Off Side (31 page)

Carvalho looked in vain for a chair on which to sit. The only chair in the room was occupied by Raurell.

‘The woman downstairs, who I presume tried to stop you seeing me, has removed the other chair. She says that she’s already doing me a big favour by allowing me to have a desk. I try to avoid talking to her. Nor have I given her the good slap that she undoubtedly deserves.’ Here the old Indian paused for a moment, before spitting out: ‘My doctor has told me that I should keep away from shit.’

‘Palacín was one of my latest successes. Not the only one, by any means, I should add. I’ve got some important deals under way at the moment, and don’t be surprised if one of these days the sporting press starts talking about Raurell again. There was a time when there was not a single club in Spain that didn’t have at least one of my players. I used to travel over to America, and whenever I saw a young player — white, of course — who showed a bit of promise, I sorted out his papers, and off he went to Spain, claiming a father or a grandfather from the Estremadura. They make their damn silly laws, and then they have to live with the consequences. They decided to get all nationalist about their football, and as a result teams were dying for lack of players. You can’t fill football stadiums with local players. Only the Northern clubs can, because they have large enough catchment areas. From this room I pull the strings in clubs all over Spain, and at this precise moment more than one club manager is thinking of getting in touch with me. “I must have a word with Raurell. He’s bound to have what we need.” And I do. I have a complete collection of all of Spain’s best older players. They come in all sizes and at all prices. In the old days I used to deal in imported cars, nowadays I deal in second-hand footballers. Life rolls on, and it’s not my fault if club directors shit in their pants when the public remembers the promises made to them. It’s also not my fault if players aren’t capable of hanging on to what they earn, or if they don’t earn as much as people think they do. People only talk about the millionaire contracts, and they either don’t know or don’t want to know about what happens to the majority of players. Some of the first division clubs owe their players up to six months’ wages, and there are second division teams owing as much as a year, and who pay when they can. These days players are more protected, and better prepared, but twenty or thirty years ago footballers were
just cannon fodder who had no way of defending their rights. What’s more, they all thought that as soon as they got a couple of pesetas in their pocket, the thing to do was to open a bar and live off the proceeds. I have known, personally, more than a hundred first division players, and out of those only twenty have enjoyed any kind of prosperity. The others live off what they used to be, and that’s not much of a living. They take the first job they can get their hands on, and more or less live for their photo albums and newspaper cuttings. If I had wanted to, I could have squeezed them like lemons, and I would have made a lot of money, but I’ve always treated them like my own children, and if you ask me it’s not surprising that every day it costs more and more to find Spaniards who are prepared to take up football professionally. Do you remember Vic Buckingham? He was a manager with Barcelona in the old days. He said something that was very true: as time goes by, you’re going to get fewer and fewer players coming into the game, because young lads these days prefer to study economics, and good luck to them. Once upon a time every town had a thousand bits of wasteland, and kids kicking balls around. Nowadays there’s no wasteland, and people have their heads screwed on better. A career in football can last ten or fifteen years, always assuming that you don’t get injured. But what then? Palacín was a typical case, and I had him on my files because one day he was bound to end up coming to me. He had made a name for himself, then he’d been forgotten, but it would be easy for him to make a comeback. He’d done his time playing soccer in the Americas, and people here are so provincial: when they know that somebody’s played abroad, they treat him like God. If you looked through my files, you’d see that I keep them up to date, and that I’m building for the future. At the moment I’m preparing files on the country’s best players between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. I can guarantee that within five to ten years a lot of them will end up knocking at my door. I’m a patient man. I sit here and wait. Raurell’s job will be to find them a team, just as I did for Palacín. They’re
