Hand of God

10

The following morning I caught a taxi down to Glyfada, just south of Athens, to have breakfast with Bastian Hoehling and the Hertha team at their hotel, a sixties-style high-rise close to the beach but perhaps a little too close to the main road north to Piraeus. Apparently Olympiacos supporters had spent all night driving past the hotel with car horns blaring to prevent the Berlin side from sleeping. The Hertha players looked exhausted; and several of them were also suffering from a severe bout of food poisoning. Bastian and the club doctor had considered summoning the police to investigate, but it was hard to see what the police could have done beyond telling them the Greek for lavatory.

‘You really think it was deliberate?’ I asked, choosing now to ignore the omelette that the hotel waiter had brought to our table.

Bastian, who was feeling unwell himself, shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but we seem to be the only ones in the hotel who’ve gone down with whatever this thing is. There’s a party of local car salesman having a conference here that seems to be quite all right.’

‘That certainly clinches it, I’d have thought.’

‘If this is a friendly,’ he said, ‘I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like when you play these guys in the Champions League. You’d better make sure you bring your own chef and nutritionist, not to mention your own doctor.’

‘Our present team doctor is just about to take up a new position in Qatar.’

‘Then you’d better find a new one. And quick.’

‘Perhaps you’re right.’

‘I wouldn’t put anything past these guys,’ said Bastian. ‘The newspapers seem to be treating this whole competition like Greece versus Germany. The Olympiacos manager, Hristos Trikoupis, referred to us as Hitler’s boys.’

‘That surprises me,’ I said. ‘Hristos was at Southampton with me. He’s a decent guy.’

‘Nothing surprises me,’ said Bastian. ‘Not after Thessaloniki: the bastards threw rocks and bottles at our goalkeeper. We had to warm up in a corner of the pitch well away from the crowd. I couldn’t feel less popular in this country if my name was Himmler not Hoehling. So much for the home of democracy.’

‘You’re Germans, Bastian. You must be used to that kind of thing by now. The first thing you learn in the professional game: there’s no such thing as a friendly, especially when there are Germans involved. There’s just war and total war.’

Because I was speaking German I used the phrase totaler Krieg famously coined by Josef Goebbels during the Second World War, and some of the Hertha team glanced nervously my way when they heard it, the way Berliners do when they hear that kind of Nazi shit.

‘If I were you, Bastian,’ I added, ‘I would play tonight’s game the same way. It’s the only language these Greek guys understand and respect. You remember the rest of what was written on Goebbels’s banner? Totaler Krieg — kürzester Krieg. Total war — shortest war.’

‘I think maybe you’re right, Scott. We should fucking run over them. Kick the bastards off the pitch.’

I nodded. ‘Before they do the same to you.’

After breakfast I went back to the Grande Bretagne Hotel, in the centre of Athens. At exactly eleven o’clock I was sitting on a large, biscuit-coloured ottoman in the hotel lobby, texting Simon Page about our first game of the new Premier League season, an away match against newly promoted Leicester City, on 16 August. Simon was just about to take an eight o’clock training session at Hangman’s Wood and I was telling him not to make it a hard one as I was concerned that some of our players were still tired after their World Cup duties, not to mention our disastrous and entirely unnecessary tour of Russia.

‘Did you sleep well?’

I glanced up to find Valentina standing in front of me. She was wearing a plain white shirt, tight blue J-Brand jeans, comfortable snakeskin sandals and black acetate Wayfarers. I stood up and we shook hands.

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘Ready?’ she said.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To see someone you know.’

We took a taxi to the National Archaeological Museum, a five-minute drive north from the hotel. The museum was designed like a Greek temple, a little less run-down than the one on top of the Acropolis, but not far off being a ruin; and like many public buildings in Greece — and quite a few private ones — it was covered in graffiti. Beggars drifted around the unkempt park that was laid out in front of the entrance like so many stray cats and dogs and I handed one old man all of the coins that were in my trouser pocket.

‘It’s something I always do back home,’ I said, seeing Valentina’s sceptical look. ‘For luck. You can’t get any if you don’t give any. Football’s cruel, sometimes very cruel. You have to make sure the capricious gods of football are properly appeased. You shouldn’t even be in the game unless you’re an optimist and to be an optimist means you cannot be a cynic. You have to believe in people.’

‘You don’t strike me as the superstitious sort, Scott.’

‘It’s not superstition,’ I said. ‘It’s just pragmatic to take a balanced approach to good luck and to careful preparation. It’s actually the clever thing to do. Luck has a way of favouring the clever.’

‘We’ll see, won’t we?’

‘Oh, I think Hertha will win. In fact, I’m sure of it.’

‘Is that because you’re half German?’

‘No. It’s because I’m clever. And because I believe in totaler Krieg. Football that takes no prisoners.’

Inside the museum were the treasures of ancient Greece, including the famous gold mask of Agamemnon that Bastian Hoehling had mentioned, back in Berlin. It looked like something made by a child out of gold foil from a chocolate bar. But it was another treasure that Valentina had brought me to see. As soon as I saw it I gasped out loud. This was a life-size bronze statue of Zeus that many years before had been recovered from the sea. What struck me most was not the rendering of motion and human anatomy but the head of Zeus, with its shovel beard and cornrow haircut.

‘My God,’ I exclaimed, ‘it’s Bekim.’

‘Yes.’ Valentina laughed delightedly. ‘He could have modelled for this bronze,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t he?’

‘Even the way he stands,’ I said, ‘mid-stride, in the act of throwing a spear or hurling a thunderbolt, that’s exactly the way Bekim always celebrates scoring a goal. Or nearly always.’

‘I thought it would appeal to you.’

‘Does he know?’

‘Does he know?’ Valentina laughed again. ‘Of course he does. It’s his secret. He grew his beard so he would look like this statue; and when he scores he always thinks of Zeus.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not sure he actually thinks he’s a god, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’

I walked around the statue several times, grinning like an idiot as I pictured Bekim adopting this same pose.

And yet, perfect as the statue was, there was something wrong with it, too. The more I looked at it the more it seemed that the outstretched left hand was wrong, that it was attached to an arm several inches too long; later on, I bought a postcard and measured the approximate length of the arm, and realized that the hand would actually have reached down as far as the god’s knee. Had the sculptor got it wrong? Or had the original display angle of the figure required an extended arm to avoid a foreshortened look? It was hard to be sure but to my critical eye, the hand of God appeared to be reaching just a little too far.

She nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier, about being lucky.’

‘Yes? What about it?’

‘I think you’re going to be lucky,’ she said, and taking my hand she squeezed it, meaningfully.

‘When?’

‘Tonight.’

I lifted her hand to my mouth and kissed it. The nails were short, but immaculately varnished, while the skin on the palm of her hand was like soft leather, which struck me as strange. ‘And I thought you were talking about the football.’

‘Who says I’m not?’

I smiled. ‘I suppose that means you’re coming to the game.’