The Circle Page 2

  No one disputed the fact, and Pujol wove his way through the crowd to fetch another beer. The bar was packed. 11 June 2010: the opening day and first matches of the World Cup in South Africa, including the match that was on the screen at that very moment, Uruguay-France, 0-0 at half time. Vincent looked again at his boss. He had his eyes glued to the screen, but his gaze was empty. Commandant Martin Servaz was just pretending to watch the match, and his assistant knew it.

  Not only was Servaz not watching the match, but he wondered what on earth he was doing there.

  He’d wanted to please his team by going along with them. For weeks now there’d been talk of little else but the World Cup at the regional crime squad. What sort of condition the players were in, the catastrophic friendlies they’d played, including a humiliating defeat against China, the selector’s choices, the hotel that was expensive beyond belief: Servaz was beginning to wonder if a third world war would have aroused this much attention. Probably not. He hoped that criminals were similarly engrossed and that the crime statistics would go down all on their own without anyone having to lift a finger.

  He reached for the cold beer that Pujol had just placed in front of him and raised it to his lips. On the screen, the match had started again. The little men in blue were running around with the same useless energy as before; they hurried from one end of the pitch to the other and Servaz could see absolutely no logic behind their moves. As for the strikers, he was no expert, but they seemed particularly clumsy. He had read somewhere that travel and accommodation for the team would cost the French Football Federation over one million euros, and he would have loved to know where they got their money from, and whether he himself would have to dig into his pocket. But although ordinarily his neighbours in the bar, as taxpayers, were easily riled, this question did not seem to trouble them as much as the ongoing absence of goals. Servaz tried all the same to get interested in what was happening, but there was a constant unpleasant buzzing from the television, as if it were a giant beehive. Someone had explained to him that it was the sound made by the thousands of trumpets the South African spectators had brought to the stadium. He wondered how they could produce and above all how they could stand such a racket: even at this distance, attenuated by microphones and technological filters, the sound was particularly enervating.

  Suddenly the lights in the bar flickered and exclamations could be heard all around: the image on the screen shrank and disappeared then suddenly flashed back on. The storm was hovering over Toulouse like a flock of crows. Servaz gave a faint smile at the thought of everyone sitting in the dark, deprived of their football match.

  His distracted thoughts veered into a familiar but dangerous zone. Eighteen months gone by and still no sign of life from Julian Hirtmann. Eighteen months, but not a day went by that Servaz didn’t think about him. The Swiss convict had escaped from the Wargnier Institute during the winter of 2008, only a few days after Servaz had visited him in his cell. At their meeting, he had discovered to his amazement that he and the former prosecutor from Geneva shared the same passion: the music of Gustav Mahler. And then there had been escape for Hirtmann, and for Servaz – the avalanche.

  Eighteen months, he thought. Five hundred and forty days, which meant just as many nights having the same nightmare over and over. The avalanche … He was buried in a coffin of snow and ice, and he was beginning to run out of air, while the cold numbed his limbs … Then finally the drill making its way through, and someone furiously clearing the snow above him. A blinding light on his face, gulping fresh air by the lungful, his mouth gaping, until a face filled the open space. Hirtmann’s face. He burst out laughing, and said, ‘Bye, Martin,’ then filled up the hole again …

  Give or take a few variations, the dream always ended the same way.

  He had survived the avalanche. But in his nightmares, he died. And in a way, part of him had died up there that night.

  What was Hirtmann doing at that very moment? Where was he? With a shiver Servaz pictured the snowy landscape, its incredible majesty … the dizzying summits protecting the lost valley … the building with its thick walls … locks clanging at the end of a deserted corridor … And then that door with the familiar music.

  ‘About time,’ said Pujol next to him.

