The Winner Stands Alone

by Paulo Coelho; Margaret Jull Costa

  Relax, he tells himself. Talk to the young women by your side. Let your muscles rest a little before the final strike, that way, they’ll be more prepared. Gabriela—the young woman who was alone at the bar when he arrived—seems very excited, and whenever the waiter comes by with more drinks, she hands him her glass, even if it’s still half full, and picks up a fresh one.

  “I love it when it’s really icy!” she says.

  Her happiness infects him a little too. Apparently, she’s just signed a contract to appear in a film, although she knows neither the title of the film nor what role she’ll be playing, but she will, in her words, be “the leading lady.” The director is known for his ability to choose good actors and good scripts, and the leading actor, whom Igor knows and admires, certainly merits respect. When she mentions the name of the producer, he merely nods knowledgably, as if to say, “Yes, of course, I know who he is,” aware that she’ll interpret the nod as meaning: “I’ve no idea who he is, but I don’t want to appear ignorant.” She babbles on about rooms full of gifts, the red carpet, her meeting on the yacht, the rigorous selection process she went through, future projects…

  “At this very moment, there are thousands of young women in Cannes and millions around the world who would like to be here tonight, talking to you and being able to tell these stories. My prayers have been answered and all my efforts rewarded.”

  The other young woman seems more discreet, but sadder too, perhaps because of her age and lack of experience. Igor had been there when she walked down the corridor and had heard the photographers calling out her name and clamoring to ask her questions afterward. Apparently, though, the other people at the party had no idea who she was; she had been so in demand at the start, and then, just as suddenly, had been dropped.

  It was probably the talkative young woman who had decided to come over to him and ask him what he was doing there. At first, he’d felt rather constrained, but he knew that if they hadn’t approached him, other solitary people would have done so, to avoid the impression that they were lost and alone and with no friends at the party. That’s why he welcomed their conversation or, rather, their company, even though his mind was elsewhere. He told them his name was Gunther and explained that he was a German industrialist specializing in heavy machinery (a subject guaranteed to interest no one) and had been invited there by friends. He would be leaving tomorrow (which he hoped would be true, but God moves in mysterious ways).

  When the actress learned that he didn’t work in the film industry and wouldn’t be staying long at the Festival, she almost moved away; however, the other girl stopped her, saying that it’s always good to meet new people. And so there they are: he waiting for the friend who showed no signs of arriving, the actress waiting for her vanished assistant, and the quiet girl waiting for absolutely nothing, just a little peace.

  SUDDENLY, THE ACTRESS NOTICES SOME fluff on his dinner jacket, and before he can stop her, she reaches out to brush it away. She says:

  “Oh, do you smoke cigars?”

  That’s a relief, she thinks the object in his inside jacket pocket is a cigar.

  “Yes, but only after supper.”

  “If you like, I could invite you both to a party on a yacht tonight. But first I need to find my assistant.”

  The other girl suggests that maybe she’s being a little precipitate. She has only been signed up for one film and has a long way to go before she can surround herself with friends (or with an “entourage,” that word universally used to describe the parasites who hover around celebrities). She should respect the rules and go to the party alone.

  The actress thanks her for this advice. Then a waiter passes, and she again places her half-full glass of champagne on the tray and takes another one.

  “I think you should stop drinking so much so quickly,” says Igor/Gunther, delicately taking the glass from her and pouring the contents over the balustrade. She makes a despairing gesture, then accepts that he’s right, realizing that he has her best interests at heart.

  “I’m just so excited,” she says. “I need to calm down a little. Do you think I could smoke one of your cigars?”

  “I’m afraid I only have one. Besides, it’s been scientifically proven that nicotine is a stimulant, not a tranquilizer.”

  A cigar. Well, they are similar in shape, but that’s all the two objects have in common. In his inside jacket pocket he has a suppressor, or as it’s more commonly known, a silencer. It’s about four inches long and, once attached to the barrel of the Beretta he has in his trouser pocket, it can work miracles, by changing BANG! into puf.

  This is because when a gun is fired a few simple laws of physics come into effect. The speed of the bullet is slightly diminished as it’s forced past a series of rubber baffles; meanwhile, the gases produced by the firing of the gun fill the hollow chamber around the cylinder, cool rapidly, and suppress the noise of the gunpowder exploding. A silencer is useless for long-range shooting because it affects the trajectory of the bullet, but it’s ideal for firing at point-blank range.

  IGOR IS BEGINNING TO GROW impatient. Could Ewa and her husband have canceled their invitation? Or could it be—and for a fraction of a second his head swims—that he had slipped the envelope under the door to the suite in which they were staying?

  No, that’s not possible; that would be such a stroke of bad luck. He thinks of the families of those who have died. If his sole objective was still to win back the woman who left him for a man who did not deserve her, all his work would have been in vain.

  His composure begins to crack. Could that be why Ewa hasn’t attempted to contact him, despite all the messages he’s sent her? He has twice rung their mutual friend, only to be told there was no news.

