A Man in Uniform (20 page)

“That’s not fair,” she protested, gripping at his hands.

“Not fair, Madame, and not legal. It is, in and of itself, grounds for an appeal. There will be a new trial. There
must
be a new trial.”

“Oh …” She gulped and did not resist as he moved toward her, drawing her into an embrace.

At first, as he kissed her, she seemed to melt into him as though wanting the contact as much as he did, and he could feel the weight of her chest pressing against him through his thin shirt. Then they quickly pulled away from each other, simultaneously realizing the implications of their kiss.

Dubon was the first to recover his composure.

“Madame. My sincere apologies. I forgot myself. That was unforgivable. I assure you it will not—”

“No, no, Maître. You don’t need—”

“Really, I … if you wish to change counsel …”

“Maître, please. Just find this secret file.”

Dubon stretched and his hand encountered soft flesh. In that luxurious state halfway to waking, he explored a thigh that seemed to go on forever, until a slight movement on the other side of the bed startled him.

“What time is it?”

“It’s almost half past seven, dear,” Madeleine replied, pushing herself up on one elbow.

He sat up abruptly, now fully awake.

“I have to go,” he said, reaching for his clothes. He had blundered over here from his own office, arriving after six and dragging Madeleine into the bedroom for the encounter he could not have with the widow. He had meant to leave immediately afterward. He would be late for dinner a third night in a row. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You haven’t been here all week, you arrive late. How am I supposed to know your schedule?” she asked.

Dubon sighed as he buttoned his shirt. He was expecting an argument when he arrived home, but Madeleine was usually genial. He tried smiling at her, but she was busy admiring the line of her naked ankle and arched foot as they protruded from under the sheets. He
supposed she wanted to talk about something, women usually did, but he simply did not have the time.

“Hope to see you tomorrow,” he said as he pulled on his jacket. He kissed her quickly on the cheek and was gone.

The next afternoon was spent fruitlessly sifting through the files, an exercise that felt especially deflating after his encounter with the widow the previous evening. Sitting at his desk or standing at the filing cabinet, where he now could put the occasional piece of paper in its proper place, he would stop and replay their kiss in his mind’s eye before remembering that he had both promised her it would never happen again and assured her he would find the secret file. At that point, his fantasies would evaporate to be replaced by a growing sense of panic: he needed to find something fast to satisfy her and allow him to end his dangerous impersonation.

“Twice in one week, eh? Your lucky day.”

It was the fat lady in the raincoat, appearing at his elbow and interrupting his increasingly desperate thoughts. Again she dumped the contents of her bag onto his desktop and waved cheerfully before turning on her heel, going back down the corridor, and disappearing through the small door.

As he sat there trying to sort these latest offerings, the colonel emerged from his office.

“Another delivery from the usual route, Dubon?” he asked.

“Yes, Colonel. I will tidy it up before I go home.”

“Too late to start piecing things together now. Just put it in a file as it is and bring it to me; I’ll lock it in my office for the night and you can get it again tomorrow.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

Dubon found a fresh file folder, tidied up the paper as best he could, and brought it to the colonel’s office.

“Off you go, then.”

And he did, but not out the front door. If he could not find the secret file, at least he could discover how it was documents were coming into the Statistical Section and people were going out. Slipping past
the major’s office, where the man could be seen sucking on his pencil as though laboring over some composition, Dubon walked quietly toward the hallway and started down it, trying to look as though he knew exactly what he was doing. At the end of it, both Gingras’s and Hermann’s doors also stood open and he could just glimpse Hermann’s foot beneath his desk but could not see his face. Dubon stopped at the small door, gently turned the handle, and stepped quickly inside.

He found himself in utter darkness, and even after waiting what seemed to be a long moment for his eyes to get used to it, there was precious little light to see by. Only the faintest line on the floor showed him the door he had just come through. He ran his hand around the walls on either side of it but couldn’t find any light switch. He must be inside some kind of closet; the air felt close and stale. He put his hand up toward where he supposed the ceiling would be and waved it to and fro; sure enough, it connected with a string and he gave a tug. An odd orangey-yellow light came on, but it didn’t feel like that much of an improvement, only partially illuminating the room.

Despite the dimness, he noticed a second bulb with a second string; he pulled that and was rewarded with better light. He appeared to be standing in a laboratory. There was a wooden counter on which various bottles and vials sat alongside several shallow pans. At the end of the counter stood a mysterious machine, a large black box, about the size of a big cooking pot, which ended in an accordion-like sleeve and was mounted on a flat wooden rod. Dubon carefully tried the round handle located on its side and found that the rod was notched and the handle moved the box slowly up and down it. He then raised the box high enough that he could look into the bottom: it was outfitted with a round glass—a lens, he supposed. The thing looked like a giant camera suspended upside down, and Dubon realized that was precisely what it was. He was standing in a darkroom.

Most of the material he had seen in the files had been copied out by hand, but there were a few photographic copies too. This must be where the section was doing its photography; it saved sending files over to headquarters. Dubon wiped his brow—he was now sweating profusely—and began hunting as quietly as he could through the few drawers beneath the counter. He found various metal instruments that
looked like tongs and clips, and a heavy leather pouch. He opened the pouch but the only thing it contained was a stack of blank paper. He put the pouch back and closed the drawer.

He looked around the rest of the tiny room but could find nothing else of interest, nor any exit, except the door he had come through. If the fat lady and the major were using this as a route out to the street, they must be magicians, he concluded.

“Good-bye, then. See you tomorrow.”

