by Susan Daitch
These love letters were from an Italian military attaché, Panizzardi; to his German counterpart, Schwarzkoppen. Panizzardi signs his letters Alexandrine. Construct a letter from these fragments that will make reference to D and payments made to him.
Jules poured a cup of coffee, looked out the window for a few minutes, then returned to the papers and began to read more fragments, footprints of some kind of love affair between the two men. He had no idea who any of these people were or who the initials referred to.
My beautiful bugger. I was in bliss, and am returning to you the three pieces. Farewell my beautiful bugger. Your friend.
Jules put the fragment aside then selected another letter. There was a part missing between the two halves of this one.
My dear Bugger,
I am forwarding to you you-know-what. As soon as you left, I studied the questions of those called and saw that certain questions of address, etcetera are all subordinated to a major one whose direction is this…
. . . for it must never be known that one attaché has dealings with another. Farewell, my little dog. Everything.
The last of the three was a whole letter, but it seemed an unimportant note.
My Very Dear Friend,
Last night I ended up calling the doctor, who has forbidden me to go out. Since I am unable to visit you tomorrow, I am asking you to come to my home in the morning, since P . . . has brought me many things of great interest and since we have only ten days to us, we shall try to divide the work.
Try then to tell the ambassador that you can’t give up.
All yours,
Alexandrine
Jules practiced his calligraphy, drawing upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, filling sheets of paper with lines of words. He knew handwriting experts mainly paid attention to the outer shapes of letters. When Felix asked for results he told him he was practicing, and in this way the uncertainty of what he had been asked to do could be put aside while he sat alone in his apartment drawing letters over and over just to pass time without ever looking at the examples he’d been given, talking to himself about how he felt backed into a corner. It all began with lifting that camera from the corpse. His uncle, had he been arrested for the same theft, would have been quick enough to invent a story about how the camera had come into his possession. Though a talented mimic, Jules wasn’t quick at inventing stories on the spot. He could hear his uncle berating him: you exposed yourself by telling the truth, you’re the architect of your own predicament, your misery is of your manufacture. “But I had no choice!” he shouted back. The apartment was empty. He balled up page after page so neither Maryse nor Caroline would have a clue as to what he was engaged in.
Jules circled the stairway near place Maubert, afraid to get too close to the iron railing. He felt shaky, yet as he walked he tried to remember what he had heard or seen that day. He had heard nothing. The block had been as silent as if he had walked onto a stage set while an invisible audience, impatient to get it over with and go home, waited for him to begin the last act. After only a few minutes standing at his corner post he saw a short, blond man emerge from the stairway where he had found the body. Red-faced, talking to himself, the man walked in his direction, looking at Jules in anger as he passed. Jules wanted to follow him, tap him on the shoulder and begin a conversation just to see what the result would be.
“Say, do you know me?”
“Never saw you before in my life.”
“Me neither,” Jules laughed.
Perhaps the man was always angry, and the anger had nothing to do with Jules, but he disappeared behind a doorway on the next block.
Copies of La Libre Parole weren’t hard to find. Jules didn’t want to be seen reading it, but on a crowded street he glanced at one lying on top of a stack and was able to make out a column headline that told him that the only lead the police had in the murder was a camera. It was as he suspected: the camera he had stolen linked him to the body he’d found in the stairwell. He didn’t know whether to believe what was printed in La Libre Parole, nor was he sure that Felix was telling him the truth. Gribelin had never really told him why he was writing what he wrote, but all these questions had an immaterial aspect. The Section of Statistics knew his address, his identity. You are, Felix had said, engaged in fraud. I know it. You know it. What can you do but work for me?
He could ask Maryse to break his hand by slamming it in a door. Disabled, he would climb the stairs to the second floor of the Section of Statistics. I can’t write anymore, Felix, you’ll have to find someone else. He might wave bandaged digits with mirthless sincerity, but Felix’s glassy stare, he knew, would remain fixed. The archivist wouldn’t care about Jules’ medical problems, and pain wasn’t something he handled stoically.
Jules determined easily that Felix had torn the bordereau into six even parts and pasted the squares together again so the list would appear to have arrived in the Section’s hands as if it had been found in the rubbish of the German embassy. The bordereau read:
Without news indicating that you wish to see me, nevertheless, Sir I send you some interesting information:
1. A note on the hydraulic buffer of the 120 and the way in which this gun behaves;
2. A note on the covering troops (some modifications will be made under the new plan);
3. A note on a modification of the artillery formations;
4. A note about Madagascar;
5. The preliminary Firing Manual of the Field Artillery.
He examined the sloping, rapid handwriting on one page. It looked natural and unforced, though slightly irregular. He had been instructed to add prices to each item, reproducing what Gribelin had said was Dreyfus’s handwriting, indicating what Dreyfus’s fee would be for procuring such information. The prices were to be followed by comments, annotations in the margin executed in the kaiser’s hand. He had no conception of what believable prices might be. I’m Dreyfus. No, I’m their idea of Dreyfus. He put his fingers in his ears, tried to imagine hunting with the kaiser, unleashing the greyhounds, speaking German. Jules wrote in the kaiser’s hand, “The rogue is asking too much — nevertheless the delivery of documents must be hastened. W.” It occurred to him it was possible that Kaiser Wilhelm might not write in French, nonetheless, Jules followed the instructions he was given. Examples of Dreyfus’s handwriting didn’t bear a close resemblance to that of the bordereau Gribelin insisted he had written, but Jules formed the numerals designating prices as best he could, becoming proficient at writing convincingly over the strips of glue although the writing should, technically speaking, have appeared under the glue. If Gribelin was careless it wasn’t his problem. His pen floated over a grid of gummed transparent paper.