  His doubt is beginning to become a certainty. Yes, the couple were both dead. That would explain the sudden departure of the actress’s “assistant” and why no one was bothering with the nineteen-year-old model who was supposed to appear at the great couturier’s side.

  Was God punishing him for having loved a woman he did not deserve and had loved too much? His ex-wife had used his hands to strangle a young woman who had her whole life ahead of her, who might have gone on to discover a cure for cancer or a way of making humanity realize that it was destroying the planet. Ewa may have known nothing about the murder, but she it was who had made him use those poisons. He had been sure that he would only have to destroy one world and that the message would reach its intended recipient. He had taken that whole small arsenal with him knowing it was all just a game, certain that on the first night, she would go to the bar for a glass of champagne before joining the party, sense his presence there, and realize that she had been forgiven for all the evil and destruction she had unleashed around her. He knows that, according to scientific research, people who have spent a lot of time together can sense their partner’s presence in a place, even if they don’t know exactly where they are.

  That didn’t happen. Ewa’s indifference last night—or perhaps her guilt at what she had done to him—had prevented her from noticing the man trying to hide behind a pillar, but who had left on the table various Russian economics journals, which should have been a large enough clue for anyone who was constantly looking for what she had lost. When you’re in love you imagine that you’ll see the love of your life everywhere—in the street, at a party, or in the theater—but Ewa had perhaps exchanged love for a life of glamour.

  He’s beginning to feel calmer now. Ewa was the most powerful poison on earth, and if she had been killed by hydrogen cyanide, that was nothing. She deserved far worse.

  The two young women continue talking; Igor moves away from them; he cannot allow himself to be overwhelmed by the fear that he might have destroyed his own work. He needs solitude, calm, the ability to react swiftly to this sudden change in direction.

  He goes over to another group of people, who are animatedly discussing various methods of giving up smoking. This was one of the favorite topics in that particular
world: showing your friends that you had the necessary willpower to defeat the foe. To take his mind off other things, he lights a cigarette, knowing full well that this is a provocative act.

  “It’s very bad for your health, you know,” says a skeletally thin woman dripping with diamonds and holding an orange juice in one hand.

  “Just being alive is bad for the health,” he replies. “It always ends in death sooner or later.”

  The men laugh. The women eye this newcomer with interest. However, just at that moment, in the corridor—about twenty yards away from where he’s standing—the photographers start shouting:

  “Hamid! Hamid!”

  Even from a distance, and with his view blocked by the people strolling about in the garden, he can see the couturier and his companion, the same woman who, in other parts of the world, had walked into rooms with him, the same woman who used to hold his arm in that same affectionate, delicate, elegant way.

  Even before he has time to utter a sigh of relief, something else attracts his attention and makes him look away: a man has just entered from the other side of the garden without being stopped by any of the security guards. The man glances this way and that, as if searching for someone, but that someone is clearly not a friend lost in the throng.

  Without saying goodbye to the group he’s with, Igor goes back to the two young women, who are still standing by the balustrade, talking. He takes the actress’s hand in his and makes a silent prayer to the girl with the dark eyebrows. He asks forgiveness for having doubted, but we human beings are still so impure, incapable of understanding the blessings so generously bestowed on us.

  “You’re moving a bit fast, aren’t you?” says the actress, making no attempt to move away.

  “Yes, I am, but given what you’ve been telling me, everything in your life is moving fast today.”

  She laughs. The sad girl laughs too. The policeman passes by without noticing him. He’s been told to look out for men in their forties with slightly graying hair, but for men on their own.

  9:20 P.M.

  Doctors look at test results which are completely at odds with what they believe the actual illness to be, and must then decide whether to trust science or their heart. They learn, with time and experience, to give more weight to their instincts and they find that the outcomes for their patients improve.

  Successful businessmen pore over graphs and diagrams, then go completely against the market trend and grow still richer.

  Artists write books or films about which everyone says: “That won’t work. No one’s interested in things like that,” and end up becoming icons of popular culture.

  Religious leaders preach fear and guilt rather than love, which should, in theory, be the most important thing in the world, and their congregations swell.

  Only one group consistently fail to go against the current trend: politicians. They want to please everyone and stick rigidly to the rules of political correctness. They end up having to resign, apologize, or contradict themselves.

  MORRIS KEEPS OPENING ONE WINDOW after another on his computer. This has nothing to do with technology, but with intuition. He’s tried distracting himself with the Dow Jones Index, but wasn’t pleased with the results. It would be best to focus a little on some of the characters he’s lived with for much of his life.

  He looks again at the video in which Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, is describing in a calm voice how he killed forty-eight women, most of them prostitutes. Ridgway is doing this not because he wants absolution for his sins or to relieve his conscience; the public prosecutor has offered to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment if he confesses, for despite having acted with impunity for a long time, Ridgway had left insufficient evidence to convict him. Or perhaps he had just grown weary of the macabre task he had set himself.

