The Winner Stands Alone

by Paulo Coelho; Margaret Jull Costa

  His heart is pounding. He’s dreamed of this all his life and cannot wait for this interminable meeting to end.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Look, the people out there aren’t expecting some official, technical statement, with precise answers to their questions. The fact is they’ll do all they can to make us say what they want to hear, but we mustn’t fall into that trap. They came here not to listen to us, but to look at us, and for their viewers and readers to be able to see us too.”

  He regards Savoy with a superior air, as if he were the most knowledgeable person on the planet. It would seem that Morris and the pathologist are not the only ones who like to show off their knowledge, well, everyone has their own way of saying: “I know my job.”

  “Think visual, by which I mean, remember that your face and body say more than words. Look straight ahead, keep your head up, and your shoulders down and slightly back. Raised shoulders mean tension and are a sure indication that we have no idea what is going on.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  THEY WALK OUT TO THE entrance of the Institute of Legal Medicine. Lights come on, microphones are thrust forward, people start to push. After a few minutes, this apparent disorder becomes more orderly. The commissioner takes the piece of paper out of his pocket.

  “The actor was killed with hydrogen cyanide, a deadly poison that can be administered in various ways, although in this case it was used in the form of a gas. The film director survived the attack. His involvement was clearly accidental. He merely happened to enter the room while there were still remnants of the gas in the air. The CCTV footage shows a man walking down the corridor, going into one of the rooms, and, five minutes later, coming out again and falling to the floor.”

  He omits to say that the room in question is not actually visible to the camera. Omission is no lie.

  “The security personnel took swift action and sent for a doctor, who immediately noticed the smell of almonds, which was, by then, too dilute to cause any harm. The police were called, and they arrived at the scene less than five minutes later and cordoned off the area. An ambulance came, and the doctors used oxygen to save the director’s life.”

  Savoy is beginning to feel really impressed by the commissioner’s easy manner. He wonders if all commissioners have to do a course in public relations.

  “The poison was delivered in an envelope, but we have not as yet been able to establish whether the writing on the envelope was that of a man or a woman. Inside was a piece of paper.”

  He fails to mention that the technology used to seal the envelope was highly sophisticated. There was a chance in a million that one of the journalists present would know this, although, later on, that kind of question would become inevitable. He also fails to mention that another man in the film industry had been poisoned that same afternoon. Apparently, everyone thinks he died of a heart attack, although no one has actually told them this. Sometimes it’s handy if the press—out of laziness or inattention—draw their own conclusions without bothering the police.

  “What was on the paper?” is the first question.

  The commissioner explains that he cannot reveal this now because doing so might hamper the investigation. Savoy is beginning to see the direction in which he’s leading this interview and is filled with admiration; he really deserves his post as commissioner.

  “Could it have been a crime of passion?” asks someone else.

  “Anything is possible at the moment. Now, if you’ll excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, we must get back to work.”

  He gets into his car, turns on the siren, and speeds away. Savoy walks to his own vehicle, feeling very proud of his boss. How amazing! He can imagine the headlines already: “Star thought to have been victim of crime of passion.”

  That was sure to capture people’s interest. The power of celebrity was so great that the other murders would go unnoticed. Who cares about a poor young girl, who died possibly under the influence of drugs and was found on a bench near the beach? What did it matter if some henna-haired film distributor had a heart attack over lunch? What was there to say about a murder—another crime of passion—involving two complete nonentities who were never in the spotlight, on a beach away from all the hurly-burly of the Festival? It was the kind of thing that appeared every night on the television news, but the media would only continue speculating about it if a Major Celebrity was involved! And an envelope! And a piece of paper inside on which something was written!

  He turns on the siren and drives in the opposite direction from the police station. In order not to raise suspicions, he uses the car radio. He finds the commissioner’s frequency.

  “Congratulations!”

  The commissioner is also rather pleased with himself. They’ve gained a few hours, possibly days, but they both know that they’re dealing with a serial killer of the male sex, well-dressed, with graying hair and about forty years old, and armed with sophisticated weapons. A man who is also experienced in the art of killing, and while he may be satisfied with the crimes he’s already committed, he could easily strike again, at any moment.

  “Have officers sent to all the Festival parties,” orders the commissioner. “They should look out for any men on their own who correspond to that description. Tell them to keep any suspects under surveillance. Call for reinforcements. I want plainclothes policemen, discreetly dressed and in keeping with their surroundings—either jeans or evening dress. And I repeat, I want them at all the parties, even if we have to mobilize the traffic police as well.”

  Savoy immediately does as he is told. He has just received a message on his mobile phone. Europol needs more time to track down the laboratories, at least three days.

  “Let me have that in writing, will you? I don’t want to be held responsible if something else goes wrong here.”

  He chuckles quietly. He asks them to send a copy to the foreign agent as well, since he himself is no longer interested in the matter. He drives as fast as he can to the Hotel Martinez, leaves his car at the entrance, blocking other people’s vehicles. When the porter complains, he shows him his policeman’s ID, throws him the keys so that he can park the car somewhere else, and runs into the hotel.

