A Man in Uniform (11 page)

“I will come again Monday,” she said as she rose to leave. “In the morning, now that I know your hours,” she added, recovering her usual sense of humor.

“I look forward to it,” he replied, and then asked, as an afterthought, “What does your friend think of this recent turn of events?”

“My friend?”

“The captain’s wife …”

“I … I haven’t spoken to her, haven’t been able to reach her,” she said. “What you must think of me, Maître! If I am upset, imagine her distress.”

What Dubon pondered were her red eyes. It occurred to him that she might be a family friend a bit fonder of the captain than of his wife.

“Where were you yesterday?” Madeleine demanded, peering quizzically at Dubon over the rim of her teacup.

“At the racetrack.”

“The racetrack? What were you doing there? You’ve never taken me to the racetrack.” Her tone was increasingly querulous.

“We can go to the racetrack anytime,” he replied agreeably. “Well, anytime this summer.” In the summertime, his wife’s absence from the city allowed him to integrate his schedule more fully with that of his mistress.

“Oh, I don’t know … maybe …”

Apparently, she didn’t really care about the racetrack, she just wanted to feel aggrieved by his absence the previous day. Dubon could not think why. Hadn’t he just agreed to give her more money?

He wondered what time it was but did not dare look at his watch. He had arrived a bit late at Madeleine’s door—his anxiety over the widow and then her appearance had delayed him finishing a letter to a client—and now he just wanted to get to the bedroom.

“Do come here, my dear,” he said, taking her cup out of her hands and placing it on the table beside him.

She sat there erect and unwelcoming, but did not resist as he drew her across the divan and started to pull at a tortoiseshell clasp that held her hair. She sighed as her locks fell to her shoulders and flipped them aside with an irritated hand.

He came home that evening to find Geneviève and André sitting in the salon, waiting for dinner. “Your brother not joining us?” he asked.

“No, he’s out.”

“Oh. But he will be here tomorrow?”

“I don’t think so. He is spending the day with Le Goff,” she said, naming an old friend of Jean-Jean’s.

“What about Sunday, then? Or the major, better yet, is he coming for Sunday lunch?”

His tone was brusque, and she looked surprised.

“Yes, they will all be here Sunday, the major and Mimi too.”

“Good, good. I look forward to it,” he said, jovial now.

“François, you don’t like my brothers. Why do you care if they are coming for Sunday lunch?”

“How can you say such a thing in front of André? You know I am very fond of his uncles.”

“You are polite and welcoming to them. Maman always praised you for that, for fitting in and overlooking our peculiarities. We can be overwhelming sometimes for outsiders, and you didn’t grow up in a big family.”

Indeed, Dubon was an only child, and his father, while successful at law, had no ambitions beyond his secure place in the bourgeoisie. Dubon sometimes resented Geneviève’s insistence on the size and uniqueness of her family; his much smaller one fell well below hers on the social register and he suspected that when she remarked on the differences in their backgrounds what she was really stressing was the aristocracy of hers. Certainly, if he had earned his late mother-in-law’s praise for fitting in, it was because he came unencumbered by embarrassingly bourgeois relations.

Still, Geneviève, to give her her due, was a clear-sighted woman who
was not given, unlike her three sisters, to flurries of false enthusiasm for family connections she did not actually like.

“There is a difference, however, between politeness and true affection,” she continued now, peering at him suspiciously.

“Do you think your uncles are peculiar, André?” Dubon asked of his son, who was picking at the braiding on a cushion, uninterested in his parents’ conversation.

“Oncle le Commandant is silly,” he offered promptly, “and Oncle le Capitaine is … well, he’s silly, but not as funny. He even manages to make guns sound boring.”

“But they are good chaps, all the same,” Dubon replied.

“And ma Tante Mimi is just stupid.”

His parents pounced.

“André, that is unnecessary,” said his mother, who tolerated honesty but never rudeness.

“Really,
mon petit,
” Dubon added. He should have known better than to ask the adolescent André his opinion of his relations. Goodness knows what the boy thought of his own dull, old father. Dubon’s history was completely unknown to his son. He was tempted to tell him sometimes, to fill the boy up with stories that could match the tales in the adventure books he so loved, but Geneviève would be appalled if she heard him. Events that had once seemed so exciting were now forbidden territory.

“Anyway,” Dubon continued, trying to take hold of the situation, “we’re family, and it will be very nice to see everyone here Sunday.”

“You have something up your sleeve,” Geneviève remarked.

“Just a question, a little business matter. I thought one or the other of them could explain a bit of military protocol to me,” Dubon replied, as Luc came into the room to announce dinner.

He had his chance to question his brothers-in-law on Sunday. He tried the younger one first because he had a moment alone with him in the salon before lunch. Jean-Jean still seemed uncharacteristically ebullient and replied enthusiastically when Dubon broached him with a question about the structure of the military.

“Fire away, Dubon. Ask whatever you like.”

“Came up at work the other day. I won’t bore you with the details, but there’s a military department called the Statistical Section. What do they do now, eh?”

Jean-Jean looked taken aback, and then blinked hard. After a long pause during which he seemed to consider his reply, he answered, “The Statistical Section? They compile military statistics.”