  Ridgway had a steady job spraying trucks and could only remember his victims by relating them to whether he had been working that day. For twenty years, sometimes with more than fifty detectives on his trail, he managed to commit murder after murder without ever leaving any kind of signature or clue. One of the detectives on the tape comments that Ridgway wasn’t very bright, wasn’t too good at his job or very educated, but was a perfect killer.

  In short, he was born to be a killer, even though he had always lived in the same place. His case, at one point, was even filed away as insoluble.

  Morris has watched this same video hundreds of times. It has, in the past, given him the necessary inspiration to solve other cases, but not today. He closes down that window and opens another, which shows a letter written by the father of Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal, who was responsible for killing and dismembering seventeen men between 1978 and 1991:

  Initially, of course, I couldn’t believe that it was really Jeff who had done the things the police had accused him of. How could anyone believe that his son could do such things? I had been in the actual places where they said he had done them. I had been in rooms and basements which at other moments, according to the police, had been nothing less than a slaughterhouse. I had looked in my son’s refrigerator and seen only a scattering of milk cartons and soda cans. I had leaned casually on the black table they claimed my son had used both as a dissecting table and a bizarre satanic altar. How was it possible that all of this had been hidden from me—not only the horrible physical evidence of my son’s crimes, but the dark nature of the man who had committed them, this child I had held in my arms a thousand times, and whose face, when I glimpsed it in the newspapers, looked like mine? If the police had told me that my son was dead, I would have thought differently about him. If they’d told me that a strange man had lured him to a seedy apartment, and a few minutes later, drugged, strangled, then sexually assaulted and mutilated his dead body—in other words, if they’d told me the same horrible things that they had to tell so many other fathers and mothers in July of 1991—then I would have done what they have done. I would have mourned my son and demanded that the man who’d killed him be profoundly punished. If not executed, then separated forever from the rest of us. After that, I would have tried to think of my son warmly. I would, I hope, have visited his grave from time to time, spoken of him with loss and affection, continued, as much as possible, to be the custodian of his memory. But I wasn’t told what these other mothers and fathers were told, that their sons were dead at the hands of a murderer. Instead, I was told that my son was the one who had murdered their sons.

  A satanic altar. Charles Manson and his “family.” In 1969, three people burst into a house occupied by a film star and killed everyone there, including a young man who happened to be driving away from the house. Two more murders followed on the next day: a married couple, both of whom were businesspeople. Manson claimed to be capable of killing the whole of humanity.

  For the thousandth time, Morris looks at the photo of the man behind those crimes, smiling at the camera, surrounded by hippie friends, including a famous pop musician of the day. They all seem perfectly harmless, talking about peace and love.

  HE CLOSES DOWN ALL THE windows. Manson is the closest thing to what is happening now, involving as it does the cinema and well-known victims. A kind of political manifesto against luxury, consumerism, and celebrity. Manson, however, was only the brains behind the killings; he didn’t actually murder anyone himself; he left that to his acolytes.

  No, that’s not it. And despite the e-mails he has sent, explaining that he can’t provide answers in such a short space of time, Morris is beginning to experience what all detectives always feel about serial killers: it’s becoming a personal matter.

  On the one hand, there’s a man, doubtless with some other profession, who, given the weapons he uses, has clearly planned the murders in advance, but who is on entirely unfamiliar territory, where he has no knowledge of the competence or otherwise of the local police force. He is, therefore, a vulnerable man. On the other hand, there’s the accumulated experience of all kinds of security organizations accustome
d to dealing with society’s aberrants, but apparently incapable of stopping the bloody trail left by this rank amateur.

  He should never have responded to the commissioner’s call. He had decided to live in the South of France because the climate was better, the people more amusing, the sea close at hand, and because he hoped that he still had many years ahead of him in which to be able to enjoy life’s pleasures.

  He had left his job in London with a reputation for being the best. And now this one failure would be sure to reach the ears of his colleagues, and he would lose that reputation earned through hard work and great dedication. They’ll say: “He was the first person to insist that modern computers be installed in our department, but despite all the technology at his disposal, he’s simply too old to keep up with challenges of a new age.”

  He presses the off button. The software logo comes up and then the screen goes blank. Inside the machine, the electronic impulses disappear from the fixed memory and leave no feeling of guilt, remorse, or impotence.

  His body has no off buttons. The circuits in his brain keep working, always arriving at the same conclusions, trying to justify the unjustifiable, bruising his self-esteem, telling him that his colleagues are right: perhaps his instincts and his capacity for analysis have been affected by age.

  He goes into the kitchen, turns on the espresso machine, which has been giving him problems lately. As with any modern domestic appliance, it’s usually cheaper to throw the old one out and buy a new one. Fortunately, the machine decides to work this time, and he sips the resulting cup of coffee unhurriedly. A large part of his day involves pressing buttons: computer, printer, phone, lights, stove, coffeemaker, fax machine.