by Philip Kerr
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 th
ere 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.’
‘Oh? Like what?’
‘I’m not sure. He enjoyed playing politics, as I expect you know. And he wasn’t very popular with the police because he had said some things about them that they didn’t like. Sometimes he said he thought of himself as the Russell Brand of football. Anyway, a month or two ago, there was a big demonstration about something on the Place de la Bastille. While it was happening a girl was attacked by a black guy. Almost raped. You can see it on YouTube, I think. When she described her attacker to the police she said he looked a bit like Jérôme Dumas. She didn’t actually mean that it was Jérôme Dumas who’d attacked her but by the time the description was put out on police radio the police had decided it was him they were looking for. And he was arrested. It took him several hours to convince the police that he had an alibi. I was his alibi. I had to go to the station and tell them that he’d been with me at the time of the attack. Which was true.’
This all sounded very familiar and I told Bella that something very similar had happened to me.
‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘the police took him to the station and while they had him in custody they were a bit rough with him, I think. And when they’d finished with the rape charges they suggested his involvement with the banlieue gangs was a lot more than him giving money and clothes to a youth centre in Sevran. That he was actively involved with the drugs trade. Which wasn’t so hard to believe if you’re a white policeman in Paris. Someone like Jérôme cultivated the black gangsta rapper look. As he was leaving the station the police told him they would be keeping a very close eye on him. I think some of them were PSG fans who didn’t like what he’d said in L’Equipe. Anyway, that’s what scared him. The idea that they were out to get him.’
‘Is that what they said?’
‘In so many words.’
‘Why didn’t Mandel tell me about this?’
‘He didn’t know about it. Nor did Alice. No one did. Jérôme and I – we kept it very quiet in case it affected his chance of a transfer out of PSG. At the time that’s what he was hoping for. He’d been linked with clubs like Arsenal and Chelsea as well as Barcelona and he thought – probably correctly – that any talk of an arrest for rape or drug dealing might affect that.’
‘He wouldn’t be wrong,’ I said. ‘English football clubs are very conservative. Especially now that the sisterhood is so very well mobilised on Twitter. The opinion of women about football and footballers used to count for nothing. Now it can be the difference between keeping your job and losing it. Big Brother is watching you, all right, only Big Brother is us, ourselves. Smartphones at the ready, we’re all Big Brother now, don’t you think?’
Bella nodded and smiled through that and it was clear to me that she really didn’t know who or what Big Brother really was or what I was even talking about. But to be fair I wasn’t that sure George Orwell had ever made much of an impact in France.
‘Fortunately,’ she said, ‘all the story amounted to in the newspapers was that the woman who’d been attacked had given a description of a black man who looked a bit like Jérôme Dumas and the whole thing just morphed into a few column inches about how the police were so racist and stupid that they’d put this out as the description of the man they were looking for. You know – as if all black men look alike? His actual arrest passed them by.’
‘Have you ever been to this youth centre?’
‘Are you joking? No way. It’s one thing for someone like Jérôme Dumas to go there, on public transport – when he wanted to be, he could be very anonymous, you know? – but it’s something else for a tall white blonde to go somewhere like that. Don’t get me wrong. I like the Metro. But in Sevran a woman like me – I’m just a mugging waiting to happen.’
‘You are in that dress,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of mugging you myself when we left here.’
She smiled but I wasn’t sure she’d understood what I meant.
‘It’s Miu Miu. I’m glad you like it. Miuccia Prada is one of my favourite designers. The pink shearling coat I was wearing when I came in here is Miu Miu, too. Such a clever woman. Did you know that in 2014 Forbes magazine ranked her in the top one hundred most powerful women in the world?’
‘I didn’t know that. Anyway, the thing is, I think I might have to go to Sevran tomorrow,’ I said. ‘What’s this place called, do you know? The youth centre?’
‘I think it’s called the Alain Savary Centre.’
‘Who’s he?’
Bella laughed. ‘I haven’t the first idea. Someone who liked football, I expect. There are plenty of those in France. By the way, if you go there you’d best leave that nice gold watch in your hotel room safe. What is it – a Hublot? The Big Bang Gold?’
I nodded, realising at last we’d managed to find a subject about which she was extremely well-informed: fashion and luxury goods. I expect she had a master’s degree from Net-A-Porter.
‘It’s my favourite man’s watch in the world. Carlo Crocco is a friend of mine, although the brand is now owned by Louis Vuitton, of course.’
‘Of course.’
Bella touched my hand again and this time she didn’t take it away. She let it rest lightly on mine. ‘Better still, Scott. Why don’t you leave your lovely watch on my bedside table? Along with
those handsome gold cufflinks, and that nice matching tiepin. And your wallet probably. That way you’ll still have all your nice things safe when you come back from Sevran.’
11
From Bella’s apartment near Parc Monceau I took the train to Sevran-Beaudottes station where I asked in the halal butcher’s shop, for directions to the Alain Savary Sports Centre.
Looking for his name on the internet, it turned out that Alain Savary was a French socialist politician and a former Minister of National Education which probably explained why Bella Macchina hadn’t heard of him. Education wasn’t working in France any better than it was working in England.
I was wearing some of the gangster-style clothes that Jérôme Dumas had previously left behind at Bella’s apartment: a hoody, a battered Belstaff motorcycle jacket, a pair of ripped G-Star RAW jeans and a casquette on my head – a baseball hat with a PSG logo on the front which was oddly hateful to me. The anomalous brown Crockett & Jones shoes were my own as the Converse trainers forgotten by Dumas were too small.
My own Zegna suit was hanging neatly in Bella’s closet and, as she had suggested, my gold watch was lying on her bedside table. I hadn’t slept very much but then sleeping seems like a bit of a waste of time when you’re in bed with a naked supermodel. A combination of champagne, red wine and good cognac, not to mention a cigarette and her insistent and clamorous love-making, had left me feeling very slightly fragile. My cock felt like it had been inside a coffee grinder. Which wasn’t so very far from the truth: the woman was a James Brown dream, a real sex machine. I might almost have felt guilty about that if I hadn’t had such a good time. Like the Daft Punk song, I’d stayed up all night to get lucky, and lucky was how I felt.