The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (24 page)

“And what’s that?”

“It is an old DDR amusement park. It is closed now. Abandoned.”

“Apart from the guards and the dogs.”

“Ja,”
Gert said.

“But why guard a defunct amusement park?”

“Because people still like to come here. They drink. Take drugs. They could start a fire, maybe. Or get hurt. The owners could be sued.”

People getting hurt. Boy, I really didn’t like the sound of that.

Ahead of us was another dinosaur, a brachiosaur, maybe. This one was toppled onto its side. It had a long, curved tail and a long, curved neck. Its rounded belly and its feet were pointing toward me. The feet were hollow, exposing the reddish color of the material the model had been cast from. Grass and weeds and thorns had grown long around it.

Beyond the dinosaur, in the middle distance above the trees, I could see a Ferris wheel. The red metal structure was corroded with rust. The green and yellow carriages swayed listlessly in the breeze.

“Is this where Victoria is being held?” I asked.

“Nein,”
Gert said.

“So why are we here?”

“You follow. I will show you.”

He showed me plenty. The amusement park was a vast, sprawling adventureland gone badly to seed. Decrepit buildings were closed and boarded up. Signs reading
BETRETEN VERBOTEN!
were fixed to posts and railings and trees. The asphalt pathways were cracked and choked with weeds.

We passed a deserted teacup ride, where the carousel floor was covered in fallen leaves and litter. The teacup booths were listing on worn-down springs, puddles of brackish water in their bases. The bunting tied up above them was discolored and torn.

A nearby pirate ship was blighted by graffiti. Just beyond it was the starting point for a roller coaster. A line of grubby cars waited forlornly beyond a ticket counter. The looping track that lay ahead was choked by weeds and thorns wherever it ran close to the ground.

Gert climbed some safety railings and followed the track, striding along a rough path beaten through the long grass and bushes. I set off behind him, with Buster’s cage becoming ever heavier at the end of my arm.

After a little while, the track tilted to the left and plunged into a tunnel. The opening had been designed to look like the mouth of a cat. It was a cat from my very worst nightmares. Painted in psychedelic colors, its slanted eyes were narrowed and its wide-open jaws were loaded with glistening fangs.

“So, we are here,” Gert said.

“Huh?”

He pointed down the deep, dark tunnel.

“This is where I live,” he told me.

“Of course it is,” I muttered. “What could possibly be more normal?”

THIRTY

The tunnel was very dark and Gert refused to let me use my penlight. He said there was a danger the light might be spotted from the mouth of the tunnel, and anyway, he knew where he was going. That was fine for Gert, but I didn’t have a clue. The tunnel was growing blacker all the while and I kept banging my shin on the roller coaster track. I was allergic to cats at the best of times, but wandering into the belly of the beast seemed like a very bad idea.

“Gert?” I hissed.

“Ja,”
he called back softly.

“Just checking you’re still there.”

No response. Gert was a man of few words.

I wished I could say the same about Buster. He was relishing the acoustics inside the tunnel and he’d revealed a bunch of new tricks. So far, we’d been treated to the noise of a laser gun, a doorbell, a telephone, and a psychotic—and frankly quite scary—laugh. He was presently having fun with the phrase
“Cooeee.”
Every few seconds, he’d ruffle his wings, clear his throat, and shout,
“Cooeee,”
into the black. Moments later, a weak echo could be heard. I wasn’t convinced that Buster understood the concept of echoes. I was fairly sure he thought he was in the middle of a conversation. Each time his words bounced back to him, he’d flick his wings and provide a response. The response was always
“Cooeee.”
It was becoming an endless refrain. I was going to hear the damn word in my head for days.

“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” I hissed, under my breath. “It’s dark in here. Just like that cloth you had draped over your cage.”

“Cooeee,”
Buster said.

Oh, boy.

The air inside the tunnel was stale and it smelled of damp and mold. The temperature was chill, like we’d ventured into a cave. I was becoming less convinced about the wisdom of following Gert with every step I took, and I felt really quite daft holding Buster’s cage ahead of me, as if I was carrying a sacrificial canary down a mineshaft.

