‘Have you considered the possibility that he’s been kidnapped? Footballers make good victims. They’re overpaid, asset-rich and wayward. They don’t always do what they’re told and most of them figure they’re too tough for bodyguards which means that they’re easier to snatch than most rich kids. When I was in the nick I had a bunch of cons come to me with a scheme to kidnap a top Arsenal player. There are some bastards out there who’ll do anything for money’
‘If that’s what this is then we’ve received no demand for ransom,’ said Jacint.
‘Nor has PSG,’ said Rivel.
‘But you are certainly empowered to negotiate a release if it turns out that this is what’s happened,’ said Ahmed.
‘Then suppose he’s just had enough of football?’ I said. ‘Maybe he’s burned out. That can happen.’
‘Your fee is still one million,’ said Ahmed. ‘The three million euro fee is payable only if Dumas plays. Needless to say that his failure to play at all for FCB will have financial consequences for PSG.’
‘We won’t get paid,’ said Rivel.
‘If he’s had enough of football an important part of your job would include persuading him to come back home,’ said Oriel. ‘That’s another reason we want to hire you. To talk him round if he’s got cold feet.’
‘Let’s say I do take this job. How long should I keep looking for?’
‘Until the end of this month,’ said Ahmed. ‘Four weeks. Six at most.’
‘Ideally,’ added Jacint, ‘we should like the player back in time for us to play him in el clásico, on Sunday, March the twenty-second. If he could feature in the match against Madrid, it will be as much as we can hope for.’ He shrugged. ‘As you may remember, Madrid won the last classic, three — one, in front of their home fans.’
‘We were robbed,’ said Oriel. ‘Not the first time, of course.’
‘They came from behind after Neymar gave us the perfect start, with a goal after just four minutes.’
‘They had a penalty which should never have been given,’ said Oriel. ‘It was ball to hand, not hand to ball as the law states. Gerard Piqué was unfairly penalised. It was the sheer injustice of this penalty that affected our team.’
I nodded, smiling. Nothing changes very much in a rivalry like the one that existed between Madrid and Barcelona. But it was perhaps the only rivalry in which one side had forced the other to play, at gunpoint. For many, the hatred that now existed between Madrid and Barcelona had not existed at all until that game, in 1943. Madrid won the game 11–1, which makes you wonder about the team talk at half time. What did the manager say to his team?
‘On second thoughts, you’d best let these Spaniards beat us, lads, or they’re liable to shoot us, like they shot Lorca. If they can shoot a poet these fascists can certainly shoot a football team.’
‘Will you do it?’ asked Jacint. ‘This club will be forever in your debt.’
‘And ours,’ added Charles Rivel.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, wavering a little.
I like Barcelona. I like Catalans. I just didn’t want to turn into football’s Inspector Clouseau.
I got up from the table.
‘I’m going to the men’s room. So give me a few minutes, to think about it.’
‘If it’s a question of money...’ said Ahmed.
‘The money’s fine,’ I said. ‘No, I’m just wondering if you’d come to Pep on his year off and asked him to help you out like this, what he’d have said.’
‘Pep’s not an intellectual,’ said Jacint. ‘You’re the one who went to university, not him. All he knows is football.’
‘Maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong,’ I said. ‘Anyway, university doesn’t mean much nowadays. You can get a degree for staying in bed and watching television. What I meant was that Guardiola has always been very single-minded. A man with a plan. Total football of the kind he learned under Cruyff doesn’t seem to accommodate what you’re asking me to do. Other clubs might get the idea that I’m less interested in playing 4-4-2 than in playing the amateur sleuth.’
‘You’re a clever man, Scott,’ said Jacint. ‘Maybe a little too clever for this game. But you’ll always be part of the Barca family. I think you know that.’
There are times — usually when it’s someone paying me a compliment like that — when I look down at my feet as if I expect to find a ball, and the fact is that sometimes I still don’t know what to do when I see there isn’t one. I swear when I first stopped playing football I used to wake up at night and look around for the ball. Especially when I was in the nick. It’s like I don’t know what to do with my feet. As if they’re at a loss without a ball to kick. Like a soldier without a rifle, I guess.
I went to wash my hands. Along the way I glanced at my phone and saw from the Twitter feed that some women were calling on me to be sacked after my joke about Rafinha coming off the pitch during the game against Villarreal because he had his period. The fact that I didn’t have a job didn’t seem to have registered with my critics, many of whom had tweeted to tell me I was a sexist pig and every bit as bad as Andy Gray, and so I dismissed them from my mind.
Besides, it seemed rather more important that the manager of another Premier League side had just lost his job. I didn’t kid myself that I was about to walk into another big club soon. Not when there were men like Tim Sherwood, Glenn Hoddle, Alan Irvine and Neil Warnock all looking for a new job. In truth I’d already made my decision about what I was going to do. Jacint had reminded me, subtly, that Barcelona had taken me into their family at a time when I was recently out of prison, and anyone else might have given the matter of my employment a second thought. I owed the Catalans something for giving me a chance when no English club had been there for me. And now that I came to consider the matter in more detail, it seemed that I owed them, big time.
Besides, without a ball to kick, what else was I going to do with my time?
I came back to the table.
‘All right, I’ll do it. I’ll look for your missing player. But let’s get one thing clear, gentlemen. Let’s assume for one minute that I am as clever as you say I am. Then you’ll forgive me if I tell you the real reason you want to find Jérôme Dumas and are prepared to pay me so handsomely to do it. Which has only a little to do with everything you’ve mentioned. I mean, that was nice and it all sounded very plausible. Even romantic. I like the idea of Barcelona as the political heart of Catalunya. But as a reason for paying me to try to find Jérôme Dumas discreetly? It’s bullshit.
‘The real reason you want me to find Dumas is mostly to do with the FIFA transfer ban on FCB that took effect at the end of December 2014.’
This was the ban that was imposed as a result of FCB having breached the rules regarding the protection of minors and the registration of minors attending football academies.
‘I assume the loan of Jérôme Dumas from PSG to FCB was specifically constructed to get around the transfer ban. Because, according to my sources, you won’t be able to sign another player until the end of 2015, which means that the loan of this player assumes a much greater importance than it would normally have done. Especially in a year with a club presidential election.’
My sources were my own father, of course, but it sounded better than just coming out with ‘my dad says’.
‘There aren’t many top strikers who get loaned between clubs like this. You were lucky to find one at this time of year. Most smaller teams are looking to sell their best players to the bigger clubs in the January transfer window. So I also assume that FCB will pay a fee to PSG at the end of 2015, regardless of whether Dumas performs or not.