A Man in Uniform (17 page)

“Right. I’ll leave you a note with instructions. You’ll want to go home now,” he said as he turned the handle on his office door.

He found the widow waiting for him inside, studying, as far as he could judge, his bookshelves. At the sight of her, he felt suffused with a sense of triumph. She turned to him with a vague look on her face and squinted a bit as though to bring him into focus. He hurried across the room to her, caught at her sleeve, and pulled her toward him, holding on to her arm in a posture that would have been awkward for both of them were it not for his excitement.

“You’ll never guess,” he said, “who they think I am.”

The next day, Dubon was sitting at what he was coming to think of as his desk, puzzling over what a biblical prophet might have to do with a Russian anarchist or a German gun with the château of Vauxle-Vicomte. At the start of the day he had walked down the corridor to where Gingras and Hermann had small offices, little more than cubbyholes, and deposited his bulging file of German-language documents on the latter’s already overflowing desk, trying to smile politely at the man’s curt “Thank you.” He then walked back to his own desk and turned his attention to the metal cabinets that surrounded it. His goal was to parse the filing system and discover Captain Dreyfus’s documents as quickly as possible before someone at the rue Saint-Dominique asked why the young Laurent had been returned to sender.

As he hunted, he kept a folder with him on top of the cabinet filled with pages and pages that he remained unable to file. If the colonel, the major, or either of the other two officers passed through, he would occasionally slip a page into the cabinet, and then take it out again as soon as they had gone, not wishing to appear incompetent or stymied.
Not that they paid him much attention; they seemed to have accepted his presence in their midst.

If he had hoped that he had simply to look under
D
and there discover the file on the Captain Dreyfus whose case increasingly consumed the newspaper pages, he had been naive. There seemed neither rhyme nor reason to the names of the files, although they were organized alphabetically. The
C
’s included
Canute, Chartres
, and
Crystal
; the
E
’s included
Emerald, Etretat
, and
Elephant;
the
R
’s included
Rouen
and
Rhinoceros
.

Organizing the names by theme, Dubon found some patterns: there was a series of Old Testament names—Ezekiel, Habakkuk, Joshua, Jeremiah—most of which seemed to contain files pertaining to Russian subjects, except one that was full of information from Belgium and listed payments to a certain Rousseau. The great châteaux and cathedrals of France—Chartres, Senlis, Versailles, Rouen—appeared to be used as file names for intelligence from Germany. But again, the system wasn’t consistent, since some of the German files were named after gemstones. At this rate, Dubon figured he would have to go through every file in the cabinets—there had to be hundreds—to find the one he wanted, and he was brought to the point of despair when he found several pages about uniform reform sandwiched in a report on fortifications in northern France in a file labeled
Zebra
. This was some devilishly encoded filing system, and was he, as a temporary clerk, expected to know the code?

He was working away on this puzzle when Hermann came quietly into the reception area carrying a file folder and stuck his head in Colonel Picquart’s door.

“Colonel. A moment if you please,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

He was inside a good ten minutes or quarter hour. When he came out, he crossed to the filing cabinet and addressed Dubon in an undertone.

“Captain. These documents—” He opened the file to show the papers Dubon had given him that morning. Was it Dubon’s fearful imagination, or was Hermann’s quiet voice purposefully threatening. “You glued them together?”

“Yes, Captain,” Dubon replied in what he hoped was an even voice.

“Why did you do that?”

“Well, that was my understanding from the colonel. That is, he—he gave me the glue pot.”

Hermann stared at him. “Do you actually speak German?” he asked.

A nasty hole opened in Dubon’s stomach. He must have made some mistake gluing the pieces back together that revealed he couldn’t read the language. Should he confess to his ignorance? If he pretended otherwise, Hermann, the German speaker, would uncover him in no time.

“It’s rather rusty, I am afraid.”

Hermann was silent for a long moment.

“We requested a German-speaking clerk,” he finally said. “That was why we had to wait so long.”

Dubon squirmed inwardly.

“There aren’t that many about who really do speak good German. You are a rare commodity, Captain Hermann,” Dubon said, trying a bit of flattery. Hermann’s expression did not change. “And I guess since the section already has you, my superior did not feel the request … Perhaps I overstated how much German I’ve studied …” He broke off, silenced by Hermann’s implacable stare.

“So, how did you manage to piece together a German text?”

“I did it by the shapes.”

“Well, don’t. It’s too easy to make a mistake. In future, leave that to me.” He turned to go and then, as he reached the corridor, added as an afterthought: “So you haven’t read through any of the documents you gave me this morning?”

“No.”

“Neither the German nor the French?”

“No, Captain. I just sorted them.”

