Hand of God

  ‘I understand, sir. I’m prasinos, myself. Green through and through. I have no love for Olympiacos. The way that bastard Hristos Trikoupis behaved after the game was a disgrace to this country. I’m surprised you didn’t hit him. So I would enjoy it very much if you beat those bastards when next you play them. I tell you, it was the best moment of my life when the Greek Football Federation stripped the gavroi of all those points and took the championship away from them. So, I will tell you what I know.

  ‘Valentina – I don’t know her surname – but this was a nice woman, for a Russian. She always left me good tips, you know? Her Greek was very good. As was her English. She liked going to art galleries and museums. And she always carried a book, which is unusual. Also I think maybe she lived close to this hotel because one time when I was going home on my scooter I saw her walking in the street. She looked like she was also going home. Where was this now? Around the corner. Somewhere between Akademias and Skoufas.’

  ‘Why do you think she was going home?’

  ‘The streets are very steep there and she had her shoes off. The way women do when they’ve finished for the evening. Like they don’t mind if they get their feet dirty.’

  I nodded. ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘In here I never seen her with any other guy I recognised. But I did see her with another girl. Not a girl with a labyrinth tattoo on her shoulder. Another girl.’

  ‘Do you have a name for this other girl?’

  ‘No. But I can tell you who this girl is. I can even tell you where to find her.’ He looked across my shoulder and nodded at the girl with the beanstalk legs who even now was leaving the Alexander bar with her diminutive friend. ‘It was her. I’m sure of it. This girl was a friend of Valentina’s. She’s Russian, too.’

  I finished my Scotch and was about to follow them when the barman took me by the arm.

  ‘The guy with her is staying in the hotel. And I expect they’re going upstairs to his room. You wait there, and I’ll make sure.’

  He followed them out of the bar and was gone for a couple of minutes. When he came back he collected the leather folder and the bill off the table where the girl with the legs had been seated.

  ‘Mr Overton went up to room 327 with her.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  The bar man grinned and flipped open the folder to reveal the bill with the Australian’s name and room number written there by him.

  ‘I followed them to the elevator,’ he said. ‘Now all you have to do is wait for her to come down again.’

  I looked at my watch; it was just eight thirty. ‘It’s kind of early,’ I said. ‘They could be a while, don’t you think?’

  The barman shook his head. ‘A girl like that costs a lot of money,’ he said. ‘My guess is that she’ll be back down here in the lobby just before ten. You can set your watch by some of these girls. Tell you what: I’ll speak to the concierge and get him to send her up to your room when she’s through with the other guy. Until then, relax. Have another drink.’

  I ordered a beer. The Macallan 1973 was good, but it wasn’t worth three hundred and ten euros a glass. Nothing is.

  26

  My iPhone rang in the royal suite. It was Peter Scriven, the team’s travel manager.

  ‘The hotel manager is already asking me how long I think we’re going to be here. He’s got other guests who are arriving at the weekend. The Ministry of Culture is trying to find us another hotel but it’s high season and things are tight.’

  ‘They can’t have it both ways. They can’t forcibly detain us in their country and throw us out of our fucking hotel. Can they?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past them, boss. This is Greece. From what I’ve read about us in the papers we should count ourselves lucky they’re not demanding the Elgin marbles back before they let us go.’

  The doorbell rang.

  ‘I’ve got to go, Pete. Talk to you later.’

  The girl standing at the front door smiled broadly when she saw that the occupant of the royal suite didn’t actually look like a royal and said, ‘Hi, I’m Jasmine. Panos said you were looking for company.’

  ‘Panos?’

  ‘The barman downstairs.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Come in, come in. ‘

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’m Scott,’ I said, closing the door behind her. ‘Pleased to meet you, Jasmine.’

  ‘Are you here on business?’

  ‘In a way.’

  She stalked slowly around the suite like a girl holding the round card for a fight at the MGM Grand. In the wine cellar she squealed; and in the dining room she let out a gasp. Then, for a moment, she stood up on tiptoe by the fifth-floor window, looking one way and the other, like a beautiful meerkat.

