The Good Thief's Guide to Paris (5 page)

Ten thousand euros. It wasn’t a life-changing sum of money by any stretch of the imagination, but put it with the remainder of the cash Bruno had paid me and I’d have enough for several months’ rent. And it sure as hell beat the advance I was likely to get when I completed my novel.

More to the point, I was reluctant to turn Pierre down. I didn’t want him to start passing jobs to other thieves ahead of me. He already had doubts about the state of my fingers, that much was clear, and I wasn’t prepared to give him another reason to look elsewhere. Over the years he’d provided me with a flow of income that was unusually steady for a thief and I wanted that arrangement to continue.

“I’d need the money up front,” I said.

“I have only half of it.”

“Half of my ten and half of yours?”

Pierre considered my words for a moment, perhaps sensing the intent in my voice. He nodded cautiously.

“If I’m going to do this, I want all of it before I begin.”

Pierre took another lingering draw on the cigarette, cheeks bulging. I’d offended him, I guess, though the truth was I didn’t mind all that much. He closed his eyes and when he opened them to look at me again, the eyelid lingered over his left pupil.

“Amsterdam, Pierre,” I prompted.

He vented smoke through his nose. “You think maybe I will ever stop paying you for Amsterdam, Charlie?”

Pierre shook his head ruefully and ground his cigarette out hard in the ashtray. After a moment’s pause, he leaned down to his side and retrieved a leather manbag from the floor. He unzipped the bag, delved inside and removed a bulky envelope. He tossed the envelope across to me without a word.

“This all of it?”

He threw up his hands. “I should count it for you too?”

“Just asking. And the fee is non-refundable, correct?”

“Of course. The client pays half to hire us. That is the deal. And now my half is with you. Because we are friends Charlie, yes?”

“Friends, sure.”

Pierre crowded over the table. The birthmark twitched around his eye.

“Then remember, do this right. I want my money too, yes?”

I nodded, holding his gaze. Then I broke eye contact and picked up the weighty envelope, slipping it into my jacket pocket. I pushed my sunglasses up on my nose while Pierre raised his espresso cup towards his lips. I realised I hadn’t touched my coffee but I sensed our meeting was drawing to a close and I wasn’t eager to prolong it. Besides, I had ten thousand new ways to buy a drink on my way home.

“So what kind of timescale are we talking?” I asked.

Pierre lowered his espresso cup and dabbed his lips with a paper napkin. “Two days. We can meet here. At ten o’clock, say.”

“Sounds reasonable. Why don’t you describe the place I’m breaking into?”

“It is an apartment,” Pierre said, as if that much could be taken for granted in Paris.

“And where’s the painting located?”

“There is only one bedroom. It is on the wall.”

“Alarms? Locks? Attack poodles?”

He shrugged, as if the details were of little consequence.

“You do have an address, I take it.”

“Oui, but of course,” Pierre said, removing a folded piece of paper from a flap on the front of his bag and sliding the note across the table towards me.

I opened the note and scanned the address. And in that instant, what had struck me at first glance as a less than perfect scenario suddenly jumped clear off the scale.

SIX

“Good morning,” I said brightly, when Victoria answered her telephone.

“Good morning yourself. How was the reading?”

“It was fine.”

“Just fine? Not splendid?”

I smiled. “Didn’t you hear? Splendid is over for me.”

“Ah, you bludgeoned the poor word to death. That’s too bad. It gave you an air of something.”

“It was a triumph, for a time.”

Victoria laughed. “A triumph? Where do you get this stuff?”

“My trusty thesaurus. How’s hubby?”

There was a pause.

“Charlie,” Victoria said, “exactly how many times do I have to ask you not to call Adam that?”

“Raw nerve?”

“Or to say that? Really, I’m going to batter you in a minute. Believe me, if Adam does ever propose, you’ll be the first to know.”

I grinned to myself and glanced down at the backlit screen of my laptop. The cursor was flashing at the end of a line I’d written, prompting me to continue. The only problem was I couldn’t think what to type next. I was blocked. And often when I was blocked I called my agent, Victoria, and we’d shoot the breeze for a while. Sometimes, the words I needed to continue my story would come to me right in the middle of a conversation we were having and I could bid her a snappy goodbye and press on.

There were other times, though, when I had to wonder if we knew each other a bit too well. Occasions when, for example, I teased her about her boyfriend for no other reason than because I was frustrated with my writing or bugged out by something that had happened to me in the course of my thieving. And I very much doubted the percentage fee she made from my books was adequate compensation for that.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not for the first time. “How is Adam?”

“He’s fine,” she replied.

“I was only kidding, you know?”

“I do. So tell me, are you stuck again?”

I made a clucking noise with my tongue. “God, sometimes it feels like you can crawl down this telephone wire into my brain. How did you know?”

