A Man in Uniform (43 page)

“So, you can see I have the nation’s interests at heart,” Masson replied smoothly. “Was it your brother-in-law who told you about the new gun?”

“No,” Dubon said, not wishing to draw Jean-Jean into it. His brother-in-law had seen the mistakes in the bordereau’s description of the 120 but had not realized how close he was to the truth when he told his superiors that all this incompetent spy had done was help the French cause by misleading the Germans.

“Well, you are cleverer than your brothers-in-law. Silly men, both of them, in their different ways—the younger one running about town telling anyone who will listen that he has invented hydraulic brakes and the floating piston in his broom closet. And there’s the major, inviting foreign military attachés to his little card parties.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Dubon asked.

“Oh, you know, situations just ripe for the kind of indiscretions that can lead to blackmail.”

“Blackmail.” Dubon said the last word very slowly as a nasty thought blossomed in his mind. It wasn’t the major’s parties that might lead to blackmail. It was other parties, more serious parties, the kind young Fiteau had attended. He remembered Masson sitting on the sidelines with the general the evening of the ball …

“Why does all Paris know that General Fiteau refused to keep paying his son’s debts?” he asked. “
You
put that story out there.”

“It was hardly a story. It was true. The general asked my advice—”

“You were setting the young man up, so somebody could blackmail him. Turn him into another of your unwitting agents.” The Germans were unlikely to doubt the quality of information they were getting from the son of a general, particularly a son with secret gambling debts to pay.

Dubon looked at his former friend with dawning horror. He was as blank as the bedsheet on to which the pictures from a magic lantern are projected. He would reflect whatever image you wanted, take on whatever role you needed and then hold your reliance and your gratitude over your head. He could play piteous orphan to Dubon’s charitably minded parents or generous patron to Madeleine’s ambitious desires; he could be the silent street sweeper who would come in the night and clean away the generals’ great big mess or the garrulous go-between who arranged everything for the young Dubon and his fiancée.

“You might as well have killed Fiteau!”

“That’s a monstrous accusation,” said Masson. He pulled open a drawer in his desk and began fiddling with something inside it. “I had no idea the young man was so lacking in courage. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been a good agent after all.”

“Have you no conscience? Have you seen his mother since his death? That lady who invited you into her home, at whose table you ate? How many other people have you killed, Masson? Was it you who arranged Jean-Jean’s mysterious accident? His superiors had told him to be more discreet, but that wasn’t the problem, was it. No, the real problem was that yet another person could show exactly why Dreyfus was innocent.”

“Your brother-in-law’s accident was sad, very sad.” He paused, removed a small vial from his drawer and placed it on the desktop. Then he reached into the desk again and pulled out a syringe. As Dubon watched in confusion and mounting fear, he loaded the contents of the vial into the chamber of the syringe. “It will be especially hard on Geneviève if she is to suffer another bereavement so soon after her brother’s death,” he said as he held up the needle. “I am bigger than you, always have been. The needle is filled with prussic acid, Dubon, and there is no point calling for help. Mathieu has gone home for the evening and the upstairs neighbors are in the country.”

The man was serious. Masson would kill him. Dubon couldn’t imagine his own death and felt instead an odd calm that enabled him to think.

“What will you do with my body?”

“I’ll call a doctor I know,” Masson explained cheerfully. “A heart attack fells a prominent Paris lawyer. Very sudden. But perhaps not so surprising. Overworking lately. Even his wife will say so.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice seemed distant, almost dreamy.

“Poor Geneviève. I’ll comfort her, of course. We’ll be drawn closer inevitably. They say if widows or widowers are going to remarry, they usually make a new match within a year. No old parents to block us now, no fanciful worries about hereditary conditions, madness in my family that might be passed on to children …”

He looked up and his tone hardened. “You were always so sure you could have what you wanted, Dubon. It was only natural Geneviève would fall in love with you. You were the handsome one. I was just that ugly, stringy Masson. You were grateful enough for my help convincing her family of your worth. Did you ever think what it might feel like to be the one on the outside looking in?”

Dubon cried out, but the noise served only to awaken Masson to his purpose. With a swift step, Masson crossed the room with the syringe in his hand and grabbed him.

