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Chapter 38: Volume 1, - 38: The Man With the Guarantees

Chapter 38: Volume 1, Chapter 38: The Man With the Guarantees

Karim called on a Tuesday evening, three days after Helena’s visit, sounding more animated than Rayan had heard him in weeks.

"Come this weekend," Karim said, before Rayan had even finished saying hello. "I want you to meet someone. Someone important."

"Important how?"

"You’ll see. Trust me on this one, Rayan. This is different." There was a particular brightness in Karim’s voice. "Saturday. Come early."

Rayan should have asked more questions. He knew that even as he agreed, some quieter part of him already uneasy in a way he couldn’t quite name, but Karim had a gift for making his enthusiasm contagious even when the specifics stayed frustratingly vague, and by the time Rayan hung up he’d half-forgotten to be suspicious at all.

There was already a stranger sitting at Karim’s kitchen table when Rayan arrived Saturday morning, and it took him a moment to place exactly why the man looked so deliberately out of place in a room that never was: a pressed shirt with the collar sitting just slightly too crisp, a leather folder squared neatly on the table beside a mug of coffee he clearly hadn’t been offered but had somehow acquired anyway, hair combed with more attention than the apartment’s cracked hallway mirror could have offered anyone.

"Rayan!" Karim was already on his feet, beaming, gesturing him in with both hands like the whole meeting had been carefully arranged for weeks rather than sprung on him with two days’ notice and no real explanation. "Come, come. Sit. This is Senhor Bento. He works with players. Real players, Rayan. Players you’ve heard of."

Bento rose from his chair with the easy, practised confidence of someone who introduced himself for a living, and extended a hand that Rayan shook mostly out of reflex.

"Rayan. It’s genuinely an honour." His grip was firm, his smile calibrated somewhere between warm and professional. "I’ve heard a great deal about you from your father, and I’ve seen the documentary your friend made. Very compelling piece of work, that. Very honest. It’s rare to see that kind of vulnerability from a player your age. Most boys your age are taught to hide it."

"Thank you," Rayan said, because he didn’t know what else to say, and sat down in the chair Karim had already pulled out for him, feeling, despite himself, a small flicker of pleasure at being called compelling by a stranger in a pressed shirt.

Bento opened the leather folder on the table, revealing several pages of dense text that Rayan couldn’t quite read from where he sat, upside down and too far away, though he caught the shape of letterheads and what looked like a list of club names printed in a confident, official-looking font.

"I represent a small network of contacts across England, Spain, and France," Bento continued, settling back into his own chair with the unhurried air of a man who had all the time in the world and wanted Rayan to feel that too. "Academies, agencies, a handful of clubs at the second-tier level who are always, always looking for exactly your profile. Young. Hungry. Technically still developing, which is precisely the stage where the right guidance makes the biggest difference." He tapped the folder gently. "Whatever Sporting ultimately decides about your future here, and I understand that decision is still some way off. It needn’t be the end of anything. I can arrange trials. Real trials, Rayan. Not friendly kickabouts organised through a cousin who knows someone. Proper club environments. Proper eyes on you, from people who actually have the authority to sign a player."

"You can get me trials in England?" Rayan asked, and heard, even as the words left his mouth, how young they sounded, how eager, how much like exactly the kind of boy Bento had clearly met a dozen times before.

"And Spain. And France, if the timing works out, which I suspect it will." Bento smiled like the answer had never really been in doubt. "I’ve placed players before. Younger than you, some of them. Talent finds its level eventually, Rayan, but it finds it much faster with the right doors opened at the right time."

Karim leaned forward across the table, practically vibrating with the pleasure of being included in something that sounded this important, this adult, this far removed from the delivery routes and cancelled shifts that usually filled his conversations. "You see? I told you. The people who matter are already watching you. This isn’t Sporting deciding whether you’re good enough. This is the whole world deciding."

Rayan felt the old, familiar warmth spread slowly through his chest. The particular warmth that came whenever Karim spoke about him like this, like greatness was simply a matter of time and the right person finally noticing what had apparently been obvious to everyone but Sporting all along. It was easy, sitting across a kitchen table from a man discussing clubs in three different countries with the calm authority of someone who did this every week, to let himself believe it, even for just a few minutes. Nobody at Sporting talked to him like this. Coach Tavares had never once called him compelling. Coach Tavares had, in fact, gone out of his way over the past several months to make absolutely certain Rayan never got too comfortable believing anything about himself too quickly.

