January Window

by Philip Kerr

  ‘That’s handy,’ said Maurice. ‘Christmas present from the wife?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘You play your games and I’ll play mine.’ Maurice chuckled obscenely.

  We pulled the man back onto a chair and waited for him to stop breathing so loudly and to straighten up again. For a moment we thought he was going to puke so I put a wastepaper bin between his feet, just in case.

  ‘Tell us what you were up to and we’ll let you go,’ I said. ‘My guess is that you’ve got form for this kind of thing. A professional. Talk to us and you can be on your way.’

  ‘That’s a good offer, cunt face,’ said Maurice. ‘Me and the boss here, we’ve both done some bird, so we’ve got no love for the law. You cooperate with us and you can be on your toes again. But stay shtum and we’ll hand you over wearing a fucking ribbon on your hat. With this gun in your pocket, you’ll get five years.’

  The man shook his head. ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’

  I looked at the key for a moment. According to the plastic identity tag it was wearing this was the key to an executive hospitality box, number 123.

  ‘Is this where you were supposed to go?’ I said. ‘Box 123? To get something for someone – some money, perhaps?’

  ‘Fuck off, you muppets.’

  ‘Muppet, am I?’ Maurice grinned. ‘You got that right, sunshine.’ He twisted the man’s ear. ‘And you know what my Muppet character is? Animal.’

  ‘Stay here with him,’ I said.

  Maurice pushed the magazine back into the handle of the little Ruger.

  ‘No problem,’ he said.

  ‘And while I’m out, find out who owns suite 123 and everything about them.’

  32

  There were one hundred and fifty executive boxes at London City, all of them on the second floor. For £85,000 – that was the starting price for the present season – you got a private box about the size of a decent caravan, a fully equipped kitchen, a private lavatory, fifteen seats for every competitive home fixture, a support team of elegant hostesses to greet guests and serve food and drinks, a widescreen television and betting facilities. The more you paid the nearer the halfway line you were and the bigger the box was. All the suites were furnished differently, according to the taste – or lack of it – of the person or company owning it. Most were owned by companies like Carlsberg and Google, but the name on the door of suite 123 was an individual and an Arab one: Mr Saddi bin iqbal Qatar Al Armani.

  I unlocked the door, switched on the lights and went inside. The room felt cold; colder than it ought to have been. I checked the sliding doors, which were still locked behind the pulled-down roller blinds, then looked around.

  Mr Al Armani’s suite was furnished like the interior of a private jet – all thick cream carpets, polished ebony panels and expensive white leather armchairs. He probably owned a private jet like this, too. Occupying a whole wall was a silver print of Monte Fresco’s famous photograph of Vinnie Jones squeezing Gazza’s bollocks, signed by both players – the poster, not the bollocks – and a framed number ten Argentine shirt belonging to Diego Maradona that had also been signed. On an ebony wood table stood a pile of dinner plates edged in gold, a canteen of gold cutlery, a gold table lighter and several gold ashtrays. The widescreen television on the wall was an 84-inch Sony, which looked as big as the sliding doors that led out to fifteen seats that were just fifty feet above the halfway line. Everything looked like it was of the very best quality, even though the taste left something to be desired in my own eyes; I don’t much care for all that Bin Laden bling.

  It was obvious Zarco had been there; a black woolly hat lay on the table and his Dunhill chestnut leather grip was on the white leather sofa. I opened the bag, half hoping I would find fifty grand and Zarco’s lucky football scarf inside it – which was still missing – but apart from a pair of motorcycle gloves, it was empty.

  I went into the lavatory; there were gold fittings on the sink and on the cistern, and on the wall an aerial photograph of the Al-Wakrah in Qatar – the so-called Vagina Stadium.