my boys — all the more so since my wife died and my own sons kicked me out. I’m prepared to make you a bet. When you leave here, buy one of the sports papers. Write down the names of the players that they’re writing about — I don’t mean the super-millionaires, of course, because their futures are assured. I mean the middle-of-the-road players. Write down their names, and I bet you anything you like that in the next five to ten years they will be clients of Raurell. I’ve earned a lot of money in my time, but I’ve spent it as fast as I got it, and now I know that when some club manager turns up on my doorstep, it’s a bad sign. He’s coming to suggest that I split my commission, or that I get them out of a tight spot. Sánchez Zapico, for example. Can you believe that he came asking me for a second-rate player? No, it wasn’t quite like that, but almost. He came and said: “Raurell, I need a player who’s cheap, with a bit of a name, but not too good.” I was amazed. It was the first time that anyone’s ever asked me for a turkey and so I said: “Raurell doesn’t deal in turkeys. He deals in wrecks, but not in turkeys.” Zapico told me I had a suspicious mind, and he told me that the reason why he didn’t want anyone too good was because he didn’t want to give the rest of his team inferiority complexes. Sometimes a top-notch player can stimulate a side, but sometimes he just makes them nervous. As it happened, while Zapico was saying his piece, I already had Palacín in mind. Wait a moment, I’ll show you the file. Here it is. Newspaper cuttings. I didn’t miss a thing that was written about Palacín, even though, mark you, there wasn’t a lot after he left for Los Angeles. But here it all is. Take a look, have a read … I knew the point that he had reached, and he was at just the right point for what Sánchez Zapico was looking for. Palacín is your man, I said, and I had to remind him who Palacín was. We paid his flight over, and he arrived in Spain in the middle of July. He surprised me, because he was in better condition than I had expected, so I tried to put the price up, but Sánchez Zapico is stingier than my eldest son, who even grudges passing you the salt at mealtimes. Mind
you, even though Palacín was physically fit and healthy, he had problems up here, in the head. He’s the kind of player who can’t face getting old, and what’s more he was in a bit of a family mess. His wife had left him, and they had a kid between them, and I reckoned he was probably heading for a fall. I warned Sánchez Zapico. I said, “This kid might crack if he doesn’t get psychological help, because it’s obvious, his head’s somewhere else.” But Centellas weren’t worried, and they signed him anyway. I pocketed half my commission, and on to other things. These days it doesn’t do to worry over other people’s problems. Palacín was like a country boy lost in the big city, even though he had lived in Barcelona when the city was at its best. He didn’t even have a place to stay. I recommended a boarding house run by an old girlfriend of mine, a lovely lady who was a chorus girl in Gemma del Rio’s troupe at the Moulin in the 1940s and early 1950s. I haven’t seen her for years, but we’re still good friends, because we first met in those difficult years when she was an artiste down on her luck and I was working on remaking my life. And look where it’s got me. Football has made me rich a thousand times over, and a thousand times over I’ve lost it all, and do you know what I’m living on now? I tell people, and they don’t believe me. I’ve worked for a good thirty years as an agent supplying footballers, and before that I worked the markets, and for a while I was even a crockery salesman, selling door to door. But you can’t live on that. No, what was my bad luck during the post-war years was the fact that I had been a policeman under the Republic. But that’s exactly what provides me with a living now. They give me a pension which is sufficient for me to pay for this asylum — I call it an asylum because it is an asylum, even though the sign outside says that it’s an old people’s home. Fifty years doing every job under the sun, and not a penny to show for it. But three years in the Republican police, and your old age is assured. Of course, being with the Republic meant that I ended up in prison after the Civil War, but I made some handy contacts there who turned out
to be useful over the years, particularly the black-marketeers — the few that actually ever ended up in prison. I live like a king here, and I expect people to show respect, and when that creepy woman comes up here whingeing and moaning, I show her my files, I show her all this, and I send her off with her tail between her legs. You are not talking to some useless old fogey, señora. I am a professional man, very active, and my visiting card opens just about every door on the Spanish football scene. What’s more, I am writing my memoirs, which are going to stir up a juicy scandal in some quarters. Do you listen to José María García’s programme on Radio 3? I recommend it. It’s like a circus! García interviews club directors, referees, managers and so on, and they let him say what he likes, because they’re scared of him — he knows his stuff, and he’s got them by the balls. Well anyway, when I start talking, García’s programme is going to look like chickenfeed. “Supergarcía”, I think they call it. I’ve written to him a couple of times, offering my services as a collaborator. I suggested that we did a section of a programme called: “Look Back in Humour”. I know them, you see. I know the football world inside out, and take it from me, the best people in it are still the players, and the biggest rogues are the club directors, closely followed by the middlemen, because most of them aren’t as considerate as me. You know, it makes me cry sometimes, because you see these lads out on the pitch, and they look like hard men. But they’re made of clay, and they’re easily broken. All it needs is for a few fans to start booing them, or a bit of an injury, or a row with the wife or the mother-in-law. Do you remember the case of Pérez? You don’t? Well, his mother-in-law ran off with the team’s assistant trainer, and his wife got so depressed that she ended up crying all night. As a result, he never got any sleep, and was always half asleep out on the pitch. Nobody ever knew why it was that Pérez was so dozy, even when he was taking a corner, but Raurell knows, because I was his agent, and I had to sell him off cheap at the end of the season to a second division team. A couple of kicks in the
