The Devil's Breath Read Free

one of the wealthier kids, Highgate or Hampstead, but when he’d mentioned it to Billy, the boy had shaken his head. Dunno, he’d said, doesn’t belong to us.
    A week later, a wet Saturday in December, the two men had found themselves side by side on the muddy touch-line. They’d talked about the game, about individual kids, who was good, who wasn’t. To McVeigh’s amusement, the man had singled out Billy as a real prospect, good ball skills, physical courage, a huge appetite for goals. McVeigh had thought that a bit strong, and said so, but the stranger had shaken his head, reproachful, almost stern, repeating what he’d said. He spoke good English with a trace of an accent. He had a strong, open face and a mass of curly black hair. He said he’d once played football himself, semi-professionally, at home in Tel Aviv. He said he’d been that rare animal, an unselfish centre-forward. He said he could have been really good, only he shared too many goals with other players, lacking the killer instinct. And with this last phrase, he’d held out his hand, introducing himself, offering a name to go with the sudden, almost childlike grin.
    ‘Yakov,’ he’d said, ‘Yakov Arendt.’
    The relationship had prospered. With a nudge from McVeigh, Yakov had made his number with the team’s manager. He said he lived near by. He loved football. He’d been watching the team for a while. He had a little spare time. Could he possibly help?
    Next week, he turned up in an old, much-used Nike tracksuit.The kids, cautious at first, watched him strip off. Ten minutes or so on the pitch and the job was his. He played football the way he talked, with a deceptive languor, moving sweetly over the muddy pitch, perfect ball control, perfect balance, riding tackle after tackle, finding space for himself where none existed, setting up the showier kids with passes of rare elegance. They loved him for it: the goals he enabled them to score, the way he taught them to play, out-thinking the opposition, making the ball do the work, baiting traps, inflicting defeat after defeat.
    Billy, especially, worshipped the man. At the boy’s insistent invitation, he began to come back to the flat, sharing toast and Marmite and pots of tea in front of the ancient gas fire. McVeigh liked him too, his warmth, his obvious enthusiasm, the gentle fun he made of himself, the sense of apartness he carried with him, nothing fretful, nothing heavy, just a good-humoured awareness of being slightly at odds with the rest of the world.
    After a while, he’d begun to talk a little about himself. He had a wife, Cela, back in Tel Aviv. He carried photographs of her, a small, cheerful, attractive woman in her early thirties, with huge, shadowed eyes and jet-black hair. They had a tiny apartment in Jaffa, near the old quarter. They’d been married for six years, and he missed her more and more, and one day soon, God willing, he might go back. Quite what he was doing in London, Yakov never made clear. McVeigh had his own ideas – the accent, the nationality, the
look
of the bloke – but he himself moved in a world where the questions always outnumbered the answers, and he respected the man’s reticence.
    Lately, high summer, the league season over, the three of them had spent a little time together, spontaneous excursions, mostly at Yakov’s suggestion. A couple of fine weekends had taken them out of London in Yakov’s car. He owned a red MGB convertible, a recent acquisition he treated with enormous pride, and he drove it fast, outside lane on the M4 overpass, Billy wedged in sideways on the tiny back seat, his huge grin partly masked by the Ray-Bans he always stole from Yakov’s jacket pocket. The last time they’d been west, a hot Sunday in late July, they’d ended up at a small village in the ThamesValley. Yakov had seemed to know the place. He’d taken them to a pub by the river. He’d ordered burger and chips for Billy, and they’d sat outside in the