The Winner Stands Alone (21 page)

But what has the safari to Kenya got to do with all that?

What better publicity than a middle-aged couple arriving back all excited from their
jungle adventure with loads of pictures in their camera, and recommending everyone else to
go on the same exclusive holiday? All their friends will want to experience the same
thing. As I say, nothing in this world is free. By the way, the three minutes are up, so
wed better go.

A white Maybach is waiting for them. The chauffeur, in gloves and cap, opens the door. The
androgyne gives her final instructions:

Forget about the film, that isnt why youre going up the steps. When you get to the top of
the steps, greet the Festival director and the mayor, and then, as soon as you enter the
Palais des Congres, head for the restroom on the first floor. Go to the end of that
corridor, turn left, and leave by a side door. Someone will be waiting for you there;

they know how youll be dressed and will do some more work on your makeup and your hair,
and then you can have a moments rest on the terrace. Ill meet you there and take you to
the gala supper.

Wont the director and the producers be annoyed?

The androgyne shrugs and goes back into the hotel with that strange swaying gait. The film
is not of the slightest importance. What matters is la montŽe des marches, going up the
red-carpeted steps to the Palais and along the ultimate corridor of fame, the place where
all the celebrities in the worlds of cinema, the arts, and the high life are photo-
graphed, and their photos then distributed by news agencies to the four corners of the
world to be published in magazines from west to east and from north to south.

Is the air-conditioning all right for you, madame? She nods to the chauffeur. If you want
anything to drink, theres a bottle of iced champagne in the cabinet to your left. Gabriela opens the cabinet and gets out a glass; then,
holding the bottle well away from her dress, she pops the cork and pours herself a glass of champagne
which she downs in one and immediately refills. Outside, curious onlookers are trying to
see who is inside the vast car with the smoked windows that is driving along the
cordoned-off lane. Soon, she and the Star will be together, the beginning not just of a
new career, but of an incredible, beautiful, intense love story.

Shes a romantic and proud of it.

She remembers that she left her clothes and her handbag in the Gift Room. She doesnt have
the key to the apartment shes renting. She has nowhere to go when the night is over. If
she ever writes a book about her life, how could she possibly tell the story of that
particular day: waking up with a hangover, unemployed and in a bad mood, in an apartment
with clothes and mattresses scattered all over the floor, and six hours later being driven
along in a limousine, ready to walk along the red carpet in front of a crowd of
journalists, beside one of the most desirable men in the world.

Her hands are trembling. She considers drinking another glass of champagne, but decides not to risk turning up drunk on the steps of fame.

Relax, Gabriela. Dont forget who you are. Dont get carried away by everything thats
happening now. Be realistic.

She repeats these words over and over as they approach the Mar- tinez. Whether she likes
it or not, she can never go back to being the person she was before. There is no way out,
except the one the andro- gyne told her about and which leads to a still higher mountain.

Even the King of Kings, Jesus Christ, was tested as Igor is being tested now: being
tempted by the Devil. And he needs to cling on tooth and nail to his faith if hes not to
weaken in the mission with which he has been charged.

The Devil is asking him to stop, to forgive, to abandon his task. The Devil is a top-class
professional and knows how to fill the weak with alarming feelings such as fear, anxiety,
impotence, and despair.

When it comes to tempting the strong, he uses more sophisticated lures: good intentions.
Its exactly what he did with Jesus when he found him wandering in the wilderness. Why, he
asked, didnt he com- mand that the stones be made bread, so that he could satisfy not only
his own hunger, but that of all the other people begging him for food? Jesus, however,
acted with the wisdom one would expect of the Son of God. He replied that man does not
live on bread alone, but on every word from Gods mouth.

Besides, what exactly were good intentions, virtue, and integrity? The people who built
the Nazi concentration camps thought they were showing integrity by obeying government
orders. The doctors who certified as insane any intellectuals opposed to the Soviet regime
and had them banished to Siberia were convinced that Communism was a fair system. Soldiers
who go to war may kill in the name of an ideal they dont properly understand, but they, too, are full of good inten- tions, virtue, and
integrity.

No, thats not true. If sin achieves something good, it is a virtue, and if virtue is
deployed to cause evil, it is a sin.

In his case, the Evil
One is trying to use forgiveness as a way to trouble his soul. He says: Youre not the only
person to have been through this. Lots of people have been abandoned by the person they
most loved, and yet managed to turn bitterness into happiness. Imag- ine the families of
the people whom you have caused to depart this life; theyll be filled with rancor and
hatred and a desire for revenge. Is that how you intend to improve the world? Is that what
you want to give to the woman you love?

