The Good Thief's Guide to Paris (18 page)

In
The Thief and the Five Fingers
, Faulks is hired to steal a painting from an art gallery in central Berlin, but his plans are far more detailed and complex than the ones I’d apparently uncovered. Faulks enters the gallery during the day and hides out until late afternoon, then crawls inside the network of ventilation shafts that criss-cross the gallery building until he’s above the area where the painting is located. He waits until the gallery has closed, at which point he lowers himself on a high-tensile wire after cleverly redirecting a network of laser sensors with some hand mirrors to prevent his entry being detected. Next, he confounds the pressure sensors that have been wired up to the painting and then he engages a motorised winch to raise himself and the painting back up into the ventilation shaft. He doesn’t replace the painting with a forgery, though. Why hadn’t I thought of it, I wondered? Then I answered my own question. It was because Faulks had carried out the theft after hours, when the gallery was shut, so he was long gone before the theft was discovered.

Did that mean the people hoping to steal the Picasso were planning to take it during the day? Was that why they needed the forgery?

I finished up at the urinal and moved over to the sink. I wafted my hands in front of the sensor fixed below the tap and then soaped and rinsed my hands. I triggered some more water and cupped it to my face, bathing my sore eyes. I ran my wet hands through my hair and washed the back of my neck. I reached for some paper towels and was just dabbing my face dry when the door to the toilets opened.

Two men walked in and I recognised them instantly. The first was Mike, the dreadlocked Mancunian hippy who worked at Paris Lights. He was wearing his one and only red jumper yet again. Alongside him was the Italian guy with the slick, coiffed hair with whom Paige had been getting cosy following my reading. What was his name again? Mario? Luigi? Paolo, that was it.

“Hello there,” I said, extending my freshly washed hand.

The Mancunian didn’t move to accept it. Instead, he pulled a gun from beneath his jumper and pointed it at my chest. The gun was very large and very dated, like a revolver from a Second World War film. It dwarfed the Mancunian’s hand, the barrel looking almost cartoon-like in its dimensions. He wasn’t wearing gloves, I noticed, and that made me think perhaps he didn’t plan to shoot me. Then again, I’d forgotten to don my Kevlar vest before visiting the museum, so I wasn’t all that keen to test my theory.

“What’s going on?”

“Check him,” the Mancunian said to the Italian, pointing at my jacket with his spare hand.

The Italian moved towards me, walking in a relaxed manner, like his joints were elastic. He was chewing gum, acting as if this was an everyday encounter for him. He gestured lazily for me to raise my hands and then he began frisking me. He found the spectacles case containing my picks and probes, as well as the brown envelope and the photographs. He passed them over to the Mancunian, who pocketed them, meanwhile keeping the gun trained on me.

The Italian was just about to drop to his knees and check my trousers when the door to the toilets opened for a second time. The Mancunian gave me a warning look and hid the gun under his jumper. The Italian wheeled round and I lowered my hands to my side, then quickly slipped them into my trouser pockets. None of us whistled, though I guess it wouldn’t have been entirely inappropriate.

An elderly gentleman entered. He paused when he saw the three of us, as if sensing something was amiss.

“Bonjour,” the Italian said to him, smacking his gum between his lips. He clapped me on the back, then gripped my shoulder tight.

“Bonjour,” I added, stiff-jawed.

The elderly man nodded uncertainly, failing to react to the look I was giving him. He moved towards one of the stalls and as soon as he’d closed the door and slid the bolt across, the Mancunian removed his gun and pointed it at me once again. I put my hands back up in the air, concealing the left-luggage pendant I’d just removed from my trouser pocket between my fingers. I didn’t want them to have the pendant but I couldn’t see where I could usefully hide it either. I thought about letting it slip down into my sleeve but if I did that, I’d have no control over when it might fall out.

The Italian checked my pockets, removing my wallet, my cigarettes and Nathan Farmer’s business card. He passed all three items to the Mancunian and then he pulled my arms down by my sides and nudged me towards the exit. The Mancunian came right up to my ear.

“You’re coming with us,” he said. “No funny business.”

Not even a knock-knock joke, I wanted to ask, but instead I kept quiet. He jabbed the gun into my back, just below my kidney. I considered ditching the pendant but it was metal and likely to make a noise when it struck the floor. I was very conscious of having it stuck between my fingers but I was equally reluctant to try and return it to my pocket in case I drew their attention.

“You’ll behave?” the Mancunian asked.

“Scout’s honour.”

“Good. Turn right out of here.”

I did as he said and led the two of them through an open-plan museum shop and out through a swinging glass door positioned beneath a red neon down-arrow and onto the terrace beyond. Most visitors would turn left, back towards the escalators. The Mancunian steered me right, in the direction of the elevators and, beyond them, the metal emergency exit stairs that flanked the far end of the building. The elevators were on different floors, I noticed, but I wasn’t encouraged to wait for them. Instead, I was guided towards the emergency exit doors up ahead.

