Philip Kerr - False Nine

‘You could die. That’s the difference, surely.’

‘And if I’m willing to take that risk? Whose business is it except mine? If I’d rather die than give up football? Who should mind but me? And who better than a player like you to understand something like that? How do you like not playing football any more? Do you miss it? I’ll bet you do. But at least you had your chance. You had your chance. At least you played, and for as long as you could. Don’t take that away from me, Mr Manson. Please, I’m begging you. You take football away from me now, you’ll be taking away everything I’ve got and everything that I’m ever going to have.’

‘Don’t put this on me,’ I said again.

‘Who else should I put it on? The pilot of the jet? I’m not asking you to lie for me. I’m just asking you not to say anything to PSG or to FCB.’

‘To be economical with the truth. A lie by omission.’

‘If you want to put it like that, yes. But where’s the harm? Who’s injured by your silence? Surely that’s what really matters. Who gets hurt?’

‘You’re asking a hell of a lot, son. I told you before I owe a lot to Barcelona. More than you know.’

‘And I repeat the question: who is hurt? Look, just assume for a moment that I go to Camp Nou and score lots of goals. Which is a fair assumption given the number of goals I scored at Monaco. It never really clicked for me at PSG because they kept playing me on the wing, when I’m a natural nine. You can see that.’

‘A false nine,’ I remarked. ‘I can see that all right.’

‘Perhaps. But you said yourself, I’m still a top player. Assume that during the remainder of the season I score... let’s say ten goals. How is the club damaged? Or, assume I play in el clásico and score just one goal and that goal is an equaliser, or even the winning goal, perhaps. How is Barcelona damaged by my condition? Suppose they sell lots of shirts as a result. Suppose all that. How is PSG damaged by Barcelona profiting from my loan to them?’

‘Suppose I just tell Barcelona and let them decide.’

‘You know that won’t work. They’re a big company and they have big company rules. It’s not people like you and Luis Enrique who decide things at clubs as big as Barcelona. Not any more. It’s accountants and lawyers and management consultants and actuaries. Medical actuaries. I’ve looked into what might happen in considerable detail. Don’t think I haven’t agonised about this myself. I have. A medical actuary is a physician who puts a number on the risk incurred by a medical insurance company when a company like PSG or FCB employs someone like me. A doctor with a calculator and a set of tables who knows nothing at all about football but who makes a bet on whether or not his medical insurance company would have to pay out in the possible event of me keeling over in the middle of a game.’

‘I know what a medical actuary does, thanks.’

‘Right. Then you know how that works. No one likes to bet on a horse when they think there might be something wrong with it. That’s all I’m asking you to do. Make a bet on the man you see, not on the man you can’t see — the man with a hole in his heart. I’m a sure thing, Mr Manson. I can feel it. I’m no crock.’

I glanced at my wristwatch. There wasn’t long before the jet was supposed to take us to Spain. And it seemed I now had to decide the future of Jérôme Dumas, not to mention his whole fucking family and possibly — if Paulo Gentile was to be believed about the commercial possibilities for their futures, together — Bella Macchina, too. I could certainly have done without that responsibility.

‘I’ll think about what you’ve said. And let you know — well, as soon as I’ve arrived at a decision. In the morning, probably.’

I collected the bottle of Elijah Craig off the drinks tray. I don’t normally drink spirits; then again, I’m seldom put in fear of my life.

‘I’m going to change my clothes because I’m soaking wet, and then I’m going to finish this bottle.’

In my time as a football manager I’ve had to make some tough decisions. Who to drop from a team; who to sell. I remember having to break it to the guy who was my captain at London City that an injury meant he was never going to play for the team again, and it would probably spell the end of his career. And it did. I remember hearing the sound of him weeping in the bogs afterwards — him, a real hard Scots bastard. He took to the bottle after that and I felt like shit for weeks. More than a few weeks. It felt like I’d ruined his life and it’s been a skidmark on the porcelain of my soul ever since.

But choosing between two players was easy compared with the dilemma that Jérôme Dumas had landed me with. How do you decide something like that? How do answer a question that might result in the end of a young man’s career? There was that and then there was all the excess fucking baggage he’d managed to attach to my decision: the kids’ school in Pointe-à-Pitre, the hospital wing in Le Gosier, his brother’s welfare, his father’s legal defence, his cousin’s legal practice in Antigua. I told myself that a hole in the heart was one thing but that I’d have to have no heart at all to rule against him playing again.

In a way I actually admired him. His determination to play the game at all costs was something I could easily understand. You had to hand it to the lad, the idea of sending his twin to take his medical was cheeky and ingenious and just the sort of thing my old mate Matt Drennan would have done. The game was different then, of course, and that was only ten or fifteen years ago. It’s true, the money has changed everything. Jérôme was right about that. And why was it all right to conceal the true sexuality of a leading man in Hollywood — not mentioning any names, of course — and yet somehow unacceptable to cover up something like VSD? Why is there a higher standard expected of football clubs than movie studios? I don’t get that. All the crap from the Labour Party in the wake of the so-called ‘obscene’ Premier League television deal, about clubs not paying the living wage to some of their employees, had really pissed me off. Why the fuck stop there? Why not slap a windfall tax on the clubs and give the money to fucking Palestine, or to find a cure for Ebola? Cunts. The BPL is one of our most successful exports and there’s nothing obscene about that.

He was also right about VSD. More than he knew, perhaps. He probably didn’t realise it but only a week or so ago I’d read a very relevant story in the sports pages of newspapers. An English court of law had ordered Tottenham Hotspur to pay £7 million in damages to a promising star of the youth team, Radwan Hamed, who suffered cardiac arrest days after signing his first professional contract for the club, since when he had been unable to live independently. An ECG screening before he signed showed his heart to be ‘abnormal’ but he was not stopped from playing by team doctors with the result that Hamed’s family had sued Spurs for negligence. Spurs were indemnified by the doctors’ insurers in respect of these damages but it underlined that there was no way that any insurance company was even going to countenance the possibility of allowing a man with a hole in his heart to play top-flight football. The days when an Asa Hartford might have enjoyed a full fifteen years at the top of the game were long gone.

By now I was just a little bit pissed. But that was good. I was going to need to be a little bit pissed to tell Jérôme I wasn’t going to participate in his deception, which was the decision I was always going to have to make. Because the plain fact of the matter is this: I owe Barcelona a lot. I owe them everything. It was them who took me on when no one else was prepared to give me a chance. And you don’t forget that in a hurry. Not in football. In spite of what I’d told Jérôme, I knew I would have to decide in favour of the club. That’s what loyalty is. I couldn’t have decided any other way. Not in a hundred years. Naturally I felt really sorry for Jérôme Dumas but the way I saw it I didn’t have any real choice in the matter. Choosing between the club that had nurtured my managerial ambitions and a player who was prepared ruthlessly to deceive it at all costs was, if I’m honest, never a choice at all. But that didn’t make it feel any better. Which was why I’d grabbed the bottle of anaesthetic.