The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (25 page)

“I don’t get it,” I said. “The American woman tried to bribe me. She offered me double what Freddy was paying me to deliver Buster to her. So why take Victoria, too?”

“A guarantee, maybe? In case this bribe was not enough.”

I thought about that. There was a sad logic to Gert’s suggestion. Nancy had struck me as tough and businesslike. Cold, even. She wasn’t the type of woman to let something she wanted slip through her fingers. She was the type to make sure she came out the winner in whatever twisted scenario she found herself. Even if that meant rigging the odds.

But why hadn’t she let me know that she was the one who’d kidnapped Victoria? To keep me off balance? To make me reluctant to trust any of the people who were trying to manipulate me, for fear that any one of them could have abducted my friend? Or was it more basic than that? Was she simply withholding the information until she judged that it would have the most telling and timely impact?

I released a long breath, then turned and pressed my face close to Buster’s cage.

“Hello,”
he said.
“Hello.”

“I’m confused,” I told him. “I’m wondering what’s so special about you.”

“Bienvenue. Wilkommen.”

“Great,” I said. “You’re multilingual.”

“Ciao.”

“Any more?”

He shuffled to one side, claws skittering along his perch. He shuffled back again. Puffed out his chest.

“A dance routine. That’s marvelous.”

Gert said, “Maybe the bird is worth money?”

I made a dubious humming noise. I seriously doubted that Buster was worth as much as Freddy had offered to pay me, let alone what Nancy had suggested.

“Wanna hear Buster count?”
he asked.

“Not right now.” I straightened and pointed toward Gert’s stereo equipment. “How about your listening network? Would anyone on there know what’s going on?”

Gert stroked his beard some more. “We did not know what you were looking for. No one knew why it could be important.”

I thought about that. It was probably true, but it was strange. Take the Russian crew. They hadn’t been at all interested in Buster when I first found him in Andrew Stirling’s apartment.

“Wait,” I said. “The Russians were after the final page of a handwritten code.”

“Yes?”

“So Buster is a talking bird. Maybe he knows the rest of the code.”

I ducked down toward the cage and treated Buster to my best grin.

“Hey, Buster,” I said.

“Wanna sing a song?”
he asked.

“No,” I said. “No songs. But what about a code? Do you know any codes?”

Buster made the sound of a laser gun. He seemed disappointed by my reaction to it. Perhaps I was supposed to play dead.

“Know any codes?” I asked again. “Does Buster have a code?”

A phone started to ring. It was ringing deep in Buster’s throat.

“Marvelous,” I said. “He doesn’t understand.”

“He is just a bird.”

“Yes, but there has to be something special about him. Why else would the ambassador want him back so badly?”

“He is his pet,
ja
? This is normal.”

“And is it normal for somebody to steal a bird? The guy who took Buster—Andrew Stirling—he must have done it for a reason.”

“Maybe he likes Buster, too?”

I gazed at Buster. He was grooming himself. His beak was buried deep under his wing and he was pecking at his jet-black plumage. And yes, I could appreciate that he was sort of cute. I could understand how his phrases and sound effects could be diverting for a time. But, I’m sorry, he was a little irritating, too. And I’d only been in his company for a short spell. Imagine putting up with his repertoire of tricks in your home. Could a serious diplomat like Stirling really have been so enamored that he’d have snatched Buster from the ambassador? Would he really risk his career for a talking bird?

“I don’t buy it,” I said. “I could believe that everyone was looking for some kind of secret code. But Buster, here? I don’t think so.”

Buster broke off from his grooming to stare up at me. He cocked his head at an angle. He looked a tad insulted.

“What?” I asked him.

“Wanna hear Buster count?”

“NO!”

I spun away from his cage and lashed out with my foot at the nearest thing I could find. The nearest thing turned out to be the roller coaster track. My heart skipped a beat. But the fateful surge of electricity never came.

“Be careful,” Gert reminded me.

“Sorry.” I raised my hand.

“You were lucky.”

