An Officer and a Spy полностью

I kneel in the passage outside Gribelin’s door. My first discovery is that lock-picking is easier than it looks. Once I have the hang of which instrument to use I am able to find the notch in the underside of the bolt. All I have to do next is press. Then it is a matter of maintaining the pressure with the left hand while with the right I insert the pick and manipulate it to raise the tumblers. One rises, then a second, and finally the third; the racking stump slides forwards; there is a well-oiled click and the door opens.

I turn on the electric light. It would take me hours to pick all the locks in Gribelin’s archive. But I remember he keeps his keys in the bottom left-hand drawer of his desk. After ten minutes of patient trial and error, it yields to my pick. I open the drawer. The keys are there.

Suddenly there is a bang that makes my heart jump. I glance out of the window. Searchlights on top of the Eiffel Tower a kilometre away are shining across the Seine to the place de la Concorde. The beams are surrounded by bursting stars which pulse and flash in silence and then a second or two later come the explosions, loud enough to vibrate the glass panes in their ancient mouldings. I glance at my watch. Nine o’clock. They are running half an hour late. The fireworks are scheduled to last thirty minutes.

I take Gribelin’s bunch of keys and start trying to open the nearest filing cabinet.

Once I have worked out which key fits which lock, I open all the drawers. My first priority is to collect every scrap of Agent Auguste material I can find.

The glued-together documents are already beginning to yellow with age. They rustle like dried leaves as I sort them into piles: letters and telegrams from Hauptmann Dame in Berlin, signed with his nom de guerre, ‘Dufour’; letters to Schwartzkoppen from the German ambassador, Count Münster, and to Panizzardi from the Italian ambassador, Signor Ressmann, and to the military attaché of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Colonel Schneider. There is an envelope full of cinders dated November 1890. There are letters to Schwartzkoppen from the Italian naval attaché, Rosselini, and the British military attaché, Colonel Talbot. Here are the forty or fifty love letters from Hermance de Weede — My dear adored friend. . My Maxi. . — and perhaps half that many from Panizzardi: My dear little one. . My big cat. . My dear big bugger. .

There was a time when I would have felt uncomfortable — grubby, even — handling such intimate material; no longer.

Mixed in with all this is a cipher telegram from Panizzardi to the General Staff in Rome, dispatched at three o’clock on the morning of Friday 2 November 1894:

Commando Stato Maggiore Roma

913 44 7836 527 3 88 706 6458 71 18 0288 5715 3716 7567 7943 2107 0018 7606 4891 6165

Panizzardi

The decoded text is clipped to it, written out by General Gonse: Captain Dreyfus has been arrested. The Ministry of War has evidence of his dealings with Germany. We have taken all necessary precautions.

I copy it down in my notebook. Beyond the window, the Eiffel Tower is a cascade of tumbling light. There is one last final thunderous explosion and slowly it fades into darkness. I hear a faint roar of applause. The display is over. I estimate it would take someone roughly thirty minutes to escape from the crowds in the Trocadéro gardens and get back to the section.

I return my attention to the glued-together documents.

Much of the material is incomplete or pointless, its sense tantalisingly out of reach. It suddenly strikes me as madness to try to read so much meaning into such detritus: that we are little better than the haruspices of the ancient world who decided public policy by scrutinising animal livers. My eyes feel gritty. I have been stuck in my office without food since noon. Perhaps that explains why, when I do come to the crucial document, I miss it at first, and move on to the next. But it nags at my mind, and then I go back and look at it again.

It is a short note, in thin black ink, on squared white paper, torn into twenty pieces, a few of which are missing. The writer is offering to sell Schwartzkoppen ‘the secret of smokeless powder’. It is signed your devoted Dubois and dated 27 October 1894 — two weeks after Dreyfus’s arrest.