A Man in Uniform (19 page)

Dubon turned and walked back out to the street. A few doors farther up the boulevard, he passed a baker’s stall where he stopped and ducked his head under the green-and-gray-striped awning to buy himself a pastry. The awning hung low, blocking his peripheral vision, and it was just as he was finishing his transaction and emerging from underneath it that he found his path blocked by a wall of dark clothing. He looked up to find himself face-to-face with the large forms of General Fiteau and his wife. At least, he presumed it was Madame Fiteau at the general’s side, although he could not see anything of the lady’s face for the black veil wrapped around her hat.

The general was staring straight at him. Dubon felt his innards seized by panic and the adrenaline flowing into his legs, tightening his muscles as they prepared to run. He fought the instinct and rocked back on his heels to compensate for the way he had pitched forward. The general had recognized him; a look of puzzlement spread across his face. There was nothing to do but to play along.

“Mon Générale!” Dubon barked, saluting sharply with one hand, while the other surreptitiously nudged the twist of paper containing his pastry back onto the edge of the baker’s table.

The general returned his salute and there was a moment of silence. Dubon could hear his own pulse beating inside his ears. Was the general not going to say something at least? Dubon, belatedly remembering himself, bowed to Madame Fiteau.

“Madame.”

There was a murmur of reply from beneath the veil.

This was doubly difficult, Dubon thought. He had to dream up some explanation for his uniform—maybe he could suggest some silly family joke was being played on Jean-Jean—and he had to offer condolences.

“May I say, Madame, how very sorry Madame Dubon and I, that
is, how very sad we were to hear of your loss …” Goodness, he was babbling. He and Geneviève had hardly needed to hear of the Fiteaus’ loss; they had been standing right there when it happened. He tried again. “That is, how very sorry we are for your loss.” There he had said it. There was no point dwelling on it. Singing the praises of the young Fiteau would only sound insincere under the circumstances. Again there was but a faint murmur from underneath the veil. The general pressed his wife’s arm closer to his side and patted it with his free hand.

“Thank you, Dubon. Kind of you. Just out taking the air, you know. Told Marthe we must get out,” he said awkwardly, before changing the topic. “I have never seen you in uniform before. I did not know you were in the reserves.”

“Uh, no.” What did he mean? The reserves …

“It’s much appreciated, Dubon,” the general said, drawing himself taller. “It’s so hard to attract good officers to the reserves. Well, I am sure I don’t need to tell you that.”

Of course, the reserves. Amateurs. Playing at being soldiers a few weeks a year and then returning to their regular jobs. Thank God. The general had just handed him an excellent excuse.

“One does like to do one’s duty,” Dubon mumbled.

“But we never see you in your uniform. You should be proud of it. We certainly encourage wearing it on official occasions.”

“Of course, of course. It’s just, you know, with my wife’s family. I am an amateur among professionals. I prefer to maintain my civilian identity. Don’t want my brothers to think I am competing.”

“I see, I see,” the general said, but his tone was skeptical.

Their conversation felt stilted, but Dubon couldn’t tell if this was his own nerves, their grief, or the general’s puzzlement over his uniform. The man maintained his hand on his wife’s arm but what had looked at first like affection now appeared more and more to Dubon like physical restraint, as though he were keeping her from bolting or falling down. There was a slight but persistent sound from under the veil, a quiet sort of gulping, and Dubon realized that the woman was crying.

“I must take Madame Fiteau home now. Good day,” the general said abruptly.

“Madame.” Dubon bowed slightly, and then saluted the general again, standing aside to let them pass.

As he did so, Madame Fiteau pitched herself at him, clutching Dubon with her free arm. Her voice was a desperate whisper from under the veil.

“Geneviève said you could help. Please. Find out who killed him.”

“Marthe!” The General pulled her back toward him. “Good day to you, Dubon,” he said almost fiercely as he hurried her away.

Dubon turned back to the baker’s table and picked up his pastry. He unwrapped it and bit into it as he started walking back down the boulevard in the opposite direction, but he barely noticed what he was chewing, and by the time he got to the door of the Statistical Section he discovered that the whole thing had vanished without his having registered its taste.

With a pleasant sensation of familiarity, Dubon dusted off the cover of a large leather ledger. Here, at least, was something he knew. He was trying to banish the anxious question that was nagging at him—what would happen when the general mentioned to some friend or family member that good old Dubon had a secret career as a reservist?—by returning to the mysterious files. He should have examined this ledger on top of the filing cabinet first, for he quickly recognized its function. It was a file log; some larger law firms used the system too. Every file that was removed had to be signed out by an officer, with the date recorded; the clerk signed it back in when it was returned. The arrival or creation of new files was also dutifully noted.

The log showed the comings and goings of exotic animals, gemstones, and monuments, but the main thing it revealed to Dubon was that the Statistical Section seemed to do very little work. There had been no entries since he arrived and the entries that preceded his arrival showed little activity from one month’s end to the next. In the previous months of 1897, perhaps two dozen files—including monkeys, camels, diamonds, rubies, Saint-Denis, and Saint-Michel—had been
consulted. The year of 1896 did not look as though it had been any busier. Did the main business of the Statistical Section lie elsewhere? He noted that the German documents he had given to Hermann never returned to him to be filed, nor did the French ones.

He was standing at the cabinet puzzling over this when Gingras came back, whistling to himself as he sauntered through the door. He paused at the desk, always ready to chat, and Dubon decided he would risk asking. Surely as a new clerk he could pretend ignorance of the code.

“Gingras, I’ve been meaning to ask you—this filing system …”

“Major gave you a copy of the book, did he?” Gingras asked, nodding in the direction of Henry’s office door.

