A Man in Uniform (26 page)

He was reaching for the handle when he heard low voices inside. Hurrying back to his desk, he busied himself with the stack of paper there, the delivery Madame Bastian had made the Friday before. He set aside several pieces of a letter in German, but finished gluing together a page that had been ripped in two and bore only a few words in French. Next, he pulled out a complete page, a letterhead with an ornate coat of arms supported by two lions. Dubon did not recognize the crest, but the hand was Panizzardi’s again, and this time his signature appeared at the bottom. As he read what the Italian diplomat had to say, he stopped cold. He sat there for a moment as the implications gripped him.

It had been Dreyfus all along.

He had better leave now. He rose to his feet and reached for his tunic, hanging off the back of the chair.

Suddenly, Picquart’s office door burst open and Major Henry barged out.

“Dubon!” he yelled. “Just who the hell do you think you are?”

“I … uh …”

“They may be all chummy over on the rue Saint-Dominique, but we run a tight ship around here. You never presented your orders to the colonel when you arrived. In the colonel’s office. With your order papers.
Now.
”

Typically, Colonel Picquart was more polite about the lapse in paperwork. Dubon suspected that Major Henry’s rage was not caused by an underling’s supposed insubordination but rather by the major’s guilty conscience. In his sulky mood on the day Dubon arrived, the major had failed to ask for his papers.

“Sorry, Dubon,” Picquart said, as Dubon entered the office. “Henry thought I had seen your orders and I thought he had. We were just discussing your clearance level. You did say on Saturday, didn’t you, when we were going through all those files, that you were cleared up to your own section?”

“Yes, Colonel,” Dubon said, trying to keep his voice even.

“Well, the thing is, those documents you are gluing together, that’s
counterintelligence
. And if you aren’t cleared for counterintelligence … Anyway, just go and get your letter from the rue Saint-Dominique so I can see what they said in your orders.”

Dubon paused, unsure what to do next. Picquart mistook the reason for his hesitation.

“Look, I don’t want to have to get a new clerk. You are working out
very well. If you are cleared only for your own section’s material, we will work something out with the rue Saint-Dominique. We’ll get you higher clearance. But first of all, I need to see your papers.”

“Yes, sir. Immediately, sir.”

Dubon left Picquart’s office, turned back to his desk, and sat there, rummaging through drawers as though looking for something, all the while thinking frantically. He had come to the end of the line. He couldn’t stay any longer—and he no longer had any reason to do so. After a few minutes, he simply picked up the sheet that he had just found and walked back toward Picquart’s office. It wasn’t his order papers but it was a piece of paper that would stop Picquart in his tracks just as surely as it had stopped Dubon. After all, he thought to himself, he really had a duty as a French citizen to show this to the colonel.

“Colonel,” he began, making up his excuse as he went, “I realize this is stupid … but I left the order papers at home. I’ve changed into my summer kit, and I’m afraid I’ve left them in my other uniform.”

“That’s no excuse, Dubon.” His voice was less friendly now.

“No, Colonel, but I think, I think there’s something you should see right away …” Dubon placed the sheet of paper on Picquart’s desk. “I found this paper this morning.”

Picquart looked sharply at Dubon and turned the sheet so he could read it.

“It was in the batch Madame Bastian delivered last week. It’s addressed to Schwarzkoppen and signed by Panizzardi. It’s pretty damning, Colonel.”

“Shh.”

It
was
damning. The letter began with some pleasantries and suggested a future meeting before coming to the point: “I have learned that questions are to be raised about Dreyfus in the National Assembly. If asked by Rome, I will deny I ever had any traffic with that Jew. You must do the same; no one must know what happened with him.”

There was a pause as Picquart read the letter twice over, considering the implications. If the Italian military attaché was instructing his German counterpart to deny to their own governments that the pair had ever had contact with Dreyfus, it could only be because they had both used him as their agent. The colonel looked up at Dubon.

“We were wrong ever to doubt the evidence,” he said slowly. He opened his desk drawer and slid the sheet inside. “They got the right man. The generals will be very pleased. That will be all, Dubon.”

