The Good Thief's Guide to Paris (3 page)

He removed his backpack from his shoulders, undid the zip and fished my novel out, setting the book down on the granite kitchen counter.

“You would like coffee?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, and approached one of the nearby canvases. The paint-spattered floor gripped the soles of my shoes. Maybe it was just as well I hadn’t cleaned them after all. “These are good, Bruno. Really.”

Bruno didn’t respond. He was busy reaching inside a wall-mounted cupboard, removing two striped mugs and a packet of coffee grounds. I watched as he pulled the coffee machine away from the wall and tipped some of the granules into it, then hit a switch on the machine that burned an amber colour. The coffee began to percolate and Bruno opened the fridge door by his side. He stuck his head into the lighted interior.

“No milk,” he said.

“Black’s fine,” I told him, running my hand over the canvas. “Might help me to sober up a bit.”

Oh, if only I’d had that thought just a few hours before . . .

THREE

“‘I want you to steal something for me.’

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard those words, though usually the person saying them liked to warm up to it first. Not the American. He got straight to the point, casual as you like
. . .
”

So began my most recent book,
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
, and as I glanced up from the copy I held in my hands and scanned the faces in front of me, I had to suppress the urge to pause and check that they really did want me to go on. A year ago, if I’d turned up at the Paris Lights bookshop and explained who I was and the type of novels I wrote, I’d have been shown the door before I could ask if they stocked my work, let alone if they’d welcome a reading. Now all that had changed. With one book, I’d been transformed from a little-known peddler of trash into a little-known author of a faked memoir that was threatening to make me credible. The few critics who’d reviewed
Amsterdam
had hailed it as a brilliant conceit – not only was the author of a series of pulp novels about a career thief pretending to be a thief in real life, he was also pretending to have written a book about his exploits. There was just one problem: it wasn’t pretend.

Oh, I’d had to change some things around – names, locations, the nature of what exactly was stolen. But to my mind, my book still felt like more than just an approximation of the truth – every word I’d put down on paper connected me back to what had really happened in Amsterdam.

Not that the crowd in front of me knew that. Either they’d bought into the whole charade along with everyone else or they didn’t have the faintest idea what my book was about in the first place. And why should they care? I was a writer giving an outdoor reading on a warm spring evening in Paris and that ought to be enough to make even the most cold-hearted soul pause and lend me their ear.

Perhaps forty people had done just that. Most were students or backpackers, slouched on the green park benches positioned around me. Many of the rest were from the makeshift staff of Paris Lights, a bedraggled lot who slept in rickety beds among the sagging bookshelves at night and who worked the shop floor in return for their board during the day. There were others too: a middle-aged British couple sneaking photographs over my shoulder of the view across the river towards Notre Dame Cathedral; a nun in a taupe habit who was really more concerned with the pock-marked façade of the church of St-Julien-le-Pauvre; and a pair of wizened old Frenchmen in blue dungarees who seemed to be willing us all to vacate the Square Viviani so they could rejoin a decades-long boules contest.

They wouldn’t need to wait much longer. I was only planning to read the opening chapter of my book and afterwards I might find there was a question or two to answer and perhaps even the odd copy to sign. Then it would be off to a local brasserie with the crowd from the bookshop, where I’d no doubt end up buying enough drinks to obliterate any semblance of a profit I might have made.

All of which was fine by me, so long as Paige came along too.

It was Paige who’d invited me to read in the first place, you see, and by happy coincidence she was really quite stunning. Her eyes were what first caught my attention – they were hazel and glistening and ever so slightly too large, as if the manic goings-on inside her brain were almost too much for them to bear. I liked that about her: the feeling of energy she had and the dizzy vibe she gave off. And I liked her delicate frame and her pale complexion, so pale you could see the blue tincture of veins coiled up at her temple, and I liked the ringlets of hair that fell around her shoulders and about her face, and when she spoke, I liked her voice most of all. She was American, from somewhere in the Midwest I guessed, and her speech was flighty and spontaneous and punctuated with shrieks of laughter. And God, did I want to kiss her.

And you want to know something truly shocking? Turned out I wasn’t alone. It seemed to me that half the customers inside the Left Bank bookshop at any one time were young men aiming to catch Paige’s eye. An awful lot of them were American grad students, loaded up with textbooks from semester-long courses at the Sorbonne. They spent their time browsing through Beat poetry and striking bookish poses and glancing over the top of Émile Zola paperbacks towards the central cash desk where Paige tended to sit. And hell, I couldn’t really blame them, because I’d spent more than a few days doing the same thing myself.

It was maybe my third visit before I decided I was ready to talk to her and my fifth before I actually did. At the time, she was chatting with one of the unwashed hippies who worked there – a guy with a whole culture of organisms living among his crusted dreadlocks and matted, bright red sweater. She was being loud and opinionated and not at all how one is supposed to behave inside a bookshop. And I thought that was just great.

