by Philip Kerr
‘I get it. Someone with positional discipline but full of confidence in his own ability. Keeps the ball for long spells. Works out well for everyone. A bit like David Luiz.’
‘I was thinking of it being a bit more like Hercule Poirot.’
‘Who does he play for? Anderlecht?’
‘Come on, Phil. I’m betting this was your idea.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because it’s the smart thing to do.’
‘Viktor’s smart.’
‘If Viktor was really smart he’d get a smaller yacht. One that doesn’t draw attention, like yours. No, you’re smarter. Besides, The Times said so when it interviewed you. You were described as one of the most high-profile lawyers in the UK. But from what you said it was my impression that you’d much prefer to be low profile. That you’re the grey eminence behind this particular cardinal.’
‘You’re pretty smart yourself, Scott. I don’t know many football managers who know books by Aldous Huxley.’
‘There’s me and there’s Roy Hodgson. Only don’t tell anyone. Being smart in football is only one down from being gay. So?’
‘You know, it might have been my idea – I can’t remember for sure. However, if there’s one useful piece of advice I can give you, it’s this: at our football club, if you’ve got a good idea – if there’s something important you want done around here – then it’s usually best to make sure you let Viktor think it was his good idea first.’
‘All right. Was it Viktor’s idea to get Zarco to slag off the World Cup in Qatar, or yours?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Toyah.’
‘Okay.’ He nodded. ‘It was my idea.’
‘Why?’
‘You know that we still haven’t sold the stadium naming rights. Or acquired a shirt sponsor. But we’d negotiated a deal with a Qatari bank. The Sabara Bank of Qatar. A deal worth about two hundred million pounds.’
‘Yes, I can easily see why you’d want to piss them off – sure.’
‘As a matter of fact that’s exactly what we wanted. To piss them off, big time. We’d agreed a deal with Sabara. And then, just before the deal was announced, Viktor found another willing sponsor. Jintian Niao-3Q Limited.’
‘Catchy. I can see that on a football shirt. But only if we buy a few really fat players – like Bekim Develi.’
‘According to Forbes, Jintian is the largest mobile phone operator in China. Bigger than VimpelCom and worth about thirty billion dollars. And they’re about to launch a new smartphone and a new 4G network in the UK. Jintian was willing to pay us five hundred million pounds for a ten-year deal. So we hit on a scheme that might persuade the Qataris to change their minds and cancel their sponsorship. That’s where Zarco came in with his comments about the 2022 World Cup. It was working, too. The Qataris were royally pissed off with us. And the Doha stadium looked like it was never going to happen.’
‘Until yesterday. When Zarco was killed.’
‘I fear so. Now the only impediment to their completing the deal has been removed.’
‘You know that’s a pretty big motive to kill someone right there, Phil.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought the Qataris had anything to do with it. They were pissed off, sure, but not that pissed off.’
‘Two hundred million pounds being the kind of insignificant sum anyone could overlook.’
‘I know these guys. I’ve had dinner with them. This kind of thing just isn’t their style.’
‘If you say so. Phil, I’m just guessing here, but I assume this is the kind of information we’re hoping to conceal from the law.’
‘Very much so. It’s not that there was anything illegal, mind. It’s just an issue of commercial sensitivity.’
‘I can see what was in it for Viktor. And perhaps for you. But what was in it for Zarco?’
‘Football is becoming more and more expensive, Scott. Three hundred and fifty million quid spent this summer in transfer fees by English football clubs. Another record signing at Real Madrid. That extra sponsorship money from the Chinks would have come in very handy. Even for someone as rich as Viktor Sokolnikov.’
‘Every little helps, eh? I bet he shops at Tesco, too.’
‘You know in five years, I’m betting three hundred million won’t be enough to pay the top transfer fee.’
‘You could be right. Let’s hope it’s us who are doing the selling, eh?’
Phil stood up and walked to the door.
‘Before you go,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a Russian name for you: Semion Mikhailov.’
