Hand of God (12 page)

Verhofstadt looked at Trikoupis.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I agree. We can play tomorrow, as well.’

‘Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you all for being so accommodating in an extremely difficult and tragic situation.’

I shook hands with Hristos Trikoupis and then with Mr Verhofstadt.

‘Then that’s settled,’ he said. ‘This match will be postponed until tomorrow.’

As Gary and I left the officials’ room, Trikoupis drew me aside.

‘I didn’t want to say this in front of the UEFA guy,’ he said, suddenly much less amicable. ‘After all, you’re a big boy now, Scott. But do you really know what the fuck you’re doing? I don’t think so. You think it was tough out there tonight? That was nothing compared to how it will be tomorrow. Don’t think that we’re going to go easy on you just because you have a player who had a heart attack. A player, I might add, who was not much loved after what he said about this country at the press conference the other night.’

‘Like I said earlier, I don’t think we have any other choice but to play.’

‘If you like. But you can depend on this. Tomorrow night, we’re going to fuck you in the ass. We’re going to comprehensively destroy you all. And then we’re going to tie your bodies to our chariots and drag you around the walls of this stadium in triumph. And however bad you feel now you will certainly feel worse tomorrow. My advice to you is this. Go home now. While you still can.’

I was still feeling too numb about what had happened to Bekim otherwise I might have told Hristos Trikoupis to go and fuck himself, especially after what he’d said about me in the newspapers. But things were quite bad enough without me starting a fight with another manager under the eyes of the local police. So I turned away without another word and went back to the dressing room where I told the players of what had been decided.

Not long after that Simon Page returned with the news that several of us had expected and all of us were dreading: Bekim Develi was dead.

It took me several moments before I could respond. When I finally did, I said:

‘We’ll leave it to the people in the media to idealise the man and enlarge him in death beyond what he was in life. That’s what they like to do but it’s not what Bekim would have wanted. I know that because last night, after that disastrous press conference, I asked him why he’d said what he said. And he replied: “The truth is the truth. I say it when I see it and that’s just the way I am.” Those of us who loved Bekim Develi, for who he really was, we’ll just leave it at this: we will remember him as a man who always tried, as a man who never gave up, as a man who defended fair play for all, but above all we will remember him as a truly great sportsman. When one of your team mates dies like this, I don’t know – this is about as bad as it gets. But tomorrow we’ll have the opportunity then as a team to show him how much we valued the time we had with him.’

I stood up. ‘Come on, lads. Have a shower and let’s get on that coach.’

Of course I’d never wanted Bekim Develi at the club. It had been Viktor’s idea to buy him from Dynamo St Petersburg. But Bekim had quickly impressed us all with his discipline and absolute commitment to the football club, not to mention his enormous technical ability. More importantly, he’d been lucky for us, which is to say he’d scored goals, more than a dozen goals in less than four months, important goals that had enabled us to finish fourth in the table behind Chelsea, Man City and Arsenal; if I had to single out one player who had helped us to qualify for Europe it would have been Bekim Develi. Yes, there had been times when I could have wished for him to be less outspoken but that was the red devil for you: mischief was hard-wired into his DNA. It was a part of him, like the red beard on his face.

Now that he was gone I wondered which of us – me or Viktor Sokolnikov – was going to telephone Bekim’s girlfriend, Alex, back in London and tell her the bad news. Vik had already spoken to her several times to assure her that everything that could be done was being done. The fact was Vik had known them both for longer than I had and, much to my relief, he volunteered to make the call himself. I’ll say one thing for our Ukrainian proprietor: he never shirked a difficult job.

‘Besides,’ he said, ‘she’s Russian and she ought to hear this terrible thing in her own language. Bad news is always less kind in translation.’ Vik shook his head. ‘Please, excuse me. Help yourself to a drink and make yourself comfortable. I may be a while.’

He went away and was gone for almost forty minutes.

