The Good Thief's Guide to Paris (7 page)

For a moment, I stood absolutely still, as if waiting for the painting to materialise before my eyes. Having seen it in the photograph Pierre had handed me, I felt I could even conjure it in my mind, if that would be of any help. But of course it wasn’t, because the bloody thing was gone.

I dropped my suitcase to the floor, with a thud very nearly as dull as my mind. The dimensions of the greying space where the painting used to be told me it was perhaps sixty centimetres wide by forty centimetres high, frame included. And the electric picture lamp suggested the oils were every bit as dark and grotty as I’d imagined. But that was all I could tell because there was nothing else to see. Pierre’s client had been prepared to pay twenty thousand euros for the monstrosity but someone else had swiped it before he’d had the opportunity.

Not that it really concerned me. Thanks to my agreement with Pierre, I’d been paid my fee up front, so I guessed it didn’t matter that the painting was gone. But if that was true, what exactly was bothering me?

Well, Bruno was. I really didn’t like the way he’d manipulated me. Because it seemed obvious now that Victoria was right and it wasn’t his apartment after all – that as soon as he’d watched me drink my coffee and bid me goodnight, he’d come straight to the bedroom, removed the painting, stuffed it into the backpack he’d so conveniently brought along with him and made good his escape. I didn’t doubt that he’d have sold the painting for a healthy profit over the five hundred euros I’d been foolish enough to accept and he’d probably enjoyed a good laugh at how easy it had been to con me too.

The other thing that was bothering me was what Pierre might think. There was no way I was going to tell him about Bruno, of course. I might have been dumb but I wasn’t completely insane, so I wasn’t about to say to the guy who’d hired me that I’d known from the moment he passed me the address that something might have gone wrong. But I would still have to convince him that the painting was already missing by the time I broke into the apartment. We’d worked together for many years, sure, but I was a thief and Pierre was a fence and mutual trust can only ever stretch so far in those circumstances. I’d already pushed things by demanding my fee up front so what was to stop him wondering whether I’d pocketed the ten thousand euros and sold the painting myself to cut him out of the deal?

Problem was, how could I possibly satisfy him that I was telling the truth? It would be like trying to prove the existence of a ghost – all I had were signs of the painting’s absence.

I suppose if I’d had a camera with me I could have taken a photograph of the bare patch on the wall. But really, that wouldn’t have helped a great deal. I mean, there would be nothing to say I hadn’t just removed the painting from the wall and set it down on the floor before taking the photo. And if I’d had the foresight to bring a camera along with me, it would only have made it seem as if I’d planned the whole thing in advance.

So far as I could see, all I could really do was take something that would prove I’d been inside the apartment. It wouldn’t be any kind of guarantee that I hadn’t double-crossed Pierre, but it was the best I could manage in the circumstances.

With that in mind, I turned my attentions to the antique dressing table on my left. The dressing table had been crafted from cherry wood and it had a quite beautiful roll-top lid. I approached the table and rolled the lid open. Of course, I wasn’t looking to take anything the owner of the apartment might miss – I’d been under strict instructions to take only the painting in the first place – but I figured there had to be something appropriate.

The first thing I saw was a framed photograph and the reason it drew my attention was because it had been turned face-down. I propped it up and found myself looking at a portrait shot of a man and a woman. The man appeared to be mid-to-late-sixties, with grey hair pulled back from his forehead into a greasy ponytail. The woman looked around ten to fifteen years younger. She was platinum blonde with a bottle tan and heavy eye make-up. The picture seemed like a holiday snap – the couple were sat on a sunny balcony and there was a sliver of green ocean behind the woman’s nut-brown shoulder.

I set the photograph back exactly as I had found it. I had no idea what they’d done to deserve being positioned face-down like that but I did know that a personal photograph was likely to be missed. There was a fair amount of make-up and some hair bands and brushes scattered across the surface of the dressing table, as well as various lotions and nail files and tweezers, all of which made me even more certain that Bruno didn’t live in the apartment. I opened a pair of miniature drawers and found that the first drawer was filled with balls of cotton wool and the second drawer was crammed with yet more make-up.

