The Good Thief's Guide to Paris (22 page)

I put the plastic bags back where I had found them, then stood for a moment looking down into the kitchen drawer before sliding it closed. I shut the other cupboards and drawers that I’d pulled so frantically open and then I went back to the glass desk and consulted a number of entries in the telephone directory. Perhaps ten minutes later, when I was finally done, I closed the directory and put it back on the shelf where I had found it. Then I returned to the telephone and spent a good deal of time trying to work out how to delete my number and Victoria’s number from the list of Pierre’s recent calls. Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t figure it out, and eventually I began to think it wasn’t all that important.

So far as I could tell, there was nothing else I could usefully do, so I shut the front door of the studio apartment behind me, picked the
Fortins
locks closed and made my way onto the street and afterwards into the centre of the Jardin du Luxembourg. I found a sage-green metal chair near to a circular boating pond and sat watching groups of children prodding wooden sailing boats with sticks while I prodded ideas around my mind without a great deal more accuracy. My ideas drifted and ricocheted, bouncing off one another and tilting precariously, threatening to capsize. I was really struggling to think clearly and it was bothering me a great deal. Francesca’s heist was scheduled for the following afternoon and I knew I’d need to be at the top of my game to avoid being arrested. More importantly, I had a wholly unexpected lead to address.

TWENTY-EIGHT

In her infinite wisdom, Francesca had decreed that the best time to carry out the Picasso robbery was late afternoon. By then, she assured me, visitor numbers would be low and the museum attendants would be less alert. I wasn’t sure I believed her but neither did I think it mattered a great deal. If something was going to go wrong with her scheme, it wouldn’t be because of the time of day she chose – it would be because the whole thing was so preposterous in the first place.

Before we could try our luck, though, I first had to retrieve the plastic folio from the left-luggage counter. It was something I’d been feeling increasingly unsure about. I had no idea what kind of policy the Pompidou operated, but it didn’t seem too outlandish to assume they might check the contents of any items that were left for more than a day. Then again, I guessed visitors often forgot to collect coats and bags, so perhaps it wasn’t all that unusual. If it was as common as I hoped, they might not have looked inside the folio just yet. I’d only left it there for one night, after all. And even if the counter staff had checked the folio, there was still a chance they wouldn’t recognise the painting for what it was. Sure, they worked within the Pompidou complex, but the entrance to the art museum itself was four floors up and perhaps they weren’t all that familiar with its contents.

In any case, nothing was said when I handed over the pendant. The scent of perfumed soap emanating from it wasn’t even commented upon. The lady on the counter, who happened to be different from the day before, simply took the pendant and retrieved the folio for me without a second thought. I was almost sorry it was so easy. I’d prepared all manner of stories in my head and now all my work had been wasted.

Once I was back outside, I carried the folio away to the right, as far as an orange VW camper van parked just behind the Atelier Brancusi art museum, on the edge of the largely pedestrianised Rue Rambuteau. The camper van had a faded CND insignia painted onto its front panel and a swarm of campaign stickers adhered to its rear window. I swung one of the dented barn doors open and climbed inside the damp-smelling interior, squeezing myself down onto a bench seat beside a selection of Francesca’s motley crew. The interior was dimmed because a collection of tatty plaid curtains had been drawn across each of the side windows. Nobody said anything until I’d undone the plastic clasps on the folio and slid the painting out for them all to see. At that point, smiles spread around me as if they were contagious.

“Very good,” Francesca remarked, from behind a lighted cigarette. She reached out to touch the canvas but I flinched as her cigarette came towards the work.

“Sorry,” I said, on catching her expression. “Go ahead.”

Francesca gave me a level gaze, then smoothed her fingertips over the textured surface. She sighed with contentment.

“Catherine, Catherine,” she said. “She was talented, no?”

