The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (2 page)

Nope. Not a chance.

So that left me with the phone, but it wasn’t a perfect solution, either. If I’d been in the UK, I could have punched 141 before I dialed, in the hope the police couldn’t trace the call. If I was in the U.S., I could have tried *67. But I didn’t know the equivalent code in Germany, and I doubted it would work with the police in any event.

I stared at the phone. I stared at the girl.

I shook my head and cursed myself for looking out through the window in the first place, and then I jabbed 110 with my finger and raised the receiver to my ear. A burr. A click. A long, flat note. Then the sharp, clipped voice of a woman repeating an efficient, well rehearsed phrase.

Now, my German’s not bad, but it’s a long way from proficient, and this wasn’t the time to dither over the vocabulary for “strangled” or to mangle my directions. So I babbled at her in English and I kept babbling until it seemed that she’d understood me, and then I slammed down the receiver, hung the phone back on the wall, and peeked outside one last time.

The girl was on her knees, her back arched, her head shaking loosely in the man’s fierce grip. The man was crouching over her. His arms were slanted down at an angle, elbows locked. I could see the side of his face but not in any detail. The slatted blind and the rain distorted his features. He was Caucasian. He was clean-shaven. Apart from his considerable height and his protruding ears, he was just about as unremarkable as it’s possible to get.

It was time for me to leave. I hadn’t found what I didn’t know I was looking for, and I don’t tend to hang around when the police have been called, least of all when I’ve summoned them myself.

Turning my back on the window, I paced across to the door and pressed my ear to the wood. I listened for any sounds above the pounding of the rain and the desperate yammering of my damn stupid conscience, and then I turned the handle and poked my head into the corridor. It was deserted and the elevator doors were beckoning to me. I locked the apartment behind myself and left the elevator doors to beckon to somebody else, and then I followed the corridor as far as the main stairwell, hurried down to the glass door at the front of the apartment building, turned up the collar of my mackintosh and stepped out into the rain.

Cold water beat against my head and trickled through my hair and inside my ears and down my neck. It danced on the pavement and wet my shoes and socks and trousers. I clenched my coat tight around me and glanced up at the offending window. It had been one floor below me. Now it was two floors above. The light was still on but the blind had been closed. I couldn’t see inside anymore, and I thought I knew why. The tall guy must have finished his nasty work. He was beginning to think about cleaning up after himself and he didn’t want anyone spying on him while he did it.

I yanked off the plastic disposable gloves I was wearing, stuffed my hands inside my pockets, hunched my shoulders and walked away up the street. And all the time I was asking myself, why me? Why did I have to look out the window? Why had I taken on this crazy assignment in the first place? And what else could possibly go wrong?

THREE

The crazy assignment had come my way two days before, on a Sunday evening. I’d been minding my own business, inside my own apartment, when my telephone had started to ring. I’d jumped up from my writing desk and answered right away.

That was my first mistake.

“Ah,
très bien,
” said a voice on the end of the line. “Charlie, you are home.
Ça va?
”

I had no difficulty recognizing my caller. It was my fence, Pierre, telephoning me from Paris. Pierre’s not his real name, by the way—I have no idea what his real name happens to be—but since he revels in clichéd French dialogue, it’s always struck me as a perfectly appropriate thing to call him.

“I’m good, Pierre. And you?”

“Formidable,”
he said. “
Mais,
I am calling for business. There is a man who wishes to meet with you.”

“I see.”

“He wishes to meet with you right away.”

Small mercies, I guess, that he hadn’t said, “
tout de suite
.”

I shot a guilty look toward my writing desk. My laptop and my thesaurus and my notebooks were there, arranged beneath my charred and battered first edition of Dashiell Hammett’s
The Maltese Falcon
. I kept the
Falcon
stored inside an airtight picture frame, and it was supposed to inspire my writing and drive me on. It always had in the past, and as a result, it had assumed a special importance to me. But following a recent fiery mishap in Venice, it seemed to have lost some of its magic. Or rather, I’d lost some of my momentum. Because the awful truth was that I hadn’t made much progress with my latest mystery novel, and the worst part of all was that I had only myself to blame.