“Hello there,” I said, approaching the counter with a lop-sided smile and offering her my hand. “My name’s Charlie Howard. I’m a local writer.”

Paige paused mid-sentence and took me in with those swollen eyes of hers. For just a moment, everything was on hold. Then she treated me to a blazing grin and pumped my hand energetically.

“Well hello yourself. I’m Paige.”

“Charlie,” I repeated.

“Poet?” the guy stood beside her asked, in a gruff, Mancunian accent.

“Mystery writer,” I confessed, and held up a copy of my book for their inspection.

Paige scanned the title. “Looks . . . interesting,” she managed, meanwhile turning from me to weigh the Mancunian’s reaction.

The Mancunian wasn’t sure what to make of me just yet so he reached for my book, checked the spine and brazenly assessed the publisher. His eyebrows jerked up a fraction. “This really you?”

“Afraid so,” I said, and worked a bashful shrug.

“I’m writing a novel,” the Mancunian told me, from behind his dreadlocks. “It’s an epic fantasy wrapped in a socialist dystopian nightmare.”

“That’s . . . great,” I managed, and caught Paige winking conspiratorially.

The Mancunian sniffed, wiped his nose with the sleeve of his red sweater and offered me his hand. “Mike,” he told me. “You want to sign some books?”

“Why not? You have a few copies towards the back, I think.”

Paige reached across the counter and squeezed my wrist. “Oh, well we can order some more now we know you. And you’ll do a reading, right?”

“Er . . .”

“Oh come on, say yes.”

“Um . . .”

“Pretty please,” she added, and batted her eyelids.

“Well,” I told her, shrugging, “If you put it like that . . .”

And boy, was I was reaping the consequences. By now, I was almost at the end of the chapter and I found myself consumed by the fear that I’d lost my audience altogether. I’d done my best to make the reading as engaging as I could but who knew if it had worked? I’d modulated my voice, though that was easier said than done, and I’d even risked an American accent on some of the dialogue, which was almost certainly a mistake. And as thoughts like that occurred to me, I cringed and began to read a little faster, straining to reach the final sentence as soon as possible without sounding as if I was hyperventilating.

With only two paragraphs left, I glanced up and noticed Paige gossiping with one of the men from the store. She was covering her mouth with her hand, which was pretty dumb because it just drew more attention to what she was up to. I guessed that said it all – even my host had had enough. I felt my cheeks flush and stumbled across a word. Paige looked up and winked at me. I paused, composed myself, and lunged for the end.

When it was finally over, I received a smattering of applause and then I asked if there were any questions.

“Yeah, hi,” said an English girl sat off to my left. I took in the girl’s large reading glasses, her no-nonsense centre parting and the collection of pimples at the corners of her mouth.

“Go ahead,” I told her.

The girl gestured at a collection of well-thumbed paperbacks by her side. “Um, will you be writing any more of your Michael Faulks novels?”

I nodded, surprised that anyone in the audience had read them. “I’m working on a new one at the moment, as it happens.”

“Oh cool. And . . .”

“Yes?”

“Well, it’s just the author picture in these books.” She gathered the top novel on her pile and showed it to me, pointing a bittendown nail at the inside page. “It doesn’t look very much like you.”

I grimaced. “That’s because it isn’t me.”

The girl frowned and blinked at the black-and-white portrait image of a suave model wearing a dinner jacket. “But, um, is that normal?”

“It’s pretty unusual,” I admitted, rubbing the back of my neck and working a sheepish grin. “It was just something my publishers put together really. They thought I’d sell more books that way.”

I was lying, of course. During the past several years when I’d been writing the Michael Faulks burglar books, I’d always managed to dodge meeting up with my publishers and even my agent, Victoria. It was easy, really, because I was often travelling to new countries, moving on whenever I’d completed a manuscript or carried out a noteworthy theft. Back when I’d submitted the image of the catalogue model for my first novel, it had been a spur of the moment decision, but the photograph went down surprisingly well with my female editor and later my readership, which was mostly women. Truth be told, I’d had some quite eye-watering fan mail over the years and I was almost sorry that with
Amsterdam
I’d insisted on having no author image at all.

“It’s kind of . . . weird,” the girl told me.

It was hard to disagree. I pulled an apologetic face, then looked away and found that I had a handful more questions to answer. Once I’d satisfied my final interrogator, I moved across to the folding card table Paige had organised and sat down behind a stack of hardback copies of
Amsterdam
, fully prepared to watch the crowd disintegrate before my eyes. To my surprise, a modest queue developed and I ended up signing books and making small-talk for a good twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, the staff from the bookshop stood off to the side, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and talking among themselves. They were a peculiar bunch: literate and well-educated, widely travelled and drenched in existential angst, yet at the same time living in a building with no hot water or bathroom facilities, several of them wearing stained clothes that looked as if they hadn’t been changed for days. I wasn’t surprised they didn’t buy my book. After all, if they had enough cash to spend on novels, they wouldn’t be living in the bookshop in the first place. And of course, living in the store meant they could read any book for free whenever they chose.

