A Man in Uniform (15 page)

Dubon walked him to the front hall and, since Luc did not seem to be about, offered him his hat. He felt a creeping anxiety about what had just passed. He didn’t like the implications of Masson’s judgment.

“You know, Masson—”

“Yes?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“Come, my friend—”

“No, really, it was nothing—”

“You are a liberal man, Dubon. I hope you don’t feel it was unduly familiar of me to stay for tea in your absence—”

“No, of course not. Geneviève enjoys your company. It’s just—”

“Yes?”

“Well, there’s no need to dig up old history.”

“No, you are right. Your radical politics are of no import anymore.”

“I actually meant the marriage contract, and the money, and all that.”

Masson drew himself up and his tone was cool as he replied, “No. No need to dig up that.”

Fearing he had offended him, Dubon hastened to add, “I mean, I was always very grateful to you, for your help. Our marriage would certainly never have been possible without your intervention.”

“It was nothing. After what your parents had done for me, taking me into the family, I was glad to be able to repay the debt.” Masson smiled at the memory. “ ‘Dubon, a plain name, but a solid family,’ ” he said, quoting his own words to Geneviève’s father nineteen years ago.

Masson had acted as the go-between, making Dubon’s case to the general, guarding the secret of his youthful antics with the Communards, which would have ended the engagement on the spot, and negotiating the details of the nuptial contract.

“I always had the utmost respect for the general …” Dubon paused, and Masson finished his thought for him.

“But he could be a vicious snob. Still, the old man was genuinely fond of you,” Masson continued, “and relieved, I think, too. You remember those wild-eyed types that his daughter was so interested in.”

“It’s true.” Dubon laughed. “I was a rock of probity compared with that other fellow. What was his name?”

“I don’t recall. Anyway, it was all for the best.”

“Yes, Geneviève had a taste for excitement but she could never—well, look at how we live now,” he said, gesturing around the front hall of his well-appointed apartment. “I think her greatest regret is that we can’t afford to keep a carriage.”

“You have provided well for her. Keeping her in the standard …” He let a laugh complete the phrase for him.

The general had been prepared to accept Dubon but did not like the look of his future. The crusading young lawyer was already making a name for himself, the wrong kind of name. In the deal brokered by Masson, General de Ronchaud Valcourt offered to double Geneviève’s dowry on the understanding the extra money would be invested in Dubon’s father’s law practice. Dubon would move it from a cramped building near the gare Saint-Lazare to more fashionable quarters on the rue Saint-Honoré and give up defending workers and widows to attend to his father’s more genteel clientele. Geneviève always believed her fiancé had taken over the practice out of a sense of duty toward his own father, rather than to appease hers. They married in 1879, a year before the Socialists won a majority in the National Assembly and voted through the amnesty that would let the exiled Communards come home and the suspected Communards in France live freely again. Dubon’s past no longer posed a threat to the young couple’s security, although it would always remain a potential impediment to their social standing. Geneviève never breathed a word of it to friends and family.

“I would never think of betraying you to your own wife,” Masson continued. “In the future, I will be more careful.” He stepped toward the door now and grasped the handle as though to leave, but then paused and turned back.

“Your many secrets are safe with me,” he said, holding Dubon’s gaze for a moment. Then he turned and left the apartment.

The next morning Dubon did not dawdle. Some odd set of coincidences had given him an opportunity to help the widow. He needed to get back to the Statistical Section and take his chance. He helped himself to a breakfast of bread and jam before seven, waving off Luc’s worried promises of coffee in just a few minutes if Monsieur would only wait, and left the house ten minutes later with a canvas garment bag under his arm. He walked briskly over to his office and let himself in with his key. Lebrun would not arrive until eight, and Dubon would have to be gone by then.

“Captain, we usually start at eight,” the colonel had told him as he left the day before. “On summer schedule now, you know.” The military kept up the old habit of working longer hours when there was more daylight to be had, though Dubon had noticed electric fixtures on the walls.

He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a few blank sheets of paper. He wrote a brief letter for the widow, apologizing for his absence the previous day, asking if she could possibly return to meet him at his office at five thirty, and signing his name. He then wrote a much
longer memo for Lebrun, explaining that research on a delicate new file required him to absent himself from the office for a few days and asking the clerk to reschedule two morning appointments and file a dossier at the Hôtel de Ville. He added that he expected his new client, Madame Duhamel, to stop by again that day, and that Lebrun was to give her the attached note and, if she was at liberty later in the day, to wait with her until he himself could return around five thirty. He thought for a moment about the rest of his commitments, and then pulled a
petit bleu
from the same drawer. He penned an apologetic note to Madeleine, saying he would be absent again that evening but hoped to attend her on Wednesday. He sealed it and left it for Lebrun to post. Then he changed into Jean-Jean’s uniform, adding his clothes to the coatrack where his suit from the previous day was still hanging. He tugged on Jean-Jean’s tunic, put the cap on his head and locked up the office, glancing nervously at his watch. It was twenty to eight now. His disguise, even if it had fooled the officers of the Statistical Section the day before, made him feel dangerously conspicuous.