Each door had an aluminium handle fixed horizontally across it and a sign in French and English reading, “
To be used only when the building is being evacuated
”. As I neared the door, the Italian stepped ahead of me and reached for the aluminium bar.

“Don’t,” I said.

He turned and looked at me with a limited degree of interest. I pointed towards a sensor positioned at the top of the door.

“It’s wired into an alarm. If you want to get me out of here quietly, we’re going to have to take the main escalator.”

The Italian absorbed my words, then grinned disconcertingly, his gum visible between his teeth. He pushed down on the bar and the door clunked open. I braced myself for the high-pitched wail of a siren but nothing happened. I looked up and saw that a lead plate had been fixed over the sensor attached to the doorframe. It was a neat trick.

The Mancunian prodded me with the gun once again, ushering me through the door and onto the metal stairwell beyond. I stood on the grilled platform and waited as the Italian expertly closed the door behind us, using a pair of long-nosed pliers to remove the dummy sensor plate at the very last moment so that the circuit was reconnected without triggering the alarm.

“A real craftsman,” I said. “I think this is maybe the second time I’ve seen your handiwork. The first would have been when you picked open the locks to my apartment, correct?”

The Italian didn’t respond. He was busy chewing his gum and peering down over the railings, towards the flights of stairs below. He pulled his head back and nodded an all-clear to the Mancunian. The Mancunian gave me a shove. The shove wasn’t particularly hard but I made the most of it and stumbled forwards down the stairs. I wasn’t planning on going for the gun or making a run for it or playing the hero. All I wanted was an excuse to bring my hand close to my face. I straightened, acting as if I was regaining my balance. Then I steeled myself and swallowed the left-luggage pendant I’d slipped into my mouth.

It went down real easy; like an ostrich egg.

TWENTY-TWO

“Stop coughing,” the Mancunian told me.

“I’m sorry,” I croaked. “Do you have any water?”

His eyes narrowed. “This some kind of a trick?”

“No trick,” I said, and coughed again.

The pendant seemed to be stuck in my throat. I was pretty sure it wasn’t. In fact, I was pretty sure it was on its way down to my gut already. But it sure as hell
felt
as if it was stuck in my throat and just the idea of it being there was enough to trouble me. I had an image of the pendant completely blocking my oesophagus, like a freakish valve. It was nonsense, I hoped, but I wanted to drink something to make certain.

“Pass us that can,” the Mancunian said, to the Italian.

The Italian was driving. I was sat in the back of a beaten-up Peugeot 205 GTI with the Mancunian alongside me and his gun pointed at my hip. We were really motoring. You want the definition of danger? Try fighting not to choke while having a gun held on you and being driven through the most congested streets in Paris by a distracted Italian in an eighties pocket rocket.

The Italian downshifted and veered out around a taxicab onto the wrong side of the road. He accelerated, then swerved back in, meanwhile reaching for the can of Cola the Mancunian had pointed to.

I took the can from him and necked it. In that instant, my situation grew even more perilous. I had no idea how long the can had been inside the car but the coke was far from fresh. The stale, flat, syrupy mixture hit the back of my throat and I almost gagged.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked, grimacing as I swallowed.

“Don’t worry,” the Mancunian said. “It’s not far.”

They took me to the bookshop, as it happened. I guess I should have seen it coming but the truth is I’d had visions of being driven to a disused building on the outskirts of the city, bound and gagged and beaten half-senseless. No doubt that’s what would have happened to Faulks if I’d been responsible for plotting the scene myself. Luckily for me, I wasn’t, and I ended up in the room with the unplumbed toilet in it that adjoined the study Paige had asked me to access.

I had my cigarettes back too. The Mancunian had handed them to me along with an ashtray, a cup of milky tea and a straight-backed chair. I sat down and lit a cigarette, aiming to smoke until I’d neutralised the lingering taste of the gone-off cola. Granted, it wasn’t the most extreme torture scenario I could have envisaged, but it wasn’t exactly a dinner party either. The Italian had taken control of the gun and he was pointing it in my direction from his position slumped upon the toilet bowl. Though I tried not to, I kept finding myself staring into the barrel. The hole at the end was large and very black, almost big enough for me to crawl into. Maybe the thing didn’t fire bullets after all – perhaps it was loaded with homing missiles.

I hadn’t seen any sign of Paige. She wasn’t in the back rooms I’d been led through and I couldn’t make out her voice among the few I could hear from downstairs. I didn’t know whether to expect her to be involved or not. She’d lied to me about knowing Bruno, but that didn’t necessarily mean she was part of what was going on now. And what exactly was going on? I got the impression we were waiting for someone, though I wasn’t entirely sure. Maybe the Italian was aiming to hold the gun on me until I smoked myself to death.

