An Officer and a Spy

what you’re up to. But everyone who’s important will know exactly what you’re doing. You’ll have daily access to the minister. And of course you’ll be promoted to colonel.’ He gives me a shrewd look. ‘How old are you?’
    ‘Forty.’
    ‘Forty! There’s no one else in the entire army of that rank at your age. Think of it: you should make general long before you’re fifty! And after that . . . You could be Chief one day.’
    Gonse knows exactly how to play me. I am ambitious, though not consumed by it, I hope: I appreciate there are other things in life besides the army – still, I would like to ride my talents as far as they will take me. I calculate: a couple of years in a job I don’t much like, and at the end of them my prospects will be golden. My resistance falters. I surrender.
    ‘When might this happen?’
    ‘Not immediately. In a few months. I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention it to anyone.’
    I nod. ‘Of course, I shall do whatever the army wants me to do. I’m grateful for your faith in me. I’ll try to prove worthy of it.’
    ‘Good man! I’m sure you will. Now I insist you have that drink that’s still sitting next to you . . .’
    And so it is settled. We toast my future. We toast the army. And then Gonse shows me out. At the door, he puts his hand on my arm and squeezes it paternally. His breath is sweet with cognac and cigarette smoke. ‘I know you think spying isn’t proper soldiering, Georges, but it is. In the modern age, this is the front line. We have to fight the Germans every day. They’re stronger than we are in men and materiel – “three-to-two”, remember! – so we have to be sharper in intelligence.’ His grip on my arm tightens. ‘Exposing a traitor like Dreyfus is as vital to France as winning a battle in the field.’
    Outside it is starting to snow again. All along the avenue Victor Hugo countless thousands of snowflakes are caught in the glow of the gas lamps. A white carpet is being laid across the road. It’s odd. I am about to become the youngest colonel in the French army but I feel no sense of exhilaration.
    In my apartment Pauline waits. She has kept on the same plain grey dress she wore at lunch so that I may have the pleasure of taking it off her. She turns to allow me to unfasten it at the back, lifting her hair in both hands so that I can reach the top hook. I kiss the nape of her neck and murmur into her skin: ‘How long do we have?’
    ‘An hour. He thinks I’m at church. Your lips are cold. Where have you been?’
    I am about to tell her, but then remember Gouse’s instruction. ‘Nowhere,’ I say.
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    1 The war of 1870 between France and Germany resulted in a crushing defeat for the French army, which suffered over 140,000 casualties. Under the terms of the armistice, the eastern territories of Alsace and Lorraine became part of Germany.

3
    SIX MONTHS PASS. June arrives. The air warms up and very soon Paris starts to reek of shit. The stench rises out of the sewers and settles over the city like a putrid gas. People venture out of doors wearing linen masks or with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses, but it doesn’t make much difference. In the newspapers the experts are unanimous that it isn’t as bad as the original ‘great stink’ of 1880 – I can’t speak to that: I was in Algeria at the time – but certainly it ruins the early days of summer. ‘It is impossible to stand on one’s balcony,’ complains Le Figaro , ‘impossible to sit on the terrace of one of the busy, joyful cafés that are the pride of our boulevards, without thinking that one must be downwind from some uncouth, invisible giant.’ The smell infiltrates one’s hair and clothes and settles in one’s nostrils, even on one’s tongue, so that everything tastes of corruption. Such is the atmosphere on the day I take charge of the Statistical Section.
    Major Henry, when he comes to collect me at the Ministry of War, makes light of it: ‘This is nothing. You should have grown up on a farm! Folk’s shit, pigs’ shit: where’s the difference?’ His face in the heat is as smooth and fat as a large pink baby’s. A smirk trembles constantly on his lips. He addresses me with a slight overemphasis on my rank – ‘ Colonel Picquart!’ – that somehow combines respect, congratulations and mockery in a single word. I take no offence. Henry is to be my deputy, a consolation for being passed over for the chief’s job. From now on we are