An Officer and a Spy

desperate for money and isn’t a man of good character.’
    ‘Really?’ Henry turns the petit bleu over to examine the address. ‘He seemed fine when he worked here.’
    I have to give him credit for the aplomb with which he delivers this bombshell. For a moment or two I simply stare at him. ‘Lauth never mentioned that Esterhazy was employed here.’
    ‘That’s because he didn’t know.’ Henry sets the documents down on my desk and takes off his spectacles. ‘It was long before Lauth’s time. I’d only just been posted here myself.’
    ‘When was this?’
    ‘Must be fifteen years ago.’
    ‘So you know Esterhazy?’
    ‘I did once, yes – slightly. He wasn’t here long – he worked as a German translator. But I haven’t seen him for years.’
    I sit back in my chair. ‘This raises the matter to a whole new level.’
    ‘Does it?’ Henry shrugs. ‘I’m not sure I follow. Why?’
    ‘You seem to be taking this very calmly, Major!’ There is something mocking about Henry’s studied indifference; I can feel my anger rising. ‘Obviously it’s more serious if Esterhazy has received some training in our intelligence techniques.’
    Henry smiles and shakes his head. ‘If I may offer you some advice, Colonel, I wouldn’t get too dramatic about it. It doesn’t matter how many gunnery courses he’s been on. I don’t see how Esterhazy can have had access to anything important, stuck out in Rouen. And in fact that letter from Schwartzkoppen tells us plainly that he didn’t, because the Germans are threatening to break off relations with him. They wouldn’t do that if they thought they had a valuable spy.
    ‘It’s always an easy mistake to make,’ continues Henry, ‘if you’re new to this game, to think that the first dodgy fellow you come across is a master spy. It’s seldom the case. In fact you can end up doing a lot more damage by overreacting than the so-called traitor has caused in the first place.’
    ‘You are not suggesting, I hope,’ I reply stiffly, ‘that we just leave him to carry on supplying information to a foreign power, even if it may be of little value?’
    ‘Not at all! I agree absolutely we should keep an eye on him. I just think we should keep it in proportion. Why don’t I ask Guénée to start sniffing around, see what he can find out?’
    ‘No, I don’t want Guénée handling this.’ Guénée is another member of Henry’s gang. ‘I want to use someone else for a change.’
    ‘As you wish,’ says Henry. ‘Tell me who you’d like and I’ll assign him.’
    ‘No, actually, thank you for the offer, but I’ll assign him.’ I smile at Henry. ‘The extra experience will do me good. Please . . .’ I indicate the door. ‘And again: welcome back. Would you mind telling Gribelin to come down and see me?’
    What is particularly galling about Henry’s pious little sermon is that I can see the truth in it. He’s right: I have allowed my imagination to build Esterhazy up into a traitor on the scale of Dreyfus, whereas in fact, as Henry says, all the evidence indicates that he hasn’t done anything very much. Still, I am not going to give him the satisfaction of letting him take over the operation. I shall keep this one to myself. Thus when Gribelin comes to see me, I tell him I want a list of all the police agents the section has used recently, together with their addresses and a brief service history. He goes away and comes back half an hour later with a dozen names.
    Gribelin is an enigma to me: the epitome of the servile bureaucrat; an animated corpse. He could be any age between forty and sixty and is as thin as a wraith of black smoke, the only colour he wears. Mostly he closets himself alone upstairs in his archive; on the rare occasions he does appear he creeps along close to the wall, dark and silent as a shadow. I could imagine him slipping around the edge of a closed door, or sliding beneath it. The only sound he emits occasionally is the clinking of the bunch of keys that is attached to his waist by a chain. He stands now with perfect stillness in front of my desk while I scan the list. I ask him which of the agents he would recommend. He refuses to be drawn: ‘They are all good men.’ He doesn’t ask me why I need an agent: Gribelin is as discreet as a papal confessor.
    In the end I select a young officer with the Sûreté, Jean-Alfred Desvernine, attached to the police division at the gare Saint-Lazare. He’s a former lieutenant of the