An Officer and a Spy

to that?’
    Tomps continues his passable impersonation of Henry. ‘“No,” he says, “it’s not worth the trouble. Forget it.” Then at six, when Captain Lauth had finished his session and turned up at the station, I asked Henry again: “Listen, I know Cuers well. Why don’t you let me take him out for a drink?” But he just repeated what he’d said before: “No, it’s useless. We’re wasting our time here.” So we caught the night train to Paris and that was that.’
    Back in my office, I open a file on Henry. That Henry is the man who framed Dreyfus I have no doubt.
    Code-breaking isn’t the province of the Statistical Section, or even the Ministry of War. It is run out of the Foreign Ministry by a seven-man team whose presiding genius is Major Étienne Bazeries. The major is famous in the newspapers for having broken the Great Cipher of Louis XIV and revealed the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask. He conforms to every cliché of the eccentric prodigy – unkempt, abrupt, forgetful – and is not an easy man to get to see. Twice I visit the quai d’Orsay on the pretext of other business and try to find him, only to be told by his staff that no one knows where he is. It is not until the end of the month that I track him to his office. He is in his shirtsleeves, bent over his desk with a screwdriver and a cylindrical enciphering device which lies all around him in pieces. In theory I am his superior officer, but Bazeries doesn’t salute or even stand; he has never believed in rank, just as he doesn’t believe in haircuts or shaving or even, to judge by the atmosphere in his office, washing.
    ‘The Dreyfus affair,’ I say to him. ‘The telegram from the Italian military attaché, Major Panizzardi, sent to the General Staff in Rome on the second of November 1894.’
    He squints up at me through greasy spectacles. ‘What about it?’
    ‘You broke it?’
    ‘I did. It took me nine days.’ He resumes tinkering with his machine.
    I take out my notebook and open it to a double page. On one side is the coded text that I copied down from the file in the archive, on the other the solution as written out by Gonse: Captain Dreyfus has been arrested. The Ministry of War has evidence of his dealings with Germany. We have taken all necessary precautions. I offer it to Bazeries. ‘Is this your solution?’
    He glances at it. Immediately his jaw tenses with anger. ‘My God, you people don’t give up, do you?’ He pushes back his chair, strides across the office, throws open his door and shouts, ‘Billecocq! Bring me the Panizzardi telegram!’ He turns to me. ‘Once and for all, Colonel, that is not what it says, and wishing it did will not make it otherwise.’
    ‘Wait,’ I say, holding up my hand to pacify him, ‘there’s obviously some history here that I’m not aware of. Let me be clear: you’re telling me that this is not an accurate transcription of the decoded telegram?’
    ‘The only reason it took us nine days to arrive at the solution was because your ministry kept refusing to believe the facts!’
    A young, nervous-looking man, presumably Billecocq, arrives bearing a folder. Bazeries snatches it off him and flicks it open. ‘Here it is, you see – the original telegram?’ He holds it up for me to see. I recognise the Italian attaché’s handwriting. ‘Panizzardi took it to the telegraph office on the avenue Montaigne at three o’clock in the morning. By ten, thanks to our arrangement with the telegraph service, it was here in our department. By eleven, Colonel Sandherr was standing exactly where you are now demanding we decipher it as a matter of extreme urgency. I told him it was impossible – this particular cipher was one of great complexity, which we’d never before managed to break. He said, “What if I could guarantee you that it contained a particular word?” I told him that would be a different matter. He said that the word was “Dreyfus”.’
    ‘And how did he know that Panizzardi would mention Dreyfus?’
    ‘Well, that was very clever, I must concede. Sandherr said that the previous day he had arranged for the name to be leaked to the newspapers as the identity of the man arrested for espionage. He reasoned that whoever was employing Dreyfus would panic and contact their superiors. When Panizzardi was followed to the telegraph office in the middle of the night, naturally Colonel Sandherr was sure his tactic had worked. Unfortunately, when I succeeded in