Hermann nodded and disappeared into his office.

Dubon sat down heavily at his desk and pondered the encounter. He seemed to have escaped with a warning, as long as Hermann didn’t complain to the colonel about his lack of German. And why had Hermann
asked him if he had read French documents? He thought he had given all those to the colonel; there had been Schwarzkoppen’s letter about the ball, that
petit bleu
addressed to the Hungarian, a few memos.

Dubon sat worrying for a while about how bad his slip might have been before he eventually returned to his ineffectual browsing through the filing cabinets. The only interesting thing he learned was that the Statistical Section was keeping copious files on French citizens, including its own military officers. He scanned those he came across but did not recognize any of the names. Most of these files seem banal, little more than personnel reports on the various officer’s postings, specializations, and medals.

Nobody disturbed him any further in his searching, although at two the major, dressed in civilian clothing, walked down the corridor to the mysterious closet without any comment or explanation and disappeared inside it. He did not reappear in the corridor until an hour later, leaving Dubon to wonder where exactly the closet led. When the major left the office through the front door shortly before five, he was back in uniform and this time nodded curtly on his way past as Dubon saluted.

Back at his desk, Dubon began tidying away the mysteriously named files.
Emerald, Pearl, Topaz
. Each exotic word couldn’t represent an individual code; they were groups that must somehow have been applied sequentially as disguises to the real file names. Somewhere there had to be a master list.

Ten minutes later, he reached the river to find an omnibus marked
MADELEINE–ST-LAZARE
stopping on the quay, so he jumped on, confident that few of his acquaintances would be found riding a bus. He inquired as to the fare, paid the conductor, and sandwiched himself in among the other passengers. The bus drove across the bridge and up the place de la Concorde, depositing him at the corner of the rue Saint-Honoré. He tucked his cap under his arm, scanned the street for anyone he knew, and set out rapidly for his own office, covering the ground with long strides.

“You just missed the lady,” Lebrun informed him as he came through the door.

“The widow?” Dubon asked eagerly. “But we had agreed she would come tomorrow.”

“Yes, she said she would come again Thursday as arranged but happened to be in the neighborhood today and hoped to catch you. She asked if you had any news for her.”

“I wish I had.” He turned to his desk and the papers Lebrun had organized into neat piles.

“It’s that captain, Maître, isn’t it?” Lebrun asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Her case. It has something to do with that captain who was court-martialed for spying. That Captain Dreyfus.”

“How do you divine that, Lebrun?”

His tone must have sounded a little chilly for Lebrun defended himself, “I won’t usually ask, Maître. I certainly don’t wish to pry. But I seem to be taking charge of the office all week and, well, if she comes again when you are not here, it is easier if I know her business.”

“She is a friend of the Dreyfus family. They believe he is innocent—not surprising, I suppose—and are working to exonerate him.”

“Very good, Maître. You then are working to exonerate the captain too?”

Lebrun’s tone was neutral, but Dubon considered the question more than rhetorical and pondered it seriously.

“Do you think it wrong? To be working to free a convicted spy?”

“Maître, I have worked for you long enough to know that every man, whatever he may have done, has the right to a good lawyer.”

They turned to the day’s business, sorting through the messages and files that had accumulated. Most were routine, but at the bottom of one pile was a telegram that had arrived that morning and caught Dubon by surprise.

The signature, in quotation marks, was Azimut Martin.

Dubon had almost forgotten about the pseudonymous journalist.
Now he had finally made contact. He looked over at the clock; it was past five thirty; it would probably be six thirty before he made it out to Montparnasse, and he’d have to forgo his visit to Madeleine. It would be the third night this week he had stood her up. He sighed; this was getting complicated. Perhaps those who signed up for the telephone were right; it might make business easier. He scribbled a message to Madeleine, and Lebrun left with it as Dubon rapidly changed out of the uniform and made for the river, hoping he might catch a cab on the way.

It had been warm and rainy all week, and the windows of the café were steamed over with the moist heat when he arrived, later than he had hoped. He pushed through the door and looked about. How would he recognize his contact? How would Monsieur Martin recognize him? He noticed someone waving discreetly from a table in the middle of the room. At first he thought it might be his man, but he realized it was that friend of Jean-Jean’s, Le Goff. He hadn’t recognized him at first because he wasn’t in uniform. Damn him. The last thing Dubon needed now was to waste a quarter of an hour exchanging pleasantries. He tried a vague gesture of recognition without approaching Le Goff’s table, but the man persisted with his waving.

It was then that Dubon heard a voice in his head, repeating words spoken at the dinner party the previous week.
You’re on the right track, Dubon
, Le Goff had said.