After a few more minutes of stumbling and cursing, Gert came to a halt somewhere in front of me. “Do you touch the track?” he asked.

“Er, no,” I said. “Why?”

I didn’t get an answer. I just heard the noise of a switch being thrown and the buzz and crackle of a sudden electrical surge. There was a bright spark of light. A dry fizzing. Then the heart of the tunnel lit up like some kind of twisted Christmas grotto.

There were fairy lights and fairground lights all around me. Some were plain. Some were colorful. Some were twinkling. They were hanging from the domed ceiling and zigzagging above my head in looping strings. They were coiled on the ground and draped around the furniture.

Well, I say furniture, but it was mostly a collection of crates and boxes, plus a foldout camp bed, a metal clothes rail, and a desk of sorts that had been constructed from an old door balanced between two dented oil drums. There was junk everywhere, on every available surface. Antique radios. Boxy computers. Dated televisions. Cash registers. Countless books and magazines. Hundreds of tins and pots and buckets of who-knew-what. The whole thing looked like an underground pawnshop on the skids.

“Careful,” Gert said. “You must not touch the track. The electricity, it is not so safe,
ja
?”

I glanced down in the gloaming twilight. My feet were on either side of a rail. I stepped carefully away.

“You really live here?” I asked him.

“Sometimes,
ja.
”

I released a low whistle. Buster joined in. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like to spend a night down here.

“Why?”

“It is secret. Only Gert knows it is here.”

I hoped he was right. I didn’t like the idea of being followed and trapped inside the tunnel by any of the people who’d been pursuing me around Berlin.

“But wouldn’t you prefer an apartment?” I asked. “Somewhere more … normal?”

He frowned and fiddled with a space heater on the floor. He clicked a switch and the filaments glowed a vibrant orange. It would take some time for the warmth to begin to penetrate the heavy chill.

“But normal is maybe not so safe,” he said. “Think of your apartment building. Think of the men who have been inside. Your friend who is missing.”

Point taken. But how did he know about my visits from Pavel, Vladislav, and Henri?

“So tell me,” I said, “what’s your involvement in all this? Are you after this little guy, too?” I lifted Buster’s cage, then set it down on top of a nearby pallet.

“I look over you,” Gert said, scratching the back of his neck. “This is all.”

“You look over me? How do you mean?”

“It is a favor,” he said. “For Pierre.”

I peered hard at him through the soft twinkling.

“Pierre?” I said. “You mean my fence, Pierre? Pierre from Paris? Pierre whose real name isn’t really Pierre?”

Gert nodded eagerly, as if this should have been a perfectly reasonable explanation.

“But how do you know him?”

He blew air through his lips and cast his lean arm around our murky surroundings. “I am a collector. Sometimes, I find things Pierre may like. I sell them to him.”

“And by collector, do you mean thief?”

“Nein,”
he said, sounding scandalized. “I sell only what I find.”

Hey, me too, I felt like saying. But to Gert, there was obviously some greater distinction.

“Like a scavenger, you mean?”

“If you wish.”

“Okay,” I told him, and walked toward a trestle table piled high with dated newspapers and magazines. A selection of vintage propaganda posters were scattered across them, featuring stylized images of Lenin and Marx. “What sort of stuff do you scavenge?”

“You will call it memorabilia, I think.”

“Of?”

“The history of Berlin. The Cold War especially. The DDR. There is a big market for it. They call it
ostalgie
.”

“You mean like bits of the Berlin Wall?”

“Tsk,” he said, and waved a disparaging hand. “This is for tourists.”

“And your stuff?”

“For enthusiasts. For experts.”

“I see,” I said, though I didn’t entirely understand. “But if that’s all you do, why did Pierre ask you to watch over me?”

“He was afraid. This man who hired you—”

“Freddy.”

“He was afraid he could maybe bring trouble.”

“Well, that’s terrific,” I said. “Pierre’s the guy who set me up with him in the first place. He told me I could trust him.”

Gert folded his arms across his chest and picked at the faded patch of corduroy covering his elbow. “But his choice was not free.”

