Philip Kerr - False Nine

Of course I knew that eventually I would feel guilty; just not yet.

‘Want a cigarette?’

‘No, thanks. I really only smoke when it means keeping someone I like company. Like last night. No one should have to smoke alone. Least of all a beautiful woman. And certainly not in this city. So, tell me more about Jérôme’s gun.’

‘It was a black thing, he said.’

‘I’m black. And I’ve never wanted to own a gun.’

‘A gangster thing. You know, like 5 °Cent or Ice Cube. He liked to wave it around in his apartment. To point it at the mirror and pose with it. That’s all. He was like a kid with it. Although sometimes he had it under his pillow. It was more of a style thing, I guess. I mean, he wore the clothes and listened to the music and, from what you’ve told me, he got down with the guys on the street. I think the gun was just part of all that bullshit. Like I said, this guy is five years younger than me. And it showed sometimes, you know? He liked his toys. The Lamborghini. The gold chains. The diamond panther studs in his ears. He bought them at the same time as he bought my bracelet, from Cartier. They were thirty-five thousand euros.’

‘What kind of a gun was it? Can you remember?’

‘I don’t know. It’s not like they’re made by Hermès, are they? One gun is much like another to me.’

‘A handgun.’

‘Yes.’

‘Revolver or automatic?’

Bella thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know. No, wait. I have something.’

She slipped out of bed and walked into the bathroom where she hauled open several drawers.

‘An ex-boyfriend gave me this when I was last in the States,’ she called out and I began to wonder what it was she was looking for. Another gun?

But when she returned to the bedroom she was carrying a box containing what was described as a MAGNUMDRYER: Model 357. The authentic western gun hair dryer . It had a pink handle and an extra large silver barrel. A novelty, obviously, but the kind that might easily get you killed.

‘It was like this,’ she said.

I opened the box and smiled. The hairdryer was even equipped with a white leather holster.

‘A magnum?’

‘Yes. Only his was black, with a rubberised handle. Not silver with a pink handle like this one.’

‘No, well, you can see how that would wreck the effect. It’s hard to look like an authentic gangster when you’re holding a magnum that has a pink handle.’

‘I don’t use it,’ she explained. ‘It’s the wrong current for France.’

‘There’s that, and the neighbours. Someone might think you were planning to kill yourself if they saw you put that next to your head.’ I shook my head. ‘Only in America. You’d think they had enough guns without making innocent objects look like guns, too. I mean, you look at this and figure that it’s only a matter of time before some dumb hairdresser in St Louis gets shot for blow-drying a lady’s hair. I mean that; it will almost certainly happen. Everything you can say about America — good or bad — is always true.’

‘I never thought of that. But yes, you’re right. Especially if you’re black.’

I nodded. ‘Especially if you’re black.’

‘You pull the trigger to operate it.’

‘Just like a gun. I don’t use them myself. Hairdryers, that is. But even I figured that you pulled the trigger to make it work.’

‘And you control the temperature with the thing at the back.’

‘The hammer.’

‘The hammer, yes.’

‘You know, I searched Jérôme’s apartment from top to bottom and I didn’t find a gun. Nor any ammunition. Have you any idea what became of it?’

‘After I found out that he was keeping it under his pillow I told him to get rid of it — to chuck it in the Seine before he hurt himself. Either it went or I did. So maybe he did get rid of it. All I know is that I never again saw it.’

‘What about gambling? Paolo Gentile told me that when Jérôme was back in Monaco there were some guys he owed money to. Debts.’

‘I know he liked to play poker. He was always watching it on television. But he never mentioned that he’d lost any money. And as for debts he always seemed to have plenty of cash in his pocket. He usually had at least a thousand on him. I know because I was often borrowing money for a cab.’

‘Tell me about his other friends. His team mates at the club. Who was he close to?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Yes, that’s what I heard from Mandel.’

‘Especially after the piece in L’Equipe . He trained. He played. He went home. He said that’s how he preferred it. Are you going to speak to any of them?’

‘No, the club want this kept as quiet as possible. It only takes one idiot with a Twitter account to fuck that up and then this is all over the newspapers.’

‘I certainly don’t want that. And not just for Jérôme’s sake. I mean, if they start looking for him, it won’t be long before those bastards at Closer are hanging around outside my building again.’

Closer was the celebrity picture magazine that had broken the story of how the French president, François Hollande, was having an affair with actress Julie Gayet.

‘I thought you French had privacy laws to stop that kind of thing.’

‘Oh, we do. But the magazines just pay the fines, which aren’t much compared with how many sales a big story can put on their circulation.’

She finished her cigarette, swept the box and the novelty hairdryer onto the floor, lay back on the bed and fixed me with a steady, blue-eyed stare that could have unzipped my trousers, had I been wearing any. If I could have read her mind I think I would have said that she wanted me to fuck her again. Paolo Gentile had been right about that, too. It had been a while since anyone had fucked her.

‘So, what’s your next move?’ she asked.

‘My next move?’ I rolled on top of her, pushed her long white thighs apart and nudged inside her. She gasped as I flexed my pelvis and swiftly found my way right up against the neck of her womb. ‘My next move is this.’

‘That’s what I hoped it would be.’

Which just goes to show that when it comes to sex a man and a woman can read each other’s minds pretty well, really. There won’t ever be an ebook that can take the place of all that.

On the long plane journey from London to Antigua I watched a recording on my iPad of the Paris Saint-Germain game against Barcelona in the early stages of the Champions League, last September. It was the match which PSG had won 3–2, and counted as a pretty stunning result for the French although the actual game seems to have been more immediately famous as the one when David Beckham turned up with guests Jay-Z and his wife Beyoncé, neither of whom looked as though they were much impressed with what they saw. Looking like Charlie Brown in his dorky, flat-brim baseball hat, Jay-Z couldn’t have seemed less comfortable if Beyoncé’s sister Solange had been sitting right behind him just waiting to give him another kicking in an elevator.

No one had expected PSG to win without the talismanic Zlatan Ibrahimovic — he had an injured heel — who must have regretted a chance to prove to his former club, Barcelona, that they had been wrong to let him leave on loan to AC Milan, in 2010. Frankly, anyone who saw the Swede’s thirty-yard wonder goal for Sweden against England in November 2012 knew that this was always a mistake. The French were also without their captain, Thiago Silva (thigh problem) and the Argentine striker Ezequiel Lavezzi (torn hamstring). And if all that wasn’t bad enough, Barcelona had fired six past Granada the previous weekend with a hat-trick from Neymar and two from Lionel Messi — the little Argentine’s 400th and 401st career goals. On the same weekend, PSG had struggled to get a 1–1 draw against the no-hopers from Toulouse. Even PSG’s manager, Laurent Blanc, had seemed to recognise the impossibility of the task ahead of him when, in a pre-match press conference, the former French captain had spoken of Barcelona as his side’s ‘near masters’.