False Nine

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with race. And everything to do with that boy’s commercial future. With her commercial future, too. She may not realise it yet but there’s a shelf-life for models, too. They’re both of them financially much stronger together than they are apart. I figure Jérôme will stand a much better chance of getting back with the lovely Bella if no one else is seeing her. And no one would certainly include you.’

  ‘Bollocks.’ I shook my head. ‘Look, I’m flattered that you even think I stand a chance with a girl like her, but you needn’t worry. I’m already in a relationship. Okay?’

  ‘I’m serious, Scott. Most men have a weakness. Mine is money. And white Ferraris. I have four now. Frankly, I don’t need any of them. Most of the time I have someone to drive me. But I have a weakness for these cars. Your weakness is women. Always has been. In spite of what you say – your modest denials – women are what will always get you into trouble. So, take my advice and keep your filthy paws off that girl. She’s forbidden fruit to a man like you.’

  13

  ‘Have you any idea why Jérôme should have felt the need to get himself a gun?’

  ‘My God, I’d forgotten about that.’

  ‘You saw it?’

  ‘He showed it to me.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘October? Maybe November. I’m not sure.’

  Bella leaned out of bed, grabbed her cigarettes and lit one. She was still wearing a black corselette, black stockings and suspenders, but her tiny floss panties were long gone. Looking at her golden bare butt now and remembering with lips that were still glowing just how much time I’d spent with my head between her legs, I wasn’t so sure I hadn’t eaten them. That’s the thing about forbidden fruit. Like the saying goes, it often tastes the sweetest. Paolo Gentile was right about that much anyway. Women had always been my weakness. I might have said they were my Achilles heel except that my feet had nothing to do with what I wanted to do with Bella. I might have felt a little more guilty about betraying Louise but I’d already managed to persuade myself that I had an out with my girlfriend on account of the fact that Bella was a Marilyn supermodel, and of course it’s not every day that a supermodel with legs up to an arse you could eat your sushi off makes it clear that she wants you to fuck her brains out. That’s not much of a defence. And I wouldn’t like to see anyone try that in court – even a good barrister. Rumpole of the Bailey couldn’t have put that one over. An all-male jury might just have bought it. Gentlemen of the jury, just look at this woman, for God’s sake. Wouldn’t you have fucked her, too? If you’d had the chance? Sure you would. But how many juries did you get these days that didn’t have at least one disapproving battleaxe on board for the trial? The days of 12 Angry Men were long gone.

  Of course I knew that eventually I would feel guilty; just not yet.

  ‘Want a cigarette?’

  ‘No, thanks. I really only smoke when it means keeping someone I like company. Like last night. No one should have to smoke alone. Least of all a beautiful woman. And certainly not in this city. So, tell me more about Jérôme’s gun.’

  ‘It was a black thing, he said.’

  ‘I’m black. And I’ve never wanted to own a gun.’

  ‘A gangster thing. You know, like 50 Cent or Ice Cube. He liked to wave it around in his apartment. To point it at the mirror and pose with it. That’s all. He was like a kid with it. Although sometimes he had it under his pillow. It was more of a style thing, I guess. I mean, he wore the clothes and listened to the music and, from what you’ve told me, he got down with the guys on the street. I think the gun was just part of all that bullshit. Like I said, this guy is five years younger than me. And it showed sometimes, you know? He liked his toys. The Lamborghini. The gold chains. The diamond panther studs in his ears. He bought them at the same time as he bought my bracelet, from Cartier. They were thirty-five thousand euros.’

  ‘What kind of a gun was it? Can you remember?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not like they’re made by Hermès, are they? One gun is much like another to me.’

  ‘A handgun.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Revolver or automatic?’

  Bella thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know. No, wait. I have something.’

  She slipped out of bed and walked into the bathroom where she hauled open several drawers.

  ‘An ex-boyfriend gave me this when I was last in the States,’ she called out and I began to wonder what it was she was looking for. Another gun?

