The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (14 page)

“Not bad,” Victoria conceded, a little begrudgingly.

“You should be able to blow these images up,” I told Freddy. “Victoria will text them to you. So you’ll still have the code.”

He was staring intently at the last image on the phone. Some of the color seemed to have leached from his face.

I glanced out my window. We were just swinging left and coming alongside the Schloss Bellevue, the stark white residence of the German president.

“Listen,” I said to Freddy, “I know it’s bad news that we had the file taken from us. And I’m sorry about that. But you slipped up somehow. You led those Russians to us. The French guy, too. And I think you’ll agree that I made the best of a bad situation.” Still nothing. I clicked my fingers before his eyes. “Er, Freddy?”

I’d like to say he snapped out of his reverie, but his eyes remained watery and unfocused. I was starting to believe his brother had got all the brains in the family.

“I’m assuming I will still be paid,” I told him. “The fee for searching location two, plus the bonus for finding the file. After all, I did what you hired me to do. The situation with the Russians is unfortunate for you, I admit, but they were never part of our bargain.”

Freddy shook his head vaguely.

“Now, hold on,” I told him. “A deal’s a deal. Agreed?”

He squeezed his eyes tightly closed and pinched the bridge of his noise, like a man suffering a bad migraine. When he did finally speak, his voice was strained.

“The package isn’t a file,” he said.

“Come again?”

“It’s not a file,” he barked.

The bus slowed abruptly, almost as if the driver had been startled by Freddy’s outburst. I checked behind him. The tourists were craning their necks and gazing up out of their windows, trying to catch sight of the Siegessäule, the imposing Victory Column that had been installed in the center of the Grosser Stern roundabout. A gilded statue of a winged lady was fixed to the top. I couldn’t see it from my position at the back of the bus. Kind of fitting, I guess. I seemed a long way from victory just at that particular moment.

“Not a file?” I repeated. “How do you mean exactly?”

Freddy gripped so hard to the railing on his seat that he looked like he was clutching the safety bar on a roller coaster.

“I didn’t hire you to steal a file,” he said. “The
package
is not a file. It never was. It never could be. Whatever you stole, whatever it is that you’ve taken, has absolutely nothing to do with what I hired you to find. Understand?”

I didn’t understand. Not even close. Oh, I got what he meant, all right. I’m not a complete dunce. But it didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

“But hang on,” I said. And from the way he was clasping the seating rail, he seemed to be doing exactly that. “If you didn’t want me to find that file, then why did the Russians take it from me? They knew all about my assignment. The French guy, too.”

“I can’t explain that. I don’t know who those men were.”

“The Russians had a car with diplomatic plates. The French guy struck me as some kind of spy.”

He looked at me blankly.

“The lead Russian was smartly dressed. He was neatly groomed and he spoke perfect English. The guy who was with him had a scar. A big, jagged one, running down his cheek.”

“A scar?” Freddy said, and I got the impression he was starting to doubt me.

“I’m not making this up.”

“It’s true,” Victoria told him. “I was there, too, remember? It was scary, I can tell you.”

He smiled fleetingly at her. “And you say they knew that I’d hired you?”

“Yes,” I told him. “They asked me if I’d found the item you’d hired me to find. They knew about Victoria’s involvement, too. I got the impression they’d listened in on our conversation with you.”

“Impossible.”

“Then what about the French guy?”

“Hmm,” was all Freddy would say, and then he snatched Victoria’s phone from me and cycled back through the photographs I’d taken.

The bus was accelerating again. We were driving out of the park, passing joggers and dog walkers and a group of guys kicking a football around. We were cruising along the main boulevard of the Strasse des 17 Juni, and according to the little map above my seat, the next stop on our itinerary was the Schloss Charlottenburg. I can’t say I was enjoying the trip all that much. I was feeling a little queasy. It wasn’t travel sickness, so much. It was confusion and fear.

I remembered very well what Pavel had said to me. He’d asked if the file was all that I’d found. He’d made me assure him that there was nothing else. And then he’d told me that if he discovered that I was lying to him, he’d kill me. And not just me, but Victoria, too.