  Servaz glanced distractedly at the screen. One player was leaving the pitch, another was replacing him. He gathered it was Anelka again. He looked at the upper left-hand corner of the screen: the seventy-first minute, and the score was still 0-0. Hence the tension that reigned in the bar. Next to him, a big man who must have weighed twenty stone and was sweating abundantly beneath his red beard, tapped him on the shoulder as if they were friends and blew in his face with his booze-heavy breath: ‘If I was the coach, I’d give ‘em a good kick up the arse to get ‘em moving, the wankers. What the fuck, they won’t even budge for the World Cup.’

  Servaz wondered if his neighbour was much in the habit of moving – apart from when he had to drag himself down here or go and fetch his six-packs at the corner shop.

  He wondered why he didn’t like watching sports on television. Was it because his ex-wife, Alexandra, unlike him, had never missed a match with her favourite team? They had been the kind of couple who, Servaz had suspected from day one, would not last long. In spite of that, they got married and stuck it out for seven years. He still didn’t know how they could have taken so long to realise what was so obvious: they were as mismatched as a member of the Taliban and a supermodel. What did they have left today, other than their eighteen-year-old daughter? But he was proud of his daughter. Oh yes, he was proud. Even if he still hadn’t got used to her look, her body piercings and her hairstyle, it was in his footsteps Margot was following, not her mother’s. Like him, she liked to read and like him, she had qualified for the most prestigious literary prep school in the region. Marsac. The best students went there from miles around, some from as far away as Montpellier or Bordeaux.

  If he thought about it, he had to admit that at the age of forty-one he had only two focuses of interest in his life: his job and his daughter. And books … but books were something else, they were not merely a focus, they were his entire life.

  Was it enough? What were the lives of others made up of? He looked at the bottom of his glass, where there was nothing left but a few specks of foam, and he decided he’d had enough to drink for one evening. He felt a sudden urgent desire to pee and he wove his way to the door to the toilets. They were disgusting. A bald man had his back to him, and Servaz could hear his stream striking the urinal.

  ‘That team is nothing but a bunch of no-hopers,’ said the man. ‘They’re a disgrace to watch.’

  He went back out without bothering to wash his hands. Servaz soaped and rinsed his own for a long time, dried them, and as he went back out he drew his right hand into his sleeve before taking hold of the door handle.

  A quick glance at the screen told him nothing had changed in his absence, even though the match was drawing to a close. The audience was a simmering volcano of frustration. Servaz figured that if things continued like this, there would be riots. He went back to his spot.

  His neighbours were shouting, things like, ‘Go on!’ ‘Pass the ball, fuck, pass it!’ ‘On the right, on the riiight!’ which meant that at least something was happening, finally, when he felt a familiar vibration in his pocket. He reached into his trousers and took out his phone. Not a smartphone, but a good old Nokia. The mobile had already transferred the call to his voicemail, and the text read ‘888’.

  Servaz dialled the number to access the message.

  And froze.

  The voice on the line … It took him half a second to recognise it. Half a second of eternity. Time-space contracting, as if the twenty years separating him from the last time he had heard it could be erased in two heartbeats. Even after all this time, he felt something tunnelling deep into his belly.

  It was as if the room were beginning to spin. The cries, the shouts of encouragement, the buzzing o
f the vuvuzelas all receded, lost in a mist. The present contracted, became tiny. The voice was saying, ‘Martin? It’s me, Marianne. Call me, please. It’s very important. I beg you, call me back as soon as you get this message.’

  A voice from the past – but also a voice in which he could hear fear.

  Samira Cheung tossed the leather jacket onto the bed and looked at the fat man who was leaning against the pillows, smoking.

  ‘You’ve got to go. I have to go to work.’

  The man sitting in her bed was at least thirty years older than she was, had an unmistakeable potbelly and white hair on his chest, but Samira didn’t care. He was a good lay, and that, in her opinion, was all that mattered. She herself was no beauty queen. Ever since the lycée she had known that most men found her ugly – or rather that they thought her face was ugly and her body was singularly attractive. Given the strange ambivalence she aroused in them, the scales tipped sometimes one way, sometimes the other. Samira Cheung made up for it by sleeping with as many men as she could; she had known for a long time that the most handsome were not necessarily the best lovers, and she was looking for men who were good in bed, not Prince Charming.