You see, since coming to Berlin, I’d been engaged in a veritable spree of larceny and misappropriation. It had been a mighty busy and a mighty rewarding spell. But it hadn’t been at all good for my word count and it had been even worse for my deadline. The book was supposed to be finished inside eight weeks. I already knew that couldn’t possibly happen, and I had a suspicion that Pierre’s call was only going to make things worse.

“What do you mean by right away?” I asked.

“I mean this very minute. There is a park outside your building,
oui
?”

It wasn’t exactly a park, but I knew what he meant. I lived in the former eastern district of Prenzlauer Berg, in a second-floor apartment in a converted town house that overlooked a leafy recreational ground known as Kollwitzplatz.

Kollwitzplatz had been at the heart of the gentrification that swept the neighborhood in the decades since the Berlin Wall came down. The grand terraced buildings that surrounded the triangular wedge of grassland were painted in appealing pastel shades, and since the first wave of artists and poets and alternative-lifestyle types had moved on, most of the inhabitants were young professionals with well-paying jobs. Rent was high, which was one reason for my recent run of lucrative burglaries. There were other reasons, too. Greed. Thrill-seeking. The intellectual and physical challenge of breaking in somewhere that was difficult to access. Oh, and of course, going out on the prowl was a terrific way to avoid tussling with my new book.

“There is a man waiting for you at the Ping-Pong table,” Pierre said. “Do you see him?”

I set the phone down and moved across to my window and peered out at the darkened view below. There were two table-tennis tables next to a children’s play area in the point of the triangle nearest to my apartment. True to Pierre’s words, a man was loitering beside them in the hazy light of a period street lamp.

The man was somewhat short and somewhat tubby. He had a head of thick, curly hair, brownish-blond in color, and a rounded face with swollen cheeks. He wore a houndstooth overcoat, dark trousers, and polished brogues. He was holding a red table-tennis paddle in each hand and swinging his arms around aimlessly, as if signaling for a kamikaze pilot to come in to land.

I returned to the telephone. “I see him,” I said. “What does he want?”

“He wishes to hire you.”

“Can I trust him?”

“But of course. This is why I am calling. You will recognize him, perhaps? He is the brother of a mutual friend of ours.”

“He is? Who?”

“Charlie, I will let him explain. It is a surprise,
oui
? But before I say
au revoir,
may I ask if the beautiful Victoria is with you now?”

I thought about pressing Pierre for an explanation. I don’t like surprises. Never have. Especially where clients are concerned. But then again, I don’t enjoy staring at the flickering screen of my laptop for hours on end, fretting about words and ideas that stubbornly refuse to come. And since a diversion from my current funk wasn’t entirely unwelcome, I decided to answer his question instead of insisting on a response to my own.

“Victoria arrived back from Frankfurt yesterday,” I said.

“Ah,
mon cher
. I told this man she may come with you. You’ll kiss her from me?”

“Absolutely,” I told him.

But that would have been my second mistake. And I wasn’t about to make it anytime soon.

*   *   *

After hanging up the phone, I walked along the corridor and knocked on the door to my spare bedroom. There was no answer. I knocked again, then nudged the door open and counted to five before poking my head inside.

“Hey, Charlie. What’s up?”

Victoria was talking very loudly. She was talking that way because she was wearing a pair of earphones and listening to some music on her mobile phone. She was sprawled on the bed in the middle of the room and a ring binder was open on her lap. The binder was jammed with papers and she was scribbling on them with a Biro.

I winced and patted the air, and she plucked the earphones from her ears and conjured a wonky grin.

Wham.
I wished she hadn’t done it. That particular grin, combined with the way she was looking up at me from beneath half-lidded eyes, her nut-brown hair falling across her face just so, had lately developed the power to throw me completely off balance.

“Sorry,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Have to go out,” I mumbled.

“Out?” She consulted her wristwatch. “But I thought we had dinner plans?”

“We do. Pierre was just on the phone. He wants me to meet someone and I thought you might like to come along with me first.”