“Because,” Victoria said, as if I was a dunce, “this is the third time you’ve called me this week. And each time you’ve been blocked. So I put all the clues together and I played a hunch.”

“A hunch?” I felt my eyebrows knit together. “Have you been reading Americans again?”

Victoria waited a beat. “I have a new client. He writes about a PI in Miami.”

“A dick?”

She groaned. “That was a joke, right?”

“Would I stoop so low?”

Victoria didn’t bite but I was pretty sure it was a struggle to control herself.

“Are you going to hurry up and tell me why you’re stuck?”

“Since you put it like that,” I said, and went on to explain my problem.

My problem related to a scene based around the Rio Carnival. Michael Faulks, my series character, was in Rio de Janeiro with the intention of breaking into a bank vault loaded with money ahead of a rival gang, all while the bank staff were out of the way, enjoying the Carnival festivities. As I’d really got into the scene, though, I’d begun to have doubts about the plausibility of what I was writing. The thing is, I’ve seen countless movies where teams of finely drilled, heavily armed robbers burst into banks, tell everyone to hit the floor, disable every conceivable security device one after the other and then empty the safe of millions of dollars of untraceable notes. But whoever heard of one man breaking into a bank, foxing every single alarm and camera and lock, cracking a maximum security vault and getting away with the perfect crime?

“That’s what you’re worried about?” Victoria asked me, once I’d set out my conundrum.

“You don’t think that’s enough?”

“Honestly Charlie, I have clients who need their hands held from time to time but you can really push it. You’re concerned about credibility in one of your Faulks novels? Next you’ll be telling me Ian Fleming made a few things up.”

“Ouch.”

“Charlie, in
The Thief on the Run
, you had Faulks double-cross a mafia kingpin, dupe the FBI and the CIA, base-jump off the Empire State Building and bed the daughter of the President of the United States.”

“I sense there’s a point to all this.”

“The point, as you well know, is that the Faulks books aren’t about realism. Your fans read them because anything can happen. And believe me, if Faulks can take down the New York mafia all by himself, he can sure as hell carry out a simple bank heist.”

I scratched my temple. “You think?”

“Yes. But unless you’ve had some kind of a lobotomy, you know that already. And that makes me think something else must be bothering you. And since I happen to remember you mentioning a meeting with Pierre this morning, I’m going to play another of my famous hunches and guess there’s a problem.”

I rolled my chair back from my desk and set it spinning, lifting my feet clear of the ground. “Seriously,” I said, the phone wire coiling around my shoulders, “we should totally apply for that “
Mr and Mrs
” television show.”

“Just tell me, Charlie. You know you’re going to eventually. So why don’t we dispense with the cavalier asides and get down to what’s really going on?”

I untwisted myself, stood from my chair and walked across to the wall beside my desk. My framed first edition of
The Maltese Falcon
was hanging there, slightly askew, and I straightened it. The Hammett novel goes everywhere with me. It’s my one essential, along with my laptop and my burglary equipment. The truth is I’m superstitious.
The Maltese Falcon
was on my desk when I wrote my first published novel and I happen to believe that anything I write without Sam Spade watching over me is liable to be terrible. I never told anyone that before.

“You have a tight schedule?” I asked Victoria.

“Tell me.”

“Oh, if you insist.”

And that’s when I shared everything that had occurred during the past twenty-four hours. Well, everything aside from my attraction to Paige, that is, because past experience had taught me how much grief I’d be letting myself in for if I happened to dwell on her. Instead, I focused on how Bruno had approached me at the end of my reading and what had been said in our conversation at the bar. From there, I described the break-in to Bruno’s apartment and briefly summarised the regrets I’d had about the whole thing the following morning. Afterwards, I recounted my meeting with Pierre, and then finally I gave her the killer news, the twist that had almost knocked me from my chair when Pierre had handed me the address of the apartment I was to burgle.

“You’re serious?” she asked, once I’d concluded my story.

“Cross my heart.”

“Wow.” She whistled. “And to think, you were worried about your novel being believable.”

“I know. Some coincidence, huh?”

“I’ll say.”

“So what’s your take on it?” I asked, dropping into my desk chair once again.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Listen, I wouldn’t have asked if . . .”

“Don’t do it.”

I straightened. “What?”

“Something’s not right about the job. You know that or you wouldn’t have called me. So don’t do it.”

I reached for a pencil and nibbled the end. “See, I think that might be a bit hasty, Vic.”

“There. I said you wouldn’t want to hear my opinion. What would you rather I said? That it’s just one of those weird quirks of life that no-one can explain but you shouldn’t be put off by it, you should just press on regardless and stuff the consequences?”

“No, I just . . .”

“You just what?”

