The Good Thief's Guide to Venice (2 page)

‘Charlie?’ She yawned without covering her mouth. ‘What’s all the fuss?’

‘Break-in,’ I mumbled, cupping my hand to the back of my neck.

‘My God. Anything gone?’

I looked again at my laptop, untouched on my desk. My notebooks and papers were there too.

‘Nothing,’ I told her.

But then my eyes drifted up to an empty space on the wall and my heart clenched with the sudden realisation of what I’d overlooked. Something was very much missing, and something else had been put in its place.

It’s fair to say that most writers are superstitious. I’ve heard of authors who have to write with a favourite pen on a particular brand of writing paper, and others who can’t begin a novel until they’ve completed some familiar ritual – like running a half-marathon, or clipping their toenails, or getting divorced. Me, I have two quirks that I’m aware of. I like to move to a new city when I’m about to start a book, and I always write with my framed first edition of
The Maltese Falcon
hanging above my desk.

The Maltese Falcon
is my most valuable possession. It’s worth a tidy sum – somewhere approaching six figures based on the last time a first edition came up at auction – which explains why I store it in an airtight picture frame. But more importantly, I’ve never succeeded in writing anything publishable without it watching over me. I’ve tried once or twice, just to see if the spell could be broken, but I’ve always found it impossible to get one of my burglar novels moving without the spirit of Sam Spade along for the ride. So, crazy as it might seem,
The Maltese Falcon
had become a kind of talisman for me.

And now it was gone, replaced by a square of red card.

‘What is it?’ Victoria asked. ‘Charlie?’

I couldn’t answer her. The best I could manage was to let go of a despairing wail and stagger towards the space on the wall where Hammett’s novel used to be.

‘For God’s sake, speak to me.’ Victoria clicked her fingers. ‘What on earth is the matter?’

I passed my hand over the floral wallpaper, as if something of the book’s magic still lingered. I wailed some more. I’m pretty sure my bottom lip trembled.

‘Oh, Charlie,’ Victoria said. ‘Tell me they haven’t taken your copy of
The Maltese Falcon
.’

I swallowed something the size and consistency of a cricket ball, then found my voice.

‘Gone,’ I croaked.

‘Gone?’

I nodded.

‘You bloody idiot. I said you should have kept it somewhere safe.’

Now, I firmly believe that if anyone else had uttered those words, I would have felt compelled to toss them out of the window into the shallow waters below. But since it was Victoria, I chose to let my shoulders sag instead.

‘In fact,’ she went on, in the manner of a dentist drilling two extra fillings for no particular reason, ‘I distinctly remember warning you that something like this could happen. I believe I even mentioned that you, of all people, should have been aware of the risks.’

At this point, I confess that my patience began to fade just a smidgen, and I may have mumbled something a touch uncharitable.

‘Excuse me?’ she asked.

‘I said, “Would you mind closing the window?”’

Victoria placed her hands on her hips and squinted at me. She tapped the toe of her slipper on the floor.

‘It’s getting cold,’ I added, shivering for effect.

‘You don’t need to tell
me
that.’

She gave my torso a dubious once-over and I remembered how little I was wearing. The boxer shorts and umbrella didn’t do a great deal to cover my modesty. I folded my arms across my chest. My arms didn’t do a great deal to cover my modesty, either.

‘I’ll go and find some clothes.’

‘You do that.’ Victoria slammed the window closed against the dismal fog. ‘And I’ll put the kettle on. It appears we have some thinking to do.’

We had plenty of thinking to do, as it happens. First, we thought about who could have known about my Hammett novel. Then we thought about how we might set about identifying and tracking down a female cat burglar. But more than anything else, we thought about the square of red card she’d left behind.

It was about half the size of a paperback novel and it featured an image of an open book on one side. Printed in black ink on the pages of the book was a good deal of Italian text. My Italian was terrible, but we managed to make some sense of it with the help of a battered language dictionary.

From what we could decipher, the card was a flyer for a business that specialised in bookbinding and restoration, located in the district of San Marco. The intricate craft of bookbinding, and the stores that promote it, are very much a Venetian speciality. But for the life of me, I couldn’t recall asking for any assistance with the preservation of my Hammett novel, and it was more than a little perverse to suppose that a shop might send a burglar to collect my book for restoration in the dead of night.

