False Nine

  ‘Let’s say I do take this job. How long should I keep looking for?’

  ‘Until the end of this month,’ said Ahmed. ‘Four weeks. Six at most.’

  ‘Ideally,’ added Jacint, ‘we should like the player back in time for us to play him in el clásico, on Sunday, March the twenty-second. If he could feature in the match against Madrid, it will be as much as we can hope for.’ He shrugged. ‘As you may remember, Madrid won the last classic, three–one, in front of their home fans.’

  ‘We were robbed,’ said Oriel. ‘Not the first time, of course.’

  ‘They came from behind after Neymar gave us the perfect start, with a goal after just four minutes.’

  ‘They had a penalty which should never have been given,’ said Oriel. ‘It was ball to hand, not hand to ball as the law states. Gerard Piqué was unfairly penalised. It was the sheer injustice of this penalty that affected our team.’

  I nodded, smiling. Nothing changes very much in a rivalry like the one that existed between Madrid and Barcelona. But it was perhaps the only rivalry in which one side had forced the other to play, at gunpoint. For many, the hatred that now existed between Madrid and Barcelona had not existed at all until that game, in 1943. Madrid won the game 11–1, which makes you wonder about the team talk at half time. What did the manager say to his team?

  ‘On second thoughts, you’d best let these Spaniards beat us, lads, or they’re liable to shoot us, like they shot Lorca. If they can shoot a poet these fascists can certainly shoot a football team.’

  ‘Will you do it?’ asked Jacint. ‘This club will be forever in your debt.’

  ‘And ours,’ added Charles Rivel.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, wavering a little.

  I like Barcelona. I like Catalans. I just didn’t want to turn into football’s Inspector Clouseau.

  I got up from the table.

  ‘I’m going to the men’s room. So give me a few minutes, to think about it.’

  ‘If it’s a question of money…’ said Ahmed.

  ‘The money’s fine,’ I said. ‘No, I’m just wondering if you’d come to Pep on his year off and asked him to help you out like this, what he’d have said.’

  ‘Pep’s not an intellectual,’ said Jacint. ‘You’re the one who went to university, not him. All he knows is football.’

  ‘Maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong,’ I said. ‘Anyway, university doesn’t mean much nowadays. You can get a degree for staying in bed and watching television. What I meant was that Guardiola has always been very single-minded. A man with a plan. Total football of the kind he learned under Cruyff doesn’t seem to accommodate what you’re asking me to do. Other clubs might get the idea that I’m less interested in playing 4-4-2 than in playing the amateur sleuth.’

  ‘You’re a clever man, Scott,’ said Jacint. ‘Maybe a little too clever for this game. But you’ll always be part of the Barca family. I think you know that.’

  There are times – usually when it’s someone paying me a compliment like that – when I look down at my feet as if I expect to find a ball, and the fact is that sometimes I still don’t know what to do when I see there isn’t one. I swear when I first stopped playing football I used to wake up at night and look around for the ball. Especially when I was in the nick. It’s like I don’t know what to do with my feet. As if they’re at a loss without a ball to kick. Like a soldier without a rifle, I guess.

  I went to wash my hands. Along the way I glanced at my phone and saw from the Twitter feed that some women were calling on me to be sacked after my joke about Rafinha coming off the pitch during the game against Villarreal because he had his period. The fact that I didn’t have a job didn’t seem to have registered with my critics, many of whom had tweeted to tell me I was a sexist pig and every bit as bad as Andy Gray, and so I dismissed them from my mind.

  Besides, it seemed rather more important that the manager of another Premier League side had just lost his job. I didn’t kid myself that I was about to walk into another big club soon. Not when there were men like Tim Sherwood, Glenn Hoddle, Alan Irvine and Neil Warnock all looking for a new job. In truth I’d already made my decision about what I was going to do. Jacint had reminded me, subtly, that Barcelona had taken me into their family at a time when I was recently out of prison, and anyone else might have given the matter of my employment a second thought. I owed the Catalans something for giving me a chance when no English club had been there for me. And now that I came to consider the matter in more detail, it seemed that I owed them, big time.