Phil stopped halfway there. ‘What about him?’
‘He was seen in the stadium yesterday afternoon.’
‘Seen by who?’
‘Someone who works here. I’ve heard he’s dangerous.’
‘Very dangerous. But not dangerous to us. And you can take my word for that. Viktor’s taking Bekim Develi from him in part-payment for a debt when he travels to Russia tomorrow. Mikhailov isn’t about to do anything to spoil that.’
‘You know, if I’m going to find Zarco’s killer before the cops do then it would help if I knew what you know.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Did Zarco have any reason to be afraid of Viktor?’
‘Why would Zarco have been afraid of Viktor?’
‘Not just Viktor, perhaps. You too, Phil.’
‘Me? What on earth makes you say that?’
‘Because Viktor knows some shady people, people like Semion Mikhailov; and so do you.’
‘This is Toyah again, isn’t it? You can tell she used to be an actress – she has a very vivid imagination. Look, Scott, why would Viktor and I ask you to look into Zarco’s death if we had anything to do with it?’
‘Sometimes if you want to stop the other side from scoring, you park the bus in the goal-mouth. Similarly, asking me to look into Zarco’s death just frustrates the police, makes it hard for them to get a result. That’s how it works. If all we want to do is not concede, then we severely reduce their chances of winning.’
‘True. But I think Viktor mentioned bonuses, didn’t he? Maybe I need to mention them again. Thanks to your father, you’re already minted, of course. But I know you well enough to believe that you’re someone who wants to succeed in your own right. This football club is going to be one of the great clubs, Scott. You can achieve great things at London City. Things you weren’t ever able to achieve as a player with Southampton and Arsenal. All you have to do is prove that you really want to manage here.’
24
Just after eleven o’clock Sarah Crompton appeared in my office to show me a draft of the press release announcing that I was to be the new City manager.
Sarah was a great-looking brunette in her forties, slim and elegant, and always dressed in a two-piece suit from somewhere like Chanel or Max Mara. Before joining London City she’d worked at Wieden + Kennedy in Amsterdam, an American-owned advertising agency responsible for Nike’s ‘Write the Future’ campaign, which hit cinemas before the 2010 World Cup. That’s the one with a bearded Wayne Rooney living in a caravan because Frank Ribery had stopped his shot going in. Sarah was smart and articulate and while I was speaking to her, even with Maurice McShane still in the room, it wasn’t obvious to me what she and he had in common beyond a love of sports; Sarah was an accomplished golfer and with a handicap of just six she could easily beat me. I had a lot of time for this woman. For any woman with a brain like hers. In many ways she reminded me of Sonja.
Since Viktor and Phil had already approved the press release I had little to add to it except the fact that I wasn’t ‘looking forward to the challenge’. I suggested that ‘trying to live up to the example set by one of the great managers of all time’ was a choice of words that suited me rather better – there were quite enough clichés in football reporting without me adding to the already enormous ziggurat.
I also told her I didn’t want to do any interviews until well after Zarco’s funeral.
&nb
sp; ‘I don’t want to make your job more difficult or anything,’ I said, ‘but I’m upset by what’s happened and I’ll need a little time to get over it. Also, I’ll need a little time to grow into the job before I feel even half comfortable talking about myself as the manager of this club.’
‘There’s a lot of interest from the Guardian in you being one of only four black managers in the Football League – you, Chris Hughton, Paul Ince and Chris Powell.’
‘I hadn’t really thought of it like that,’ I said.
‘Maybe you should,’ said Sarah.
‘No,’ I told her. ‘Players get bought because they’re good players, regardless of colour. And managers get hired because they’re good managers. I don’t for a minute believe that some kind of affirmative action programme by the FA is going to fix anything. If we can get a few players on the board of the FA then maybe things will change for the better – any players, not just black ones. Until the FA stops being a club for footloose royals and fat white businessmen then nothing can happen for the good.’
‘So, say that.’