I thought about that. I remembered the hold Nathan Farmer had over Pierre. Was it possible that Nathan had been eavesdropping on Pierre’s call to me?

“Because of Freddy’s older brother?” I asked.

“Yes, I think so.”

“But that still doesn’t explain why he came to you. What did he expect you to do?”

“To watch you.”

“Yes, you said that. But I still don’t—”

“And to listen.” He moved behind his makeshift desk and dropped onto a rickety swivel chair that was badly in need of some oil. There was a stack of electrical equipment at one end of the desk that looked like the component parts of a hi-fi system from the early 1980s. Gert punched a button and a series of dials became illuminated. He picked up a pair of stereo headphones and passed them to me. “Here,” he said. “You try.”

The headphones didn’t look altogether clean, but I accepted them and set them over my ears. I heard nothing to begin with. Then Gert punched a few buttons and twiddled a few dials and suddenly I was listening to a guy talking in fast, hushed German. His speech was too quick for me to understand all but the occasional word.

“Who is this?” I asked.

Gert twisted the dial some more. Now I was listening to a woman. She had a hoarse, scratchy voice, but she sounded every bit as serious as the man. I lifted the earphones away from my head and set them down on top of the equipment.

“You listen to people?” I asked.

“And talk.” He tapped a desk-mounted microphone. “There are many of us. All over the city. We share information.”

“And are all of you … collectors?”

His eyelids fluttered several times, waving his fair lashes. “Some of us.”

“And the rest?”

“They are what you would call squatters. People who live like me.”

Nobody lives like you, I thought. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe plenty of people did. Enough to pass information around? To watch over someone like me?

“So what, you have some sort of secret network here in Berlin?”

“It is not so secret. Anyone may join.”

“Is it legal?”

He smiled and stroked his beard. He didn’t answer that one.

“And who was telling you about me?”

“The man you listen to just now. The woman, too.”

I shuddered. Couldn’t help it. “Would you care to explain?”

“I asked them to do it. They live on the Kollwitzplatz.”

I frowned. “There are no squats on the Kollwitzplatz.”

Gert exhaled wistfully, as if I’d embarrassed myself with my naïveté. “There are many empty homes,
ja
? There are rich people who live in them for only a few weeks each year. It is simple to avoid these people.”

“Yeah? Maybe you could give me their addresses. We could both make some cash.”

He shook his head. “This is not what we do. We do not steal.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. Gert’s friends were living in other people’s homes. Using their things. Tapping into their utility supplies. But I didn’t argue with him. There was something else I was far more interested in.

“These people watching my home,” I said. “Did they see who took Victoria?”

Gert nodded.

“So who was it?”

“A black man,” Gert said. “Very big. And a white woman, in a blue business suit. They put your friend in the trunk of their car.”

THIRTY-ONE

It took a moment for what Gert had said to sink in. It took a little longer for the full meaning of it to become clear to me.

I thought back to how the Americans had first approached me outside the cleaner’s apartment on Karl-Marx-Allee. So far as I was aware, the Russian crew hadn’t been there. Neither had Henri or Gert. That suggested Freddy hadn’t broadcast the location to his brother. So the Americans had to have found out some other way. From Victoria.

The timing was beginning to make sense. They must have snatched her from my apartment shortly after I’d left. Then they must have made her tell them where I was going.

With Victoria in the trunk of their town car? It seemed possible. And that would mean she’d been very close when I’d been talking with Nancy. Would she have heard me? I didn’t know. The soundproofing in the car had been impressive, and I certainly hadn’t heard her. But maybe there was no chance of that anyway. Perhaps she’d been gagged. Bound.

Then a new thought occurred to me, more terrible than any I’d had so far. Duane liked to make people squeal. Had he hurt Victoria in some way? Had he forced the information out of her?

“Did your friends say how Victoria looked?” I asked Gert. “Had the Americans harmed her at all?”

“They told me she was asleep.”

“Asleep?”

“
Ja.
The black man was carrying her. Over his shoulder. She was like this.”

Gert let his spindly body sag, his head droop, his arms go limp. I got it now. Victoria had been unconscious. Sedated, perhaps.