False Nine

9

Dumas’s PA, Alice, provided me with several useful telephone numbers, including that of his ex-girlfriend, Bella Macchina, the Marilyn Agency model whom she called and arranged for me to meet that evening. Alice made me coffee while she and I talked in the apartment’s huge and very shiny kitchen. She was a good-looking girl with short hair and glasses who somehow reminded me of Jeanne d’Arc. Perhaps it was the gamine hairstyle. Then again it might have been the silver cross around her neck, the silver bouclé sweater that resembled a chain-mail shirt, or the number of cigarettes she smoked, lit with a handsome vintage lacquer Dunhill she said had been a parting gift from Jérôme Dumas, the flame of which needed a little adjusting it was so long.

I explained that PSG and FCB had hired me to try and find him.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Mr Mandel from the club told me.’

‘First of all — and I’m sure that a lot of people have asked this already, so I apologise in advance — but have you any idea at all where Jérôme might be now?’

‘I had assumed he was already in Spain. That he must have gone there immediately he came back from his holiday in Antigua. Because there was no real reason for him to return to Paris. The apartment is up for sale. The agency believed it would sell more easily if he left it furnished as it is now. Only Mr Mandel tells me that there’s no evidence he ever came back from Antigua. That neither of the return air tickets he bought were used.’

‘I believe so. Tell me about Antigua.’

‘He had planned to go there for two weeks over Christmas and New Year. It was me who bought the air tickets and booked the hotel.’

‘There were two tickets?’

‘He had arranged to go there with his girlfriend, Bella. But they broke up just before they were supposed to go and so he went on his own.’

‘Any idea why they broke up?’

Alice smiled. ‘He was like any other young man with too much money. There were a great many other women ready to help him spend it. I think she was able to tolerate that for a bit. After all, she saw a few other men herself. But with Jérôme women were like a hobby. You’d have to ask her about this. I don’t feel comfortable talking about this with a stranger.’

‘You’ll forgive me, I hope, if some of my questions seem intrusive, but there’s a time factor here. If I don’t find him soon I think the loan deal with FC Barcelona could be off. Which would be bad for Jérôme. His reputation is already in the mud. This could finish him. Clubs don’t like players who take time to settle in, but they especially don’t like players who disappear without a trace. It makes picking a team difficult.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said. ‘So, ask away.’

‘Did you ever sleep with him yourself?’

She coloured.

‘I’m sorry. But I have to ask.’

‘Yes. But we both agreed it was a mistake and we decided not to do it again.’

‘Was it?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Did he agree more than you did? That it was a mistake?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you in love with him, maybe?’

‘Yes,’ she said dully. Alice took off her glasses and began to clean them with a tissue she’d found in the sleeve of her sweater. She was much better looking than I had first appreciated.

‘Did he know that?’

‘No. I certainly didn’t tell him. And I don’t think he was capable of knowing it in any other way. He was much too caught up in himself to have even considered the possibility. My feelings were probably quite low on his horizon.’

‘When Bella said she wouldn’t go with him to Antigua — did he ever ask you to go in her place?’

‘He would have done if I hadn’t already made it very clear that I wasn’t prepared to go in those circumstances.’ She tried a smile but it didn’t seem to work very well. ‘It’s one thing to come off the bench as a player substitute in a football match, it’s another thing to take another girl’s place in a man’s bed. Even if the sex we had was very good.’

‘Why did he want to go to Antigua when he was from the island of Guadeloupe? After all, Guadeloupe is less than a hundred kilometres south of Antigua.’

‘I asked him that. The reason was simple, he said. For one thing he has no family left in Guadeloupe. But the main reason he said is that Antigua has much better hotels. He was booked in to stay at Jumby Bay, which is the best hotel on the island, apparently. A villa there costs anything between ten and twenty thousand US dollars a night.’

‘Christ, it must be good.’

‘He could afford it.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘He likes expensive hotels. The more expensive the better.’

‘I’ve heard he’s a bit of a champagne socialist. Is that right?’

‘You’ve been talking to Mandel. Jérôme’s a socialist, yes, but I don’t think he liked champagne very much.’

‘It’s an English phrase. It means that you’re a hypocrite.’

‘Not in France. There are plenty of socialists who like to eat and drink well here. Especially in Paris. Our president, for example. Jérôme likes the good things in life, like anyone else. Me included. In different circumstances I wouldn’t mind a week in Jumby Bay and I’m a socialist. And I love champagne. So what does that make me? A hypocrite?’

