A Man in Uniform (23 page)

“I have to confess,” said Dubon, trying to keep his voice light, “that
I was starting to enjoy myself this week, until my brother-in-law came home Friday night and discovered that his uniform was missing.”

They laughed together and reclaimed a bit of their old footing.

“I do have more news for you too.”

“Yes?”

“The secret file does exist. The colonel in the Statistical Section is currently reviewing it.”

“So …”

“He finds it suspiciously slim.”

“Something’s missing?” she asked.

“No, I would say the issue is whether there was anything there in the first place.”

“What do you think?”

“Don’t know until I see it …”

“Yes, you need to get a good look at it,” she agreed.

They smiled at each other, enjoying how she was playing him.

“You, Madame,” he replied, “are always full of impossible assignments for me.”

“And what are you going to do about your brother-in-law’s uniform?”

“Start using his summer kit.”

“So you will continue working on my case?”

“Apparently so.”

In the end, Picquart simply pushed the secret file across the desk to him.

It was the Monday morning and when Dubon came in, the colonel was sitting at his desk as though he had not moved since Saturday. Dubon, entering his commander’s office to see if he had further instructions on the files, saluted.

“Did you sleep here, Colonel?”

Picquart looked up distractedly. “What? Eh, oh yes, yes. No, I did go home Saturday afternoon.” He smiled, realizing Dubon’s purport. He looked down at his papers and then back at Dubon.

“Sit down. You’re an intelligent man, Dubon. Can’t think why you
are still a captain, at your age, in fact. Read that. Tell me what you think.” He slid a ten-page document across the desk.

Dubon looked at him to assure himself he was supposed to read it then and there, and dutifully began. It was a report on the character and biography of the accused, assembled from various of Dreyfus’s former commanding officers, many of them complaining he was cold, officious, did not socialize with his colleagues and, surprisingly considering these were reports from his superiors, was overly keen. Dubon gathered the accused was given to boasting of his expertise in military matters and not above mentioning his family wealth. One officer suggested that his work ethic was suspicious; another said he was not surprised the man was a spy. There was an account of an incident that occurred during his training, years before—a charred piece of an instruction manual had been found. The report alleged the accused had copied out the manual by hand and tried to get rid of the original by burning it. No proof was given to support this thesis.

“Was this presented as evidence at the court martial?” Dubon asked.

“It was shown to the judges. Privately, I believe.”

Dubon found both anger and excitement rising inside him. Picquart seemed no more concerned than Le Goff that evidence had been kept from the defense.

“It’s of no value,” Dubon said decisively. “It’s all hearsay.”

“Hearsay?”

“Secondhand evidence … Uh, I believe that is what the lawyers would call it, no, Colonel?” The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself by offering specialized knowledge.

“Read that, then.” The colonel pushed a single tattered sheet across the desk and, as Dubon read, drew his attention to a particular line by placing his finger beside it.

The letter itself was of the kind Dubon was now very used to seeing. It had been ripped into half a dozen pieces that someone in the section had then glued back together, although the signature was missing. The hand looked the same as that on some documents Madame Bastian had delivered from Schwarzkoppen’s wastepaper basket the previous week and the letter was addressed to the German military attaché. In French,
the correspondent wrote that he was sharing some information that he had acquired recently, twelve plans of the military installations at Nice, which “that bastard D” had sold him. It was this phrase that Picquart was pointing out.

“D?”

“Yes. D.”

“Just an initial. The same as the accused’s … as the prisoner’s.”

“Yes, the same initial.” Picquart stared at the page as though lost in thought.

“So.” Dubon spoke slowly, wanting to know the man’s thoughts. “The judges were shown some bad character references and speculative reports on suspicious activities along with a letter that, while damning, only incriminates someone with the initial D. Quite a common initial. Dupont. Durand. Delmas.”

“Or Dubon, eh?” Picquart laughed brittlely. “I take it you are not the bastard in question?”

“No, Colonel.”

“So, that’s their file,” the colonel concluded, drawing the papers back. “On top of it all, the bastard letter has no date. Who knows how long it has been kicking around here. The minister wants to see some explanation of Dreyfus’s motive for spying. It nags at him, and all I can show him is the slightest circumstantial evidence of guilt, let alone motive.”

“But what of the original evidence, Colonel?” Dubon could no longer remember whether, as a junior intelligence clerk, he could have known of its existence or not, but the colonel seemed unsuspicious.

“Oh yes. The bordereau. The list of the spy’s information. It’s anonymous, of course, but evidence of treachery, to be sure. Somebody was offering secrets to the Germans. The question is: Did we get the right man?”

“Indeed, Colonel,” Dubon said as neutrally as he could manage.

“You had better get back to your desk,” Picquart said. “Our hunt has produced nothing.”

Dubon retreated to his own desk and sat thinking about what he had seen. The very existence of the secret file, if it became known, was
reason enough to grant the captain a new trial. Furthermore, nothing he had seen in the file suggested the captain would have difficulty winning an acquittal. The evidence was circumstantial, speculative, secondhand, or nonexistent. Indeed, it was so scant, he suspected it had been withheld from the defense not for reasons of national security but because the captain’s lawyer could have demolished it in a minute.

The question was how to get an appeal. If Dubon was really going to help the widow—for that was how he continued to think of her—he would have to find a way to make the secret file public. Perhaps Le Goff could help him there, publish some speculation, and explain that secret evidence invalidated the trial; rattle the original military judges enough to get an investigation going. That seemed a long shot. He was thinking like a lawyer not a detective. The lady had given him his assignment from the start: the coup de grâce was to uncover the identity of the real spy. He still hadn’t got a look at the bordereau, the original evidence that had convicted the captain. The colonel must have it—or at least a copy of it.

