The Winner Stands Alone

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 out 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.

Nevertheless, after a period during which the two parties barely spoke, they had become friendly again, and whenever they asked him for a favor--getting a university place for their daughter or tickets for concerts that their "clients" wanted to attend--Igor always did all he could to help them. After all, regardless of their motives, they were the only people who had believed in his dreams. Ewa--whenever he thought of her now, Igor felt intensely irritated--used to say that they had played on her husband's innocence to launder money earned from arms trafficking, as if that made any difference. It wasn't as if he'd been involved in the actual buying or selling of arms, and besides, in any business deal, both parties need to make a profit.

And everyone has their ups and downs. Some of his former backers had spent time in prison, but he had never abandoned them, even though he no longer needed their help. A man's dignity isn't measured by the people he has around him when he's at the peak of his success, but by his ability not to forget those who helped him when his need was greatest. Whether those hands were drenched in blood or sweat was irrelevant: if you were clinging on to the edge of a precipice, you wouldn't care who it was hauling you up to safety.

A sense of gratitude is important; no one gets very far if he forgets those who were with him in his hour of need. Not that you have to be constantly thinking about who helped or was helped. God has his eyes fixed on his sons and daughters and rewards only those who behave in accordance with the blessings that were bestowed on them.

And so when he wanted to buy some curare, he knew where to go, although he had to pay an absurd price for a substance that is relatively commonplace in the jungles of South America.

HE REACHES THE HOTEL LOBBY. The party is more than half an hour away by car, and it would be very hard to find a taxi if he just stood out in the street. He long ago learned that the first thing you do when you arrive at a hotel is give a large tip to the concierge without asking anything in exchange; all successful businessmen do this, and they never have any trouble getting reservations at the best restaurants, or tickets for shows, or information about certain areas of the city that don't appear in the guidebooks, and which prefer not to shock the middle classes.

With a smile, he asks for and gets a taxi right there and then, while another guest beside him is complaining about the problems he's having finding transpor

t. Gratitude, necessity, and the right contacts. You can get anything you want with those three things, even a silver envelope with the seductive words "For you" written in fine calligraphy. He had held off using it until the very end because if Ewa had failed to understand the other messages, this--the most sophisticated of all--would leave no room for doubt.