The Circle Read Free

book.
    â€˜Domenech is one fucking coward,’ said Pujol, as if he had been reading Vincent’s thoughts. ‘If we made it into the final in 2006, it’s because Zidane and the rest of the team took over.’
    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 amazementthat 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