Philip Kerr - False Nine

‘It’s okay. I had a pretty miserable Christmas about it but really, I’m over him now.’

‘Did he call and try to persuade you to change your mind?’

‘Maybe. Yes, I should think so. But I changed all my numbers and my email address so he couldn’t persuade me. And for Christmas I went back to stay with my parents in Arras so he couldn’t find me at my apartment.’

‘So how did Alice get hold of you?’

‘I gave her my number on the strict condition that she didn’t give it to Jérôme. When he got loaned to Barcelona she lost her job, of course, and asked me if I could help her find another. It’s not so easy now, finding jobs in Paris. As a matter of fact I was thinking of employing her myself. She’s very loyal. I like that. I think perhaps she was a little in love with Jérôme.’

‘Did you know he was taking antidepressants?’

‘Yes. He wasn’t very good at keeping secrets.’

‘Do you think he might have been suicidal?’

‘No. Not him. He loved himself too much.’

‘What about his mother? She died about six months ago, didn’t she? A man can take that quite hard.’

‘They were close. But not close enough for it to have made him suicidal. I don’t know for sure. But I think he was scared about something. Something that wasn’t related to football which might have been getting him down.’

‘Oh? Like what?’

‘I’m not sure. He enjoyed playing politics, as I expect you know. And he wasn’t very popular with the police because he had said some things about them that they didn’t like. Sometimes he said he thought of himself as the Russell Brand of football. Anyway, a month or two ago, there was a big demonstration about something on the Place de la Bastille. While it was happening a girl was attacked by a black guy. Almost raped. You can see it on YouTube, I think. When she described her attacker to the police she said he looked a bit like Jérôme Dumas. She didn’t actually mean that it was Jérôme Dumas who’d attacked her but by the time the description was put out on police radio the police had decided it was him they were looking for. And he was arrested. It took him several hours to convince the police that he had an alibi. I was his alibi. I had to go to the station and tell them that he’d been with me at the time of the attack. Which was true.’

This all sounded very familiar and I told Bella that something very similar had happened to me.

‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘the police took him to the station and while they had him in custody they were a bit rough with him, I think. And when they’d finished with the rape charges they suggested his involvement with the banlieue gangs was a lot more than him giving money and clothes to a youth centre in Sevran. That he was actively involved with the drugs trade. Which wasn’t so hard to believe if you’re a white policeman in Paris. Someone like Jérôme cultivated the black gangsta rapper look. As he was leaving the station the police told him they would be keeping a very close eye on him. I think some of them were PSG fans who didn’t like what he’d said in L’Equipe . Anyway, that’s what scared him. The idea that they were out to get him.’

‘Is that what they said?’

‘In so many words.’

‘Why didn’t Mandel tell me about this?’

‘He didn’t know about it. Nor did Alice. No one did. Jérôme and I — we kept it very quiet in case it affected his chance of a transfer out of PSG. At the time that’s what he was hoping for. He’d been linked with clubs like Arsenal and Chelsea as well as Barcelona and he thought — probably correctly — that any talk of an arrest for rape or drug dealing might affect that.’

‘He wouldn’t be wrong,’ I said. ‘English football clubs are very conservative. Especially now that the sisterhood is so very well mobilised on Twitter. The opinion of women about football and footballers used to count for nothing. Now it can be the difference between keeping your job and losing it. Big Brother is watching you, all right, only Big Brother is us, ourselves. Smartphones at the ready, we’re all Big Brother now, don’t you think?’

Bella nodded and smiled through that and it was clear to me that she really didn’t know who or what Big Brother really was or what I was even talking about. But to be fair I wasn’t that sure George Orwell had ever made much of an impact in France.

‘Fortunately,’ she said, ‘all the story amounted to in the newspapers was that the woman who’d been attacked had given a description of a black man who looked a bit like Jérôme Dumas and the whole thing just morphed into a few column inches about how the police were so racist and stupid that they’d put this out as the description of the man they were looking for. You know — as if all black men look alike? His actual arrest passed them by.’

‘Have you ever been to this youth centre?’

‘Are you joking? No way. It’s one thing for someone like Jérôme Dumas to go there, on public transport — when he wanted to be, he could be very anonymous, you know? — but it’s something else for a tall white blonde to go somewhere like that. Don’t get me wrong. I like the Metro. But in Sevran a woman like me — I’m just a mugging waiting to happen.’

‘You are in that dress,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of mugging you myself when we left here.’

She smiled but I wasn’t sure she’d understood what I meant.

‘It’s Miu Miu. I’m glad you like it. Miuccia Prada is one of my favourite designers. The pink shearling coat I was wearing when I came in here is Miu Miu, too. Such a clever woman. Did you know that in 2014 Forbes magazine ranked her in the top one hundred most powerful women in the world?’

‘I didn’t know that. Anyway, the thing is, I think I might have to go to Sevran tomorrow,’ I said. ‘What’s this place called, do you know? The youth centre?’

‘I think it’s called the Alain Savary Centre.’

‘Who’s he?’

Bella laughed. ‘I haven’t the first idea. Someone who liked football, I expect. There are plenty of those in France. By the way, if you go there you’d best leave that nice gold watch in your hotel room safe. What is it — a Hublot? The Big Bang Gold?’

I nodded, realising at last we’d managed to find a subject about which she was extremely well-informed: fashion and luxury goods. I expect she had a master’s degree from Net-A-Porter.

‘It’s my favourite man’s watch in the world. Carlo Crocco is a friend of mine, although the brand is now owned by Louis Vuitton, of course.’

‘Of course.’

Bella touched my hand again and this time she didn’t take it away. She let it rest lightly on mine. ‘Better still, Scott. Why don’t you leave your lovely watch on my bedside table? Along with those handsome gold cufflinks, and that nice matching tiepin. And your wallet probably. That way you’ll still have all your nice things safe when you come back from Sevran.’

From Bella’s apartment near Parc Monceau I took the train to Sevran-Beaudottes station where I asked in the halal butcher’s shop, for directions to the Alain Savary Sports Centre.

Looking for his name on the internet, it turned out that Alain Savary was a French socialist politician and a former Minister of National Education which probably explained why Bella Macchina hadn’t heard of him. Education wasn’t working in France any better than it was working in England.

I was wearing some of the gangster-style clothes that Jérôme Dumas had previously left behind at Bella’s apartment: a hoody, a battered Belstaff motorcycle jacket, a pair of ripped G-Star RAW jeans and a casquette on my head — a baseball hat with a PSG logo on the front which was oddly hateful to me. The anomalous brown Crockett & Jones shoes were my own as the Converse trainers forgotten by Dumas were too small.