‘Maybe when I’ve got my feet under the table a bit more. When City have won something. Not before.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘But maybe there’s one interview you should do now. Hugh McIlvanney from the Sunday Times. You know him, don’t you?’
I nodded. ‘A little.’
‘He sent me an email. A very nice email, actually. He’s writing a piece for next Sunday’s paper about Zarco and says he’d welcome your input. And let’s not forget that he is the best sports journalist in the country.’
I couldn’t disagree with that assessment. It wasn’t the fact that McIlvanney was a Scot that made me like him, it was his sheer ability as a writer. He never disappointed you. When George Best had died, in November 2005, it had been McIlvanney who’d written the most eloquent appreciation of George in his ‘Voice of Sport’ column. I still remembered a particularly favourite phrase of mine that he’d written then: ‘Trying to explain how or why the sight of men playing about with a ball can hold countless millions in thrall from childhood to dotage is a task beyond rational argument. But we never needed anything as prosaic as logic when George was around.’ Amen. Mac hadn’t always written kind things about João Zarco – once he’d described his approach to football as ‘forensic’ and the man himself as ‘the reigning master of sporting realpolitik’ – but he was always scrupulously fair.
‘Yes,’ I told Sarah. ‘I’ll speak to him. But only because it’s a piece about Zarco.’
Sarah put out the press release on Twitter and almost immediately I started getting texts from other managers that were an understandable mixture of commiserations and congratulations. From Porto – Zarco’s home town – I received an Instagram of the Estádio do Dragão where, underneath a mural of the club’s famous dragon, there was now an enormous brooding photograph of Zarco flanked by two members of the Portuguese National Republican Guard. While from Glasgow, where Zarco had ended his career as a very popular player with Celtic, every inch of the green railings that surrounded Jock Stein’s statue was now covered with lengths of black ribbon. In the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, where for a while Zarco had managed Atlético Mineiro, the Estádio Raimundo Sampaio – a ground that always reminded me a little of Arsenal’s old stadium at Highbury – the pitch was now covered with flowers. It seemed that the man’s death had touched people all over the world.
One or two of these texts I answered, but I was rather more interested in reading the hundreds of texts that were on João Zarco’s ‘something else’ mobile phone. Mostly these were to and from Paolo Gentile who, as well as having been Zarco’s agent, had been the club’s agent, too – at least he had been in the recent transfer of Kenny Traynor. The texts between Gentile and Zarco were undated and often deliberately obfuscating, but it was quickly obvious that Zarco had taken a bung on the Traynor transfer. For a nine-million-pound transfer an agent would have made close to a million quid in commission. That was just normal pay for a top-ten football agent like Paolo Gentile, and indeed he’d made much bigger fees on higher-priced players. When Henning Bauer went to Monaco from Bayern Munich for fifty million euros, Gentile had walked away with a cool five million euros.
Put simply, a bung is an illicit payment made to ensure that a player-transfer deal is completed satisfactorily; a club sanctions a payment to an agent, some of which then gets secretly handed back to a manager in cash. Famously, during the scandal that followed on from the transfer of Teddy Sheringham to Nottingham Forest, Terry Venables alleged that Brian Clough ‘liked a bung’. And not very much has changed. Managers and agents are perhaps more careful of the FA and the Inland Revenue these days but, as anyone in football will tell you, illicit payments are more or less impossible to police. I wouldn’t ever take a bung myself, but if an agent and a manager decide between them that cash should change hands, then I don’t see how it can be prevented.
Zarco and Gentile were wise to be cryptic. The penalties for taking a bung were severe, as the former manager of Arsenal, George Graham, would testify: he was the first and only casualty of the bungs scandal that hit football in 1995. He lost his job and was punished by the FA with a year-long ban from football.
What was less obvious was exactly how and when and in what form the bung on Kenny Traynor was to be paid to Zarco. I had to read the texts several times before I could get any kind of a handle on what had happened between the two men.
