False Nine

by Philip Kerr

  19

  There were several things about Guadeloupe that reminded me strongly of France: the autoroutes, the cars, the number plates on the cars, the postal vans, the occasional Casino, and the airport, of course, which, like the road to England from Scotland, was perhaps the island’s most impressively modern and inviting feature. But as soon as we left the airport and the main highways things turned more ramshackle. Nature was rampant, as if the lush tropical vegetation itself was in the process of staging some irresistible green revolution against the march of civilisation – although on Guadeloupe civilisation was less of a march and more of a slow, barefoot, sideways shuffle. Indeed, the island seemed to be trying to push mankind and all of his pathetic and unwelcome structures back into the sea from where they had originated. Palm trees grew out of abandoned buildings and bushes flourished on rooftops like hundreds of eco-friendly satellite dishes. Old wooden planters’ mansions on fire with banana leaves and which were little more than tottering façades, looked like the forgotten sets from a Hollywood movie. As your eyes passed over their once elegant lines you half expected to see Stanley Kowalski appear on the street and drunkenly howl ‘Stella!’ with frustrated desire at one of the padlocked upper doors and windows. And if all that wasn’t enough for the islanders to contend with, there was the occasional earthquake as well – the most recent a 5.6 magnitude less than two months ago.

  Pavements that were greasy with dirt and cracked with the relentless heat of the sun looked like trays of toffee and were almost as sticky. Fence posts and gates collapsing because of the damp and the voracious appetites of many insects resembled driftwood that, at any moment, might find its way back into the sea that seemed never very far away. There was salt in the hot air and on almost everything else, like a hoar frost. Large pelicans wheeled across the sandy beaches like pterodactyls before dive-bombing the waves for fish and one had the feeling that at any moment a dinosaur might have lumbered noisily out of the trees, crushing several shacks underfoot before eating a small 4x4, or perhaps a dozing Rasta man. Crickets whistled away in the bushes like the wheels of a dozen rusty wheelbarrows. Dogs dozed in doorways and on street corners with only the twitch of a flea-bitten ear or the slight ripple in a ribcage to persuade you that they were not fresh roadkill.

  In the central square of Pointe-à-Pitre there was a spice market that was about as picturesque as a cheap tea-towel and just as small, where none of the so-called traders seemed to care very much if anyone bought anything or not. I’ve seen more obvious enterprise in a hospice for the chronically ill. Here and there were a few traces of former French elegance; a fountain, the bronze statue of some forgotten Gallic hero, an ignored wall plaque; otherwise a guillotine might have seemed more in keeping with the look of the place. It was indeed like a Devil’s Island without Papillon, a penal colony bereft of convicts, although the many aimless French tourists who had recently disembarked from the two cruise ships now docked in the harbour of Pointe-à-Pitre seemed as if they might have been sent there as a punishment. With their pale skins, backpacks and ugly, shapeless sportswear they had the bewildered look of men and women who were uncomfortably far from home and true justice. Certainly there was nothing attractive in the shops of this unlikely capital that might have made any of them glad to be here. Even the local graffiti seemed to lack style.

  But while the island and its buildings were less than attractive the same could not be said of the indigenous people. With the exception of a bearded lady I saw eating garbage off the street and the fat hookers inhabiting the shanties on the western edge of the town, the Guadeloupeans themselves were altogether more noble in appearance. Some of them were astonishingly beautiful and looking at them it was easy to understand how it was that this island of less than half a million inhabitants could have produced such fine-looking men as Thierry Henry, Lilian Thuram, William Gallas and Sylvain Wiltord. All of the islanders spoke French but to each other they spoke Creole, which is a mixture of French and Spanish and as different from normal French as Welsh is from English. I can speak both French and Spanish and yet I couldn’t understand a word of Creole – it made me glad that Grace had insisted on accompanying me. There was that and the fact that she was great in bed, which may have been the best reason why we decided to check into a local hotel and base our search from there, at least for one night.

  ‘The Auberge de la Vieille Tour doesn’t begin to compare with Jumby Bay or any of the better places on Antigua,’ explained Grace as we arrived at the hotel in Le Gosier, to the east of Pointe-à-Pitre, ‘but it’s the best of a bad lot. Believe me, we could do a lot worse. I’m told that there are times when the food here is almost edible. Besides, it’s quite close to the spot where we’re going to commence our search for Jérôme Dumas.’

  Built around an old eighteenth-century windmill and occupying three hectares of tropical gardens on the edge of the Caribbean, the hotel resembled one from a very old Bond movie, Thunderball or Live and Let Die, perhaps, and, in lieu of a bottle opener, whenever we were there I was looking around for a man called Tee Hee with a steel claw for an arm. I could equally have used a steel-claw-type arm for a telephone aerial as the mobile signal on the island was almost non-existent, as was the whole concept of service with a smile. The Guadeloupeans may have been a handsome people but they weren’t in the least bit interested in giving customer satisfaction. In the hotel some of them were just rude.

  Which drew the scorn of my female companion.