  ‘Great view,’ she said.

  ‘It is from where I’m standing,’ I muttered, then added, ‘This suite is a little fancy for my taste, but then I’m not royal.’

  ‘Oh, I like it. I like it a lot.’ She sat down on one of the many sofas and arranged her legs, carefully, which is to say what I was now looking at was a perfect geometry of flesh and high-heels that Euclid never dreamed of – for which the only algebraic formula could be S=EX2.

  I offered her a drink from the extensive bar. She asked for a Coke. I fetched us both one from the fridge and sat down beside her on the sofa. Her hair was nicely combed and she smelt lightly of scent; it was hard to believe that she’d just come from another guy’s bed. But then some of these girls can scrub up in less time than it takes for a scally to steal a car.

  ‘Can we get the business out of the way first of all?’ I asked, like a real John.

  ‘I’m glad you mentioned that,’ she said. ‘It’s five hundred for an hour. Eight for two. And two thousand for the whole night. Nice suite like this. Be a shame to waste it sleeping.’

  I took out my wallet and counted four new one hundred Euro notes onto the coffee table. ‘Listen, Jasmine. All I want to do is talk.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What do you want to talk about, Scott?’

  ‘Jasmine,’ I said. ‘You’re Russian, right?’

  She nodded, suspiciously. ‘You’re not a cop, are you?’

  ‘This is the royal suite, not police headquarters. And that’s cash on the table, not a bailout from the European Central Bank. Really, I’m not a cop. I hate the cops.’

  Jasmine shrugged. ‘Some of them aren’t so bad.’

  ‘Do you know a girl called Valentina, Jasmine? And please don’t say, no, because I know you do. Your friend Panos told me. All I really want from you is some information about her. You tell me what you know about her, you take the money and then you go. Simple as that.’

  ‘Is she in trouble?’

  ‘No. Not yet. As a matter of fact that’s what I’m trying to save her from. It’s important that I speak to her before the cops do. Really, you’d be doing her a favour. Nobody wants cops in their life. Not if they can help it. I had a brush with them once, in London, and it’s left me badly scarred. Cops are like herpes: once you’ve had them, they always come back.’

  ‘You want her phone number? Her email? I can give you this. For free.’

  She opened her bag and took out a little notebook and after consulting it for a minute or so, she wrote a number and email on a piece of paper.

  I glanced at it. I knew the number by heart, I’d already called it so many times; and her email was almost as familiar.

  ‘Any other contact numbers? A postal address? A Skype address, perhaps? Only I’ve been ringing this number all day and she hasn’t called back.’

  Jasmine shook her head. ‘That’s all I have. Sorry.’

  ‘Pity.’

  I didn’t suppose for a minute that Jasmine was this girl’s real name; I imagined she’d chosen it because she thought the name made her seem more alluring; it didn’t. I was doing my best to be brisk and businesslike, but it wasn’t working very well, at least not for me. She couldn’t have seemed more alluring to me if I’
d been tied to the mast of the Argo.

  ‘All right. Let’s try something different. Did you ever work together? You know, for a client who wanted to see two girls. That kind of thing?’

  It was a pleasant thought; and one that would have been all too easy to have made a reality.

  ‘I asked her to do this once. But she said no. She preferred to work alone. Without an agency. And to pick and choose who her clients were. She could have made much more money than she did, I think. Have you met her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you know what I’m talking about. She’s so beautiful. And clever, too.’

  ‘What else can you tell me about her?’

  ‘She is from Moscow. A graduate in Russian literature. She likes going to art galleries and museums. She’s into sculpture, I think.’

  ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘In the bathroom downstairs. She spoke to me. I guess I looked a bit more obvious than she did back then. She gave me a few tips on how to tone it down a bit so I wouldn’t get thrown out of places like this. Once or twice I saw her in here, at the Intercontinental, or the St George. We would say hello and sometimes have a drink if we were waiting for someone. I liked her.’