  He goes up to a private room on the first floor, where a police officer is waiting, along with the duty manager and a waiter.

  “How much longer are we going to have to stay here?” asks the duty manager. Savoy ignores her and turns to the waiter.

  “Are you sure that the murdered woman, whose picture appeared on the news, is the same woman who was sitting on the terrace this afternoon?”

  “Yes, sir, pretty much. She looks younger in the photo with her hair dyed, but I’m used to remembering guests’ faces, just in case one of them tries to leave without paying.”

  “And are you sure she was with the male guest who reserved the table earlier?”

  “Absolutely. A good-looking man of about forty, with graying hair.”

  Savoy’s heart almost leaps out of his mouth. He turns to the manager and the policeman.

  “Let’s go straight up to his room.”

  “Do you have a search warrant?” asks the manager.

  Savoy’s nerves snap:

  “No I haven’t! And I’m not filling in any more forms! Do you know what’s wrong with this country, madame? We’re all too obedient! In fact, that isn’t a problem peculiar to us, it applies to the whole world! Wouldn’t you obey if they wanted to send your son off to war? Wouldn’t your son obey? Of course! Well, since you are an obedient citizen, either take me to that room or I’ll have you arrested for aiding and abetting!”

  The woman seems genuinely frightened. With the other policeman, they make their way over to the lift, which is coming down, stopping at every floor, unaware that a human life may depend on the speed with which those waiting for it can act.

  They decide to take the stairs instead. The manager complains because she’s wearing high heels, but Savoy simply tel
ls her to take off her shoes and go up the stairs barefoot. They race up the marble stairs, gripping the bronze banister so as not to fall and passing various elegant waiting areas on the way. The people there wonder who this barefoot woman is, and what a uniformed policeman is doing in the hotel, running up the stairs like that. Has something bad happened? If so, why don’t they take the elevator? Standards at the Festival are definitely dropping, they say to themselves; hotels aren’t as selective about their guests as they once were; and the police treat the place as if they were raiding a brothel. As soon as they can, they will complain to the manager, who, unbeknownst to them, is the same barefoot woman they’ve just seen bounding up the stairs.

  Savoy and the duty manager finally reach the door of the suite where the murderer is staying. A member of the “security squad” has already sent someone up to find out what’s going on. He recognizes the manager and asks if he can help.

  Savoy asks him to speak more quietly, but yes, he can help. Is he armed? The guard says that he is.

  “Then you’d better stay here.”

  They are talking in whispers. The manager is instructed to knock on the door, while the three men—Savoy, the policeman, and the security guard—stand to one side, backs to the wall. Savoy takes his gun out of his holster. The other policeman does the same. The manager knocks several times, but gets no answer.

  “He must have gone out.”

  Savoy asks her to use the master key. She explains that she doesn’t have it with her, and even if she did, she would only open that door with the authorization of the managing director.

  Savoy responds politely this time:

  “No matter. I’ll go downstairs and wait in the surveillance room with the security staff. He’ll be back sooner or later, and I’d like to be the first to question him.”

  “We have a photocopy of his passport and his credit card number downstairs. Why are you so interested in him?”

  “Oh, no matter.”

  9:02 P.M.

  Half an hour’s drive from Cannes, in another country where they speak the same language, use the same currency, and have no border controls, but where they have a completely different political system from France—it’s ruled by a prince, as in the olden days—a man is sitting in front of a computer. Fifteen minutes ago, he received an e-mail informing him that a famous actor had been murdered.

  Morris studies the photo of the victim. He hasn’t been to the cinema for ages and so has no idea who he is. However, he must be someone important because there are reports of his death on one of the news portals.

  Morris may be retired, but things like this used to be the equivalent of a chess game to him, a game in which he rarely allowed his opponent to win. It wasn’t his career that was at risk now, it was his self-f esteem.

  There are certain rules he always liked to follow when he worked for Scotland Yard, one of which was to come up with as many flawed hypotheses as he could. This freed up your mind because you weren’t necessarily expecting to get it right. At the tedious meetings with work evaluation committees, he used to enjoy provoking the people present: “Everything you know comes from experience accumulated over long years of work. However, those old solutions are only of use when applied to old problems. If you want to be creative, try to forget that you have all that experience.”

  The older members of such committees would pretend they were taking notes, the younger ones would stare at him in horror, and the meeting would continue as if he had said nothing. But he knew that the message had been received loud and clear, and soon afterward, his superiors—without giving him any of the credit, of course—would start demanding more new ideas.

  He prints out the files sent by the police in Cannes. He normally tries to avoid using paper because he doesn’t want to be accused of being a serial killer of forests, but sometimes it’s necessary.

  He starts studying the modus operandi, that is, the way the crimes were committed. Time of day (morning, afternoon, and night), weapons (hands, poison, stiletto knife), type of victim (men and women of different ages), closeness to victim (two involved direct physical contact, two involved no contact at all), the reaction of victims to their aggressor (none in all cases).

