On Wednesday morning, suitably accoutred, I present myself outside the Louvre. From the lines of tourists suddenly emerges a keen-looking, fresh-faced man with a salt-and-pepper moustache, who I take to be Desvernine. We exchange nods. I realise he must have been watching me for several minutes.
‘You’re not being followed, Colonel,’ he says quietly, ‘at least not as far as I can tell. However, I suggest we take a walk into the museum, if that’s agreeable, where it will look more natural if I need to make notes.’
‘Whatever you advise: this sort of thing is not my line.’
‘Quite right too, Colonel – leave it to the likes of me.’
He has a sportsman’s open shoulders and rolling walk. I follow him towards the nearest pavilion. It is early in the day, and therefore not yet crowded. In the vestibule there is a cloakroom by the entrance, stairs straight ahead, and galleries to our left and right. When Desvernine turns right, I make a protest: ‘Do we have to go in there? That’s the most awful rubbish.’
‘Really? It all looks the same to me.’
‘You handle the police work, Desvernine; leave the culture to me. We’ll go in here.’
I buy a guidebook and in the Galerie Denon, which has the smell of a schoolroom, we stand together and contemplate a bronze of Commodus as Hercules – a Renaissance copy from the Vatican. The gallery is almost deserted.
I say, ‘This must remain between the two of us, understood? If your superiors try to discover what you’re doing, refer them to me.’
‘I understand.’ Desvernine takes out his notebook and pencil.
‘I want you to find out everything you can about an army major by the name of Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.’ My voice echoes even when I whisper. ‘He sometimes calls himself Count Esterhazy. He’s forty-eight years old, serving with the 74th Infantry Regiment in Rouen. He’s married to the daughter of the marquis de Nettancourt. He gambles, plays the stock market, generally leads a dissolute life – you’ll know where to look for such a character better than I.’
Desvernine flushes slightly. ‘When do you need this done?’
‘As quickly as possible. Would it be possible to have a preliminary report next week?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘One other thing: I’m interested in how often Esterhazy goes to the German Embassy.’
If Desvernine finds this last request surprising, he is too professional to show it. We must make an odd couple: I in my bowler and frock coat, apparently reading the guidebook and holding forth; he in a shabby brown suit, taking down my dictation. But nobody is looking at us. We move along to the next exhibit. The guidebook lists it as Boy extracting a thorn from his foot.
Desvernine says, ‘We should meet somewhere different next time, just as a precaution.’
‘What about the restaurant at the gare Saint-Lazare?’ I suggest, remembering my trip to Rouen. ‘That’s on your patch.’
‘I know it well.’
‘Next Thursday, at seven in the evening?’
‘Agreed.’ He writes it down then puts away his notebook and stares at the bronze sculpture. He scratches his head. ‘You really think this stuff is good, Colonel?’
‘No, I didn’t say that. As so often in life, it’s just better than the alternative.’
Not all my time is devoted to investigating Esterhazy. I have other things to worry about – not least, the treasonable activity of homing pigeons.
Gribelin brings me the file. It has been sent over from the rue Saint-Dominique, and as he hands it to me I detect at last a faint gleam of malicious pleasure in those dull eyes. It seems that pigeon-fanciers in England are in the habit of transporting their birds to Cherbourg and releasing them to fly back across the Channel. Some nine thousand are set loose each year: a harmless if unappealing pastime which Colonel Sandherr, in the final phase of his illness, decided might pose a threat to national security and should be banned, for what if the birds were used to carry secret messages? This piece of madness has been grinding its way through the Ministry of the Interior for the best part of a year, and a law has been prepared. Now General Boisdeffre insists that I, as chief of the Statistical Section, must prepare the Ministry of War’s opinion on the draft legislation.