‘No, but you’re not telling other people to wear a hair shirt and pay less attention to making money. You’re not the one going on demonstrations outside the French stock exchange. Or preaching the end of capitalism to Mélissa Theuriau on French television.’

The co-editor in chief and anchor of Zone Interdite, Mélissa Theuriau was generally held to be the best-looking woman on French TV — a view with which I found it hard to disagree.

Alice shrugged. ‘It wasn’t all hot air with him, you know. He’s done some good things with his money. Things he didn’t like to shout about.’

‘Such as?’

‘There was a youth centre in Sevran to which he often gave money to pay for sports facilities. He went there sometimes to see how they were getting on. He wanted to give something back.’

‘Sevran?’

‘It’s a suburb northeast of the Paris Périphérique.’

‘Tough area?’

‘Very. Lots of black kids with no future. His words, not mine.’

‘What was he like to work for?’ I asked.

‘Thoughtful. Gentle. Kind. A bit impulsive.’

‘I found some antidepressants in the bathroom cabinet. Did he seem depressed to you?’

Alice took a deep breath and smiled a gentle smile. ‘This is Paris. Everyone is depressed about something. It’s how we Parisians are. From what I’ve seen of life in London I don’t think we’re as carefree as the English. Even when we drink champagne.’

‘Was there anything specific depressing him?’

‘His mother died about six months ago. I suppose that might have had something to do with it.’

‘Here in Paris?’

‘No. She lived in Marseille. That’s where she brought Jérôme to live when they left Guadeloupe.’

‘Any other family there?’

‘As far as I know it was just her and Jérôme.’

‘Anything else that might have been getting him down?’

‘His football. He hadn’t been playing well. And he was getting a lot of abuse from the fans for not trying hard enough. The situation with Bella also depressed him, of course. I’m not sure she loved him but I would say that he loved her. And the loan to Barcelona. That affected him a great deal, too.’

‘I gained the impression that he wanted this move from PSG. That he was looking forward to it.’

‘I think he convinced himself it would be a good move. But he was concerned the loan to FCB was evidence that there wasn’t a club that was prepared to buy him outright. That no one else would touch him. He was worried that it meant he was getting a reputation as a player who was difficult. Someone in the French newspapers had compared him to Emmanuel Adebayor. And this depressed him too, I think.’

‘Yes, I can understand how it would.’

‘He was worried how he might be received in Barcelona.’

‘Do you think he was the type of guy to commit suicide?’

She thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Did he ever talk about suicide? The way people do sometimes? How you’d do it? Jump off a tall building. Drown yourself. That kind of thing.’

‘No.’

‘Because players do kill themselves,’ I added. ‘My own friend, for example. Matt Drennan.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I was with him the night he hanged himself. He’d been drinking, but that was nothing new. He’d been drinking too much for years and there was nothing that he did or said on this particular night that made me think he might be suicidal. At least suicidal enough to go and do it after leaving my house. But in retrospect I wish I’d treated the possibility with greater seriousness. And that’s what still haunts me a little. The idea that perhaps I could have done a little more.’

‘There’s nothing I’m not telling you, Mr Manson, if that’s what you’re driving at. And if he has killed himself I won’t be haunted by the idea that I could have done more for him. I did everything for him. His laundry, his dry-cleaning, I paid his bills, booked the taxis and the tables at the restaurants and the nightclubs, took out the trash — which is to say I paid off the girls who needed paying off...’

‘Hookers?’

‘By the bus load.’

‘Hmm.’

‘I answered all his mail, answered his telephone and I even wrote his tweets.’

‘Yes, I was going to ask you about his Twitter account...’

‘I’m afraid you won’t find any clues there. I wrote all his tweets. If you look at his Twitter account you’ll see that the last one was written on my last day of employment. The day before he went to Antigua. Most of them I cleared with him. The rest were retweets, or stuff I picked up in the newspapers about football that struck me as interesting. Nothing personal.’

‘Well, at least that’s one mystery solved.’

Alice frowned.

‘I thought maybe the date of the last tweet might be significant,’ I explained. ‘In trying to determine if he might have committed suicide.’

‘What can I tell you? France has a suicide rate that is three times higher than in Italy and Spain, and twice the rate in Britain. It’s like I was telling you earlier. We’re not a happy people. Maybe that’s why we’ve had so many revolutions. There’s always something that’s pissing us off.’ She shrugged. ‘He was on Seroxat, wasn’t he? Since Jérôme Dumas left Paris I’ve been taking Seroxat myself.’