None of it was of any use to me so I stepped backwards and looked beneath the dressing table and right then I happened to notice a plastic accordion folder down by my feet. I reached for the folder and popped the clasp and the insides fanned open to reveal a well-ordered collection of personal effects. I found store cards and video membership cards, insurance policies and credit card bills, general correspondence and medical prescriptions. There was also a driver’s licence. All of the items belonged to the same person – a Madame Catherine Ames – and the pixelated image on the driver’s licence matched the platinum blonde woman in the photograph. At first, I thought about pocketing one of the cards, but only the driver’s licence had an address on it and I wasn’t about to take that.

I went back to the accordion folder and riffled through the various sections until I found a series of bank account statements. I paused and absorbed the details of the first statement I came across and then I worked backwards through the pile until I found a statement from many months beforehand that I thought it would be safe to take. I removed the statement, checking the name and address once more, and then I slipped it into my pocket, set the folder back down on the floor and closed the roll-top lid on the dressing table.

I hadn’t been inside the apartment all that long but I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. This wasn’t one of those jobs where I knew when the apartment was likely to be empty and how long it might stay that way. There was no guarantee I wasn’t about to be disturbed at any moment and as far as I could tell, there was no emergency exit or alternative way of leaving the apartment other than the front door. But still, I didn’t feel entitled to leave quite yet. Despite logic telling me that Bruno had the painting, it would have been remiss of me not to conduct a quick search of the apartment to make absolutely certain it was gone. After all, it wasn’t completely out of the question that Madame Ames might have suspected that someone was after her painting and had hidden it.

So I looked at my watch and I told myself that I would search every possible hiding place I could think of in the next fifteen minutes. And that’s what I did. I searched the bed and the mattress and the wardrobe. I checked behind the dressing table and I searched the adjoining bathroom (though only very quickly, because I couldn’t imagine anyone hiding a painting where it might get wet). I poked my head inside all of the kitchen cupboards as well as the storage cupboard out in the hallway. Lastly, I went through every single one of the paintings in the main living area in an orderly fashion, including the canvases that had been clipped to the easels. I even checked the wallpaper pasting table for hidden compartments, of which there were none.

And once I was done, once I was absolutely sure the painting was nowhere to be found within the apartment, I shrugged my shoulders, collected my suitcase, primed the intruder alarm and relocked the door behind me. Then I retraced my steps up onto the roof and down into the adjoining hotel, even letting myself into the room I’d paid for with a novel device known as a key. Once there, I flushed my disposable gloves down the toilet and I stashed my empty suitcase inside the wardrobe. Finally, I walked downstairs to the lobby, returned my room key to Quasimodo, bid him a snappy goodbye and made my way outside.

EIGHT

Paige was sat behind the makeshift cash desk at the front of the Paris Lights bookshop when I entered. Her hair was tied back from her pale face with a black ribbon and she was holding a paperback novel in her right hand, her gimlet eyes scanning the pages. The book had a dark, foreboding cover and it was written by one of those Russian guys I’ve never been able to get to grips with. She seemed engrossed, her pupils jittering from left to right and back again, like miniature typewriter carriages imprinting the words on her brain.

I approached the cash desk and cleared my throat. Paige glanced up from her book, then did a double-take when she saw it was me.

“Hey there stranger,” she said, setting the book down and tucking a stray curl of hair behind her ear. “Where did you disappear to the other night?”

“An appointment,” I told her. “You have a good time?”

“Sure. Missed you, though.”

“Looked that way.”

She frowned, and the veins at her temple pulsed beneath her skin.

“Italian guy – has a long arm,” I said.

“Paolo?”

I shrugged.

“Silly,” she told me, reaching out and squeezing my hand. “You know, I read your book. It’s fun.”

“You sound surprised.”

“Truthfully? I was. But I sat here yesterday and I read it between customers and, yeah, I liked it a lot.”

“Well, that’s something, I suppose.”

“I even put my main guy on hold for you,” she added, and lifted the paperback for me to see.