"What would I need to do?" Rayan asked, and Bento’s smile widened by exactly the amount that told Rayan, though he wouldn’t understand it until later, that this had been the question the entire conversation had been built to arrive at.

"Very little, for now. Simply that we formalise our arrangement properly. Nothing binding beyond what’s fair to both parties, you understand, I only ever want what’s fair, and there’s a modest development fee involved, to cover the administrative work of arranging the trials themselves. Flights need booking. Contacts need calling. Paperwork needs preparing on your behalf. After that, the work is entirely mine. You simply play, and let the clubs see what I already see."

"How modest?"

Bento named a figure that made Karim’s smile falter, just barely, for perhaps half a second, before he covered the flicker by reaching for the water jug and refilling a glass nobody had actually asked for.

"We can discuss the specifics properly once we’ve had a chance to talk further," Bento said smoothly, already closing the folder as though the number had never quite been spoken aloud at all, as though mentioning it and then moving briskly past it were simply part of the natural rhythm of the conversation. "The important thing today was really just for the two of you to meet me properly, to put a face to everything, so you understand there are people outside Sporting’s walls who already believe in what Rayan can become."

Karim didn’t ask what "modest" actually meant in real terms, sitting in an apartment where the electricity bill had gone unpaid twice that year already. He didn’t ask which second-tier clubs Bento genuinely represented, or request a single verifiable name, or wonder aloud why a man with contacts across three countries was conducting business from a scratched kitchen table beneath a hallway light that had been flickering for a month. He simply kept nodding along, delighted, already halfway to believing the whole story was true before a single detail of it had actually been confirmed.

Rayan noticed his father’s silence on all the questions that should have mattered, and felt, underneath his own excitement, a small, uncomfortable prickle of doubt he wasn’t yet ready to examine too closely.

Sofia found out two days later, entirely by accident, when Leonor mentioned it in passing over dinner. Something about Rayan meeting "that football agent guy" at Karim’s over the weekend, said with the careless ease of someone who had no idea she was dropping a live wire onto the kitchen table.

Sofia went very still. Rayan recognised the stillness immediately, having seen it before. The particular quality of quiet that meant she was deciding, in real time, exactly how angry she was permitted to allow herself to be in front of her children.

"What agent?" she asked, in a voice so carefully level that it was somehow more alarming than if she’d raised it.

"Senhor Bento," Rayan said, already feeling the ground shift beneath the conversation. "He works with clubs. In England and Spain. He thinks he can arrange trials—"

"Does Karim have this man’s full name? A registration number? Anything in writing that confirms who he actually represents?"

Rayan didn’t have an answer to any of it, because it hadn’t occurred to him, in the moment, to ask for any of those things, and the realisation of that gap sat uncomfortably in his stomach for the rest of the meal.

Sofia said very little else about it that evening, which Rayan understood, by now, to be far more concerning than if she’d argued. She waited until both children had gone to their rooms before she picked up her phone and called Helena, and though Rayan wasn’t meant to hear that conversation, he found himself standing quietly at the top of the stairs for several minutes anyway, catching fragments through the thin apartment walls. Sofia’s voice, careful and controlled, describing what little she knew; a pause; her voice again, sharper this time, repeating a word back with clear disbelief. Fee. He asked for a fee.

Sofia sat Rayan down at the kitchen table the next morning before school, her phone already in her hand, a page of notes beside it in handwriting tighter and smaller than usual. The particular compression it took on whenever she was containing something larger than the page allowed.

"Helena looked into your Senhor Bento overnight," she said, without preamble. "She couldn’t verify that he has the authority to represent players or act for any of the clubs he mentioned. He gave you no written terms, no clear explanation of exactly what service he would provide and no evidence that any trial had been discussed with a club. Then he asked your father for money upfront."

"Maybe he’s just new. Maybe he hasn’t registered yet."

"Rayan." Her voice stayed level, but there was an edge beneath it now, thin and taut. "Being new would not explain why he made promises he couldn’t support, avoided putting the arrangement in writing and moved toward payment before proving he had done any work. Helena said this particular request is suspicious because nobody can verify his authority, the terms are missing and the payment is being requested before he has shown that any club is actually involved."

Rayan sat with that for a long moment, turning it over, trying to hold onto the warmth he’d felt sitting across from Bento against the cold, plain logic of everything Sofia had just laid out, and finding, uncomfortably, that the logic won.

"Does dad know?" he asked finally.

"I’m calling him this evening," Sofia said, and something in the set of her jaw told Rayan that evening was going to be considerably longer than either of his parents expected it to be.