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He keeps walking, sure of one thing: someone must have witnessed the murder. But how would that someone describe him? A man with grayish hair, wearing jeans, a white shirt, and a black jacket. That possible witness would help the police make an Identi-Kit picture, a process that would not only take time, but lead them to the conclusion that there are tens or maybe thousands of men who look just like him.
Ever since he tried to give himself up to that policeman and was sent back to his hotel, he has felt sure that no one would be able to interrupt his mission. The doubts he feels now are of a different nature: is Ewa worth the sacrifices he's offering up to the universe? When he arrived in Cannes, he had felt sure she was; now, though, something else is filling his soul: the spirit of the little street vendor with her dark eyebrows and innocent smile.
"We are all part of the divine spark," she seems to be saying. "We all have a purpose in creation and that purpose is called Love. That love, however, shouldn't be concentrated in just one person, it should be scattered throughout the world, waiting to be discovered. Wake up to that love. What is gone cannot return. What is about to arrive needs to be recognized."
He struggles against the idea that perhaps we only discover that a plan is wrong when we take it to its ultimate consequences, or when all-merciful God leads us in another direction.
He looks at his watch: he still has another twelve hours in Cannes, time enough before he gets on the plane with the woman he loves and goes back to...
...goes back to what? To his work in Moscow after everything he has experienced, suffered, thought, planned? Or to find rebirth through his victims and choose absolute freedom and discover the person he didn't know he was, and from then on do all the things he had dreamed of doing when he was still with Ewa?
4:34 P.M.
Jasmine is sitting staring out at the sea while she smokes a cigarette and thinks of nothing. At such moments, she feels a deep connection with the infinite, as if it were not she who was there, but something more powerful, something capable of extraordinary things.
SHE REMEMBERS AN OLD STORY she once read.
Nasrudin appeared at court wearing a magnificent turban and asking for money for charity.
"You come here asking for money and yet you're wearing an extremely expensive turban on your head. How much did that extraordinary thing cost?" asked the sultan.
"It was a gift from someone very rich. And it's worth, I believe, five hundred gold coins," replied the wise Sufi.
The sultan's minister muttered: "That's impossible. No turban could possibly be worth that much."
Nasrudin insisted:
"I didn't come here only to beg, I also came to do business. I know that only a true sovereign would be capable of buying this turban for six hundred gold coins so that I could give the surplus to the poor."
The sultan was flattered and paid what Nasrudin asked. On the way out, Nasrudin said to the minister:
"You may know the value of a turban, but I know how far a man's vanity will take him."
And that's what the world around her is like. She has nothing against her profession, she doesn't judge people by their desires, but she knows what's really important in life and wants to keep her feet on the ground, even though there are temptations at every turn.
Someone opens the door and says there's just half an hour before the show begins. The worst part of the day, the long period of tedium that precedes any fashion show, is coming to an end. The other girls put down their iPods and their phones; the makeup artists do any necessary retouching; the hairdressers comb back into place any stray locks.
Jasmine sits in front of the dressing room mirror and lets them get on with their work.
"Don't be nervous just because it's Cannes," says the makeup artist.
"I'm not nervous."
Why should she be? On the contrary, whenever she steps onto a catwalk, she feels a kind of ecstasy, a surge of adrenaline. The makeup artist seems in a mood to talk, and tells her about the many celebrity wrinkles she has smoothed, suggests a new face cream, says she's tired of her job, asks if Jasmine has a spare ticket to a party that night. Jasmine listens to all this with infinite patience. In her mind she's back in the streets of Antwerp on the day she decided to get in touch with the two photographers who had approached her earlier. She had met with a slight initial difficulty, but it had all worked out in the end.
As it would today and as it had then, when--along with her mother, who, eager for her daughter to recover from her depression as quickly as possible, had agreed to go with her--she rang the bell of the first photographer, the one who had stopped her in the street. The door opened to reveal a small room with a transparent table covered in photographic negatives, another table, on which sat a computer, and a kind of drawing board piled with papers. With the photographer was a woman of about forty, who looked at her long and hard, before smiling and introducing herself as the events coordinator. Then the four of them sat down.
"I'm sure your daughter has a great future as a model," said the woman.
"Oh, I'm just here to keep her company," said Jasmine's mother. "If you have anything to say, speak directly to her."
The woman, slightly taken aback, paused for a few seconds, then picked up a card and started noting down details and measurements, saying:
"Of course, Cristina isn't a good name for a model. It's too ordinary. The first thing we need to do is to change that."
"There's another reason why Cristina isn't a good name," Jasmine was thinking. Because it belonged to a girl who had ceased to exist when she witnessed a murder and denied what her eyes now refused to forget. When she decided to change everything, she began with the name she'd been called ever since she was a child. She needed to change everything, absolutely everything. She had her answer ready.
"My professional name is Jasmine Tiger--a combination of sweetness and danger."
