Philip Kerr - False Nine

We chatted for a while, ordered dinner. I even tried to flirt with her a little.

‘Bella Macchina. It means beautiful car, doesn’t it? In Italian?’

‘Yes.’

She didn’t volunteer any information about her name and it didn’t seem worth irritating her by asking about it. I don’t suppose any of the women in France or England ever thought about it; after all, she’d been on the cover of the Christmas issue of Paris Vogue wearing what looked to me like a Lagerfeld parody of an SS uniform, so what did they care what her name meant in Italian.

‘Jérôme used to say I was the Lamborghini of women. Difficult to drive.’

‘That’s for sure. I mean the car, not you.’

‘Is it difficult to drive?’

‘I think you’d have to be Lewis Hamilton to drive it well.’

‘Lewis who?’

I smiled. What did it really matter if she hadn’t ever heard of Lewis Hamilton? I find that you can forgive a really beautiful woman an almost prelapsarian level of ignorance. And I was damn sure that there were plenty of English footballers I knew who couldn’t have told you who Winston Churchill was. So, what the hell? Just to be seated opposite her made me feel more attractive. It was like someone had instructed her beauty to sit on a flowery island and sing out to passing sailors in order to lure the shirts off their backs. There were no prices on the enormous menu given to her by the waiter but she knew instinctively what to choose that would cause the most damage to a man’s credit card. It was as well that FCB was picking up my expenses.

I took her hand and inhaled the scent. If music be the food of love then smell and touch are certainly the hors d’oeuvres. I was starting to feel hungry.

‘Nice,’ I said. ‘I bet you can’t find that in Duty Free.’

‘No. That’s one of the reasons I wear it. I don’t like smelling like anyone else.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘You could eat a hamburger with extra onions and mustard and you still wouldn’t smell like anyone else.’

She liked that.

We talked about all sorts of things though I really can’t remember what. Opposite her I was doing well just to remember my own name and it was quite a while before we got around to talking about Jérôme Dumas. With her perfect smile faltering a little, like a flickering light bulb, she sighed, shook her head and ran her manicure over the mini spikes on her evening bag as she told me about him.

‘In some ways he’s a very caring man. Thoughtful. Always generous. He does a lot of charity work for UNICEF and for cystic fibrosis charities. In other ways he’s the most selfish man I ever met.’

‘How did you meet?’

‘We met during Paris Fashion Week in 2013 when we were both doing modelling for Dries Van Noten and G-Star RAW,’ she explained. ‘We were wearing G-Star’s latest untreated denim jeans. I think they liked the fact that he was so black and I was so white. So did I. And so did he. The Othello shoot, they called it. You know? Like the famous play?’

A little more familiar with the play than the brands, I nodded.

‘It wasn’t love at first sight. But it was something close to it, perhaps. We started seeing each other almost immediately. Like you, he’s a very beautiful man. And he pursued me relentlessly. He showered me with gifts. This Cartier bracelet was a gift from him on my birthday.’

She lifted her arm to show me the solid gold band around her wrist; it had the head of a panther with emeralds for eyes and diamonds for a collar and it certainly looked very expensive.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’

‘It certainly is.’

‘We went to the shop on Place Vendôme to choose it.’ Without any trace of embarrassment, she added, ‘And that was the night we first slept together.’

It figured, I told myself. I didn’t know how much those little baubles cost but, looking at it now, I didn’t think there would be much change out of a year’s wages for some regular Jean.

‘I hate to ask about your private life,’ I said. ‘But it’s important that I try to cover all of the possibilities as to why he might have disappeared. To that end I need to know how things were between you. So if I apologise if occasionally I manage to sound like a cop.’

She nodded her assent to being gently probed.

‘Well, at least you don’t look like one.’

‘You were together for how long?’

‘About a year.’

‘Maybe you could tell me why you guys broke up.’

‘He was seeing other women.’ Bella pulled a face. ‘Although “seeing” doesn’t begin to cover what he was doing. And “other women” hardly explains what they were.’ She shrugged. ‘They were prostitutes. High-end escorts. Two at a time, usually. Jérôme liked to see two women in bed together. I hold myself responsible for that, mind you. On his birthday last summer I hired a hooker myself and had her make love to me while he watched us.’

I tried to stop myself grinning as, for a brief second, I imagined her in bed with another woman. It wasn’t the kind of birthday present any woman had ever given me, but then I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure I’d have been entirely comfortable watching another woman go down on my girlfriend.

‘I bet that blew his candles out,’ I said.

‘He liked it a bit too much, actually. After that he was always inviting girls around in pairs to his apartment. It got so that I refused to go there in case I found the kind of evidence I couldn’t ignore. You know, women’s panties, contraceptive packets, manacles, that kind of thing.’

‘Right.’

‘There were two women in particular he liked to hire. From an agency that called itself the Elysée Palace. They were American twins. Blonde, very expensive and very, very tall. L’Wren Scott tall. At least six feet and taller in high heels. He called them the Twin Towers and by his account — he was quite open about it — they would do anything. With footballers you expect that a bit. I mean, they’re athletes, with appetites and a culture — or perhaps the lack of one — to match. But it wasn’t what I was looking for in a relationship. I’m five years older than him. And I would like to settle down and have a family, sooner rather than later. We’d even talked about me coming with him to Spain. I love Barcelona and it seemed that there might be quite a bit of work there for me. There was a strong possibility that Hoss Intropia or Desigual were going to make me the face of their new look. And there was even some talk that a top retail brand in Spain were prepared to give me my own line in underwear. Which would have been fantastic.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d like to have seen your own ideas on underwear.’

Bella smiled sadly and touched my hand.

‘Anyway, things came to a head between us just before Christmas. Jérôme had booked a holiday for us in Antigua — just the two of us — and then I found a sex-toy under the bed. Which I was really pissed off about and which almost persuaded me to end our relationship right then and there. I took his word that he was prepared to change, that he was prepared to stop whoring and to give up all other women. But even as we were talking and he was promising to turn over a new leaf another woman called Dominique was texting him a very lovey-dovey picture of the two of them together. I couldn’t believe it. It looked as if they’d been on some holiday I didn’t even know about. And it really was the final straw when he lied to my face about it. So that was the last time I saw him. I’m sorry he’s missing, Scott, but I’ve completely washed my hands of him. This is going to be a Jérôme-free year for me. I’ve no wish ever to see him again.’

‘Then I apologise again for asking you to describe things that might be painful for you.’