  ‘They’ve got no idea how to run a hotel or a restaurant,’ she said. ‘Which is odd considering that this is part of France. I mean, you’d think they’d have learned a bit about food and hotel-keeping from the French.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s something to do with their dislike of the so-called Mother Country,’ she said. ‘They’d certainly like to be independent of France. So perhaps their rejection of French cuisine and decent hotel service is a corollary of that. Either way, I always feel rather sorry for all those French tourists who get off those hideous cruise ships in search of a good meal. You can go from one end of this island to the other in search of edible food and you won’t find it. You haven’t tasted really bad food until you’ve eaten in a local Creole restaurant.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  We were sitting in the hotel bar while this conversation took place, having ordered a glass of fruit juice with which to refresh ourselves after the bumpy flight from Antigua.

  ‘I mean, look at that,’ she said, pointing at the hotel’s hapless barman. ‘It’s a scandal. This island is sinking under the weight of all the fruit growing on the trees and still he’s giving us fruit juice out of a bottle and then diluting it with mineral water. Because he’s too lazy to squeeze a few goddamn oranges.’

  ‘I’m beginning to see why you left,’ I said.

  ‘This place always drives me crazy. What you were saying at Jumby Bay about how it’s hard to know why so many footballers in the French national team come from this island, I was thinking that it’s a lot easier to understand why so few of them – if any – ever come back. Imagine if you were a hugely well-paid footballer from Guadeloupe, living in Paris. All those fine restaurants. All that lovely shopping. The beautiful houses. You’d think you’d died and gone to heaven.’

  ‘So what’s Jérôme Dumas doing back here?’ I asked. ‘I’ve seen the way he lived in Paris. And I can tell you, the guy was behind heaven’s velvet rope.’

  ‘Now that I don’t know,’ said Grace. ‘I’ve got no idea why he was here. All I have are four possible addresses where we might find him.’

  ‘Courtesy of our mystery convict?’

  ‘Courtesy of our mystery convict.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Not quite. My client was specific that we should visit these four locations in turn. One after the other.’

  ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘I think we’ll have a better idea about that when we’ve been to the first address. Don’t yo
u think? It’s a short walk from here. In Le Gosier.’

  After we finished the ersatz fruit juice we walked out of the hotel entrance and went west along the road. After a short while we came to the Morne-à-l’Eau cemetery – a gated necropolis full of hundreds of tombs and mausoleums all made of black and white marble tiles and resembling a village made of liquorice. Next to this was a strangely modern church with a corrugated roof and a bright blue, eight-storey bell tower that the local fire department might have used for exercises.

  As we passed the church, Grace looked at me and said, ‘Do you believe in God?’

  ‘When I’m more than two goals down I’ve been known to pray, yes.’

  ‘That’s not quite the same thing.’

  ‘Depends if it works or not. When it works I believe and when it doesn’t I don’t. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I think it’s better to be absolutely sure of nothing when it comes to things such as God. I don’t feel frightened by not having an answer to something like that. Generally speaking, I like not having the answers to anything important. How could we ever know that shit? This is the way things are supposed to be, I think. And this is one reason I like football so much. In football it’s perfectly possible to have all answers to everything mysterious, such as why one side wins and why another side loses. To that extent football provides a perfect philosophy for life, by which I mean a theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for human behaviour. And it will never let you down. Unless it involves FIFA and Sepp Blatter, of course, in which case it will always let you down. But fundamentally football is a perfect way to live your life, because all “why” questions can be answered in football, as opposed to a lot of other things where they can’t be answered at all.’

  Grace laughed.

  ‘I’m serious. Believe me, applying the values and tenets of football to the world in general will take you a lot further than any religion I’ve ever come across. You have to be a philosopher to be a manager – although not every manager knows that he is one. And you can forget Stephen Hawking. There’s not one manager in football who doesn’t have a better understanding of time than he does. How it expands, how it stretches, how everything in a game changes from one minute to the next.’

  ‘I had no idea that it was so intellectually challenging. And here was me thinking that it’s just twenty-two men kicking a ball around.’

  ‘That’s a very common mistake.’

  We turned the corner and stopped in front of a concrete bungalow that must once have looked modern and inhabitable; now it reminded me of a caravan in January. The fuse box on the front wall was open and half of the electrics were spilling out onto the grass verge in a miniature Gordian knot of coloured wires and copper screws; the windows were untidily curtained and dirty; and the porch was home to a broken washing machine and a bale of old newspapers.

  ‘We’re here,’ said Grace. ‘At the first place I was told to look for Jérôme Dumas.’

  ‘If he’s here he certainly needs rescuing.’

  It was impossible to know if the place was occupied or not but, undeterred, Grace opened the gate to the empty driveway and, ignoring the faded yellow front door, she went around the back with me following close behind her. By now we could hear a football match on a radio or a television, life’s universal soundtrack, and I started to believe that our search was going to be a mercifully short one.

  ‘Hello,’ Grace said loudly in French. ‘Is there anyone home?’

  Instead of Jérôme Dumas we found a man lying on a cheap sunlounger and reading a copy of France-Antilles, which is the local newspaper. Seeing us in his back yard he put aside his newspaper and stood up. He was tall, thin, strong, and very very black; he looked like a length of pig-iron.