Now, I hadn’t deceived him deliberately. I’d allowed his pet goon to take the file from me, and at the time I’d honestly believed it was exactly what Freddy had hired me to steal. But if Pavel suspected that I’d tricked him on purpose, then it could be a very costly mistake.

I felt a sharp pressure on my leg. Victoria was squeezing my thigh. She was squeezing pretty tight. I got the impression she’d been following the exact same thought process and that she liked where it had taken her almost as much as I did.

“What was I supposed to find?” I asked Freddy. “What was I meant to be looking for?”

Freddy handed the phone back to Victoria. It seemed like the code and the top secret file didn’t interest him very much. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“But you still need it, right?”

He nodded.

“And it has to be in location three or four.”

“Does it?”

“Logic dictates so,” I said, talking fast now. “I searched the first two places and the only thing I found was the file.”

“Assuming you didn’t miss something. You’ve made one rather big mistake already.”

I paused. I counted to five. Now really wasn’t the time to lose my rag.

“I wouldn’t have
made
a mistake if you’d simply trusted me enough to tell me the full facts.”

“So what are you suggesting? You wish to search the other two locations?”

It wasn’t so much that I wished to do it. It was more that I
needed
to.

“You’d be working on the same basis as before,” Freddy told me. “You’d be searching in the dark.”

“Then the job just got even crazier than it was the first time around.”

“Those are my terms. You either accept them or the deal is off.”

I would have liked to have walked away. I would have loved for it to be the simplest solution all round. But I had a feeling I’d have to walk a very long distance for a very long time. And that I’d be checking over my shoulder incessantly.

“Fine,” I told Freddy, “give me the next address.”

But even as I said it, I could feel a fast pounding in my ears. My blood pressure was up. My nerves were tingling. The assignment had been risky enough the first time around. Four separate burglaries. Four distinct opportunities to be caught. But right now, it seemed a whole lot more hazardous.

EIGHTEEN

Freddy bid us farewell, bowing his head to kiss Victoria’s hand before stepping off the bus at Checkpoint Charlie. I suppose there was a kind of harmony in that. My spy fantasy had begun with a rendezvous at the Brandenburg Gate, and now it had concluded at perhaps the most famous Cold War location of them all. But if I was looking for encouraging patterns or a neat way of bookending my daydream, then I was plumb out of luck. The outcome of our meeting with Freddy had been a pale imitation of what I’d hoped it might be. Then again, the same could be said for Checkpoint Charlie.

The area around the old Allied border control was a mess of fast food franchises and souvenir stores selling enough ‘genuine’ itty-bitty chunks of the Berlin Wall to divide the city four times over. There were beggars and drug dealers. There were pickpockets and con artists. There were more tourists to go round than opportunities to exploit them. And right at the very heart of it all was the modest border hut that everyone had come to see.

The hut was no bigger than your average garden shed. It had a pitched roof and white wooden cladding. There were floodlights attached to it, along with a sign reading
U.S. ARMY CHECKPOINT
, and it was surrounded by banked sandbags.

Oh, and it was utterly fake. A complete fabrication.

So were the two guys standing in front of it, wearing shabby American army uniforms. They were holding a pole with a tattered Stars and Stripes flag on the end of it, and if you tipped them a couple of euros, they’d pose for a photo. Tip them an extra couple of euros and they’d stamp your passport with a fake border pass that would go a long way to invalidating it. Catch them later the same day, and you could tip them a few euros more to shed all their clothes. Think I’m kidding? I wish that were so. But the guys doing the posing were part of a troupe of male strippers who took it in turns to don knockoff army costumes during the day and considerably less during the night.

I hated the place for the tacky theme park it had become. I can’t say I felt a great deal better about the bus we were on, but there was an undeniable appeal to staying put. For one thing, I didn’t want us to get off at the same location as Freddy, just in case someone really was following him. And for another, I was feeling listless and melancholy. Part of it was how little sleep I’d managed the night before. Part of it was the cloying heat on the bus. And part of it was not being sure what my next move should be.