  But when she returned to the bedroom she was carrying a box containing what was described as a MAGNUMDRYER: Model 357. The authentic western gun hair dryer. It had a pink handle and an extra large silver barrel. A novelty, obviously, but the kind that might easily get you killed.

  ‘It was like this,’ she said.

  I opened the box and smiled. The hairdryer was even equipped with a white leather holster.

  ‘A magnum?’

  ‘Yes. Only his was black, with a rubberised handle. Not silver with a pink handle like this one.’

  ‘No, well, you can see how that would wreck the effect. It’s hard to look like an authentic gangster when you’re holding a magnum that has a pink handle.’

  ‘I don’t use it,’ she explained. ‘It’s the wrong current for France.’

  ‘There’s that, and the neighbours. Someone might think you were planning to kill yourself if they saw you put that next to your head.’ I shook my head. ‘Only in America. You’d think they had enough guns without making innocent objects look like guns, too. I mean, you look at this and figure that it’s only a matter of time before some dumb hairdresser in St Louis gets shot for blow-drying a lady’s hair. I mean that; it will almost certainly happen. Everything you can say about America – good or bad – is always true.’

  ‘I never thought of that. But yes, you’re right. Especially if you’re black.’

  I nodded. ‘Especially if you’re black.’

  ‘You pull the trigger to operate it.’

  ‘Just like a gun. I don’t use them myself. Hairdryers, that is. But even I figured that you pulled the trigger to make it work.’

  ‘And you control the temperature with the thing at the back.’

  ‘The hammer.’

  ‘The hammer, yes.’

  ‘You know, I searched Jérôme’s apartment from top to bottom and I didn’t find a gun. Nor any ammunition. Have you any idea what became of it?’

  ‘After I found out that he was keeping it under his pillow I told him to get rid of it – to chuck it in the Seine before he hurt himself. Either it went or I did. So maybe he did get rid of it. All I know is that I never again saw it.’

  ‘What about gambling? Paolo Gentile told me that when Jérôme was back in Monaco there were some guys he owed money to. Debts.’

  ‘I know he liked to play poker. He was always watching it on television. But he never mentioned that he’d lost any money. And as for debts he always seemed to have plenty of cash in his pocket. He usually had at least a thousand on him. I know because I was often borrowing money for a cab.’

  ‘Tell me about his other friends. His team mates at the club. Who was he close to?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I heard from Mandel.’

  ‘Especially after the piece in L’Equipe. He trained. He played. He went home. He said that’s how he preferred it. Are you going to speak to any of them?’

  ‘No, the club want this kept as quiet as possible. It only takes one idiot with a Twitter account to fuck that up and then this is all over the newspapers.’

  ‘I certainly don’t want that. And not just for Jérôme’s sake. I mean, if they start looking for him, it won’t be long before those bastards at Closer are hanging around outside my building again.’

  Closer was the celebrity picture magazine that had broken the story of how the French president, François Hollande, was having an affair with actress Julie Gayet.

  ‘I thou
ght you French had privacy laws to stop that kind of thing.’

  ‘Oh, we do. But the magazines just pay the fines, which aren’t much compared with how many sales a big story can put on their circulation.’

  She finished her cigarette, swept the box and the novelty hairdryer onto the floor, lay back on the bed and fixed me with a steady, blue-eyed stare that could have unzipped my trousers, had I been wearing any. If I could have read her mind I think I would have said that she wanted me to fuck her again. Paolo Gentile had been right about that, too. It had been a while since anyone had fucked her.

  ‘So, what’s your next move?’ she asked.

  ‘My next move?’ I rolled on top of her, pushed her long white thighs apart and nudged inside her. She gasped as I flexed my pelvis and swiftly found my way right up against the neck of her womb. ‘My next move is this.’

  ‘That’s what I hoped it would be.’

  Which just goes to show that when it comes to sex a man and a woman can read each other’s minds pretty well, really. There won’t ever be an ebook that can take the place of all that.