“What kind of statistics?”

“Um. Well, casualties and deaths, I guess, if there’s a war on. Or … number of men needed to do
X
or
Y
; number of loaves of bread eaten; average shoe size of French soldier … that kind of thing.”

“They need a whole section to do that?”

“Well, I guess it’s a small section … I really don’t know much about it.” He seemed his own awkward self and relieved to be interrupted by the arrival of the major and his wife, she of whose intelligence André had been so scornful.

The major quickly gravitated toward the men.

“Major, I was just asking a professional question,” Dubon continued. “Your brother was able to enlighten me a bit, but I’m still puzzled. There is a military department called the Statistical Section and I was wondering what kind of statistics—”

“Counterespionage, Dubon,” the major replied with a grin.

“Don’t tell him that,” Jean-Jean said. “If it were true, it would be classified.”

“Worst-kept secret in town. Everyone knows what they do over on the rue de Lille,” the major replied, at which point his younger brother retorted, “I want no part of this,” and stomped across the room.

The major grimaced at Dubon. “Some people never change.”

“He was awfully cheerful when he arrived on Thursday. Intimated there were some changes in his life or a move in the works … I even thought he might be in love.”

“We can only hope, eh?”

“You were telling me about the Statistical Section …”

“Yes, it can hardly be counted as a national secret. It’s where they run the counterespionage ops.”

“And what, excuse my ignorance, is counterespionage?”

“Well, you have spies, yes? Like that German and that Italian I introduced you to the other night. The military attachés, so-called.” Dubon nodded to indicate he recalled having met the two foreigners the night of the disastrous ball, and the major continued. “I guess we have our own in other countries too, I would imagine. Not like we French are so pure. Anyway, then you have fellows whose job it is to root them out. That’s what they actually do in the Statistical Section, try to see if they can figure out who is spying on us and stop them. You know the Jew that there has been all the fuss about in the papers this week, the spy on Devil’s Island?”

Dubon nodded again, anxious to hear what came next.

“It was the Statistical Section that originally caught him,” the major said. “I believe they are rather proud of it—guess that’s why everyone knows who they are now.”

That explained what Fournier had said at the racetrack. The Major Henry who had caught Dreyfus worked in the Statistical Section doing counterespionage. Maybe Dubon could find him.

“So the Statistical Section caught Dreyfus? How?” he asked his brother-in-law.

“Found the evidence. All pointed to one man, so off he goes to Guiana for the rest of his days, the bastard. No escaping that place, no matter what the papers say.” Noting Dubon’s interest, he asked, “Why? What did Jean-Jean tell you they did at the Statistical Section?”

“Something about collecting the shoe sizes of the troops.”

The major laughed.

Dubon was sitting in his office that Monday morning admiring the widow’s nose, or at least the bridge of it. There was a certain delicacy to the way it met her brow, creating a high arch above each eye that gave her an intelligent air when she was seriously considering an issue. She was not a woman to be trifled with, he suspected; a dalliance would be unwise.

She was restored to fighting spirit that morning and was busy plotting action. She wore a high-necked white blouse underneath a short and narrow-waisted jacket, its bottom hem descending sharply to a V just where her black skirts flared out across her body. It was a modest but flattering silhouette. Why didn’t he confess then and there that he didn’t have a clue how to go about uncovering a spy and pass her on to someone better qualified to help her?

She had arrived at nine, eager to discuss what she assumed would be strategy. He began gently, feeling that at least he had a better grasp of the situation since his conversations with the military correspondent Fournier and his own brother-in-law, but also knowing it did not look good for the captain.

“I am sorry to say, first of all, that most in the military seem to believe that your friend’s husband is guilty. I am not sure the false rumors of the captain’s escape have worked in your favor. On the one hand, they have brought the case back into the public eye, but on the other, they have allowed the press to reassure its readers that the government has the right man. I don’t see any impetus in the military to look any further as long as the public is satisfied that justice has been done.”

“But it hasn’t been done. That is why I came to you in the first place.” Her tone was disappointed. “With your reputation, Maître, I would have thought a case like this would cry out to you, but perhaps you are just not interested, perhaps …”

It was a bit embarrassing the way she kept returning to his reputation, considering how long ago all that work had been. When he did not respond immediately, she made a little movement to rise from her chair.

“No, no, Madame.” He reached out to forestall her. He didn’t want her to leave. He liked seeing her sitting there; he liked talking to her, and, he had to confess to himself, he liked the idea that he might be about to run out and solve the captain’s case—he just wished he could think how. He wanted to hand her something that would make her grateful to him.

“I have made some initial inquiries as to where the case against the captain originates. If we are going to dismantle it, it will be helpful to know how it was built. The court martial was based on certain documents that investigators intercepted indicating there was a spy in French ranks offering secrets to the Germans.”

She leaned forward eagerly now, as though following his reasoning.

Encouraged, Dubon continued. “The investigation would have originated in a secret department known as the Statistical Section. It is disguised as the military’s statistical research arm, but it is responsible for counterespionage.” Warming to his theme, Dubon repeated to the widow all that his brother-in-law had told him of how the Statistical Section operated.