The Circle (57 page)

There was something inside.

At the wheel.

The windscreen was covered with a thin green translucent film, but he could see through it.

Pale.

Motionless.

Staring straight ahead.

The coach driver.

He could tell his pulse was pounding too hard, he was breathing too quickly. He twisted his way round the vehicle, and approached the door on the driver's side.

He reached out to squeeze the handle, expecting it to be blocked, but against all expectation the door opened with a creak muffled by water. But there wasn't enough room to open it all the way.

Servaz leaned inside through the opening and lit up the shape at the wheel.

Still in place, held by what remained of the seatbelt. The beam from his torch revealed details Servaz would have preferred to ignore: prolonged immersion in the water had transformed the body's fat into adipocere, or ‘corpse wax', a substance that was like soap to the touch, and Joachim resembled a perfectly preserved wax figure. It was the process of adipocere transformation that had halted decomposition and preserved the body all this time. His scalp had been destroyed, and it was a bald, waxy head that Servaz saw before him, emerging from what remained of his shirt collar. The epidermis of his hands had also become detached, and looked like two leather gloves. His eyes had vanished, leaving two black sockets. Servaz observed that the car had protected the corpse from predators to some extent. He was breathing more and more quickly. He had often looked at corpses, but not deep under the surface of a lake, imprisoned in a diving suit. The water was getting colder and colder. He shivered. The encroaching darkness, the bubble of light, and now this body …

Then Servaz saw the hole near the corpse's temple. The bullet had gone through his cheek near the left ear. Servaz looked more closely. He had been shot at point-blank range.

The corpse suddenly moved. He was overwhelmed by panic. And again, the tatters of the shirt on the corpse's torso stirred, and Servaz recoiled violently. His head banged the metal frame of the car. He let out a cloud of panicked bubbles. With the shock, he dropped his torch, and it drifted slowly to the floor of the car, between the dead man's legs, capturing the corpse, the dashboard, and the roof of the car in its luminous eddy.

At the same time a tiny fish emerged from what was left of the shirt and swam away. Servaz's ears were buzzing. He didn't have enough air. He realised he'd forgotten to look at his dive computer. He reached inside, grabbed the torch from between the pedals and the dead man's shoes, and waved it every which way to call for help.

Where was Ziegler?

He didn't have the courage to wait. With a few desperate kicks of his flippers, he rushed towards the surface. After only a few metres he found himself caught in a tangle of white, tentacular roots.

Something was clutching his leg. He struggled furiously to get free, when another piece of wood struck his mask violently. Dazed by the shock, he tried to go left, then right, but once again he banged into the hard, rigid roots. They were everywhere. He was a prisoner, only a few metres from the surface. He felt he was losing control, he couldn't think straight any more. He couldn't face the idea of going back out the way he had come or going back down. He had to find a way up at all costs.

Now!

Suddenly the nozzle of his regulator was torn from his mouth. He groped, terrified, found it, pulled on it, but the regulator was stuck among the branches and the roots! He pressed his mouth to the nozzle and breathed in the oxygen, greedily. There was something wrong. The regulator was still connected to his air tank. How could it be stuck among the roots? He carried it to his mouth, breathed in again, tried desperately to free it by shaking it. There was nothing for it. Panic was blinding him. He could hear the fizzing of bubbles all around him, a symptom of his distress.

He did not want to stay another minute in the water, trapped like this. He undid the straps of his air tank and struggled to get free from his harness. He breathed one last time, as much as he could, from the regulator.

Then he grabbed the roots, shook them, but in the water he lacked
strength. He kicked with his flippers, pulled, arched his body. Pushed on his legs. There was a muted cracking sound. He forced his way up, blindly, slipped through, swam up some more, bumped against the roots, shook them, climbed, struggled, bumped, got free, swam up, and up, and up …

The rain came from the west. Like an army bent on conquering a territory. After the vanguard announced its arrival with salvos of lightning and violent gusts of wind, it unfurled on the woods and the roads. Not just an ordinary rain: a deluge. It swept the roofs and streets of Marsac, caused the gutters to overflow, and whipped the old stone facades before continuing its way across the countryside. It drowned the hills, caused them to vanish under a heavy liquid shroud, and it was spiking the surface of the lake when Servaz's head burst through the raft of dead wood and debris that floated among the roots near the shore.

