The Winner Stands Alone (26 page)

Carry on, even if youre not so sure now of what youre doing. God moves in mysterious ways,
and sometimes the path only reveals itself once you start walking it.

Thank you, Olivia, he thinks. Perhaps he is here in order to show the world the
aberrations of modern life, of which Cannes is the su- preme manifestation.

Hes not sure, but whatever the case, hes here for a reason, and the last two years of
tension, planning, fear, and uncertainty are finally justified.

He can imagine what the
next Festival will be like: people being issued with swipe cards even to get into the
lunch parties on the beach, sharpshooters on every rooftop, hundreds of plainclothes po-
licemen mingling with the crowds, metal detectors at the door of every hotel, where those children-of-the-Superclass will have to wait while the police search
their bags; women will have to take off their high heels and men be called back because
the coins in their pockets have set off the alarm; gray-haired gentlemen will have to hold
out their arms and be frisked like common criminals; the women will be led to a kind of
canvas tent at the entrancewhich clashes horribly with the former elegance of the
placewhere theyll have to wait patiently in line to be searched, until a policewoman
discovers what triggered the alarm: the underwiring in a bra.

The city will begin to show its true face. Luxury and glamour will be replaced by tension,
insults, wasted time, and the cool, indifferent gaze of the police. People will feel more
and more isolated, this time by the system itself, rather than by the eternal arrogance of
the chosen few. Army units will be sent to that simple seaside town with the sole
objective of protecting people who are trying to have fun, and the pro- hibitive cost of
this will, of course, fall on the taxpayers shoulders.

There will be demonstrations by honest workers protesting at what they deem to be an
absurdity. The government will issue a statement saying that theyre considering the
possibility of shifting the cost to the organizers of the Festival. The sponsorswho could
easily afford the expenselose interest when one of their number is humiliated by some
insignificant little officer, who tells him to shut up and respect the security
regulations.

Cannes will begin to die. Two years on, theyll see that everything they did to maintain
law and order really has paid off, with zero levels of crime during the Festival period.
The terrorists have failed in their attempt to sow further panic.

Theyll try to turn the clock back, but they wont be able to. Cannes will continue to die.
This new Babylon will be destroyed, this modern- day Sodom will be erased from the map.

He steps out of the
shower having made a decision. When he goes back to Russia, he will order his employees to
find out the girls family name. He will make anonymous donations through neutral banks. He will order some gifted author to write the story of her life and pay for it to
be translated into different languages.

The story of a young woman who sold craftwork, was beaten by her boyfriend, exploited by
her parents, until the day she surren- dered her soul to a stranger and thus changed one
small corner of the planet.

He opens the wardrobe, takes out an immaculate white shirt, his carefully pressed dinner
jacket, and his handmade patent-leather shoes. He has no trouble tying his bow tie because
he does this at least once a week.

He turns on the TV in time for the local news bulletin. The parade of stars along the red
carpet takes up much of the program, but there is also a brief report about a woman found
murdered on the beach.

The police have cordoned off the area. The boy who witnessed the murder (Igor studies his
face, but feels no desire for revenge) says that he saw the couple sit down to talk, then
the man got out a small sti- letto knife and appeared to run it lightly over the womans
body. The woman seemed quite happy, which is why he didnt call the police ear- lier
because he thought it was some kind of joke.

What did the man look like?

White, about forty, wearing such-and-such clothes, and apparently very polite.

Theres no need to worry. Igor opens his leather briefcase and takes out two envelopes. One
contains an invitation to the party that is due to start in an hour (although everyone
knows that the start will be de- layed by ninety minutes), where he knows he will meet
Ewa. If she wont come to him, too bad; he will go to her. It has taken less than
twenty-four hours for him to see the kind of woman he married and that the sufferings of
the last two years have been in vain.

The other envelope is silver and hermetically sealed. On it are the two words For you
written in an exquisite hand that could be either male or female.

There are CCTV cameras in the corridors, as there are in most hotels nowadays. In some
part of the basement is a dark room lined with TV screens before which a group of people
sit, watching. They are on the lookout for anything unusual, like the man who kept going up and down stairs
and who explained to the officer sent to investigate that he was simply enjoying a little
free exercise. Since the man was a guest at the hotel, the officer apologized and left.

They take no interest in guests who go into another guests room and dont leave until the
next day, usually after breakfast has been served. Thats normal and none of their business.

The screens are connected to special digital recording systems, and the resulting disks
are stored for six months in a safe to which only the manager has the key. No hotel in the
world wants to lose a cus- tomer because some rich, jealous husband manages to bribe one
of the people watching one particular part of the corridor and then gives (or sells) the
material to a tabloid newspaper, having first presented proof of adultery to the courts
and thus ensured that his wife will get none of his fortune.

That would be a tragic blow to the prestige of a hotel that prides itself on discretion
and confidentiality. The occupation rate would im- mediately plummet; after all, people
choose a five-star hotel because they know that the people who work there are trained to
see only what theyre supposed to see. For example, if someone asks for room service, when
the waiter arrives, he keeps his eyes fixed on the trolley, holds out the bill to be
signed by the person who opens the door, but never everlooks over at the bed.

Prostitutesmale and femaledress discreetly, although the men in the screen-lined room know
exactly who they are, thanks to a data system provided by the police. This is none of
their business either, but in these cases, they always keep one eye on the door of the
room they went into until they come out again. In some hotels, the switchboard operator is
told to make a fake phone call just to check that the guest is all right. The guest picks
up the phone, a female voice asks for some nonexistent person, hears an angry Youve got
the wrong room and the sound of the phone being slammed down. Mission accomplished; theres
no need to worry.