  Opening the door to the kitchen, I switched on the light and walked the length of the room to the window. I opened the cupboards and the fridge, I even opened the dishwasher, which was switched on and had run a cycle, because a little light on the door indicated as much. There were three coffee cups in there, which wasn’t much washing up to have warranted switching it on. Glancing around, I saw a pair of grey steel Oakley sunglasses that lay on the worktop. I picked them up. They were Zarco’s. I knew that because I’d bought them for his birthday; I had told him they matched the colour of his hair, which they did. Otherwise I’d found nothing that left me any the wiser as to why a man with a gun would have taken the risk of impersonating a police officer to get in here.

  On the face of it I couldn’t see why anyone would have burgled the suite. Not for an empty bag. I weighed the cutlery in my hand – at best it was dipped, and hardly worth the risk. The framed Maradona shirt wasn’t worth more than a few hundred quid; after all, he’d signed so many. At fifteen to twenty grand the telly was probably the most expensive thing in the suite, but it weighed a ton and wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you could tuck under your coat.

  The only interesting fact I’d discovered was that the suite was owned by an Arab who appeared to be from Qatar. Why had Zarco arranged to have Paolo Gentile come here, of all places, with fifty grand? After all, the Qatari who owned the box was hardly likely to think fondly of a man who had been so vocal in his opposition to a Qatari World Cup. And you could just tell that fifty grand was chump change for a man like that. None of it made sense.

  I sat down and noticed that the stereo was still on; I turned up the volume and found myself listening to TalkSPORT. Don’t get me wrong, I like TalkSPORT; most of the pundits know what they’re talking about. Especially Alan Brazil and Stan Collymore. But this was one of those post-mortem phone-ins when football fans would ring in with their opinions on the weekend’s games. Their comments were always the same: x should be sacked, y should never have been bought, and z was rubbish. TalkBOLLOCKS would have been a better name for what most of the fans calling in had to say.

  I turned it off, picked up Zarco’s bag and his hat and his sunglasses, locked the door of 123 behind me and went back to my office.

  The fake cop was where I had left him, handcuffed on the chair, staring morosely at the floor. There was a little bit of blood on his nose; I found a tissue and wiped it, but only to prevent it from dripping on the carpet.

  With the man’s gun lying on the desk, Maurice was in front of my PC.

  ‘Has he said anything?’ I asked.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘What did you find out about suite 123?’ I asked.

  ‘The suite is owned by an Arab gentleman from Qatar,’ said Maurice. ‘Mr Saddi bin iqbal Qatar Al Armani from the Bank of Subara and, according to Forbes, he’s worth six billion dollars. Mr Al Armani has owned one of the top-price boxes here for the last three years, although he doesn’t actually appear to be a very keen fan of football. He hasn’t been to a match since the beginning of the season. Probably too busy finding oil and shitting money. Not that this is at all unusual at our club. There’s at least half a dozen others who own a hospitality suite who’ve never shown up to a game. Wanker bankers, mostly. No wonder the fucking fans go mad when they see so many empty seats going begging. Some of these rich bastards have probably forgotten they even own these boxes. Not surprising when you think about it. Eighty-five grand when you’re worth several billion dollars? What’s that? A fucking pizza.

  ‘Yesterday wasn’t an exception to Mr Armani’s general no-show rule. None of the tickets allocated to Mr Armani shows up on the computer as having been used. And whoever João Zarco went to see in that box it doesn’t look like it was a man with a towel on his fucking head.’

  ‘Possibly that’s why he went there,’ I said. ‘Because he knew it wasn’t going to be occupied. A nice quiet pla
ce for Gentile to leave a bung and for Zarco to collect it. Only I don’t think he did. He took a bag there all right. This bag. But the bag was empty.’

  ‘So maybe the bung didn’t get paid after all,’ said Maurice. ‘And Zarco went looking for Gentile. Found him somewhere. Dragged him into that maintenance area to give him a piece of his mind and got more than he bargained for.’

  ‘And no one recognised him?’ I shook my head. ‘Wearing this hat and these sunglasses I can easily see how he made it to the executive suite without attracting attention. But he seems to have left them there. Who owns the suites on either side of 123?’