“Would you care to tell me why I’m here?” I asked.

The Mancunian looked up at me with a blank expression. He was sat in an area of exposed floorboards over by the window, sorting through the documents and papers from the brown envelope the Italian had taken from me. I’d watched him in silence for a while, his dreadlocked head on his shoulder, holding the blueprints up to the light or tracing his grubby finger over one of the circuit diagrams. He hadn’t seemed surprised by the contents of the envelope, nor altogether shocked by the photographs of the security cameras in the art museum. I got the impression they were exactly what he’d hoped to find.

“Not even a clue?” I asked, when he failed to say anything.

“Just wait. You’ll hear it soon enough.”

Would I? It would have been nice to be able to believe him but I very much doubted what he said could be true. I got the feeling I was never going to uncover the answers I needed. I kept finding out new things and those things kept leading me towards further mysteries. I seemed to be moving away from solving the riddle of who had killed the woman in my apartment and how I might clear my name, becoming caught up in the plans for a wildly ambitious robbery. I didn’t need any of it. All I wanted was for my life to be simple again.

I sighed at just the idea, stretching my legs out before me. The carpet beneath my heels was thick and ornate and expensive-looking. I might have called it ostentatious had it actually fitted the room we were sat in. Instead, it was threadbare at the edges and left patches of floorboard exposed. And who knew when it had last been vacuumed? Never, was my guess. The dirt and grime and hair the carpet was caked in was really quite something to behold and it made a complete mockery of the ashtray the Mancunian had provided me with.

I exhaled and tapped some ash from my cigarette into the ashtray. Each time I inhaled, my body quaked a little less, though I was still far from relaxed. I looked up at the clouds of cigarette smoke eddying above my head and wished I could just float away from it all. I was fed up with chasing around trying to solve puzzles and I was tired of feeling dead on my feet. I just wanted to sleep and once I’d slept I wanted to open my eyes and find that everything had magically resolved itself.

What was Victoria doing right now, I wondered? Would she think I’d bailed on her or would she know something was wrong? I guessed the former, and it wasn’t great timing. Just as I’d begun to mend things between us, this had happened. I hoped I’d be able to explain myself eventually but who knew when or even if I’d be given the chance?

Just then, I heard footsteps from the study across the way. The locking mechanism on the door retracted and I caught sight of the door handle turning. An instant later, I found myself staring at a truly exotic individual.

“I gather from your expression you were expecting a man,” the figure said.

Actually, I still wasn’t entirely convinced I wasn’t looking at one. The figure was dressed all in black: black leather boots, faded black jeans and a ribbed black vest top. I glimpsed the vaguest swell of breasts beneath the material of the vest and a delicate gold bracelet on her wrist. Her hair was unbrushed and had very possibly gone unwashed for as long as the carpet. Auburn in colour, it was more like a tangled mane really. She wore no make-up and her face was deeply lined with a maze-like network of wrinkles and creases. She appeared unhealthily thin and because her clothes and her jeans in particular were very tight, she reminded me somewhat of a lion tamer minus the whip. At a guess, I thought she was pushing seventy. Then she spoke again and I registered her deep, growling baritone of a voice and added a few more years.

“So you’re Charlie Howard,” she began.

“Guilty,” I replied, stubbing my cigarette out in the ashtray.

She peered down at me through lidded eyes, then reached for her back pocket and removed some cigarettes of her own. She placed a full-tar number between her bare lips and fired it up, drawing a good cubic foot of smoke into her lungs.

“Younger than I was expecting,” she said, in the deep, husky voice.

I shrugged. There wasn’t a great deal I could do about it.

The woman took a rangy step into the centre of the room and stood right before me. She crossed one arm in front of her stomach and cradled the elbow of her other arm in her palm, keeping the cigarette ever close to her lips. She took another long, determined draw.

“I’m Francesca,” she went on eventually, extending her hand to shake. Her nails were all bitten down and unpainted.

“Hello Francesca,” I said, gripping her hand and finding that it was chafed and lifeless. “You’re the owner of this place, correct?”

Francesca exhaled and waved her arm about the room in an expansive gesture. There was a hole in the armpit of her vest and I caught sight of a flash of pale skin.

“Since 1961,” she told me, breathlessly. “A great many writers have stayed here, of course. Some wonderful books have been written inside these very walls.”

“At gunpoint?” I asked, and gestured towards the Italian.

Francesca turned and her shoulders sagged.

“Paolo,” she said, pronouncing the vowel sounds with all the energy and flair of a native Italian. “We’re not barbarians.”

The Italian lowered his eyes and set the gun down on the floor. It wasn’t completely out of the equation, I supposed, but it was a step in the right direction.

