An Officer and a Spy

to have met occasionally, even if only casually in the street.’
    ‘That may well be. I do know the colonel tried to avoid him. He didn’t like him – thought he was always asking too many questions.’
    I bet he didn’t like him , I think. The Jew with the vast apartment and a view of the river . . . I imagine Sandherr striding briskly towards the rue Saint-Dominique at nine o’clock one morning and the young captain attempting to fall in beside him and engage him in conversation. Dreyfus always seemed to me, when I dealt with him, to have something missing from his brain: some vital piece of social equipment which should have told him when he was boring people or that they didn’t wish to speak to him. But he was incapable of recognising his effect on others, while Sandherr, who could see a conspiracy in a pair of butterflies alighting on the same bloom, would have become increasingly suspicious of his inquisitive Jewish neighbour.
    I open my desk drawer and take out the various medicines I discovered the previous day: a couple of tins and two small dark blue bottles. I show them to Henry. ‘Colonel Sandherr left these behind.’
    ‘That was an oversight. May I?’ Henry takes them from me with fumbling hands. In his clumsiness he almost drops one of the bottles. ‘I’ll see they get returned to him.’
    I can’t resist saying, ‘Mercury, extract of guaiacum and potassium iodine . . . You do know what these are normally used to treat, don’t you?’
    ‘No. I’m not a doctor . . .’
    I decide not to pursue it. ‘I want a full report of what the Dreyfus family are up to – who they’re seeing, whatever they might be doing to help the prisoner. I also want to read all of Dreyfus’s correspondence, to and from Devil’s Island. I assume it’s being censored, and we have copies?’
    ‘Naturally. I’ll tell Gribelin to arrange it.’ He hesitates. ‘Might I ask, Colonel: why all this interest in Dreyfus?’
    ‘General Boisdeffre thinks it might turn into a political issue. He wants us to be prepared.’
    ‘I understand. I’ll get on to it at once.’
    He leaves, cradling Sandherr’s medicines. Of course he knows exactly what they’re prescribed for: we’ve both hauled enough men out of unregistered brothels in our time to know the standard treatment. And so I am left to ponder the implications of inheriting a secret intelligence service from a predecessor who is apparently suffering from tertiary syphilis, more commonly known as general paralysis of the insane.
    That afternoon I write my first secret intelligence report for the General Staff – a blanc , as they are known in the rue Saint-Dominique. I cobble it together from the local German newspapers and from one of the agents’ letters that Sandherr has elucidated for me: A correspondent from Metz reports that, for the past few days, there has been great activity among the troops in the Metz garrison. There is no noise and alarm in the city, but the military authorities are pushing the troops intensively . . .
    I read it over when I’ve finished and ask myself: is this important? Is it even true? Frankly, I have not the faintest idea. I know only that I am expected to submit a blanc at least once a week, and that this is the best I can do for my first attempt. I send it over the road to the Chief of Staff’s office, bracing myself for a rebuke for crediting such worthless gossip. Instead, Boisdeffre acknowledges receipt, thanks me, forwards a copy to the head of the infantry (I can imagine the conversation in the officers’ club: I hear on the grapevine that the Germans are up to something in Metz . . . ), and fifty thousand troops in the eastern frontier region have their lives made slightly more miserable by several days of additional drills and forced marches.
    It is my first lesson in the cabalistic power of ‘secret intelligence’: two words that can make otherwise sane men abandon their reason and cavort like idiots.
    A day or two later, Henry brings an agent to my office to brief me about Dreyfus. He introduces him as François Guénée, of the Sûreté. 1 He is in his forties, yellow-skinned with the effects of nicotine or alcohol or both, with that manner, at once bullying and obsequious, typical of a certain type of policeman. As we shake hands I recognise him from my first morning: he was one of those who were sitting around smoking their pipes and playing cards downstairs. Henry says, ‘Guénée has