“Yes, Colonel. I will just go home now and get those papers. I live, um, at some distance. I may be gone awhile.”

Dubon saluted, turned on his heel, and walked back to his desk, defeated. Dreyfus was a spy and he himself was a fraud. He slipped his arms into his tunic and walked out the door, knowing he would never return.

Dubon crossed the river slowly, berating himself as he went. Dreyfus had been guilty all along and he had been wasting his time. Really, it made sense when he stopped to think about it. The military prosecutors were unlikely to have made as gross an error as the secret file suggested; they must have known they had the right man. The judges had bent the rules of judicial procedure—no, broken them altogether—but in the name of a good cause: they were protecting France from a spy. What game exactly did he think he had been playing—a barrister turned undercover detective? It was silly, schoolboy stuff. Geneviève had been right. He wasn’t a teenager anymore, nor was he the legal crusader of his youth. What a fool he had made of himself. At least now he could honestly tell Geneviève that he had abandoned the case.

The truth was that he had been seduced not only by nostalgia for his days with Maître Gaillard but also by the widow’s eyes. Well, the eyes of the captain’s wife, he thought bitterly. Pretty women had always been his weakness. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to save her husband; all the same, he was going to stick her with a bill large enough to do more than pay for Geneviève’s new blue dress. He had devoted hours
to a wild-goose chase; he had been at the Statistical Section for more than a week. If he had been caught, he might have been charged himself or at the very least been barred from his profession.

God, he would be glad to be rid of the uniform. The cotton was stiff and chafed at his skin.

As he pushed open the door to his office, he found Lebrun had allowed a visitor to wait for him: the captain’s wife was sitting in the armchair across from his desk and rose to greet him eagerly. She was the last person he wanted to see.

“I am sorry to keep bothering you, Maître,” she began in a subdued tone, sensing his displeasure.

“If you have come today looking for more news, I’m afraid I have little and what I have is not good.”

“Oh.” She looked crestfallen and sank back down into the chair.

“Today, I have seen with my own eyes clear evidence of the captain’s guilt.”

“That is impossible,” she said indignantly.

“It is a letter written to the military attaché at the German embassy in which his Italian counterpart names the captain as a contact they have both used.”

“It is a lie.” She was growing more agitated. Clenching her hands into two fists, she chopped the air in frustration as she spoke. “Anyone who knows the captain, I mean
really
knows him …” At this, she stopped and gave up, unclenching her fists and wiping angry tears from her eyes.

Dubon remained unmoved.

“Madame Dreyfus,” he said, placing a hard insistence on the name so as to assure himself he was breaking free from any fantasy he had about her. “Perhaps you are misled by your wifely devotion.”

“I am not such an innocent, Maître. I know I must appear ridiculous to you, but I am quite capable of sound judgment. The captain’s heart is true.”

The woman seemed restored to fighting spirit by her tears.

“Maître, last time I visited here, you told me you knew the secret file existed and you believed it was very scant. Have you made any progress in confirming its existence?”

“Yes, it does exist. I have seen it.”

“And what does it contain?”

“Madame, a day ago I would have told you it contained nothing much, some scraps of circumstantial evidence, but coupled with this more recent letter, it is incriminating.”

“Whatever the nature of the evidence, it was withheld from the defense. You said that alone was grounds for appeal.”

“Yes.”

“So we know for certain there is evidence that was withheld from the defense. I will launch an appeal, then. You see, you do have good news, Maître.”

“Madame, the captain’s lawyers may launch an appeal,” he said, “but what point is there to launching an appeal if the new evidence is against the captain?”

“A second trial will prove his innocence.”

“Even to win that trial you have to get the authorities to admit there is a secret file …”

“Yes. Well, how should we proceed in that regard?”

“I have no plans to proceed. I resign from your file.”

“But you did have a plan, Maître. Before you saw this latest evidence, you had a plan. You always do.”