His mask was stuck to his face like a suction cup. He had to pull very hard to yank it off and he felt as if his cheeks were going to come off with it. He opened his mouth wide to swallow the fresh air in great avid lungfuls. He let the rain ripple over his tongue. He turned his head and looked around and the panic returned. What time was it? How long had they been down there, since it was already dark? He heard Ziegler break the surface next to him. She took him by the shoulders.

‘What happened?
What happened?
'

He didn't answer. He was shaking his head back and forth, his eyes wide open, his mask on his forehead. He heard the crash of nearby thunder. The sound of the storm pounding on the surface of the lake.

‘My God!' he roared. ‘Can you see me?'

She was still holding his shoulders. She looked around them, trying to determine how to get to the shore. She turned back to him. He was looking everywhere but, oddly, without looking anywhere in particular, and without looking at her.

‘Can you see me?' he said again, even louder.

‘What? What?'

‘I can't see a thing! I've gone blind!'

He observed them, as silent and invisible as a shadow. A shadow among shadows. They could not imagine that he was so close.

He had followed them to the abandoned, ruined chapel where they were clearly in the habit of meeting. He had hidden in the tall shrubs and, through the window whose glass had disappeared long ago, listened to them holding forth while they smoked. He had to admit that they were considerably more interesting than most of their peers, all those semi-literate young primates. He had a better idea now of why Martin had become who he was. This place turned out quite promising adults. What if there were a school of crime that trained its students in a similar fashion – he could have taught classes there, he mused, and a smile spread across his face.

Crouching in the bushes in the rain, he watched them leave the chapel and take the path towards the lycée. And then he went into the deserted little building. Christ and any signs of worship had vanished long before. The place was littered with beer cans, empty Coca-Cola bottles, snack wrappers and magazines, the vulgar symbols of that other religion, the dominant cult of mass consumerism.

Hirtmann was not religious, but he had to admit that certain faiths, Christianity and Islam in particular, had bypassed all the others where torture and savagery were concerned. He could picture himself quite easily, preaching with the same eloquence that he had applied in the courts. Now he was preparing himself to be both judge and executioner. In his own way he was going to revive the good old joke of the biter being bit.

Originally he had believed that the usurper, the one who had dared to pretend to be him, must be one of these young people. But as he listened to them, and nosed about here and there, he realised his mistake. And the irony of the situation appeared to him in all its cruelty.
Poor Martin
… he had already suffered so much. For what might have been the first time in his life, Hirtmann felt a surge of compassion and comradeship. It almost brought tears to his eyes. It would have been a real surprise to Martin to know that he could have this effect on him.
Martin, my friend, my brother
… he thought. He was going to mete out a harsh punishment to the guilty party. The crime was double, since there had been two victims. She would pay for her crime of lese majesty on the one hand, and her betrayal on the other. A punishment that would remain branded upon her body and her mind forever.

Hospital

‘Retinal haemorrhage,' said the doctor. ‘Boyles's law, where the variation in pressure is accompanied by variation in the volume of the gas space: like all gases, the air contained in your mask was subject to changes in pressure. Given the effect of the pressure, the air was compressed when you went down, and expanded when you came back up. You are the victim of what is known as barotrauma: a trauma due to extremely abrupt changes in atmospheric pressure. I don't know what happened down there, but a total loss of vision is extremely rare. Even a momentary one. But rest assured, you will not remain blind.'

Great
, thought Servaz.
Couldn't you have said that sooner, stupid bastard?

