CHAPTER 39 — SUNDAY EVENING
**Gothenburg — June 28th, 1992**
He didn't go to the celebration.
Not because he didn't want to — he did, in the abstract way of someone who understood that celebrations were important and human and worth participating in. But the Danish team's celebration was the Danish team's celebration, and showing up as the agent who represented five of them felt like arriving at someone's birthday party because you'd helped plan it. Technically justified. Still wrong.
So he walked instead.
Gothenburg at ten on a Sunday evening in June was barely dark — the sky a pale washed-out blue that couldn't quite commit to night, the streets full of people who had watched Denmark win a European Championship and had decided that sleep was somebody else's problem. Danish flags everywhere. Songs he half-recognised. A man in a full Danish kit — shirt, shorts, socks, the complete ensemble — running past him for no apparent reason, which seemed about right.
He bought a hot dog from a street vendor who was doing the best business of his life and ate it leaning against a wall, watching Gothenburg celebrate something it hadn't expected to be celebrating forty-eight hours ago.
The hot dog was fine. Not spectacular. He'd had better in Denmark, worse in England, and one genuinely life-altering one in Hamburg in February that he thought about more than was probably healthy for a professional man in his early thirties.
*Thirty-one,* he reminded himself. *You are thirty-one years old in this body.*
He was also, technically, sixty-one if you counted his previous life, which he'd decided early on not to do because it made ordering coffee feel existentially complicated.
---
His phone — the 1992 version, which was a Nokia brick that weighed approximately the same as a small dog and had the battery life of a particularly optimistic candle — had been silent for two hours, which was the longest it had been silent since June 12th. He'd told Astrid nothing until Monday. He'd told Dowd the same. He'd told Gerald Dowd specifically because Dowd had a habit of calling at inconvenient moments with information that was sixty percent accurate and one hundred percent delivered with the tone of someone who expected gratitude for it.
He liked Dowd. Dowd was useful. Dowd also believed that the concept of appropriate timing applied to other people and not to him, which was a quality Mikkel had learned to manage rather than correct.
He finished the hot dog. Bought another one because it was Sunday and Denmark had just won the European Championship and some decisions required no justification beyond that.
---
He found a bar near the waterfront that had somehow not been taken over entirely by football supporters — a small place, wooden tables, a television in the corner showing highlights that everyone in the bar had already lived through but was watching again anyway. He ordered a beer he didn't particularly want and sat at a corner table and watched the highlights with the specific quality of attention he brought to everything football-related, which was to say: completely.
The Schmeichel saves. Jensen's goal — still improbable, still correct. Vilfort's goal, and the moment afterward where he stood at the corner flag and the television cameras found his face and the commentator went quiet because some moments were better served by silence than words.
The man at the next table — Swedish, fifties, the look of someone who had come to watch his own country and ended up watching something larger — caught Mikkel's eye and said in workable English: *"Your Danes. Extraordinary."*
*"They are,"* Mikkel said.
*"You Danish?"*
*"Yes,"* Mikkel said, which was technically true in every way that mattered in 1992 and technically false in every way that had mattered before 1990, and which he'd long since stopped thinking too hard about because the alternative was a headache.
*"You know any of the players?"* the Swede asked.
*"A few,"* Mikkel said.
The Swede nodded, satisfied, and turned back to the television. Mikkel turned back to the television. They watched in companionable silence, two people from adjacent countries sharing a bar in a third country on an evening that neither of them had quite anticipated.
Football, Mikkel thought, was genuinely good at this.
---
At half past eleven he walked back to the hotel.
The city was still going — it would be going until four in the morning at least, the Danish contingent showing the specific stamina of people who had been emotionally compressed for three weeks and had finally been allowed to release everything simultaneously. A group of Danish supporters outside a bar recognised him — he didn't know how, he wasn't famous, but one of them pointed and said *that's the agent, the one from the newspaper* and the group responded by insisting he take a photograph with them and then insisting he have a drink with them and then insisting he take another photograph.
He did all three, because they had just watched Denmark win the European Championship and saying no to people in that condition was both impossible and wrong.
