De Vèze realises that his sentences are too complicated, two and a half pages, he feeds them into the shredder and settles for a three-line letter of resignation, it’s the answer to everything, he drops his letter in the internal mail and leaves the building, giving the porter a doll as a present for his little girl who is sick.
He is alone, nothing seems to mean much, Jug Ears was right when he’d said ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ more than ten years ago. Today, there are only lies, and it’s the laughter of Jug Ears in Singapore parodying the man de Vèze had come to meet, it is that old laughter which now has the colour of truth.
De Vèze decides to walk upriver along the quais of the Seine, as far as Notre-Dame, he passes the Pont de la Concorde, goes down the steps to the river bank to escape the traffic, he has plenty of time now, he can travel, follow his nose, or not, it’s too late, he should have started earlier, he’ll give it a go, buy a sailing boat or become an ethnologist, just take off somewhere, is he still fit enough for it? Or maybe write a book to escape the pack, to get away from the bastards, a bit late for that too, writing, de Vèze has missed out on so much, it’s not easy to start telling stories when all your pen has under its belt is thirty years of diplomatic report-writing, and people like jovial Jug Ears from Singapore who could have stepped out of a stage farce and tell you with a laugh that it’s all over, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ people who mess up their lives and then give you the benefit of their failures.
‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ De Vèze walks under the Palais Royal bridge, sharp smells, there’s no one around, he shouts so he can hear the echo bounce back off the arch of stone and girders, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’ and in the echo he seems to hear once more the voice of Jug Ears, like the crack of a whip, just like that first time.
Resigning wasn’t a very clever move, it’s what they expected him to do, by handing in his resignation he has allowed a page to be turned, poor de Vèze, a casualty of the Berthier affair, and anyway it was his own fault, his wandering prick, in this profession you can’t be too careful.
The trap had been laid a long time before, Moscow, it was no accident, he’d been fingered, and he must have met the man who’d fingered him. One day, a note had been made about him: a man who puts it about a lot, that’s how it must have started, a ladies’ man, plenty to say for himself, already in a senior post, a track record which will ensure that he’ll go even higher, a juicy target, de Vèze would very much like to meet up again with the man who’d fingered him.
He’s enjoying this walk along the Seine, a corridor, with a wind blowing along it chasing all that city smog away, de Vèze has now reached the Pont des Arts, he can see the île de la Cité, the statue of Henri IV on his horse, it’s de Vèze’s favourite, he halts for a moment in front of it.
The French continued to look for the mole, without creating as much upheaval, but they didn’t give up, the mole must have been part of an estimated circle of three hundred people, this was judged too small, so it was extended to six hundred.
One day, the Americans sent Paris a copy of a Russian document brought out of Moscow by a defector, an excellent survey of ten years of friction between France and her allies, very methodical, with high-grade information on NATO which should never have gone outside the family, one of the deputy directors of the CIA flew specially to Paris to discuss this document, a man named Walker, Richard F. T. Walker, a man who put his questions casually:
‘Is what the Russians claim you’re saying about us true? Is that really what you think of us? Or is it what the Russians would like you to think about us and you do genuinely think about us? Or is it what you say when you know the Russians are listening, so that we get the idea that you’re doing it on purpose and we finally start trusting you? It’s an amusing game, but you’ve got to come clean and tell us once and for all, because it’s bizarre that the Russians think that you aren’t a very easy ally to have, even though you’ve broken with Gaullist foreign policy, as your President has confirmed several times, personally, to ours.’
Walker, very Princeton, all tweed and corduroy:
‘You know, what we can’t figure out in this Russian document, yes, it’s authentic, we checked it out, it cost two or three lives, notably the defector’s father, anyway what’s bugging us isn’t the general political anecdotal material, no, but in it there is also intelligence about France’s view of the weakness of NATO’s southern flank, those shoot-outs between the Greeks and the Turks, the detail is too specific, the cliché of the nation of talkers, did you really say those things? You need to keep tabs on your military, otherwise we’ll have to start looking up their asses, back home there’s some of our people think we should take a closer look at your President, but they’re neanderthals.’
Assurances were made to the Americans, they were given guarantees, more strenuous efforts were made to investigate the military, and the military began looking at the non-military, the whole business started up again, out of control, some slack had to be put into the loop.
To complicate matters, there were two suicides in the circle of the six hundred, they kept a lot of people busy for very little return, the first one had wearied of counting his multiplying malignant tumours and the other had almost certainly suffered some terrible blow, the sort that makes you shake and sob before making the most anodyne of phone calls, and you chew your fingernails down to the quick and you promise that starting tomorrow you’ll leave your nails alone, you cry, you swallow a dose of Optalidon. Everything, except a lead.
They couldn’t see a thing, like owls at noon, so the other hypothesis was revived, that there was no mole, that the mole was an invention of the paranoid minds who ran counter-espionage, people who dreamed of spies the way other paranoid persons imagine that their child has been killed so that they can unleash on the killers all the tortures they’ve been dreaming of ever since they stopped being children, a phantom mole which did ten times more damage than a real one, in any case he wasn’t called a mole any more, they called him a traitor, someone lived behind his name just as he existed behind an unsilvered mirror.
He’d been a traitor since at least the start of the 1960s, they said ‘mole’ in English, their way of using a word to cover the slime of the thing, as if it were a cartoon, good-natured large bulldog, gleaming tan coat, who slips a stick of dynamite in a hole in the lawn and waits, and the little grey mole pops up out of another hole with the dynamite in its jaws and puts it down with a tee-hee just behind the bulldog, and the bulldog goes up with a ‘Bang!’, falls back down to earth, is flattened, then sets off in even hotter pursuit of the mole over five keys of a piano, it’s one gag after another, the bulldog is so angry, turns red in the face, digs hundreds of holes in the lawn to chase the mole away then his master returns and lays about the bulldog who turns grey, and in the end the mole offers the bulldog, now a great big placid sleepyhead, a safe shelter at the bottom of the garden, ‘that’s all, folks!’, a rather effective metaphor.
In Paris, no one used metaphors now, they said plain ‘traitor’, and twelve bullets were heard, whistling in the wind.