I nodded, then checked the reactions of the others inside the van. Altogether, there were eight of us – Francesca, Mike, Paolo, the guy with the colourful skullcap and the beaded goatee beard and the girl with the multiple piercings I’d seen inside the brasserie following my reading, as well as two others I’d only just met. The guy with the skullcap was called Jan and he was supposed to be Francesca’s electronics expert. Jan was Polish, from Krakow originally, and he’d told me he’d come to Paris seeking a job in the IT industry. I doubted that disarming a series of pressure sensors and rerouting a collection of security cameras inside one of the most famous modern art museums in the world was quite what he’d had in mind when he’d set off from home, but he seemed wildly enthused by the task.

“You have everything you need?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, hefting a plastic toolbox in his hand and giving me a toothy grin.

“And you’re sure you can do this?”

“Once Paolo the magician gets me inside, it will be easy.”

I transferred my gaze to Paolo the magician. He didn’t look much like a stage entertainer. In fact, like Jan and Mike, he was dressed in a regulation blue boiler suit. Francesca’s theory was that the boiler suits would make them look like workmen or contractors, so nobody would query why they were walking around the service corridors they needed to access. To my mind, the outfits made them look like a gang of art thieves. Didn’t robbers always wear blue boiler suits in the movies? But then again, maybe that was the point. Perhaps the very fact that the outfit and the ruse were so familiar would give it a chance of working. And hey, it was sort of novel to see Mike wearing something other than his grubby red jumper.

To tell you the truth, I was a little bothered by all the attention Paolo was getting. Yes, he could turn locks, but the fact he’d been tasked with getting Jan and Mike inside the building still annoyed me. A sense of professional pride made me believe I could do a better job, but even though I’d told Francesca as much, she’d stuck with what she knew. I guess the state of my bandaged fingers had a role to play in her thinking and there wasn’t a great deal I could do about it.

So far, I’d resisted the temptation to quiz Paolo on what his approach would be. I knew they were intending to access the building via the same metal fire escape steps they’d led me down at gunpoint just a day before, and I also knew that Paolo was capable of defeating the security locks on the double gates at the bottom of the stairs and the alarm sensors above the glass doors on the fourth and fifth floors. I just believed I’d be neater and faster and less likely to make mistakes.

“You don’t want to switch?” I asked Paolo, for maybe the third time.

He treated me to a contemptuous sneer and shook his head, meanwhile transferring a selection of picks, screwdrivers and pliers to the chest pocket of his boiler suit.

“I was thinking, you could use a couple of rakes on those locks. Hold them back to back and you could probably jog all the pins a lot quicker.”

Paolo looked away and glanced out of a side window from behind one of the curtains, as though my suggestion was entirely inconsequential.

“Fine,” I said, passing the folio to Mike. “It’s all yours,” I told him.

He nodded, then checked on Paolo and Jan once more. He consulted the time on his watch and gave Francesca a meaningful look. She stubbed her cigarette out on the floor of the van and gripped him firmly by the wrist.

“Go,” she said, and with that Mike popped the door on the camper van and the three of them set the entire farce in motion.

*

We waited twenty minutes, first watching from between gaps in the window curtains as Paolo picked the locks on the gates at the bottom of the fire escape stairs, then following them with our eyes as they made their way up between floors. At the double doors on the fourth floor, Paolo took a good five minutes to disarm the security sensors but Mike and Jan crowded around him, making it seem as if they were just carrying out repairs to the doors themselves. Once they were through, they moved beyond our line of sight, heading off along the external glass corridor towards one of the emergency exit doors that led into the inner recesses of the museum. Jan had calculated that he would need ten minutes to do his job and after that they would retrace their steps and make their way to the fifth floor of the building.

Francesca smoked her way through four cigarettes as we waited and pretty soon the air in the camper van became too acrid for my liking. The girl with the piercings seemed unfazed by the smoke and the two others, a red-haired girl from Battersea and a tanned South African rugby fanatic, were sat in the front of the van with their windows wide open. The South African was Francesca’s driver and his instructions were to stay with the van at all times and only to move if it became absolutely necessary. I doubted he had any experience as a getaway driver but I didn’t think that really mattered considering the camper van would struggle to get above walking pace. Francesca’s plan didn’t account for a madcap dash from the scene of the crime and if it ever became about that, we were almost certainly doomed.

I saw Francesca consult her watch and stub out her latest cigarette. She leaned forwards and rubbed the South African’s shoulders.

