Igor has walked past the scene of the crime several times now. At one point, he realized that his comings and goings might arouse suspicion and so decided to remain a prudent two hundred yards from the scene, leaning on the balustrade that looked out over the beach. He's wearing dark glasses, but there's nothing suspicious about that, not only because it's a sunny day, but because in a celebrity town like Cannes, dark glasses are synonymous with status.
He's surprised to see that it's almost midday, and yet no one has realized that there's a person lying dead on the main street of a city which, at this time of year, is the focus of the world's attention.
A couple are approaching the bench now, visibly irritated. They start shouting at the sleeping beauty; they're the girl's parents, angry because she isn't working. The man shakes her almost violently. Then the woman bends over, obscuring Igor's field of vision.
Igor knows what will happen next.
The mother screams. The father takes his mobile phone from his pocket and moves away, clearly agitated. The mother is shaking her daughter's unresponsive body. Passersby stop, and now he can remove his dark glasses and join them as one more curious onlooker.
The mother is crying, clinging to her daughter. A young man gently pushes her away and attempts mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but soon gives up; Olivia's face already has a slight purple tinge to it.
"Someone call an ambulance!"
Several people dial the same number, all of them feeling useful, important, caring. He can already hear the sound of the siren in the distance. The mother's screams are growing louder. A young woman tries to put a comforting arm around her, but the mother pushes her away. Someone attempts to sit the body up, and someone else tells them to lay her down again because it's too late to do anything.
"It's probably a drug overdose," the person next to him says. "Young people today are a lost cause."
Those who hear the comment nod sagely. Igor remains impassive while he watches the paramedics unload their equipment from the ambulance, apply electric shocks to Olivia's heart, while a more experienced doctor stands by, not saying a word, because although he knows there's nothing to be done, he doesn't want his colleagues to be accused of negligence. They place Olivia's body on the stretcher and put it in the ambulance, the mother still clinging to her daughter. After a brief discussion, they allow the mother to get in too, and the ambulance speeds away.
No more than five minutes have passed between the couple discovering the body and the ambulance leaving. The father is still standing there, stunned, not knowing where to go or what to do. Forgetting whom he's speaking to, the same person who made the comment about a drug overdose goes over to the father and gives him his version of the facts:
"Don't worry, sir. This kind of thing happens every day around here."
The father does not respond. He's stilling holding his mobile phone and staring into space. He either doesn't understand the remark or has no idea what it is that happens every day, or else he's in a state of shock that has sent him immediately into some unknown dimension where pain does not exist.
The crowd disperses as quickly as it appeared. Only two people remain: the father still clutching his phone and the man who has now taken off his dark glasses and is holding them in his hand.
"Did you know the girl?" Igor asks.
There is no reply.
It's best to do as everyone else has done, keep walking along the Boulevard de la Croisette and see what else is happening on this sunny morning in Cannes. Like the girl's father, he doesn't know quite what he is feeling: he has destroyed a world he will never be able to rebuild, even if he had all the power in the world. Did Ewa deserve that? From the womb of that young woman, Olivia--the fact that he knows her name troubles him greatly because that means she's no longer just a face in the crowd--might have sprung a genius who would have gone on to discover a cure for cancer or drafted an agreement that would ensure that the world could finally live in peace. He has destroyed not just one person, but all the future generations that might have sprung from her. What has he done? Was love, however great and however intense, sufficient justification for that?
He had chosen the wrong person as his first victim. Her death will never make the news and Ewa won't understand the message.
Don't think about it, it's done now. You have prepared yourself to go much further than this, so carry on. The girl will understand that her death was not in vain, but was a sacrifice in the name of a greater love. Look around you, see what's happening in the city, behave like a normal citizen. You've already had your fair share of suffering in this life; now you deserve a little peace and comfort.
Enjoy the Festival. This is what you have been preparing yourself for.
EVEN IF HE'D HAD HIS swimming things with him, he would have found it difficult to get anywhere near the seashore. The big hotels had, it seems, acquired the rights to great swaths of beach which they had filled with their chairs, logos, waiters, and bodyguards, who, at every entry point, demanded the guest's room key or some other form of identification. Other areas were occupied by huge white tents, where some production company, brewery, or cosmetics firm was launching its latest product at a so-called l
unch. People here were dressed normally, if by "normal" you mean a baseball cap, bright shirt, and light-colored trousers for men, and jewelry, loose top, Bermudas, and low-heeled shoes for women.
Dark glasses were de rigueur for both sexes, and there was little bare flesh on show because members of the Superclass were too old for that now, and any such display would be considered ridiculous or, rather, pathetic.
Igor noticed one other thing: the mobile phone. The most important item of clothing.
It was essential to be receiving a constant stream of messages or calls, to be prepared to interrupt any conversation in order to answer a call that was not in the least urgent, to stand keying in endless texts via an SMS. They had all forgotten that these initials mean Short Message Service and instead used the keypad as if it were a typewriter. It was slow, awkward, and could cause serious damage to the thumb, but what did it matter? At that very moment, not only in Cannes, but in the whole world, the ether was being filled with messages like "Good morning, my love, I woke up thinking about you and I'm so glad to have you in my life," "I'll be home in ten minutes, please have my lunch ready and check that my clothes were sent to the laundry," or "The party here is a real drag, but I haven't got anywhere else to go, where are you?" Things that take five minutes to be written down and only ten seconds to be spoken, but that's the way the world is. Igor knows all about this because he has earned hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to the fact that the phone is no longer simply a method of communicating with others, but a thread of hope, a way of believing that you're not alone, a way of showing others how important you are.
And it was leading the world into a state of utter madness. For a mere five euros a month, via an ingenious system created in London, a call center would send you a standard message every three minutes. When you know you're going to be talking to someone you want to impress, you just have to dial a particular number to activate the system. The phone rings, you pick it up, open the message, read it quickly, and say "Oh, that can wait" (of course it can: it was written to order). This way, the person you're talking to feels important, and things move along more quickly because he realizes he's in the presence of a very busy person. Three minutes later, the conversation is interrupted by another message, the pressure mounts, and the user of the service can decide whether it's worth turning off his phone for a quarter of an hour or lying and saying that he really must take this call, and so rid himself of a disagreeable companion.
There is only one situation in which all mobile phones must be turned off. Not at formal suppers, in the middle of a play, during the key moment in a film, or while an opera singer is attempting the most difficult of arias; we've all heard someone's mobile phone go off in such circumstances. No, the only time when people are genuinely concerned that their phone might prove dangerous is when they get on a plane and hear the usual lie: "All mobile phones must be switched off during the flight because they might interfere with the onboard systems." We all believe this and do as the flight attendants ask.
Igor knew when this myth had been created: for years now, airlines had been doing their best to convince passengers to use the phones attached to their seat. These cost ten dollars a minute and use the same transmission system as mobile phones. The strategy didn't work, but the myth lingered on; they had simply forgotten to remove the warning from the list of dos and don'ts that the flight attendant has to read out before takeoff. What no one knew was that on every flight, there were always at least two or three passengers who forgot to turn their phones off, and besides, laptops access the Internet using exactly the same system as mobiles. And no plane anywhere in the world has yet fallen out of the sky because of that.
Now they were trying to modify the warning without alarming the passengers too much and without dropping the price. You could use your mobile phone as long as it was one you could put into flight mode. Such phones cost four times as much. No one has ever explained what "flight mode" is, but if people choose to be taken in like this, that's their problem.
HE KEEPS WALKING. HE'S TROUBLED by the last look the girl had given him before she died, but prefers not to think about it.