  When he feels that he’s faced by a dead end, the best thing is to let his thoughts wander for a while, while his unconscious mind goes to work. He opens a new screen on the computer, showing the New York Stock Exchange. Since he has no money invested in shares, it couldn’t be more boring, but that’s how it works: his years of experience analyze all the information he has received so far, and his intuition comes up with new, creative responses. Twenty minutes later, he goes back to the files, and his head is once again empty.

  The process has worked. The murders do have things in common.

  The murderer is an educated man. He must have spent days and weeks in a library, studying the best way to carry out his mission. He knows how to handle poisons and obviously hadn’t touched the hydrogen cyanide himself. He knows enough about anatomy to be able to stick a knife in at exactly the right place without meeting a bone, and to kill someone with his bare hands. He knows about curare and its lethal power. He may have read about serial killings, and would be aware that some kind of “signature” always leads the police to the attacker, and so he had committed his murders in a completely random manner, with no fixed modus operandi at all.

  But that’s impossible. The unconscious mind of the murderer is bound to leave some signature, which Morris has not yet managed to decipher.

  There’s something more important still: he obviously has money, enough to follow a course in Sambo, in order to be absolutely sure which points on the body he needs to press in order to paralyze his victim. He also has contacts: he didn’t buy those poisons from the corner pharmacist, not even from the local criminal underworld. They are highly sophisticated biological weapons, which require great care in their handling and application. He must have got other people to acquire them for him.

  Finally, he works very quickly, which leads Morris to conclude that the murderer won’t be staying long. Perhaps a week, possibly a few days more.

  Where does all this take him?

  The reason he can’t reach a conclusion now is because he’s got used to the rules of the game. He has lost the innocence he always demanded of his subordinates. That’s what the world does to people; gradually, over the years, we become mediocre beings, concerned not to be seen as weird or overenthusiastic. Old age is considered a stigma, not a sign of wisdom. People assume that no one over fifty can keep up with the speed of change nowadays.

  True, he can’t run as fast as he could and needs reading glasses, but his mind is as sharp as ever, or so at least he wants to believe.

  What about this crime though? If he’s as intelligent as he thinks, why can’t he solve something that seems so easy?

  He can’t get any further at the moment. He’ll have to wait until the next victim appears.

  9:11 P.M.

  A couple pass by. They smile and congratulate him on his luck at having two such lovely ladies by his side!

  Igor thanks them, for he’s genuinely in need of distraction. Soon the long-awaited meeting will take place, and although he’s accustomed to all kinds of pressure, he reminds himself of the patrols he had to go on near Kabul and how before any very dangerous mission, he and his colleagues would drink and talk about women and sport, chatting away as if they weren’t in Afghanistan, but were back in their hometowns, sitting round a table with family and friends. It was a way of quelling their nerves and recovering their true identities, and thus feeling better prepared for the challenges they would face the next day.

  Like any good soldier, he knows that battles have more do with aims and objectives than with the actual fighting. Like any good strategist—he did, after all, build up his company from nothing to become one of the most respected in Russia—he knows that one’s objective should always remain the same, even if the motive behind it may change over time.
That is what has happened today: he arrived in Cannes for one reason, but only when he began to act did he understand the true motives behind what he was doing. He has been blind all these years, but now he can see the light; the revelation has finally come.

  And precisely because of this, he needs to keep going. The decisions he made required courage, a degree of detachment, and, at times, even a little madness, not the kind of madness that destroys, but the sort that carries a person beyond his own limits. He’s always been the same and has won precisely because he knew how to use that controlled madness whenever he had to make a decision. His friends would move with astonishing speed from saying, “It’s too risky” to “I always knew you were doing the right thing.” He was capable of surprising people, of coming up with fresh ideas, and, above all, of taking any necessary risks.

  Here in Cannes, though—perhaps because he’s in an unfamiliar place and still befuddled by lack of sleep—he has taken quite unnecessary risks, risks that might have forced him to abort his plan earlier than expected. Had that happened, he would never have reached his present clear-eyed position, one that cast an entirely different light on the woman he thought of as his beloved and whom he believed merited both sacrifice and martyrdom. He remembers the moment when he went up to the policeman to confess. That was when the change began. It was then that the spirit of the girl with the dark eyebrows began to protect him and to explain that he was doing the right things but for the wrong reasons. Accumulating love brings luck, accumulating hatred brings disaster. Anyone who stands outside the Door of Problems and fails to recognize it may well end up leaving it open and allowing tragedies to enter.

  He had accepted the young girl’s love. He had been an instrument of God, sent to rescue her from a dark future; now she was helping him to carry on.

  He is aware, too, that, regardless of the many precautions he may have taken, he could not possibly have thought of everything, and his mission might yet be interrupted before he reaches the end. There is no reason, however, for regret or fear; he has done what he could, behaved impeccably, and, if God does not wish him to complete his task, then he must accept his decisions.