De Vèze did not speak up too strongly for his military attaches, he’d never got on particularly well with them, they were drunks happy to be in Russia, the Alsatian finally arrives, he was called Baby, sleek black and tan coat, forty kilos of aggression, trained the hard way, he cocked his leg against the furniture, three drops each time as a marker, he sniffed around, marked, then sniffed some more. He was on the prowl.
One morning, he sniffed out a dachshund belonging to one of the officers, the dachshund stood its ground, as it did whenever it encountered a dog on a lead, it barked and stood its ground, Baby didn’t bark, he wasn’t on a lead, he upended the dachshund, he tried to rip its stomach open and the dachshund bit his bits from underneath, even an Alsatian trained the hard way gives his first thought to saving his bits, it was this that saved the dachshund, they were separated and then the Alsatian forgot all about cocaine and his three years of training, all he could think of was finding the dachshund and resuming their discussion, he went sniffing for him everywhere and drooled and peed every time he got a faint whiff of dachshund, at least this raised a laugh, and nobody found any cocaine.
All departments in the Moscow Embassy stood their ground, this isn’t the place where you’ll find traitors, moles winkle their way into your ranks, they’re in counter-espionage like you, take the English, they have counter-spies to spy on spies, you recruit them any old how, Zorros and Pieds Nickelés, and when they’re any good they use their skills to play a double game, even a triple hand, they’re unstable types, here you’ll only find people with traditional loyalties whom you can trust, straight-up people, some of them ram-rod stiff, but no dimwits, complete confidence, I can answer for all my colleagues.
Such solidarity! Wonderful! Berthier fiddled with his quadruple-clicking biro and revived his threatening sorrows, he put up with everything and got nothing, zilch, when he was weary of probing hearts and souls he turned his attention to walls and floors, then began a new round of interviews, but all he got were vague words and generalities.
They’d fob him off with generalities and he would canter off down the corridors on his hobby-horse, his questionnaire, only to be handed more generalities, there are far fewer spies about than people think, true sometimes there’s loose talk, but don’t make a big espionage thing out of the titbits anyone can read in the newspaper and repeat at cocktail parties, those are generalities, we can’t avoid having conversations with the Russians if we want to know what’s going on in Moscow or the country at large, what you’ve got to look at is the bottom line: we know a great deal about what goes on here, we’ve got to be trusted, we are people with traditional loyalties, with a sense of what’s right, when I say ‘we’ I’m talking about people who have made this their career, the tenured staff.
These generalities were intended to make Berthier go to hell, and go away Berthier did, though he stayed within the Embassy, focusing on the non-tenured staff, saying where he’d come from and even which of their colleagues had sent him, or without saying so in so many words but letting the non-tenured staff work out who the bastard could be, because the harder you look the greater the need to believe in what you’re looking for, and there are people who really believed that some bastard had dropped them in it.
Or if they didn’t, they suspected that whoever was winding Berthier up by sending him away to get lost, i.e., in their direction, that someone was taking the piss, and they did the same, but a few of them started half-believing, A, what other people said about them, that they weren’t as trustworthy as they thought, and B, what they themselves said about other people, though nothing ever went beyond the level of generalities, but no one much cared for any of these proceedings.
Berthier was told that his shabby little game would get him nowhere, and it didn’t get him anywhere, a few titbits of gossip, people were above all that sort of thing, absolutely, an acerbic note in the voice, opinions changed about certain individuals of whom no one would ever have believed that they were so, oh, mum’s the word, but we were above all that, we were happy just to pat the ball back, we saw clean through Berthier’s little game and through everybody’s little game, it was all so transparent, we retained our dignity, at least I’m not sleeping with just anybody, I never go out just anywhere, and Berthier starts peeking into the movements of those who do not sleep alone and those who go out, right, though at least you don’t see those people hanging about the Embassy after office hours.
Berthier also questions the ones who stay late at the office, he tells them why he thought of questioning them a second or third time, still no names but a hot potato circulating at an ever increasing speed, keep alert, every man for himself, and not a closed door anywhere, no one dares shut himself up in his office any more, unless it’s Berthier who closes the door, everybody remains on formal terms with everybody else, but no one really speaks to anybody and there are fewer contacts.
No one even dares go round with a hat collecting for a birthday or the rota for watering the indoor plants, so the plants shrivel, they are neglected, especially the papyrus on the second floor, the big one, the one on the landing by the window that needs so much watering, a papyrus in Moscow is not just any old plant, but with water it’s possible, after all its name is ‘feet-in-water’, also a papyrus needs to be talked to, that’s right, even plants need to be talked to, that was the view taken by Madame Cramilly, in the passport office, and by a few others too, including a man in security, but they were less forthright than Madame Cramilly in expressing their opinions in public on the real needs of certain house plants and notably the papyrus.
Besides, Madame Cramilly is not extreme in her views, it’s true she talks to the papyrus, whispers to it while she’s watering it or giving it a helping of the fertiliser which she arranges to have brought in the diplomatic bag, she speaks slowly but no one has ever made out what she says to it, when she’s in a confidential mood she readily admits that she talks to the papyrus but mark this: she’s never said that the papyrus talks back, it’s not a dialogue, mischievous tongues allege that she has conversations with the papyrus, but that’s outright slander, a bit of own-back because a few years ago she refused to contribute to the cost of a coffee machine to be installed in the office of Mademoiselle Legeais, whom she doesn’t like, why her office? Because hers is the biggest, but Mademoiselle Legeais smokes like a man who has just hours to live, the image is admittedly brutal but that’s how she smokes, she lights each cigarette with the previous one except when she intends to remove the filter from a cigarette, in which case she waits, she reckons that everything they say about tobacco is hooey, but that doesn’t stop her waiting. When she has decided to remove the filter from her next cigarette, when she waits, everyone knows that she is going to remove the filter.
Madame Cramilly would never have set foot in her office where, to boot, people talk aimlessly, the coffee machine was a pretty low tactic aimed at Madame Cramilly who would have refused to go anywhere near it, so there is no coffee machine in Mademoiselle Legeais’s office, no machine for making real espresso, a machine that works like the ones you see behind the counters in bars, they have several percolators, they cost a fortune.
At least thirty of you would need to club together, but even with the tax-free advantages of the diplomatic service, even a machine with only two percolators, and there is a really big difference in price between the two- and three-percolator types, the model offering best value-for-money according to Mademoiselle Legeais’s consumer magazine was the one with two percolators, it would have worked with a bit of organisation, actually, that’s wrong, actually it wasn’t too expensive, though you could manage very nicely with two percolators, but faced by the cabal unleashed by La Cramilly it had not been possible to arrange a proper collection, Mademoiselle Legeais had only been able to purchase a machine which used paper filters, and there were already a lot of those in the Embassy, the big model, it’s not exactly dishwater but it sure is no match for the percolator. And ever since then, the Legeais faction has never missed an opportunity to be nasty about Madame Cramilly.