Free Hand of God by Philip Kerr Page B

Germans have had quite enough of autocrats and dictators. But they couldn’t get enough of Valentina who, it turned out, spoke quite good German; glasses of champagne in their hands, they were round her like wasps at a picnic. She had that effect on men. Perhaps she wasn’t the most beautiful woman in Greece but she was certainly one of the most attractive.
    An hour later we returned to the hotel in a limo kindly provided by Hertha FC.
    A little to my surprise no money was ever asked for and none offered; and it was only after I arrived back in London that I learned how my night with Valentina owed nothing to good luck and everything to Bekim Develi, when the red-haired Russian let slip that he had paid five thousand euros for me to have Valentina, in advance of me going to Athens.

12
    It was a warm Saturday afternoon in August when we arrived at the King Power Stadium in Leicester for our first match of the new season. Just to the west of the main entrance single sculls were going up and down the River Soar like hi-tech swans. Full of misplaced optimism at being in the Premiership once again, Leicester’s supporters were noisy but hospitable and a far cry from the kind of hostile welcome we could expect when we travelled to Greece the following week. I wondered just how good-humoured these fans would remain when they were faced with the cost of supporting their club at away matches in London and Manchester. It was high time that TV companies like Sky and BT started to insist on ring-fencing a proportion of the money paid to the Premiership to subsidise ticket prices: there’s nothing worse for your armchair fan than seeing empty terraces.
    I still hadn’t resolved our goalkeeping crisis – we still needed to replace Didier Cassell – and if there was one player of Pearson’s I really envied it was Leicester goalie Kasper Schmeichel, son of the more famous Peter. Kasper had played for Manchester City and for Leeds United before joining the Foxes in 2011; he’d also played for his country, Denmark, on several occasions, and I had the feeling that, like his father, who had played for Man U until the age of thirty-nine, Kasper’s best years as a keeper still lay ahead of him. With fourteen days left before the summer transfer window closed I was seriously considering asking Viktor Sokolnikov if we could make an offer for the twenty-seven-year-old Dane.
    Any doubts about Schmeichel’s ability were swiftly squashed when, just five minutes into the game, we were awarded a penalty. Prometheus powered the ball straight for the bottom right corner of the net, and how Schmeichel got a hand to it seemed nothing short of miraculous. That would have been impressive enough but, having batted the ball straight back at Prometheus, Schmeichel then launched himself across the whole width of the goalmouth, to the very opposite corner, where he just managed to prevent the Nigerian scoring on the rebound. Almost as important as the Dane’s agility was the way he cleverly managed to psych out our man even before he took the penalty kick. After Prometheus had placed the ball on the spot, Schmeichel had calmly walked out of his goal, picked the ball up, dried it on his shirt, and then cheekily tossed it back at the African, who angrily waved Schmeichel back into his goal. Some referees might have given a keeper a yellow card for doing that, but on the first day of the season? It looked like mind games and if it was, it worked.
    A team’s overall psychology is never helped when you miss a penalty; and this was dealt a further knock when our captain, Gary Ferguson, scored an own goal which left the home side one-up at half time. Shit like that happens; you learn to shrug it off. What worried me more was seeing Prometheus berate his own team captain. I’m no lip-reader but I think Gary gave the kid a few choice words back, although how he restrained himself from smacking the boy in the mouth is beyond me. Generally speaking, when you’re