I didn’t feel altogether fortunate. Here I was, talking to a strange, paranoid guy and a pea-brained bird in the depths of an unused roller coaster tunnel that smelled a lot like a faulty fridge stocked with rotting food. My best friend was missing. I was being pursued and threatened by a bunch of devious foreigners. And my toe was throbbing like I’d struck it with a mallet. So no, right at this particular moment, lucky was about the last thing I felt.

“I suppose I should call the Americans,” I said. “Tell them I have their precious package and see if I can exchange Buster for Victoria. Is there a phone near here?”

“I have some,” Gert told me.

“Some?”

He wheeled his chair backward, ducked below his desk, and sorted through the contents of a wooden crate. Within a few moments, he was holding a stack of cardboard boxes in his hand, propped beneath his hairy chin. The boxes were all sealed in plastic. I took the top one and found that it contained a mobile phone.

“Something else you collected?” I asked.

“I exchange for them. They are all prepaid. No tracing. It is safe,
ja
?”

I didn’t know about that, but I doubted I’d be able to find a working pay phone anywhere close. I opened the box and unpacked the phone from its plastic wrapping. Then I reached inside my pocket and removed Nancy’s business card. I switched on the phone. The screen lit up and the speaker emitted a three-tone chime.

Buster opened his throat and mimicked the sound. He was note perfect.

I stared at the display on the phone, waiting for a signal, while Gert approached Buster’s cage, poking a finger through the bars and wiggling it like a gnarled, pink worm.

“Guten Tag,
my pretty friend,” Gert said.

Buster made the sound of the phone switching on again. Maybe his German was a little shaky.

I started to punch Nancy’s number into the mobile. I was only halfway through when I had to stop.

“Hey,” I yelled at Gert. “What the hell are you doing?”

Gert froze. His hand was inside the cage. He’d opened the little metal door and he was reaching in toward Buster.

“What if Buster gets out?” I asked him. “What then?”

Apparently, Buster didn’t want to escape. He leaped up onto Gert’s thumb and twittered away contentedly.

“Will you leave him alone?” I said. “I don’t want anything else to go wrong.”

“But he is so cute.”

“Oh, he’s delightful. But he’s also my best chance of getting my friend back safely.”

“She is very beautiful, I am told.”

I stared hard at the back of Gert’s head. I was tempted to yank him away by his ponytail. “Excuse me?”

“My friends tell me. On the radio.”

I was having trouble staying calm. It sounded as if Gert’s contacts had taken their own sweet time evaluating Victoria’s appearance, but they hadn’t bothered to intervene when she was abducted from my home.

“Gert,” I snapped. “Will you please leave Buster alone?”

Gert was feeling around the bottom of Buster’s cage, shifting sawdust aside with his fingers and delving beneath it. Buster was riding his thumb and chirping gleefully, as if he was enjoying a miniature fairground ride.

“Gert,” I said again.

“Gert,”
Buster repeated.

“Hey,” Gert said, “he knows my name.”

“Gert,” I repeated.

“Gert.”

“Hey! He said it again!”

I stepped over and cracked him on the back of the head.

“Stop fooling around.”

“But I do not fool,” he said, rubbing his scalp with his free hand.

“Yes you do. You’re disturbing things in there.”

“No,” Gert said. “I check the cage. For the code you mention. Did you do this already?”

Hmm. Truth was, I hadn’t thought of it. I hadn’t even considered the possibility. But now that Gert had mentioned the idea, there was a certain something to be said for it.

I bit down on my lip. I toed the ground.

“Er, no,” I mumbled. “Why don’t you go ahead.”

So he did. He piled all the wood shavings up on one side of the cage, then the other. He lifted the newspaper that lined the bottom of the cage and found absolutely nothing below it.

“Oh, well,” I told him. “Worth a try.”

Gert shrugged and raised his thumb toward the top of the cage until Buster hopped onto the uppermost perch. Then he flattened the newspaper back down, rearranged the sawdust, and closed the little metal hatch, blowing Buster a kiss when he was done.

I concentrated on the mobile phone again and started to punch in the rest of Nancy’s number. I was just about to place the call when I noticed that Gert was lifting the cage high above his head.

