Much more Adi than Jimmy Wayland had ever managed to be.
I shook my head. “OK, it’s just – I’m still struggling with it really being you this time. I mean, last time I saw you – it wasn’t you. And…”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, there’s this American lawyer, by the name of Lonza, who’s been pressuring Declan and the trustees to give up the sports centre. He’s told them that he’s had your authority to take over control, and to back that up he had some actor made up to look like you.”
“He did what?” Adi’s eyes narrowed. “That slimy piece of…”
He cut himself off, shaking his head. Adi had always had a fine command of English profanity, but I’d trained him out of it over the years. “Not good for your image,” I’d explained, and that had convinced him to take control. I was glad to see that it was holding.
“I knew he was capable of some devious tricks, but I hadn’t anticipated that one,” he continued.
“You know Lonza?”
He chuckled. “Oh, yes. Me and Rocco Lonza have had a lot to do with each other in recent years… but tell me more about this actor. You’ve seen him? How much of a likeness is there? Could he fool Declan, do you think?”
I took a deep breath. “He did look very like you. Fooled me the first time I saw him. But he’s not involved any more. He – had an accident.”
Adi leaned forward. “What sort of an accident?”
“The fatal sort. He fell off a building.”
“Oh? Well, that’s a thing!” He leaned back again, and a smile came across his face. “How sad for him – and for Rocco!”
“It wasn’t a smiling matter, Adi. I saw it happen. His name was Jimmy Wayland, and it wasn’t a death I’d wish on anyone.”
In my mind, the screaming face receded, falling…
“I’m sure it wasn’t, Graham, but here’s one of the tough facts of life: you take money from someone like Lonza, you take the risk that comes with it. You say you saw it?”
“Yes. I was trying to talk to him at the time.”
“Bit of a shocker for you as well, I suppose. Sorry about that. But how come it’s not been on the news? I’d have thought that a corpse looking like me would have rated at least a local mention.” Adi sounded as if his pride was hurt.
“It never happened, officially. I called an ambulance, of course – but by the time it arrived the body had gone. There’s a big man following Lonza around. Wears a black leather jacket. He turned up just after it happened, and I presume he whisked it away.”
“Big man in a leather jacket, eh?” Adi exchanged a glance with Casey. “That’ll be Handy Jack.”
“Handy Jack?”
“Just my name for him. Jack Crail – Go-to Jack, he’s known as in certain circles, since he’s a good man to go to to make things happen. Especially things involving broken limbs or damaged property.”
“Or disappearing bodies?” Sam suggested.
“Exactly. A handy man to have around, as I said! And for the past few years he’s been Lonza’s personal bodyguard and full-time fixer.”
“How come you know so much about Lonza and his associates?” I asked, with a trace of suspicion.
“Well now, that’s a long story. And actually, it’s all to do with why I needed to speak to you, Graham. But we’re going to need some refreshments to get through it. Casey, would you mind getting that coffee?”
“I’d prefer tea,” I said.
“Well, of course you would. Still a bit of a tea snob, eh, Graham? I didn’t expect that to change! But to be honest, you’d be better with the coffee. Americans don’t understand tea. We make it in a pot – they make it in a harbour!”
I laughed along with him. “Adi, I told you that one about thirty years ago! And I had to explain it – you’d never heard of the Boston Tea Party!”
“Well, you always did know a lot of useless information.”
We laughed again, and the moment of banter brought back the old days, all the shared jokes and the long conversations about life, the universe, and football. But mostly about football.
“There’s beer in the fridge if you’d rather have that,” said Casey, not sounding amused, and bringing us back to the present.
“OK, beers all round then,” Adi agreed as Sam and I nodded.
“I’m surprised this place even has a fridge,” Sam commented as Casey left the room. “Looks more like one of those ‘living museum’ places.”
Adi glanced round as if seeing the room for the first time. “Yes, it is a bit of a dump. All this clutter – that all came with the house. The kitchen’s better… I bought this place years ago. Some old lady died here, no relatives, needed some doing up, so I thought it might be a good investment. And a quiet little hidey-hole, somewhere to escape to. Did have a bit of work done on it, but then I left before it got very far. So Casey and I are just camping out here for a while.”
“You could have gone home, Adi,” I said. “Karen and the girls – they miss you. You could work something out.”
He frowned. “Yes, well, like I told you, I’ve got to keep a low profile at the moment. As far as Lonza knows, I’m dead, and I don’t want him to find out otherwise.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Well, that explains why he brought in a double. I was thinking that he must feel pretty sure the real you wouldn’t show up.”
“So how did you get involved with him in the first place?” Sam asked.
“It was… 2009. You remember I took the family over to the States for a holiday? New York, Disney World, Las Vegas – all the big places.”
I nodded. “You took a couple of months at it. Longest holiday you’d ever had.”
He shrugged. “Karen was nagging at me to take a proper break, spend time with the girls. And we finished the season in a good place, so I reckoned I’d earned a bit of time off. Besides, I was curious about how football was taking off over there. Soccer, I should say. I had the idea that there must be some good talent waiting to be recruited, a pretty much untapped resource.”
“So mixing business and pleasure, then?”