We were on Vik’s yacht,
The Lady Ruslana
. His helicopter had flown me from the landing pad in front of the hotel onto the ship soon after my arrival back in Vouliagmeni from the Karaiskakis Stadium. He’d offered me dinner on-board, which I declined. I had no appetite for food although the same could not be said of his other guests on the yacht – Phil Hobday, Kojo Ironsi, flicking mosquitoes away with one of those African fly-whisks, Cooper Lybrand wearing an immaculate white linen suit that made him look like Gatsby, a couple of Greek businessmen who had lost their razors, and several pretty girls – who even now were loudly tucking in to dinner on the outside deck that would not have disgraced the table of a minor Roman emperor. Even close to the death of someone I was sure he had cared a lot about, Vik lived well; perhaps that’s the only way to be: with an eye not to the future, or the past but only on the present.
Tempus fugit
and all that.

The yacht’s red ensign flag at half-mast was a nice touch but I could have done without Kojo’s big, booming laugh; or the fireworks and lightshow on another yacht – bigger than the Vatican State and just as opulent – moored about a hundred metres away.

‘That’s
Monsieur Croesus
,’ said Vik when he came back to the stateroom where he’d left me, ‘Gustave Haak’s boat; the investor and arbitrageur,’ as if that was all the explanation needed for such a conspicuous middle finger to the cash-strapped Greeks who must have watched what was happening from the shore with something like astonishment. ‘It’s his birthday. Haak likes to enjoy his birthdays. Me, I prefer to forget them. There have been too many, and they come too often for my liking.’

‘How did she take it?’ I asked. ‘Alex?’

Vik sighed. ‘Stupid question.’

‘Sorry. Yes, it was.’

‘Actually, it so happens I’m very good at giving bad news. But then, as a Jew coming from Ukraine we’ve had generations of practice.’

‘I didn’t know you were Jewish, Viktor.’

‘So was Bekim. I don’t suppose you knew that either.’

‘No, I didn’t. Why didn’t I?’

‘Jews in football. This isn’t something to shout about like some stupid Haredi with a
kolpik
on his head. It’s like being gay: best kept quiet about in front of the great British public with its strong sense of sporting fair play.’

‘You got that right.’

He grimaced. ‘I’m worried about Alex. According to Bekim she’s suffering from post-natal depression. That’s normal, of course. But when I first got to know her she was addicted to cocaine. It’s at times like this that people – weaker people, such as her – reach for the wrong kind of help. I told her to leave all of the arrangements for Bekim’s funeral to me, but perhaps it would be better for her to be busy. You see, I know he wanted to be buried in Turkey, where he was born. In Izmir.’ He pointed at one of the windows. ‘Which is just across the Aegean Sea, in that direction. So it makes sense that I should do it. Don’t you think?’

‘Yes. And I, for one, am very glad you’re doing it. I’m not sure I can handle the Champions League and the local undertakers in the same day.’

‘Scott, really.’ Vik smiled and rubbed his beard. ‘You’re being a little melodramatic. What you do, you do very well, but honestly it’s nothing compared to what I have to do.’

‘No?’

‘No. You’re an intelligent man. But sometimes I wonder if you have the least idea of what it’s like to run a twelve-billion-pound business. The responsibility. The effort required. The number of things I have clamouring for my attention. I have thirty thousand people working for me. All you have to do is get eleven men to play football.’

I nodded silently. I already felt sad but now I felt small, too.

On
The Lady Ruslana
Vik was the master in a way he never was on land; he only had to nod to make things happen around him. The crew of the boat wore orange polo shirts and shorts and were so young they looked like a high school gym class in Australia, which was where they were from, mostly; once or twice I thought he’d nodded at me only to discover that he’d ordered himself a drink, or a snack, or sent some flowers to Alex, or summoned the launch that would take me back to the hotel.

‘I’d forgotten that helicopters make you nervous, Scott,’ he explained.

‘I don’t think I ever mentioned it, did I?’

He shrugged. ‘A man doesn’t have to say anything at all for him to be just as eloquent as Hamlet,’ he said. ‘Sometimes, his body says everything for him. Besides, I think you’ve had more than enough stress for one day, my friend. I know I have. So then. Take the launch. Go back to the hotel. Eat something. Try to get a good night’s sleep. And like I said before, leave everything other than tomorrow’s football match in my hands. But before you do all that, forgive me please. I’m sorry I put you down like that earlier. I made you feel insignificant and unimportant and that really wasn’t necessary. My apologies.’

It was perhaps a modest demonstration of omniscience; all the same it was a touching one.

And then he embraced me warmly.

