An Officer and a Spy

I sleep very little that night. I sweat and turn and twist on my narrow bed, corrugating the sheets until it feels as if I am lying on stones. The windows are open to try to circulate some air, but all they admit is the noise of the city. In my insomnia I end up counting the distant chimes of the church clocks every hour from midnight until six. Finally I drop off to sleep, only to be woken thirty minutes later by the hoarse horn blasts of the early morning tramway cars. I dress and go downstairs and walk up the street to the bar on the corner of the rue Copernic. I have no appetite for anything more substantial than black coffee and a cigarette. I look at Le Figaro. An area of high pressure off the south-west coast of Ireland is moving across the British Isles, the Netherlands and Germany. The details of the Tsar’s forthcoming visit to Paris have yet to be announced. General Billot, the Minister of War, is 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.