  14

  On the long plane journey from London to Antigua I watched a recording on my iPad of the Paris Saint-Germain game against Barcelona in the early stages of the Champions League, last September. It was the match which PSG had won 3–2, and counted as a pretty stunning result for the French although the actual game seems to have been more immediately famous as the one when David Beckham turned up with guests Jay-Z and his wife Beyoncé, neither of whom looked as though they were much impressed with what they saw. Looking like Charlie Brown in his dorky, flat-brim baseball hat, Jay-Z couldn’t have seemed less comfortable if Beyoncé’s sister Solange had been sitting right behind him just waiting to give him another kicking in an elevator.

  No one had expected PSG to win without the talismanic Zlatan Ibrahimovic – he had an injured heel – who must have regretted a chance to prove to his former club, Barcelona, that they had been wrong to let him leave on loan to AC Milan, in 2010. Frankly, anyone who saw the Swede’s thirty-yard wonder goal for Sweden against England in November 2012 knew that this was always a mistake. The French were also without their captain, Thiago Silva (thigh problem) and the Argentine striker Ezequiel Lavezzi (torn hamstring). And if all that wasn’t bad enough, Barcelona had fired six past Granada the previous weekend with a hat-trick from Neymar and two from Lionel Messi – the little Argentine’s 400th and 401st career goals. On the same weekend, PSG had struggled to get a 1–1 draw against the no-hopers from Toulouse. Even PSG’s manager, Laurent Blanc, had seemed to recognise the impossibility of the task ahead of him when, in a pre-match press conference, the former French captain had spoken of Barcelona as his side’s ‘near masters’.

  But on the night against Barcelona, PSG played out of their skins and it was plain to see that this was the match that had persuaded the Catalan side to make a mid-season move for Jérôme Dumas, because while PSG’s goals had been scored by David Luiz, Marco Verratti and Blaise Matuidi, the man of the match was, without question, Jérôme Dumas. In and out of possession he had been the spirit of PSG’s impressive display. Having played for much of the previous season as a holding player, the young Frenchman was moved forward into the No. 10 role for the game against Barcelona, although his workrate did not seem to suffer in the least. Brimming with two-footed invention, he was a great example to the Parisians and on several occasions he managed to turn like a scalded cat in the tightest spaces and get his team out of pressure, creating chances where none had seemed to exist before.

  Dumas was equally irrepressible in defence, frequently dropping back deep to aid David Luiz and Gregory van der Wiel, who were hard to break down, although Messi and Neymar tried hard enough. Halfway through the second half, Dumas had briefly looked tired, as if he might have to be taken off, but Laurent Blanc’s decision to keep him on proved inspired when Verratti nodded in a perfectly weighted ball from the Frenchman. At times the sheer verve he brought to his work seemed nothing short of miraculous: in one fifty-yard run deep in the second half begun after he’d easily dispossessed no less a figure than Lionel Messi, Dumas dribbled, swerved, pivoted and almost slalomed, before succumbing to a hard, scything tackle from Dani Alves which would have had many a footballer crying foul, before getting up again with a smile instead of an accusatory stare of goggle-eyed incredulity at the referee.

  He was like this for the whole game: an unruly, hyperactive, runaway child. Messi and Neymar – who both scored – must have wished that someone would put Ritalin in his half-time water bottle. Even Dumas seemed to recognise that he’d surpassed himself.

  When the match was over Jérôme Dumas finally left the pitch with his socks rolled down his wobbling legs and wearing a euphoric grin like some footballing d’Artagnan from the pages of The Three Musketeers, that great French novel written by Jérôme’s more famous namesake, Alexandre Dumas. On the strength of the performance I saw in this match it didn’t seem too much to expect that this young footballer would soon stand alongside the writer in the pantheon of French glory.