“Dostoevsky? Really?”

“You don’t like him?”

I curled my lip. “I happen to think it’s pretty obvious whodunnit by the end of the first chapter.”

Paige rolled her eyes and blew a raspberry at me. Then she pointed beyond a group of customers towards a chipped trestle table on the other side of the room. The table was situated below a dusty candelabra and I could see a few copies of my novel displayed on it, beside a smouldering incense stick.

“I talked to Francesca. She’s the owner of this place. She said you could have the table for two days.”

I hitched my eyebrows as elaborately as possible. “That many, huh?”

Paige nudged me. “Hey, that table’s a big deal. You should thank me.”

“With dinner?”

Paige smiled and shook her head, as if I was a hopeless cause. Then she crossed her arms in front of her chest, assessing me with narrowed eyes.

“There is something I wanted to ask you, as it happens,” I told her. “At the bar the other night, after my reading, I was talking with a guy. Name of Bruno.” I glanced around the shabby interior, on the off chance of seeing him. “I don’t think he works here but I wondered if you knew him at all?”

“Bruno?” Paige scrunched up her face. “I’m not sure. What does he look like?”

“Bit taller than me, maybe,” I said, raising my hand an inch or so above my head in the direction of the rotted ceiling beams. “Kind of muscular. Short, brown hair. Unshaven. He was wearing jeans and a blue polo shirt. Had a backpack too.”

“No,” Paige said, shaking her head and chewing her lip. “I know a Bruno, but he’s black.”

“Not the same Bruno.”

“Sorry.”

“Not to worry. It was a long shot anyway. But now I think of it,” I went on, knocking my temple with my knuckle, “could you do me a favour and ask the others who work here?”

“Sure,” Paige said, uncertainly. “You lose his number or something?”

I smirked, wagged my finger. “Nothing like that. He mentioned he can sometimes get tickets at Paris Saint-Germain’s ground. I was thinking of going to a game.”

“Oh, fine,” she gushed. “I’ll ask around. And say, can I ask you something in return?”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“It’s just, all that stuff in your book,” she began, “about picking locks and all. Can you really do that?”

I met her gaze. It was a question I’d been asked more than once over the years and I was yet to come up with the perfect response.

“I’ve practised a bit at home. Character research, I guess you’d call it.”

“Oh, swell,” Paige said, releasing a breath and then finding her feet. “Come with me?”

I did as Paige asked and followed her to the rear of the store, beyond a compact single bed that had been covered for the day in a moth-eaten quilt and upon which a selection of Keats’ poetry had been displayed. The books we passed along the way were crammed into every available space, packed one on top of another on uneven wooden tables and bowed shelves, piled precariously on the tiled floor and stuffed into plastic crates and cardboard boxes that showed signs of water damage. There was a staircase on our right and countless paperbacks had been inserted beneath the treads and between the banister rails. The staircase shook as Paige began to climb and I wondered whether the whole thing would one day come crashing to the floor if a customer happened to remove the wrong book in the wrong place.

I went up behind Paige, distracted from the books scattered haphazardly on the treads by the swaying of her bottom in front of me. She was wearing a long skirt that hugged the contours of her body in a quite understandable manner. Below the skirt I could glimpse her ankles; bare and slightly chaffed and tantalisingly close.

Paige turned at the top of the stairs and walked along a narrow corridor, again lined with books of every conceivable size and shape and colour, as well as a cramped writer’s nook with a battered manual typewriter. She passed a doorway on her left and sang out a “Hey” and I looked in as I passed to see a dusky parlour room furnished with a threadbare couch and a scattering of pastel-coloured cushions and frayed rugs. There were four people in the room, reclined in various positions, reading books and scribbling on foolscap notepads. There was also a silver tea urn and what looked like a very old and unsanitary bong on the floor beside the guy with the skullcap whom I’d seen in the bar-café with Paige. He was reciting poetry but, from what I could tell, it didn’t appear as though anyone was listening.

