An Officer and a Spy

attending the cavalry manoeuvres in Gâtinais. In other words, in these dog days of August, there is no news.
    By the time I reach the Statistical Section, Lauth is already in his office. He wears a leather apron. He has produced four prints of each of the two Esterhazy letters: damp and glistening, they still reek of chemical fixer. He has done his usual excellent job. The addresses and signatures have been blocked out but the lines of handwriting are sharp and easily legible.
    ‘Good work,’ I say. ‘I’ll take them with me – and the original letters, too, if you don’t mind.’
    He puts them all in an envelope and hands it to me. ‘Here you are, Colonel. I hope they lead you somewhere interesting.’ There is an imploring spaniel’s look in his pale blue eyes. But he has already asked me once what I want with them, and I have refused to answer. He dare not ask again.
    I take great pleasure in ignoring the implied question and wishing him a jaunty ‘Good day, Lauth,’ before strolling back to my office. I remove one print of each of the letters and slip them into my briefcase; all the rest go into my safe. I lock my office door behind me. In the lobby I tell the new concierge, Capiaux, that I’m not sure when I’ll be back. He’s an ex-trooper in his late forties. Henry dredged him up from somewhere and I’m not entirely sure I trust him: to me he has the glassy-eyed, broken-veined look of one of Henry’s drinking companions.
    It takes me twenty minutes to walk to the Île de la Cité, to the headquarters of the Préfecture of Police, a gloomy fortress rising over the embankment beside the pont Saint-Michel. The building is the old municipal barracks, as dark and ugly inside as out. I give my visiting card to the porter – Lt Col. Georges Picquart, Ministry of War – and tell him I wish to see Monsieur Alphonse Bertillon. The man is immediately respectful. He asks me to come with him. He unlocks a door and ushers me through it, then locks it behind us. We climb a narrow, winding stone staircase, floor after floor of steps so steep I am bent half double. At one point we have to stop and press ourselves against the wall to let past a dozen prisoners descending in single file. They trail a stench of sweat and despair in their wake. ‘Monsieur Bertillon has been measuring them,’ explains my guide, as if they have been to visit their tailor. We resume our ascent. Finally he unlocks yet another door and we emerge on to a hot and sunny corridor with a bare wooden floor. ‘If you wait in here, Colonel,’ he says, ‘I’ll find him.’
    We are at the very top of the building, looking west. It swelters like a greenhouse with the trapped heat. Beyond the windows of Bertillon’s laboratory, past the chimneypots of the Préfecture , the massive roofs of the Palace of Justice rise and plunge, a blue slate sea, pierced by the dainty gold and black spire of the Sainte-Chapelle. The lab’s walls are papered with hundreds of photographs of criminals, full-face and profile. Anthropometry – or ‘Bertillonage’, as our leading practitioner modestly calls it – holds that all human beings can be infallibly identified by a combination of ten different measurements. In one corner is a bench with a metal ruler set into it and an adjustable gauge for measuring the length of forearms and fingers; in another, a wooden frame like a large easel, for recording height, both seated (torso length) and standing; in a third, a device with bronze calipers for taking cranial statistics. There is a huge camera, and a bench with a microscope and a magnifying glass mounted on a bracket, and a set of filing cabinets.
    I wander around examining the photographs. It reminds me of a vast natural science collection – of butterflies, perhaps, or beetles, pinned and mounted. The expressions on the prisoners’ faces are variously frightened, shamed, defiant, disinterested; some look badly beaten up, half starved or crazy; no one smiles. Amid this dismal array of desperate humanity I suddenly come across Alfred Dreyfus. His bland accountant’s face stares out at me from above his torn uniform. Without his habitual spectacles or pince-nez his face looks naked. His eyes bore into mine. There is a caption: Dreyfus 5.1.95 .
    A voice says, ‘Colonel Picquart?’ and I turn to find Bertillon holding my card. He is a squat, pale figure in his early forties with a thick pelt of black hair. His stiff beard is cut square, like the blade of