A sound in the hall made him jump, causing jagged lines to come from his pen. The paper was wrecked. He would have to start all over again, but Jules couldn’t muster the concentration to start from the beginning. He walked around the room performing parodies of the people who had made his life miserable, from schoolteachers to those who passed him in the corridors of the Section of Statistics, but there was no audience.
On another evening as the iron grill from his balcony cast a curling shadow over his papers, he told himself the writing he invented signified no more than a police drama dreamed up by someone who was bored at his job and rankled by the late nights he felt compelled to work, someone who had access to papers kept in vaults on the rue de Lille. There was no Dreyfus. There was no trial. It was all a conspiracy to help someone win an election. He switched to another pen. He didn’t know where Maryse was, and Caroline was either in the hall or had disappeared too. In the middle of the silence he had heard her talking to someone, and then the sound of conversation stopped.
“You shouldn’t be here while I’m writing.”
“You aren’t writing, you’re copying,” Maryse corrected him.
“No, I’m writing. If people didn’t want forgeries to exist, forgeries wouldn’t be created. If there wasn’t a need or an audienc
e, no one would bother,” he said, wondering if he were as big a phoney as those he parodied. “Where will you go?”
“We’re out of coffee.”
“I don’t think we’ll need as much as we used to.”
“There are rumors of riots due to break out when Méliès tries to show his film about the trial.”
“Méliès is incapable of subversion. He has his head in the clouds. Dreyfus goes to Saturn.”
Caroline was bored. Her boredom marked off the hours of the morning, and then the afternoon, as if she lived in a city where she didn’t understand the language, only the patterns of speech and so was excluded from most activity. She understood the formations of sound that indicated meals would soon be served or that she should go outside. The verbiage her mother and Jules spoke had the pitch and rhythm of language but the meaning, as far as she could tell, yielded only nonsense. With no more books to tear up, no more coffee to stir, she was excluded and superfluous to their industry, whatever it was. Jules rarely left the apartment anymore. He spent hours filling pages with careful script, and while he was writing he didn’t want her in the room or even on the balcony. She looked over his shoulder.
Alfred Aid Alfred
DDDDDD
“Who’s Alfred?”
“Nobody. Watch it, you’ll knock my elbow. Go play in the hall, sweetheart.”
He sat at the table with solidity, unbudgeable in every way. Once he had taken her to the wax museum. When her father wasn’t looking she had pitched a pencil at the Napoléon display, aiming for his open mouth as he lay dying. She ran past the freaks in glass jars, and he comforted her. Now he barely noticed whether she came or left.
In time I, too, will turn into a two-headed monster. It’s inevitable. There nothing I can do about it.
Jules shut the door behind her and went back to his pen nibs. She heard a cat and followed the sound up a flight of stairs to the top floor where it disappeared. Curious about the animal she knocked on the apartment door, its paint blistered and coming off in temptingly long peels, and while waiting for an answer she pulled one off. A cat could be heard inside along with the sound of someone moving around, but no one answered.
“Fire!” she yelled.
“Get lost!” A voice within seemed to issue from close to the door.
She wondered why this door and hallway were so shabby while the others in the building were relatively well kept. Stripping another long paint tail from the molding she turned at the sound of coughing several floors below her. It grew closer, and from the landing she could see a man’s head between flights of stairs. He was near their landing, then he passed their door. If he wasn’t coming to see Jules, he could only be a visitor for the man they never saw. A young man with a tightly knotted scarf, elfin face, and curly hair came into view. As he grew out of breath from the stairs, his compact body became more racked by vibrations of coughing. He said hello to Caroline, walked past her, straightened his clothing, and knocked.
“No one will come to the door,” she told him.
“Do you mind?” The coughing man looked down at her, telling her, in effect, to scram. Caroline sat on a stack of books and stared at him.
“This is my hall, sir.” He ignored her.
“Louis,” the man got out between coughs. “It’s me, Antoine.”
Caroline decided not to pester him further; his tone when he spoke to the door was personal and desperate. She walked down to the next landing. Sitting cross legged in a niche meant for a small statue, she could listen to his conversation with the door while allowing him the illusion that he had some kind of privacy.
“Louis, listen, let me talk to you. I have to leave the city tonight.”
Caroline could just make out the voice of the man behind the door, and his garbled syllables sounded like, “You’ll be back in a few days.”
“Why am I under suspicion, Louis? When have I let you down?”
Caroline strained her ears but only heard more quasi-
unidentifiable sounds.
