‘Christ, it must be good.’
‘He could afford it.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘He likes expensive hotels. The more expensive the better.’
‘I’ve heard he’s a bit of a champagne socialist. Is that right?’
‘You’ve been talking to Mandel. Jérôme’s a socialist, yes, but I don’t think he liked champagne very much.’
‘It’s an English phrase. It means that you’re a hypocrite.’
‘Not in France. There are plenty of socialists who like to eat and drink well here. Especially in Paris. Our president, for example. Jérôme likes the good things in life, like anyone else. Me included. In different circumstances I wouldn’t mind a week in Jumby Bay and I’m a socialist. And I love champagne. So what does that make me? A hypocrite?’
‘No, but you’re not telling other people to wear a hair shirt and pay less attention to making money. You’re not the one going on demonstrations outside the French stock exchange. Or preaching the end of capitalism to Mélissa Theuriau on French television.’
The co-editor in chief and anchor of Zone Interdite, Mélissa Theuriau was generally held to be the best-looking woman on French TV — a view with which I found it hard to disagree.
Alice shrugged. ‘It wasn’t all hot air with him, you know. He’s done some good things with his money. Things he didn’t like to shout about.’
‘Such as?’
‘There was a youth centre in Sevran to which he often gave money to pay for sports facilities. He went there sometimes to see how they were getting on. He wanted to give something back.’
‘Sevran?’
‘It’s a suburb northeast of the Paris Périphérique.’
‘Tough area?’
‘Very. Lots of black kids with no future. His words, not mine.’
‘What was he like to work for?’ I asked.
‘Thoughtful. Gentle. Kind. A bit impulsive.’
‘I found some antidepressants in the bathroom cabinet. Did he seem depressed to you?’
Alice took a deep breath and smiled a gentle smile. ‘This is Paris. Everyone is depressed about something. It’s how we Parisians are. From what I’ve seen of life in London I don’t think we’re as carefree as the English. Even when we drink champagne.’
‘Was there anything specific depressing him?’
‘His mother died about six months ago. I suppose that might have had something to do with it.’
‘Here in Paris?’
‘No. She lived in Marseille. That’s where she brought Jérôme to live when they left Guadeloupe.’
‘Any other family there?’
‘As far as I know it was just her and Jérôme.’
‘Anything else that might have been getting him down?’
‘His football. He hadn’t been playing well. And he was getting a lot of abuse from the fans for not trying hard enough. The situation with Bella also depressed him, of course. I’m not sure she loved him but I would say that he loved her. And the loan to Barcelona. That affected him a great deal, too.’
‘I gained the impression that he wanted this move from PSG. That he was looking forward to it.’
‘I think he convinced himself it would be a good move. But he was concerned the loan to FCB was evidence that there wasn’t a club that was prepared to buy him outright. That no one else would touch him. He was worried that it meant he was getting a reputation as a player who was difficult. Someone in the French newspapers had compared him to Emmanuel Adebayor. And this depressed him too, I think.’
‘Yes, I can understand how it would.’
‘He was worried how he might be received in Barcelona.’
‘Do you think he was the type of guy to commit suicide?’
She thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Did he ever talk about suicide? The way people do sometimes? How you’d do it? Jump off a tall building. Drown yourself. That kind of thing.’
‘No.’
‘Because players do kill themselves,’ I added. ‘My own friend, for example. Matt Drennan.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I was with him the night he hanged himself. He’d been drinking, but that was nothing new. He’d been drinking too much for years and there was nothing that he did or said on this particular night that made me think he might be suicidal. At least suicidal enough to go and do it after leaving my house. But in retrospect I wish I’d treated the possibility with greater seriousness. And that’s what still haunts me a little. The idea that perhaps I could have done a little more.’
‘There’s nothing I’m not telling you, Mr Manson, if that’s what you’re driving at. And if he has killed himself I won’t be haunted by the idea that I could have done more for him. I did everything for him. His laundry, his dry-cleaning, I paid his bills, booked the taxis and the tables at the restaurants and the nightclubs, took out the trash — which is to say I paid off the girls who needed paying off...’
‘Hookers?’
‘By the bus load.’
‘Hmm.’
‘I answered all his mail, answered his telephone and I even wrote his tweets.’
‘Yes, I was going to ask you about his Twitter account...’
‘I’m afraid you won’t find any clues there. I wrote all his tweets. If you look at his Twitter account you’ll see that the last one was written on my last day of employment. The day before he went to Antigua. Most of them I cleared with him. The rest were retweets, or stuff I picked up in the newspapers about football that struck me as interesting. Nothing personal.’
‘Well, at least that’s one mystery solved.’
Alice frowned.
‘I thought maybe the date of the last tweet might be significant,’ I explained. ‘In trying to determine if he might have committed suicide.’
‘What can I tell you? France has a suicide rate that is three times higher than in Italy and Spain, and twice the rate in Britain. It’s like I was telling you earlier. We’re not a happy people. Maybe that’s why we’ve had so many revolutions. There’s always something that’s pissing us off.’ She shrugged. ‘He was on Seroxat, wasn’t he? Since Jérôme Dumas left Paris I’ve been taking Seroxat myself.’
10
Paris looks its best at night. I’m not going to get stupidly Woody Allen about this but after dark the place really is magical, even a little ghostly, like one huge haunted house. Maybe it helps not seeing all the cops on the streets or the beggars in the doorways, not hearing the clamour of the traffic, not smelling the decay, but at night, when you look up and see those searchlights coming off a floodlit Eiffel Tower as if searching out enemy bombers, there is nowhere else like it on earth. Around every corner is some new aspect of the city, some new delight for the eyes, some extraordinary affirmation of the ingenuity of men. The man who is tired of London is tired of life but the man who is tired of Paris must be tired of civilisation itself. The continued existence of Paris — such an affront to so many Americans who can’t adjust to its lofty indifference from ordinary human concerns — is perhaps the premier work of man anywhere in the world. The extraordinary proclamation of a beauty that never fades is especially true at night, when the lady always looks her best.
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.