‘Oh no, don’t desert – if you desert I’d have to shoot you.’ He gets up to stretch his legs – a big, lithe man, despite his years. A fighter, I think, not a desk man. He prowls up and down the veranda, frowning, and then stops to look out across the garden. I can’t name all the flowers – jasmine I recognise, and cyclamen, and dianthus. He notices me looking. ‘You like it?’
‘It’s very fine.’
‘I planted it myself. Prefer this country to France now, oddly. Don’t think I’ll go back when I retire.’ He falls silent and then says fiercely, ‘You know what I can’t stand, Colonel? I can’t abide the way the General Staff dump their rubbish out here. No offence to you, but every malcontent and deviant and well-bred cretin in the army gets sent my way, and I can tell you that I’m just about sick of it!’ He taps his foot on the wooden boards, thinking things over. ‘Do you give me your word that you’ve done nothing criminal or immoral – that you’ve simply fallen foul of those desk-generals in the rue Saint-Dominique?’
‘On my honour.’
He sits down at his desk and starts writing. ‘Is a week enough?’
‘A week is all I need.’
‘I don’t want to know what you’re up to,’ he says, still writing, ‘so don’t let’s talk about it. I shan’t inform the ministry that you’ve left Tunisia. If and when they find out, I propose to tell them that I’m a soldier, not a gaoler. But I won’t lie, you understand?’ He finishes his writing, blows on the ink and hands the letter to me. It is official permission for Lieutenant Colonel Picquart of the 4th Tunisian Rifles to leave the country on compassionate leave, signed by the General Officer Commanding, Tunisia. It is the first official help I have been offered. I have tears in my eyes, but Leclerc affects not to notice.
The passenger ferry for Marseille is scheduled to leave Tunis at noon the next day. A clerk at the steamship company’s office tells me (‘with profound regret, my Colonel’) that the list is already full; I have to bribe him twice – first to allot me a tiny two-berth cabin all to myself, and then to keep my name off the passenger manifest. I stay overnight in a pension near the docks and go aboard early, dressed in civilian clothes. Despite the sweltering African midsummer I can’t linger on deck and risk being recognised. I go below and lock my door, strip naked and lie on the lower bunk, dripping sweat. I am reminded of Dreyfus and his description of his warship anchoring off Devil’s Island: I had to wait nearly four days in this tropical heat, shut close in my cell, without once going upon deck. By the time the engines start, my own metal cell is as hot as a Turkish bath. The surfaces vibrate as we slip our moorings. Through the porthole I watch the coast of Africa recede. Only when we are out at sea and I can see nothing except the blue of the Mediterranean do I wrap a towel around my waist, summon the steward and ask him to bring me some food and drink.
I have packed a Russian–French dictionary, and a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, which I set to work translating, propped up on my bunk bed, the two books balanced on my knees, my pencil and paper beside me. The work soaks up the time and even the heat. To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things . . .
At midnight, when the vessel seems quiet, I venture up the iron staircase and step cautiously out on to the deck. The momentum of the ship provides a warm northerly breeze of thirteen knots. I walk to the prow and raise my face to it, drinking it in. There is blackness ahead and to either side. The only light is above: a wash of stars and a moon that scuds in and out of cloud and seems to be racing us. A male passenger stands nearby, leaning over the rail, talking quietly to one of the crew. Behind me I hear footsteps and turn to see the glowing red tip of a cigar approaching. I move on quickly, down the other side of the ship to the stern, where I watch our wake for a while, flickering like a comet’s tail. But when I see the cigar again, disembodied in the dark, I go below and make my way along the passageway to my cabin, where I stay for the remainder of the voyage.
We dock in Marseille in the late afternoon of the following day in a summer downpour. It seems an ominous welcome home. I hurry straight to the gare Saint-Charles and buy a ticket on the first available train to Paris, conscious that this is my moment of maximum vulnerability. I must assume that Savignaud has reported my visit to Tunis, and also by now my subsequent failure to return to Sousse. Therefore it’s possible that Gonse and Henry will have worked out that I am on my way back to Paris. All they need to do is ask Leclerc. If I were Henry, I would have telegraphed the Prefécture of Police in Marseille and asked him to keep watch at the station, just in case.