As he was puzzling over how he could possibly get into the colonel’s files, Picquart himself emerged from his office, crossed behind Dubon’s desk, and called abruptly to the major, who was working with his door ajar.

“A word, Major, if you please.”

“Yes, Colonel,” Henry replied as he strode back to his superior’s office and, at some indication from Picquart, shut the door behind him.

“Someone’s in trouble.” Gingras had just come into the hall in time to see Henry summoned and was now smiling maliciously at the closed door.

“The colonel is unimpressed with the file on the Dreyfus case,” Dubon ventured.

“Yes, and Henry is its chief architect. He put it together before they went to trial. And his good name—I guess more than his good name—rides on the captain’s guilt.”

“Why is that?”

“He testified at the court martial that he had received warning of a spy in the ranks and he swore up and down it was Captain Dreyfus.”

“Did he say how he knew it was the captain?”

“No, he wouldn’t reveal that.”

Again, Dubon was appalled at what the judges had permitted.

“But he was convinced it was the captain?”

“Well,” said Gingras slyly, “he was convinced his superior officers needed a conviction.” He turned to the filing cabinets and threw his next words over his shoulder. “Can’t have spies wandering about, can we?”

Dubon made no response and sat there gazing vacantly into the air, pondering the nasty implications of what Gingras had just said. Not only should the judges have rejected Henry’s testimony as hearsay, but also Gingras was now implying that Henry had knowingly perjured himself. If that was the case, Major Henry had more than professional reasons for needing Dreyfus to remain guilty. If his lies were exposed, Henry himself could be court-martialed.

Gingras was still rummaging around pulling files when Major Henry emerged from Picquart’s office a few minutes later looking angry or worried, Dubon wasn’t quite sure which. Henry ignored both of them, went back into his office, and shut the door firmly.

He emerged just before lunch with a
petit bleu
in his hand and gave it to Dubon.

“Send this at once, Captain,” he barked.

“From a post office, Major?” Dubon asked. Most of the section’s correspondence was carried over to the rue Saint-Dominique by a young lieutenant who showed up daily with a leather pouch over his shoulder.

Henry looked at Dubon as though he were particularly stupid and enunciated slowly. “Yes, Captain. The post office. On the boulevard Saint-Germain.”

Dubon saluted and put on the jacket of his uniform, pocketed the telegram, and set off.

Once inside the post office, he took a good look at the addressee, a Monsieur Leblanc, who lived at number 35 rue de Bretagne, and trusted it to memory before approaching the counter, paying his coin, and posting the message.

At the end of the day, the unshaven character he had seen the
previous week again appeared in the corridor that led to the water closet and the darkroom.

“Monsieur Leblanc?” Dubon hazarded.

The man stopped on his way toward the major’s office and smiled. Without knocking, he slipped through the major’s open door and closed it behind him.

At six o’clock that evening, Dubon found himself undoing an inordinately long series of tiny pearl buttons.

“So, tell me about the great mystery,” Madeleine said.

“What mystery?” he asked disingenuously as he slipped a delicate little loop sewn from a twist of blush-colored linen off one button before proceeding to the next, located just south of her left breast.

This dress, her spring afternoon dress, was something of a standing joke between the lovers. It was her own design and she was particularly proud of it: the buttons began on the far right side of a high Chinese collar and continued in a slow spiral downward, between her breasts, across her left side and down her left hip before tailing off in the folds of the skirt. Another dressmaker, she explained to Dubon, would have been content to hold the form-fitting outfit together with invisible metal hooks and eyes down the back that required a lady’s maid to help her fasten. Madeleine had made a virtue of necessity and spent many hours twisting the pink linen into a fabric cord to hold the buttons just so. A seamstress’s delicate fingers could undo the dress in no time. Dubon still fumbled about, but they tacitly agreed it was his job, not hers.

“François,” she replied. “This is the first evening you have been here in a week. You send telegrams, you send flowers, you promise you’ll come tomorrow, you don’t show up. What are you up to?” She sounded aggrieved.

“I’ve got a tricky case on the go at the moment.”

“A case that requires you to go about in disguise?”

He dropped his hands from her chest and rose up off the divan in alarm. Had she somehow seen him?

“You didn’t wear these clothes to work today. The shirt is smooth and the collar is perfectly fresh. You don’t usually bother putting on a clean collar to come here.” Indeed, Dubon had changed into a fresh shirt and collar on his way over because the anxiety of his new assignment was leaving him sweaty. “Besides, you smell different from usual. Perhaps you were disguised as a policeman? Or an artist? No, no, a gypsy …” Her tone was sarcastic but made him laugh all the same.

“You aren’t far off the mark,” he said as he sat back down and began to tell her of his current assignment. It felt comforting and safe to talk.

“You remember a case, a few years ago, of a spy, a military officer who was caught selling secrets to the Germans?”

“That one there’s so much fuss about in the papers? The one who tried to escape?”

“He didn’t really try to escape. Anyway, that’s the man. And it’s his case I am working on. I have a client who has an interest in proving his innocence.”

“Who’s the client?”

“A relation of the family who believes in the man and wants to see him exonerated.”

“But why did he come to you?”

“I do have a certain reputation and I was recommended to the client. Uh, the client, well, this client is …”

Madeleine sensed he was avoiding a pronoun and pounced. “Is the client a woman? François, it’s always about women with you. Don’t think I don’t notice. Anytime we are on the street together, your eyes are all over the place. Goodness knows what you get up to when you aren’t here. You say you are somewhere with your wife, but for all I know—”