The Circle (35 page)

‘I don't know. The town hall? The National Assembly?'

‘You can't think of anything more discreet?'

‘Hang on a minute,' said his assistant. ‘How could Paul Lacaze have dropped off that notebook at the lycée? Everybody knows him in Marsac. He certainly wouldn't have taken such a risk if he were getting ready to kill her.'

A point in his favour.

‘Who else, then?'

‘Someone who can move around freely at the lycée without being noticed. A student, a teacher, a staff member … there are plenty of people.'

Servaz thought again about the mysterious pile of cigarette butts in the forest. He slipped his ticket and his bank card into the machine, and punched in his code.

‘This takes Hirtmann out of the picture again,' said Espérandieu.

Servaz pushed open the glass door into the car park, and walked along the vast echoing space between the rows of cars.

‘How come?'

‘Honestly, how do you think he could be so well informed about Marsac, and Hugo, and the lycée?'

‘And the letters? The e-mail? The CD? What are they supposed to mean?'

Silence on the other end of the line.

‘Maybe it's just someone trying to unnerve you, Martin—'

‘For Christ's sake, the Mahler CD was in the stereo before the investigation was even assigned to us!'

Touché. This time his assistant had no answer. Suddenly Servaz heard the sound of footsteps behind him, ringing on the concrete.

‘I don't know, it's weird,' said Espérandieu. ‘Something's not right.'

Servaz could tell from his assistant's voice that he had come to the same conclusion he himself had: the whole business didn't make sense. It was as if they had all the keys, but not the right lock. He walked more slowly. He was level with the Cherokee. The footsteps behind him were coming closer. He pressed the remote and the vehicle made a double beep at the same time as the lights flashed to welcome him.

‘In any case, watch out—' his assistant was beginning to say.

Servaz whirled round, a single quick fluid movement. He was there, only a few inches away … with his hand in the pocket of his leather jacket. Servaz saw his own reflection in his dark glasses. He recognised his smile. His pale skin and brown hair. Before Hirtmann had time to pull out his gun, he struck him with his free hand.

The punch sent a sharp pain into his knuckles, but he didn't give Hirtmann the time to recover. He grabbed him by his jacket and pushed him towards a car on the other side of the row, smashing his face against the rear window. Hirtmann swore. His sunglasses fell to the ground with a clatter. Servaz pressed himself against his back. His hand was already rummaging in the inside pocket of Hirtmann's jacket. His fingers found what they were looking for … or so he thought. Not a weapon.

A mobile phone.

He swung his opponent around. It wasn't Hirtmann. Now there was no doubt. Even cosmetic surgery couldn't have changed him to that degree. The man's nose was bleeding profusely. His gaze was wild, frightened.

‘Take my money! Go ahead! But don't hurt me, please!'

Shit! Servaz picked his glasses up off the ground, put them back on his nose and patted the leather jacket.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I mistook you for someone else.'

‘What? What?' croaked the man, relieved, indignant and stunned, while Servaz slipped his own telephone in his pocket and quickly walked away.

He turned the ignition and put the car in reverse, gears grating. Through the rear window he could see that the man had taken out his phone and was staring at his number plate. With his other hand he was trying to stop his nosebleed with the help of a thick pack of tissues.

Servaz would have liked to repair the damage, but it was too late. He had often thought that a time machine would have been the most wonderful invention for guys like him – guys who had a tendency to act before thinking. How many things might he have saved in his life with such a machine? His marriage, his career, Marianne …? He put the car in first and drove off, tyres squealing on the slick surface of the car park.

Perhaps he was fantasising, he mused, as he took the exit ramp. Perhaps he had a tendency to complicate things. Perhaps Hirtmann had nothing to do with all this … Vincent was right: how could he? But perhaps he was the one who was right and they were all wrong, and he did have a reason to look behind him, to be on his guard, to fear the future.

A reason to be afraid.

The End of the Road

Drissa Kanté was awoken by the sound of a car horn in the street. Or perhaps it was in his nightmare.