I linger under the station clock with my head buried in a newspaper until just before seven, when I hear the whistle blow and the Paris train begins to move. I grab my suitcase, run through the ticket barrier, weave past the guard, who tries to stop me, and sprint along the platform. I wrench open the rearmost door of the train, feeling the strain on my arm socket as the locomotive gathers momentum. I throw in my suitcase, increase my pace and narrowly manage to scramble aboard and slam the door behind me. I lean out of the window and look back. There is a man fifty metres behind on the platform, a thickset, bare-headed fellow in a brown suit, who has just missed the train and is leaning forward with his hands on his knees, recovering his breath, being reproached by the guard. But whether he is an ordinary passenger who arrived too late or an agent of the Sûreté who was on my tail I have no way of knowing.
The carriages are crowded. I have to walk almost the entire length of the train to find a compartment where I can squeeze into a corner seat. My fellow passengers are businessmen, mostly, and a priest, and an army major who keeps glancing in my direction, even though I am not wearing my uniform, as if he recognises a fellow soldier. I don’t stow my suitcase overhead but keep it on my lap as a precaution should I fall asleep. And indeed, despite my nervous tension, as the day fades, lulled by the motion of the train, I do drop off, only to be jerked awake repeatedly throughout the night whenever we pull into a gas-lit station or someone enters or leaves the compartment. Eventually it is the early June daybreak that rouses me, the light falling drab and grey, like a film of ash spread over the southern outskirts of the city.
I move towards the very front of the train, so that at five in the morning, as we pull into the gare de Lyon, I am the first to disembark. I hurry across the deserted concourse, my eyes darting in all directions, but all I can see are a few ragged men, les ramasseux de mégots, gathering cigarette butts in order to sell the tobacco. I tell the taxi driver, ‘16, rue Cassette,’ and sink down low in my seat. A quarter of an hour later we are skirting the Jardin du Luxembourg and turning into the narrow street. As I pay the fare, I glance in either direction: no one is about.
On the second floor I knock on the apartment door: loudly enough to wake the occupants but not so loud, I hope, that I terrify them. Unfortunately no one can be roused from their bed at five-thirty in the morning without experiencing dread. I see it in my sister’s eyes the moment she opens the door, clutching her nightdress to her throat, and finds me there exhausted and engrimed with the dust and smell of Africa.
Jules Gay, my brother-in-law, boils a kettle to make coffee while Anna fusses around in the children’s old bedroom, making it fit for me to sleep in. They are a couple on their own together now, pushing sixty; I can tell they are glad to take me in, to have someone to look after.
Over coffee I say, ‘I’d prefer it if no one knew I was here, if that’s all right with you both?’
They exchange glances. Jules replies, ‘Of course. We can be discreet.’
‘If anyone comes to the door asking for me, you should tell them you don’t know where I am.’
Anna says, only half jokingly, ‘Good heavens! You haven’t deserted, have you, Georges?’
‘The one person I do need to see is Louis Leblois. Would you be kind enough to take a message to him, asking if he could call round as soon as possible? But tell him he m
ustn’t mention to anyone that I’m here.’
‘So you only want to talk to your lawyer?’ Jules laughs. ‘That’s not a good sign.’ It’s the closest he comes to an expression of curiosity.
After breakfast he goes off to work, and then later Anna leaves to find Louis. I prowl around the apartment, examining its contents – the crucifix above the marital bed, the family bible, the Meissen porcelain figures that used to belong to my grandmother in Strasbourg and which somehow survived the siege. I peer out of the windows at the front of the apartment, which overlook the rue Cassette, and then at the rear where there is a public garden: that is where I would station a man if I were watching the house – with a small pocket telescope he could record every movement. I am unable to sit still. The most quotidian sounds of Parisian life – children playing in the park, the clip-clop of traffic, the cry of a hawker – seem charged with menace.
