The Three Evangelists by Fred Vargas Read Free Book Online Page B

domestic intricacies. She was the kind of woman who started to laugh before the end of the joke. This made her laugh a good deal, which appealed to Mathias. A very pretty laugh. She reminded him of his elder sister. Juliette was helping the waiter to serve the dinner and rarely sat down herself, by choice more than necessity. By contrast, Sophia was demureness itself. From time to time she looked at the three diggers and smiled. Her husband was sitting beside her. Vandoosler’s gaze lingered on this man and Marc wondered what he hoped to discover there. Vandoosler often looked as if he was discovering something. Police tactics.
    Mathias, for his part, was looking at Juliette. She was exchanging remarks quietly with Sophia, now and then. They looked as if they were enjoying themselves. For no particular reason, Lucien wanted to know if Juliette Gosselin had a man in her life, a boyfriend or some such. Since he was drinking rather a lot of a wine which had found favour in his sight, he thought of putting the question to her directly. And did so. It made Juliette laugh, as she explained that somehow or other she had ended up without anyone, but didn’t really know why. She was a woman on her own, OK. And that made her laugh. That’s the kind of attitude to have, said Marc to himself, envying her. He would have liked to know how she did it. Instead, he learned that the restaurant took its name from the wine-cask shape of the cellar, which had an arched stone ceiling, so that huge casks of wine could be stored there. The rooms were very fine: 1732, according to the date on the lintel. The cellar itself would be interesting to see. If the advance on the Eastern Front kept up progress, he might go and have a look.
    The advance did make progress. Somehow or other, as sleep overtook other people, by three o’clock in the morning the only ones left, sitting round a table covered with glasses and ashtrays were Juliette, Sophia and the inhabitants of the ‘disgrace’. Mathias was next to Juliette, and Marc thought that he had managed this deliberately but discreetly. Oh no, the fool. He was sure that Juliette had excited feelings in his friend, even though she was five years older than the three evangelists-Vandoosler had found out her age and passed it on. She had fair skin, round arms, soft plump cheeks, long blonde hair, a clinging dress and, above all, that infectious laugh. But it had to be admitted she wasn’t trying to seduce anyone. She seemed perfectly content with her single status, running her bistro, as she had said earlier. But Mathias was on the way to being smitten. Not seriously, but a bit, all the same. When you’re down on your luck, it isn’t very clever to fall for the first woman you run into in the neighbourhood, however charming she may be. It only complicates life, and this was not the moment. And it leads to other things. As Marc very well knew. But perhaps he was mistaken. Mathias had the right to be attracted to a woman without it leading to anything in particular.
    Juliette, not noticing how still and attentively Mathias was sitting, was telling anecdotes: about the customer who ate his potato crisps with a fork, or the one who came in on Tuesdays for instance and looked at himself in a pocket mirror throughout his meal. At three in the morning, everyone is indulgent towards this kind of story, whether you’re telling them or listening to them. So they allowed Vandoosler senior to tell them about a few criminal cases. He spoke slowly and persuasively. Lucien set aside his worries about rebuffing the advances from the Eastern and Western Fronts. Mathias went to fetch a glass of water and sat down again at random, without choosing a place, not even one from which he could study Juliette. That surprised Marc, who was not generally wrong about even the passing afflictions of his friends. So Mathias was not as easy to read as other people after all. Maybe he was operating in code. Juliette whispered