A Man in Uniform (28 page)

Afterward, as he dressed hurriedly, she did not linger either, but pulled a clean pair of white stockings from her top drawer and arranged fresh underthings. As she removed her fabulous pink linen dress from the closet, it dawned on him that she was going out.

“Lunch date?”

“Yes.”

“Who with?”

“Just the old gang.”

“Fancy dress for the old gang. You look good enough to lunch on yourself. Wish I could go with you.”

“You wouldn’t be interested.”

As he pulled on his own clothes, she tidied her hair and then affixed a hat and veil over her chignon.

“New hat?” It was a large, sloping affair dyed a shade of green just as pale as the pink of her dress. It seemed an unusual color combination—but what did he know of fashion? Certainly, with the hat sitting at the jaunty angle at which Madeleine managed to make it cling to her head, the effect was very dashing, and he felt a tingle of arousal as they walked to the end of her street together arm in arm before parting company on the boulevard.

“You’re jumping to conclusions, Dubon.”

He and Le Goff were sitting in an outdoor café in the park at the bottom of the Champs Élysée the next day, sheltering under the shade of a flowering chestnut tree and drinking glasses of beer to fend off an early heat wave that had descended unexpectedly on the city. Dubon was in a hurry and had grown tired of hiking all the way to Montparnasse to meet. Le Goff, meanwhile, was disappointing him; he was much less excited by the Napoléon discovery than Dubon had been and was now putting a damper on his whole theory.

“The man’s a forger, I tell you.”

“I don’t doubt he’s a forger, but that isn’t proof that letter is a forgery.”

“Why else would Henry have contact with a forger?”

“I can think of other reasons why the Statistical Section might use forgeries. They are in the business of counterintelligence, after all. They may be trying to pass information back to the enemy.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

“Disinformation, they call it. False information. Troops are to move
left when actually you plan them to move right; tests of a new gun show it has failed miserably, no threat to you there, Monsieur Boche. You can go back to sleep. Or it might be true information that you want the enemy to have but that diplomacy prevents you from releasing officially. Tests of a new gun show it performs exceedingly well; we are now in a position to blow your brains out one hundred times over.”

“And this information is forged?” Dubon asked peevishly. Le Goff’s sense of humor was wearing on him.

“You are hardly going to ask the generals to sign false troop orders or release their actual gun reports to the enemy.”

“Why not?”

“Too embarrassing if they got caught. Plus you don’t want to disturb them. Never bother the superior officers: rule number one of a successful career in the military.”

Dubon wondered if the military bred such cynicism in all its young officers. Le Goff’s position was so totally different from that of his brothers-in-law, the younger so earnest in his attitude to the army, the older so affectionate.

“Your Major Henry is certainly a familiar type in that regard. Mr. Fix-It,” Le Goff continued. “Colonel wants stronger evidence; stronger evidence miraculously appears.”

“But I thought you said the evidence wasn’t forged,” Dubon protested. His head was starting to swim trying to understand Le Goff’s take on the machinations of intelligence.

“I’m not saying it isn’t a forgery,” Le Goff said. “I am just cautioning you that Major Henry may have perfectly legitimate, well, perhaps not legitimate, but perfectly professional reasons for doing business with a forger. You’re the lawyer; what do you have proof of? That some suspicious man with whom Henry has had some kind of transaction likes to amuse himself by re-creating Napoleonic memorabilia. Not much to go on.”

“I need to prove he forged that letter … I’ll go and talk to him again. And I’ll ask Picquart to take another look at the letter.”

“Picquart is your contact?”

“Well, yes. I … that is …” He had tried to hide the extent of his activities from Le Goff, but the man now guessed what was up.

“Dubon, are you inside the place?”

“Yes, actually. I have taken a post as a temporary clerk in the Statistical Section. I showed up wearing Jean-Jean’s second-best uniform.”

“Impersonating a military officer! Daring stuff, Dubon,” Le Goff said with a note of sarcasm. “But just think what it will do to Dreyfus if you are caught: he’s going to have a hard time proving he’s not a spy if he’s got spies working for him.”

Dubon had not thought of that. He wasn’t just risking his own career; if he was exposed, he would jeopardize the captain’s cause. He was being foolhardy—foolhardy and stupid. He reached for his beer.

“Does Picquart believe the captain is innocent?” Le Goff persisted.

“He did, or at least he was very suspicious, until that letter came in. If I can get him to examine it, maybe he’ll realize it’s phony and take it to the higher-ups,” Dubon said, trying to bolster his own confidence.

“I wouldn’t bank on it. He wanted to see stronger evidence. He may be rather pleased.”

“I’ll just wait and see what signals he is sending out on Monday,” Dubon replied, deflated. “If he can’t be trusted to expose the forgery, I’ll find some other way. Maybe you could print something?”

“Not without some proof,” Le Goff replied. “What I want is the stuff about the secret file. You were supposed to let me run with it yesterday. The other papers have nothing new, but that doesn’t stop them from rehashing tales of the captain’s perfidy. He’s news now, like it or not.”

“Give me a week. I’ll expose the forgery and then you can expose the secret file.”

“I can’t promise you that, Dubon. My editors want copy, and frankly, I need the money. I’ll give you a couple of days but if you are not in touch by Wednesday, I’ll just write up what I already know and publish that.”

Four hours later, Dubon was gazing at a half-naked woman and trying to find some comment to make other than to remark on the shape of her breasts.

“Yes, very touching …”

It was a biblical scene, Susanna spied on by the elders as she bathed. Geneviève gave it a perfunctory ten seconds and then looked up, carefully scanning the press of gallerygoers before she moved on to the next painting. Dubon followed her with some amusement. He had always suspected that she attended these occasions not to see art but to see people. He did not enjoy galleries but felt it was only politic to accompany her. He had arrived home in good time for dinner Friday night and for lunch Saturday. And he had spent an hour after lunch reviewing her guest list for the following Tuesday. It was her big spring dinner party, an occasion that marked the end of her social season and imminent departure for the coast, and there would be a few new acquaintances she would seek to impress alongside her old reliables.