“No, actually,” Dubon said, lowering his voice.

Gingras laughed. “What have you been doing for the past three days if you can’t file all the junk?”

“I … well, I didn’t like to ask the major,” Dubon said, more quietly still. “He was rather preoccupied the day I arrived.”

“More like ferocious, but it’s all bluster, you know,” Gingras replied as loudly as ever, ignoring Dubon’s attempts at discretion. “Anyway, you can always ask me. Back in a minute,” he added over his shoulder as he now headed down the corridor toward his office.

He reemerged moments later with a small notebook in his hand.

“Ever seen one of these before?” He handed the notebook to Dubon.

“No, I don’t believe I have.”

Dubon skimmed through it. It contained a list of dates with a word beside each one. He recognized the words as the file names, following broad categories—monuments of France, biblical names, animals, flowers. Scribbled in pencil beside each one was what appeared to be a legitimate file name, so that Chartres was
Germany—Armaments
and Rouen was
Germany—Berlin Agents
.

“What is it?”

“It’s an old codebook, from the war. Those are keywords. I use them to provide code names for these files.”

“Ah.” Dubon turned the little book over in his hand.

“How much do you know about ciphers?” Gingras asked.

Dubon hesitated. How much might he be expected to know about ciphers?

“Not really my area,” he tried.

“We’ve got even more sophisticated ones now, but during the war they were still using the Vigenère cipher.”

“Of course,” said Dubon, who hadn’t the least notion what the Vigenère cipher might be. As he hoped, Gingras was all too happy to explain.

“It’s a multiple alphabetic cipher. Each letter of a message is encoded using a different letter of a keyword. In a simple alphabetic cipher you just use a displacement to give an alternative letter for each letter you want to encode:
A
is
B, B
is
C, C
is
D
, and so on until you get back to
Z
, which is
A
.

“But the Vigenère system uses the letters of a keyword to provide multiple alternatives. So, if you use the keyword
Rouen
, for example, the first letter of your message is encoded using an alphabet in which
A
is
R
, so
B
would be
S
, and so on, but the second letter of the message is encoded in another alphabet in which
A
is
O
, and the third letter in a third alphabet in which
A
is
U
.

“It’s ingenious, very complicated to crack, although the Germans supposedly have. We don’t use it anymore—not considered secure. But during the war, it was still the thing, and in those days there were books like this issued every six months, full of the next set of code words. This one covers the first half of 1870. It’s basically a list of about 175 words, one word signifying the cipher for each day. I got five copies of the book from one of your fellows in the rue Saint-Dominique. Just gave them to me for a laugh, bit of a curiosity.

“And then I had the idea of using it. The colonel’s predecessor, Sandherr, was trying to impose a bit of order on the files that came over from the rue Saint-Dominique. He liked word games, so I suggested to him that we encode the file names simply using the old keywords. It was sort of a tribute to the old cipher clerks, you know. I distributed my copies around the office and just penciled in our file names in alphabetical order. Anybody who wants a file just looks up the real name alphabetically in the book to discover the code name. Then look up the code name alphabetically in the files, and there you have it.”

“So all you need is the codebook?” asked Dubon.

“Yes, that’s right. I’ll leave you to get some filing done,” he added with a snicker and walked back to his office.

The system struck Dubon as cumbersome and unnecessary. Surely it would have been easier to keep the files under lock and key? He suspected Gingras had merely dreamed up the ciphers to amuse himself, but the minute the man was gone he sat down and started looking through the codebook under any names or subject headings that might be significant. Then he went back to the beginning and read the whole alphabetical list. There was no reference to Dreyfus anywhere.

He clearly wasn’t cut out to be a spy and just wanted to see the widow again. She would be waiting for him that evening and he felt nothing but relief when, a few minutes after five, Picquart came out of his office and dismissed him. Shaken by his encounter with the general and his wife, he decided he could no longer risk walking about in public in uniform. He crossed the rue de Lille, walked up to the quay, and slipped inside a small green kiosk he had spotted on previous mornings. The stench was appalling. Dubon preferred never to use public urinals, but today he was thankful for them. He pulled off his tunic and cap, bundled them into a tight roll under his arm, and reemerged on the street. It was mid-May now, warm enough to wear shirtsleeves, and if this dishabille shocked any acquaintance he happened to meet as he walked back to the rue Saint-Honoré, he judged it would be easier to explain than a uniform. Some story about a jacket soiled in a nasty encounter with a careless cab driver would be all that was required.

When Dubon arrived back at his own office, Lebrun looked disapprovingly at his shirtsleeves but said nothing, simply indicating with a nod of his head that the widow was waiting inside.

“I left the day’s messages on your desk, Maître. Something from Chaudière again; otherwise nothing that can’t wait. I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

“Yes. Thank you, Lebrun,” he said, as he unrolled the tunic, shook it out, and hung it and the cap on the coatrack before walking with anticipation into the inner office.

The widow turned to him eagerly as he entered. “Maître, I am so relieved to see you.”

“Madame.” Dubon gave her a little, half-mocking bow, moved to her, and took both her hands. “I have all sorts of things to tell you, but most of all I have good news.”

“Good news?”

“Yes, good news. There exists in the Statistical Section a secret file of evidence against the captain.”

“Secret evidence?” She pulled back and dropped one of his hands. “Why is that good news?”

“Ah, Madame …” he said as he took back the hand she had pulled away. “I am a lawyer, and you were right to come to a lawyer. It’s good news because whatever it contains, it was kept secret. It was not shown to the defense.”