He weighed the risks of running into someone he knew as he walked or getting trapped alighting from a cab as he had the day before when he had almost bumped into his neighbor; he decided he felt nimbler and safer on foot. If he walked quickly, he would be at his new job on time. He set out briskly and found there was something familiar about this anxious walk down to the river. He was reminded of his first days with Maître Gaillard. Every morning he would brush his one good suit, slick back his hair, and cross the pont Neuf to an office near the Palais de Justice, his pulse racing with excitement for the work that lay ahead and his stomach turning at the thought of not living up to his superior’s expectations. He had a lot more reason to be nervous about his latest assignment, but his new superior seemed a friendly enough fellow so far.

Having crossed paths with Gingras and the silent Hermann on his way in, Dubon was just settling at his desk when the colonel himself arrived; Dubon sprang to his feet and saluted sharply, but the colonel dismissed this with a wave.

“Oh, as you were, Captain … Dubon, isn’t it? As you were. Settling in, figuring all this out?”

“Er, yes,” Dubon replied, unsure how much ignorance might be expected of a replacement clerk. “That is to say, there is a lot of paper here that needs to be filed, and I wasn’t sure …”

“Oh yes, it’s hopeless, just hopeless. My predecessor … I’ve only been here a month myself. Things were not as well organized as they might have been. We just need to straighten up the files a bit, so we know what we are working on. I’d concentrate on the German stuff, since you speak the language, and then pass those documents on to Captain Hermann for translating.” Dubon’s heart sank. If his new job required a knowledge of German, he would get in trouble very soon.

“Once he has done the translating he can tell you if he needs you to make copies of any of it,” the colonel continued. “I trust you have a nice italic hand.” He smiled as though it didn’t matter much either way. “We haven’t succeeded in getting much English material, but if you find anything, give it to Captain Gingras. He does the English. Do you speak some English too, Captain?”

“A very little, Colonel,” Dubon said, truthfully enough. “Captain Gingras suggested chronological order was important,” he added, trying to move on from the topic of languages.

“Yes, get everything in order by date. That’s a start, and maybe then Hermann can get back on top of the German pile.”

“And the French-language material? What do I do with that?”

“Shouldn’t be much of it left, but you can just give it to me if you find any.”

“There seem mainly to be a lot of memos here addressed to the Statistical Section or addressed to headquarters.”

“Oh, you mean the shoe sizes and the loaves of bread?” The colonel laughed. “Got to keep up our cover. There are files of that stuff over there.” He indicated a filing cabinet behind Dubon. “There is some sort of system to it, if you take a look. I’m sure you’ll figure it out. You found the glue, did you? You’ll want to work quite carefully with it.”

“Oh yes, of course,” Dubon replied, unsure as to what he was supposed to be gluing.

Later, as he was organizing the German material into chronological order, he noticed some of it had been ripped into pieces. He uncovered a glue pot in the desk and soon understood why the colonel had
suggested care. It was tricky finding which pieces went with which and Dubon had to rely almost entirely on the shapes since he couldn’t read the foreign words. It was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, he thought to himself as he tried to glue the pieces carefully enough that he did not obscure the writing. After some messy attempts, he decided that if the paper had been used on only one side he could best reassemble it by gluing the pieces down on a new, clean sheet. He came across a few pages in French that were also ripped and pieced them together more quickly. The documents seemed of little import to him. Some were pages from a personal letter; another was a
petit bleu
addressed to some Hungarian nobleman requesting details on a business proposal. Dubon dutifully put them in a separate pile from the military memos so that he could pass them on to the colonel.

By ten, he was making good progress and was sufficiently engrossed in the job that the fear in the pit of his stomach had receded enough to let him concentrate. He sensed some movement to his right and looked up to find a rather fat lady in a worn blue raincoat standing in the corridor that led down to Gingras’s and Hermann’s offices. Dubon wasn’t sure how she had got there, since she had not come through the front door, but she must have come from outside: her coat was wet.

“Raining is it, now?” he asked as she walked up to his desk, seeming quite at home in the place.

“Just started to drizzle. So, you’re new.” She stopped in front of him, opened the clasp of a large leather purse that was shaped like a doctor’s bag but oversized and dumped the contents onto the desktop. “There you go. Until next time.” She waved and walked back toward the head of the corridor, which was located on the same side of the reception area as the colonel’s office. Gingras’s and Hermann’s doors were at the end of it, but she stopped before that, opened a smaller door—perhaps it was that of a water closet—and disappeared.

Dubon looked down at the desktop, now littered with more scraps of paper. He took a breath and started sorting again. Some were in German; some were in French. There were typed memos and a few handwritten notes. Many appeared to be rough drafts that ended in
midsentence or had words crossed out. Some were ripped, like the papers on which he had been working. Some were crunched into balls. One was badly stained with the telltale ring of a wineglass. The fat lady had simply emptied the contents of a wastepaper basket onto his desk, Dubon concluded.

He spent the morning organizing these latest contributions to the section’s intelligence, smoothing out the crumpled ones and reassembling the ripped ones. None of them mentioned Dreyfus. Some of the papers bore dates, especially the drafts of letters and memos, but some did not or if they did, the fragment bearing the date happened to be missing. He had noticed that in his previous piles the dates were often added by a different hand, and that the same dates appeared again and again: these must reflect not the date of the document, which could not be known, but the date it had come into the section. Accordingly, he began to scribble the date—
Tuesday, May 11, 1897
—on each of the undated sheets that the fat lady had brought him that morning.