I wasn’t surprised they were hanging around, either. Half of them looked as if they hadn’t eaten a square meal in weeks and they must have figured they could hit me up for more than just a few glasses of beer. I didn’t mind that. If I was trying to get by on just the sales from my book, it might have been a different matter, but I wasn’t and I didn’t, and the income from my thieving was quite capable of paying for a few plates of hot food.

I returned my attention to the person stood in front of me. It turned out to be my fan with the pimples and the centre parting. She was the last in line and she wanted all of her Faulks novels signed without buying my new book. I sat there scribbling my name, aware that she was studying my face intently, and then I closed the cover of the final novel and wished her goodnight. I was just twisting the top back onto my fountain pen, turning my thoughts to what I would say to Paige by way of thank you, when a young, muscular man with a confident grin approached the card table. The man snatched the top copy of
Amsterdam
from the pile and tossed it across to me.

“Would you like me to sign?”

“Yes, of course,” he said, his English laced with a strong French accent.

“Who should I make it out to?”

The young man flashed me his dazzling grin again. “I would like, ‘To my protégé’,” he said.

FOUR

My protégé was sat up at the bar alongside me. I was smoking heavily – it’s a French thing – and I was drinking a dense red wine from a very large glass. And I’d had one glass already and I still wasn’t getting it.

“So, just to be clear, you want me to help you break into your own apartment?”

“Yes,” Bruno said, looking at me intently.

“Because I have to tell you, if you want to know how secure your home is, there are firms that can tell you that. You simply contact them and set a convenient time and they send round a guy with a clipboard and a handful of colour pamphlets.”

“This is not what I want.”

“Because what, you don’t trust those people but you do trust a guy who happens to have written a book about being a burglar?”

“Well, I suppose, if you put it like this . . .”

“It sounds pretty crazy.”

Bruno pursed his lips and shrugged. It was a good Parisian shrug. He must have been schooled on it since birth, along with every other French kid. Certainly the barman was a fine practitioner of the art. I watched him gesticulate and shrug like an Olympian, meanwhile pouring a shot of absinthe for a middle-aged redhead sat towards the far end of the counter. I got the impression the redhead was a regular and the absinthe was her familiar companion. The barman set the bottle back on the shelf and wiped his hand on his starched apron. No money changed hands.

I took another lingering draw on my cigarette. I wasn’t smoking Gauloises – I kind of value my throat – but I was definitely smoking a lot more than I usually do. And I couldn’t put it all down to the general ambience in the bar. It also had something to do with my nerves. This was no standard approach, no common request.

“This really your apartment?” I asked Bruno, eyes narrowing.

“Of course.”

“Because it occurs to me you could just be trying to get me to break into a place that doesn’t belong to you.”

“Look, I will show you.”

And with that he rooted around in the backpack he had with him until he found a crumpled piece of paper. He unfolded the paper, flattened it on the bar and smoothed the page.

I scanned the document. My language skills were only basic but I could see it was a printed letter from a French high-street bank, addressed to M. Bruno Dunstan, Rue de Birague, Paris.

“And that’s you?”

“Yes,” Bruno said, and pulled a credit card from his wallet with his name on it.

I took a mouthful of wine, swallowed, then drained the rest of the glass. I motioned to the barman for a refill and returned the letter to Bruno.

“This protégé thing, is that just to make me feel good or are you serious?”

“Serious,” he said, and looked it.

“So why not ask me to show you how to break into an apartment that doesn’t belong to you? We could both make some money.”

Bruno shook his head and rubbed idly at his bicep. The muscle was bulging from the sleeve of his polo shirt, like someone had forced all the toothpaste into the middle of an oversized tube.

To my side, the barman uncorked the bottle of moderately expensive red wine I’d been drinking and splashed some into my glass. He gave me a nod and I returned the gesture, then peered at Bruno.

“You don’t trust me?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Perhaps you are just a writer, after all.”

My jaw dropped, somewhat dramatically. “I have to show you my credentials now?”

Bruno waved his hand, dismissing the point. “It is also about me. I like this idea, being a thief,” he said, whispering the last word, even though we couldn’t be overheard because the waiter had moved away and the acoustic café music was quite loud. “But maybe I will be terrible,” he said, rolling his ‘r’s with gusto. “Maybe I will see how it works and know if I can do it.”

I raised my hand to my face and covered my eyes. I peered out from behind splayed fingers. “Breaking into your own place won’t do that. The job’s about nerve as much as anything else.”