  15

  There are two things that strike you as your plane comes in to land on the Caribbean island of Antigua. The first is how small the island is. It’s not much bigger than the city of Birmingham. The second is how like an emerald the green of the land is against the lapis-lazuli blue of the sea which seems to extend forever so that you can hardly tell where the sky ends and the sea begins. Darker blue patches of coral reefs surround the island like submerged thunderclouds and almost every inch of the meandering coast is gilded with the sand of some perfect beach. Nearer to the ground there are more houses than you anticipated and these are mostly white as if a green coat had been studded with the shiny buttons of some eco-minded pearly king. And then there is the airport, as pink as candyfloss with the name of the island helpfully spelled out in large green letters under the seven arches of the building’s roof which resemble alphabetical trains sitting in a railway siding, awaiting dispatch to various parts of the island. But this is the last time on Antigua you ever stop to think about something so urgent as a train because as soon as you are off the plane life drops a rusty gear or two. Enveloped by warmth and confronted everywhere by almost fluorescent smiles, you even blink more slowly as if you’d just had a hit on a big spliff and were trying to remember your own name and something like a name actually mattered. Nothing on Antigua seems to matter all that much. There’s not even a drink-driving law which – in spite of the many wines I’d sampled in Club Class – hardly mattered either since the hotel had sent a man with a car to drive me to a jetty, and from there by boat to an even smaller, more exclusive island where there were no cars at all. I might have normally baulked at seventy-five bucks, US, for a ten minute airport transfer but already I was feeling as laid-back as the fellow with cornrows in his hair who drove the boat. Besides, that’s the thing about travelling on someone else’s dollar: suddenly everything seems quite simple; only the best will do. If you ever win the lottery then come straight here; that’s the Euromillions lottery, not the smaller, British one; two weeks at the Jumby Bay won’t leave you much change from a British lottery win.

  As I arrived in Antigua’s airport a photographer took my picture which irritated me as I had hoped to remain as anonymous as possible. I hardly wanted to talk to anyone about being hoodwinked in Shanghai or, as the Sun had put it, Manson’s Chinese Fake-Away, which I have to admit was rather good.

  But I was keen to talk to almost anyone about Jérôme Dumas. I decided to get started right away, and by the time the boat guy picked me up to take me to Jumby Bay, I’d already asked questions of the airport police and my driver. I thought the sooner I found out what had become of the guy the sooner I could get back to looking for a proper job in football. And there was something about the boat guy I liked which encouraged me to think he might be a bit more forthcoming than the cops and the chauffeur.

  ‘Welcome to Jumby Bay,’ he said. ‘The island is
named after a local word meaning playful spirit. It comprises just forty guest rooms and suites and a collection of villas and estate homes owned by a group of people who are all committed to protecting the environment and several endangered species that still live on the island such as the hawksbill turtle, the white egret, and the Persian black-headed sheep. Everything in Jumby Bay is su-stain-able.’

  He said it like I should watch out where I put my dirty hands and feet but clearly he liked to talk and I hoped it might not be too much to expect if, having helped me with my luggage, and then into the boat, he also helped me with some information that hadn’t been fished out of the resort’s guest brochure like the local red mullet.

  ‘It’s a long way from home, isn’t it? The Persian sheep, I mean. How did it get here, anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know, boss.’

  ‘Christopher Columbus, I suppose,’ I said, answering my own question. ‘Along with horses and syphilis.’

  ‘I suppose you must be right.’ The boatman laughed and then clapped his big hands. ‘All these years I’ve been saying it, and I never asked myself what a Persian sheep be doing here in the Caribbean.’

  ‘And a black-headed one, too,’ I said. ‘There seems to have been a bit of a theme going on here.’

  ‘Hell, yes. You’re right.’

  ‘When you think about it, everyone is a guest here. People brought over from Africa to cut the sugar cane – like you and me – a few Europeans, and the Persian black-headed sheep. And the tourists, of course. Strikes me as the people who were first here – the real native Antiguans – are probably long gone.’

  ‘Never thought of it that way. But I guess you’re right, boss. Where you from? London?’

  ‘That’s right. What’s your name?

  ‘Everton.’

  ‘Like the football club?’