A Man in Uniform (39 page)

“Shall I put dinner on the table, Maître?” Luc asked.

“No, Luc. Thank you.”

“Is Monsieur not dining at home this evening?” Luc asked tentatively.

“No,” said Dubon, making up his mind. “No, Luc. I am going out. I won’t need dinner.”

He rushed down his street and out onto the quay, toward the place de la Concorde. He was not retracing his path to the office but rather his more common evening route, the one that led from Madeleine’s apartment off the boulevard des Italiens to his own front door. He might have hailed a cab but he was too distracted to look about for one. As he walked at a furious pace, he thought about his wife, a woman who would never wear a pair of black gloves with a navy suit, and his mistress, a woman who would surely never wear a pale green hat with a pink dress—unless, of course, she had been given it by someone she wanted to please, someone she could not afford to displease, a new lover perhaps, or a man who was readying himself to become her lover. And Dubon thought also about the one man he knew who might mistake a pale green for a pale red.

Masson was sitting on Madeleine’s divan smoking a cigar when Dubon opened the door to her apartment. Madeleine rose in surprise at the intrusion.

“François—”

“Yes.” Dubon just stood there.

“I don’t want a scene, François.”

“Am I making a scene?”

“I don’t expect you to barge in without knocking, even if you do have a key.”

“I don’t think it’s my manners that are at issue here.”

Masson stubbed his cigar in a dish on a table at his elbow, rose calmly to his feet, and smiled wryly at Dubon.

“I was just on my way. I will leave you, my dear. I’m sure that you have things to discuss.” He ran his hand delicately down her arm and then walked slowly toward the door.

“Good-bye, Dubon,” he said easily as he slipped from the room.

Madeleine waited a moment, perhaps to be sure Masson was out of earshot, and then started in defensively.

“You have barely been here in weeks …”

“I am not sure that is reason to take a lover—”

“He’s not my lover.”

“But soon will be, I imagine.”

“I wanted to talk to you—”

“Organize a smooth transition …”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic about it. I have to earn my keep, François.”

“Ah, he’s going to pay better, is he?”

Madeleine drew herself up with injured pride; Dubon could see he had hit the mark.

“He’s promised me an apartment in a building on the rue du Bac.”

“Lovely.”

She put a hand up behind her head as though to fluff her chignon. “And a lady’s maid …”

“Ah, a lady’s maid … And what am I to do? Is there to be bidding, is that what I am to understand?”

“François. That’s horrible of you. You know how fond—”

“Yes, fond, but at the end of the day, it is not fondness that binds us, is it.”

“I have to look to the future. I have always supported myself. I am not your wife who doesn’t have to worry about whether you still find her attractive, whether you will keep paying the bills.”

“How long has he been coming here? How did you meet him?”

“You introduced us.”

“I did?”

“Last summer. At lunch. When your wife was on holiday.”

It had been one of those wonderfully leisurely Sunday lunches in which he and Madeleine indulged themselves during the two months when Geneviève took her holidays, first at a hotel on the coast and then with her sisters at the family house in the country. He had felt contented, expansive, so expansive that when his friend Masson had happened by their table, he had hailed him, introduced him to Madeleine without much thought of the implications. His relationship with Madeleine was not a secret from his male friends; there was always an
understanding that they would not discuss it with their own wives, let alone with Geneviève. They had their own secrets to keep.

“So when were you planning to tell me about this?”

“Soon, very soon. I was just waiting, well, until …”

“Until you had finalized all the details?”

“Until he signs the lease on the apartment.”

“Get him to sign a contract with you. If he’ll steal his best friend’s mistress, what loyalty do you think he will have when he tires of you?” Dubon said. He barely knew Masson, he thought. Was this man who had betrayed him the same sad and lonely character to whom his parents had given a home? Was it the same helpful comrade who had kept the story of Dubon’s days on the barricades from the general so that he could marry Geneviève, the intimate friend who had sat at their table for all these years, charming Dubon’s wife?

“Why did you come here this evening?” Madeleine demanded.

“Because I guessed,” Dubon replied. Her appointments and her distraction, the sense he sometimes had that someone else had preceded him into the room—those had only made him suspicious. A whiff of cigar smoke in the vicinity of her building he had attributed to the English detective. But it was not Brown but rather Masson who had been there before Dubon and stopped to light up as he left. The image of his rival smoking a postcoital cigar as he sauntered away jabbed at him.

“It was your hat that gave him away—the green hat. It doesn’t match your pink dress.”

“Well, it’s an unusual choice, but chic, I think …”

“No, Madeleine, he’s color-blind. Always has been, since we were schoolboys. We used to tease him about it. He can’t distinguish reds from greens. He thought he was buying you a pink hat.”

“Yes, perhaps, but it’s a gift. He is so generous. He has promised to take me to Deauville for a few days and …”

They were standing at the door, but her eyes slid over to the table beside the divan where Masson had butted his cigar in a dish. There was a package lying beside it, unwrapped but sitting in its paper. Dubon had interrupted another bit of gift-giving.

“What has he bought you this time?”

Madeleine stood there silent and unhappy, her lips pursed.

