A Man in Uniform (27 page)

Dubon arrived there at eight to find the door locked. The others had keys, but he had not been given one and had not had the nerve to ask. He waited, rehearsing his excuse about his lost papers in his head and nervously anticipating Picquart’s arrival, but Hermann was the first to show up a few minutes later.

Dubon saluted smartly and said, “Good morning, Captain.”

“Captain,” Hermann said blankly. He fiddled with his keys in silence but finally, as he opened the door, asked in his graceless manner: “And when will you be leaving us, Dubon?”

“Uh, that hasn’t been determined precisely,” he replied. “I don’t expect to be here that long.”

“Oh, stick around, Dubon. We missed you yesterday afternoon. You’re invaluable.”

The man’s tone was so cold, Dubon wondered if he was being sarcastic.

Hermann walked off to his office and Dubon settled at his desk. Gingras hailed him gaily when he arrived a few minutes later, followed by Major Henry, who said, “As you were, Captain,” when Dubon saluted. The major headed to his office and closed the door firmly.

Dubon wished Picquart would come and yet fervently hoped he wouldn’t. He needed the colonel to accept his story for a day at least—and let him see the Italian letter again so he could confirm his suspicions—but he didn’t suppose there was anything to stop the man from marching over to the rue Saint-Dominique and demanding to see Captain Dubon’s file.

It was past nine and still the colonel had not arrived. To distract himself, he took out the little codebook Gingras had given him and began looking up the names of people he knew. He noted there were files on his late father-in-law and on both his brothers-in-law. Were they merely personnel reports or something more nefarious? Knowing both the Statistical Section’s mania for collecting paper and his wife’s family, he rather suspected the former. He was about to hunt them out, when another thought came to him and he looked up General Fiteau. There he was,
Gen. L. Fiteau
, but the next name on the list made Dubon stop.
It was simply
L. Fiteau
. The file was code-named
Anemone
, and Dubon rapidly turned to the first filing cabinet.

The file on Louis Fiteau was one page, noting the basics of his biography and education, his relationship with his father, and his gambling habit. Dubon wondered if it was assessing him as a risk, weighing the likelihood that he was privy to any information through his father that he could sell. One thing was certain—no one was filing these intelligence reports swiftly: the one page on Louis Fiteau failed to record his death.

Dubon was just slipping the page back and thinking of hunting out General Fiteau’s file when the colonel finally arrived, looking grim.

“Colonel.” Dubon saluted. “Can I present—?”

“Not now, Dubon. Oh, it’s your papers, is it? Finally. Well, clear that up with the major,” he said, walking into his office and closing his door behind him.

Dubon sat down, swallowed, and felt the welcome sensation of saliva flooding back into his mouth. He was safe—for now. Picquart seemed distracted by other matters. But how could he ask him to take a second look at the Italian letter?

A few minutes later, Picquart emerged from his office and called sharply for Major Henry. The major’s door was still shut, so Dubon knocked lightly. The door was flung open with some force.

“What?”

“The colonel wishes to see you, Major.”

“Oh.” The major looked disconcerted now, and he pushed past Dubon without another word, entered the colonel’s office, and shut the door.

Gingras, who must have overheard their exchange from the corridor, came into the reception area and, smiling, perched himself on Dubon’s desk.

“I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that one,” he said, inclining his head in the direction of the closed door.

He reminded Dubon of a cat, or perhaps a malicious child, hovering on the sidelines gleefully to observe others getting into trouble.

“I guess Henry thought he could satisfy the colonel with his decisive new evidence, whatever it was.”

“A letter. I found it in the pile that Madame Bastian brought in last Friday. Pretty conclusive. Mentions Dreyfus by name.”

“Oh, I am sure it was conclusive. Henry never fails to please in that regard.”

Dubon did not reply. He was too busy considering what Gingras had just said: he was equally suspicious of the convenient new Italian letter. But how could Henry get such a thing? Was he possibly in collusion with the Italians himself?

“My guess,” Gingras continued, “is that Picquart is now after Henry about the second spy.”

