Page 31 of Catch a Kiwi
Moyano Convicted of Tax Fraud,the first article informed me. And more links with variations on the theme.How Far Can You Fall?That was an opinion piece, probably, and so wasThe Price of Hubris.
I skimmed on down.Another Yank Gold Digger? Along for the ride … until the money ran out.That was the one I opened, because it was about her.
Felipe Moyano, Argentinian-born soccer superstar. Striker, played for Manchester City. I didn’t follow the sport much, but I’d heard of him. You couldn’t avoid it. I hadn’t realized he’d gone to prison.
The big question, apparently, was, “Where’s the money?” He’d been paid better than three hundred million over ten or eleven years, and made over two hundred million more in endorsements. Pounds, not New Zealand dollars. He’d written off nearly a hundred million in losses on bad investments, but those investments didn’t stand up to scrutiny. The money, though, was just as gone.
The unpaid taxes? Over forty million pounds. The fines?Seventy percent of that. Together, it came to almost seventy million pounds. There was a number for you.
The money was offshore. Hidden. That was the theory, anyway, but Moyano had denied it passionately and Summer had insisted she hadn’t known anything about it. She’d paid the income tax on her own salary, which was a point in her favor. However it had happened, Moyano had got seven years, and she’d got off.
Black Widow,the article said. After the conviction, he and Summer had lost the enormous house in Manchester and the luxury flat in Buenos Aires. They’d lost the furnishings, the clothes, the cars, and had forfeited their bank accounts, too, because there wasn’t enough house in the world to pay that tax debt, not to mention the legal fees and the rest of the debt Moyano had somehow racked up despite those earnings, and it wasn’t as if he could earn more now. So it had been bankruptcy.
The idea that Moyano could possibly actually be bankrupt had earned some scoffing, and when Summer filed for divorce? That was when she was really dragged through the mud. How had he spent so much? The press thought they knew the answer. Photos of her jewels, her clothes. One of her standing beside a Rolls-Royce, and a magazine spread on that house. There were no jackals like the British press, no heroes like the sporting kind, and no headlines as scurrilous as the ones in the red-tops, the British tabloids. They’d talked to the other players’ wives, to her hairdresser, to her personal trainer, and found people willing to tell them how much she’d spent. How she hadn’t fit in, too. How she hadn’t even tried.
I clicked on a video interview with three players’ wives, all of them with beautiful faces, beautiful bodies, beautiful hair, beautiful clothes. So shiny and glossy and perfect, you’d think they’d been born that way. “He picked her up from themean streets of Seattle,” one of them, a tall blonde with endless legs in her short skirt, told the camera. “And I meanmeanstreets. I didn’t grow up anyplace posh, none of us did, but she grew up in a caravan park, the dodgy kind. Her mum was a cleaner, and she had no idea who her dad was. And she still thought she was all that. Where did she come off?”
“Her mum was a prostitute, actually,” a brunette said. “She told me that once, when I was talking about my mum. It made me feel better, so there’s that, and she couldn’t help what her mum was, could she? She’d do that, try to make you feel better. I liked her. I didn’t know her very well, but I did like her.”
“That was her American thing, that’s all,” another blonde said. “She’d hug you and all that when you weren’t expecting it, and ask about your feelings like you were just waiting to spill them. They do that in the States, I guess, but it comes across a bit odd to English people. The thing was—it was hard to tell what she was like inside, whether that was really the truth of her.”
“It wasn’t hard to tell at all,” the first blonde said. “She was hard inside. You could tell. She rode her looks and that tiny bit of fame from trashy reality TV straight into marrying Felipe just a few months after she’d met him. And that job of hers that she kept saying was so important, that she was so proud of? It was nothing but some computer thing, and not the startup kind that makes you millions. She was a bit of a snob, really, which was a laugh, looking down on the rest of us, when who was she? Not Vic Beckham, not by a long chalk. No kind of star. She was out for that top bloke, and she found him, but did she appreciate him? Got him to spend all that money, and then couldn’t even stand by him when the money was gone.”