Igor, however, is wiser than the temptations that seem to be pos- sessing his soul. If he
can hold out a little longer, that voice will grow tired and disappear. He thinks this
largely because one of the people he sent to Paradise is becoming an ever more constant
presence in his life. The girl with the dark eyebrows is telling him that everything is
fine, and that theres a great difference between forgiving and forget- ting. He has no
hatred in his heart, and hes not doing this to have his revenge on the world.

The Devil may insist all he likes, but he must stand firm and re- member why hes here.

He goes into the first
pizzeria he sees, and orders a pizza margharita and a Coke. Its best to eat now because he
wont be able tohe never caneat properly over supper with a lot of other people round the
table. Everyone feels obliged to keep up an animated but relaxed conversation, and someone
always seems to interrupt him just as hes about to take a bite of the delicious food in
front of him.

His usual way of avoiding this is to bombard his companions at table with questions, then
leave them to come up with intelligent re- sponses while he eats his meal in peace.
Tonight, though, he will feel disinclined to be helpful and sociable. He will be unpleasant and dis- tant. He can always
claim not to speak their language.

He knows that in the next few hours, Temptation will prove stron- ger than ever, telling
him to stop and give it all up. He doesnt want to stop, though; his objective is still to
complete his mission, even if the reason for that mission is changing.

He has no idea if three violent deaths in one day would be consid- ered normal in Cannes;
if it is, the police wont suspect that anything unusual is happening. Theyll continue
their bureaucratic procedures and hell be able to fly off as planned in the early hours of
tomorrow. He doesnt know either if he has been identified: there was that couple who
passed him and the girl this morning, there was one of the dead mans bodyguards, and the
person who witnessed the other womans murder.

Temptation is now changing its tactics: it wants to frighten him, just as it does with the
weak. It would seem that the Devil has no idea what he has been through nor that he has
emerged a much stronger man from the test fate has set him.

He picks up his mobile phone and sends another text.

He imagines Ewas reaction when she receives it. Something tells him that she will feel a
mixture of fear and pleasure. He is sure that she deeply regrets the step she took two
years agoleaving everything behind her, including her clothes and jewelry, and asking her
lawyer to get in touch with him regarding divorce proceedings. The grounds:
incompatibility. As if interesting people will ever necessarily think ex- actly the same
way or have many things in common. It was clearly a lie: she had fallen in love with
someone else.

Passion. Which of us can honestly say that, after more than five years of marriage, we
havent felt a desire to find another companion? Which of us can honestly say that we
havent been unfaithful at least once in our life, even if only in our imagination? And how
many men and women have left home because of that, then discovered that pas- sion doesnt
last and gone back to their true partners? A little mature reflection and everything is
forgotten. Thats absolutely normal, part of human biology. He has had to learn this very slowly. At first, he instructed his law- yers to proceed
with the utmost rigor. If she wanted to leave him, then she would have to give up all
claim to the fortune they had accumulated together over nearly twenty years, every penny
of it. He got drunk for a whole week while he waited for her response. He didnt care about
the money; he was doing it because he wanted her back, and that was the only way he knew
of putting pressure on her.

Ewa, however, was a person of integrity. Her lawyers accepted his conditions.

It was only when the press got hold of the case that he found out about his ex-wifes new
partner. One of the most successful couturiers in the world, someone who, like him, had
built himself up from noth- ing; a man, like him, in his forties, and known, like him, for
his lack of arrogance and his hard work.

He couldnt understand what had happened. Shortly before Ewa left for a fashion show in
London, they had spent a rare romantic holiday alone in Madrid. They had traveled there in
the company jet and were staying in a hotel with every possible comfort, but they had
decided to rediscover the world together. They didnt book tables at expen- sive
restaurants, they stood in long queues outside museums, they took taxis rather than
chauffeured limousines, they walked for miles and got thoroughly lost. They ate a lot and
drank even more, and would arrive back at the hotel exhausted and contented, and make love
every night as they used to do.

For both of them it took a real effort to stop themselves from turn- ing on their laptops
or their mobile phones, but they managed it. And they returned to Moscow with their hearts
full of good memories and with smiles on their faces.

He plunged back into work, surprised to see that everything had continued to function
perfectly well in his absence. She left for London the following week and never came back.

Igor employed one of the top private surveillance agenciesnor- mally used for industrial
or political espionagewhich meant having to look at hundreds of photos in which his wife
appeared hand in hand with her new companion. Using information provided by her hus-

band, the detectives managed to provide her with a made-to-measure friend. Ewa met her by
chance in a department store; she was from Russia and had, she said, been abandoned by her
husband, couldnt get work in Britain because she didnt have the right papers, and had
barely enough money to feed herself. Ewa was distrustful at first, but then resolved to
help her. She spoke to her new lover, who decided to take a risk and get the friend a job
in one of his offices, even though she was an illegal worker.

