Thieves Like Us 01 - Thieves Like Us (11 page)

* * *

Jonah came staggering back up to the lamppost outside the museum, his lungs burning, saliva thick in his mouth. He spat on the pavement, gasping for breath.

Tye stumbled out of the shadowy mouth of the alleyway. She was obviously in a lot of pain.

‘You OK?’

She nodded, wincing as she did so.

‘What happened back there? Those people in black –?’

‘They got away?’

‘I’m crap, I’m sorry.’ He coughed noisily. ‘This other guy came after me, and I had to duck out of the way. They were all so fast!’

‘Tell me about it,’ she said. ‘They sure sped that vase away.’

‘They did?’ He chewed his lip. ‘Well, it may not be a total disaster. They had a car. I got the number plate.’

She just nodded. Jonah felt slightly hurt that she wasn’t more impressed. ‘Whoever they were,’ she said, ‘they had the jump on us. Totally.’

Now Con came out of the alley, Patch leaning on her for support and Motti lagging behind. He and Patch looked like they’d been chasing after parked lorries and hadn’t stopped in time.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Con said. ‘There must be cops on the way after all that.’

Motti was glaring round wildly. He was holding his broken glasses in his left hand, and his eyes seemed small and watery without them. ‘Washout,’ he snarled, wiping his bleeding nose on his jacket sleeve. ‘We screwed up big time.’

‘They were better informed than us,’ said Tye, as they started as quickly as they could down the street.

‘Local knowledge?’ Con suggested.

Tye shook her head. ‘I reckon they must have had inside help. One of the museum staff, maybe.’

Motti frowned. ‘How’d you figure?’

‘They’d already taken care of the alarm on the fire exit. They knew the layout of that floor of the museum so they could move fast even in the dark.’

‘And they must have known the combination to the lock-up,’ Patch added. He had a livid bruise rising over his good eye. ‘They didn’t knacker the keypad, did they?’

‘So then why bother to screw with the magnetic switch?’ said Motti. ‘They coulda disabled the alarm easy.’

‘Maybe that was for show,’ Patch said. ‘Fake calling card. Like, “Hi, we’re regular burglars!”’

Tye agreed. ‘If it looked too much like an inside job, cops would start asking the staff questions.’

Patch gave a theatrical groan and leaned more heavily on Con, managing to nudge his head against her chest.

‘You’re not hurt so bad,’ Con told him, shoving him away. ‘But keep that up and you will be.’

‘OK, so they had some help.’ Motti stared down angrily at his smashed glasses. ‘But that don’t let us off the hook. We screwed up big. Coldhardt ain’t gonna be happy.’

‘Don’t write us off yet,’ said Tye, gritting her teeth. Jonah offered her his arm to lean on but she pulled away.

The distant grizzle of police sirens sounded. As one, the group quickened their step. The car wasn’t far away now.

‘Come on. Let’s pool what we know,’ said Tye. ‘Did you see that snake tattoo on the woman’s hand?’

‘Can’t see nothing without these.’ Motti dangled his crushed glasses in her face. ‘But jeez, man, fists of fury … That guy whupped my ass. Didn’t even have time to pull my blade.’

‘Like you’d really use it,’ Tye muttered.

‘I’ve told you, Motti,’ Con complained. ‘You should wear contacts!’

‘Don’t start telling me what I should –’

‘’Ere,
I
saw that bird’s tattoo,’ said Patch quickly, heading off the row. ‘What do you reckon, Tye – some kind of gang marking?’

She nodded. ‘Or a cult, maybe. Some kind of religious thing, from the look of that veil she wore.’

‘So we got us a religious broad and two bodyguards,’ said Motti.

‘If someone at the museum
was
helping them, we could maybe try and find out who tomorrow,’ Jonah suggested.

Motti looked at him like he was about to have a go. Then he just nodded, dabbed again at his leaking nose. ‘Good thinking.’

They’d reached the BMW. Tye fumbled in her pocket for the keys. ‘Jonah got the number of the car that picked them up, too,’ she remarked, crossing round to the driver’s side. ‘Probably stolen or false plates, but it might turn up something.’

‘If only they hadn’t got the lekythos,’ sighed Con.

Motti gave Patch a kick up the arse. ‘If only he hadn’t smashed it to bits.’

Jonah frowned, and Con mimed Patch picking out his eye and lobbing it like a grenade.

‘That bitch was gonna kill Tye!’ Patch complained. ‘I was aiming for her head, all right?’