Adi winked. “As always, Graham. As always… Anyhow, while I was over there I met this guy Lonza. Slick lawyer type, not someone I’d take to, but he was interested in the business side of sport in general and gave me some talk about the money potential in US soccer. He got as far as suggesting that if I moved over there, he had a project in mind that we could work on together.
“Of course, at the time I wasn’t ready to make a move like that, and I told him so. And that would have been the end of it…”
Casey came back into the room with a cluster of opened beer bottles on a tray. Budweisers, of course. I’m not a great beer drinker, but when I do I prefer a local ale. Still, this was no time to be picky. I accepted mine without comment.
“So why wasn’t that the end of it?” Sam prompted.
Adi took a sip from his bottle and continued. “Well, things change, don’t they? That was 2009 and I was committed to staying with The Vale for the rest of my career. The following year I had a different point of view.”
“We’ve talked to a few people about that,” Sam said. “No one understands why you did it.”
“Don’t they?” Adi met my eyes and for a long moment we stared at each other. “Someone understands very well, Sam. But perhaps they prefer not to say.”
He took another drink, without breaking eye contact with me. “But the point is that when I did decide to leave The Vale, Lonza’s offer came to mind. It sounded good. So I got in touch and asked if it was still on.
“And of course it was. I flew over there a few days later. Lonza had contacts, he knew how to sort out visas and work permits and so on. He took me out to California – top hotel, all the perks – and set out his scheme. He wanted to start up a brand new team, and he wanted me to manage it.”
“Yes,” I broke in. “We heard about that. California Strike All-Stars, wasn’t it?”
Adi looked irritated. “Superstars. California Strike Superstars. The CSS, I called it for shorthand. Well, you should have heard of it. I worked my butt off to get the name out there, to make it happen.”
I smiled to myself at the Americanism. Adi hadn’t quite acquired the accent, but he’d made a start on the phrasing.
“So what happened? We heard you’d got a pretty good team together – even beat Real Madrid in a friendly! – but then everything went quiet.”
Adi said nothing for a moment. He just glared. At me, I thought, and I was taken aback by the venom in his expression, but then I decided, No, that’s not directed my way.
“Well, it was a scam, wasn’t it?” He grinned suddenly. The old Adi, the irrepressible Adi who hated to lose but never accepted defeat as final, just a detour on the way to the next win. “Right from the start, Lonza was playing me. And I have to say, he did a good job. Everything looked right. He could talk the talk, he had all the names, all the contacts. The money was in place, he told me, but what he needed was the expertise, the knowledge of the game. And I was the one to provide that. Ex-England international, successful manager, someone with a track record of success – we were the Dream Team, and together we’d make CSS the biggest sensation in football history. Of course, he was telling me what I wanted to hear.”
Adi paused to take another drink. “Hated this stuff when I first went out there. But it grows on you. America grows on you. The size… the big thinking, big talking, go-for-it attitude. And Lonza had all the trappings in place. The hotels and the press conferences, the cars and the parties and the girls…”
“Didn’t you ever think about your girls, Adi? And your wife?”
He jabbed a finger at me. “Don’t go there, Graham, all right? You know I never shared your puritanical outlook. What was between me and Karen was over, long before I left. I did my duty by her, I saw her set up OK.”
“They missed you,” I said quietly. “They loved you, Adi. They still do.”
“They’ll get over it. Things change, people change; you’ve got to move on. We all have to learn that lesson, Graham, even you – so don’t get all judgmental on me. I put up with that holier-than-thou attitude for years, but not any more – you getting me?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it again. This was getting us nowhere. Arguing with Adi rarely achieved anything. I made a conscious effort to sit back and relax, and after a moment Adi continued.
“For a long time, things were good. I was travelling all over, meeting people, talking it up. And the team was coming together. I got some good people in to build round – you remember Hans Van Hoorn, don’t you? Solid player, not as fast as he had been when he played for Holland, but he knew how to read a game. And José Santos – he went back to Brazil after he finished with Inter. I tracked him down coaching some low-budget youth team, but he still had the skills and he jumped at the chance to get back into real football.”
“Yes, we heard. What you were doing got noticed.”
“Of course it did. That was the point. Lonza’s point, particularly. The more publicity, the more credibility – the more money coming in. He had all sorts of people wanting to invest in this big new team. As I was building the team, he was selling it, and the money came rolling in.
“The problem was, we weren’t actually seeing much of it. Oh, he was still providing the stuff for show. There was a new strip, some top designer Lonza conned into putting his name to it. We made a big thing out of that. And the parties were non-stop.
“But when I pushed for some actual progress, he backed off. Not the time, things not quite in place, need a bit more patience, Adi. He had talked about a brand-new, purpose-built stadium that was going to be built in Los Angeles, or Sacramento… but there were problems, building regulations, not the right site, not the right time. So perhaps it would be San Francisco, or San Diego… then he was talking about smaller places, maybe Fresno, which after all was pretty central for California. Or Bakersfield, which wasn’t that far off. Or perhaps somewhere else. Never happened, of course. It was never going to.