In his dream, it was night time, in the middle of the sea, somewhere south of Lampedusa. In his dream, the sea was a succession of rolling hills, the sky a maelstrom of clouds and lightning. The rain assaulted them, blinded them, the women were screaming, the children were crying, the roar of the furious sea drowned out everything else.

Their motor had died not long after departure; the rotten hull of the old tub creaked with every blow of the sea. Drissa, his teeth chattering, turned his thoughts to the Libyan smugglers who had taken all their savings to sell them this raft, knowing full well they were probably sending them to their deaths; then he thought of all the vultures who had got rich at their expense at every stage of their ‘journey' – and he cursed them.

When the lights of the Maltese trawler had appeared on the horizon, they thought their salvation had come. They had all stood up in the boat, at the risk of capsizing, and they had screamed and waved their arms. But the vessel did not stop. As the ship passed by they had seen the indifferent expressions on the faces of the Maltese fishermen; some were even laughing and waving to them.

That was when he woke up.

He looked around him, his mouth open, and his heart gradually stopped pounding as he recognised the room. He rubbed his eyes and repeated, like a mantra,
My name is Drissa Kanté, I was born in Ségou, Mali, I'm thirty-three years old and now I am living and working in France.

It was a Spanish trawler, the
Rio Esera
, which came to their rescue. When the Spanish captain attempted to disembark his passengers on Malta, the authorities refused to let him. The trawler was stranded
off the Maltese shore for over a week before at last his unwanted cargo was taken off his hands.

Once they were on land, Drissa was told to take bus number 113 and he would find a reception centre at the end of the line where he could sleep, wash and eat.

He boarded the bus and got out at the terminus. The Hal Far Camp: an old military airport transformed into a refugee camp. Sheet-iron containers with tiny windows, a tent village and a hangar with no planes. In the hangar alone there were over 400 people. He spent over a year living in one of the containers. Many of the migrants were sorry they had ever left home. And then, in 2009, there came a glimmer of hope: the French ambassador to Malta, Daniel Rondeau, agreed to take in refugees. That was how Drissa Kanté came to find himself in France.

Work was better paid than in Malta, where people like him had left the camp every morning to cluster at a roundabout near Marsa, where recruiters negotiated the price of a day's work from their cars. It had been the same thing here, in the beginning, until Drissa found a job at a cleaning firm. He was glad of it. He got up every morning at three o'clock to clean offices. It wasn't too hard. He had got used to the calming noise of the Hoover, the artificial smells of carpeting and leather armchairs, of bottles of cleaning products, and the routine simplicity of his task – all this despite the fact he had a degree in engineering. He was part of a small team – five women and two men – who went from one office block to the next. In the afternoon, he rested. In the evening he went out to meet people like himself in the town's cafés and he dreamt of another existence, the one he could see briefly as he walked past the shops and observed customers sitting in restaurant windows.

Something was bothering Drissa, though. Dreaming hadn't been enough. He had wanted to experience that life as well. And to do so, he had agreed to do something, and now he was sorry. It haunted him. Drissa Kanté was a fundamentally honest person. And he knew that if he were ever found out, he would lose his job. And perhaps a great deal more. He did not want to be sent back – not any more.

When he stepped out onto the pavement the streets of Toulouse were vibrating with that energy peculiar to summer evenings. It was 19.00 and the temperature was still close to thirty-five degrees. He was glad. He liked heat. Unlike most of the inhabitants of the city, he found it easier to breathe like this.

He sat down at the terrace of the café L'Escale, on the place Arnaud-Bernard, and greeted Hocine, the owner. He ordered a mint tea while waiting for his friends to arrive. At a neighbouring table a customer stood up, came over and stood right in front of him. Drissa looked up and saw a man in his forties, with greasy brown hair, a potbelly that stretched a shirt of questionable whiteness beneath a worn jacket, and an impenetrable face behind dark glasses.

‘May I sit down?'

The Malian sighed.

‘I'm waiting for friends.'

