A Man in Uniform (30 page)

“The lenses are just plain glass; they won’t affect your sight. But the man will notice them, which will put him off noticing other things about your appearance, things he might recognize. Let’s get your clerk back in here.”

Lebrun entered and, to the detective’s gratification, was impressed.

“Unrecognizable, Maître. Your own mother, were she still alive …”

“Yes, Lebrun, yes. Very good,” Dubon said, still trying to effect the English accent.

“Skip the accent,” Brown recommended. “It will only slip. Try something simpler. Can you lower your voice a little?”

“Like this … Like this,” Dubon tried. “André, I have told you often enough there is to be no ball playing in the house. Yes, that’s it, the voice of authority. Sounds a bit different from my own, no?”

“Yes, that’s good.”

“Right. I’ll be off, then,” said Dubon, looking at his watch. It was almost five o’clock.

“How do you know he’ll be home?” Brown asked reasonably enough.

“I don’t.”

Dubon arrived at Rivaud’s apartment about half an hour later to find the door slightly ajar. He knocked, waited, and, unsure whether the muffled voice he heard was inviting him inside, pushed the door open slowly, calling out, “Monsieur Rivaud?” as he did so. He was greeted by a blinding flash of light. It seemed not only to illuminate the ghastly scene inside but also to brand the image on his retina with the permanence of a photograph. Rivaud’s body lay sprawled on the studio floor, his head snapped over at an angle so close to his shoulder that his ear was touching it and his eyes wide open as though his death had taken him by surprise.

“You kill him?” asked a voice, as a large figure in a black suit stepped away from Rivaud’s big desk, where the ink bottles still stood in their tidy line.

“
Mon Dieu, non,
” Dubon replied.

“Friend of yours?”

“No, no, not really. No, not a friend.”

“Business associate?”

“No. Who are you?”

“That’s just what I was going to ask you, Monsieur,” replied the man. “But I don’t mind going first. Inspector Maury of the Sureté. This is Pons.” He indicated the man who was the source of the flash of light—a police photographer, to judge from his tripod and camera. He seemed to be busy setting up for another shot and, having fiddled with his camera for the duration of Dubon’s exchange with the inspector, was now carefully spooning some kind of powder into a short metal trough. He put a match to it, lit it, and, while he held it aloft, pushed a button on the camera. The room was once again illuminated.

The inspector ignored the light and asked Dubon, “And you are?”

Dubon paused. The inspector was investigating a murder, and Dubon was a member in good standing of the Paris bar. Probably best not to lie.

“Maître François Dubon. A barrister,” he explained.

“Really?” The inspector raised an eyebrow at Dubon and kept it raised as he stared at him. Perhaps this was how he got suspects to confess. “You don’t look like any kind of lawyer I would hire.”

Dubon put a hand up to the fake whiskers.

“I don’t usually dress like this. I confess I was not going to reveal my true profession to, er, um …” Dubon looked back down at the forger’s dead body. This was the second violent death he had witnessed in the space of a month. It was not a pleasant feeling. He felt his stomach churning, and he turned away, struggling to quell his nausea.

The inspector waited a moment and continued.

“So, you weren’t planning to tell the gentleman who you really are. But you know who
he
is?”

“Yes, his real name is Rivaud, although I believe he goes by various aliases. He’s a forger by trade.”

“Ah yes,” replied the inspector, “and known to the Paris police, Monsieur—Dubon, you said it was, I believe.” His tone suggested he thought Dubon was probably an alias too. “And why would a lawyer be visiting a forger in disguise?”

“I have a client who is working to exonerate a man we believe to have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice,” Dubon said, as succinctly
as he could. “I think Rivaud forged some of the evidence against the man, and I was going to attempt—”

“You were going to wring a confession out of him, were you?”

“Yes, well, something like that.”

“And when you couldn’t wring a confession out of him, you wrung his neck instead, did you? And you just came back now because … perhaps you forgot something or you realized you had missed an opportunity to riffle through his files …”

“That is preposterous, Inspector.” The accusation made Dubon recover himself in a hurry. “If I had killed the man and then been stupid enough to return to the scene of my crime, I certainly wouldn’t have pushed open the door when I heard a voice inside.”

“Maybe you are a lawyer, after all.” The inspector laughed. The man seemed quite unmoved by the dead body on the floor.

“Maître.” He used the title with ironic emphasis. “Sit there for a moment while we finish up our work. Another detective will be along in a bit and he can take you into the commissariat to make a statement.”

Dubon knew he could insist on the presence of a lawyer before he answered any questions, but he decided it wasn’t wise to argue. He began pushing aside some of the clothes, newspapers, and debris that covered the divan to make a place for himself.

“Not there! We haven’t photographed that yet,” the inspector shouted at him.

Dubon found himself a chair and perched on it as the photographer turned his attention to the room.

“Interesting, the killer ransacked the room but left the desk,” the inspector remarked to his colleague as he began to take pictures of the divan.

“I think it was always like this,” Dubon said.

“What?”

“The room … I visited Monsieur Rivaud once before. On that occasion, he was very much alive, and his desk was the only thing in the room that was tidy.” Dubon gestured at the ink bottles and brushes. “I guess he took pride in his, er, his craft, if you want to call it that.”

Dubon kept to himself the one thing he had noticed that was different about the room. Napoléon’s love letter had been removed from the wall. There was a barely discernible rectangular patch where it had hung, faintly lighter than the surrounding plaster and marked with one small black hole where a nail had been.

Dubon returned home in a police wagon. The inspector had kept him waiting an hour in the forger’s studio until a constable finally showed up and was dispatched to find the boss. The chief inspector arrived promptly, full of apologies for detaining a busy man like Maître Dubon.

