Viviane by Julia Deck Page A

enters the bookstore. Your husband strolls among the tables of new arrivals, picking up and immediately putting back books, checking the titles lined up on the shelves without in all likelihood remembering any of them, finally leaving the store to use his phone but you still don’t answer. You order a second hot toddy.
    Julien enters the bookstore again. This time he goes to the back, chooses something from a rack of graphic novels, and methodically turns the pages until the end. When he has finished the book he comes out again and night is falling on the square. Julien makes one last call but this time your phone doesn’t vibrate, and theperson he’s now calling seems more approachable because he’s talking on the phone—you can clearly see his lips move, quickly then slowing down as the conversation progresses—until having definitively given up on you, he retraces his steps and leaves the square.
    Is it the effect of that soppy expression on your husband’s face or the toddies multiplying as you found the time dragging?—anyway your balance isn’t as solidly grounded as before. You start tailing him again, preparing to hail him and lead him over to that lonely métro entrance you’d thought of earlier, in the rocking chair, as a suitable sign-off place for your crime. But now Julien is walking right past Rue des Arènes. He’s leading you toward another neighborhood you know well, Rue des Carmes and its police station. Your husband is walking some fifteen yards ahead of you, passing the florist’s, the hardware store, the wine shop, the bakery you pass in turn without hearing the name called out behind you.
    Nor do you recognize the voice of Gabrielle, the doctor’s wife who, having just completed a little inventory at the Rue du Pot-de-Fer apartment, had been on her way back to the one she shares with her lover. Refusing to hear this name chasing after you, it’s impossible for you to know that she’s right on your heels, hoppingin the snow, grabbing her cell and calling Inspector Philippot, then Angèle, to whom the police have recently introduced her. In the end, the two of them didn’t hit it off too badly, sharing as they do many experiences and opinions regarding the deceased.
    So Gabrielle verifies some of the givens in the problem and resumes trotting several paces behind you, as you pursue your husband through cobblestoned streets where tourists buy souvenirs of Notre Dame and where he at last stops short, as if undecided. Fearing he might spot you, you duck into an entrance to a movie theater where you don’t spot Gabrielle, who has taken refuge there a moment earlier through the other entrance for the same reason. No, you don’t see anything around you, too preoccupied by the form you are shadowing ahead of you, which soon sets off through the crowd.
    You rush after him, the widow tagging along. She’s becoming less and less cautious in her pursuit: glued to her phone, she’s now transmitting geographic coordinates, precisely following your movements. At last Julien enters a jewelry store, comes out again carrying a pretty package. You’d love to tear it from his hands but with an effort you breathe in, breathe out. It’s painful for air to circulate through your lungs compressed bynervous tension and that slight nausea you’ve been experiencing constantly since a little while ago. You keep following him, though, on to the Seine where you’re soon crossing the Saint-Michel bridge.
    Which leads to the Île de la Cité, police headquarters, the Palais de Justice. To the Conciergerie and its towers of evil memory: cold jails, final judgments, gleaming guillotines. You carry the icy weight of those stone walls on your drooping shoulders as you press on through the snow. But your steps begin to falter on their own and you think that if Julien were to turn around in that instant, the black water beneath the bridge