“Wait here for us, Boyd.”

“Sure thing,” he said.

“Good boy.”

She opened the barn doors on the side of the van and ushered me and the two girls outside. We gathered on the pavement next to a rack of rental bicycles, blinking in the sunshine. I placed my hands on my hips and squinted up at the inside-out exterior of the building. All the primary colours and the glass and the pipe-work made it seem so cheerful, like a children’s play area. So why did it suddenly feel so daunting?

TWENTY-NINE

We purchased tickets for the museum in separate queues and headed upstairs in staggered intervals so as not to look as if we were part of a group. By the time I handed my ticket to the attendant at the entrance to the museum on floor four, I could already see Francesca climbing the wooden stairs towards the more permanent exhibitions one floor above. I chose to go up in the lift, then strolled as casually as I was able alongside the glass-lined corridor in the direction of the Picasso room.

To be fair to Francesca, the museum was quieter than I had expected. Even so, there were still plenty of visitors. Most were ambling between the linked display rooms, hands clasped behind their backs, fingers gripping glossy brochures. Others were sneaking flash photographs of the art, only to be reprimanded by the numerous museum staff. There were a few kids running between rooms or hanging off modernist sculptures and there was also the occasional art student sat with a sketchbook and a pencil, copying elements from some of the more obscure works.

Although the cubist room was situated towards the opposite end of the gallery, it didn’t take long for me to reach it. Francesca and the girl with the piercings were already inside, admiring a pair of compact Picasso portraits on the left-hand wall. Like me, I got the impression they were finding it hard to act as if they were absorbed by the paintings. All I wanted to do was to stare at The Guitar Player. It was right there, smack in the centre of the wall that faced the main entrance to the room, and it was by far the most distinctive canvas. I gave it the merest glance, then circled over to the right and waited for the redhead to arrive and do something similar. Once she was with us, the girl with the piercings gravitated back out into the main corridor and hovered beside the bronzed horse sculpture. Behind the horse was an opposing wall and hanging on the wall was the large Picabia called Udnie. The fact it was there was fundamental to the heist – the room where The Guitar Player was situated was one of the few areas in the museum that was faced by an opposing wall rather than another viewing gallery.

There were only three entrances to the room: the large archway from the main corridor where the girl with the piercings was keeping watch and the two much smaller side archways. As I already knew from my previous visit, one of the side archways led into an adjoining corridor that was fronted by the expanse of glass running along the exterior of the building and a pair of emergency exit doors. Behind those doors, if all had gone to plan, Paolo, Mike and Jan would be waiting.

The security camera in the service corridor was just one of the many in the vicinity that Jan had been tasked with looping for a ten-minute period. I guessed we were already something like three minutes in so Francesca would have to call it soon or risk missing our window of opportunity.

There was one more factor, of course, and that factor happened to be a middle-aged man in a sober grey uniform who was sat upon the plastic chair beneath the main archway into the room. I recognised the museum attendant as Jean-Patrick Deville, the smart-looking chap from the photograph with the centre parting, the young girlfriend and the questionable morals. He was wearing a white ID badge on his lapel that exactly matched the one I had found at the back of the painting of Montmartre. Francesca was holding his eye, I noticed, and hers was certainly a knowing gaze. So long as it was only us and him in the room, and so long as Jan had been able to rejig the security cameras and disable the pressure sensors, and so long as Paolo succeeded in picking the locks on the emergency doors without triggering an alarm or drawing unnecessary attention to himself, then we would be home and dry. Was it just me, or did that seem like one hell of a lot of provisos?

I tensed and glanced for a moment towards The Guitar Player. I felt the museum attendant watching me. His hands were gripping the side of his chair, knuckles whitening as though he was bracing himself for a surge of 50,000 volts, and I could see beads of perspiration on his forehead. Francesca looked over to me and I was all set to give her the go-ahead when I decided to check on the girl with the piercings one last time. She was tugging on her earlobe, signalling that someone was approaching. I shook my head to Francesca just as a group of schoolchildren invaded the space.