He demonstrated his shrugging prowess once more. “But this way, I cannot be arrested, yes? It is my home.”

“I guess. So what’s your plan, you want me to run some kind of course here? First I show you how to crack your own place, then someone else’s?”

He pouted. “It would be up to you.”

“Because let me tell you, it’s not going to be as easy as you think. Picking locks takes practice. And there are all kinds of locks. Every manufacturer has something different going on. I mean, granted, the principles are the same, but still.”

“I would like to try, even so.”

I snatched up my wine glass and reacquainted it with my lips, meanwhile glancing over Bruno’s shoulder towards a corner table where Paige was sat with some of her colleagues from the bookshop. Dirty plates filled the centre of their table, alongside empty bottles of wine. One of the men, an Italian-looking guy with shimmering, coiffed hair and a high, square forehead, was being awfully tactile with Paige. He was smoking a cigarillo and gripping Paige by the shoulder, clinching her towards him, and the truth was she didn’t appear to mind all that much. Her cheeks had a boozy flush to them and every so often she would roll her puffed-up eyes and collapse at some wildly amusing comment the Italian made.

Mike, the dreadlocked Mancunian I’d met, was sat opposite them, pouring more of the wine I’d paid for. He had on the same frayed, red woollen jumper he’d been wearing when I’d first spoken to Paige and I noticed that the overstretched sleeves were brushing against the rims of the wine glasses as he poured. Beside him sat a man in a garish skullcap who sported a pointed goatee that was weighed down with a colourful glass bead. The final member of their group was a serious-looking young woman with very fine, jet-black hair, purple lipstick and perhaps eight studs in her ears.

“Why do you want to be a thief?” I asked Bruno, my gaze still focused on the table across the room and, in particular, the intricate movements of the Italian’s fingers on Paige’s neckline.

“Maybe it is the challenge,” he suggested, spreading his hands on the bar. “It is not easy, as you say. Maybe I would like to learn something like this. Anyone can break a window, yes? Not so many people can find another way in.”

“So it’s an intellectual exercise?”

“For me, I think so,” he said, straightening on his stool.

“Well, for me it’s about the money. So tell me, how much are my services worth to you?”

Bruno seemed taken aback by what I’d said but he recovered soon enough and delved into the back pocket of his jeans, withdrawing a folded bundle of notes. I gripped his wrist and forced it below the counter of the bar, checking to see the barman hadn’t noticed.

“You want it to look like I’m pushing drugs here? Keep the money in your pocket. How much?”

“Five hundred euros.”

My eyes widened. “And you figure that’s enough?”

“It is all I have. I could get a little more, only . . .”

I looked at him, shook my head and took another draw on my cigarette. I exhaled over his shoulder, towards the ceiling. Just then, Paige exploded with laughter, the outburst beginning in her nose with a loud snort. Her body buckled and she nudged against the Italian in a playful way.

I tried to ignore how things were shaping up between them and focus on what Bruno was asking me instead. I didn’t need the job or even the hassle for that matter but I couldn’t deny I was interested. I’d been around enough confidence men in my time to know just how crudely he was trying to flatter me but that didn’t make the effect any less potent. It wasn’t everyday I was offered the chance to demonstrate my skills. Usually, I was more than a little concerned to ensure I had no observers whatsoever when I was picking a lock. But Bruno was giving me the chance to showboat and offering me cash to boot. By my calculations, the money would easily cover the food and wine I’d paid for, and I guessed I could always treat the episode as a harmless bit of fun.

Fun was something Paige seemed to be experiencing. She was giggling again, looking up at the Italian with an unmistakable spark in her eyes. I finished my wine.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Bruno. “I’ve had enough for one night.”

Together, we left the bar and crossed Place Saint-Michel and then Bruno led me along the Quai running beside the inky River Seine, in the direction of the Ile Saint-Louis. Notre Dame Cathedral loomed alongside us, the arachnid limbs towards the Cathedral’s rear bathed by the spotlights of a passing Bateau Mouche. Cars and mopeds streamed by, a clamour of diesel engines above the city’s background hum. I took a few deep breaths to clear my mind, as if a lungful of traffic fumes could counteract the wine I’d ingested.

The stretch of wall we were walking beside had a series of green wooden boxes fixed to it. During the daytime, the boxes folded open to form street stalls selling artistic prints, second-hand books, snowglobes, fridge magnets and other bric-à-brac. The closed stalls were protected by the cheapest of padlocks. I could have picked them open in my sleep. With one arm tied behind my back. And a whole squadron of gendarmes marching by. And . . . oh, you get the idea.

“She is pretty, yes?” Bruno said, from nowhere.

“Excuse me?”

“The American girl.”

I glanced sideways at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Bruno studied me for a moment, then did his Parisian shrug again. “I live not far away. Across the river.”

“So focus,” I told him. “You need to concentrate if we’re going to do this right.”