Philip Kerr - False Nine

My own Zegna suit was hanging neatly in Bella’s closet and, as she had suggested, my gold watch was lying on her bedside table. I hadn’t slept very much but then sleeping seems like a bit of a waste of time when you’re in bed with a naked supermodel. A combination of champagne, red wine and good cognac, not to mention a cigarette and her insistent and clamorous love-making, had left me feeling very slightly fragile. My cock felt like it had been inside a coffee grinder. Which wasn’t so very far from the truth: the woman was a James Brown dream, a real sex machine. I might almost have felt guilty about that if I hadn’t had such a good time. Like the Daft Punk song, I’d stayed up all night to get lucky, and lucky was how I felt.

But for the three hundred pound shoes on my feet I hoped I looked like anyone else in that neighbourhood, which is to say jobless (40 per cent of young people in Sevran are unemployed, or so I’d learned on the internet), African (that was easy for me), tired (that was also easy after my night of passion with Bella) and poor (36 per cent of people in Sevran are below the poverty line). Back in 2005, after three weeks of rioting that ended in a government-imposed state of emergency, there had been talk of a Marshall Plan for the banlieues , but there was little or no sign of any money having been spent here. And it wasn’t difficult to see the evidence of people barely scraping by, and sometimes not at all. The graffiti said it all: SANS ESPOIR , which means ‘without hope’, and I couldn’t have disagreed with that. But for the graffiti I could have been in any London sink estate. Surrounded by 1970s neo-brutalist blocks of flats resembling monochrome Rubik’s cubes, it was the sort of area where they could easily have filmed the French version of films like Harry Brown or Attack the Block and a whole world away from the eighth where Bella’s apartment was situated.

The Algerian guy in the butcher’s shop directed me to the Lidl supermarket, and next to it a recreation area with a rusting Christmas tree sculpture and a plastic football pitch with markings that were barely visible. A boy of about fourteen wearing a cheap tracksuit was standing there with an Adidas Smart Ball under his foot which told me something. These balls cost about 175 euros and it suggested that I might at least be close to the place where Jérôme Dumas had spread some of his cash around; that amount of money was a fortune in a dump like Sevran.

‘I’m looking for the Alain Savary Sports Centre,’ I said.

The boy, who looked to be of Middle Eastern origin, pointed at a low-level concrete square, covered in graffiti, that resembled the police station in Assault on Precinct 13 .

‘Be careful,’ he said.

I walked down a slope and around the building to a security glass front door. Already I could hear loud music — it was NTM’s Paris Sous les Bombes — and smell the skunk. Inside the sports centre there was little sign of sport, just graffiti and a few posters of more French rappers. I wandered into a dressing room where the music was coming from. I knew it was a dressing room because there were lockers although I suspected that none of them contained so much as an old football sock. A gang of youths was grouped there and, seeing me, one of them got off a plastic chair and came to me with a baggy of white powder already in his hand, expecting that I was there to buy drugs.

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘It’s information I’m looking for.’

‘Are you a cop?’

I grinned. ‘Fuck off.’

I sat down on the edge of a Formica table and surveyed the gang who were mostly black, and in their teens, but no less intimidating for all that. But kids are like computers; you give them shit, you get shit back. So I wasn’t intimidated; besides, I always feel comfortable in a dressing room. I looked around me. It was hard to see what Jérôme Dumas could have spent money on in here.

‘No, I work for Paris Saint-Germain,’ I said. ‘The football club. I take it you’ve heard of them.’

‘If you’re scouting for talent, we’re it, Dad.’

‘Yeah, give us a fucking ball and we’ll show you a trick or two.’

‘No, I’m not scouting.’

‘You’re a bit old to be a footballer, Dad.’

‘You’re right. I’m too old now. But I used to play. For Arsenal.’

‘Arsenal’s a good club. Thierry Henry. Sylvain Wiltord.’

‘Arsène Wenger. He’s a good manager.’

I nodded. ‘Know them all.’

‘What’s your name, Dad?’

‘Scott Manson.’

‘Never heard of you.’

‘Yeah, well, my career was tragically cut short, wasn’t it?’

‘Got injured, did you?’

‘Nope. I went to prison. I was banged up for something I didn’t do.’

‘They all say that, Dad,’ said the gang’s apparent leader. He was a handsome boy wearing a PSG hoody tied around his waist and a Dries Van Noten T-shirt. At least I thought it was Dries Van Noten; the satin ‘D’ patch had been torn off but I was pretty sure I’d seen Jérôme Dumas wearing the same T-shirt in a picture that Bella had shown me in her own portfolio.

‘True,’ I said.

‘How long for?’

‘Long enough for it to end any hopes I might have had of a winner’s medal.’

‘From what I hear nothing’s changed at Arsenal.’

‘Yeah, it’s been a while since anyone there got a winner’s medal for anything.’

I let that one go. An FA Cup means less than it did of old, even to those who win it.

‘I remember,’ said the leader. ‘You raped that chick, didn’t you?’

‘They said I did. But I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s all. The police thought I looked good for it and fitted me up.’

‘Yeah, we all know how that works.’

‘So what brings you down here?’

‘Like I say, I’m working for PSG now. I’m what you might call a fixer. I’m a guy they call on when they want something sorted. On account of the fact that a lot of footballers are just bad boys. Just like you. Right now I’m looking for Jérôme Dumas. They sent a fuck-up to find a fuck-up, you might say. Dumas didn’t turn up for training and they told me to check out all his usual haunts, see if I can’t find him. His lady told me he used to spend money on this sports centre. Although I really can’t see the evidence of that.’

The leader laughed. ‘He used to come here all right. Only it wasn’t to spend money on this fucking sports centre.’

Everyone thought that was funny.

Easy does it, I thought. Best not be too direct about this. They might be chary of dropping him in it.

‘Look, I won’t ask what he got up to when he was here. It’s none of my business. But we’re worried something might have happened to the guy. That maybe he’s done himself in. Gone on a bender. Lost more than a weekend, you might say. So when was the last time you saw him?’

‘Couple of weeks before Christmas.’

‘It’s no big secret what he did when he came here to Sevran-Beaudottes, man,’ said the leader. ‘He used to buy his weed and blow from us.’

‘I never figured him as the type to put stuff up his nose,’ I said.

‘The blow was for his ladies. You know, to get them in the mood for love, right? All he did was smoke a little bit of weed and hang out. He liked to talk politics. Like maybe he wanted to be one himself one day. He wanted to hear what we had to say about all kinds of shit. He didn’t just want to talk the talk, he wanted to walk the walk, too. I guess you could say he liked to pretend he was down with us. Which was cool because he was generous. Brought us clothes and trainers from fashion shoots he’d been on. Cash, too. Jérôme gave us money for all kinds of shit. He might have suggested that we use it to buy sports kit and shit like that but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. For one thing, who would come here to play us who wasn’t soft in the head?’