  Besides, without a ball to kick, what else was I going to do with my time?

  I came back to the table.

  ‘All right, I’ll do it. I’ll look for your missing player. But let’s get one thing clear, gentlemen. Let’s assume for one minute that I am as clever as you say I am. Then you’ll forgive me if I tell you the real reason you want to find Jérôme Dumas and are prepared to pay me so handsomely to do it. Which has only a little to do with everything you’ve mentioned. I mean, that was nice and it all sounded very plausible. Even romantic. I like the idea of Barcelona as the political heart of Catalunya. But as a reason for paying me to try to find Jérôme Dumas discreetly? It’s bullshit.

  ‘The real reason you want me to find Dumas is mostly to do with the FIFA transfer ban on FCB that took effect at the end of December 2014.’

  This was the ban that was imposed as a result of FCB having breached the rules regarding the protection of minors and the registration of minors attending football academies.

  ‘I assume the loan of Jérôme Dumas from PSG to FCB was specifically constructed to get around the transfer ban. Because, according to my sources, you won’t be able to sign another player until the end of 2015, which means that the loan of this player assumes a much greater importance than it would normally have done. Especially in a year with a club presidential election.’

  My sources were my own father, of course, but it sounded better than just coming out with ‘my dad says’.

  ‘There aren’t many top strikers who get loaned between clubs like this. You were lucky to find one at this time of year. Most smaller teams are looking to sell their best players to the bigger clubs in the January transfer window. So I also assume that FCB will pay a fee to PSG at the end of 2015, regardless of whether Dumas performs or not.

  ‘Look, I don’t blame you. I’d have done the same if I’d been in your position. A ban like this because of some stupid administrative error seems quite disproportionate and typical of the high-handed way that FIFA conducts itself these days. Frankly, I think they’re all a bunch of crooks. But please don’t think I’m at all ignorant of what’s going on here. If you hire me you hire me to find the truth, with all that that entails. I think it’s best we all know what’s what here. Fair enough?’

  Jacint smiled, exchanged a look with Oriel and then nodded.

  ‘Fair enough.’

  8

  I returned to Paris to begin the search. By now the Twitter flap was a storm with the sorority calling for the FA to punish me with a fine, and given some of the things I was on record as having said about the FA, this looked to be more than likely. Tempest O’Brien told me she thought that the tweet about Rafinha was going to cost me ten grand, which works out at almost seventy-two quid a character.

  Jérôme Dumas’s apartment was in the sixteenth arrondissement, in Avenue Henri Martin, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. The apartment was at least four hundred square metres, on the top floor of a high-end building near the embassy of Bangladesh and, if you like that kind of thing, sumptuously designed by some modern architect. Most of the furniture looked like it was out of an old sci-fi movie about the future. I was met there with the keys by the PSG club fixer, Guy Mandel, who showed me around the place and gave me some useful background on the missing player.

  ‘Dumas came here from AS Monaco about a year ago for twenty million euros,’ he explained. ‘Bit of an attitude. But then that’s not unusual.
Originally from Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean. That’s not unusual either, as it happens. I don’t know how much you know about the place but for a tiny island with the population less than the city of Lyons, it punches well above its weight. Of the French World Cup Squad in 2006 seven were from Guadeloupe. The island is part of France, see, so it’s not a FIFA-recognised country. Just as well, probably, otherwise we wouldn’t have had people like Thierry Henry, Sylvain Wiltord, William Gallas, Lilian Thuram, Nicolas Anelka and Philippe Christanval eligible to play for us.’

  ‘I never knew,’ I said. ‘So much great football from such a small island.’

  ‘Not that there’s a great deal of affection for France on the island itself. I believe most of the islanders tend to side with Brazil. Can’t say I blame them really. France tends to call these people scum when they live in the suburbs and French only when they play for the team. I expect it’s the same in England.’

