False Nine (11 page)

‘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.’

10

Paris looks its best at night. I’m not going to get stupidly Woody Allen about this but after dark the place really is magical, even a little ghostly, like one huge haunted house. Maybe it helps not seeing all the cops on the streets or the beggars in the doorways, not hearing the clamour of the traffic, not smelling the decay, but at night, when you look up and see those searchlights coming off a floodlit Eiffel Tower as if searching out enemy bombers, there is nowhere else like it on earth. Around every corner is some new aspect of the city, some new delight for the eyes, some extraordinary affirmation of the ingenuity of men. The man who is tired of London is tired of life but the man who is tired of Paris must be tired of civilisation itself. The continued existence of Paris – such an affront to so many Americans who can’t adjust to its lofty indifference from ordinary human concerns – is perhaps the premier work of man anywhere in the world. The extraordinary proclamation of a beauty that never fades is especially true at night, when the lady always looks her best.

No mortal woman in Paris could have looked better than Bella Macchina, especially in the elegant setting of Le Grand Véfour – a fine restaurant in the elegant arcades of the Palais-Royal. She was tall and blonde and blue-eyed and astonishingly beautiful and – as Mandel had said – possessed of legs right up to her arse. And maybe this is the secret of why French women look so good;
they live in Paris
. Even the tramps in Paris are the best, most convincing-looking tramps you’ve ever seen.

Bella was every inch the model: the hair heaped on top of her head was like golden thread and her complexion as smooth and clear as milk. She wore a black, embellished suede minidress, a pair of spiked leather Louboutin pumps and carried a matching mini-spiked leather evening bag. As she catwalked her long-legged way to my table even the women in the restaurant turned around to get a better look at her. But I don’t think Bella noticed. She was already smiling at me and extending a lace-mittened hand, and then allowing about three waiters to help her sit down. I guess they were in search of a view of her underwear. I know I was. These days you snatch your pleasures where you can.

‘Would you like something to drink?’ I asked.

‘Just champagne,’ she said.

I enjoyed that – the use of the word ‘just’, as if champagne was something ordinary and quite undeserving of the ludicrous price that Le Grand Véfour deemed appropriate for what is only wine with bubbles, after all. Not that she’d have known anything about the cost of champagne. Women like Bella Macchina know the price of nothing and the value of only the most expensive so I threw caution to the wind and told the waiter to bring us a bottle of vintage Louis Roederer, which is a favourite of mine. Cristal is for footballers – American footballers.

We chatted for a while, ordered dinner. I even tried to flirt with her a little.

‘Bella Macchina. It means beautiful car, doesn’t it? In Italian?’

‘Yes.’

She didn’t volunteer any information about her name and it didn’t seem worth irritating her by asking about it. I don’t suppose any of the women in France or England ever thought about it; after all, she’d been on the cover of the Christmas issue of Paris
Vogue
wearing what looked to me like a Lagerfeld parody of an SS uniform, so what did they care what her name meant in Italian.

‘Jérôme used to say I was the Lamborghini of women. Difficult to drive.’

‘That’s for sure. I mean the car, not you.’

‘Is it difficult to drive?’

‘I think you’d have to be Lewis Hamilton to drive it well.’

‘Lewis who?’

I smiled. What did it really matter if she hadn’t ever heard of Lewis Hamilton? I find that you can forgive a really beautiful woman an almost prelapsarian level of ignorance. And I was damn sure that there were plenty of English footballers I knew who couldn’t have told you who Winston Churchill was. So, what the hell? Just to be seated opposite her made me feel more attractive. It was like someone had instructed her beauty to sit on a flowery island and sing out to passing sailors in order to lure the shirts off their backs. There were no prices on the enormous menu given to her by the waiter but she knew instinctively what to choose that would cause the most damage to a man’s credit card. It was as well that FCB was picking up my expenses.

I took her hand and inhaled the scent. If music be the food of love then smell and touch are certainly the hors d’oeuvres. I was starting to feel hungry.

‘Nice,’ I said. ‘I bet you can’t find that in Duty Free.’

‘No. That’s one of the reasons I wear it. I don’t like smelling like anyone else.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘You could eat a hamburger with extra onions and mustard and you still wouldn’t smell like anyone else.’

She liked that.

We talked about all sorts of things though I really can’t remember what. Opposite her I was doing well just to remember my own name and it was quite a while before we got around to talking about Jérôme Dumas. With her perfect smile faltering a little, like a flickering light bulb, she sighed, shook her head and ran her manicure over the mini spikes on her evening bag as she told me about him.

‘In some ways he’s a very caring man. Thoughtful. Always generous. He does a lot of charity work for UNICEF and for cystic fibrosis charities. In other ways he’s the most selfish man I ever met.’

‘How
did
you meet?’

‘We met during Paris Fashion Week in 2013 when we were both doing modelling for Dries Van Noten and G-Star RAW,’ she explained. ‘We were wearing G-Star’s latest untreated denim jeans. I think they liked the fact that he was so black and I was so white. So did I. And so did he. The Othello shoot, they called it. You know? Like the famous play?’