“I had nothing to do with that.” Antoine raised his hands to the door as if it were animate. “This isn’t a trick to get you to open the door. I really mean it, Louis. I’ve brought you food. I won’t be able to come again. I’m leaving the city tonight.”
“Leave me alone.”
A coughing fit followed that was so severe Caroline jumped out of the alcove and ran into her apartment to get the man a glass of water. A hot breeze blew through the open windows, ruffling Jules’s papers. He snapped at her as if the racket in the corridor had been her fault. When she returned to the hall with the glass, the man was descending the stairs, wiping his face with his scarf. A bottle of wine had been left before the locked door overhead. She ran downstairs to try to see where the man might have gone. When she returned a few minutes later, the bottle had disappeared.
Facsimiles of Jules’s writings were reproduced as posters and pasted to walls, kiosks, and lampposts. The documents, which bore Dreyfus’s signature, were meant to convince skeptical citizens of his guilt. A very thin man, so thin he looked like he was made of pencils, stopped to read the posters. Renard wore a velvet coat, soft felt hat; his clothing was frayed at the edges, but he had assembled himself as if he gave his dress a great deal of thought. As a writer he was captivated by what he read and imagined the texts were inventions if not composite forgeries, but then he wasn’t sure. Studying them he felt the desire to write some Dreyfus stories of his own, complete with anecdotes about family, school, army career, and if he had any resources at all he too would plaster his fictions all over the city, signing his name, or one of his names. He was drawn to the idea of being falsely accused. It was something he felt familiar with. At the school where he used to work he had been accused of showing children too much attention when he had only been trying to help them. One child had told a story using dolls to show what she claimed he had done to her. Acts of love were confused with acts of violence. It is possible to love something so much you end by destroying it, he wrote melodramatically.
Felix waited for Jules. Men passed him with hats pulled low, lapels turned up. Women didn’t look at him; veiled, squinting, smelling of burnt sugar, they held each other’s elbows as if they might topple in the wind. Felix clutched his documents, loosely bound and intended for Jules. He was anxious. If the pages of instruction were blown out of his hands and dispersed down the street, not only would the case against Dreyfus be lost, but Felix would become the fall guy. He didn’t want to end his life in a prison cell as a convict whose inevitable murder would be made to look like suicide.
Write letters declaring that D has new contacts. Even on Devil’s Island there is no cessation of his betrayal and subversions. He writes of them to his wife. He can’t get off a treadmill of betrayal because it’s in his character. Be sure your handwriting matches D’s to a T.
He would have that fool Jules done away with before they got to him. It grew late, shops were locked up; he clenched his papers even more tightly. Hat spinning in the gutter, Felix imagined trying to run after the incriminating documents should they slip from his grasp. He would try to catch the papers, but they become pierced on the ends of canes, umbrellas, made into paper hats, gliders, boats. Stuck to the bottom of a shoe, a word might catch the eye before being thrown away, my beautiful bugger — use Alexandrine’s phrase. The accidental reader or readers would expose his scheme. The cat would be out of the bag. Dreyfus would be released, a hero. Felix grew impatient and cursed all those whose facility with a pen made him their victim, and he also damned those who had no sense of what it meant to be on time.
By the time Jules arrived Felix had left, but he ran north toward the rue de Lille, soon catching up. Following the archivist down the block, he continued to walk in his shadow, imitating Gribelin’s loping steps, unable to say Felix, incapable of pronouncing even similar sounds: felicitas, felicité stuck in his throat. A stray dog nipped at his heels, finally giving him away to the man whom he both mistrusted and re
lied on. Turning around to face him, Felix looked disappointed, but it was the lofty disappointment of one in authority, one who condescended to be disappointed, one who expected atrocious slip-ups from those who worked without direct supervision and control. He handed Jules the package.
“The administration of the prison at Devil’s Island is confiscating and burning Dreyfus’s letters. Neither he nor his family ever see the originals any one of them sends.”
“This is a shorter street if you’re going back to your office,” Jules pointed.
“Letters sent to and from the prison must be copies.”
Jules put the package under his arm as if it were nothing more than a pair of shirts. “I’m going to get a cup of coffee. I’ve only just gotten out of bed and would like something to eat.”
“I’m walking in the other direction.” Felix examined Jules’s rumpled hair and wrinkled trousers.
“I wasn’t asking you to join me.”
“You know your work would be considered a serious crime in Italy, plagio, taking over an individual’s will,” Gribelin needled Jules.
“Who’s the real counterfeit? Your D or me?”
Felix shrugged and stepped off the curb and into traffic. “The messenger will pick up your letters next Wednesday.”
“Good-bye, Felix.” Jules coughed out the name and waved at his black hat as it disappeared across the street. He looked at the package under his arm, then walked toward a café, away from the archivist. If they were to run into each other in public they would behave as strangers. He would be nervous, and Maryse would point her finger at Felix writing prices in a notebook. She would say, “Is he the one?” They would all be found dead in an alley, just like his uncle who thought he left no t uncrossed. He imagined Gribelin in his office referring to him as M. Loophole, one that would soon have to be closed. Uncrossed t’s had become his specialty.