Built around an old eighteenth-century windmill and occupying three hectares of tropical gardens on the edge of the Caribbean, the hotel resembled one from a very old Bond movie, Thunderball or Live and Let Die, perhaps, and, in lieu of a bottle opener, whenever we were there I was looking around for a man called Tee Hee with a steel claw for an arm. I could equally have used a steel-claw-type arm for a telephone aerial as the mobile signal on the island was almost non-existent, as was the whole concept of service with a smile. The Guadeloupeans may have been a handsome people but they weren’t in the least bit interested in giving customer satisfaction. In the hotel some of them were just rude.
Which drew the scorn of my female companion.
‘They’ve got no idea how to run a hotel or a restaurant,’ she said. ‘Which is odd considering that this is part of France. I mean, you’d think they’d have learned a bit about food and hotel-keeping from the French.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Perhaps it’s something to do with their dislike of the so-called Mother Country,’ she said. ‘They’d certainly like to be independent of France. So perhaps their rejection of French cuisine and decent hotel service is a corollary of that. Either way, I always feel rather sorry for all those French tourists who get off those hideous cruise ships in search of a good meal. You can go from one end of this island to the other in search of edible food and you won’t find it. You haven’t tasted really bad food until you’ve eaten in a local Creole restaurant.’
‘I can’t wait.’
We were sitting in the hotel bar while this conversation took place, having ordered a glass of fruit juice with which to refresh ourselves after the bumpy flight from Antigua.
‘I mean, look at that,’ she said, pointing at the hotel’s hapless barman. ‘It’s a scandal. This island is sinking under the weight of all the fruit growing on the trees and still he’s giving us fruit juice out of a bottle and then diluting it with mineral water. Because he’s too lazy to squeeze a few goddamn oranges.’
‘I’m beginning to see why you left,’ I said.
‘This place always drives me crazy. What you were saying at Jumby Bay about how it’s hard to know why so many footballers in the French national team come from this island, I was thinking that it’s a lot easier to understand why so few of them — if any — ever come back. Imagine if you were a hugely well-paid footballer from Guadeloupe, living in Paris. All those fine restaurants. All that lovely shopping. The beautiful houses. You’d think you’d died and gone to heaven.’
‘So what’s Jérôme Dumas doing back here?’ I asked. ‘I’ve seen the way he lived in Paris. And I can tell you, the guy was behind heaven’s velvet rope.’
‘Now that I don’t know,’ said Grace. ‘I’ve got no idea why he was here. All I have are four possible addresses where we might find him.’
‘Courtesy of our mystery convict?’
‘Courtesy of our mystery convict.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Not quite. My client was specific that we should visit these four locations in turn. One after the other.’
‘I wonder why.’
‘I think we’ll have a better idea about that when we’ve been to the first address. Don’t you think? It’s a short walk from here. In Le Gosier.’
After we finished the ersatz fruit juice we walked out of the hotel entrance and went west along the road. After a short while we came to the Morne-à-l’Eau cemetery — a gated necropolis full of hundreds of tombs and mausoleums all made of black and white marble tiles and resembling a village made of liquorice. Next to this was a strangely modern church with a corrugated roof and a bright blue, eight-storey bell tower that the local fire department might have used for exercises.
As we passed the church, Grace looked at me and said, ‘Do you believe in God?’
‘When I’m more than two goals down I’ve been known to pray, yes.’
‘That’s not quite the same thing.’
‘Depends if it works or not. When it works I believe and when it doesn’t I don’t. It’s as simple as that.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I think it’s better to be absolutely sure of nothing when it comes to things such as God. I don’t feel frightened by not having an answer to something like that. Generally speaking, I like not having the answers to anything important. How could we ever know that shit? This is the way things are supposed to be, I think. And this is one reason I like football so much. In football it’s perfectly possible to have all answers to everything mysterious, such as why one side wins and why another side loses. To that extent football provides a perfect philosophy for life, by which I mean a theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for human behaviour. And it will never let you down. Unless it involves FIFA and Sepp Blatter, of course, in which case it will always let you down. But fundamentally football is a perfect way to live your life, because all “why” questions can be answered in football, as opposed to a lot of other things where they can’t be answered at all.’
Grace laughed.
‘I’m serious. Believe me, applying the values and tenets of football to the world in general will take you a lot further than any religion I’ve ever come across. You have to be a philosopher to be a manager — although not every manager knows that he is one. And you can forget Stephen Hawking. There’s not one manager in football who doesn’t have a better understanding of time than he does. How it expands, how it stretches, how everything in a game changes from one minute to the next.’
‘I had no idea that it was so intellectually challenging. And here was me thinking that it’s just twenty-two men kicking a ball around.’
‘That’s a very common mistake.’
We turned the corner and stopped in front of a concrete bungalow that must once have looked modern and inhabitable; now it reminded me of a caravan in January. The fuse box on the front wall was open and half of the electrics were spilling out onto the grass verge in a miniature Gordian knot of coloured wires and copper screws; the windows were untidily curtained and dirty; and the porch was home to a broken washing machine and a bale of old newspapers.
‘We’re here,’ said Grace. ‘At the first place I was told to look for Jérôme Dumas.’
‘If he’s here he certainly needs rescuing.’
It was impossible to know if the place was occupied or not but, undeterred, Grace opened the gate to the empty driveway and, ignoring the faded yellow front door, she went around the back with me following close behind her. By now we could hear a football match on a radio or a television, life’s universal soundtrack, and I started to believe that our search was going to be a mercifully short one.
‘Hello,’ Grace said loudly in French. ‘Is there anyone home?’
Instead of Jérôme Dumas we found a man lying on a cheap sunlounger and reading a copy of France-Antilles, which is the local newspaper. Seeing us in his back yard he put aside his newspaper and stood up. He was tall, thin, strong, and very very black; he looked like a length of pig-iron.
‘You’re not the cops,’ he said in French.
‘No, no. no. Nothing like that. Look, we’re sorry to disturb you, but we’re looking for a friend. Jérôme Dumas.’
The man shook his head. ‘Never heard of him.’
‘I know,’ said Grace. ‘Mwen ka palé Kréyol. Sa ou fé?’
The man nodded. ‘Sa ka maché, è wou?’ he said.
They continued in Creole, which meant I understood nothing about what was happening. The conversation lasted about five minutes, at the end of which Grace smiled and shook the man’s hand.
‘Mwen ka rimèsié’w anlo,’ she said, and walked back the way we’d came. I followed.