‘And he saved my life,’ added Tye, smiling at him as she freed the keys. ‘Thanks for that.’ She hit the button on her key fob and the car unlocked, flashing its side lights.

‘Anyway,’ said Patch, reaching into his own trouser pocket. ‘At least we got to take
some
of the stupid thing away with us.’

He pulled out three large fragments of the funeral vase. A black, crumbly powder coated the pieces. Patch started brushing it away on to the filthy pavement, but Jonah stopped him. ‘I’m guessing that black stuff was inside the vase and not in your pockets?’

‘I just had these jeans washed last week,’ said Patch indignantly. ‘That stuff’s all over my eye, too. Should’ve cleaned it up better.’ He scratched the skin beneath his patch, grimacing. ‘It’s all gritty now.’

‘Would you quit with the eye stuff?’ Motti warned him.

Jonah took two of the pieces from Patch. ‘So was it the vase or the grit they were after?’

‘Got to be the vase, innit?’ Patch argued. ‘Who’d fight like that over some grit?’

‘Over two and a half thousand years, whatever was stored inside could have decomposed,’ Con reasoned. ‘This black stuff is all that’s left. We need to get it studied properly.’

Patch grinned. ‘So we didn’t come out with nothing but bruises after all.’

‘Maybe more than you think,’ Jonah realised as he held together the fragments like two pieces of a jigsaw. ‘That description of the lekythos on the list – “engraved characters, obscure” – remember? I thought they meant like
cartoon
characters. But look here.’

‘Could we just get inside the damned car?’ said Motti, looking round shiftily.

Jonah ignored him and held up the pieces to Tye across the car roof.

‘It’s like writing,’ she said.

‘I think it’s a cipher,’ said Jonah slowly.

‘You mean it could be the Amrita prescription?’ Con breathed.

Patch laughed. ‘And
we’ve
got it, they don’t!’

‘We’ve got
part
of it, anyway,’ said Jonah more cautiously. ‘Let me see those other pieces –’

‘Back at the hotel,’ Motti instructed. ‘Get in the car. You got to drive us back to the hotel, geek.’

‘Me?’ Jonah blanched. ‘I told you, I don’t drive!’

‘Well, I can’t see a damn thing without my glasses,’ Motti retorted. ‘And Tye can barely move that shoulder.’

‘It’s not so bad –’ she broke off, gasping as she tried to open the driver’s door.

‘It
is
so bad,’ Motti told her. ‘And Con won’t drive us nowhere.’

Patch was watching her as she got in the front passenger side. ‘Grand Theft Auto is my game, guys. Maybe
I
should try!’

‘You know you can’t judge distance good with just
one eye, man,’ Motti said with surprising tenderness. ‘Geek, it’s down to you. It’s only a couple of miles.’

Tye handed Jonah the key.

He got into the driver’s seat, tried turning the ignition. The car lurched into life, strained forwards before the engine died.

‘Needs to be in neutral,’ Tye told him.

‘What’s neutral?’ said Jonah nervously.

‘That’s it, I’m walking,’ Con announced. ‘No way am I going anywhere in this car.’

Motti sighed. ‘Look, I could sit up front and work the gearshift if you’d just –’

‘And I’m not going in the back, either,’ she snapped.

‘OK, let’s not stress over this,’ said Tye wearily, shifting in the seat, trying to get more comfortable. ‘We’ll just have to hang here in the car for a while and hope the cops don’t find us. There’ll be a bus or something when it gets light.’

A tense silence settled over them.

‘This is bollocks,’ said Patch at last. ‘Five so-called talents and we can’t even drive a car between us!’

‘I know.’ Motti gave a grudging snigger. ‘We’re like, total crap!’

‘Totally.’ Patch tittered, dabbing his eye.

‘It’s not funny,’ Con said hotly. ‘Coldhardt will be expecting us to call in.’

Motti nodded seriously. ‘We could maybe tell him we were stuck in traffic.’

This time he and Patch dissolved into guffaws of laughter. Con turned away and looked grumpily out of the window.

Tye yawned. ‘Welcome to the family, Jonah.’

He nodded, half-smiled, looked down at the fragments of pottery in his hands. Pondered the characters and curlicues scratched beneath the glaze, and the secrets they were keeping.

Jonah woke with a start, a dull stiffness in his neck. He was still in the car, a whiff of stale sweat now about the expensive upholstery. The drone of the traffic that had lulled him to sleep had risen to a low roar, and the sun was a fat orange perched on the boxy horizon.

Motti lay snoring softly in the back, a grisly sight with his face and goatee caked in dried blood. Otherwise the car was empty.