25
I assumed VS was Viktor Sokolnikov, DK was Denis Kampfner, KT was Kenny Traynor and SD was Silvertown Dock.
So far this was all entirely above board, but as the texts became more cryptic and numerical, paradoxically it became more and more obvious that something even dodgier than a straight bung was about to go down.
On the few occasions that I’d heard agents and managers talking business, some of them would mention ‘a quid’ in a kind of shorthand, coded, Polari way, almost as if trying to conceal the real monies that were involved in modern football. A quid was a million quid, just as ten quid was ten million and fifty quid was fifty million. It was yet another reason to despair of the attitude to money in football. With the likes of Eden Hazard, Robin Van Persie and Yaya Touré on £180,000 a week, it was easy to forget that fans could be asked to pay up to 126 quid – real quid, not millions – for a match-day ticket at Arsenal, which represents a quarter of the average weekly wage.
But it seemed that things had not quite gone to plan, and probably explained why I had seen the two men arguing at the service station in Orsett, near Hangman’s Wood – which was certainly ‘BP on A13’.
My first thought was that Monaco STCM was something to do with AS Monaco FC, the football club, and that SSAG was perhaps a player, although it hardly seemed likely that an agent would have been encouraged to buy a player, unless it was one of those offshore, Tevez-type economic rights schemes that had given lawyers and accountants so much well-paid work on the back of a talented footballer; but things were about to become even more confusing for me and, it seemed, very much more awkward for Zarco, to say the least.
I typed a few of these abbreviations into Google on my desktop PC. Monaco STCM was actually Monaco Short Term Capital Management, an investment company wholly owned by the Sumy Capital Bank of Geneva, which was in turn owned by Victor Sokolnikov; and SSAG looked like it was probably Shostka Solutions AG, which – according to the newspapers – was the Sokolnikov-owned construction company that had the contract to build the new Thames Gateway Bridge. According to what I found on Google, SSAG shares had shot up following the news that planning permission for the bridge had finally been granted. And from the texts I’d read it looked as if Zarco had used most of his bung for a bit of offshore insider-trading – to buy into his employer’s company before the news that all planning objections to the bridge had been lifted could be made public. Since the announcement, the shares had risen by almost thirty per cent, which meant that if the ‘half a quid’ men
tioned in the texts represented half a million pounds – bar ‘50k’, presumably fifty thousand pounds – then four hundred and fifty thousand invested would have turned into almost six hundred grand. Which is a hell of a return. And thoroughly illegal.
There were no texts from Zarco after 12.45 p.m. and, according to Phil Hobday, Zarco had left the director’s dining room at around 1.05 p.m., after which he hadn’t been seen alive again. Where had he gone after that? It was impossible to imagine him being forced to go somewhere against his will without someone noticing. Zarco’s face was in a thirty-foot-high mural on the side of the stadium. He wasn’t exactly anonymous. Surely someone must have seen him.
These texts begged several other questions, too: if Paolo Gentile had brought a fifty grand bung to Silvertown Dock and left it hidden somewhere for João Zarco, where was it now? Was it even where he had left it? After all, fifty grand is a pretty good reason to beat someone up and rob them. Unless of course he hadn’t brought it at all, and they’d quarrelled again. Wasn’t it possible that the texts Gentile had sent to Zarco after 1 p.m. had just been a cover? And where better to be now that the police were investigating Zarco’s death than safely at home in Italy?
On the other hand, maybe Toyah was right after all, and Zarco had good reason to be afraid of Viktor – a better reason than even she knew. Just what would Viktor have done if he’d found out that Zarco had bought shares in SSAG on an insider tip?
In the hope of learning more – what was 123? Who were the guys he’d needed the fifty grand for? Could they have been sufficiently pissed off at Zarco to have killed him? – I called Paolo Gentile on the number listed on Zarco’s mobile phone, but I wasn’t at all surprised when the call went straight to his voicemail. I left a message asking Gentile to call me urgently.