The brunette said, “What I think she didn’t understand—in this game, in this life, loyalty matters. We’re loyal to ourmen. We’re their support. She never understood that. Told me I should go out and get a job of my own, when my marriage was going through a rough patch. That I was worth more than that, that I should be tired of being ‘arm candy.’ That’s what she called me. ‘Arm candy.’ It hurt, really.”
“Thought she was a princess,” the stroppy blonde said, “swanning about with her little job and her opinions. Football’s Meghan Markle, that was Summer. Well, what does she have now? She’s gone, and we’re still here, arm candy and all. I’ve still got my husband, and she doesn’t even have her job anymore.”
“We’re not exactly lords and ladies ourselves, though,” the other blonde said, sounding troubled.
“I never said that,” Stroppy Blonde said. “It wasn’t her family, or that she was American. It was the other things she did. She wouldn’t take his name, for one thing. Oh, sheansweredto ‘Summer Moyano,’ but that wasn’t the name on her passport. It wasn’t the name she was working under, either. It was like she was ashamed of him. Felipe Moyano! Who was she to be ashamed of him? And that wasn’t all. She wouldn’t even come to all the matches. Wouldn’t you think that’s the least you could do? Taking his name, being proud to be his wife? Supporting him in the stands? Let alone having his kids, because of course she didn’t do that, either. She wanted what she wanted, and Summer got what she wanted. She had to work, she always said, when the rest of us were going overseas, supporting our men. Why?”
Photos flashing on the screen, then, of immaculately groomed women dressed to the nines and made up like they were headed for the clubs, wearing their Man City scarves in the stands like a fashion mistake. And no Summer.
“She was out for the main chance, that’s the truth of it,” the stroppy one went on. “First and last.”
“I don’t know,” the brunette said. “It’s sad.”
“It is,” the other blonde said. “Sad for Felipe, too. Who knows why he did what he did, if he really did it? Was it for her? And who knows what her part of it was? How could she not have known? They said there wasn’t enough evidence, but that doesn’t mean she was innocent. Was it really the way she looks, the way she acts, that innocent bit she does? That’s what bothers me. If she was part of it, or even if she just benefited from it—why isn’t she in prison with him?”
Well, that was poisonous. Somebody’d photographed her at the gym, too, for another newspaper article, on the chest press in tank top and little shorts, her arms and legs splayed wide. Very nearly obscene. Smiling at a man in the shot, a good-looking bloke.Who’s Missing Him Now?the article blared, andWhere’s the Money, Sugar Baby?I thought of her in her mud-smeared clothes on my hillside with her stitched hand and her rake, trying to find her gumboots, worrying about cleaning my car. Standing up to me, much as it annoyed me, so stubbornly insistent on following her own rules. Like a …
Like a Kiwi, that was what. Unashamed of who she was. Knowing what mattered. Which was her cousin, her independence, and her pride.
I closed the window and went back to my spreadsheet, feeling smeared by something dirtier than the mud I’d waded through in gumboots today. Feeling a bit sick, to be honest. I told myself,You needed to know, and now you do. She’s going to be in your house, and it’s no secret. Splashed all over the papers, wasn’t she.
That was wrong. I hadn’t needed to know. The person she was had been obvious to me. Judgment was my life, and I’d used it to decide to let them stay. I hadn’t needed this information to do it. “Do not follow the idea of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself,” I muttered. “Dogen Zenji.”
It didn’t matter anyway. It was a couple of weeks. She’d give me her labor, and from what I’d seen today, she’d give me her best. Then she and Delilah would be on the road again with no harm done. I’d sold her twenty-nine thousand dollars’ worth of ute for seventy-nine hundred, for Christ’s bloody sake. It wasn’t like I was taking advantage of her.
It wasn’t until much later, when I’d done my review and was falling asleep at last, that I remembered that I’d forgotten to look at the other part. The part about “the show.”
Another thing I didn’t need to know. If she wanted to tell me, she would. I was dropping it. All of it. Here and now. Whether I admired her character or not, shedidannoy me. I wasn’t even getting sex out of it!
I didn’t need any of this, and I was dropping it.
14
WHAT’S BEEN DONE TO YOU