wrong place, and a flighty mother-in-law — that’s what ruined Pérez. I tell you, when I talk, the shit will really hit the fan. And I’m still in time to bring down a good few reputations, because I know the truth behind a lot of the characters you see in the news these days. Mind you, five years from now it’ll be another story, because I’ll be eighty by then, and a lot of the people I’ve known will be out of it. Do you know how old I’ll be in 1992? Eighty years old. And what about the year 2000 — I don’t even want to think about it, with the amount of business there’s going to be in the football game in the next fifteen years. The future for a middleman is in indoor football. Do you think that indoor football is going to take off in the same way that basketball, hockey and volleyball did? Where are the players going to come from? Very simple — from the second- and third-ranking players in league football. And that’s where I come in — that’s the area I’ve been specializing in over the last while. One day I said to myself: Raurell, these days there are middlemen who work with computers and fly private jets. You’re not up to that. You know your limits, but you know that you’re the best in your field. And so I am. Look at this pile of envelopes. I keep them because I collect the stamps, but these letters come from all over Spain, and they all know that they can rely on Raurell, whether it’s for a bit of advice, or for a player like Palacín. And I know it’s not good to speak ill of the dead, but after everything I did for him he never even came to visit me, never told me how it was going at the boarding house … Mind you, maybe that’s because I advised him not to mention my name in front of Conchita, because she’s still a little bit annoyed with me about the pension I told you about. When she decided to give up her trade, if you know what I mean, she went round all her regular clients, and asked us to make a little contribution so that she could set herself up as a landlady. But she caught me at a bad time. My wife was very ill, which involved me in spending a lot of money, and at the time I wasn’t getting the kind of contracts that I used to have, and I was frank with her:
“Look, Conchita, I like you now, and I’ve always liked you, and if you were ten years younger, and I was twenty years younger, then maybe I would have taken out a loan for you so that you could start your business. But you aren’t ten years younger, and I’m not twenty years younger, and I’m not taking out a loan. Why kid ourselves?” She wanted to scratch my eyes out, because that’s the sort of lady she is, but when all’s said and done, she’s got a kind heart, and when I told Palacín about her boarding house I knew I was putting him in good hands. She would treat him like a mother. Poor Palacín. What bad luck. Conchita’s a darling, you know, and Sánchez Zapico is the exact opposite, because he still hasn’t paid me the balance of my commission, and I’m having to ring him day after day in case he thinks he can try and get off the hook now that Palacín’s kicked the bucket. It’s hardly my fault if things turned out the way they did. I put the boy in a position where he could earn good money in the last years of his footballing life. That’s my job. In the old days I always used to tell my lads: I’ll get you the contracts, but when they hire you you’re going to have to use your heads and look out for yourselves. Watch out, and don’t any of you kid yourselves. I’ll put myself in the front line as often as I’m needed, but never my arse, eh? Never my arse.’

Biscuter was not in the office, but his absence was more than sufficiently made up for by the presence of three North Africans, one of whom was Mohammed. This would not have been the first beating Carvalho had taken in his life, and he sounded out his body, asking it for some small sign of solidarity. His body made no answer. It wasn’t looking for a fight. When he tried to estimate the distance between himself and the door, with the idea of making a run for it, and as he looked over at the drawer where he kept his gun, he deduced that his fate was more or less sealed, and that he wouldn’t achieve a lot by attempting elaborate
conversation with a man of as few words as Mohammed. What’s more, the three men were rapidly forming up in a triangle around him, and Carvalho stood at the centre, trying to relax his body so that the blows would hurt less when they came. But nobody hit him, and nobody said a word. Mohammed’s face showed a degree of inscrutability more appropriate to an Asian than to an African, and when he finally spoke his tone struck Carvalho as alarmingly normal.