Drunks who try their key in the lock of the wrong room and, when the door fails to open,
start angrily pounding on it, are often surprised to see a solicitous hotel employee appear out of nowherehe just hap- pened to be passing,
he saysand who suggests accompanying the drunken guest to the right room (usually on a
different floor and with an entirely different number).

Igor knows that his every move is being recorded in the hotel base- ment: the day, hour,
minute, and second that he comes into the lobby, gets out of the lift, walks to the door
of his suite, and puts the swipe card into the lock. Once inside, he can breathe easy; no
one has access to what is happening in the room itself, that would be a step too far in
violating someones privacy.

He closes his room door
behind him. He had made a point of studying the CCTV cameras as soon as he arrived the night before. Just as all cars have a blind spot when over- taking, regardless
of how many rearview mirrors they may have, the cameras show every part of the corridor,
except the rooms located in each of the four corners. Obviously, if one of the men in the
basement sees someone pass by a particular place but fail to appear on the next screen,
hell suspect something untoward has happenedthe person might have faintedand immediately
send someone up to check. If he gets there and finds no one, the person has obviously been
invited into one of the rooms, and the rest is a private matter between guests.

Igor, however, doesnt intend to stop in the corridor. He walks non- chalantly to the point
where the corridor curves away toward the el- evators and slips the silver envelope under
the door of the corner room or suite.

It all takes less than a fraction of a second, and if someone down- stairs was observing
his movements, they would have noticed nothing. Much later, when they check the disks to
try and identify the person responsible for what happened, they will have great difficulty
deter- mining the exact moment of death. It may be that the guest wasnt there and only
opened the envelope when he or she returned from one of that nights events. It may be that
he or she opened the envelope at once, but that the contents took a while to act.

During that time, various people will have passed by the same place and every one of them
will be considered suspicious; and if some shabbily dressed person or someone from the
less orthodox worlds of massage, prostitution, or drugs had the misfortune to follow the
same trajectory, theyll immediately be arrested and questioned. During a film festival,
the chances of such an individual appearing on the scene are very high indeed.

He knows, too, that theres a danger he hadnt reckoned with: the person who witnessed the
murder of the woman on the beach. After jumping through the usual bureaucratic hoops, the
witness will be asked to view the recordings. Igor, however, had checked in using a false
passport, and the photo shows a man with glasses and a beard (the hotel reception didnt
even take the trouble to check, although if theyd asked, he would simply have said that
hed shaved off both beard and mustache and now wore contact lenses).

Assuming that they were much quicker off the mark than most po- licemen and had reached
the conclusion that just one person was behind this attempt to derail the normal running
of the Festival, they would be awaiting his return and he would be asked to give a
statement. Igor, however, knows that this is the last time hell walk down the corridors of
the Hotel Martinez.

Theyll go into his room and find an empty suitcase, bearing no fingerprints. Theyll go
into the bathroom and think to themselves: Whats a millionaire doing washing his own
clothes in the sink! Cant he afford the laundry?

A policeman will reach out to pick up what he considers evidence bearing DNA traces,
fingerprints, and strands of hair, and drop it with a yelp, having burned his fingers in
the sulfuric acid that is now dissolv- ing everything Igor has left behind. He needs only
his false passport, his credit cards, and some cash, and he has all of this in the pockets
of his dinner jacket, along with the Beretta, that weapon so despised by the cognoscenti.

He has always found traveling easy; he hates luggage. Even though he had a complicated
mission to carry out in Cannes, he chose things that would be easy and light to transport.
He cant understand people who take enormous suitcases with them, even when theyre only spend- ing a couple of days
away.

He doesnt know who will open the envelope, nor does he care; the choice will fall to the
Angel of Death, not to him. A lot of things could happen in the meantime, or indeed
nothing.

The guest might phone reception and say that the envelope has been delivered to the wrong
person and ask that someone come and collect it. Or they might throw it in the trash,
thinking its just another of those charming letters from the management, asking if
everything is going well; the guest has other things to read and a party to get ready for.
If the guest is a man expecting his wife to arrive at any moment, hell put it in his
pocket, convinced that the woman he was flirting with that afternoon is writing to say
yes. Or it might be a married couple, and since neither of them knows to whom the you on
the envelope refers, theyll agree that this is no time for mutual suspicion and throw the
envelope out of the window.

If, despite all these possibilities, the Angel of Death does decide to brush the
recipients face with his wings, then he or she will tear open the envelope and see the
contents. Those contents had involved a great deal of work and required him to call on the
help of the friends and collaborators who had given him their financial backing when he
was first setting up his company, the same ones who had been most put out when he repaid
that loan early. It had been a real godsend to them being able to invest money of suspect
origin in a business that was per- fectly legal and above-board, and they only wanted the
money back when it suited them.

Nevertheless, after a period during which the two parties barely spoke, they had become
friendly again, and whenever they asked him for a favorgetting a university place for
their daughter or tickets for concerts that their clients wanted to attendIgor always did
all he could to help them. After all, regardless of their motives, they were the only
people who had believed in his dreams. Ewawhenever he thought of her now, Igor felt
intensely irritatedused to say that they had played on her husbands innocence to launder
money earned from arms trafficking, as if that made any difference. It wasnt as if hed been involved in the actual buying or selling of arms, and besides, in any business deal, both
parties need to make a profit.

And everyone has their ups and downs. Some of his former back- ers had spent time in
prison, but he had never abandoned them, even though he no longer needed their help. A
mans dignity isnt measured by the people he has around him when hes at the peak of his
success, but by his ability not to forget those who helped him when his need was greatest.
Whether those hands were drenched in blood or sweat was irrelevant: if you were clinging
on to the edge of a precipice, you wouldnt care who it was hauling you up to safety.