Anna returns and says that Louis will come as soon as he can get away from court. She cooks me an omelette for lunch and I tell her about life in Sousse as if I have been on some exotic grand tour – the narrow stone alleyways of the old Arab town unaltered since the days of the Phoenicians, the hot stink of tethered sheep on the street corners waiting to be slaughtered, the foibles of the tiny French community, only eight hundred souls out of nineteen thousand. ‘No culture,’ I complain. ‘No one to talk to. Nothing Alsatian to eat. My God, how I hate it!’
She laughs. ‘And I suppose you’ll tell me next they’ve never even heard of Wagner.’ But she doesn’t ask how I ended up there.
At four, Louis arrives. He crosses the carpet on his dainty feet and we embrace. The mere sight of him helps restore my nerve. His trim figure and beard, his neat appearance, his mild voice, his economical gestures – all convey an air of supreme competence. ‘Leave it to me,’ his personage seems to say. ‘I have made a study of all that is difficult in this world, I have mastered it, and I am ready to place my mastery at your disposal for an appropriate fee.’ Even so, I feel I have a duty to warn him what he might be getting into. So after I have fetched my suitcase from the children’s bedroom, and Anna has made tea and discreetly withdrawn from the sitting room, I sit with the case on my lap and my thumbs poised on the locks and say, ‘Listen, Louis, before I go any further, you ought to be aware that for us merely to have this conversation could put you in some danger.’
‘Physical danger?’
‘No, not that – I’m sure not that. But professional danger – political danger. It could become all-consuming.’ Louis frowns at me. ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say is that once you start on this I can’t promise you where it may end. And you need to be aware of that now.’
‘Oh do shut up, Georges, and tell me what all this is about.’
‘Well, if you’re quite certain.’ I press my thumbs on the locks and open the suitcase. ‘It’s difficult to know where to start. You remember I came to see you in the middle of November, to tell you I was going away?’
‘Yes, for a couple of days or so you said.’
‘It was a trap.’ From a false compartment at the bottom of the case I take out a wedge of papers. ‘First of all I was sent by the General Staff to Châlons to inspect intelligence procedures in the 6th Corps. Then I was told I would have to go straight on to Nancy to write a report on the 7th as well. Naturally I asked for permission to return to Paris, for a few hours at least, just to pick up some clean clothes. That was turned down flat by telegram – you see?’ I hand it over. ‘All these letters I’ve kept are from my immediate superior, General Charles-Arthur Gonse, ordering each move – there are fourteen. From Nancy I was sent to Besançon. Then to Marseille. Then to Lyon. Then to Briançon. Then back to Lyon again, where I fell ill. This is the letter I received from Gonse while I was there: I’m sorry that you are suffering, but I hope that after resting in Lyon you will regain your strength. Meanwhile prepare yourself to depart for Marseille and Nice . . .’
‘And all this time you were not permitted to return to Paris, not even for a day?’
‘See for yourself.’
Louis takes the handful of letters and scans them, frowning. ‘But this is ridiculous . . .’
‘I was told I would be meeting the Minister of War over Christmas in Marseille, but he didn’t turn up. Instead I was ordered to sail directly for Algeria – that was at the end of last year – to reorganise intelligence. And then a month after I got to Algeria I was ordered to Tunisia. Once I was in Tunisia I was transferred out of my old regiment and into a native outfit. Suddenly it wasn’t an inspection trip any more: it was a permanent posting to the colonies.’
‘You must have complained, I assume?’
‘Of course. Gonse simply wrote back telling me to stop sending him so many letters: You just have to let things go and gain satisfaction from serving a regiment in Africa. Effectively, I’d been exiled.’
‘Did they give you a reason?’
‘They didn’t have to. I knew what it was. I was being punished.’
‘Punished for what?’
I take a breath. It still feels almost sacrilegious to say it aloud. ‘For having discovered that Captain Dreyfus is innocent.’
‘Ah.’ Louis looks at me, and for once even his mask of professional detachment seems to crack very slightly. ‘Ah, yes, I can see that would do it.’