“The second spy?”

Gingras leaned in closer and lowered his voice. “There’s evidence of another spy in the ranks. I think that’s why Picquart reopened the Dreyfus file in the first place. A telegram came in through ‘the usual route’ that showed the Germans are still in touch with a source inside the army.”

Dubon felt a surge of adrenaline in his gut. Someone else had been offering secrets to the Germans. Was this the real spy?

“Hermann showed me the telegram last week,” Gingras said. “He was annoyed because it was in French, and he’s only supposed to do German. Maybe you put it in his pile by mistake. Anyway, he thought I was trying to slough off work and pass it over to him. Then we both read the thing and he grabbed it back quick enough when he realized he could be the one to march it into the colonel’s office. Innocent little
petit bleu
, unless you happened to notice it was written by the German military attaché to a French officer. I guess it was never posted, since it was found in the trash.”

This explained Hermann’s questions the previous week about whether Dubon had read either the German or French documents. Dubon tried to remember what bit of paper in French he might mistakenly have passed on to Hermann. There had been a telegram, but it had been addressed to a Hungarian count.

“Hermann took it in to Picquart,” Gingras continued, “and Picquart
must have taken it to the rue Saint-Dominique. I don’t suppose he likes his orders from that quarter.”

“What orders?”

“To cover it up, I imagine. Find the second spy as quickly as possible and discharge him quietly. After the fuss over Dreyfus, the army can’t possibly withstand another court martial. The public would lose confidence.”

“Yes,” Dubon agreed, “the place would seem to be crawling with spies.”

The rue de Bretagne was bustling with Saturday morning shoppers when Dubon arrived there. Against the backdrop of the jewelers’ windows that lined the old street, a market was in full swing; women with bulging straw baskets were assessing their potential purchases, weighing vegetables in their hands or nibbling on slivers of cheese proffered on the blade of the cheese merchant’s knife.

Dubon passed a fishmonger bellowing out his prices and a butcher’s shop festooned with rabbits, their bodies skinned to reveal the fresh meat but their heads and paws still covered in fur, before he found the address he was looking for. Number 35 was a small building on the corner with a narrow exterior door leading through to a courtyard. Apartment 3, a small sign indicated, could be reached by an exterior staircase leading up to the second floor.

Dubon was making a delivery for Major Henry. About eleven that morning, Henry had come out of his office with three letters and asked Dubon to mail them before the post office shut at noon, grandly allowing that the clerk could then leave for the day.

In the queue in the post office on the boulevard Saint-Germain,
Dubon looked down at the envelopes in his hand. All three bore civilian names and local addresses. He did not recognize the first two, but the third letter was addressed to a Monsieur Dubois on the rue de Bretagne. He had seen the address before; it was the one where Monsieur Leblanc lived. The ridiculously common names must be aliases, he decided, for the same shifty fellow who had, now that he thought of it, eyed him ironically when Dubon addressed him as Leblanc. He stepped up to the wicket and posted the other two letters; this last one he would deliver by hand.

He didn’t really know what he was going to ask the mysterious Leblanc/Dubois if he answered his door, but Le Goff had suggested all these shady characters were for sale. He would use the delivery of the major’s letter as an entrée and sound the man out; suggest that if he had information for sale, Dubon might be able to get him a better price. Perhaps ask him if he knew who “D” might be.

A lengthy silence greeted his knock, but eventually there were sounds from inside and the scruffy man from his earlier encounters in the Statistical Section stuck his head out.

“Yes? What do you want?”

“I … I don’t know if you recognize me—”

“Yeah, I recognize you. What do you want?”

“Can I come in for a moment? I have a message …”

The man begrudgingly opened the door and Dubon found himself in a generous room that overlooked the street corner. It had the feel of a studio with large windows on two sides letting in the north light and a big standing desk, like a draftsman’s table, pushed up against them. The rest of the room was in chaos, with discarded clothes lying on chairs, a tangle of blankets decorating the one couch, and a plate of congealed food on the floor, but the desktop was perfectly ordered, with a series of ink pots lined up across the back beside a jam jar filled with a variety of pens.