  ‘You’re not the cops,’ he said in French.

  ‘No, no. no. Nothing like that. Look, we’re sorry to disturb you, but we’re looking for a friend. Jérôme Dumas.’

  The man shook his head. ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘I know,’ said Grace. ‘Mwen ka palé Kréyol. Sa ou fé?’

  The man nodded. ‘Sa ka maché, è wou?’ he said.

  They continued in Creole, which meant I understood nothing about what was happening. The conversation lasted about five minutes, at the end of which Grace smiled and shook the man’s hand.

  ‘Mwen ka rimèsié’w anlo,’ she said, and walked back the way we’d came. I followed.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s strike one, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I never get that,’ I said. ‘About baseball, I mean. They call it a strike when they don’t hit it. That’s what you meant, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I never get that – any more than I get calling American football, football, when no one kicks the goddamn ball. At least hardly ever.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t know where Jérôme Dumas is. At least he said he didn’t. I don’t know whether or not you noticed the headphones on the ground by the sunlounger. They were Paris Saint-Germain Beats, by Dr Dre.’

  ‘I didn’t see that. No.’

  ‘Which are quite expensive, I think. At least a hundred euros.’

  ‘At least.’

  ‘And just the sort of thing that someone might bring a guy from Paris, as a present. Like the PSG charms key ring that was lying next to them. And the miniature PSG shirt in the acrylic glass ornament that was on the kitchen windowsill.’

  ‘You didn’t happen to see what number it was?’

  ‘Nine, I think.’

  ‘You see what I meant before? About me being a detective? That’s Jérôme’s shirt number.’ I grinned. ‘So much for my powers of observation.’

  ‘I expect you were trying to get your head around Antillean Creole.’

  ‘Maybe. I mean, I can speak good French, but I don’t understand a word of Creole.’

  ‘That’s the whole point of it. It’s not meant to be understood by the masters.’

  ‘Is that why you were speaking it? So that I wouldn’t understand?’

  ‘No. I was speaking Creole so that he wouldn’t feel threatened.’ She took my hand. ‘But I do like the idea of having a master.’

  ‘I can see I’m going to have to be quite firm with you.’

  ‘Oh, I do hope so, sir.’

  ‘Where to now, Mr Frodo?’

  ‘Back to the hotel. And from there we can get a taxi into Pointe-à-Pitre. For some lunch and then the next address on our list.’

  ‘If that guy knows where Jérôme is then he’s bound to tell him that we’re looking for him, don’t you think?’

  ‘I would say that’s half the point of us looking for him at the four addresses that I’ve been given by my client, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘In which case we might easily subvert the whole process and go to the last address on your list.’

  ‘We could do that, yes. But then you’d only have my word that it was the last address on my client’s list, wouldn’t you? So, I think we’ll just do this by the numbers. The way my client asked us to do this. You never know. We might incur some penalty for disobedience. And we wouldn’t want this decided by penalties, now would we?’

  20

  The Yacht Club in Pointe-à-Pitre wasn’t really a yacht club but a modern-looking restaurant on the edge of an empty harbour. It certainly didn’t look as if any of the smart yachts that came to winter in the Caribbean were mooring here in Guadeloupe. It wasn’t much of a restaurant either and I’ve had much better meals at Piebury Corner, near the Arsenal, and certainly less expensive ones. Guadeloupe used the euro and while there was nothing of any quality to buy and – on the evidence of the lunch we pushed around our plates at the Yacht Club – nothing to eat either, the prices were comparable with mainland France, which is to say, expensive.

  It started to rain, which didn’t help my mood. The waiter came and drew down some screens to stop our table from being soaked. It seemed uncharacteristically thoughtful.

>   ‘That’s the most expensive bad meal I’ve had in a long while,’ I remarked.

  ‘I’ll remind you that you said that at dinner. I warned you not to have the Creole Plate.’

  ‘The mobile signal’s not much better.’

  ‘No, but I’m really not surprised by that either.’

  ‘You’re not expecting much of an improvement then?’

  ‘In the signal? Or the food?’

  ‘Either one.’

  ‘Not until we’re back on Antigua.’

  ‘I’m beginning to understand why you’re over there and not here. You know, it’s a pity. You could do a lot with this island.’

  ‘If you were a Bond villain I guess you could. But what did you have in mind?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Perhaps, if they were able to prove that this was the island that Columbus discovered first, and not the Bahamas, they might get some Americans coming here. No one really knows for sure where he came ashore in 1492. If they could get some Americans then that might bring in some money.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Without that it’s all a question of attitude. I think there would be more money spent here if the local people looked as if they gave a shit. Until that happens, this place is going to remain a backwater. Right now the most valuable export the island has are its footballers.’

  ‘That I can understand. Almost. But how is it that the French manage to export their ugliest tourists here? I like the French, I love the French, but these are the most badly dressed tourists you can find anywhere south of Blackpool. Anyway. How do you change an attitude?’

  ‘Give the place its independence, probably.’

  ‘Yes, I can see why that wouldn’t ever work in France. You’re talking about taking away the best chance France has of winning the next World Cup. And the one after that.’