“Oh, God knows.” I flicked the pencil across the room, marking the far wall with a dot of pencil lead.

“Charlie, if I was in your shoes, I’d have turned Pierre down the moment he said he didn’t know who his client was. We’ve been here before, remember?”

I made a noise that was intended to convey uncertainty. “I’m not sure it’s quite the same thing.”

Victoria huffed into the receiver. “Who cares? The fact is you chose to ignore your concerns because of the money Pierre waved in your face. But what you can’t ignore, what you’d be plain mad to close your mind to, is that the place Pierre wants you to burgle just happens to be the apartment you’ve already broken into with this Bruno guy.”

“It’s Bruno’s apartment.”

“So he says.”

I threw up a hand, for all the good that would do. “He showed me proof of address.”

“God Charlie, I have a certificate on my wall here saying I own an acre on the moon.”

“Hey, that was a carefully selected gift.”

“But it’s just a piece of paper! You want me to send you a letter saying I live in that apartment too?”

I pouted. “Bruno’s letter was from a bank.”

“Easily forged.”

“And the credit card?”

Victoria paused. “I don’t know,” she said, exhaling. “I suppose he could have faked an application.”

“All of that just for me? I don’t buy it. And you didn’t see him when we got inside that building. The concierge recognised him for starters, or we would have been stopped. And Bruno knew that apartment, Vic. He knew where the alarm panel was located and what code to enter. Jesus, he even knew which cupboard the coffee was in.”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” she told me. “I’m not even going to try to explain it. All I’m saying is what you already know – something’s not right.”

I glanced at my Hammett novel again, reluctant to concede the point. “Maybe.”

“But you’ll do it anyway, right?”

“I thought I’d just take a quick look.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Think of the positives, though,” I said, trying to control the pleading tone in my voice. “I know the layout of the building. I know I can pick the locks I’ll come up against. The only real problem I’ll have is getting by the concierge.”

“So why call?”

“Honestly? I was seeking moral guidance.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking,” I said, marking a circle on the surface of my desk with my finger. “Say this apartment does belong to Bruno. The way I see it, he hired me to show him how to break in, right? He paid me in full, up front, and nothing went wrong. So, it seems kind of duplicitous, doesn’t it, if I go back and steal his painting?”

I could almost hear Victoria’s jaw tense. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” she told me, a note of laughter in her voice. “Charlie, you’re a thief for goodness sake. Where’s this noble streak been on every other occasion you’ve broken into somebody’s home?”

“But I’ve never ripped off someone who hired me before. I mean, it wouldn’t occur to me to rob Pierre.”

“You have a history with Pierre.”

“Even so. You think it’s bad form to break in again?”

“I haven’t a clue,” Victoria replied. “And if this is really what’s bothering you then I have to say I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not for me to give you the go-ahead, Charlie. I’ve always let you talk to me about this stuff in the past, that’s true, but I can’t justify what it is that you do. That’s for your conscience.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment and neither did Victoria. I could hear her breathing, composing herself. She was right, I guessed, though it wasn’t as if I’d asked her to come on the job with me. All I’d wanted was her take on the situation and she was usually more forthcoming with that.

Off in the distance, somewhere near Boulevard Garibaldi, I could hear the screech and drone of an ambulance siren. You hear sirens all the time in Paris – as if they form some kind of plaintive, background muzak for the city. They’re so common that I often don’t notice them, but when I really pay attention, I’m able to distinguish between the police klaxons and the sirens of the other emergency services. That might not sound like something worth bragging about, but believe me, it’s easy to take pride in certain skills when your liberty might depend on it.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re sure? Because I have to say it seems as though something’s bugging you.”

“Nothing’s ‘bugging’ me Charlie. I just have work to do. I’m kind of busy today. And on that note, I’m going to go now, okay?”

“Okay.”

I set the telephone receiver down and looked sightlessly at the two-pin plug socket on the wall near my feet. What on earth had just happened? No matter what Victoria said, there was definitely something going on and I ran my mind back through our conversation to see if I could work out what it was. I replayed every word I could remember, every nuance, even going over certain passages again and again. And still I had no idea what exactly had set her off.

No, that’s not true, I did have an inkling; I just wasn’t all that keen to explore it. Because the impression I was getting was that maybe after all the years of absorbing the details of my scams, Victoria had grown tired of my behaviour. Perhaps she’d been waiting for me to reform and was only just beginning to realise that wasn’t going to happen. Stealing was in my DNA. It might not be anything to be proud of, at least not on any rational scale, but that didn’t mean I wanted to quit.

I glanced down at my laptop, fingers poised to tap a key and remove the screen-saver that had appeared. But my fingers didn’t move. I growled and slammed the lid closed, pushed myself away from my desk and swore colourfully. I couldn’t very well write now, could I?