  Maurice typed out the numbers on my keyboard. ‘122 is owned by a Chinese gentleman called Yat Bangguo. Runs something called the Topdollar Property Company. 124 is owned by Tempus Tererent Inc. They’re the people who make games for people like Xbox and PlayStation. Including Totaalvoetbal 2014. The Tempus Tererent people were there yesterday, used all their tickets; Mr Bangguo only used half his tickets. 121 is owned by Tomas Uncliss.’

  Tomas Uncliss was the previous manager for London City when they’d been in the Championship League; he’d been sacked unceremoniously by Viktor after a few unlucky results.

  ‘All of them had catering and hostesses. Might be an idea to speak to some of those girls and see if they noticed anything unusual in 123.’

  ‘Have you ever spoken to one of those girls?’

  ‘Can’t say I have.’

  ‘Most of them aren’t English; and about the only footballer they would ever recognise in a million years is David Beckham. Still, it couldn’t do any harm, could it? See what you can find out.’

  ‘Sure thing, boss.’

  I looked at our prisoner. ‘What do you think, Mr…?’

  Maurice pushed back from my desk and handed me a driving licence and a Tesco loyalty card.

  ‘This cunt’s name is Terence Shelley. Lives in Dagenham. And he shops at Tesco. Apart from that I know fuck all about him.’

  ‘Well, every little helps, doesn’t it?’

  I picked a football off the floor and bounced it hard on the back of Shelley’s head.

  ‘Hello! Is anyone at home? Talk to us, Mr Shelley, or you’re the Sweeney’s fucking dinner.’

  Shelley said nothing.

  ‘I’m tired. My friend here is tired. So I tell you what we’re going to do: we’re going home, he and I. But we’re going to leave you somewhere safe overnight to reflect upon your situation. Manacled to a nice heavy kettlebell. All right? That is unless you talk to us, now. So, what do you say?’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said the man.

  ‘You know something, Terry?’ I said. ‘I can call you Terry, can’t I? You should be on TalkSPORT.’

  33

  Sonja didn’t much care for football and tended to spend most weekends alone, at her own flat in Kensington. This was just as well as Saturdays and Sundays are always the busiest times at a football club. If we played on Saturday she would come around on Sunday morning; and if we played on a Sunday she would arrive on Sunday night. It was an arrangement that seemed to suit us both very well.

  I was especially looking forward to seeing Sonja after her shrinks’ weekend in Paris. As a leading authority on eating disorders she was much in demand as a speaker at practitioners’ conferences. But whenever she was away I felt a definite lack of equilibrium in my life, as if something important was missing from what kept me going; you might say that without her I had too much football, that she was the vital ingredient in the Gestalt that made me a complete man. But to put it much more simply, she made me happy. We always talked a lot, mostly about books and art, and we joked a lot, too – we shared a sense of humour, although sometimes it did seem that I had the lion’s share of it. We were also very attracted to each other, which meant that we always had great sex. I never knew a woman who enjoyed sex with me as much as she did. She was keen on games and on trying to find ways of pleasing me in the bedroom. Not that this was very difficult but for a number of reasons – the affair I’d had when I was married, the fact that I’m in a very physical profession and because I am very fit being the most important ones – she thought that I was also highly sexed, when in fact I don’t think I am. I was just as happy with what you might call main course sex as I was with the many sauces and pickles she was fond of devising. Frankly I think that if anyone was highly sexed it was her. She couldn’t get enough of it but, like a lot of blokes in football, I was often too knackered to have sex every night of the week – which she’d have liked, I think. In fact I’m sure of it.

