A Man in Uniform (44 page)

“When did you realize your mistake, Madame?”

“Oh, as soon as you sent me a note from your office arranging a meeting. Your signature is illegible, but your letterhead is not. Then I went and looked you up and found you in a directory of lawyers.”

“But you did not think to let me go so that you might pursue the right lawyer?”

“Oh no, Maître. By that time you had sneaked into the Statistical Section. I don’t think Maître Déon would ever have dared such a thing. You were the one who found Esterhazy. It will surely not be long before the appeal is granted and the captain comes home. So, in the end, what does it matter if I had the wrong lawyer? I had the right man.”

What did it matter? Dubon bit down on his lip as the irony of it threatened to overwhelm him. He thought of the fear he had felt in the Statistical Section and the anger Geneviève had hurled at him for taking on the case and the time he had been away from Madeleine leaving Masson ample opportunity to make arrangements with her. Had it really been worth it? He stared at the widow, hoping for an answer, but she had other things on her mind.

“It’s funny, your not being Déon, because that was what I was so worried someone might notice. That was why I came to the office in
my widow’s weeds. I did not want to be seen visiting such a prominent lawyer, a Socialist and all that.”

“Who would notice?”

“Government agents, I suppose. You may think this sounds ridiculous, Maître, but both the captain’s brother and Madame Dreyfus are followed continually by government agents, looking to see whom they make contact with or hoping to catch them in some incriminating behavior. There are those who might remember I was an acquaintance of the captain’s and I certainly did not want to draw attention to myself. The press would be only too happy to publish a story saying the captain kept a mistress. His brother has been very careful to have almost no contact with me since the captain was deported.”

“So you know the family?”

“I have never met Madame Dreyfus, and I only met Mathieu Dreyfus after the captain left France. It was my husband who knew the captain. I was married to an officer, a lieutenant. He was killed during a training exercise. We probably should have waited to marry. His salary was really too small to keep a wife, and the pension … well, it was impossible. The captain was so kind, always so kind to me. They have family money, you know, and he started to pay me a stipend, and …”

“Certain things were expected in exchange?” Dubon said, trying to phrase it delicately. He was, after all, familiar with the arrangement.

“It was our choice,” she replied. “I don’t want you to think the captain seduced me or profited from my distress. We had fallen in love.”

It was what he had feared. She had hired him to save the man she loved.

“And now?” he asked, almost harshly.

“Now?”

“Are you in love with him now?”

She looked up, surprised at the strength of his tone. “It’s been two and a half years since I laid eyes on him, Maître, and I have never received any word from him. I don’t suppose he can risk writing to me. I am loyal to his cause, I am heartsick about his current situation, but no, I don’t think I would say I am in love with him now.”

“Good,” said Dubon, and there was a pause while they both thought about what he meant.

“Why did you come to me, then?” he asked, realizing they could not dismiss her last lover quite so easily. “I mean, why did you want to hire Maître Déon to look into the captain’s case?”

“I wasn’t satisfied that Monsieur Dreyfus was getting results for his brother, and I was frustrated by that, and really, I owe the captain so much. I couldn’t stand by and just let him be forgotten.” She paused and swallowed visibly, as though coming to the hard part of the story.

“After the captain was deported, the stipend continued. The captain’s brother arranged that I would still be paid. Right away when I read the newspapers, I doubted they had the right man. If you knew the captain …”

It had been her refrain throughout; if you knew the captain, you knew he was loyal. Loyalty of a certain kind—the same kind he practiced himself, Dubon supposed.

“I wrote to Monsieur Dreyfus, his brother,” she said, “and we met. He told me what he knew of the charges and the evidence, and I told him I believed in the captain’s innocence as much as he did, but I also told him to stop the money. Well, under the circumstances, I wasn’t performing the services for which it was paid, was I.” She let out an ironic little laugh. “Also, I worried that now that he was gone, his wife might have access to financial records she would not have seen before, that she might see the stipend going out and guess. I would never have wanted to hurt her. It has been very hard being the captain’s mistress. It’s like what they say about bereavement: a man dies and his grieving widow gets all the attention, but his mistress has to keep her sorrow a secret. I have often felt invisible, unable to tell anyone of my troubles, but when I imagine what it must be like to be her …

“But Monsieur Dreyfus wouldn’t hear of cutting me off,” she continued. “He insisted that his brother would not want me to be abandoned, although he could never ask for instructions on such a matter in his letters. They do get letters from the captain but, of course, the government reads them all. Monsieur Dreyfus promised me his
sister-in-law would not find out about my stipend. And he apologized, but he said he could not risk having regular contact with me. So the monthly check still arrives, but I have felt increasingly burdened by the money: I cannot move on. That’s why I was so upset after those stories of the escape, that day at the racetrack. I realized right away they couldn’t be true, and that made it all the worse. To have an ending of some kind dangled in front of me and then snatched away … As long as the captain was a prisoner, I was too.

“I took the money, but I tried to live very carefully. I found work doing some accounting in an office and managed to put a bit aside each month. As my despair for the captain grew, so did my savings. When I had enough to pay a lawyer, I came to you … or to Maître Déon, or someone.” She laughed.

Few women, Dubon thought, would have been so scrupulous—but what was the point of her chaining herself to a cause if she no longer loved the man?

“You have been supremely loyal to the captain.”

“His wife might not call it loyalty …”

“Faithful to his cause, then. That kind of faith can be stronger than personal fidelity,” he observed.

