Deadly Slipper Read Online Free PDF Page B

nothing friendly about it), he had failed to stop a tryin the final minute of play, which had put the dreaded team from Les Eyzies on top. It wasn’t good rugby—mostly middle-aged men, short of wind and gone to fat, who met in occasional inter-village matches organized by Paul—but the play was serious.
Le rugby
being one thing sure to rouse passion in the breast of the otherwise phlegmatic Périgourdin, Julian was not an especially popular man with his teammates at the moment.
    “I’m not talking to you,” snarled Paul, wringing a rag into a bucket of soapy water. A bull of a man, son of a farmer near Issigeac, he played right-hand prop to Julian’s fullback.
    “Come on, Paul,” Julian pleaded. “Christ, it wasn’t my fault. Those guys from Les Eyzies are out of the Stone Age. How would you like having le Trog pushing
your
face in?” The one they called le Troglodyte was Les Eyzies’s horrendous center, a brute with a forehead like a cliff and small, piggy eyes. “He nearly bit my ear off last year.”
    “You chickened out,” Paul accused in a seriously aggrieved voice.
    “I wanted to live!” Julian recalled his feeling of extreme vulnerability as le Trog advanced on him, head lowered, arm outstretched like a battering ram, fully intent on flattening Grissac’s last remaining line of defense: Julian. Why did they call it a “line” when it always boiled down to one lone man?
    “Anyway, why do I always get stuck with fullback?” He knew the answer: the position was hisbecause no one else wanted it. Since their forward defense was not particularly good, he frequently found himself alone, deep in home territory, scrambling for the ball while a rush of attackers—loggers, farmers, abattoir workers—converged darkly on his field of vision. Admit it. He was getting too old for the game.
    “All right,” conceded Paul. “What do you want?”
    “Well, I just stopped by to say hello,” said Julian, feeling as wounded by Paul’s unfriendliness as by the pounding he had suffered. He still showed the bruises.
    “Go bother Mado.”
    “I intend to,” said Julian, relieved to see that he had been forgiven.
    “And leave that bloody thief outside,” Paul roared, meaning Julian’s canine companion, but Julian and Edith were already through the door.
    Chez Nous could just as well have been called Chez Paul, or Chez Madeleine, but when the couple had first set up the establishment, they could not agree on whose name should go on the sign. “Chez Nous” was the compromise. In fact, Chez Nous had evolved, through economic necessity, into more than a bistro. It served Grissac also as
tabac
, newsstand, post office, general store, and community hall. The Brieux lived above all of this and worked below in the various capacities implied. If Chez Nous had failed so far to rise to the height of culinary fame originally intended by the pair, in fact the cookingwas very, very good. Julian ate there at least once a week, as much for the company, which he genuinely enjoyed, as for Mado’s confit of duck or Paul’s
feuilleté au citron.
Despite his bulk, Paul had the lightest hand with pastry in the region.
    There was no one in the front area, which served as the store. The bistro was through a bead curtain off to the side and consisted of a bar with stools, a dozen or so tables, and a mixed collection of chairs. Julian had a look in. The only person there was a morose type named Lucien Peyrat, who delivered bread to communities too small to have their own baker. The man was eating an early lunch. Julian gave him a perfunctory nod and wandered back to the kitchen. The appetizing odor of frying garlic filled the air.
    “What’s cooking?” he asked in both senses of the word, sticking his head through the door. Edith stuck her head in, too.
    “Ah,”
cried Mado, a statuesque redhead with tawny, leonine eyes,
“c’est toi.”
She was at the stove, pan-frying river sprats to a golden crispness, moving the fingerling