A little more familiar with the play than the brands, I nodded.

‘It wasn’t love at first sight. But it was something close to it, perhaps. We started seeing each other almost immediately. Like you, he’s a very beautiful man. And he pursued me relentlessly. He showered me with gifts. This Cartier bracelet was a gift from him on my birthday.’

She lifted her arm to show me the solid gold band around her wrist; it had the head of a panther with emeralds for eyes and diamonds for a collar and it certainly looked very expensive.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’

‘It certainly is.’

‘We went to the shop on Place Vendôme to choose it.’ Without any trace of embarrassment, she added, ‘And that was the night we first slept together.’

It figured, I told myself. I didn’t know how much those little baubles cost but, looking at it now, I didn’t think there would be much change out of a year’s wages for some regular Jean.

‘I hate to ask about your private life,’ I said. ‘But it’s important that I try to cover all of the possibilities as to why he might have disappeared. To that end I need to know how things were between you. So if I apologise if occasionally I manage to sound like a cop.’

She nodded her assent to being gently probed.

‘Well, at least you don’t look like one.’

‘You were together for how long?’

‘About a year.’

‘Maybe you could tell me why you guys broke up.’

‘He was seeing other women.’ Bella pulled a face. ‘Although “seeing” doesn’t begin to cover what he was doing. And “other women” hardly explains what they were.’ She shrugged. ‘They were prostitutes. High-end escorts. Two at a time, usually. Jérôme liked to see two women in bed together. I hold myself responsible for that, mind you. On his birthday last summer I hired a hooker myself and had her make love to me while he watched us.’

I tried to stop myself grinning as, for a brief second, I imagined her in bed with another woman. It wasn’t the kind of birthday present any woman had ever given me, but then I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure I’d have been entirely comfortable watching another woman go down on my girlfriend.

‘I bet that blew his candles out,’ I said.

‘He liked it a bit too much, actually. After that he was always inviting girls around in pairs to his apartment. It got so that I refused to go there in case I found the kind of evidence I couldn’t ignore. You know, women’s panties, contraceptive packets, manacles, that kind of thing.’

‘Right.’

‘There were two women in particular he liked to hire. From an agency that called itself the Elysée Palace. They were American twins. Blonde, very expensive and very, very tall. L’Wren Scott tall. At least six feet and taller in high heels. He called them the Twin Towers and by his account – he was quite open about it – they would do anything. With footballers you expect that a bit. I mean, they’re athletes, with appetites and a culture – or perhaps the lack of one – to match. But it wasn’t what I was looking for in a relationship. I’m five years older than him. And I would like to settle down and have a family, sooner rather than later. We’d even talked about me coming with him to Spain. I love Barcelona and it seemed that there might be quite a bit of work there for me. There was a strong possibility that Hoss Intropia or Desigual were going to make me the face of their new look. And there was even some talk that a top retail brand in Spain were prepared to give me my own line in underwear. Which would have been fantastic.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d like to have seen your own ideas on underwear.’

Bella smiled sadly and touched my hand.

‘Anyway, things came to a head between us just before Christmas. Jérôme had booked a holiday for us in Antigua – just the two of us – and then I found a sex-toy under the bed. Which I was really pissed off about and which almost persuaded me to end our relationship right then and there. I took his word that he was prepared to change, that he was prepared to stop whoring and to give up all other women. But even as we were talking and he was promising to turn over a new leaf another woman called Dominique was texting him a very lovey-dovey picture of the two of them together. I couldn’t believe it. It looked as if they’d been on some holiday I didn’t even know about. And it really was the final straw when he lied to my face about it. So that was the last time I saw him. I’m sorry he’s missing, Scott, but I’ve completely washed my hands of him. This is going to be a Jérôme-free year for me. I’ve no wish ever to see him again.’

‘Then I apologise again for asking you to describe things that might be painful for you.’

‘It’s okay. I had a pretty miserable Christmas about it but really, I’m over him now.’

‘Did he call and try to persuade you to change your mind?’

‘Maybe. Yes, I should think so. But I changed all my numbers and my email address so he couldn’t persuade me. And for Christmas I went back to stay with my parents in Arras so he couldn’t find me at my apartment.’

‘So how did Alice get hold of you?’

‘I gave her my number on the strict condition that she didn’t give it to Jérôme. When he got loaned to Barcelona she lost her job, of course, and asked me if I could help her find another. It’s not so easy now, finding jobs in Paris. As a matter of fact I was thinking of employing her myself. She’s very loyal. I like that. I think perhaps she was a little in love with Jérôme.’

‘Did you know he was taking antidepressants?’

‘Yes. He wasn’t very good at keeping secrets.’

‘Do you think he might have been suicidal?’

‘No. Not him. He loved himself too much.’

‘What about his mother? She died about six months ago, didn’t she? A man can take that quite hard.’

‘They were close. But not close enough for it to have made him suicidal. I don’t know for sure. But I think he was scared about something. Something that wasn’t related to football which might have been getting him down.’