still standing there, stunned, not knowing where to go or what to do. Forgetting who 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 still 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 sea shore. The big hotels had, it seems, acquired the rights to great swathes 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 marquees, where some production company, brewery or cosmetics firm was launching its latest product at a so-called ‘lunch’. People here were dressed normally, if by ‘normal’ you mean a baseball cap, bright shirt and light-coloured trousers for men, and jewellery, 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 key pad 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 5 euros a month, via an ingenious system created in London, a call centre 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 realises 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 on-board 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 $10 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 take-off. 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.
More bodyguards, more dark glasses, more bikinis on the beach, more light-coloured clothes and jewellery attending ‘lunches’, more people hurrying along as if they had something very important to do that morning, more photographers on every corner attempting the impossible task of snapping something unusual, more magazines and free newspapers about what's happening at the Festival, more people handing out flyers to the poor mortals who haven't been invited to lunch in one of the white marquees, flyers advertising restaurants on the top of the hill, far from everything, where little is heard of what goes on in Boulevard de la Croisette, up there where models rent apartments for the duration of the Festival, hoping they'll be summoned to an audition that will change their lives for ever.
All so unsurprising. All so predictable. If he were to go into one of those marquees now, no one would dare ask for his identification because it's still early and the promoters will be afraid that no one will come. In half an hour's time, though, depending on how things go, the security guards will be given express orders to let in only pretty, unaccompanied girls.