She had not asked Dubon about the Dreyfus case again, and he was hoping he could somehow expose the forgery to the colonel on Monday and get out of the Statistical Section for good so that the next time she challenged him about it he could say, more or less honestly, that he was finished.

“That’s Madame du Châtel,” she whispered at him, cocking a head across the room. “We should work our way over to her.”

But as they approached the next painting, the last in a row, they were interrupted by the appearance of Masson in the doorway.

“Baron!” Geneviève called out with overenthusiastic delight.

“Madame, Dubon …” He took Geneviève’s hand and kissed it.

“Will you join us, Baron?” she asked, and then paused. “But perhaps you haven’t seen this room yet. We were just finishing,” she said, keeping up the pretense they were all there to see paintings.

Dubon noted her excited face and it dawned on him that she had set up this meeting.

“Oh, I can come back to it,” Masson replied coyly. “I seem to be going through backward. No matter. You, Madame, are more beautiful company than any painting.”

Dubon had to bite his lip to stop himself from laughing out loud—Masson could be so unctuous—but Geneviève smiled in apparently genuine appreciation, and the three of them moved on to the next room, which was devoted entirely to landscapes. Masson and Geneviève agreed they particularly liked an Italian sunset and spent some time
analyzing its merits, although Dubon wondered if Masson were not completely color-blind to the lurid effect of its glowing red sky.

They were about halfway around the room when they came face-to-face with Madame du Châtel, whom Geneviève now seemed less interested in meeting, even though that lady professed delight at being introduced to Masson. She joined their party for the rest of the exhibition and as she chatted with Geneviève, Masson drew back to make polite conversation with Dubon.

“Madame Dubon tells me you are still busy defending the indefensible,” he said.

His tone was lighthearted but the remark made Dubon pause: had Geneviève told Masson that he was working on the Dreyfus case? He didn’t ask, but replied instead, “It’s a lawyer’s job—defending whoever needs a defense.”

“Remember what I told you, Dubon,” Masson said. “The caravan will move on, and you will have associated yourself with another lost cause.”

“That’s my business, I guess,” Dubon said as he stepped forward to join the ladies.

“Dubon. In here. Now.”

Dubon hurried into the colonel’s office and saluted sharply. As he raised his hand, he could feel a slight tearing under his armpit—stitching giving way. The uniform Madame Dreyfus had provided was of a fine serge, a much more comfortable fabric than that of Jean-Jean’s summer kit, but the tunic was too short and pressed on his shoulders, leaving him feeling as hunched over as an orangutan.

“What is
this
?” the Colonel demanded, gesturing at the front page of a newspaper sitting on his desk.

It was the Monday morning edition of
Le Soleil
, his friend Morel’s paper. Dubon hadn’t read it, he seldom did, but as he turned the folded broadsheet to face him he saw that the article the colonel was pointing at was written by one J. Fournier, the military correspondent whom Dubon had met at the racetrack.

“Shut the door, Dubon.”

He obeyed and returned to stand in front of the colonel’s desk.

“You don’t know this story?”

“No, Colonel.”

“It says that the military holds a file of conclusive evidence proving the guilt of Captain Dreyfus, including a letter from an Italian diplomat that speaks of buying information from ‘that bastard Dreyfus.’ ”

“Not ‘that bastard D’?”

“No, ‘that bastard Dreyfus,’ all spelled out, nice and clear.”

Somebody was leaking stuff to Fournier. Probably Henry, Dubon guessed. He must think the case against Dreyfus needed some fuel in the press. Le Goff was going to be furious he had been scooped.

“Dubon, what do you have to say for yourself?”

“For myself, Colonel?”

“This is classified information. Sharing it with a newspaper is a serious offense, subject to immediate discipline, if not court martial.”

“Colonel, you don’t think it was me who leaked this to the press,” Dubon protested. He had, of course, been about to do that very thing, but his surprise that someone had beaten him to it—and embroidered on the information—added sincerity to his tone of injured innocence.

“Yes, I do, Dubon. Temporary clerk. New to the section. None of my regular staff would ever betray our work in this way. They are too loyal.”

“Perhaps that is your problem, Colonel,” Dubon suggested gently. “Someone feels the section’s work needs to be defended in the press, that the questions being raised need to be quashed. Perhaps someone is
too
loyal …”

“Henry. He wouldn’t …” Picquart picked up the paper as though to weigh this conclusion and began smacking the desk with it. “The fool, the fool … Didn’t he realize …”

He did not finish his sentence, but Dubon could guess what line of reasoning Picquart was now following. In his attempt to bolster the case against Dreyfus, Henry had just handed the prisoner’s lawyers exactly the material they needed to launch an appeal: reason to believe evidence had been withheld from the defense at the time of the court martial. All they had to do was come forward and say this “bastard” letter had never been shown to them.

Now another thought came to Picquart as he stared at the paper again.

“Why do you suppose the name is spelled out? If it’s Henry, he certainly knows that only an initial appears in the ‘bastard’ letter. And why not tell the paper about the newer letter, the second Italian letter that does name Dreyfus? It’s much harder evidence.”

“Maybe the journalist confused the two,” Dubon said. Fournier wasn’t particularly bright, he recalled, and he would have been dealing with a lot of information.

“Or maybe,” Picquart speculated, “his source led him to think the original evidence actually named Dreyfus … Maybe his source …” He opened a desk drawer, pulled out a bunch of keys, selected one, and turned with urgency to the filing cabinet behind his desk.