The voice made him jump before he realized it was coming through the wall from Picquart’s office. The colonel was bidding one of the others good night.

He waited a few minutes and then opened the small door again very gingerly and, hearing no one moving on the other side, stepped back into the corridor. He looked to his right, back toward the colonel’s office, and then to his left, realizing there was a second, even smaller door a few paces farther down. He opened it and slipped inside.

This time, he had no problem identifying where he was. He had walked into the forbidden water closet. There was a flush toilet in one corner, operated by a large cistern suspended well above it on the ceiling, and a very small sink with a single tap. A rather grubby towel hung to one side. He didn’t think he had seen either the colonel or the major enter the water closet and emerge in an amount of time that would suggest they were using it for the purpose it seemed intended. In fact, the only officer he had seen go down the corridor and disappear was the major, but he could not imagine him or the fat lady climbing out the one, small, high window to the left of the toilet.

He gently tapped on the linoleum-covered walls to discover if they concealed a door. He found one panel that sounded different from the others, directly under the window, but no amount of pushing seemed to open it and he could find no catch or handle. He was feeling in his pockets for something he could use to pry at it when he noticed a short wooden ruler on the floor under the sink. He slipped it into the crack where the panel ended and, sure enough, it sprang open like a door. He looked out and found he was standing at the top of a metal fire escape leading into an alley below. He replaced the ruler under the sink and walked onto the fire escape, pulling the small door closed behind him.
It had a regular handle on the outside, but when he tried it, he found it had locked automatically. He was now locked out of the building on a fire escape three floors above the ground! The fat lady, the major, and even the disheveled visitor of the other day must have keys, he concluded. Or the visitors warned the major in advance and he left the door ajar for them. Either way, the logistics of how they got through the door did not trouble Dubon much until he climbed down the fire escape to the ground and realized the alleyway was without exit.

At one end, a high brick wall cut it off from a property on the street behind, and at the other end, it acted merely as a light well between the two buildings whose facades were joined together on the rue de Lille. He paused to think: surely those who used this exit were not climbing over high walls. He began trying the several doors that gave onto the alleyway, starting with the one on the ground floor of the building he had just exited. It was locked. He tried three doors on the ground floor of the building across the way; one opened easily and he found himself in a warm corridor; a din of conversation and clinking glasses came from the room beyond. There was a telephone cabin on his left and a door marked
WC
on his right. He was standing at the back of the next-door café.

He took a breath, squared his shoulders, and walked forward, preparing to sit down at the first table he could find and order a drink, as though he were merely a patron who had used the toilets before taking a seat. As he squeezed himself into a chair at the back of the room, congratulating himself on his sangfroid and looking about for a waiter, he noticed the fat lady. She was sitting at a table in the front window, nursing a short glass of wine.

Dubon slunk down in his chair and stared at the tabletop, believing, whether rightly or wrongly, that if he did not look at her, she would be less likely to see him. He sat there for what felt like a long while, occasionally sneaking a glance across the room to her table. Eventually, a waiter appeared at his elbow.

“My apologies, Captain,” said the waiter, looking at the stripes on Dubon’s uniform. “I didn’t see you come in.”

Dubon ordered a dry sherry—he seldom drank the stuff but wanted something he could either linger over, or gulp down if that proved
necessary—and asked for the bill when it arrived. He was only halfway through his drink when the fat lady hailed the waiter and called for her bill. She gave Dubon plenty of time to decide on his next move as she fiddled with her bag, extracting a money purse from its depths. He quickly crossed the room and paid the cashier with the coins he had ready. He nodded curtly and left through the front door. Out in the street, he slipped into the next doorway, a stationery store that was closing for the evening; the manager gesticulated broadly through the glass that he was shut and Dubon waved him away.

The fat lady soon emerged from the café and turned up the rue de Lille, moving toward its intersection with the boulevard Saint-Germain and the quay. She walked briskly for a heavy person; she was not unhealthy, Dubon judged, and he found that his usual pace kept up with her nicely. He was not sure why he was following her, or what exactly he hoped to find out, so when she joined the crowd waiting for the omnibus at the top of the boulevard, he decided he would keep going in his own direction, cross the river, and walk back to his real office. He reminded himself he was no detective and had no idea how you tailed someone in the closed quarters of a horse-drawn public conveyance. But just as he was turning toward the bridge, the bus pulled up, and as he watched his quarry board at the back with a clutch of other passengers, he realized that if he climbed to the upper deck, known affectionately as l’Impériale, he could get on without her seeing him. He bought a ticket as he boarded and settled himself in a seat toward the back. The omnibus began its slow progress down the boulevard Saint-Germain. To his surprise, they had gone only a few hundred meters when the fat lady came out to the conductor’s platform at the back of the bus. Could she really be getting off so soon? Dubon prepared himself to disembark too.

“Whew. It’s close in there,” she remarked to the conductor. “I’ll just go up and join the gentlemen.”

Dubon froze in his seat. He had never expected a lady to climb those stairs. He had miscalculated severely: his quarry was not, of course, a lady. Geneviève had never ridden an omnibus in her life and certainly never would have climbed to l’Impériale, while Madeleine had once recounted to him as a great adventure the time she was forced
upstairs by the crowd of men sheltering from the rain below. The fat lady was now reaching the top of the steps. Dubon looked in the opposite direction, over the rail, turning his head as far to the side as he could, hoping his cap would hide his face and feeling increasingly ridiculous. He felt someone settle a weight in the empty seat beside him and a voice rang out.