Needless to say, I have no opinion. After Gribelin has gone I sit at my desk, reviewing the file. It might as well be written in Sanskrit for all the sense I can make of it, and it occurs to me that what I need is a lawyer. It further occurs to me that the best lawyer I know is my oldest friend, Louis Leblois, who by a curious coincidence lives along the rue de l’Université. I send him a bleu asking if he could call round to see me on his way home to discuss a matter of business, and at the end of the afternoon I hear the electric bell ring to signal that someone has entered. I am halfway down the staircase when I meet Bachir coming up, carrying Louis’s card.
‘It’s all right, Bachir. He’s known to me. He can come to my office.’
Two minutes later, I am standing at my window with Louis, showing him the minister’s garden.
‘Georges,’ he says, ‘this is a most remarkable building. I’ve often passed it and wondered who it belonged to. You do appreciate what it used to be, don’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Before the revolution it was the hôtel d’Aiguillon, where the old duchess, Anne-Charlotte de Crussol Florensac, used to have her literary salon. Montesquieu and Voltaire probably sat in this very room!’ He wafts his hand back and forth in front of his nose. ‘Are their corpses in the cellar, by any chance? What on earth do you do here all day?’
‘I can’t tell you that, although it might have amused Voltaire. However, I can put some work your way, if you’re interested.’ I thrust the carrier pigeon file into his hands. ‘Tell me if you can make head or tail of this.’
‘You want me to look at it now?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind: it can’t leave the building, I’m afraid.’
‘Why? Is it secret?’
‘No, otherwise I wouldn’t be showing it to you. But I have to keep it here.’ Louis hesitates. ‘I’ll pay you,’ I add, ‘whatever it is you would normally charge.’
‘Well, if I’m actually going to extract some money from you for once in my life,’ he laughs, ‘then naturally I’ll do it,’ and he sits at my table, opens his briefcase, takes out a sheaf of paper and starts reading the file while I return to my desk. ‘Neat’ is the word for Louis: a dapper figure, exactly my age, with neatly trimmed beard and neat little hands that move rapidly across the page as he sets down his neatly ordered thoughts. I watch him fondly. He works with utter absorption, exactly as he did when we were classmates together at the lycée in Strasbourg. We had both lost a parent at the age of eleven, I my father and he his mother, and that made us a club of two, even though what bound us was never spoken of, then or now.
I take out my own pen and begin composing a report. For an hour we work in companionable silence until there is a knock at my door. I shout, ‘Come!’ and Henry enters, carrying a folder. His expression on seeing Louis could not have been more startled if he had caught me naked with one of the street girls of Rouen.
‘Major Henry,’ I say, ‘this is a good friend of mine, Maître Louis Leblois.’ Louis, deep in concentration, merely raises his left hand and continues writing, while Henry looks from me to him and back again. ‘Maître Leblois,’ I explain, ‘is writing us a legal opinion on this absurd carrier pigeon business.’
For a few moments Henry seems too choked with emotion to speak. ‘May I have a word outside a moment, Colonel?’ he asks eventually, and when I join him in the corridor, he says coldly: ‘Colonel, I must protest. It is not our practice to allow outsiders access to our offices.’
‘Guénée comes in all the time.’
‘Monsieur Guénée is an officer of the police!’
‘Well, Maître Leblois is an officer of the courts.’ My tone is more amused than angry. ‘I have known him for thirty years. I can vouch for his integrity absolutely. Besid
es, he is only looking at a file on carrier pigeons. They are hardly classified.’
‘But there are other files in your office which are highly secret.’
‘Yes, and they are locked up out of sight.’
‘Even so, I wish to register my strong objection—’
‘Oh really, Major Henry,’ I interrupt him, ‘don’t be so pompous, please! I am the chief of this section and I shall see whoever I like!’
I turn on my heel and return to my office, closing the door behind me. Louis, who must have heard every word, says, ‘Am I causing you a problem?’
‘Not at all. But these people – honestly!’ I drop into my chair and sigh and shake my head.
