An Officer and a Spy

‘It’s obvious, surely? He must have changed his mind. Or he was lying in the first place. What a fellow blurts out when he’s drunk at home at night with someone he knows is different to what he might say in the cold light of day to strangers.’
    ‘Well why didn’t you take him out and get him drunk then?’ I bang my fist down on the desk. ‘Why didn’t you make some effort to get to know him better?’ Neither man answers. Lauth looks at the floor, Henry stares straight ahead. ‘It seems to me that you both couldn’t wait to get back on that train to Paris.’ They start to protest but I cut them off. ‘Save your excuses for your report. That will be all, gentlemen. Thank you. You may leave.’
    Henry halts at the door and says, with quivering and affronted dignity, ‘No one has ever questioned my professional competence before.’
    ‘Well I’m very surprised to hear it.’
    After they have gone, I lean forward and put my head in my hands. I know that a decisive moment has just been reached, in terms of both my relationship with Henry and my command of the section. Are they telling the truth? For all I know, they might be. Perhaps Cuers really did clam up when he got into their hotel room. Of one thing I am sure, however: that Henry went to Switzerland determined to wreck that meeting, and succeeded, and that if Cuers told them nothing it was because Henry willed it to be so.
    Among the files demanding my attention that day is the latest batch of censored correspondence of Alfred Dreyfus, sent over as usual by the Colonial Ministry. The minister wishes to know if I have any observations to make ‘from an intelligence perspective’. I untie the ribbon and flick open the cover and begin to read:
A gloomy day with ceaseless rain. The air full of tangible darkness. The sky black as ink. A real day of death and burial. How often there comes to my mind that exclamation of Schopenhauer at the thought of human iniquity: ‘If God created the world, I would not care to be God.’ The mail from Cayenne has come, it seems, but has not brought my letters! Nothing to read, no avenue of escape from my thoughts. Neither books nor magazines come to me any more. I walk in the daytime until my strength is exhausted, to calm my brain and quiet my nerves . . .
    The quotation from Schopenhauer leaps out at me from the file. I know it; I have used it often. It never occurred to me that Dreyfus might read philosophy, let alone harbour a blasphemous thought. Schopenhauer! It is as if someone who has been trying to attract my attention for a long while has finally succeeded. Other passages catch my eye:
Days, nights, are all alike. I never open my mouth. I no longer ask for anything. My speech used to be limited to asking if my mail had come or not. But I am now forbidden to ask even that, or at least, which is the same thing, the guards are forbidden to answer even such commonplace questions. I wish to live until the day of the discovery of the truth, that I may cry aloud my grief at the torture they inflict on me . . .
    And again:
That they should take all possible precautions to prevent escape, I understand; it is the right, I will even say the strict duty, of the administration. But that they bury me alive in a tomb, prevent all communication with my family, even via open letters – this is against all justice. One would readily believe one is thrown back several centuries . . .
    And on the back of one intercepted and retained letter, written out several times as if he is trying to commit it to memory, is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Othello :
Who steals my purse steals trash. ’Tis something, nothing:
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
    As I turn the pages, I feel as if I am reading a novel by Dostoyevsky. The walls of my office seem to melt; I hear the ceaseless crash and roar of the sea on the rocks beneath his prison hut, the strange cries of the birds, the deep silence of the tropical night broken by the endless clumping of the guards’ boots on the stone floor and the rustle of the venomous spider crabs moving in the rafters; I feel the saturating furnace of the humid heat and the raw itch of the mosquito bites and ant stings, the doubling-over stomach cramps and blinding headaches; I smell the mouldiness of his clothes and his books destroyed by damp and insects, the