One of them — a large man from Aarhus named Bent, who had driven to Gothenburg in a van with seven friends and was wearing a Viking helmet that was not historically accurate but was extremely committed — told Mikkel that he was the best agent in the world.
*"You don't know any other agents,"* Mikkel said.
*"Exactly,"* Bent said. *"No competition."*
Mikkel took the third photograph and extracted himself from the group with the diplomatic skill he'd developed over two years of managing people who were enthusiastic about things he needed them to be calm about. He walked the remaining ten minutes to the hotel, took the lift to his floor, and sat on the bed.
Quiet.
The first genuine quiet of the evening.
---
He opened the notepad. Not to write anything — just the habit of it, the physical act of opening it grounding him in the practical rather than the abstract. He looked at the last thing he'd written during the match.
*Vilfort. 78 minutes. 2-0.*
Below it, from after the final whistle: *January. United. Renegotiation.*
He looked at both lines for a while. Then he closed the notepad and put it on the bedside table.
Tomorrow was Monday. Sixty-seven contacts. Jensen and three English clubs. Dein at Arsenal. Barcelona's intermediary who had called three times and was presumably somewhere between curious and desperate. Leverkusen and Nielsen. KV Mechelen and Elstrup. The Povlsen situation sitting in October like a correctly placed piece of furniture — not urgent, just there, waiting to be sat in at the right moment.
Tøfting arriving at Hamburg in six weeks. Friis-Hansen developing quietly at Frem. Helveg at Brøndby with Ajax circling. Møller scoring goals at Anderlecht that were making Belgian football people say things in French that translated roughly to *where did this come from.*
Schmeichel at United, about to play in the first Premier League season, about to become — in the specific way that players became things when the stage finally matched their ability — one of the most recognisable footballers in the world.
Laudrup at PSV in July. Post-PSV in 1994. Barcelona calling already.
All of it, moving simultaneously, the agency running at a scale he hadn't quite imagined when he'd sat at a shared desk in Vesterbrogade with a Norwegian furniture man arguing about shipping costs in the adjacent office.
He thought about that desk. The burnt coffee. The manual typewriter. DKK 12,400 and thirty years of knowledge and a plan that had seemed, on the quiet Tuesday morning in March 1990 when he'd first walked into the Danish Football Union to register as an agent, entirely insane.
It had not been insane. It had been correct.
He turned the light off.
*Monday,* he thought. *Just keep moving.*
He was asleep in four minutes, which was a personal record for a man who had just watched five of his clients win the European Championship and had forty-three hours of work waiting for him in the morning.
Some things, he'd learned, you couldn't prepare for by staying awake thinking about them.
Monday would come regardless.
---
In Copenhagen, Astrid had watched the final alone and gone to bed at a reasonable hour because Monday was a workday and sixty-seven contacts didn't follow themselves up. She had, however, allowed herself one glass of wine before bed, which for Astrid constituted a significant celebration and which she felt was entirely warranted.
Anders had watched with friends, celebrated enthusiastically, and set three alarms for Monday morning because he knew himself well enough to know that enthusiasm on Sunday had consequences on Monday and that the contacts log was not going to manage itself.
Rasmus had driven to his parents' house after the final and eaten dinner with his father, who had watched every match of the tournament and who said, at the end of the evening, that he was proud of what Rasmus was doing. Rasmus said he was just writing reports. His father said that was not just anything.
Bent from Aarhus posted the photograph with Mikkel on his refrigerator when he got home three days later. It stayed there for eleven years.
---
**⚙ SYSTEM UPDATE — SUNDAY EVENING**
*Funds: DKK 608,749 (£59,049 / $97,400)*
*Monthly Commission: DKK 41,148 (£3,991 / $6,584)*
*Net Monthly Position: DKK -15,652 (£-1,519 / $-2,504)*
*Total Clients: 13*
*Incoming Contacts: 67 — all pending Monday*
*Reputation: 780 / 1000*
*System Note: Monday begins the most significant period of work in Trane Sports' history. Get some sleep.*
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