A Man in Uniform (31 page)

“Baron, you are always envying our domestic harmony, but now you see what I have to put up with, a husband who comes home for dinner two hours late,” Geneviève continued.

“We missed his company, but here he is, safe among us now.”

“You are taking his side only because you were late yourself, Baron,” Geneviève said, all but wagging her finger at him.

Here, Masson looked nonplussed and wasn’t as eager as usual to continue their bantering.

“My apologies again, Madame,” he said in a low voice. “Called back to the office just as I was dressing for dinner.”

Now that the men had humbled themselves, the dinner party continued happily enough, although Dubon found his thoughts drifting away. Comfortably settled at his own table with a good glass of wine but unable to banish the image of Rivaud’s body sprawled amid the chaos of the studio, he began to question the import of what he had seen. Who had killed Rivaud? Was it really some criminal dissatisfied with a deal? Or was his death related to the captain’s case?

Dubon was at sea here and thought with some relief about returning to the Statistical Section the next morning. He could tell Picquart what he had stumbled across, hand the problem over to him. The colonel’s reaction would give him some idea of what was afoot.

Once the guests had left, Geneviève initially pursued her restrained tone, albeit on a cooler note than she had affected at the table. Her party had been a success; she was flush with the pleasure of it and several hours removed from the tense moments between six thirty and seven.

Settled at her dressing table and unpinning her hair, she eyed her husband reflected in her mirror and asked calmly, “You haven’t given up that case, have you?”

“Well, not quite yet. There were some dramatic developments this evening, and I do hope I am reaching an end.”

She dismissed this answer with a wave of her hairbrush, so uninterested in his work that its dramatic developments were of no import to her.

“Tomorrow, François. I insist,” she said. His failure to arrive in time for dinner had been a significant breach; she had the high ground here and she was going to use it. She began brushing her hair with fierce
strokes, each one culminating in a sharp flick of the wrist. “You need to send the client a message tomorrow saying you are passing the file to someone else.”

“No, I can’t simply abandon a client like that. I am almost finished, but it will take another few days.”

She banged the hairbrush down on the table and swung around to confront him. “I don’t understand you. Do you not read the papers? What is going to happen if our friends find out you are defending this fellow?”

“There are more important issues at stake here than your invitations,” Dubon retorted, and as soon as the words were spoken he knew he had made a mistake.

“It’s not the invitations; it’s the income,” she spat back. “You think I am so trivial, and you so above it all. Where do your clients come from? Who has provided you with all those contacts over the years? Where will your practice be if our friends desert us?”

Dubon was still for a moment. She had a point. Why was he taking such a risk? Because he believed captain Dreyfus was innocent? Because the captain’s wife had beautiful eyes? Because he felt happier than he had in years?

“Geneviève.” He tried a gentle tone. “I would never call you trivial. I have always admired your wit and your spirit, but we cannot lose sight of what is important to us. Of course we need money to live, and I have worked hard to provide us with a good life in that regard. You have helped by introducing me into your family’s circle, but our friends would not continue to use my services if I did not give satisfaction. And surely they don’t matter to us only as business connections but as those who provide us with warmth and companionship. At the end of the day, we have to stand for something or we are not worthy of their affection. Friendship matters—but what of justice? I will pursue this case because I believe it is the right thing to do.”

They stared at each other.

“I do apologize for my tardiness,” he added. “I know how much you wanted the dinner to go smoothly and I wasn’t here to help you.”

“The major was happy to step in.” She turned back to her mirror.

He couldn’t tell if she had acquiesced or was just saving her ammunition for another day.

“Good, good,” he said, and retreated to the bathroom.

A few minutes later, he heard a sharp cry from the bedroom.

“What on earth has happened to my cream?”

Dubon entered Picquart’s office the following morning, gave the colonel a perfunctory salute, and sat down in the chair across from him.

“Rivaud is dead,” he announced without preamble.

“Dead?”

“Murdered.”

“Murdered? Who killed him?”

“I don’t know, but Chief Inspector Remy of the Sureté is happy to embrace the theory that some ruffian probably already known to police wrung his neck in a dispute over what we can safely assume was a criminal activity.”

“A thug kills a minor criminal, nobody much cares, and the whole matter can be swept aside,” said Picquart, following Dubon’s lead. “How did you find this all out?”

“I walked in on the police investigation in progress.”

“Ah. So you missed your opportunity to talk to Rivaud?”

Dubon nodded.

“But how did you explain your presence to the inspector?”

“Luckily I wasn’t in uniform, since my idea had been to pose as a
representative from the Dreyfus camp. I just told the police I represented a client who hoped to make Rivaud an offer for a confession to forging evidence.”

“So you didn’t mention the Dreyfus case or the section?”

“No, I thought it wiser not to. They seemed satisfied and let me go about my business.”

“Good, good. You handled yourself well, Dubon.” Picquart paused, the implications of Rivaud’s death just sinking in. “So, now we can’t get Rivaud to confess he improved the bastard letter
or
to expose the new letter.”

“No,” Dubon said. “I should give it back to you.” He held up the envelope with the Italian letter in it, the one that Picquart had allowed him to take away the previous day.

Picquart accepted it, slipped the page out of the envelope, and put it on his desk.

“I could consult one of the graphologists, privately, ask if it would stand up in court …”

The two men looked at the page again, Dubon turning his head at an awkward angle to read it. The office was full of spring sunlight, but Picquart switched on his desk lamp to further illuminate the lined paper with its ornate letterhead. It stared back at them, unwilling to release its secrets. Picquart sighed and lifted the page, ready to return it to the envelope. Dubon could see the dust dancing in the sunlight coming in from the window to Picquart’s right, and the beam now shone briefly on the paper.