‘This is weird,’ Victoria told me, her hands wrapped around a steaming mug of English tea.

‘You’re telling me. I’ve heard of burglars leaving calling cards, but never anything like this.’

‘Perhaps it’s a guerrilla marketing campaign.’

‘For a Venetian bookbinder?’

‘Hmm, I suppose it is a touch aggressive.’

‘You think?’

I slapped the language dictionary onto the wooden steamer trunk that functioned as my coffee table and placed the card on top. I was perched on the rickety dining chair I used when I was writing. Victoria was sitting on the leather chesterfield across from me, her legs and feet folded beneath her and hidden by the pink dressing gown she’d put on.

There wasn’t a lot of furniture in my apartment, and much of what there was hailed from England. The building I lived in was owned by the retired couple in the maisonette below – a former GP from Cambridge and his Italian wife – who’d furnished each floor with the belongings they’d brought with them to Venice more than a decade before. The apartment above me was currently unoccupied, as it was likely to remain for another few weeks until the tourist season picked up for
Carnevale
in February.

Victoria had been in my apartment for three days so far. She’d come to visit me for a fortnight with the intention of reading my new novel. I suppose I should have felt relieved that she could still do that, given that my laptop hadn’t been swiped. But for the moment, I was struggling to focus on the bright side of my situation.

‘And you say the burglar was female?’ Victoria asked me.

‘Very.’

She scowled. ‘Attractive?’

‘It was dark, Vic. And she was in something of a hurry to leave. And to be honest, I had other things on my mind.’

Victoria rolled her eyes and slurped her tea. She clenched her dressing gown across her chest, then reached for the flyer and subjected it to another assessment. ‘Any theories about this card?’

‘Maybe she’s goading me – telling me where I might buy a replacement for my book.’

‘Is that likely?’

‘If she’s a complete bitch.’

‘No, you idiot, I meant about there being a replacement. How many first editions of
The Maltese Falcon
are there?’

I gave her question some thought. ‘Few enough for them to be worth an awful lot of money. And let’s not forget that my copy was signed.’

‘It’s funny.’ Victoria swallowed more tea. ‘You never did tell me how you came to own it. Where did you find the money?’

I treated her to a level gaze.

‘My God,’ she said. ‘You stole it.’

I threw up my hands, as if that much should have been obvious.

‘Who from?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘It might. If they decided to steal it back.’

‘Oh. I hadn’t considered that.’

‘Is it possible?’

I drummed my fingers on my chin. On balance, it struck me as highly unlikely. It was more than eight years since I’d acquired the book and I hadn’t been back to England since. So far as I was aware, the person I’d liberated it from had no idea who I was, and I’d never felt the need to contact a dealer to establish its worth because I had no intention of selling. To me, the book was priceless.

I’d first read
The Maltese Falcon
when I was at boarding school. It hadn’t been on the curriculum. Nothing that
was
on the curriculum could possibly have swept me away with the same force. I fell hard for the wise-cracking private eye, the overblown villains, the tawdry San Francisco backdrop and the switchback plot (the cross, the double-cross, the triple-cross – I could go on). Anything I ever learned about writing I learned from Hammett. So perhaps you can imagine how much it had meant to me when, years later, I found myself in a position to pinch a first edition, signed by my own personal hero.

‘I don’t think it’s possible at all,’ I told Victoria, in what I hoped was a conclusive tone. ‘In fact, I’m sure of it.’

‘Well, somebody must have known it was here.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Have you entertained many guests since you’ve been in Venice?’

I did my best to navigate a safe response. ‘One or two, perhaps. Though I wouldn’t have drawn their attention to the book.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do.’

Victoria plonked the flyer down on the steamer trunk and peered into the depths of her cup. The dregs of her tea seemed to fascinate her. ‘How about your landlords?’

‘Martin and Antea? They’re scrupulously honest. The rent I pay them is evidence of that. Antea’s a real sweetheart. She’s always fussing over me – bringing me a treat from the market, or forcing jars of home-made pasta sauce onto me. Besides which, they have a key. If they wanted to steal my things, they’d have no need to hire a cat burglar.’

‘Could anyone else have been in here?’

I scratched my head. ‘I have a cleaner who comes on Tuesdays.’

