A Man in Uniform (24 page)

“No, no. Mazou. I have eyes only for you,” he reassured her, returning his hands to her dress, which now flapped open to reveal her lace camisole. “The client is quite ugly, as a matter of fact. An old aunt of the accused. It’s about the case,” he said, and, as he fingered a button just above her waist, he began to explain his increasingly firm conviction that the captain was innocent of all charges against him.

Pacified, Madeleine allowed him to proceed.

Later, as he was putting his own clothes back on, she returned to the topic.

“You never told me why you need to wear different clothes to work on this case.”

Dubon, flush with both his sexual prowess and his success that day in getting sight of the secret file, was only too relieved to come clean. With both his wife and his mistress, he liked to maintain a well-ordered life that, as long as neither asked too many questions, never required him actually to lie.

“I am working undercover, Mazou.”

“Undercover?”

“Yes, I have got myself a job as a filing clerk with military intelligence so that I can poke around in their files, and I go in every day wearing a spare uniform of my brother-in-law’s.”

“They don’t know who you are?”

“Not yet. Think I am just the temporary clerk, filling in for an absence.”

“How much longer do you expect you’ll be at it?”

“Oh, just another day or two. Then we’ll be back to normal, my dear.”

“Well, I hope so,” she said petulantly. “Will I see you tomorrow?”

Dubon recalled he had sent a message to Le Goff, asking to meet him the following day at six. “Now that I think of it …”

“Too busy? More secret missions for your lady client?” She sounded angry now. “You know if you aren’t interested anymore, I have other things I could—”

“Of course I am interested. Wednesday, I will be here Wednesday.”

On the sidewalk across the street from Madeleine’s building, a man lingered, smoking a cigar. As Dubon stepped onto the street, the man stubbed it out on the ground, consulted his watch, and began walking away. Dubon might not have noticed him, but it was a short and narrow street that ran only one block down from the boulevard des Italiens before it ended at the next boulevard, and there were never many pedestrians on it. The man kept looking straight ahead and walking with a gait of studied leisure. Dubon crossed to where the fellow had been standing and looked down at his cigar butt. He had smelled cigar smoke before around the entrance of Madeleine’s building. Was it possible someone was shadowing him?

Alarmed, Dubon started after him and for the rest of the block he and his quarry pretended they were two men who happened to be walking the same way. Before the man reached the next boulevard, he passed a narrow curving street that opened on their left. He stopped, as though pondering his next move. He started up again and turned into this street, which Dubon knew came to a dead end just around the bend. The man would be forced to double back and run smack into him—which is exactly what happened.

“Excuse me, Monsieur. You seem lost,” Dubon said.

The man looked back at him pleasantly enough and spoke with an excruciating English accent.

“I was trying to get back to the … the boulevard des Italiens,” he said, pronouncing the
d
on
boulevard
and simply substituting the English “Italians” for
Italiens
.

Who was this Englishman and why was he following him?

“It’s that way, Monsieur,” he said, gesturing back the way they had come, toward the busy boulevard at the top of Madeleine’s street. “Just what exactly is your game?”

The man replied with the same painfully accented French, “I might ask the same of you, Maître Dubon.”

“You’re following me,” Dubon cried in indignation, surprised the Englishman knew his name.

The man smiled. “No, Monsieur. I believe you were following me.”

“Only because I wondered what you meant by following me,” Dubon replied.

The conversation was growing childish. The two men stood in the street eyeing each other and feeling increasingly ridiculous. Dubon considered some way around the impasse.

“Perhaps we share an interest?”

“Yes, perhaps we do …”

“In a woman?” Dubon asked dubiously. He supposed he had given Geneviève grounds for suspicion lately, but surely she would not stoop to such a stratagem.

“No. The women are your business,” the man replied.

“Ah.” Dubon was initially relieved, but when he came to think about it, he liked the alternatives even less. He hesitated, looking for a safe way to phrase the next question.

“So perhaps we share an interest in a certain army captain?”

“Yes, that might be closer to the mark,” the man agreed.

Dubon considered this for a moment. The French military was unlikely to be using a foreigner as an agent; perhaps the man was an English spy. Other nations were increasingly following the case since the rumors of Dreyfus’s escape, and the English were said to favor the theory that the captain was innocent. It occurred to Dubon that really there were only two sides to this matter. Some believed Dreyfus had never received a fair trial; others believed he was guilty and justly punished.

“Monsieur,” Dubon ventured. “We need only tell each other our beliefs.”

“What do you mean?”

“The man is a spy.”

“Is he?”

“If he isn’t, tell me what
you
think.”

“No, no, you first.”

Dubon, frustrated, took the plunge: “I increasingly believe Dreyfus is innocent.”

“My client would be glad to hear that.”

“Your client? Who is your client?”

“I cannot identify him.”

“Are you a lawyer?”

“No, Monsieur,
you
are a lawyer.”

“Yes, well, I also represent a client who would be glad to know of the captain’s innocence. That is my interest. Now tell me yours.”

The man looked sheepish. “I am a detective, a private detective. I work for a client who wishes to prove the captain’s innocence.”