  The big bed creaked as her round-bellied lover lifted his legs out from under the sheets and leaned over to retrieve his neatly folded clothes. Samira pulled on a pair of knickers and a T-shirt then disappeared through the trap door in the floor.

  ‘Booze or coffee?’ she shouted from below.

  She made her way through the little red kitchen that was so narrow it looked like a ship’s galley, and switched on the capsule coffee maker. With the exception of the bare bulb over her head, the big house was plunged into darkness. And for a reason: Samira had bought the ruin twenty kilometres from Toulouse the year before. She was gradually restoring it, choosing her occasional lovers from various trades – electricians, plumbers, masons, painters, roofers – and for the time being she lived in only one-fifth of the inhabitable space. The rooms on the ground floor were completely empty of furniture, draped in plastic tarpaulins, the walls covered with scaffolding, pots of dripping paint and tools, as was half of the first floor, and she had made the attic into a bedroom for the time being.

  The man went heavily down the ladder. She handed him a steaming espresso and took a bite from an apple that had already been started and was going brown on the countertop. Then she vanished into the bathroom. Five minutes later she went into the ‘dressing room’. All her clothes were hanging temporarily from long metal rods encased in thin plastic covers, while her underwear and T-shirts were stored in small dressers with plastic drawers, and dozens of pairs of boots stood in a row against the wall.

  She pulled on a pair of jeans with holes in, flat-heeled ankle boots, a clean T-shirt and a leather belt with studs. Then the holster for her service weapon. And a military parka for the rain.

  ‘You still here?’ she said, re-entering the kitchen.

  The fat fifty-year-old wiped the jam from his lips. He pulled her closer and kissed her. She submitted for a moment, then pulled away.

  ‘When are you going to fix my shower?’

  ‘Not this weekend. My wife is coming back from her sister’s place.’

  ‘Find a day. This week.’

  ‘My schedule is full,’ he protested.

  ‘No plumbing, no fucking.’

  The man frowned.

  ‘Maybe Wednesday afternoon. I’ll have to see.’

  ‘The keys will be in the usual place.’

  She was going to say something else when a mixture of electric-guitar riffs and horror-film screams could be heard somewhere. The first bars of a song by Agoraphobic Nosebleed, an American grindcore group. By the time she found her mobile, the screaming had stopped. She looked at the number on the screen: Vincent. The phone vibrated. A text message:

  Call me back.

  Which she did at once.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked without answering.

  ‘I’m at home, I was about to leave. I’m on duty tonight.’

  On a night like this, every man in the squad who had managed to call in sick had done so.

  ‘What about you, you’re not watching the match?’ she asked.

  ‘We’ve had a call.’

  An emergency. Probably the deputy on call at the public prosecutor’s office. Hard luck for any football fans. At the law courts, as well, the televisions must be overheating. She’d even had trouble finding a lover for the evening: it was obvious that football was winning over fucking that night.

  ‘Did the prosecutor’s office call?’ she asked. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t the prosecutor’s office.’

  ‘It wasn’t?’

  She could hear unusual tension in Espérandieu’s voice.

  ‘I’ll explain. No point going to the crime division. Take your car and get over here. Have you got something to write with?’

  Paying no attention to her guest, who stood next to her growing impatient, Samira opened a kitchen drawer and took out a pen and a Post-it.

  ‘Hang on … okay, right.’

  ‘I’ll give you the address, meet us there.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  She raised an eyebrow as she wrote it down, even though he couldn’t see her.

  ‘Marsac? That’s way out in the country. Who called you, Vincent?’

  ‘I’ll explain. We’re already on our way. Meet us there as soon as you can.’

  ‘Us? Who’s us?’

  ‘Martin and me.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll come as quick as I can.’