‘Well, there you go.’

‘She’s not the type.’

‘But what does that even mean, Charlie? It’s not as if
you
look like a thief.’

‘Maybe that’s because I haven’t been for the past nine months.’

It was perfectly true. In fact, it was 279 days (and counting) since I’d stolen anything at all. Now, that may not sound like a big deal to you, but to me it was mighty significant. I’d always made a fairly decent – if not entirely respectable – living as a burglar, and changing my habits had been a genuine challenge.

It didn’t help that I enjoyed it. Reprehensible, I know, but I get an undeniable buzz from snooping through a person’s belongings. There’s satisfaction, too, in setting about a theft in the right way. It takes brains, as well as guts, to exploit a property’s weaknesses and get out without leaving any evidence behind. Oh, and of course, there’s always the chance, however remote, of finding something, someday, that might just turn my entire world on its axis.

In short, it had been tough to go straight, and if I’m honest, I’d only succeeded in abstaining because I’d focussed all my energies on my new book. Mind you, I couldn’t have done it without cigarettes. Speaking of which, now seemed a good time to reach for the packet on the steamer trunk and fire one up.

‘You know,’ Victoria told me, ‘I really think your cleaner could be a suspect.’

‘Forget it.’ I exhaled smoke into the room, shielding myself from the tight expression that had gripped Victoria’s features. ‘She looks nothing like the woman who was here tonight.’

‘Not what I’m suggesting.’ She wafted my smoke aside in a deliberate fashion. ‘Very few people hang books on their walls, agreed? And an Englishman in Venice, doing something like that – she might have found it curious enough to mention to someone.’

‘Maybe.’

‘So will you speak to her?’

‘Maybe.’

I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms, the smoke from my cigarette wreathing my forehead. It was closing in on three in the morning according to the grandfather clock in the corner of the room and I was beginning to feel it. I’d been up making notes far later than I’d intended, and now that the adrenaline of the break-in was leaving my system, I was struggling to stay alert. Perhaps I’d been fortunate. If I’d gone to sleep at my usual hour, I might never have heard my intruder blundering around in the first place.

I frowned and gave my last thought a little more air. Wasn’t that a bit odd? On reflection, she was clearly experienced, because her getaway had been seamless.
Audacious
, some might say. Speaking personally, I’d never abseiled away from a building, or used a climbing rope to access a property. And all right, my window hadn’t been locked – largely because there wasn’t a lock on the thing – but it would have been tricky to open the catch from the outside. All of which suggested she was something of an expert. So why the heavy footsteps and the bumping into furniture? Had she wanted to wake me? Had she wanted me to
see
her?

It seemed like a crazy notion at first, but the more I thought about it the more I began to believe there could be something to it. Your average thief would be ecstatic if you failed to notice that anything had been stolen from your home until long after they’d gone. But she’d drawn my attention to what she’d taken by leaving the flyer behind.

I reached for the card and read the text once more, coaxing another jolt of nicotine from my cigarette.

‘What are you thinking?’ Victoria asked.

‘I’m thinking that we should get some sleep,’ I told her. ‘Because I have the strangest feeling we’ll be visiting this bookshop in the morning.’

My apartment was located on the Fondamenta Venier, about halfway between the Accademia di Belle Arti and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, in the district of Dorsoduro. Traditionally, the area had been popular with artists and writers, and considering how expensive Venice could be, I knew that I was fortunate to live anywhere close. The downside, at least this morning, was that I was on the opposite side of the Grand Canal from where I needed to be, and there was only one nearby crossing point – the wooden Accademia Bridge.

The mid-morning air was brittle with a lingering frost that had coated the railings and plank treads in a glitter of crystal slush. I had on a knitted hat, scarf, and mittens, as well as a thick woollen coat. The mittens were a necessity – it was freezing outside, and I couldn’t wear conventional gloves because the middle and fourth fingers of my right hand are slightly crooked and bent over one another. I suffer from localised arthritis in my finger joints and the damp Venetian weather hadn’t done anything to improve my condition. Neither had the constant typing I engaged in when I was writing. But hey, I get by, and Victoria had even commented on how fetching my mittens happened to look – although she had been disappointed that they weren’t stitched to my coat sleeves.