“I told them not to harm you, I was very specific about that.”

“That’s good. You have them house-trained.”

“Ha!” Francesca threw back her head and laughed heartily, much like a pirate in a children’s film. She didn’t slap her thigh when she was through but the move wouldn’t have been entirely out of place.

“I knew you’d amuse me. I could tell from your book.”

“You’ve read it then.”

“I read everything that goes on the display table. It’s a personal rule.”

“I’m flattered.”

“I didn’t say I enjoyed it.”

She stared at me, eyebrows raised. I waited for her to break into the pantomime laugh once again but it never came. Evidently, she wasn’t my number one fan.

“I suspect your range is quite limited,” she added.

“Depends how hard you throw me.”

Francesca’s eyes narrowed and she took another ragged draw on her cigarette. There was still a way to go until she reached the filter but she dropped the cigarette and ground it out on the carpet with the toe of her boot.

“Please don’t exhaust my patience.”

“I’ll do my best. And in return, perhaps you could tell me why I’m here?”

“That’s simple,” she said. “The painting.”

“Painting?”

“The one you stole.”

“Stole?”

Francesca grimaced, then turned to the Italian and clicked her fingers in an impatient way. “The book Paolo,” she said. “Go fetch.”

At her prompting, the Italian stood up from the toilet and entered the study. He emerged a few moments later with a copy of
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
in his hands. He gave the book to Francesca, who opened it at the first printed page and then passed it over to me.

I recognised my handwriting immediately. “
To my protégé
,” I’d written, before signing my name.

“Where did you find this?”

“Catherine’s apartment,” Francesca told me. “Mike found it on the morning I sent him and Paolo to collect the painting.”

So that was how they’d made the connection to me. I cast my mind back and remembered Bruno removing the book from his backpack and leaving it on the kitchen counter. They must have found it and assumed I was the one who’d left it there. It was some assumption. Not even I was that careless.

“I wrote this inscription, but that doesn’t mean I was in that apartment.”

“So explain this,” the Mancunian said, lifting the papers and documents in his hand. He stood and delivered them to Francesca. She thumbed through the documents, a smile beginning to form on her face.

“Excellent,” she said, revealing a set of crooked, nicotine-stained teeth. “You are a clever boy.”

I wasn’t sure if she meant me or the Mancunian but I didn’t imagine it mattered all that much. What mattered was steering the conversation back in a direction that might prove useful to me.

“So maybe it was me,” I admitted. “But what about your boys here? I take it they’re the ones who broke into my place.”

Francesca looked up from the documents and winked, unabashed.

“And they left the message on my laptop?”

“Paolo’s idea,” she said, face clouding over.

“It didn’t say who you were.”

She rolled her eyes, as if she’d already been through all that with the Italian.

“So tell me,” I went on, “did they also kill Catherine in my living room?”

“Ah,” Francesca replied. “I’m afraid that had nothing to do with us.”

“You expect me to believe you?”

“From what I gather from the radio, you’re really much better-placed to know the killer’s identity.”

“It wasn’t me,” I said, inverting my thumb towards my chest.

“Indeed.”

“I’m serious.”

“Well, it’s a serious situation.”

“You fitted me up.”

“Now, now. I’ve told you it wasn’t us. I give you my word on that.”

“Your word?”

“My word,” she said, raising her voice and glaring down at me in a way that suggested she wasn’t willing to be tested any further.

But if what she was saying was really the truth, then who had killed Catherine? And why? I’d assumed the culprit had to be the same person who’d picked the locks on my apartment door but Francesca was telling me that wasn’t the case. Could someone else really have arrived after Francesca’s goons had left and before I got home? How had they known they’d be able to get in and how had my concierge missed two groups of visitors? The situation was becoming ever more confusing and I was beginning to fear I’d never get to the bottom of it all. The more people who ruled themselves out of the equation, the smaller my chances of finding the real killer became. At this rate, I might have to reinterview myself.

“Where’s Paige?” I asked. “Is she involved in all this?”

“That tramp,” Francesca said, spitting the word from her lips. “I would have pictured you with better taste.”

“So she’s not involved?”

Francesca gave me a curious look. “What made you think that she was?”

I shrugged.

“She no longer works here, as it happens.”

“Oh?”

“She was a thief.”

I laughed, amused by the disgust with which she said it.

“Here at the bookshop,” Francesca added, as if that somehow explained her attitude. “I gave her a roof over her head, a little food. All she had to do in return was sell books. But no, she stole them instead.”

“Really?”

“From my office,” Francesca said, with a flick of her head in the direction of the study. She reached for her back pocket again and lit a fresh cigarette. She took a hit, then exhaled. “She must have taken the keys from my bedroom, I suppose. She stole some of my oldest and most expensive editions and sold them for a pittance.”