“You are one of the brother’s schemes, aren’t you? The captain’s brother hired you.”

“And who hired you?”

“Another … let’s say a friend of the captain’s, a friend of the family.”

“His brother doesn’t know of this. Or at least I was never told about it.”

“So you admit you work for the brother. An English detective …” Dubon paused as he remembered how her brother-in-law’s strategies had so disappointed the captain’s wife. “It wasn’t you who planted
those outlandish stories about the escape in the British press, was it?” He took the man’s silence and an abashed look as a yes. “Well, that really backfired. Have you seen the reaction? The French papers are virulently insisting on his guilt.”

“Nonetheless, I would point out that the captain’s case is now talked about in every newspaper and in every drawing room, and that was our goal,” the man replied huffily. “He won’t get any justice as long as he’s been forgotten.”

“True enough. We both seem to want the same thing here. So why are you following me?”

“I have been looking for an entrée into the Statistical Section and suddenly a new recruit appeared,” he said.

Dubon felt his mouth go dry.

“I thought it might be possible to approach him, that he might be less, let us say, imbued with the section’s esprit de corps,” he continued. “I followed him and, lo and behold, I discover he is a prominent Paris lawyer in disguise.”

This was alarming. They might be on the same side, but if this incompetent character had succeeded in tying Maître Dubon to Captain Dubon, he did not like to think what a quicker sort like Picquart or Hermann might achieve if suspicious. He needed to find out how much this detective really knew about him and about the case.

“We should be working together,” he suggested.

“Indeed. Perhaps we could share some information,” the detective replied.

This was tricky, Dubon thought; he did not really want to share information; he wanted to extract it.

“You place me in an awkward situation, Monsieur. My client has given me express instructions that the captain’s brother is not to know of my work.”

“You represent the wife, do you? I thought as much.”

“No, a friend of hers. This lady is not satisfied with the progress and wants to make her own inquiries.”

“Women, eh? Well, as I said, I leave the women to you. But at least we can compare notes.”

“Yes. Perhaps we could,” Dubon replied as he puzzled for a moment
over this last remark. “Do you know the purpose of my business here?” he asked, gesturing with his head back to Madeleine’s street.

The detective smirked, pulled out his pocket watch, and checked the time. “Home for dinner by seven? I can guess the nature of your business.”

“Sherlock Holmes, I presume.”

“No, actually, his name is Brown.”

“With an
E
or without?”

“I have no idea,” Dubon replied with irritation.

For some reason, Le Goff was in a playful mood. Dubon, on the other hand, was feeling inadequate and anxious after two unprofitable days at the Statistical Section and another missed evening with Madeleine. He had postponed his drink with Le Goff by a day to meet the English detective, but their exchange of information had not proved fruitful, while Brown’s ability to link him with the section continued to gnaw at him. He was an amateur in the world of espionage who might be disastrously exposed at any minute. He wanted to get Le Goff’s advice on strategy and get home on time.

“How did Mr. Brown know you were on the case?” Le Goff asked.

“He followed me from the Statistical Section one day.”

“You meet your contact at his office in the section?” he said in surprise, and Dubon remembered belatedly that Le Goff did not know
the extent to which he had penetrated the Statistical Section and that there was no reason to tell him.

“I … I went there once, just the one time, and Brown trailed me back to my office. I guess when he discovered I was a lawyer, he thought I was worth pursuing. He doesn’t know about the secret file, either.”

“So, there definitely is a secret file?”

“Yes, yes. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I was shown the file.”

“Your contact showed you the documents?”

“He snuck it out of the office. I got a quick look at it. Anyway, the point is, evidence was withheld from the defense, clear grounds for an appeal. And it gets better: the evidence in the file is slight, monstrously slight, in fact.”

In his enthusiasm over what he had found, Dubon shook off his ill temper and brought Le Goff up to date.

“There are only two documents,” he said, moving a wineglass out of the path of his gesticulating hands as he began first to describe the letter referring to “that bastard D.”

“So who was it written by?” Le Goff asked when he had finished.

“I don’t know. It’s a fragment without a signature or a date, though the hand looked familiar to my contact. He said he thought he had seen other documents in their files written by the same person.”

“Probably Panizzardi, Schwarzkoppen’s counterpart at the Italian embassy,” Le Goff offered. “The two go everywhere together.”

“The Italian fellow? He was at the Fiteaus’ ball with Schwarzkoppen.”

“Yes. That’s him.”

“So, Schwarzkoppen and Panizzardi must know whether they used Dreyfus or not,” Dubon reasoned. “Would the Germans not try to tell the French if they had the wrong man?”

“Couldn’t do that,” Le Goff pointed out. “They would have to admit they use spies. What’s the second document in the file?”

“A report about the captain’s character and professional history, all speculative stuff. Some hoary old story from his training days about somebody finding a charred piece of an instruction manual in one of the classrooms.”

“Ah, last day of school; the boys were burning the books.” Le Goff laughed.

“Really?”

“Used to happen at my school. Why not in training camp?”

“Hadn’t thought of that. Anyway, the report offers this wild theory that Dreyfus had copied out a manual to sell to the Germans and then destroyed the original.”