Suddenly his door was opened sharply and he jumped.

It was Tye. ‘Morning!’ she said.

‘I s’pose it must be.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘You feeling better?’

‘Good enough to drive, I think,’ she said. ‘Just been stretching my legs. Took a walk with Patch and Con back down to the museum.’

‘Back to the scene of the crime?’

‘Since we’re here. Working day’s beginning. Thought I could check out the reactions of the people working there, watch their body language. See who knew more about the break-in than they were letting on.’

‘And did you?’

‘Didn’t have to. The chief janitor’s freaking out there ’cause his early-shift assistant hasn’t shown, and
he’s got so much crap to clean up. Seems it’s the first day this guy’s missed in almost a year.’

‘Coincidence?’

‘Con got the address out of the janitor. It’s local, so her and Patch, they’re going to check it out.’ She looked at him meaningfully. ‘Now do you want to shift over? I need to see what I can do with this shoulder. I’ve got a plane to fly.’

‘Stiff, is it?’ Jonah shifted into the passenger seat. ‘Need a massage?’

She looked at him warily. ‘No thanks.’

‘Then how about you give
me
one?’

‘I’ll give your head a massage with this gear stick if you don’t watch it.’ She got awkwardly into the car. ‘But Patch said to give you these.’ She passed him some more red-brown clay fragments. ‘Cleared out his pockets. The last bits of the vase he picked up.’

‘More parts of the puzzle. Cool.’ He took them and arranged them on his lap. While Tye slowly flexed her arm, breathing deeply and calmly, he picked up some of the black crumbs and placed them inside an old sweet wrapper. Only one of the fragments showed any more of the cipher – if it even
was
a cipher. The rest showed only bits of people. One showed a man’s head, thrown back in grief like he was wailing.

‘You have no idea,’ Jonah muttered.

The district was called Faggala, though Patch reckoned ‘Fag End’ might be more appropriate. It was a slum neighbourhood, with a diesel reek about it. Prayer recordings blasted out from crumbling mosques, a wake-up call to the masses, warbling
through rusting loudspeakers. Panicked chickens ran about in the soiled gutters as traffic rumbled through. Somewhere in the rooftops, a cock was crowing over the din.

It was the kind of place people did their best to believe did not exist – a sick, smelly dumping ground for life’s unluckiest victims.

Patch glanced at Con, who was attracting more than a few glances in her figure-hugging black. ‘Glad we’re just visiting,’ he said.

Con strode through the decay, aloof. ‘Some nights I used to lie awake and wonder if I’d end up in a place like this.’

Patch was surprised by the confession. ‘What, when your parents died you mean?’

‘Each time I was packed up and shipped out to the next relative on the list, I was sure…Sure that this time the trick would be played,’ she shrugged, ‘and I’d be here.’

‘We
are
here.’ Patch stopped, checked a street sign. ‘This is the Rue Kamel Sidqi. The bloke we want is somewhere down here.’

In Arabic, Con asked a dumpy woman in a flowery shawl and djellaba if she’d heard of a man named Muneeb. She waved to a second-storey apartment a little way up the road. Patch led the way till they reached the gaping doorway, and an odour of piss and orange peel. Then he stepped aside so she could go first.

Patch followed her slowly up the creaking wooden steps, which felt like they might give way beneath him at any time. The gloomy atmosphere was oppressive.
The sounds of the street were muted in here, the prayers reduced to a low, deranged jangle.

The door stood ajar. Patch watched Con tense herself and put on her biggest smile, ready to waltz in and charm the Egyptian pants off Muneeb.

But as she stepped inside, he heard her gasp. Peering over her shoulder, he saw the body on the crumpled bed.

The man lay on his back, clearly dead, his sightless eyes fixed on the cracked ceiling. His dirty white nightgown was stained almost black with blood. A wound gaped in his neck like an obscene smile.

‘You’d think he’d have called in to work and told them he was ill,’ joked Patch weakly.

Con walked further inside the filthy room. There was a note on the bed, scrawled in Arabic on a torn piece of paper. She closed the dead man’s eyes with the tips of her fingers, then picked it up.

Patch hovered in the doorway; he didn’t want to follow her in. ‘What does it say?’

‘“A warning to those who would seek to follow us,”’ she read.

‘Love from …?’

‘There’s no signature. Just a pattern of dots.’ She folded it away in her pocket. ‘Our friends from last night, I think, yes? They must have realised we’d know it was an inside job.’

‘Poor old Muneeb.’

‘He told them how to get inside,’ Con agreed. ‘This is how they repaid him.’