When I got back to the hotel I found the police waiting for me in the lobby; they explained that there would have to be a post-mortem and that for legal reasons Bekim Develi’s possessions could not be removed from his bungalow at the hotel, which was now closed until further notice.

‘It’s the coroner’s office,’ they explained. ‘When a man of just twenty-nine drops down dead there are procedures that must be observed.’

‘I understand,’ I said.

It looked as though any funeral plans that Viktor Sokolnikov might have had for Bekim Develi to be buried in his home town of Izmir were now on hold.

We resumed the match abandoned the previous night with eighty-three minutes still to play. And the game started well. How could it not? We were already a goal up. This was an away goal too, the best kind in UEFA’s
Animal Farm
world where some goals are more equal than others. Our players seemed anxious to win the game, for Bekim’s sake if nothing else. The sports page of every English newspaper urged us on to victory over the Greeks and – with one Cassandra-like exception, the always-prescient Henry Winter at the
Daily Telegraph
– predicted that City would surely prevail.

Unfortunately no one had shown Olympiacos the script of how this particular revenge tragedy was supposed to play.

Our evening began to break up like the Elgin Marbles almost as soon as the City players stepped onto the pitch. It was as if, having lost Hector, our doom had been sealed for we were uncertain in defence, clueless in midfield, and impotent in attack. Schuermans and Hemingway were both outplayed by the thirty-two-year-old Argentine Alejandro Domínguez, who proved that his team had no need of centre forward Kostas Mitroglu – sold to Fulham for £12.5 million – to score goals. He equalised with just fifteen minutes on the clock, running on to a fantastic through ball from Giannis Maniatis, Olympiacos’s captain and central midfielder, whose pass looked as if he might have called Jesus Christ’s bluff and got a camel through the proverbial eye of the needle. Why our own midfielders didn’t close him down was one mystery; but it was wrapped up in the enigma of how our almost sedentary defenders didn’t manage to stop Domínguez from finding space to take a shot that Kenny Traynor ought to have saved easily. Unsighted and wrong-footed, our goalkeeper dived one way and Domínguez neatly flicked the ball the other. The ball crossed the line with an almost cartoonish lack of pace, as if Jerry the mouse could have stopped it, adding to Traynor’s obvious distress. He slapped the ground several times and shouted at the pitch, as if blaming the gods of the underworld below our feet.

The Legend fired off several red flares behind Traynor’s goal, which only served to underline the Scotsman’s infernal performance and filled the air in the stadium with a strongly sulphurous smell.

‘Fucking hell,’ exclaimed Simon. ‘I’ve seen some daft defending in my time but those two twats take the biscuit. The way they ran at the lad Domínguez you’d have thought they were trying to do a scissors in fucking rugby. Do you want to shout at them or shall I? Because I am so fucking angry about that, boss. I am so fucking angry.’

‘Be my guest,’ I said.

Simon spat out his extra-strong mint like a loose tooth, marched to the edge of the technical area, gesticulated furiously at our back four and let rip with a stream of obscenities that made me glad the Greek supporters were so loud. All I heard were the words ‘stupid cunts’, and in truth, when you come right down to it, those were the only two words he really needed. I wasn’t sure if FIFA could have envisaged what Simon was doing as ‘an element of the game’ within the change it had made to the laws in 1993, bringing technical areas into existence, but I doubted this kind of thing really did ‘improve the quality of play’. Of course, I was guilty of this sort of intemperate behaviour myself; indeed there were a couple of times when I’d been sent to the stands for what the referees’ association called ‘aggressive coaching’.

By now our goalmouth had disappeared in the cloud of red smoke from the Greek flares, which spared our goalkeeper’s blushes, and wisely, the referee waited a full minute before restarting the game.

‘Simon,’ I called, ‘come back here. You’ll give yourself a fucking heart attack.’

He didn’t hear me. Brick-faced and full of rage, the big Yorkshireman continued to shout and wave his arms about like a madman conducting an orchestra of deaf musicians and suddenly it occurred to me, after what had happened to Bekim Develi, that his having a heart attack wasn’t so very improbable. And as the game restarted I got out of my seat and, leaving the dugout, went to fetch him back. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hristos Trikoupis complaining to the fourth official that I had stepped in his technical area, which wasn’t true, of course, but, at that particular moment, I had other things to worry about.