I hand Louis the envelope that is to be delivered to the President in the event of my death. He pulls a face as he reads the inscription. I suppose he considers it melodramatic, the sort of device one might encounter in a railway ‘thriller’. I would have felt the same until a year ago. Now I have come to see that thrillers may sometimes contain more truths than all Monsieur Zola’s social realism put together.
I say, ‘Go ahead.’ I light a cigarette and watch his expression as he takes out the letter. He reads the opening paragraph aloud: ‘I, the undersigned Marie-Georges Picquart, Lieutenant Colonel with the 4th Colonial Infantrymen, formerly head of the secret intelligence service at the Ministry of War, certify on my honour the accuracy of the following information, which in the interests of truth and justice it is impossible to “stifle”, as has been attempted . . .’ His voice trails off. He frowns, and then glances at me.
I say, ‘There’s still time to stop, if you don’t want to get involved. I wouldn’t blame you for a moment. But I warn you: if you continue beyond that paragraph, you will be in the same predicament I am.’
‘Well now you make it sound quite irresistible.’ He continues reading, but silently, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth as he scans the lines. When he’s finished, he blows out his cheeks in a sigh, then leans back in his chair and closes his eyes. ‘How many copies of this letter exist?’
‘Only that one.’
‘God! Only this? And you carried it all the way from Tunisia?’ He shakes his head in dismay. ‘Well, the first thing you’ll have to do is to copy it out at least twice more. We shall need three copies as an absolute minimum. What else do you have in that old suitcase of yours?’
‘There’s this,’ I say, giving him my original report to Boisdeffre: ‘Intelligence Service note on Major Esterhazy, 74th Infantry’. ‘And there are these’ – my earlier exchange of letters with Gonse, after I had been out to see him in the country, in which he urges me not to extend my enquiries from Esterhazy to Dreyfus. ‘There’s also this’ – the letter from Henry revealing the existence of an inquiry into my behaviour as chief of the Statistical Section.
Louis reads them quickly and with complete absorption. When he has finished, he sets them aside and looks at me with great seriousness. ‘The question I ask all my clients at the outset, Georges – and that is what you are now, by the way, although heaven knows how I’m ever going to be paid – the question I always ask my clients is: what do you want to achieve from this?’
‘I want to see justice done – that above all. I’m anxious that the army should emerge from this scandal with as little damage as possible: I still love the army. And on a selfish note,
I’d like to have my career restored.’
‘Ha! Well, you might conceivably achieve one of those, or by a miracle two, but three is quite impossible! I assume there’s no one in the military hierarchy who would take up the struggle alongside you?’
‘That’s not the way the army works. Unfortunately, we are dealing with four of the most senior officers in the country – the Minister of War, the Chief of the General Staff, the Head of Military Intelligence and the Commander of the 4th Army Corps – that’s Mercier’s command these days – and all four of them are implicated in this affair to a greater or lesser extent, not to mention the entire secret intelligence section. Don’t misunderstand me, Louis. The army isn’t completely rotten. There are plenty of good and honourable men in the High Command. But if it came to it they would all put the interests of the army first. Certainly none of them is going to want to bring the temple crashing down around their ears, just for the sake of a – well . . .’ I hesitate.
‘A Jew?’ suggests Louis. I make no response. ‘Well,’ he continues, ‘if we can’t approach someone in the army with the facts, then what else can we do?’
I am about to reply when there is a loud knocking at the door. Something about the force of it, the implied sense of entitlement, warns me this is official: police. Louis opens his mouth to speak, but I hold up a silencing hand. I walk quietly over to the sitting-room door, which is glass-paned with lace curtains, and peer round the edge, just as Anna, smoothing her skirts, walks down the passage from the kitchen. She catches my eye, nods to show she knows what she has to do, then opens the front door.
I can’t see who is standing there, but I can hear him – a heavy male voice: ‘Excuse me, madame, is Colonel Picquart here?’
‘No. Why would he be? This isn’t his apartment.’
‘Do you happen to know where he is?’