Philip Kerr - Hand of God

‘It’s something I always do back home,’ I said, seeing Valentina’s sceptical look. ‘For luck. You can’t get any if you don’t give any. Football’s cruel, sometimes very cruel. You have to make sure the capricious gods of football are properly appeased. You shouldn’t even be in the game unless you’re an optimist and to be an optimist means you cannot be a cynic. You have to believe in people.’

‘You don’t strike me as the superstitious sort, Scott.’

‘It’s not superstition,’ I said. ‘It’s just pragmatic to take a balanced approach to good luck and to careful preparation. It’s actually the clever thing to do. Luck has a way of favouring the clever.’

‘We’ll see, won’t we?’

‘Oh, I think Hertha will win. In fact, I’m sure of it.’

‘Is that because you’re half German?’

‘No. It’s because I’m clever. And because I believe in totaler Krieg . Football that takes no prisoners.’

Inside the museum were the treasures of ancient Greece, including the famous gold mask of Agamemnon that Bastian Hoehling had mentioned, back in Berlin. It looked like something made by a child out of gold foil from a chocolate bar. But it was another treasure that Valentina had brought me to see. As soon as I saw it I gasped out loud. This was a life-size bronze statue of Zeus that many years before had been recovered from the sea. What struck me most was not the rendering of motion and human anatomy but the head of Zeus, with its shovel beard and cornrow haircut.

‘My God,’ I exclaimed, ‘it’s Bekim.’

‘Yes.’ Valentina laughed delightedly. ‘He could have modelled for this bronze,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t he?’

‘Even the way he stands,’ I said, ‘mid-stride, in the act of throwing a spear or hurling a thunderbolt, that’s exactly the way Bekim always celebrates scoring a goal. Or nearly always.’

‘I thought it would appeal to you.’

‘Does he know?’

‘Does he know?’ Valentina laughed again. ‘Of course he does. It’s his secret. He grew his beard so he would look like this statue; and when he scores he always thinks of Zeus.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not sure he actually thinks he’s a god, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’

I walked around the statue several times, grinning like an idiot as I pictured Bekim adopting this same pose.

And yet, perfect as the statue was, there was something wrong with it, too. The more I looked at it the more it seemed that the outstretched left hand was wrong, that it was attached to an arm several inches too long; later on, I bought a postcard and measured the approximate length of the arm, and realized that the hand would actually have reached down as far as the god’s knee. Had the sculptor got it wrong? Or had the original display angle of the figure required an extended arm to avoid a foreshortened look? It was hard to be sure but to my critical eye, the hand of God appeared to be reaching just a little too far.

She nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier, about being lucky.’

‘Yes? What about it?’

‘I think you’re going to be lucky,’ she said, and taking my hand she squeezed it, meaningfully.

‘When?’

‘Tonight.’

I lifted her hand to my mouth and kissed it. The nails were short, but immaculately varnished, while the skin on the palm of her hand was like soft leather, which struck me as strange. ‘And I thought you were talking about the football.’

‘Who says I’m not?’

I smiled. ‘I suppose that means you’re coming to the game.’

The Karaiskakis Stadium, in the old port of Piraeus, looked like a half-sized version of the Emirates, in London, with a capacity of just 33,000. The impression was bolstered by the fact that Emirates Air was an Olympiacos team sponsor and because of their red and white strip, although the shirt was more like Sunderland’s than Arsenal’s. The match was not well attended, but it was enthusiastically supported. The Gate 7 boys, or Legend as they liked to call themselves, made their calculatedly intimidating presence very loudly felt behind the German goal. They had bare chests and big drums and a sort of director of operations who kept his back to the pitch for almost the whole game so that he might properly orchestrate the obscene songs and low, Neanderthal chants. From time to time bright red flares were let off in the stadium but these were ignored by the police and security, who kept a low profile to the point of near invisibility. I was surprised at how unwilling the local police were to interfere in what took place inside the ground; they were forbidden to use the security cameras inside the stadium to identify potential troublemakers, a result of some obscure privacy law.

Valentina and I were seated in a VIP area immediately behind the German dugout. At eighty euros a ticket in a country where the average monthly income was just six hundred and fifty euros you might have expected these mostly middle-aged and elderly supporters to be better behaved. Not a bit of it. I don’t speak any Greek but thanks to Valentina I was soon able to distinguish and understand words that would certainly have had the users of their Anglo-Saxon equivalents quickly removed from almost any ground in England. Words like arápis (nigger), afrikanós migás (coon), maïmoú (monkey), melitzána (eggplant), píthikos (ape).

The man in the seat beside me must have been in his late sixties but every so often he would leave off smoking his Cohiba cigar or eating his cardamom seeds, leap onto the top of wall, bend over the edge of the German dugout and bellow, ‘ Germaniká malakas ,’ at the unfortunate Bastian Hoehling.

‘I keep on hearing that phrase, Germaniká malakas ,’ I said to Valentina. ‘I get the Germaniká part. But what does malakas mean?’

‘It means wanker,’ she said. ‘That’s a very popular word in Greece. You can’t get by without it.’

I found it hard to condemn the man for his choice of language. As I’d discovered, there are worse things to be called at a Greek football match. It’s a passionate game and stupid people watch it just as often as clever ones; you can encourage respect in football, and I was all in favour of that, but you can’t stop people from being ignorant.

The match was keenly contested but the Greeks seemed genuinely surprised that the Berliners should have come at them so aggressively. Although Olympiacos competed strongly for every ball, they were quickly behind thanks to a superb header from Hertha’s talented Adrian Ramos that made me understand why Borussia Dortmund were so keen to secure the Colombian’s services after their own top striker, Robert Lewandowski, had left to join Bayern Munich in the early summer. But oddly the Gate 7 boys didn’t even pause; indeed, they carried on shouting as if the German goal had not happened.

Meanwhile, trying my best to ignore the crowd, I made tactical notes in an ancient Filofax I always used for this kind of thing:

Greeks weak at defending set-pieces. Muscular and fit-looking, but small of stature which makes them less equipped to compete in the air when good crosses swing in. Bekim Develi or Prometheus can give anyone problems if they get the right service. Develi tends to drift naturally to the right and this should probably be encouraged as Miguel Torres, likely Olympiacos’s right left-back, plays more like a right-winger than a defender — especially if Hernán Pérez isn’t playing, which he wasn’t today. If Develi does find space, or drags out Sambou Yatabaré (most likely centre half), he is more than capable of putting Jimmy Ribbans through. I hope our referee will be better than the one here today. I wouldn’t be surprised if the penalty earned him a small bonus .