  ‘Can you think of anyone else who knew her? Other girls, perhaps?’

  ‘No. Like I said, she didn’t work through an agency or from a website. She relied on word of mouth.’

  ‘What about a girl with a tattoo on her shoulder? A tattoo of a labyrinth.’

  Jasmine frowned. ‘I’ve seen a girl like that talking to Valentina, perhaps. But I didn’t know her name.’

  ‘Was she Russian, too?’

  ‘I think so. A lot of the girls working in Athens are Russians these days.’

  I decided to level with Jasmine in the hope that what I told her would jog her memory, or even scare her into remembering something.

  ‘The reason I’m asking is this, Jasmine: the girl with the labyrinth tattoo was found drowned in the harbour at Marina Zea sometime yesterday morning. As yet she hasn’t been identified. All I know is that she might have known Valentina and that Valentina might be able to identify her.’

  ‘But why? You said you weren’t a cop.’

  ‘I’m not. When did you last see Valentina?’

  ‘Not for a while.’ She shrugged. ‘There are so many girls doing this kind of thing in Greece since the recession that it’s hard to keep track of anyone. People drop out of the business all the time. But there’s no shortage of girls to take their place.’

  ‘One last question. Valentina’s clients. Did you ever see her with one?’

  ‘Maybe. But it’s not the kind of thing you talk about.’

  ‘Come on, Jasmine. It’s important.’

  ‘All right. I saw her with two clients. One was at a restaurant here in Athens called Spondi, with that footballer who died the other night: Bekim Develi. The other time she was getting into a man’s car. Outside here, as it happens. A nice car. A new black Maserati.’

  ‘Expensive.’

  She shrugged. ‘Believe me, this guy – he can afford it.’

  ‘You recognised him? The client?’

  Jasmine hesitated. Her eyes were on the money. ‘If I tell you who it was, you won’t say it was me who told you.’

  I placed another fifty on the table. ‘Not a word.’

  ‘It was Hristos Trikoupis,’ she said.

  ‘The Olympiacos manager?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Are you sure it was Hristos Trikoupis?’

  ‘Yes,’ she sneered. ‘It was him all right.’

  ‘You’re not a fan then?’

  ‘Of Olympiacos? No.’

  ‘Why? Because you support Panathinaikos?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘My boyfriend supports PAOK. He’s from Thessaloniki. Believe me, they hate Olympiacos just as much as those bastards from Panathinaikos.’

  ‘Football,’ I said. ‘Ninety minutes of sport and a Trajan’s Column of hatred and resentment.’

  ‘Is it any different in England?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.’

  ‘No, you’ve helped me a lot. Really, you have. You can take your money and go if you like.’

  She gathered up the money and left.

  27

  The next morning I was outside the hotel at seven o’clock to find several journalists and TV crews waiting for me on what was left of the hotel’s marble steps. These looked as if someone had attacked them with a hammer.

  ‘What happened here?’ I asked the doorman.

  ‘Some people decided to throw some rocks at parliament last night,’ he explained. ‘So they used bits of our steps.’

  ‘You’re never getting the Elgin Marbles back. All right?’

  I pushed my way through the scrum of microphones and cameras to where Charilaos was parked in the black Range Rover Sport, without giving any of the comments that first sprang into my mind.

  ‘Morning, Charilaos,’ I said. ‘It looks like the press have tracked me down again.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked as I closed the door.

  ‘Apilion,’ I said. ‘Training session. Then Laiko General Hospital. Then back here at twelve for a meeting with Chief Inspector Varouxis.’

  ‘Okay, sir. And call me Charlie. Everyone does.’

  We drove off. In the back seat were some of the Greek newspapers and on most of the front pages was a likeness of the dead girl as drawn by a police artist. He or she had managed to make her look like the princess from a Disney cartoon and it was hard to imagine that a member of the public seeing this sketch would be prompted to call the police – except to recommend another artist.