‘It won't take me long,
Driss.
'

Drissa Kanté shrugged. Zlatan Jovanovic, glass of beer in his hand, flopped down onto the wobbly little chair. Drissa stirred the sugar in his steaming little glass with its gilded edge, as if it made no difference.

‘I need you to do me a favour.'

Drissa said nothing.

‘Did you hear me?'

He guessed that behind his dark glasses the man was looking at him.

‘I don't want to do that sort of thing any more,' he said firmly, his eyes staring at the chequered tablecloth.

The booming laughter that greeted his declaration made him jump in his chair. Drissa looked anxiously at the other customers in the café, who were now all looking at them.

‘He doesn't want to do that sort of thing any more!' said Zlatan loudly, leaning back. ‘Did you hear that?'

‘Be quiet!'

‘Calm down, Driss. No one is interested in other people's business here; you ought to know that.'

‘What do you want? I told you last time it was finished.'

‘Yes, I know, but there is … something new. A new client, to be exact.'

‘It's not my business. I don't want to know.'

‘The client needs us, I'm afraid,' said the man, unperturbed, as if they were two partners discussing business. ‘And this client pays well.'

‘That's your problem – find another mug! I've moved on.'

Drissa felt his will growing stronger as he spoke. Maybe the man opposite him would finally understand that he couldn't count on
him any more. All he had to do was stand firm: the man would eventually give up.

‘No one ever completely moves on, Driss. Not from the place you are in. No one can decide to stop just like that. Not with me. I'm the one who decides when it stops, understand?'

Drissa felt a tremor go through him.

‘You can't force me to—'

‘Oh yes I can. All the photocopies you made, all those papers you stole from dustbins, what would happen if they ended up in the hands of the police?'

‘You'd go down with me, that's what would happen.'

‘Really, you would do that, denounce me?' asked Zlatan in a tone of fake outrage as he lit a cigarette.

Drissa stared defiantly at the dark glasses, but the man's calm was unsettling. He could tell Zlatan was making fun of him, and that he wasn't afraid, while his own fear was increasing proportionately.

‘Fine,' said the man after taking a puff on his cigarette. ‘So, tell me,
who am I
?'

The Malian didn't answer, because he couldn't.

‘What are you going to tell them, my friend? That a man with dark glasses you met in a café gave you
1,000
euros to put a microphone in a lamp? And you couldn't resist? And then he gave you 500 more to take pictures of some documents? And another 500 to collect the papers tossed in the dustbin every day? They're going to ask you what his name is: what are you going to say? Father Christmas? You're going to tell them that this man is in his forties, that he's tall and definitely overweight, that he has a slight accent? That you don't know his name or his address or even his telephone number: he's always the one who calls you from a withheld number? Is that what you're going to tell them? Believe me, you're the one who's in a mess, Driss, not me.'

‘I'll tell them I'm prepared to reimburse the money if I have to.'

Once again, the man burst out laughing, and Drissa Kanté felt himself shrinking. He would have liked to vanish into the ground; he wished he had never met this man.

A big hand, damp and hot, came down on his own in a gesture of repulsive intimacy.

‘Don't act more stupid than you are, Drissa Kanté. I know that you're not an imbecile.'

Hearing his name made him tremble from head to toe.

‘So, let's go back over this. You have committed industrial espionage in a country where it's almost as serious a crime as killing someone, even though you arrived only recently, and you've only just found a stable job here and, who knows, maybe even a future. There's not a single element that can be authenticated other than that, amigo.'

Drissa glanced at the rings of sweat staining the underarms of the man's jacket.

‘Plenty of people have seen you here,' he said. ‘They can testify. You're not the product of my imagination.'

‘Suppose they do – and then what? People round here don't like to talk to the police too much and anyway, it's obvious that someone paid you for the job. Big deal. It doesn't change anything for you. All these customers, what will they say? The same thing as you. The police will never be able to find me and you will rot in prison for a few years and then you'll be sent home. You travelled a long way, my brother; you crossed the desert, the sea, you crossed borders … Do you really want to be without papers again?'