An Officer and a Spy

wondering what I should read into this. It may be that they are continuing the debriefing into a second day and have taken the precaution of changing hotels, or it could be that the meeting is over and they are rushing to catch the overnight train back to Paris. I hang around for another hour in the hope of receiving a telegram, then decide to leave for the evening.
    I would welcome some company to distract me, but everyone seems to be away for August. The de Commingeses have closed up their house and decamped to their summer estate. Pauline is on holiday in Biarritz with Philippe and her daughters. Louis Leblois has gone home to Alsace to be with his gravely ill father. I am suffering from a pretty bad dose of what the gentlemen in the rue de Lille would call Weltschmerz : I am world weary. In the end, I dine alone in a restaurant near the ministry and return to my apartment intending to read Zola’s new novel. But its subject, the Roman Catholic Church, bores me, and it also runs to seven hundred and fifty pages. I am willing to accept such prolixity from Tolstoy but not from Zola. I set it aside long before the end.
    I am at my desk early the next morning, but no telegrams have come in overnight and it isn’t until early in the afternoon that I hear Henry and Lauth coming upstairs. I rise from my seat and stride across my office. Flinging open the door, I am surprised to find them both wearing uniform. ‘Gentlemen,’ I say with sarcasm, ‘you have actually been to Switzerland, I take it?’
    The two officers salute, Lauth with a certain nervousness it seems to me, but Henry with a nonchalance that borders on insolence. He says, ‘I’m sorry, Colonel. We stopped off at home to change.’
    ‘And how was your trip?’
    ‘I should say it was a pretty good waste of time and money, wouldn’t you agree, Lauth?’
    ‘It proved to be disappointing, I’m afraid, yes.’
    I look from one to the other. ‘Well, that’s unexpectedly depressing news. You’d better come in and tell me what happened.’
    I sit behind my desk with my arms folded and listen while they relate their story. Henry does most of the talking. According to him, he and Lauth went directly from the railway station to the hotel for breakfast, then upstairs to the room, where they waited until nine thirty, when Inspector Vuillecard brought in Cuers. ‘He was pretty shifty from the start – nervous, couldn’t sit still. Kept going over to the window and checking the big square in front of the station. Mostly what he wanted to talk about was him – could we guarantee the Germans would never find out what he’d done for us?’
    ‘And what could he tell you about the Germans’ agent?’
    ‘Just a few bits and scraps. He reckoned he’d personally seen four documents that had come in via Schwartzkoppen – one about a gun and another about a rifle. Then there was something about the layout of the army camp at Toul, and the fortifications at Nancy.’
    I ask, ‘What were these? Handwritten documents?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘In French?’
    ‘That’s it.’
    ‘But he didn’t have a name for this agent, or any other clue to his identity?’
    ‘No, just that the German General Staff decided he wasn’t to be trusted and ordered Schwartzkoppen to break off relations with him. Whoever he is, he was never very important and he’s no longer active.’
    I turn to Lauth. ‘Were you talking in French or German?’
    He flushes. ‘French to start with, in the morning, then we switched to German in the afternoon.’
    ‘I told you to encourage Cuers to speak in German.’
    ‘With respect, Colonel,’ cuts in Henry, ‘there wasn’t much point in my being there unless I had a chance to talk to him myself. I take responsibility for that. I stuck it for about three hours then I left it to Captain Lauth.’
    ‘And how long did you talk to him in German, Lauth?’
    ‘For another six hours, Colonel.’
    ‘And did he say anything else of interest?’
    Lauth meets my gaze and holds it. ‘No. We just went over the same old ground again and again. He left at six to catch the train back to Berlin.’
    ‘He left at six?’ I can no longer suppress my exasperation. ‘You see, gentlemen, this just doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would a man risk travelling seven hundred kilometres to a foreign city to meet intelligence officers from a foreign power in order to say almost nothing? In fact to say less than he’d already told us in Berlin?’
    Henry says,