  I nodded. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘They could probably have qualified for the World Cup in Brazil if we’d given them the opportunity. In other words if we – the French – hadn’t blocked them from becoming a FIFA member.’

  ‘I had no idea,’ I said.

  ‘There are probably a lot more I’ve forgotten who come from Guadeloupe. I only know these names because Jérôme Dumas told me about them. He was very proud of his island heritage.’

  ‘Do you know how long he’s lived in France?’

  ‘No idea. His life before Monaco is a bit of a mystery, really.’

  Comprising an entrance hall, a large living room, a second rotunda lounge of fifty square metres, several bedrooms, a superb kitchen, a gymnasium and a wine cellar, the apartment would have been any young man’s dream. As would have been the Lamborghini and the Range Rover that occupied the apartment’s two parking spaces. But for me it was the roof gardens that really distinguished the place; the views – which included the new Louis Vuitton Museum designed by Frank Gehry – were superb and there was a large variety of mature plants that showed no sign of having been neglected by the owner’s absence.

  ‘Who looks after this place?’

  ‘There’s a maid and a gardener who come in almost every other day. A boy who cleans the cars. A cook who prepares meals according to nutritional guidelines drawn up by the club. He had a PA called Alice, who he let go after signing the deal with FCB. Nice girl. Clever.’

  ‘I shall certainly want to speak to her,’ I said.

  ‘All the details are on the attached file I sent by email. And she’s coming over here in an hour or so to assist you in any way she can.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘There’s even an art advisor employed by a private bank who bought pictures for him. He had access to the place so that he could come in and hang pictures and position sculptures.’

  ‘Is this one of them, do you think?’

  I was looking at a painting of a pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama. I wouldn’t have minded having a painting by Yayoi Kusama myself.

  Mandel pulled a face. ‘Not my taste. The sort of crap they hang in that new heap of mangled tin they call the Vuitton Museum.’

  He was wrong about that. Like the rest of the paintings on the walls of Dumas’s apartment the Kusama was much too representational ever to have found a place in the Vuitton collection of contemporary art. For one thing you could perceive what it was – almost – which meant of course that it lacked all irony and, therefore, was without significance and possibly any lasting investment value. I guessed that the private bank was giving Dumas the kind of advice he wanted to hear so that they could buy him the kind of paintings he wanted to see instead of the ones that would make him money.

  ‘The place is on the market, of course, now that he’s on his way to Barcelona. With Lux-Residence. I think they want eight million for it.’

  ‘What about girlfriends?’

  ‘There were lots of girls, as far as I heard. But none that caused him any trouble. No unwanted babies. No rape charges. That kind of thing. Nothing that required any help from me.’

  ‘Anyone regular?’

  ‘There was one girl he was seen out with more often. A model at the Marilyn Agency here in Paris. Name of Bella Macchina. Blonde, legs up to her arse, smell under her cosmetically enhanced nose – you know the type. But I don’t know how serious it was. You’d have to ask her. You’ll find the agency number in the attachment.’

  ‘I will.’ I glanced around the apartment. ‘You’d never know that a footballer lives here,’ I remarked. ‘I mean, there’s not a shirt in a glass case, a player award, a winner’s medal anywhere.’ I went to the bookcase which was all politics, art books and photography monographs. ‘There’s not even a book about football.’

  ‘Well, you can’t fault him for that,’ said Mandel. ‘Me, I like a good thriller, not some shit about life in the banlieues and how my only way out was to kick a fucking ball. You can say all that in one short chapter.’

  ‘Yes, I think I read that one, too.’

  Mandel stepped onto the terrace and lit a French cigarette. He was a heavyset man with longish hair and an almost bifurcated nose like a pixie’s arse. In his butcher’s fingers the cigarette looked like a little mint that had become stuck to his hand. His huge head nestled in the outsized collar of his white shirt as if his neck didn’t exist at all. His voice made Ray Winstone’s Bet365 commercial sound effeminate.

  ‘You mentioned an attitude problem,’ I said.