At the end of the corridor, Paige climbed a new and altogether more dicey staircase. The treads were much thinner than before and we stepped on dirt-encrusted paperbacks for most of the way up. When we reached the top, Paige checked over her shoulder to make sure I was still following her and then she led me into a large room with a stained, unplumbed toilet bowl positioned in the far corner. There was nobody else in the room and from the lack of cushions and chairs and tables, I assumed the space was rarely used. The area behind the doorway was filled with yet more crates of books. There was an unmarked door on the opposite side of the room and Paige approached it and rattled the handle.

“A woman from Estonia was working here until a little while ago,” she explained. “Her name was Sophia. When she left, I think she took the key to this door. And no matter what I say, Francesca refuses to pay for a locksmith to come around or to allow any of the guys who live here to kick the thing through.”

“Just as well,” I said. “Kicking a door through isn’t as easy as it seems. And in here, well, you might bring half the building down with it.”

Paige smiled and looked up at me from beneath lidded eyes. “You think maybe you could get us inside?”

I swallowed. “I could try.”

She stepped aside and hovered over me while I assessed the lock. It was one hell of an old thing. The keyhole was so large I could almost see the internal pins with my bare eyes. I glanced around and screwed up my features in what I hoped was a bashful way.

“Would you mind giving me a few minutes?”

“Stage fright?”

“Something like that.”

“I guess I can wait out in the hall.”

“Actually,” I said, “do you have a city telephone directory I could borrow?”

“You need a phone book to pick the lock?”

I grinned. “Nope. I was just hoping you might have one and I forgot to ask before.”

“Downstairs,” Paige said, with a heft of her shoulders. “I’ll go find it.”

While she was gone, I reached into my jacket and removed my trusty spectacles case and then I selected a likely pick and the largest screwdriver I carried. I could have done with a can of spray lubricant too, something that’s always handy on a lock that hasn’t been turned in a while, but I didn’t have one to hand and, since I couldn’t face the prospect of heading downstairs to ask the wannabe poet if there was any cooking oil in the building or the Italian if I could run my fingers through his glistening hair, I decided to press on with just my tools and my own innate talent.

I dropped to my haunches and peered into the lock, then inserted the screwdriver blade with my left hand and started to probe away with the pick in my right. By the time Paige had returned with the city telephone directory, I was in a whole new space.

It was a small room, perhaps the size of your average family bathroom, and unlike the other rooms in the bookshop it had some semblance of order. There were three genuine, well-crafted bookshelves, each neatly stacked with a collection of hardback and cloth-bound books. A leather-inlaid desk faced the opposite wall, and an electric spot lamp and a vintage telephone with a rotary dial were positioned on it. The final item of furniture was a soft-sprung reading chair beneath the narrow window. The window was partially obscured by a grimy rug that had been pinned up as a makeshift curtain. The room smelled musty and dank.

“Francesca’s study,” Paige said, in a hushed voice. “Isn’t it awesome?”

“It’s certainly unique.”

Paige inhaled deeply and stretched out her arms, turning on the spot. “I think it’s special, you know? There’s a vibe.”

“There’s a smell.”

Paige gave me a skewed look. “You always have to do that? Try to be funny?”

“Just try?”

Paige thought for a moment, casting a quizzical gaze back towards the door furniture and the lock I’d picked open. Then she moved towards me, coming real close. She lifted her face. I checked her eyes – she had them shut.

I kissed her, aware of the muted silence and the ghostly stillness all about. I put my hand to the back of her neck, felt the heat beneath her hairline and the softness of her skin. I reached my hand down towards her bottom but she backed away, shaking her head and placing a finger against my lips.

“Didn’t you want to make a call?”

“A call?”

“That’s why I brought you the telephone book, right?” She lifted the directory into my line of vision and stepped away from me some more. “Cos, I kinda have to go back downstairs, and all.”

“Right now?”

She giggled. “Right now,” she said, handing me the directory and running her fingers over my hand.

I tried not to flinch as she hit my busted knuckles.

“Does this phone even work?” I asked, hoarsely.

“Guess so,” she said. “And hey, when you’re done, you can figure out where to take me for dinner.”