“Still, I was pretty happy and doing OK. I wanted to bring in some bigger names, but Lonza pushed for me to get some local talent. So I spent a year or more scouting out the soccer teams in California, going round the colleges and schools. And you know what, Graham? I found some serious talent there. There were some kids with decent skills, and a few who could be up there with the best, given the right coaching and the right opportunities.”
“You were always good at that stuff, Adi. You could see talent in places no one else thought of looking.”
“True.” Adi grinned. “What was that you wrote once? ‘Adi Varney could sniff out a rose in a dungheap.’ That was after I found Johnnie Muldoon languishing down in the Fourth Division and got Dandy Dan to give him a trial. He saved two penalties in that game.”
“That was just the first draft that I showed you. The editor reworded it. Probably for the best.”
“It worked for me. Never mind. The thing was, I put together a team with some real potential. Started training, arranged a few friendlies with local sides – college teams, mostly, but a few pro clubs. And we did OK. Nothing phenomenal, but it was coming together.
“But it was all on a game-by-game basis. I couldn’t get Lonza to come up with proper contracts for these boys, or even a regular training venue. He had the same old excuses, and they were starting to sound a bit tired. And by then I’d found out a bit more about him.”
“Like he’s some sort of Mafia money-man?” Sam put in. He had been sitting on the sofa, sipping his Bud and idly playing with the knick-knacks that covered the table next to him.
“Oh, you found out about that, did you?”
“Wasn’t difficult. Seems he has a bit of a reputation in the States.” I gave him a steady look. “How long was it before you cottoned on?”
“Yes. Well, OK, I knew he was a bit dodgy from the start. But so what if some of the money he was using was a bit dirty? There always has been some of that floating round in sport. If he was using the CSS to launder some cash, that wasn’t my problem. But I started to wonder what else he was into. And yes, I should have looked into it a bit more from the start.”
“So what else was he into?” I wondered.
Adi shrugged. “Lots of stuff. Anything where there was money to be made. But his speciality was exchanging cash for promises. He’d launch a project with a lot of razzmatazz, give it a big build-up. He’d use money from some of his dodgy friends to do that – they’d make donations to his scheme like legitimate investors – then all of a sudden the whole thing would collapse. The Mafia or whoever he was working for would get their money back, freshly laundered with a good bit of interest on top. Lonza would skim off his own cut, and all the real investors were left high and dry. Sometimes bankrupt.”
“And that was what he was doing with California Strike?” Sam asked. He’d picked up a paperweight, a sort of brass and glass thing with a serpent wrapped round a globe, and was tracing the line of the serpent’s body as he spoke.
“Yes, that was the plan.” Adi finished his beer, then rolled the empty bottle between his hands. “What I didn’t find out till later was just how I fitted into the plan. I should have dug some more.
“Lonza’s MO was to handle things from behind the scenes, while someone else did the upfront stuff. Usually someone with a bit of a name, a bit of credibility in that particular business. Like me. Then, when the scheme tanked and Lonza slipped out the back with a bag of cash, the poor dope who had fronted things was left to try to explain things to the creditors – and the cops. Very often, they’d done some time as a result. But Lonza was clean, and so was the money.”
“You should have got out then, Adi,” I said.
Sam had put the globe down and had picked up a small brass pyramid, which he was turning over in his hands. I was starting to find it a bit annoying.
Adi shrugged. “Maybe. But as you know, I don’t like to lose, Graham.
And besides, I still thought I could make it work. The original plan – what I’d thought was the plan – that was still good. I knew that we could really make something out of CSS. There was no need for dirty dealing. Given a bit more investment, a bit more opportunity, we could have a successful team that was also a serious business proposition. I just needed something to convince Lonza and the other investors of that. And I saw a way.”
He paused, and looked pointedly at Sam. “Like the ornaments, do you?”
“Oh, sorry, Uncle Adi.” Sam hurriedly put the pyramid back on the table.
“No, keep it if you want. It’s just some junk the previous owner left behind. She was a bit of a hoarder.”
“Oh, cool. Thanks.” Sam stuffed it into a pocket.
“Real Madrid?” I suggested, trying to get Adi back on track. He turned his attention back my way.
“Exactly. I got to hear that they were doing an off-season tour of the West Coast – bit of a holiday for them really, but they’d keep in practice and get some publicity by playing a few exhibition matches. So I got in touch. I knew a few people who knew some people, and yes, they were open to it. So I put it to Lonza.
“To my surprise, he was really keen on the idea. Backed me to the hilt. Promised to hire a big stadium, even let me get players on a short contract to train them properly. And I thought I’d done it. That things were going ahead properly at last, and CSS was on its way up.
“But what I didn’t know was that Lonza was having a bit of trouble of his own. He’d got greedy, skimmed off more than his share, and his bosses were starting to get a bit suspicious. Plus all the legitimate investors were wondering when they were going to see a return.
“I’d given him the answer. Get CSS playing a big match, something really high-profile. Like a big European team. And then make sure that we lost, and lost big. Then he could go around to everyone who was asking for money and tell them that it had all gone; that Adi Varney had talked big but he couldn’t deliver and he’d spent all the investments on a crap team that was going nowhere.”
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