She was Ewas only Russian-speaking friend. She was alone. She had marital problems.
According to the psychologist employed by the surveillance agency, she was ideally placed
to obtain the desired infor- mation. He knew that Ewa hadnt yet adapted to her new life,
and what could be more natural than to share her intimate thoughts with another woman in
similar circumstances, not in order to find a solution, but simply to unburden her soul.

The friend recorded all their conversations, and the tapes ended up on Igors desk, where
they took precedence over papers requiring his signature, invitations demanding his
presence, and gifts waiting to be sent to customers, suppliers, politicians, and fellow
businessmen.

The tapes were far more useful and far more painful than any photos. He discovered that
her relationship with the famous couturier had begun two years earlier, at the Fashion
Week in Milan, where they had met for professional reasons. Ewa resisted at first; after
all, he lived surrounded by some of the most beautiful women in the world, and she, at the
time, was thirty-eight. Nevertheless, they ended up going to bed with each other in Paris,
the following week.

When Igor heard this, he realized that he felt sexually aroused and couldnt understand why
his body should react in that way. Why did the simple fact of imagining his wife opening
her legs and being pen- etrated by another man provoke in him an erection rather than a
sense of revulsion?

This was the only time he feared he might be losing his mind, and he decided to make a
kind of public confession in an attempt to dimin- ish his sense of guilt. In conversation
with colleagues, he mentioned that a friend of his had experienced sexual pleasure when he
found out that his wife was having an extramarital affair. Then came the sur- prise.

His colleagues, most of them executives and politicians from various social classes and
nationalities, at first expressed horror at the thought. Then, after the tenth glass of
vodka, they all admitted that this was one of the most exciting things that could happen
in a marriage. One of them always asked his wife to tell him all the sordid details and
the words she and her lover used. Another declared that swingers clubs places frequented
by couples interested in group sexwere the ideal therapy for an ailing marriage. A slight
exaggeration perhaps, but Igor was glad to learn that he wasnt the only man who found it
arousing to know that his wife had slept with someone else. He was equally glad that he
knew so little about human beings, especially the male of the species. His conversations
usually focused on business matters and rarely entered personal territory.

Hes thinking now about what
was on those tapes. During their week in London (the fashion weeks are held consecutively
to make life easier for the professionals involved), the couturier declared himself to be
in love with her; hardly surprising, given that he had met one of the most unusual women
in the world. Ewa, for her part, was still filled with doubts. Hussein was only the second
man with whom she had made love in her life; they worked in the same industry, but she
felt immensely inferior to him. She would have to give up her dream of working in fashion
because it would be impossible to compete with her future husband, and she would go back
to being a mere housewife.

Worse, she couldnt understand why someone so powerful should be interested in a
middle-aged Russian woman.

Igor could have explained this had she given him a chance: her mere presence awoke the
light in all those around her; she made every- one want to give of their best and to
emerge from the ashes of the past filled with renewed hope. That is what had happened to
him as a young man returning from a bloody and pointless war.

Temptation returns. The Devil tells
him that this isnt exactly true. He himself had overcome his traumas by plunging into
work. Psychiatrists might consider working too hard to be a psychologi- cal disorder, but
for him it had been a way of healing his wounds through forgiveness and forgetting. Ewa
wasnt really so very important. He must stop focusing all his emotions on a nonexistent
relationship.

Youre not the first, said the Devil. Youre being led into doing evil deeds in the
erroneous belief that this will somehow create good deeds.

Igor is starting to feel
nervous.Hesagoodman,andwhen- ever hes been obliged to behave harshly, it has been in the
name of a greater cause: serving his country, saving the marginalized from un- necessary
suffering, following the example of his one role model in life, Jesus Christ, and, like
him, using a combination of turning the cheek and wielding the whip.

He makes the sign of the cross in the hope that Temptation will leave him. He forces
himself to remember the tapes and what Ewa had said: that however unhappy she might be
with her new partner, she would never return to the past because her ex-husband was
unbalanced.

How absurd. It appeared she was being brainwashed by her new environment. She must be
keeping very bad company. Hes sure she was lying when she told her Russian friend that she
had only got married again because she was afraid of being alone.

In her youth, she had always felt rejected by others and never able to be herself. She
always had to pretend to be interested in the same things as her friends, playing the same
games, going to parties, and looking for some handsome man to be a faithful husband and
give her security, a home, and children. It was all a lie, she said on the tapes.

In fact, she always dreamed of adventure and the unknown. If she could have chosen a
profession when she was still an adolescent, it would have been that of artist. When she was a child, she had loved making collages from
photos cut out of Communist Party magazines; she hated the photos, but enjoyed coloring in
the drab figures. Dolls clothes were so hard to find that her mother had to make them for
her, and Ewa loved those outfits and said to herself that, one day, she would make clothes
too.