After a good deal of cajoling and reassurance, Freddy had finally given me the address and a description of the third location on his list. It was an apartment on Karl-Marx-Allee that belonged to a cleaning lady who was responsible for tidying the ambassador’s office and who’d been on duty to assist with cleaning during the embassy function. By Freddy’s reckoning, her access to the ambassador’s office had given her an opportunity to swipe whatever it was that had been stolen. But as to why she might have taken the blasted
package
or what exactly it might be, Freddy had had nothing useful to add.

The bus lurched on toward its next stop. I propped my head against the vibrating window glass and folded my arms across my chest. I blew air through my lips and pouted at Victoria. She was in the process of texting Freddy the photographs I’d taken. I waited until she was finished, then batted my eyelids and huffed loudly.

“Am I to take it that you’re frustrated?” she asked, pocketing her phone.

“Very.”

“Well, join the club. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about the French guy.”

Yeah, and my German telephone friend, I thought.

“And you were really quite rude to Freddy,” she added.

“Was I? Chalk it up to jealousy, I suppose. I don’t know why you’re the only one who gets to be pawed by him.”

Victoria thumped me on the arm. “That’s really all you have to say?”

“Not quite,” I told her. “I’d also love it if you could tell me what the hell I’m supposed to be looking for.”

“Can’t help you there.”

“Then maybe you can think of some way of explaining things to our Russian friends that won’t make it seem like I deliberately duped them.”

Victoria smiled flatly. “You think they’ll realize the file wasn’t what Freddy hired you to find?”

“Sooner or later.”

“How soon?”

“Judging by the way things are going, I’m guessing it’s going to be sooner than either of us would prefer.”

“So what can we do?”

“I wish I knew. I suppose the best we can hope for is that I find something marked ‘Property of the British Ambassador’ in this cleaner’s apartment.”

“You think that’s likely?”

“I honestly don’t know. And the annoying part is that we won’t be able to find out until she starts work.”

Freddy had told us that the cleaner would begin her evening shift at six o’clock and that she’d be on duty at the embassy until eight
P.M.
. I’d asked him if she cleaned for anyone else and if her apartment might be empty during the afternoon, but he hadn’t been able to say. I’d also asked him if she lived alone or if there was a risk of anyone else being home when I broke in, but he hadn’t been able to tell me that, either. All things considered, Freddy wasn’t exactly the most informed client I’d ever had.

“What do you plan to do in the meantime?” Victoria asked me.

“Think,” I told her. “And sulk.”

“In that order?”

“Probably not.”

I wasn’t lying. I sulked about the situation I’d found myself in a lot more than I thought about it, and although it didn’t get me very far, it did occupy my mind until the bus delivered us as far as Alexanderplatz.

“Come on,” I said, nudging Victoria. “Let’s get off this thing.”

“Why here?”

“Follow me and I’ll show you.”

* * *

“There,”
I said. “Right
there
.”

“Where?” Victoria asked. “I don’t see it.”

“Right where my finger’s pointing.”

“Your finger’s pointing at a piece of glass, Charlie.”

“Yeessss,”
I conceded. “But look
through
the glass. Line your eyes up with my finger and you’ll see the building I’m pointing toward.”

“Fine.” Victoria sighed. “I’ll try again.”

I got the impression it wasn’t fine. In fact, I got the impression Victoria was more than a smidgen frustrated. But she propped her chin on my shoulder all the same, and then she squinted along my arm toward the very end of my pinkie finger.

The pad of my finger was squished up against a sheet of double-thick glass. The glass was sloping away from us at a shallow angle. Below it was two hundred and three meters of nothing but vaporous gray air. I gripped a little harder to the metal railing that was fitted down by my waist. I’ve never been a great fan of heights, but the circular viewing platform inside the Fernsehturm was making my palms sweat.

Well, all right, that wasn’t the only reason. Victoria was awfully close. I could feel her hair brushing my face. I could smell her perfume.

“See it now?” I asked, doing my best to conceal the quiver in my voice.