‘Well, this is finished in any case.’ Louis stands and gives me the file. On top of it are several pages of notes in his meticulous hand. ‘It’s very straightforward. Here are the points you need to make.’ He looks down at me with concern. ‘Your glittering career is all very well, Georges, but you know, none of us ever sees you any more. One needs to keep one’s friendships in good repair. Come home with me now and have some supper.’
‘Thank you, but I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
I want to say: ‘Because I can’t begin to tell you what’s on my mind, or what I do all day, and when there’s no longer a possibility of unguarded intimacy, social life becomes a fraud and a strain.’ Instead I merely remark blandly, ‘I fear I am poor company these days.’
‘We’ll be the judge of that. Come. Please.’
He’s so good and honest that I have no option except to surrender. ‘Well, I would like that very much,’ I say, ‘but only if you’re sure Martha won’t mind.’
‘My dear Georges, she will be absolutely delighted!’
Their apartment could scarcely be closer, literally just across the boulevard Saint-Germain, and Martha does indeed seem pleased to see me, throwing her arms around me the moment I enter their apartment. She is twenty-seven, fourteen years our junior. I was the best man at their wedding. She goes everywhere with Louis, I presume because they have no children. But if that is a source of sadness, they do not let it show; neither do they demand to know when I am going to get married, which is also a great relief. I pass three happy hours in their company, talking about the past and politics – Louis is deputy mayor of the local arrondissement, the seventh, and takes a radical view on most issues – and the evening ends with my playing their piano while they sing. As he shows me out, Louis says, ‘We should do this every week. It might just keep you sane. And remember, whenever you’re working late, you know you can always come back here to sleep.’
‘You’re a generous friend, dear Lou. You always have been.’ I kiss him on the cheeks and lurch off into the night, humming the tune I have just been playing, slightly the worse for drink but much the better for company.
The following Thursday evening, at seven precisely, I sit in a corner of the cavernous yellow gloom of the platform café of the gare Saint-Lazare, sipping an Alsace beer. The place is packed; the double-hinged door swings back and forth with a squeak of springs. The roar of chat and movement inside and the whistles and shouts and percussive bursts of steam from the locomotives outside make it a perfect place not to be overheard. I have managed to save a table with two seats that gives me a clear view of the entrance. Once again, however, Desvernine surprises me by appearing at my back. He is carrying a bottle of mineral water, refuses my offer of a beer, and is pulling out his little black notebook even as he sinks into his place on the crimson banquette.
‘He’s quite a character, your Major Esterhazy, Colonel. Big debts all over Rouen and Paris: I have a list here for you.’
‘What does he spend the money on?’
‘Mostly gambling. There’s a place he goes to in the boulevard Poissonnière. It’s a sickness that’s hard to cure, as I know to my cost.’ He passes the list across the table. ‘He also has a mistress, a Mademoiselle Marguerite Pays, aged twenty-six, a registered prostitute in the Pigalle district, who goes by the name of “Four-Fingered Marguerite”.’
I can’t help laughing. ‘You’re not serious?’
Desvernine, the earnest former non-commissioned officer turned policeman, does not see the humour. ‘She’s from the Rouen area originally, daughter of a Calvados distiller, started work in a spinning factory when she was a kid, lost a finger in an accident and her job with it, moved to Paris, became an horizontale in the rue Victor-Masse, met Esterhazy last year either on the Paris–Rouen train or at the Moulin Rouge – there are different versions depending on which of the girls you speak to.’
‘So this affair is common knowledge?’
‘Absolutely. He’s even set her up in an apartment: 49, rue de Douai, near Montmartre. Visits her every evening when he’s in town. She’s furnished it, but the lease is in his name. The girls at the Moulin Rouge call him “The Benefactor”.’
‘That kind of life can’t come cheap.’
‘He’s working every racket he can think of to keep it going. He’s even trying to join the board of a British company in London – which is a rum thing for a French officer to do, when you think about it.’