Dubon could feel the tip of the needle grazing his neck. One quick jab and a push on the plunger and he would be dead. Masson had his arm twisted painfully behind his back and had shoved him up against a wall and pinned him in place with his knee. Dubon dared not move for fear the needle would hit its mark.

“What’s the point, Masson?” he asked, trying to speak as neutrally as possible, willing himself to breathe slowly despite his pounding heart. “You can’t kill everyone who is demanding the truth.” He tried to lean away from the needle a little by sliding his head along the wall, but Masson tightened the grip on his arm.

“I should warn you that I have left accounts of my conclusions about the captain’s innocence with several prominent journalists. They will print them. It’s too late. Revision is inevitable.” Dubon thought he felt Masson’s grip on his arm slacken a little, but he replied in an unrelenting voice.

“They won’t print anything, Dubon. There can be devastating penalties for a newspaper that endangers national security. And nobody
will be able to refute the government’s evidence. The caravan will move on.”

So I keep hearing, Dubon thought to himself, and might have laughed were it not for Masson twisting his arm yet more tightly. Dubon felt the tip of the needle push ever so slightly into his skin.

He tried to swallow and then blurted out, “Your evidence is a piece of paper that Henry cobbled together from different sheets. The lines are blue at the top and purple at the bottom.”

Masson let Dubon’s arm drop down his back but did not let go. “Ah,” he said reflectively. “Hermann thought you had discovered something, something about the Italian letter.” Masson laughed lightly. “I told you that you would betray yourself. You just gave me the key.”

Clearly, Picquart had not had the time or inclination, as he was packed off to Algeria, to explain to the generals how he knew the new evidence against Dreyfus was a forgery.

“But what good is it to you?” Dubon asked. “The letter can be exposed as a fraud by anyone who holds it up to good light. It’s too late, Masson. It’s over.” As Masson hesitated, Dubon pressed his advantage home. “If you don’t believe me, believe your own kind. Look in my pocket.” He gestured with his head to his right pant leg.

“If you are trying to trick me into letting go—”

“Don’t let go. Just put the needle down, or at least back it away a bit.”

Masson withdrew the needle a few centimeters and released his knee from Dubon’s lower back so that his captive could reach awkwardly around his own body with his one free arm. Dubon pulled the crumpled telegram from his pocket and tossed it onto a small table. Masson now had to make a choice. He let go of Dubon’s arm but kept the needle, holding it aloft as a threat. Stooping to the table, he used his left hand to smooth out the paper. Dubon shook out the arm that had been twisted behind his back and stepped gingerly away from the wall, watching as Masson read the news of Henry’s arrest and suicide.

“The idiots! I told them to stay the course,” he said, his arm holding the needle now falling to his side.

They had reached an impasse. Masson slumped down in one of
the chairs, leaving Dubon standing. Faced with the reality that Henry had fallen on his sword and that the generals’ cover-up was unraveling, Masson could no longer deny Dreyfus’s innocence even if he could still try to protect Esterhazy, his unwitting double agent.

“Let me go and I will forget this episode,” Dubon said, desperately thinking how to extricate himself from their encounter. “I will not pursue you. Nor urge the journalists to ask how high the cover-up extends. Rivaud’s murder can languish at the back of some police file for eternity.”

At this Masson snorted and drew himself straighter in his chair. Dubon backed away a small distance, moving closer to the door.

“I will not tell anyone what I know of your involvement; most especially I will not tell Madeleine what kind of man you are. She can find that out for herself. And, of course, I will never mention to Geneviève what fantasies you might have about her, nor will I tell her the real reason you are not welcome at our table anymore. I will never show her the letter that her brother left me when he set off for Algeria, a letter in which he reports how he went to his superiors with his suspicions about the bordereau only a few weeks before his mysterious death. But you must promise me two things.”

Masson stared at him, the syringe in his hand, waiting to assess the deal: Dubon’s life for Masson’s invisibility. He was wary now, but at least he no longer seemed murderous.

“First, you will never see Geneviève again, and you will never accept any invitation she might extend to you.” It was the ban he had been rehearsing in his head since he had walked in on Masson and Madeleine.