“What’s the message?”

Leblanc/Dubois did not seem in any mood for chitchat, so Dubon made a show of shuffling through his pockets and finally pulled out the envelope the major had given him to post. As the man opened it, Dubon stepped aside, so as not to seem inquisitive, and fell to examining
the only picture on the walls, a small document tidily mounted in a frame. It was a brief letter, or perhaps a page torn from a longer letter, in which the writer swore undying devotion to his beautiful correspondent and promised an imminent reunion. It was signed with a flourish:
Napoléon
.

“Humph … Very nice. Very prompt,” Leblanc/Dubois said. He looked up from the envelope, from which Dubon could just glimpse the corner of a banknote protruding, and asked, “Why the special delivery? The major normally uses the mail.”

Dubon thought it best to invent an excuse. “I confess that the major entrusted the letter to me to post last night, saying I was to catch the five o’clock so that it would be delivered today and you wouldn’t have to wait until Monday. Unfortunately, I was a bit delayed getting out of the office …”

“Stopped for a drink and missed the post, did you?” The man sneered. “Well, thank you.”

“Not at all. I must be going now. Just wanted to make sure that it was in safe hands,” Dubon said.

He took his leave promptly, without attempting any further conversation. He had found all the information that he needed on the man’s wall.

He had to restrain himself from running down the two flights of stairs and dancing his way up the rue Réamur and across the boulevard de Sébastopol. The two-kilometer walk over to Madeleine’s apartment seemed to take only two minutes and he twitched with impatience as he waited for her to answer the door. He was bursting to tell someone what he had just discovered and guessed that his mistress, always a late riser, would be happy to receive a surprise Saturday visit after another week of absences. She had called out “Coming!” at his knock, but it took her a while to appear sleepily in her peignoir.

“Oh, it’s you.”

It wasn’t exactly the enthusiastic welcome he had hoped for.

“Expecting someone else?” he joked, taking her into his arms. She pulled away.

“No, of course not. It’s just that you haven’t been here all week and now you wake me up on a Saturday morning.”

“Mazou … you’re still half asleep. Let’s have coffee. I have a story to tell you.”

Once she had made the coffee and they were settled on the divan, she seemed to recover herself, and listened as Dubon recounted his morning.

“Napoléon. Plain as day. Signed with a big sloping
N
and then a series of squiggles. A love letter to Josephine.”

“That was true love,” Madeleine sighed. “The emperor would have done anything for her.”

Dubon refrained from noting that the emperor had eventually divorced his true love for the sake of his crown. He was too eager to produce his discovery: “So, where would he have got such a thing?”

“I have no idea. From an antiques dealer? Lots of people would pay handsomely to have one of Napoléon’s love letters. Imagine having such a thing to hang on your wall—”

“That’s the whole point, you see,” Dubon said impatiently. “The man I was visiting didn’t buy it, he
made
it. He’s a forger. He’s got a nice large desk with the most lovely selection of inkpots and pen nibs. The army is employing a forger in the case against Captain Dreyfus.”

He knew now that the fresh evidence against the captain was fake. It had not been written by Panizzardi at the Italian embassy but by a weaselly forger in the rue de Bretagne. He himself had just delivered payment for the job. Picquart had complained the evidence against Dreyfus wasn’t strong enough, and Henry, the loyal facilitator, the original architect of the case against the captain, had obliged by producing something better. The major simply slipped the forgery into the file that Madame Bastian had brought the previous week. It was proof of deceit on the part of the captain’s prosecutors. Dubon would have to find some way to expose the forgery to Picquart so he would reopen the Dreyfus case. He might not find the real spy, but he could at least help the captain’s wife obtain the appeal her husband deserved.

Dubon was jubilant, and a week’s absence from Madeleine’s apartment had inflamed his passions. His coffee drunk, his secrets spilled, he practically dragged her to the bedroom.