“I find something,” he said.

“You do?” I craned my neck and took a look for myself. All I could see was the molded plastic base. “Where?”

“Look here.”

I looked. Gert was pointing toward a tiny ridge in the otherwise smooth black plastic. He tugged at the base.

“It moves,” he said. “Quick. Help me.”

I set the phone aside and grabbed hold of the base, yanking it downward. There was a slurping, sucking noise. I tugged harder. Gert pulled on the cage. Buster whistled and flapped his wings excitedly.

The plastic base came away in my hands, leaving a matching base attached to the cage.

I looked down into the black plastic shell I was holding. There was a square of paper resting there. The paper was lined and discolored with age. It was folded in two. It looked just like the notepaper I’d found in the top secret file in Jane Parker’s hotel room.

I lifted it out very carefully, then cleared a space on Gert’s makeshift desk and smoothed the paper flat with my hand. The top third of the page was covered in slanted handwriting. The writing was in a familiar faded blue ink. The words were in code.

I slapped my hand to my forehead and barked out a laugh.

“You did it, Gert,” I said. “You solved the puzzle. You found the rest of the code.”

He grinned widely and waggled his fingers at Buster. “So this is good, I think. Would you like that I crack it, too?”

THIRTY-TWO

I confess, I thought Gert was kidding, but he was serious about cracking the code. He dropped onto his tatty swivel chair and rooted through a box beneath his desk.

“You really know how to do this?” I asked.

“It is not so difficult,” he said, speaking into the box.

“Who taught you?”

“I teach myself.” He straightened up with a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen in his hand. “I read how to do it in books about the Cold War. Stasi history books. Things like this.”

He started by copying out the code onto a fresh sheet of paper in a hurried scrawl. It didn’t take long. There were only four lines of handwriting in the original version.

“It’s lucky that the message is quite short,” I said.

Gert shook his head, not looking up from his work. “No, it is bad.”

“Bad?”

He ripped the paper from his pad and set it down next to him. He indicated the first few letters with the nib of his pen.

“In English, you call this a cipher.”

“Sure. It’s a code.”

“No, a cipher, it is a special type of code.” He squinted at me and I got the impression his eyesight was pretty poor. Then again, I guessed living somewhere without natural light would tend to have that effect. “Each true letter is replaced by another. The replacement letters scramble the words.”

“It wouldn’t be much of a code if they didn’t.”

“But a basic cipher is quite simple. You just add a number to a letter. Say the number you choose is five. If I want to write the letter
a,
I add five letters.”

As he talked, Gert printed the alphabet on a fresh sheet of paper. He arranged the letters over three lines, leaving a lot of space in between.

“Look,” he said, and tapped his pen against the letter
a.
“If I choose the number five, then the letter
a
becomes
e. b
becomes
f.
”

“That’s easy enough,” I told him. “But how do you figure out what number the code maker used?”

“You must look for repeats. This is why it is good to have as many letters as possible.
E
is the most common letter. So I look through the code and I find the letter that appears most often. The chances are good that this is
e.
”

“And if it’s not?”

“Then I begin again. I try another letter. Eventually, I solve it.”

“
If
that’s how this code was written.”

“So let me find out. I will begin.”

He lowered his face to the page and began to count letters, his ponytail coiling around his neck. He tallied his results beneath the alphabet letters he’d already set out. I got the impression he expected me to be quiet. I couldn’t quite manage it.

“I have a question,” I said.

He tensed and held up a scrawny finger. I waited until he’d jotted down a note.

“How do you know what language the code is in?” I asked.

He blinked and backed away from the page.

“The paper and the ink look pretty old,” I explained. “And for the past hundred years or so there’ve been a lot of different languages floating around Berlin. You might think you’re cracking it in German, but it could be a different language entirely.”

Gert chewed the end of his pen. “But this should not matter.”

“It shouldn’t?”

“I do not think so. But anyway, I am thinking the code is in English.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because your ambassador had it,
ja
? In the cage.”