“And the second thing?”

“You will no longer stand in the way of revision. Do what you want with Esterhazy—I can’t imagine the Germans will still buy information from him now that his name is public—but don’t block those who will prove Dreyfus’s innocence. Let justice take its course. Do I have your word?”

Masson paused and took a breath.

Dubon waited, not daring to move.

“Ah, my word. Yes, my old friend, you have my word.” If he was
vexed by his defeat, he did not show it. He stood and crossed back to his desk, dropping the syringe into the open drawer and sliding it silently shut.

Dubon backed away quickly now, reached the door, and fumbled for the handle.

“There is just one other thing, Dubon. One thing that has puzzled me. Who exactly is your client?”

Dubon almost laughed as he maneuvered his body out the door. “I can tell you with all honesty that I really don’t know.”

Dubon did not stop running until he reached the Seine. He crossed the pont Solférino and walked the rest of the way home in a haze. He had stared down a man who had planned to kill him. He had won justice for the wrongfully convicted. He badly wanted a drink. He contemplated opening that ’75 Margaux. It had been a spectacular vintage in an outstanding decade. The seventies—they had been his glory years too.

It was just as he pushed open the door of his apartment, deciding that the wine would be wasted on him in his current condition, that he remembered he didn’t have time for a drink. He had to dress for dinner with his client, whoever she might be. He looked at his watch and discovered that the appointed time was half an hour away; he was going to be late.

When he arrived at the restaurant, he found to his embarrassment that the lady was already waiting for him at a table on the far side of the room. She looked around as though expecting someone but did not appear to see him. The maître d’hôtel, who knew Dubon slightly, appeared at his side.

“I showed the lady to a table, Maître Dubon. That was her preference.”

“Good. I’ll join her.”

Dubon followed him across the room, moving eagerly toward the lady, whose beauty, he had to note, was somewhat marred by the way she squinted as he approached. He was just launching into his apologies when he stopped himself.

“I don’t know how to address you, Madame. All I know is that you are not Madame Dreyfus.”

She looked down at her lap. “I am not the captain’s wife …” She hesitated, perhaps too embarrassed to continue.

“But you are someone who loves him just as much,” Dubon said. “Someone who keeps one of his old uniforms in her closet.” The kind of woman, he thought to himself but did not add, who will agree to meet a man in a public restaurant.

“Yes. I’m the captain’s mistress.” She said it sadly, as though the status demeaned her.

“Why did you let me believe otherwise?” he asked.

“I never told you I was Madame Dreyfus.”

“No, but you are something much closer than a family friend.”

“I really am a widow, although my husband has been dead more than eight years now. I don’t usually dress in black, but I do find it convenient sometimes, when I want to pass unnoticed. People don’t pay much attention to a middle-aged lady in a black dress.”

“People would always pay attention to you, Madame.”

She acknowledged the compliment with a wave of her hand. “So, we have both made mistakes, Maître Dubon, but things seem to have worked out for the best.”

“What was your mistake?” he asked.

“Well …” She grimaced. “On the day I came to you, I actually entered your building looking for the famous Maître Déon.” She fumbled in the soft bag in her lap for a few seconds and pulled out a pair of glasses. “Can’t abide them, although I do have to wear them for shopping. Otherwise the merchants will pass off inferior goods on me. I must have misread your name and thought I had reached the right office.” She laughed a little and returned her glasses to her bag.

How could he have been so dim? Dubon berated himself. Lebrun had even indicated the first time he met her that he thought there was some misunderstanding and she was looking for the lawyer upstairs. She had wanted the great social crusader Déon to take on the Dreyfus case, not some lowly solicitor who hadn’t tackled anything more serious than a contested will in decades. She had intended to hire the man who would not merely have discovered Esterhazy’s name but who would have dragged it through the mud while rallying every left-wing intellectual in the land to the cause. While Dubon was playing dress-up in the Statistical Section, Déon would have got an appeal moving through the courts. He’d probably have had the captain home by now. The lady had climbed the stairs to Déon’s office and not realized that she had yet to reach the right floor, because there, on the tiny plaque outside Dubon’s door, was a name that—if looked at with bad eyes—might be mistaken for Déon’s.