The Winner Stands Alone Page 21

  "Is the air-conditioning all right for you, madame?"

  She nods to the chauffeur.

  "If you want anything to drink, there's 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.

  She's a romantic and proud of it.

  She remembers that she left her clothes and her handbag in the Gift Room. She doesn't have the key to the apartment she's 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. Don't forget who you are. Don't get carried away by everything that's happening now. Be realistic."

  She repeats these words over and over as they approach the Martinez. 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 androgyne told her about and which leads to a still higher mountain.

  4:52 P.M.

  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 he's 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. It's exactly what he did with Jesus when he found him wandering in the wilderness. Why, he asked, didn't he command 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 God's 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 don't properly understand, but they, too, are full of good intentions, virtue, and integrity.

  No, that's 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: "You're 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. Imagine the families of the people whom you have caused to depart this life; they'll 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 possessing 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 there's a great difference between forgiving and forgetting. He has no hatred in his heart, and he's not doing this to have his revenge on the world.

  The Devil may insist all he likes, but he must stand firm and remember why he's here.

  HE GOES INTO THE FIRST pizzeria he sees, and orders a pizza margharita and a Coke. It's best to eat now because he won't be able to--he never can--eat 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 he's 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 responses while he eats his meal in peace. Tonight, though, he will feel disinclined to be helpful and sociable. He will be unpleasant and distant. He can always claim not to speak their language.

  He knows that in the next few hours, Temptation will prove stronger than ever, telling him to stop and give it all up. He doesn't 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 considered normal in Cannes; if it is, the police won't suspect that anything unusual is happening. They'll continue their bureaucratic procedures and he'll be able to fly off as planned in the early hours of tomorrow. He doesn't 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 man's bodyguards, and the person who witnessed the other woman's 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 Ewa's 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 ago--leaving 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 exactly 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 haven't felt a desire to find another companion? Which of us can honestly say that we haven't 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 passion doesn't last and gone back to their true partners? A little mature reflection and everything is forgotten. That's absolutely normal, part of human biology.

  He has had to learn this very slowly. At first, he instructed his lawyers 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 didn't 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-wife's new partner. One of the most successful couturiers in the world, someone who, like him, had built himself up from nothing; a man, like him, in his forties, and known, like him, for his lack of arrogance and his hard work.

  He couldn't 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 t
ogether. They didn't book tables at expensive 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 turning 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 agencies--normally used for industrial or political espionage--which 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 husband, 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, couldn't get work in Britain because she didn't 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 Ewa's 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 information. He knew that Ewa hadn't 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 Igor's 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 couldn't understand why his body should react in that way. Why did the simple fact of imagining his wife opening her legs and being penetrated 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 diminish 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 surprise.

  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 sex--were the ideal therapy for an ailing marriage. A slight exaggeration perhaps, but Igor was glad to learn that he wasn't 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.

  HE'S 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 couldn't 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 everyone 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 isn't exactly true. He himself had overcome his traumas by plunging into work. Psychiatrists might consider working too hard to be a psychological disorder, but for him it had been a way of healing his wounds through forgiveness and forgetting. Ewa wasn't really so very important. He must stop focusing all his emotions on a nonexistent relationship.

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

  IGOR IS STARTING TO FEEL nervous. He's a good man, and whenever he's been obliged to behave harshly, it has been in the name of a greater cause: serving his country, saving the marginalized from unnecessary 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. He's 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.

  There was no such thing as fashion in the former Soviet Union. They only found out what was going on in the rest of the world when the Berlin Wall was torn down and foreign magazines started flooding into the country. As an adolescent, she was able to use these magazines to make brighter and more interesting collages. Then, one day, she decided to tell her family that her dream was to be a fashion designer.

  As soon as she finished school, her parents sent her to law school. They were very happy with their new-won freedom, but felt that certain capitalist ideas were threatening to destroy the country, distracting people from real art, replacing Tolstoy and Pushkin with spy novels, and corrupting classical ballet with modern aberrations. Their only daughter must be kept away from the moral degradation that had arrived along with Coca-Cola and flashy cars.

  At university, she met a good-looking, ambitious young man who thought exactly as she did, that
they had to give up the idea that the old regime would return one day. It had gone for good, and it was time to start a new life.

  She really liked this young man. They started going out together. She saw that he was intelligent and would go far in life, plus he seemed to understand her. He had, of course, fought in the Afghan war and been wounded in combat, but nothing very serious. He never complained about the past and never showed any signs of being unbalanced or traumatized.

  One day, he brought her a bunch of roses and told her that he was leaving university to start his own business. He then proposed to her, and she accepted, even though she felt only admiration and friendship for him. Love, she believed, would grow over time as they became closer. Besides, the young man was the only one who really understood her and provided her with the intellectual stimulus she needed. If she let this chance slip, she might never find another person prepared to accept her as she was.

  They got married with little fuss and without the support of their families. He obtained loans from people she considered dangerous, but she could do nothing to prevent the loans going ahead. Gradually, the company he had started began to grow. After almost four years together, she--shaking with fear--made her first demand: that he pay off the people who had lent him money in the past and who seemed suspiciously uninterested in recouping it. He followed her advice and often had reason to thank her for it later.

  The years passed, there were the inevitable failures and sleepless nights, then things started to improve, and from then on, the ugly duckling began to follow the script of all those children's stories: it grew into a beautiful swan, admired by everyone.

  Ewa complained about being trapped in her role as housewife. Instead of reacting like her friends' husbands, for whom a job was synonymous with a lack of femininity, he bought her a shop in one of the most sought-after areas of Moscow. She started selling clothes made by the world's great couturiers, but never tried to create her own designs. Her work had other compensations, though: she visited all the major fashion houses, met interesting people, and it was then that she first encountered Hamid. She still didn't know whether or not she loved him--possibly not--but she felt comfortable with him. When he had told her that he'd never met anyone like her and suggested they live together, she felt she had nothing to lose. She had no children, and her husband was so married to his work that he probably wouldn't even notice she was gone.