“It’s probably easier to hold on to abstract principles than to human beings,” she agreed. “People can be so unpredictable.” She smiled at him.

“Certainly, unpredictable,” he said, thinking ruefully of Madeleine. “Easier to worship an idea than a person. They say love is blind, but perhaps ideals blind us even more completely.”

“You think the generals have been blinded by their loyalty to the nation,” she said, seeing at once into the heart of the question.

“No, Madame, what they have been is mistaken in their notion of what the nation represents. In their paranoia about Germany, they have forgotten that the rights of a man are as important as the future of Alsace and Lorraine.”

“The end does not justify the means?”

“Use the wrong means and you’ll have no end left worth fighting for.”

“You set a high standard.”

“You do, too,” he replied, and then asked gently, “So are you still being paid?”

“I have urged Monsieur Dreyfus again to stop the payments,” she replied. “I have seen him twice recently to pass on information. That’s how I heard the captain is shackled now. They had another letter from him, after the stories about the escape. And then last week, I was able to give Monsieur Dreyfus Esterhazy’s name. It felt wonderful. I could hand him the real spy, and this time, we agreed the money will stop. I do not owe the captain anything any longer.”

Her assertion of her independence hung in the air between them for a moment.

“Good,” he said. “That’s good.” Then something occurred to him and he asked, “Madame, what
is
your name?”

It turned out she had not lied. Her name was Duhamel. Emilie Duhamel.

They lingered over dinner, talking about everything and nothing, and avoiding the topic of the captain’s case. They seemed like old friends now, at ease with each other, Dubon noted, as though the knowledge of their real identities had liberated them from their business relationship. Or perhaps it was merely that she did not need to pretend any longer that she was Madame Dreyfus or some supposed family friend. She chatted and joked and told stories at her own expense. That vital energy that he had so often sensed pulsing beneath a surface marked by sorrow and grief came bubbling up now, and her air of mystery dissolved into something sweeter and more familiar. Dubon had to admit that perhaps his fantasies had clouded his view of her and made his behavior stupidly flirtatious. Now, their newfound companionship floated all kinds of hopes inside him. She was free and so was he. Or at least, he thought, as he recalled his conversation with Geneviève the night they had received the news of Jean-Jean’s death, as free as he had always been.

It was almost ten when they left the restaurant and he insisted on accompanying her in a cab to her door.

“It was very nice to make your acquaintance, Maître Dubon. I hope I will see you again soon.” She shook his hand warmly. “Don’t forget to send me your bill.”

He turned over her hand and raised it to his lips.

“I am sure, Madame Duhamel, that we can come to some kind of understanding about my bill.”

He dismissed the cab and walked home through the streets, thinking over the captain’s case and reassuring himself it would not be long now. Justice would be done. The truth was out, marching forward. It couldn’t be stopped.

Truth is on the march
. He savored the phrase, it had a ring to it. He would offer it to Clemenceau when he went to pay a call on the newspaper editor. Without betraying his bargain with Masson, he still had much to tell him. Clemenceau was the crusader; he would do the work that Déon might have.

He turned the key in his door and stepped quietly into the hall. Luc had left one gas light burning for him, but the household had gone to bed. He took off his clothes in his study, which always doubled as his dressing room, and washed himself in the adjoining bathroom before he pushed through its second door into the bedroom.

At his approach, Geneviève stirred and, as he climbed into bed beside her, awoke enough to asked foggily, “François? Is everything all right?”

“Yes, my dear. Everything will be perfectly all right.” He curled his body along the length of hers and together they settled into sleep.

Light seeped slowly into the room, awakening him from a half sleep. He shifted his weight on the bed, aware he must move carefully while not conscious enough to think why. Something pressed against his wrist and, as he winced with pain, knowledge flooded back in: the bracelet knocked against the bandage there. Underneath the gauze was an open wound. He had spent another night shackled to his cot.

In the end, the palisade had proved more blessing than curse. It cut off his view to the sea, but the lieutenant now ordered the guards to take him down to the little beach at one edge of the island for exercise each morning. He was left to pace the small strip of sand or simply sit there staring out at the relentless waves while his guards perched on the rocks behind him, their rifles resting across their knees.

Those days some months before, as the stakes had risen around his hut, he had soon realized the palisade’s potential: at any hour other than high noon, it provided shade away from the hot metal of the shed and its little porch. By late afternoon it offered an entire corner of coolness where he soon took to sitting for hours. Eventually, the lieutenant allowed him to move his desk there, and even ordered
the erection of a canvas sunshade over the top of it to protect him in the mornings.

The lieutenant was unrelenting, however, on the subject of the shackles. It was as though, the prisoner thought, the man had to make a report all the way back to Paris: as ordered, the prisoner is kept shackled at night and under armed guard during the day. He need not mention the ways in which he eased the prisoner’s situation as long as he followed his orders.

The first night they had pinned him to his cot spread-eagled, each arm raised above his head and locked to either side of the metal frame. The position quickly became excruciating. He had managed, by dint of digging in his heels and bending his knees, to inch his trapped body into a more upright position and so lessen the strain on his arms, but by morning his muscles were in spasm.

The next night, he pleaded with them in his cracked voice to allow him to lie on his side with his hands in a prayer position locked together on the frame. It was a position he could hold all night without agony but, repeatedly jolted back to consciousness by the rubbing of the shackles, he never slept deeply again. When it was not his bracelets that pained him, it was the insects that he was powerless to swat from his face. One fly could keep him awake all night. A stinging mosquito could render him half mad.