“Nasty business, these underworld characters,” he said to Dubon, genially dismissing Rivaud’s murder. “It will be some deal that has gone awry, you can count on it—another criminal type.” He asked Dubon to accompany the constable to the commissariat, where Dubon dutifully answered the few questions that were put to him and signed a statement. After the inspector’s hard approach, it felt perfunctory to say the least.

As the constable drove him home in the wagon, he hoped Geneviève and the servants would not spot him alighting from such a notorious conveyance—and puzzled over who had vouched for his identity with the chief inspector.

It was only as he walked into the foyer of his own home and saw the
look on Luc’s face that he remembered: it was the night of Geneviève’s dinner party. It had been called for seven. He pulled out his pocket watch: it was eight thirty.

“Madame held dinner for half an hour, Maître,” Luc said in a tone carefully scrubbed of judgment. “She decided she could wait no longer. They have just sat down: Major de Valcourt Ronchaud took the head of the table.”

“Oh good, good. That’s fine, I’ll just pop in and sit at his place.”

“Would you not prefer to change, Maître? And perhaps … shave?”

Dubon was reminded of his disguise; he had abandoned the glasses Brown had offered him, but the whiskers were still in place.

“Yes, yes. I’ll go and change and get these things off my face.” He gave a good tug to one tuft of hair and bits came off in his hand. He laughed, but Luc just looked a little sick. “I’ll be as quick as I can. Is my evening suit ready?”

“Yes, Maître. I had laid it out on the bed for you. Madame had expected you at six.”

Of course Geneviève had spoken to him about the dinner the previous evening, but he had been too busy considering how to expose the forgery to listen. He had been out of the house before anyone else had woken that morning but he had come back to get his old suit around eleven. He should have remembered the party—there had been two bouquets of flowers in the hall and sounds of activity in the kitchen, he now recalled—but by then all he could think of was what he was going to say to the forger.

There would be hell to pay, he thought to himself as he made his way into the bathroom and started pulling at the whiskers; they came off erratically, leaving patches of skin that were both sticky and flaming red. The result looked worse than when he had started and he surveyed himself in the mirror with rising panic.

“What are you doing?”

The voice made him jump. It was André at the bathroom door.

“Removing a false beard,” Dubon replied testily. At least with children you did not have to explain yourself.

“For the school play, we used face cream,” André offered helpfully.
“Maybe Maman has some.” He turned to his mother’s dressing table in the bedroom behind him and rummaged about before returning with a jar in his hand.

Dubon applied the stuff and found it melted the gum and took off the whiskers with a lot less yanking. He achieved an effect that made him look clean-shaven but ruddy-faced, as though perhaps he had spent the day outdoors. The cream had a flowery perfume that he rather liked; it conjured up images of cozy family dinners or Geneviève rising from the breakfast table to plan her morning. It was her scent, he now realized, hoping it would not smell as strong to his dinner companions as it did to him.

“Not bad,” he said to André, who followed him back into the bedroom. There he pulled on evening dress and began knotting his evening tie in the mirror.

“Why were you wearing a beard?” André asked.

“For work. I wanted to talk to someone without his knowing who I was.” He fumbled with the tie; Luc would have done a firmer job.

“That’s clever,” André said in a tone of uncharacteristic awe. “Do you get to wear any other disguises at work?”

“No, not usually,” Dubon replied, thinking of his borrowed uniform. “I must go to the table or your mother will be furious.”

“She already is,” André said, as Dubon hurried to the dining room.

But of course Geneviève was not going to show her displeasure in front of her guests. She would take a jovial tone of wifely forbearance with the major and Masson providing backup. As he slid into the chair originally intended for his brother-in-law, Dubon recognized that the storm would wait for later.

“Hope you don’t mind my taking the head of the table,
mon vieux,
” the major greeted him.

“No, no, not at all. Best thing to do under the circumstances. My apologies, Mesdames,” he said, smiling at the female guests with what he intended to be captivating charm but he suspected looked merely smarmy. Certainly the Comtesse de Chambort, from whom, he now
recalled, Geneviève was hoping for more regular invitations, did not look impressed.

“I was unavoidably detained at the office. I am sure that Geneviève has complained already this evening about a particularly onerous case I am working on at the moment. It has been most inconvenient, and I am so sorry it has disrupted my duties as your host.”

“Work, work, it is all the gentlemen ever talk about these days,” the comtesse offered. “It is a wonder we can get to the table at eight, the men are all so busy at their offices. When I was a girl, we ate at six, and not just
en famille
. Six even if we had guests, well, six unless we had a ball, and of course, then we had a late supper after the dancing too. Did I tell you, my dear”—she turned to Geneviève now—“that the count has taken an office? I don’t believe he really does anything there, but he feels it necessary. He wants to return home at seven o’clock, like a working man. I tell him all this socialism is an affectation, but it makes no difference. He insists he go there every day. At least it keeps him out of my way.”

Dubon gathered that the count himself was not present, but couldn’t recall why.

“Oh, I don’t deny the power of a profession, Comtesse,” Geneviève replied. “In my family, of course, my cousin, the Comte de Ronchaud Valcourt, never took a profession, just lived on the estate, but my father always had a vocation for the military. Both the major and my younger brother, Captain de Ronchaud Valcourt—I don’t believe you have met him, Comtesse—both of them follow in the family tradition in that regard. No, I never begrudge François his work, certainly I don’t.”

Nor my income, Dubon thought to himself, inured to Geneviève’s efforts to present his law practice as little more than an interesting hobby.

“You have a forgiving wife, Dubon. You are blessed,” Masson said.