Free Hand of God by Philip Kerr

several inches too long; later on, I bought a postcard and measured the approximate length of the arm, and realized that the hand would actually have reached down as far as the god’s knee. Had the sculptor got it wrong? Or had the original display angle of the figure required an extended arm to avoid a foreshortened look? It was hard to be sure but to my critical eye, the hand of God appeared to be reaching just a little too far.
    She nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier, about being lucky.’
    ‘Yes? What about it?’
    ‘I think you’re going to be lucky,’ she said, and taking my hand she squeezed it, meaningfully.
    ‘When?’
    ‘Tonight.’
    I lifted her hand to my mouth and kissed it. The nails were short, but immaculately varnished, while the skin on the palm of her hand was like soft leather, which struck me as strange. ‘And I thought you were talking about the football.’
    ‘Who says I’m not?’
    I smiled. ‘I suppose that means you’re coming to the game.’

11
    The Karaiskakis Stadium, in the old port of Piraeus, looked like a half-sized version of the Emirates, in London, with a capacity of just 33,000. The impression was bolstered by the fact that Emirates Air was an Olympiacos team sponsor and because of their red and white strip, although the shirt was more like Sunderland’s than Arsenal’s. The match was not well attended, but it was enthusiastically supported. The Gate 7 boys, or Legend as they liked to call themselves, made their calculatedly intimidating presence very loudly felt behind the German goal. They had bare chests and big drums and a sort of director of operations who kept his back to the pitch for almost the whole game so that he might properly orchestrate the obscene songs and low, Neanderthal chants. From time to time bright red flares were let off in the stadium but these were ignored by the police and security, who kept a low profile to the point of near invisibility. I was surprised at how unwilling the local police were to interfere in what took place inside the ground; they were forbidden to use the security cameras inside the stadium to identify potential troublemakers, a result of some obscure privacy law.
    Valentina and I were seated in a VIP area immediately behind the German dugout. At eighty euros a ticket in a country where the average monthly income was just six hundred and fifty euros you might have expected these mostly middle-aged and elderly supporters to be better behaved. Not a bit of it. I don’t speak any Greek but thanks to Valentina I was soon able to distinguish and understand words that would certainly have had the users of their Anglo-Saxon equivalents quickly removed from almost any ground in England. Words like arápis (nigger), afrikanós migás (coon), maïmoú (monkey), melitzána (eggplant), píthikos (ape).
    The man in the seat beside me must have been in his late sixties but every so often he would leave off smoking his Cohiba cigar or eating his cardamom seeds, leap onto the top of wall, bend over the edge of the German dugout and bellow, ‘ Germaniká malakas ,’ at the unfortunate Bastian Hoehling.
    ‘I keep on hearing that phrase, Germaniká malakas ,’ I said to Valentina. ‘I get the Germaniká part. But what does malakas mean?’
    ‘It means wanker,’ she said. ‘That’s a very popular word in Greece. You can’t get by without it.’
    I found it hard to condemn the man for his choice of language. As I’d discovered, there are worse things to be called at a Greek football match. It’s a passionate game and stupid people watch it just as often as clever ones; you can encourage respect in football, and I was all in favour of that, but you can’t stop people from being ignorant.
    The match was keenly contested but the Greeks seemed genuinely surprised that the Berliners should have come at them so aggressively. Although Olympiacos competed strongly for every ball, they were quickly behind thanks to a