The Winner Stands Alone

by Paulo Coelho; Margaret Jull Costa

  However, at the end of that period of four years, he would be obliged to give up the throne and leave the city, taking with him only his family and the clothes on his back. Everyone knew that this would mean certain death within three or four days because there was nothing to eat or drink in that vast desert, which was freezing in winter and like a furnace in summer.

  The wise men of the Loya Jirga assumed that no one would risk standing for the position of king, and that they would then be able to return to the old system of democratic elections. Their decision was made public, and the post of king fell vacant. Initially, several people applied. An old man with cancer took up the challenge and died during the period of his rule with a smile on his face. A madman succeeded him, but left four months later (he had misunderstood the terms) and vanished into the desert. Then rumors started going around that the throne had a curse on it, and no one dared apply for the position. The city was left without a governor, confusion reigned, and the inhabitants realized that they must forget the monarchist tradition altogether and prepare to change their ways. The Loya Jirga felt pleased that its members had taken such a wise decision. They hadn’t forced the people to make a choice, they had simply got rid of those who wanted power at any price. Then a young man, married and with three children, came forward.

  “I accept the post,” he said.

  The wise men tried to explain the risks. They reminded him that he had a family and explained that their decision had merely been a way of discouraging adventurers and despots. However, the young man stood firm, and since it was impossible to go back on their decision, the Loya Jirga had no option but to wait another four years before they could put in place the planned return to elections.

  The young man and his family proved to be excellent governors. They ruled fairly, redistributed wealth, lowered the price of food, organized popular festivals to celebrate the change of season, and encouraged craftwork and music. Every night, though, a great caravan of horses would leave the city, drawing heavy carts covered with jute cloth so that no one could see what was inside them. These carts never came back.

  At first, the wise men of the Loya Jirga thought that the king must be removing treasure from the city, but consoled themselves with the fact that the young man rarely ventured beyond the city walls; if he had and had tried to climb the nearest mountain, he would have realized that the horses would die before they got very far. This was, after all, one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. They determined that, as soon as his reign was over, they would go to the place where the horses had died of exhaustion and the riders of thirst, and they would recover all that treasure.

  They stopped worrying and waited patiently.

  At the end of the four years, the young man left the throne and the city. The population was in an uproar; after all, it had been a long time since they had enjoyed such a wise and just governor!

  However, the Loya Jirga’s decision had to be respected. The young man went to his wife and children and asked them to leave with him.

  “I will,” said his wife, “but at least let our children stay. They will then survive to tell your story.”

  “Trust me,” he said.

  The tribal laws were very strict, and the wife had no alternative but to obey her husband. They mounted their horses and rode to the city gate, where they said goodbye to the friends they had made while governing the city. The Loya Jirga were pleased. They might have made many allies, but fate is fate. No one else would risk accepting the post of governor, and the democratic tradition would be restored at last. As soon as they could, they would recover the treasure abandoned in the desert, less than three days from there.

  The family rode into the valley of death in silence. The wife didn’t dare say a word, the children didn’t understand what was going on, and the young man was immersed in thought. They climbed one hill, traveled for a whole day across a vast plain, and slept on the top of the next hill.

  The woman woke at dawn, wanting to make the most of the final few days of her life to look her last on the mountains she had loved so much. She went up to the very top of the hill and gazed down on what should have been an empty plain, and she was startled by what she saw.

  During those four years, the caravans leaving the city each night had not been carrying off jewels or gold coins. They had been carrying bricks, seeds, wood, roof tiles, spices, animals, and traditional tools that could be used to drill into the earth and find water.

  Before her lay a far more modern, far more beautiful city than the old one, and all in working order.

  “This is your kingdom,” said the young man, who had just woken up and joined her. “Ever since I heard the decree, I knew it would be pointless to try and change in four years everything that centuries of corruption and bad governance had destroyed. I was certain of one thing, though, that it was possible to start again.”

  Igor, too, is starting again as he stands in the shower with the water cascading over his face. He has finally understood why the first person he spoke to in Cannes is by his side now, sending him off along a different path, helping him make the necessary adjustments, and explaining that her sacrifice was neither a chance event nor unnecessary. On the other hand, she has also made it plain to him that Ewa has always been naturally perverse and only interested in climbing the social ladder, even if doing so meant abandoning her family.

  “When you go back to Moscow, try and do plenty of sport. That will help free you from your tensions,” says the girl.

  He can just make out her face in the clouds of steam in the shower. He has never felt as close to anyone as he does now to Olivia, the girl with the dark eyebrows.

  “Carry on, even if you’re not so sure now of what you’re 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 supreme manifestation.

  He’s not sure, but whatever the case, he’s 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 policemen 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 entrance—which clashes horribly with the former elegance of the place—where they’ll 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 prohibitive 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 they’re considering the possibility of shifting the cost to the organizers of the Festival. The sponsors—who could easily afford the expense—lose 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, they’ll 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 ha
ve failed in their attempt to sow further panic.

  They’ll try to turn the clock back, but they won’t 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 girl’s 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 surrendered 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 stiletto knife and appeared to run it lightly over the woman’s body. The woman seemed quite happy, which is why he didn’t call the police earlier 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.

  There’s 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 delayed by ninety minutes), where he knows he will meet Ewa. If she won’t 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 guest’s room and don’t leave until the next day, usually after breakfast has been served. That’s 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 customer 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 immediately plummet; after all, people choose a five-star hotel because they know that the people who work there are trained to see only what they’re 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—ever—looks over at the bed.

  Prostitutes—male and female—dress 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 “You’ve got the wrong room” and the sound of the phone being slammed down. Mission accomplished; there’s 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 nowhere—he just happened to be passing, he says—and 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 basement: 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 someone’s 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 overtaking, 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, he’ll suspect something untoward has happened—the person might have fainted—and 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, doesn’t intend to stop in the corridor. He walks nonchalantly to the point where the corridor curves away toward the elevators 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 downstairs 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 determining the exact moment of death. It may be that the guest wasn’t there and only opened the envelope when he or she returned from one of that night’s 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, they’ll 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 there’s a danger he hadn’t 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 didn’t even take the trouble to check, although if they’d asked, he would simply have said that he’d shaved off both beard and mustache and now wore contact lenses).

  Assuming that they were much quicker off the mark than most policemen 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 he’ll walk down the corridors of the Hotel Martinez.

  They’ll go into his room and find an empty suitcase, bearing no fingerprints. They’ll go into the bathroom and think to themselves: “What’s a millionaire doing washing his own clothes in the sink! Can’t he afford the laundry?”

  A policeman will reach ou
t 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 dissolving 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 can’t understand people who take enormous suitcases with them, even when they’re only spending a couple of days away.

  He doesn’t 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 it’s 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, he’ll 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, they’ll 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 recipient’s 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 perfectly legal and above-board, and they only wanted the money back when it suited them.