The Circle (29 page)

Hirtmann in Toulouse …

She saw herself again, with Martin, in that cell in unit A, the high-security unit where the most dangerous inmates of the Wargnier Institute were locked up. She had sat in on the interview, at least at the beginning, until Hirtmann asked to speak to Martin alone. Something happened that day. She had felt it. It happened without warning, but they had all felt it: between the serial killer and the cop, there had been some sort of connection; they were like two chess champions, sizing each other up, acknowledging each other. What had they said to each other, once they were alone? Martin had not been very talkative on the subject. What Irène remembered above all was that as soon as they went into the cell, the two men immediately struck up a conversation about the music on the CD player that day: it was Mahler – or at least according to Martin it was, because Ziegler couldn't tell Mozart from Beethoven. It was like watching a heavyweight boxing match between two adversaries who respect each other.

‘
You'll have news of me soon. I doubt you will like it very much – but I am sure you will find it interesting
.'

She shivered. Something was going on. Something extremely unpleasant. Ziegler switched off the computer and stood up. She went into her room and got undressed, but the wheels in her mind went on turning.

Resolution

She'd had a childhood.

She had had an eventful life, full of joy and sadness, a full life. A life like millions of others.

Her memory was like all memories: an album full of yellowing photographs, or a series of jerky little Super 8 film clips, stored away in round plastic boxes.

An adorable little blonde girl who made sandcastles on the beach. A preteen who was more beautiful than her peers, whose curls and soft gaze and precocious curves troubled some of her parents' adult male friends, who had to struggle to ignore her. A mischievous, intelligent kid who was her father's pride and joy. A student who had met the love of her life, a brilliant, melancholy young man with a big mouth and an irresistible smile, who would talk to her about the book he was writing – until she realised that he was carrying a burden that could not be prised from his grip, and even she could do nothing against the ghosts.

Then she betrayed him.

There was no other word. It made her want to weep.
Betrayal.
There was nothing more painful, more sinister, more despicable than that word. For the victim and the traitor. Or, in this case, the traitress … She curled up in a foetal position on the hard bare earth of her tomb. Was that what she was expiating? Was God punishing her through the pervert upstairs? These months of hell: was that what she was paying for, her betrayal? Did she deserve what was happening to her? Did anyone on earth deserve what she was going through? She would not have inflicted such a punishment on her worst enemy …

She thought about the man who lived there, just over her head – who was living, unlike her; who came and went in the world of
the living while keeping her in the antechamber of death. She suddenly went cold all over. What if he didn't tire of this game? What if he
never
got tired of it? How long could it last? Months? Years? Decades? Until
he
died? And how much longer before she went completely insane? She could already see the beginnings of her madness. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, she began laughing uncontrollably. Or she would recite, hundreds of times, ‘Blue eyes go to the skies, grey eyes go to paradise, green eyes go to hell, and black in Purgatory dwell.' There were times when her mind went completely astray, she had to admit. Where reality vanished behind a screen of fantasy. Welcome to Saturday's special screening. Tears and emotion guaranteed. Get out your handkerchiefs. Next to me, Fellini and Spielberg are desperately lacking in imagination.

She would end up crazy.

It was so obvious it terrified her. That, and the thought that it would never end. And that she would get old in this tomb, while at the same time he was getting old up there. They were almost the same age … No! Anything but that. She felt as if she were going to pieces, as if she were going to fall into a dead faint.
No no no no anything but that.
And suddenly, she felt even colder. Because she had just caught a glimpse of the way out. She had no choice. She would never get out of there alive.

So she would have to find a way to die.

She picked at her thought, looked at it every which way. The way she might have examined a butterfly, or an insect.

To die
…

Yes. She had no choice. Up to now she had refused to look at what was staring her in the face.

She could have done it already: that time when she thought she'd escaped, when he'd just been pretending to be asleep, the better to play with her in the forest afterwards. No doubt she could have found a way to put an end to it if she'd been determined enough at the time. But back then all she could think of was running away, getting out of there alive.

Had there been others before her? She had often wondered and she was sure that there had. She was only the latest in a long series: his system was too perfect, not a single detail was left to chance. It was a masterly piece of work.

Suddenly, with icy clarity, she saw the solution.

She had no way to commit suicide. So she had to drive him to kill her.

It was as simple as that. She felt a sudden rush of enthusiasm, as incongruous as it was fleeting, like a mathematician who has found the solution to a particularly complicated equation. Then the difficulties became apparent, and her enthusiasm vanished.

But she did have one advantage over him: she had time.

Time to brood, to think, to go crazy, but also time to devote to her strategy.

Slowly, she began to come up with what is conventionally known as a plan.

Insomnia

The moonlight filtered through the open French windows, spreading throughout the room. If he looked to his left, he would see it sparkling on the surface of the lake. He could hear the water lapping against the shore, a rustling as quiet as that of cloth crushed between fingers.

He felt Marianne's warm, soft body beside him. Yes, a body beside him, something that had not happened to him for months. Her thigh on his, her bare breasts against his torso, and her arm around him, trusting. A strand of fine blonde hair was tickling his chin. She was breathing regularly and he did not dare move for fear of waking her. The strangest thing of all was her breathing: there is nothing more intimate than someone sleeping and breathing so close to you.

Through the window, he could see the dark mass of the Mountain. It had stopped raining. The forest beneath the starry sky was motionless.

‘You're not asleep?'

He turned his head. Marianne's face in the moonlight, her big, light eyes, curious and gleaming.

‘What about you?'

‘Mmm. I think I was dreaming. A strange dream, neither pleasant nor unpleasant.'

He looked at her. She did not seem to want to say any more about it. A thought occurred to him and vanished the moment he began to wonder whom she had been dreaming about: Hugo, Bokha, Francis – or himself?