She tipped her head onto her shoulder and squinted at me. “Does this someone want you to steal something?”

“Looks that way.”

“Well then…” She beamed. “Why didn’t you just say so?”

Victoria’s my literary agent. She’s also my closest friend. Outside of Pierre and a few shady characters I’ve had the dubious pleasure of meeting over the years, she’s the only person who knows about my hush-hush sideline as a professional thief. Perhaps a little worryingly, she tends to find my exploits as a burglar a good deal more interesting than my novels. At least, that had always been the case, until around six months ago, when I’d completed a manuscript that had turned my entire world upside down.

The Venetian Cat
was something of a departure for me. It was still a crime novel and it was still about a burglar, but it was my first book that didn’t feature the character of Michael Faulks. This time around, my protagonist had been based on a stunning female cat burglar I’d had the misfortune to meet in Venice. The book was a calculated attempt to be more commercial. It was filled with over-the-top scenes, high-stakes action, and larger-than-life characters. None of the sentences had more than eight words in them. None of the words had more than three syllables. There was plenty of violence, oodles of sex, and countless implausible plot lines. In short, it was trash, but it was trash that had developed a real buzz of excitement since a major UK publisher had signed me up to write a three-book trilogy with quite an eye-watering advance.

The book and the buzz were the reason Victoria was visiting me in Berlin. For one thing, she wanted to know how the second book in the series was coming along (it wasn’t). And for another, she’d dropped by on her way back from the Frankfurt Book Fair, where she’d been attempting to drum up some international interest in my work. Perhaps the most unsettling thing of all was that she appeared to have succeeded.

My sudden success, after years of mediocre sales and snide reviews, had come as a surprise to us both. But it was nowhere near as shocking as my recent discovery that I was finding Victoria oddly alluring. Worse still, I had it on good authority (namely, her father, Alfred) that she felt the same way about me. I was beginning to fear that these strange new emotions I was experiencing were more than a passing fad. And whenever my pulse raced in her company or her wonky smile caused me to lose all sense of balance, I could hear a small, childish voice inside my head, taunting me with the ridiculous notion that I
lurved
her.

So these were dangerous times, and as fortune would have it, I could think of few better distractions than a clandestine meeting with a complete stranger at an outdoor Ping-Pong table in the middle of old Berlin.

The stranger grinned boyishly as he saw us approaching from the shadows, then wafted a table-tennis paddle through the air with a fast swish.

“Good, good,” he said. “Knew you’d come. Nathan told me you wouldn’t let me down.”

“Nathan?”

“Nathan Farmer. My elder brother.”

And suddenly I understood Pierre’s connection to this man. “Our mutual friend,” as Pierre had so mischievously referred to Nathan, was a guy capable of forcing Pierre to do pretty much anything he desired, including, apparently, obliging me to meet with his younger sibling to discuss a potential assignment. Nathan’s hold over Pierre was the result of an unfortunate set of circumstances that had involved us both in Paris some years ago now. I was beginning to fear that I might have cause to regret it.

My temples started to tingle. My pulse was up and I was aware of a peculiar buzzing in my ears. I possess a kind of sixth sense where danger is concerned, and right now an alarm was ringing inside my head with all the subtlety of a fire bell.

“He sends his regards from Paris,” the man added. “Here, I’m Freddy.”

He switched both paddles to his left hand and extended his right to shake. Aside from his attitude and his accent, which were a little pompous and fairly reeked of the British upper class, he didn’t look at all like his brother. He was short, not tall. Dumpy, not thin. Unkempt and a little knocked about the edges, instead of being immaculately tailored and impeccably groomed. He was younger, too, by at least ten years, and he lacked his brother’s air of calm authority. He seemed unsure of himself. Awkward and fidgety. Almost as if he was embarrassed by the comparisons he must have known we were making.

“Charlie Howard,” I said, and shook his hand.

His grip was sudden and eager. So was the way he transferred his attention to my companion. “And am I right in thinking this delightful creature is your friend Victoria?” Freddy straightened his shoulders and puffed out his ample chest.