  ‘They’ve all got one of those. Name me one fucking footballer who doesn’t think he’s descended from Zeus. The minute they buy a Lamborghini they think it comes with a parking place on Mount Olympus.’ He laughed, cruelly. ‘And then they have to live with the thing and drive it. Which soon brings them crashing down to earth. There are times when I think God only invented Lamborghinis to prove to footballers that they are mortals after all. You just try reversing his Aventador out of the garage downstairs. It’s like trying to manoeuvre a grand piano.’

  ‘But attitude was almost the first thing you said about Jérôme Dumas. So maybe he had more attitude than most.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘How did you find him, personally?’

  ‘When he first came to the club, it was like he was a different guy, you know? Full of laughs and jokes. It was impossible not to like Jérôme. Then something happened. I don’t know what. He changed.’

  ‘Changed, how?’

  ‘Perhaps he grew up a little. Became a bit more serious. Took himself a bit more seriously. Too seriously.’ Mandel pulled a face. ‘He was too political for our tastes. Too left wing. He was always shooting his mouth off about things on Twitter that had nothing to do with football and which he ought to have left alone.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘The PS. The French Socialist Party. He gave money to the lefties which hardly endeared him to some of his team mates, none of whom much like paying Hollande’s millionaire tax. I believe he also gave money to some youth groups here in Paris. And you can bet if there was a demonstration he’d have been there. He was a real hypocrite like that.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘We French take revolution very seriously. We don’t like people who play at revolution. For whom it seems to be a pose.’

  ‘Was it a pose?’

  ‘The Lamborghini lefty, that’s what people called him. Mao in a Maserati.’

  ‘Yes, I can see how that might irritate some. Is that why PSG decided to loan him to FCB?’

  Mandel nodded. ‘Then there were the interviews he did with Libération and L’Equipe which pissed a lot of people off and really helped him on his way out of the Parc des Princes.’

  L’Equipe was a French nationwide daily newspaper devoted to sports.

  ‘Is that in the attached file, too?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘By the way, I shall also want to see the recordings of the most recent matches Dumas played for PSG. This season and last season.’

  ‘This seaso
n he’s had one good game. That was back in September, against Barcelona.’

  ‘That was the famous 3–2 in Group F, right?’

  ‘Yes. He was really good that night. He didn’t score himself but he had three good assists. You ask me it was that night which persuaded Barca to take him on loan. I mean, he wasn’t just good in attack, he was good in defence, too.’

  ‘I saw him in the match against Nice. He wasn’t bad then, I thought. Of course I had no idea that I was going to have to pay such close attention to the minutiae of this young man’s life. When you are trying to understand the man and what has happened to him it helps to see him do what he is good at.’

  ‘Very well. I’ll get you some films. Would you prefer DVDs or video files?’

  ‘Video files. And I’ll need some tickets for the next home match. You never know who I might have to sweeten up for some information. You can have them back, of course, if I don’t use them.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Now then. That article in L’Equipe. Read it to me, while I search this place.’

  ‘All right. But tell me what you’re looking for and then maybe I can help you there, too.’

  ‘I really have no idea what I’m looking for, Mr Mandel. I’ll only know it when I see it and even then perhaps not immediately. As so-called detectives go, I’m someone who relies on the discovery of things unsought. The forensic equivalent of penicillin. The trick to this is to realise the significance of what one has found. Which is, of course, not always immediately apparent. It’s the equivalent of the goalkeeper who scores goals as well as saving them. Rogério Ceni scored 123 in his career. That’s not a happy accident. It’s more than that – what the English call serendipity. Since your language doesn’t like to use English words, I would invite you to take rogérioceni as the French equivalent.’

  It sounded good. And I hardly wanted to tell him that serendipity was the only thing I had in my investigative sports bag. The truth was I felt like a physio called onto the pitch to fix a torn Achilles with just a roll of tape and a bottle of smelling salts. Really, it was pathetic how ill-equipped I was to carry out my appointed task.