Dubon crossed over to the table and flicked back the wrapping paper. He stared down at the gift, a chill of fear passing over his body while his brain whirred.

To decorate her new apartment, Masson had given Madeleine, mounted in a small gilt frame, a love letter signed by Napoléon.

Dubon spent most of the following day in his office, alternating between bitter grief and fearful bafflement. When he thought of Madeleine, a great howl of pain rose up within him, and it was all he could do to remember Lebrun’s presence in the outer office and not lash out in anger at the furniture. When he thought of her thighs and her easy laugh, he ached at the idea she would no longer share them with him. At other moments, he silently delivered bitter speeches of recrimination in his head. In passing, he might admit that his brief dalliance with the captain’s wife suggested his relationship with Madeleine was on the wane—that he was bored or that they were growing apart—but it did nothing to mitigate his current pain. There is nothing like losing something you take for granted, to make you recognize its value.

When he thought of Masson, he only felt worse, tumbling into a pit of confusion and fear. Why did his friend—his former friend, that much was clear—have the Napoléon letter? Did he know who had killed the forger? Dubon realized he had no idea exactly what Masson did. He worked for the Foreign Ministry—at least, Dubon supposed he worked for the Foreign Ministry—but he also seemed
awfully friendly with the military brass. Was he perhaps some kind of arranger or fixer? The army did not want Henry’s forgery exposed. Had
Masson
killed the forger?

Then a worse thought occurred to Dubon: he had told Madeleine about the forger; he had even told her about the Napoléon letter. She had been intrigued by the thing. Had she told Masson? Had Dubon unwittingly brought about the forger’s death? And why would Masson take the letter and give it to Madeleine? Did the man actually want Dubon to see it in her apartment? Was he thumbing his nose at his rival?

These questions only made him more miserable, and he was sitting at his desk stabbing a blank sheet of paper with a pen nib when Lebrun announced a Mr. Brown. In strolled the English detective.

“I stopped in to say good-bye. I’m heading back to London on the boat-train tomorrow.”

“Good-bye, then,” Dubon mumbled.

“How did your little deception work out?”

“Which little deception?”

“The whiskers, the glasses …”

“Oh yes. Wasn’t needed in the end. The man I was attempting to deceive was dead when I arrived.”

“Dead! My goodness.”

“Murdered, actually.”

“Dubon, really, you are dabbling in some nasty stuff here.”

“Yes, perhaps I am. I should return these to you …” He fished around in his desk drawer and found the blank glasses the Englishman had lent him.

“So, I have been discharged by the client,” Brown said. “Not needed anymore. The family has somehow discovered the name of the real spy.”

“Really?” For the first time since he had left Madeleine’s the evening before, Dubon permitted himself a smile.

“Yes, some contact passed it on to them.”

“And what is the spy’s name?”

“I’m not sure I am at liberty to divulge that, although it will probably become public soon enough.”

“It isn’t Esterhazy, is it?” Dubon asked, feeling like a character in a fairy tale who miraculously guesses the villain’s strange name.

“The rumor is out there already, then? It all seems to be on the right track now.”

“Wish I could share your optimism …”

“Surely, the army will be forced to admit its mistake and the captain will be exonerated,” Brown said earnestly.

“I wouldn’t underestimate how far the army will go to cover up the mistake and shield Esterhazy—”

“You’re in a bad temper today, my friend. I could see it when I came through the door.”

“My mistress is leaving me.”

“Ah yes. Your French domestic arrangements.” Brown paused a moment. “He’d be a tall fellow, this other man? Black hair, big man but elegant? Very good suit?”

“Yes, that’s him,” Dubon said, recognizing the description but surprised to hear anyone describe the once awkward Masson as elegant.

“I saw him outside the building near the boulevard des Italiens,” Brown explained. “That day I followed you there. He arrived about an hour after you and waited outside for a bit. He kept looking up at the windows of the building and at his watch. I wondered if he was waiting for you or for someone else in the building to appear, but then after a while he cleared off.

“I suppose I could have told you,” the detective offered sympathetically. “Perhaps you’ll have some luck with that other beauty.”

“Which other beauty?”

“That lady who comes here. Sorry, I was shadowing your office for a few days before we, uh, met, so to speak. That client of yours … she’s something, you have to admit, despite the black dress.”

Dubon pulled himself up straight. “Listen, Brown, I would never indulge in any kind of improper relations with a client. That’s Dreyfus’s wife.”

“No, it’s not.”

“What do you mean?”

“That lady is not Madame Dreyfus.”

A surge of excitement rose through Dubon’s body and into his mouth.

“I have met Madame Dreyfus,” Brown said. “It was the first time
the captain’s brother gave me my assignment. Your client is not the captain’s wife.”

“My God,” said Dubon, his head now swimming with new romantic possibilities. There could hardly be two women running around town dressed as widows when they were actually married to living men. “Then who
is
she?”

He and the detective took a drink together in the quartier before he returned home at seven thirty, late for dinner, but in his current state of heartache, confusion, and anticipation he hardly cared.

“Madame is in the salon, Monsieur,” Luc informed him in a hushed tone. “Major de Ronchaud Valcourt is with her.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I think you had better go in to Madame.”

Dubon raised an eyebrow. “All right.”