Dubon considered how he might best disentangle himself. He could let Le Goff publish his article on the secret file and then stand back and watch the captain’s lawyers deal with the rest, including the new evidence.

“I did finally hear word from Azimut Martin and he’s, um, sympathetic,” he said. “He could publish a story affirming the existence of the secret file. I think from there, you could trust the captain’s lawyers to press for an appeal.”

“Yes. Maître. Thank you. Contact your journalist friend. But I still want you to keep looking for the real spy.”

“No, Madame, you must realize—”

“You have achieved far more than the captain’s lawyers already—”

“But I do not wish to continue … and, well, there is the question of my bill.”

“Oh, don’t worry about the money. I will pay, Maître, whatever it is.”

It appeared the stories about family wealth had not been exaggerated.

“I also have other clients who need my attention.”

To this the woman made no response. She simply sat looking at Dubon, waiting patiently for him to acquiesce.

“I will contact the journalist about publication. To what address can I send the bill?”

The woman seemed knocked off balance by this simple request.

“Oh. Oh yes … my apologies. I will leave my address on your clerk’s desk on my way out. In the meantime, I have a little gift for you.”

She eyed him with that deceptively girlish air she sometimes conveyed and Dubon could not help but smile back.

She leaned down beside the chair and picked up a loose bag he had not noticed lying there. It was similar to the canvas garment bag he had used to tote Jean-Jean’s clothes about, and as she pulled it up, it revealed a summerweight uniform with its captain’s stripes in place.

“I thought you might find this useful,” she said.

Waiting in a café that evening, Dubon was of two minds as to how much he should tell Le Goff, but the journalist slid into the seat across from him before he had made any decision.

“What news?”

“Nothing much. I haven’t made any more headway, and my client cannot keep paying my fee forever without seeing more results. We have agreed that you can publish and see what response your story brings. At the very least, it will bolster demands for an appeal.”

“Good, good. My editors are hungry as ever. I’ll give them something tomorrow and they can publish it Saturday. So, you described two documents …”

Dubon discussed the contents of the secret file with Le Goff for half an hour, describing in as precise detail as he could the report on the captain’s history and character and the letter with the phrase “that bastard D,” and trying yet again to impress upon him the injustice of withholding evidence from the defense.

“I wouldn’t tell you how to do your job, Le Goff. But the fact that
evidence was withheld should be your emphasis, not the nature of the evidence. Whether he’s innocent or guilty, it wasn’t a fair trial.”

“But we know he’s innocent, don’t we?”

Dubon gave no response and Le Goff now sensed his reluctance.

“You’ve gone cold on me. Do you know something more?”

Dubon hesitated, and then plunged forward, describing the new letter from Panizzardi to Schwarzkoppen.

“Clearly, both attachés had been using Dreyfus as an agent,” he concluded.

“Very convenient timing,” Le Goff said. “Ever since the story of the escape, people are starting to look at the case, question it. The original evidence is very weak and now, presto, here’s the bloodstained dagger?”

“Well, it couldn’t have surfaced any earlier. It didn’t exist until a few days ago. It’s a damning document.”

“You haven’t actually seen the thing, have you?”

“Er, no. But my contact described it to me in detail. It is handwritten on letterhead, the Italian crest. It’s one page …” Dubon’s voice trailed off as he pictured in his mind’s eye the letter he had found that morning.

He saw the ornate coat of arms with the lions, Schwarzkoppen’s name written tidily at the top, Panizzardi’s flowery signature at the bottom. It was one page, one single sheet that had been ripped across the middle and glued back together again. But who had glued it? Not Dubon. If the major or Gingras or Hermann had for some reason gone through the file on Dubon’s desk, found the two pieces and assembled them, surely they would have alerted Picquart instantly rather than replace the thing. The document couldn’t have come into the office with Madame Bastian’s scraps. It must have been planted on Dubon’s desk.

“Dubon?” Le Goff was waiting for him to continue.

“That letter is a fraud,” Dubon exclaimed, awaking from his reverie. Order papers be damned, he would just have to go straight back into the section the next day.