Aurèle Castaing

Aurèle Castaing is 29 and the lieutenant who assists Captain Brémont in counterintelligence. Born in eastern France, the son of a Latin teacher, he studied law in Paris before the war pulled him out of the library and put him in a horizon-blue uniform. Wounded in the first offensive of 1915, he was assigned to office duty, which he calls his second war. Correct and formal, he speaks like someone drafting a report and takes offense when his service is doubted.

He lives in a rented room in a townhouse on the Left Bank, in the home of a widow who serves him soup at night and keeps track of his arrival time. An iron bed, a walnut desk arranged to the millimeter, a glass inkwell he cleans on Sundays and a single graduation photograph on the wall. In the evening he reads the day's paper, marks date errors in pencil and, before bed, brushes his uniform and hangs it on a chair, squared away.

He is tall and thin, with a pale, clean-shaven face, short light-brown hair slicked with brilliantine, clear, attentive eyes and a thin, trimmed mustache. He wears a lieutenant's horizon-blue uniform and leather gloves, and walks with his cap in his hand. He speaks with the bearing of someone saluting, weighs each word and looks the other person in the eye for exactly as long as a question lasts.

About the night of the list, his account is that of an officer: he carried the sealed envelope on the captain's orders, on January 16, she read it in front of him and burned the paper in the ashtray, and then insisted he stay for dinner. He says he has served France since the first day of the war and that he typed those names to save those men. With the city blacked out and the hotel full of people coming and going, nobody can say for certain where each person was at each hour.

Aurèle knows the lieutenant who carried the envelope is the first name counterintelligence writes down when a list leaks. When the detective asserts that he sold it, his face goes a shade paler and he demands that the remark be withdrawn. It could be the honor of an offended officer. It could be someone measuring his tone because he has other things to protect. The detective will have to decide which.