  She hung up. Something was wrong.

  3

  Marsac

  The rain hammered relentlessly on the roof of the car. It danced in the headlights, flooded the windscreen and the road, banished animals to their burrows and isolated the rare passing vehicles from one another. It had come from the west, like an army invading new territory. This was no simple downpour; it was a deluge. From time to time, flashes of lightning scored the sky but the rest of the time they could see nothing beyond the headlights. It was as if a cataclysm had drowned all inhabited land and they were making their way along the bottom of the ocean.

  Servaz peered out at the road. The pulsing of the windscreen wipers echoed that of his heart, which was contracting and dilating far too quickly. They had left the motorway a while ago and were driving now through hills plunged in rural darkness. Vincent had slipped a CD by Queens of the Stone Age into the player and for once Martin had not objected.

  He was far too absorbed by his own thoughts.

  For a split second Espérandieu took his eyes from the road. He saw the glow from the headlights and the to and fro of the wipers reflected in his boss’s black pupils. Servaz was staring at the tarmac the way he had been staring at the television screen not long before: without seeing it. His deputy thought of the telephone call again. From the moment he’d got it, Martin had been transformed. Vincent gathered that something had happened in Marsac, and that the person at the other end of the line was an old friend. Servaz wouldn’t say anything more. He had told Pujol to stay and watch the match and asked Espérandieu to go with him.

  The rain eased up a bit just as the Renault headed into the tunnel of plane trees that marked the entrance to the town, and they wound their way through the little streets in the centre, jiggling along the cobblestones.

  ‘To the left,’ said Servaz when they reached a square with a church.

  Espérandieu could not help but notice the number of pubs, cafés and restaurants. Marsac was a university town. 18,503 inhabitants. And almost as many students. Faculties of letters, science, law, economy, and management, and the renowned prep school. Newspapers, always eager for a pithy epithet, had dubbed it ‘the Cambridge of the Southwest’. From a strictly police point of view, the influx of so many students meant recurring problems with drink and drug driving, dealing, and damage caused during student protests. But there was nothing that fell within t
he remit of the crime squad.

  ‘It looks as if the power is out.’

  The streets were engulfed in darkness. They could just make out moving flickers of light behind the windows: torches. The storm, thought Vincent.

  ‘Go around the square and take the second street on the right.’

  They drove around the little circular piazza and left by a narrow cobblestone street that wound its way up past tall facades. Through the downpour, twenty metres further along, they could make out the swirl of revolving lights. The gendarmerie. Someone had called them.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ said Espérandieu. ‘Did you know that the gendarmerie was in on this?’

  They pulled over behind a Renault Trafic and a Citroën C4, both of which were painted in the colours of the gendarmerie. Since his boss didn’t answer, Vincent turned and looked at him. Martin looked more tense than usual. He gave his assistant a puzzled, reticent look and climbed out of the car.

  In less than five seconds Servaz’s hair and shirt were drenched. Several members of the gendarmerie were stoically sheltering beneath waterproof windbreakers. One came over to them and Servaz pulled out his warrant card. The gendarme raised his eyebrows to convey his astonishment that the crime squad was on the scene before the prosecutor had even referred the case to them.

  ‘Who’s in charge?’ asked Servaz.

  ‘Captain Bécker.’

  ‘Is he inside?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know whether—’

  Servaz walked past the gendarme without waiting to hear the rest.

  ‘Martin!’

  He turned his head to the left. A Peugeot 307 had pulled in a bit further down the narrow street. There was someone standing on the driver’s side, behind the open door, someone he had thought he would never see again.

  The streaming rain, the dazzling, spinning lights from the vehicles, the faces beneath the windbreakers, everything was a blur. But he would still have recognised her among thousands. She was wearing a raincoat, the collar turned up. It really was her. She was standing straight with her hand on the door, her chin up, the way he remembered. Her face was ravaged by fear and sorrow, but she had not abandoned her pride.