‘Mathieu was in my dream,' she said at last.

Bokha … Before he could say anything, she stood up and went to the bathroom. Through the half-open door he could hear her urinating, then she opened a cabinet. He wondered if she was looking
for another condom. What was he to make of the fact that she had a supply of them? It was the first time they had ever used one. The fact that he had shown up without one had, however, seemed to cheer her. He looked at the clock radio: 2.13.

Back in the room she took a cigarette from the night table and lit it before lying down next to him. She inhaled twice then placed the cigarette between his lips.

‘Do you have any idea what we're doing here?' she asked.

‘It seems pretty obvious to me,' he tried to joke.

‘I wasn't talking about fucking.'

‘I know.'

She caressed between his thighs.

‘What I mean is … that I don't have the slightest idea,' she added. ‘I don't want to … to make you suffer all over again, Martin.'

Servaz's cock, in all honesty, was thinking neither of suffering nor of all the years it had taken him to forget her, to get her out of his life. It didn't care about any of that and immediately went hard. She pulled back the sheet and lay on top of him. She rubbed his belly, from top to bottom, exerting a delicious pressure. She kissed him again, then resumed her intimate strokes, scrutinising him intensely; her pupils were dilated, there was a smile on her dry lips, and he wondered if she had taken something in the bathroom.

She leaned closer and suddenly bit his lower lip until it bled; the pain made him shudder, and the coppery taste of blood filled his mouth. She squeezed his head, hard, crushing his ears between her palms, while he kneaded her lower back and sucked at her nipple, erect like a bud. He could feel the soft, wet back-and-forth against him. Finally she raised herself up, her fingers closed around him and she gave a strange guttural moan as she straddled him and brought him inside her. He remembered then that it had been her favourite position, in the old days, and for a fraction of a second, which almost spoiled everything, he felt a pang of sadness, devastating sadness.

Was it the night, the moonlight, the time? They let themselves go in a way that left him both drained and distraught. When she headed once again to the bathroom, he raised his fingers to his wounded lip. He had scratches on his back, and she had also bitten him on the shoulder. He could still feel the fire in his skin, the burn of her caresses – and he gave a smile that was both solemn and victorious,
solemn because he knew his victory was only provisional. Was it even a victory? Or more of a relapse? What should he think? He wondered again whether Marianne had taken something before making love. He was feeling increasingly uneasy. Who was this woman? Not the one he used to know …

She came back and flopped onto the bed. Then she kissed him with a tenderness she had not shown since they'd started making love that night. Her voice was hoarser and deeper than usual when she rolled over onto her side.

‘You should watch out: everyone I grow attached to comes to a bad end.'

He looked at her. ‘What do you mean?'

‘You heard me.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘Everyone I love comes to a bad end,' she said again. ‘You, with what happened back then … Mathieu … Hugo …'

He felt a column of ants nibbling at his belly.

‘That's wrong. You've forgotten Francis. He's not doing too badly, by the looks of it.'

‘What do you know about Francis's life?'

‘Nothing, other than that he ditched you, not long after you left me for him.'

She stared at him.

‘That's what you think. That's what everyone thinks. Actually, I'm the one who called it quits. After that, he went shouting from the rooftops that he had ended our relationship, and that it was his decision.'

He gave her an astonished look.

‘And it wasn't true?'

‘I left him a note, one day, after we'd argued for the umpteenth time, where I said that it was over.'

‘So why didn't you set the record straight?'

‘What difference would it have made? You know Francis – everything always has to revolve around him.'

One point to her. She looked at him, and in her eyes he saw the gaze of the Marianne from the old days, full of attentiveness, insight and tenderness.

‘You know … when your father committed suicide, I wasn't surprised. It was as if I already knew what was going to happen; all
that guilt you had on your shoulders – it was as though it had already occurred. As if it were written somewhere.'

‘Seneca:
Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt
,' he said darkly.

‘You and your Latin. You see, that's why I left you. You think I left you for Francis? I left you because you were elsewhere. You were lost, haunted by memories, by your anger and your guilt. Being with you was like sharing you with ghosts, I never knew when you were with me and when—'

‘Do we really need to talk about this now?' he said.

‘If not now, when? Of course, I found out later what Francis wanted,' she continued. ‘When I understood that it wasn't me, that it was
you
– that he wanted to get at you through me, I left him. He wanted to beat you at your own game, show you who was the strongest. I was just part of the stakes, I was a battlefield. Your bloody rivalry, your duel from a distance – with Marianne in the middle, like a trophy. Do you realise? Your best friend. Your alter ego, your brother. You were inseparable and all that time, there was only one thing he wanted: to take what you loved most in the world.'

His brain was on fire; he wanted to run away, not to hear another word.

‘That's Francis all over,' she said, ‘brilliant and funny, but deep down he's jealous and spiteful. He doesn't like himself. He doesn't like his face in the mirror. He likes only one thing: humiliating others. Your best friend. Do you know what he said to me once? That I deserved better than you … Did you know that he was jealous of your talent as a writer? Francis Van Acker has no true talent – apart from manipulating other people.'

He suppressed a desire to gag her with his hand.

‘And then Mathieu came along. Bokha, as you called him … Oh, he wasn't as brilliant as you two. No. But he had his feet on the ground, and he was much cleverer than either of you suspected with your enormous egos. Above all, there was a strength about him … and kindness, too. Mathieu was all strength, patience and kindness, while you were fury and Francis was duplicity. I loved Mathieu. Like I loved both of you. Not with the same devouring passion. Not the same flame, but maybe in a deeper way – something that you and Francis could never understand. And now, today, there is Hugo. He's all I have left, Martin. Don't take him away from me.'