“Wait!” he commanded. Picquart looked at him, startled. “Hold it up to the window.”

Picquart turned his body in his chair and held up the paper with both hands. Both of them could see it clearly now. The stationery was a translucent writing paper with fine blue lines to guide the writer’s hand; in any regular light the colors looked identical, but with the sun shining through the paper it was clear that at the bottom of the page the lines weren’t blue but rather a dark burgundy.

“The top and bottom don’t match,” Picquart said. “There’s the tear …” There was a tear through the middle of the page as though the recipient had ripped the letter before discarding it.

“It arrived on my desk in one piece,” Dubon explained. “Someone had already glued it together.”

“The letterhead is the genuine article … the crest …” Picquart said. “The first lines …”

“But the reference to the captain is in the bottom half. Someone has ripped a blank area off another sheet, stuck it on the top of a real letter, and just added the forgery at the bottom.”

“Daring, considering the forger has got to match the handwriting that’s already on the page,” Picquart noted.

“Rivaud was nothing if not daring,” Dubon said, thinking of Napoléon’s signature hanging on the forger’s wall. “I am surprised he didn’t notice the lines, though. His studio had good light.”

“Perhaps someone gave him the paper already assembled. You and Henry and Gingras, well, you all do a lot of gluing, and none of you has much light in your office,” Picquart said.

“So Henry assembled the page for Rivaud here, and then gave him his assignment: add one paragraph at the bottom of the page. Rivaud did it, and then Henry slipped the letter into the latest file from the usual route.”

“I don’t want to implicate the major in anything,” Picquart said. “Perhaps he has been overzealous, but I have no evidence he ordered the forgery. I wish I had never shown it to headquarters. I’ll have to retract it, tell them I am investigating how it came to be created, and get permission to destroy it. The generals will just have to understand that if the Dreyfus family gets an appeal, we will have no conclusive evidence to present at a second trial.”

“And you think they will accept that?”

“Why shouldn’t they?” Picquart asked in a defensive tone.

“Because,” Dubon replied. “Somebody just killed Rivaud to make sure the conclusive evidence stays that way.”

Henry reappeared late in the morning and passed Dubon’s desk with the briefest of nods. He didn’t look guilt-stricken, Dubon thought, swiveling around in his chair as quietly as he could to watch the man’s back as he walked to his office. Was this the demeanor of a murderer? Dubon had no idea.

Picquart must have heard him come in, for he appeared at his door a few minutes later and simply raised an inquiring eyebrow at Dubon while tilting his head toward Henry’s closed door. Dubon nodded. Picquart crossed the reception area and knocked.

“Colonel.”

“Major. If you would be so good as to step into my office.”

Henry followed Picquart back across the room and the two entered Picquart’s office and shut the door behind them.

What I would give, Dubon thought to himself, recalling Gingras’s phrase of the previous week, to be a fly on the wall. He stood up now, looked about, and quickly set off down the corridor, moving as quietly as he could so as not to draw the attention of Gingras and Hermann, both working in their offices. He could hear the rumble of Picquart’s
voice even as he stepped inside the darkroom. He looked about hopefully. Geneviève had always said that when they were children, the de Ronchaud Valcourts used a water glass to eavesdrop on the nursemaid’s conversations with their father’s valet. There were various beakers sitting on the counter and Dubon gingerly picked up the smallest and put it to the wall. Geneviève was right. It did work. He could hear almost every word now. Picquart was, as he had expected, confronting Henry with his handiwork.

“So you found the pieces in the file, matched them up, and applied the glue?”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Do you think we ever make mistakes with our gluing, Major? Get the wrong pieces …”

“Well, maybe with something that was ripped into tiny fragments.” Even through the wall, Dubon could hear the hesitancy in Henry’s voice. “But not with a letter like that; it’s only two pieces.”

“Why did you not bring it to me at once when you saw the contents?”

“I often work on the files after the others have gone for the day, to speed the work along, Colonel. I certainly planned to bring it to your attention the next morning.”

“Very well, Major. So you are sure the two pieces you glued both came from the same file?”

“I guess it’s possible I could have made an error, and that one of the pieces was in some previous file …”

“Major, are you telling me you cobbled this letter together from two pieces from two different time periods?”

“I … I don’t know what you want me to say, Colonel …” Henry sounded increasingly miserable.

“I want you to tell me the truth, Henry. Did you tamper with this letter?”

“Well, perhaps I added a few words that were difficult to read. Sometimes the ink is smeared and—”

“The ink is perfectly clear here, Major. Are you in the habit of improving documents?”

“We sometimes pencil in missing words …”

“So, you are saying words have been added to this document?”

“Colonel … I really don’t know what you expect … I have done what my superiors needed me to do.”

“What they needed, Major, or what they ordered?”

“Colonel. I have done my duty.”

“So you felt you had some duty to improve upon this letter?”

“Colonel, I really—”

At this point, Picquart must have grown exasperated. Dubon could hear a chair scraping back, and he pictured the colonel moving to the window.

“You see the lines, Major? Blue. Burgundy. Two separate sheets of paper.”

There was a long silence now, then Henry finally spoke: “Colonel, you yourself told me the generals needed conclusive evidence. I did what my country required.”

“I think it is best left up to our superiors, Major, to decide precisely what one’s country might require. You put me in a very awkward position. I have affirmed to the rue Saint-Dominique that this letter is legitimate. I must now go back and seek permission to destroy it. The situation is extremely delicate. You are aware there have already been press reports of documents naming Dreyfus.”