits, and the little grey mole pops up out of another hole with the dynamite in its jaws and puts it down with a tee-hee just behind the bulldog, and the bulldog goes up with a ‘Bang!’, falls back down to earth, is flattened, then sets off in even hotter pursuit of the mole over five keys of a piano, it’s one gag after another, the bulldog is so angry, turns red in the face, digs hundreds of holes in the lawn to chase the mole away then his master returns and lays about the bulldog who turns grey, and in the end the mole offers the bulldog, now a great big placid sleepyhead, a safe shelter at the bottom of the garden, ‘that’s all, folks!’, a rather effective metaphor.

In Paris, no one used metaphors now, they said plain ‘traitor’, and twelve bullets were heard, whistling in the wind.

*

‘Whatever happens,’ Lilstein tells you, ‘there’s no risk, there is no record, no phone number, no address, no go-between, no dead-letter box, they know nothing, they’re leaving no stone unturned but it’s as if they were trying to make holes in marble with a spoon. And as for having agreed eight years ago to become the secretary of the Waltenberg Forum, why, my boy, it was a stroke of genius!

‘You can come from Paris whenever you like, only the two of us know that we’ll be together, excellent thing this forum, makes me feel younger despite the bulldozers and the heliport. Nobody knows a thing, when they look, they always look in the direction of the Russians, and in Moscow no one’s ever asked me to name my sources, or, more accurately, when some of them wanted me to give names, I asked ‘who to?’, that created ructions between the various departments and after a while no one ever brought the subject up again, I always gave the impression that my information came from several sources simultaneously and that I was the only one able to cross-check them.

‘The only thing a defector could ever say about me is that there’s someone somewhere in Berlin who can see a long way, and they’ve not even got to that stage yet, so you’ve nothing to fear except your own reactions, a defector could finger some of my agents, but no one could blow your cover because you do not exist in any agency file, which means you do not exist at all, oh yes, I know the current state of play, the French are starting to put some very competent people on the job, but they won’t find anything, no tracks, so we don’t even need to scatter pepper to hide our trail.

‘You have just one thing to fear, your own anxious French self,’ Lilstein adds. ‘If that’s our only problem, everything will go swimmingly.’