  Before she’d gone to Paris she’d told me that she was going to visit a lingerie shop called Fifi Chachnil in the rue St Honoré to buy something seductive to wear for me just as soon as she was back in London. She was always doing things like that and while I never asked her to, I have to confess I never tired of seeing Sonja in sexy underwear. In fact I had come to appreciate it very much. I suppose I liked her wearing it because it was the absolute antithesis of my own very masculine world of liniment and sweat, jock straps and shin pads, muddy boots and Vaseline, dubbin and compression shorts. The lingerie she bought and wore was improbably, impossibly small and delicate and lacy and utterly feminine, or at least so it seemed to me. And of course she had the most fabulous figure. Her bottom was quite perfect and she had a stomach like a washboard. For a woman who spent a lot of time in an office she was very fit indeed. Whenever she dressed up – as she usually did when she returned from a weekend away – she would light lots of tea lights and scented candles and answer the door wearing something diaphanous and wispy. After the weekend I needed a bit of that, but more importantly I needed a lot of love from the woman I loved; the death of Zarco, and the revelations about Drenno’s friend Mackie – not to mention the crisis with the UKAD people and the pressure I was getting from everyone – had left me feeling very raw indeed.

  I turned into Manresa Road and saw the lights on in my flat, which lifted my spirits. In my mind’s eye I was already stepping out of a hot bath into a large towel to be dried carefully by her. At the same time I saw that the press had gone from outside my building. Now that Ronan Reilly had been arrested they had other fish to fry. I breathed a sigh of relief, parked the Range Rover in the underground car park and already happy to be home, I rode the lift eagerly up to my floor. My only regret was that I’d not bought flowers – a white orchid, perhaps; she was very fond of orchids – or some sort of present. I loved buying her presents.

  But as I opened the front door I knew immediately something was wrong. For one thing there was no scented candle on the hall table; and for another the Louis Vuitton Bisten 70 suitcase I’d bought her for Christmas was standing on the floor, next to the matching beauty case I’d got for her birthday. I’d joked that I was planning on turning her into a proper WAG, which she thought was very funny, but in truth there was never any danger of that happening; Sonja was much too clever to be something as pejorative as that. I picked the Bisten up by the handle to check the weight; it was heavy, too heavy for a weekend in Paris. Besides, I knew she’d been home to her own flat already.

  Another reason I knew something was wrong was that the television was on; she seldom ever watched television and certainly not the news, which she said was mostly disasters and sport. Sonja only watched television when she was trying to take her mind off something at work. A patient. Or a paper she was preparing for a journal. She was wearing a rather businesslike two-piece suit with a pencil skirt, and a white shirt, which was the very opposite of what I’d thought she’d be wearing. She got up when I came into the sitting room – that was another bad sign, I thought; it was as if something formal was about to happen. Which of course it was. Nobody ever sits down to give you bad news.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I said, warily. ‘But since this time last night it’s just been one thing after another. But all that can wait, I think. It looks as if you’ve got something important to tell me.’

  ‘I suppose I should congratulate yo
u,’ she said, ‘on your new job.’

  I hesitated. ‘Thanks, but I’ve got a feeling that in about five minutes congratulations are going to seem like the wrong word. I’m looking at you, baby, and I can tell that I’m about to see a card come out of your pocket. So say what’s on your mind, eh? Before you lose your nerve for whatever this is about.’

  ‘Okay, I will.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Now that you’ve been given this job, Scott, I’ve got a feeling that we’re going to see even less of each other than we do already. And, well, the fact is, I want a bit more than that during the weekend. The fact is, I want a lot more than that.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘You remember that Nike ad we saw in the cinema? With all the famous footballers and the Elvis Presley song?’

  ‘A little less conversation, a little more action?’

  She nodded. ‘That’s the very opposite of what I want in life. And what I need from a man. My man.’

  ‘I see. At least I think I do.’

  ‘And it has to be said that in the bedroom things aren’t very good, either. At least not for me. You’re always tired, Scott.’

  I nodded. ‘I can’t deny that.’

  I went to my cigar humidor and took out a cigarette. Once a week – usually it was a Sunday night – I smoked a single cigarette, which always felt like a real pleasure. Used like that – just a couple of puffs, the way South American Indians had smoked the stuff – tobacco seemed to have almost medicinal qualities. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ I asked, lighting up. ‘But, under the circumstances…’ I let out a sigh that was one third smoke and two thirds disappointment. ‘You know how to pick your moments, Sonja, I’ll say that for you.’

  ‘Don’t feel sorry for yourself, Scott. It really doesn’t suit you. You’re not the type.’