The group were shepherded by a middle-aged woman with a frazzled expression who held a metal aerial above her head with a yellow ribbon attached to it. The woman moved to the space directly in front of The Guitar Player and craned her neck until she was certain her entire group were present. Then, in a hoarse, scraping voice, she began to lecture them in what I thought was probably Spanish. The group seemed disinterested and distracted by one another. They were chewing gum or peeking at the displays on their mobile telephones, and at least one kid was listening to an iPod. I rose up on the balls of my feet and peered across the heads of the schoolchildren towards Francesca. Her jaw was set hard and she was staring daggers at the female teacher. Just then, a male teacher arrived and shuffled towards the rear of the group. He offered the museum attendant a casual wave that seemed as though it might carry enough force to topple him from his chair.

The teacher droned on and on. More than once, I felt certain she’d reached the end of her presentation, only for her to take a deep breath and begin a new thread. Time was ticking away. I had to assume that Paolo, Mike and Jan were hovering outside the emergency exit, trying their best to appear inconspicuous and meanwhile looking searchingly towards the redhead, willing her to give them the all-clear.

Two of the schoolgirls seemed very interested in my appearance. They were openly staring at me and conferring with one another. I wondered for a moment if they’d seen my picture on the television news but I thought it unlikely. It was probably just that they’d spotted the discrepancy between the colour of my hair and my eyebrows. After all, they both seemed familiar with the finer points of hair dye – one of the girls had blonde highlights running through a dark bob and the other had lurid pink locks. I tried to ignore the way they were whispering to one another but I was finding it tough. I began to think about sticking my tongue out or sneering at them, which wouldn’t have been my smartest move ever.

Mercifully, the teacher chose that moment to clap her hands and I got the impression she was asking if anyone had any questions. I was tempted to thrust my hand into the air myself: “
Please Miss, may we get on with our million-dollar heist?
”

Eventually, the group began to shuffle out of the room, with just the two girls who’d been staring at me continuing to linger. I did my best to behave as if I was completely absorbed by the Braque piece in front of me. I scratched my head and rubbed my chin, eruditely assessing the work with all the concentration of a gnat. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the male teacher return and herd the girls out of the room. I checked on the museum attendant, if only to make sure he hadn’t been reduced to a puddle of sweat and anxiety, and then I looked back towards the girl with the piercings. She gave me a solemn nod and I passed the signal onto Francesca. Francesca gestured towards the redhead and less than a minute later, Paolo, Mike and Jan burst in.

As soon as they entered the space, I hurried across to The Guitar Player and whipped it off the wall, setting the heavy wood and glass frame face-down on the floor in a way that spared my fingers too much discomfort. I stepped aside and Mike moved in with a battery-operated screwdriver to remove the four Phillips screws that were securing the glass backing in place. The moment the screws were out, Jan levered the glass free with a long-bladed knife and I very carefully removed the canvas. Meanwhile, Paolo popped the clasps on the plastic folio and eased Catherine’s canvas into the picture frame. Jan replaced the glass backboard and Mike began to screw it into position. Before he was done, I slipped The Guitar Player into the plastic folio. Once the last screw was tightened, I handed Jan the folio and signalled for the three of them to go. As they left, I heaved the frame up from the floor and set it hanging once more on the wall, trying my best to get it as straight as possible.

The entire procedure was over in less than two minutes and even though I say so myself, it was beautifully choreographed.

Stepping back from the painting, I raised my hand to the back of my head and scratched my skull. I turned to Francesca and she winked at me before heading for the corridor. I was all set to give the attendant the thumbs-up when a middle-aged couple entered the space. They walked right over to The Guitar Player and stood perhaps two feet away, admiring the painting. I did the same myself. I could have looked at it a hundred times more and still been unable to tell if it was any different from the painting with which Jan was hurrying down the fire escape. I wasn’t sure whether that said more about my eyesight or the quality of the reproduction and I didn’t altogether care. The painting was gone. Francesca was gone. The girl with the piercings and the redhead were beginning to make their way out too. I had only to follow.

Except I didn’t. I stayed where I was and waited for Nathan Farmer to arrive.