Philip Kerr - False Nine

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

‘Fair enough.’

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.’