The doctor's voice, which was deep and steady as it pontificated, horrified him. In all likelihood, if he'd been able to see the rest of him, he would have felt the same.

‘The haemorrhage may take a certain time to evolve,' continued the voice, learnedly. ‘The macula has been affected, the central zone of vision. There is no specific treatment. We can only act on the cause. And obviously in this case, the cause is already behind you; therefore all we can do is wait for things to go back to normal. We may need to resort to a surgical ablation to recover your eyesight completely. We will see. In the meantime we will keep you under observation. And you will keep this bandage over your eyes. Whatever you do, don't try and take it off.'

Servaz nodded, wincing. There wasn't much he could do; he couldn't see a thing.

‘One might say you don't do things by halves,' said the doctor, ironically.

He wished he could have come up with a scathing reply, but oddly enough, these words reassured him. Perhaps because of the doctor's positive tone.

‘Right, I'll come by later. Get some rest.'

‘He's right,' said Ziegler next to him, when the doctor's footsteps had faded away. ‘You really don't do things by halves.'

He could tell from her voice that she was smiling. And concluded that she too had some reassuring news.

‘Tell me what he told you.'

‘The same thing he's told you. It could take several hours or several days. And if they need to, they will operate. But you will get your sight back, Martin.'

‘Fantastic.'

‘It was a mistake, that dive.'

‘I know.'

‘I'm going to have to explain it to my superiors.'

He made a face. She was going to get into trouble again, he knew it. And again because of him.

‘I'm sorry. I'll take all the blame. I'm going to ask Sartet and the prosecutor if we can pre-date the request. Otherwise I'll say that I lied to you, and claimed I already had approval.'

‘Hmm. Well, they're not going to sack me over it. And they can hardly do any more to me than what they've already done. Besides, there's the corpse: that justifies everything, don't you think?'

‘What's going on with the car and the body?'

‘This time, they're sparing no expense: they're taking everything out of the lake. The body will be sent for autopsy tonight. Everyone is on a war footing.'

He could hear the persistent noise of the storm, and ordinary hospital sounds: nurses' voices, footsteps in the corridors, trolleys being pushed along.

‘Am I all alone in here?'

‘Yes. Do you want me to station someone outside your door?'

‘What for?'

‘Have you forgotten that someone shot at you last night? You can't see a thing, you're even more vulnerable. And it's a hospital. Anyone can just walk right in.'

He sighed. ‘No one besides the police knows I'm here,' he replied.

She squeezed his hand. Then he heard her push back her chair.

‘In the meantime, you have to sleep. Do you want a sedative? The nurse can give you one.'

‘Only the liquid variety. And then only if it's been aged at least twelve years.'

‘I'm afraid that won't be reimbursed by Social Security. Get some rest. I have something to see to at my end.'

He straightened up a little. He could hear the tension in her voice.

‘It sounds important.'

‘It is. I'll fill you in tomorrow morning. There are several things I have to tell you.'

He could sense her awkwardness.

‘What sort of things?'

‘Tomorrow.'

Ziegler paused under the hospital's glass canopy and looked out at the downpour. The lightning formed an electric arc in the darkening sky. A second later, the thunder made the air vibrate.

She put on her helmet and ran to her motorbike. The summer storm had transformed the road into a rushing stream. She went down to the centre of Marsac, gliding like a shadow through the deserted streets, riding very slowly over the flooded cobblestones. It was almost eight o'clock in the evening and she wondered if she would find him at home or at his office. The business address was nearest. When she looked up at the yellow facade of the shoddy building in the centre of town, she saw that there were lights on the top floor. Her hunter's instinct was immediately aroused. It had been a long time since she had gone hunting, really hunting: the kind that gave her a sensation that even sex or motorbikes couldn't match. She parked on the pavement, removed her helmet, smoothed her streaming blonde hair and headed to the door. There was no intercom or lock and all she had to do was climb the creaking stairway up to the top floor. She rang the bell and waited.