‘And where is his wife during all this?’
‘Either on her estate at Dommartin-la-Planchette in the Ardennes or at the apartment in Paris. He goes back to her after he’s finished with Marguerite.’
‘He seems to be a man to whom betrayal is second nature.’
‘I’d say so.’
‘What about the Germans? Any links there?’
‘I haven’t got anywhere on that yet.’
‘I wonder – perhaps we could follow him?’
‘We could,’ says Desvernine doubtfully, ‘but he’s a wary bird from what I’ve seen. He’d soon get wise to us.’
‘In that case, we can’t risk it. The last thing I need is to have a well-connected major complaining to the ministry that he’s being harassed.’
‘Our best bet would be to put a watch on the German Embassy, see if we can catch him there.’
‘I’d never get authorisation for that.’
‘Why not?’
‘It would be too obvious. The ambassador would complain.’
‘Actually, I think I know a way we can do itted">ht, humming the tune I have just been playing, slightly the worse for drink but much the better for company.
The following Thursday evening, at seven precisely, I sit in a corner of the cavernous yellow gloom of the platform café of the gare Saint-Lazare, sipping an Alsace beer. The place is packed; the double-hinged door swings back and forth with a squeak of springs. The roar of chat and movement inside and the whistles and shouts and percussive bursts of steam from the locomotives outside make it a perfect place not to be overheard. I have managed to save a table with two seats that gives me a clear view of the entrance. Once again, however, Desvernine surprises me by appearing at my back. He is carrying a bottle of mineral water, refuses my offer of a beer, and is pulling out his little black notebook even as he sinks into his place on the crimson banquette.
‘He’s quite a character, your Major Esterhazy, Colonel. Big debts all over Rouen and Paris: I have a list here for you.’
‘What does he spend the money on?’
‘Mostly gambling. There’s a place he goes to in the boulevard Poissonnière. It’s a sickness that’s hard to cure, as I know to my cost.’ He passes the list across the table. ‘He also has a mistress, a Mademoiselle Marguerite Pays, aged twenty-six, a registered prostitute in the Pigalle district, who goes by the name of “Four-Fingered Marguerite”.’
I can’t help laughing. ‘You’re not serious?’
Desvernine, the earnest former non-commissioned officer turned policeman, does not see the humour. ‘She’s from the Rouen area originally, daughter of a Calvados distiller, started work in a spinning factory when she was a kid, lost a finger in an accident and her job with it, moved to Paris, became an horizontale in the rue Victor-Masse, met Esterhazy last year either on the Paris–
Rouen train or at the Moulin Rouge – there are different versions depending on which of the girls you speak to.’
‘So this affair is common knowledge?’
‘Absolutely. He’s even set her up in an apartment: 49, rue de Douai, near Montmartre. Visits her every evening when he’s in town. She’s furnished it, but the lease is in his name. The girls at the Moulin Rouge call him “The Benefactor”.’
‘That kind of life can’t come cheap.’
‘He’s working every racket he can think of to keep it going. He’s even trying to join the board of a British company in London – which is a rum thing for a French officer to do, when you think about it.’
‘And where is his wife during all this?’
‘Either on her estate at Dommartin-la-Planchette in the Ardennes or at the apartment in Paris. He goes back to her after he’s finished with Marguerite.’
‘He seems to be a man to whom betrayal is second nature.’
‘I’d say so.’
‘What about the Germans? Any links there?’
‘I haven’t got anywhere on that yet.’
‘I wonder – perhaps we could follow him?’
‘We could,’ says Desvernine doubtfully, ‘but he’s a wary bird from what I’ve seen. He’d soon get wise to us.’
‘In that case, we can’t risk it. The last thing I need is to have a well-connected major complaining to the ministry that he’s being harassed.’
‘Our best bet would be to put a watch on the German Embassy, see if we can catch him there.’
‘I’d never get authorisation for that.’