  I tossed the Greek papers aside and, for a while, read The Times I’d downloaded onto my iPad. There were plenty of column inches about City’s plight in Athens. And now that UEFA had agreed for us to play our home match against Olympiacos at the ground of Panathinaikos, the story held even more interest that it had before.

  ‘Will you need me this afternoon, sir?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘I’m afraid so. I thought I’d go and see my opposite number. Hristos Trikoupis. To discuss next week’s match. I don’t suppose you’d know where I could find him this afternoon.’

  ‘You could always ring him up and ask,’ suggested Charlie.

  ‘I’d prefer him not to know I was coming.’

  ‘Olympiacos have a match on Sunday evening. Against Aris. Right now he’s probably at their training centre, in Rentis. You’ll find it’s very different from Apilion. Those red bastards have much more money.’

  ‘You’re not a fan, then, of Olympiacos.’

  ‘No, sir. I’ve been always been Panathinaikos. Ever since I was a kid.’

  ‘I envy you that, Charlie. You lose that devotion to just one team when you enter the world of professional football. Once you start playing for money you’re a gun for hire and it’s never the same again. Sometimes I think it would be nice just to follow a team; to be able to go and watch a game and be like everyone else, you know?’

  ‘Right now it looks like it’s us being followed, sir.’

  I turned around in my seat.

  ‘That silver Skoda Octavia,’ he said. ‘It was parked outside the hotel when I arrived this morning. And I’ve been around the block twice just to make sure.’

  ‘Fucking journalists,’ I said. ‘When there’s a piece of shit around there’s always one of them there to peck at it.’

  ‘More like cops,’ said Charlie.

  I turned around again.

  ‘How do you work that out?’

  ‘Because no one else in Athens wants to drive the same shitty car as the Hellenic Police. And because there are just two of them.’

  ‘If they’re cops, why the fuck are they following me?’

  ‘Without wanting to alarm you, it’s probably for your protection, sir. Now that it’s been announced in the newspapers that you’re playing the next leg against those red mal
akes in our stadium, there will be plenty of them who think you’ve made common cause with their most mortal enemies: the Greens. You might actually be in danger of being attacked yourself.’

  ‘That’s a comforting thought.’

  Ten or fifteen minutes later we saw Mount Hymettus. The only clouds in the otherwise blue sky were collected on the undulating summit as if to shield the gods from the importunate eyes of men. I could have wished for such privacy; the press were also in full force outside the training ground and Charlie was obliged to slow the car to a crawl as we approached the gate.

  The training session was already in progress; and Simon Page’s voice carried across the playing fields like a Yorkshire zephyr. No matter how many times I heard him explaining the purpose of a particular training exercise he always made me smile; this was no exception:

  ‘It was Edson Arantes do Nascimento, more usefully known to us as Pelé, who first described football as the beautiful game. Now in Brazilian football the sole of the foot is used to control the ball much more often than in England. Like this. Left to right. To left, to right. If it feels odd to you that’s good; that’s why we’re practising this. You can pass with the sole, you can dribble with the sole, you can check the ball with the sole. Most of what you see from Cristiano Ronaldo involves the sole of the boot. That boy can do more with the underneath of his foot than a fucking chimpanzee. So what I want to see now is you passing the ball from one sole to another, left to right to left. Slowly at first with one leg planted on the floor, and then, running on the spot, left to right to left. Nice and wide. Okay. Off you go. Don’t look at the fucking ball, Gary. Keep your heads up. If this was a fucking game you’d be looking for someone to pass to. Even a greedy bugger like you, Jimmy.’

  Seeing me, Simon walked over to the touchline and with arms folded watched our players as they continued with their technical training.

  ‘If you can get Gary Ferguson to play like a Brazilian I’ll eat your England cap,’ I said. ‘He’s got the ball skills of Douglas fucking Bader.’

  ‘Aye, but he’s got the best eye for the ball of any centre back I’ve seen. Not to mention shin bones like a couple of crowbars. Gary could take the legs off a bloody dining table.’