The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (3 page)

I swallowed my irritation and explained that my agent was indeed the creature in question.

“Jolly good. Nathan assures me I can trust both of you.” Ah, if only the feeling was mutual, I thought to myself, as Freddy summoned a dinky bow for Victoria’s benefit. “But my goodness,” he said, “only a few hours ago I never would have believed that burglars have agents. Especially such delightful ones.”

Victoria did her best to look demure. Or perhaps she was genuinely flattered. She offered him her hand. The goof ducked his head and kissed it.

“One has to move with the times, Mr. Farmer,” Victoria said. Her hand was still gripped in Freddy’s. He took his own sweet time releasing it. “How is your brother?”

“He’s incredibly well.”

I didn’t doubt it. Nathan Farmer was one of the shrewdest customers I’d ever crossed picks with. His job description and his remit were somewhat fluid, but I tended to think of him as a fixer. He was somebody that well-heeled clients and discerning institutions across Europe could call on for help if they ever found themselves in the kind of trouble where police involvement might be, shall we say,
undesirable
. Above all else, he was a results man, and for his more law-abiding clients, some of his methods were best left unmentioned. I was beginning to suspect his brother was in the same racket.

“What is it you want to talk to me about, Mr. Farmer?”

“Freddy, please,” he said. “And here, do take a paddle.” He forced a table-tennis bat on me, then cast a suspicious glance over his shoulder toward a patch of gloopy blackness. “Would you care for a game? I think it might afford us a useful cover.”

“A cover?”

He began to remove his overcoat. “Oh, I don’t think it would do for us to be seen talking like this without some kind of explanation. Though I fear I must warn you, I’ve become quite the Ping-Pong fiend since I’ve lived in Berlin.”

FOUR

Freddy wasn’t kidding. He laid down his coat on a nearby bench, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and treated me to a lesson in sporting humiliation. He danced and he jinked and he huddled intensely around his end of the table, his brow knotted in fierce concentration, his stubby arm describing a precise, efficient arc that sent the little white ball pinging and ponging toward me at an array of alarming angles and speeds. My only solace was that we weren’t keeping score.

“Been honing my game for eighteen months now,” Freddy told me, between points. His breath was clouding in the cool night air and his face was flushed. “There are hundreds of these tables throughout the eastern side of the city. It’s something we have the good old GDR to thank for.”

It wasn’t hard to believe. The table we were playing on was sturdy and functional in design, and like a lot of the Soviet-era architecture, it was formed out of concrete. The legs were concrete. The tabletop was concrete. The net, for variety, was made from a gridded strip of metal that glinted in the electric lamplight. Oh, and the whole thing was covered in a colorful array of graffiti. Layer upon layer of names and slogans and profanities and symbols, almost as if we were playing on a horizontal slab of the Berlin Wall.

Graffiti could be found most places in Berlin, and there was plenty of the stuff surrounding us now. It had been sprayed on tree trunks, on litter bins, on benches, and on the green metal pissoir just outside the perimeter railings of the
Platz
. It covered every square inch of the spare table-tennis table where Victoria was perched, her chin tucked down inside the collar of her red down jacket, her hands buried in her pockets and her legs dangling in the murky shadows beneath. She seemed to be enjoying the way Freddy was thrashing me. I was pretty sure she was smirking every time I had to turn my back and wander off to collect the silly little ball from whichever area of unlit pea gravel Freddy had dispatched it to.

“So,” I said, on one of my many treks back to the table, “do you think we might talk now?”

I swatted the ball toward him and Freddy looped it back, high and gentle. I almost lost it in the sodium glare.

“Let’s talk
and
play,” he said. “We’ll rally.”

“Don’t you think that might be a bit distracting?” I asked, blinking hard and returning the ball on a similar, if less certain, trajectory. I’m not very good at Ping-Pong. Having two arthritic fingers on my right hand makes holding the bat a real challenge.

“Not at all. I daresay we can build up a good rhythm.”

Oh, we had a rhythm, all right. The ball papped and popped between us. It blipped and it bopped. And as it arced to and fro, Freddy finally began to explain himself.

“I work for a company,” he said, dispatching a sliced forehand. “Here in Berlin. And in the last few days, something was stolen from the office of our head man.”

I mirrored his shot with a sliced forehand of my own. It was a mistake. The arthritic knuckles on my middle and fourth fingers felt like they might pop. “What was stolen?” I asked, through gritted teeth.

“We’ll come to that.” His eyes were wide open in concentration. His mouth was a gaping void. I would have loved to smash the ball deep inside it. “The important thing is that we’ve narrowed down the suspects to four employees. They all had access to the office in question during the time the theft must have occurred.”

“Just four?” Victoria asked, her head swiveling from side to side as she tracked the ball’s movement.

“That’s the good news,” Freddy said. He was panting like a dog by now. Steam was rising from his body and he was perspiring heavily. His shirt was marked by two dark half-moons of sweat beneath his armpits.

“And the bad news?” I asked.

“The bad news is that we need the item retrieved. Quite urgently.” He moved sideways to use his backhand. “But confidentiality concerns mean we don’t wish to involve the police, and we can’t risk alerting the culprit that we’re on to him—a factor that prevents us from seeking a solution via the internal procedures or more predictable options available to us. Our problem has arisen from
inside
our organization. We need help from
outside
. Specialized help. Unconventional help.”

“Which is where I come in, I presume.”

“Quite so. We’d like you to reclaim the item and identify the guilty party.”

“Reclaim it?”

“By searching the homes of each of the four suspects.”

“Hmm,” I said, and patted the ball back to him. “How do you know that whoever took this thing is still holding on to it?”

His feet scuffled in the dirt as he adjusted his stance to reach my somewhat wayward shot. “As I said, it’s sensitive. If the item had passed into the wrong hands, we’d have heard about it by now.”

“You’re certain that it’s been stolen? It couldn’t have been borrowed, say?”

“No. Nobody had any right to take this item. And it definitely couldn’t have been misplaced.”

“What makes you think the thief is keeping it in his home?”

“It’s an assumption, though you may find evidence to suggest otherwise.”

“I’m not a big fan of assumptions.”

“I can understand that,” Freddy told me. “But I think you may appreciate how our proposal is structured.”

He hung his tongue out of his mouth as he sent an ambitious shot curving way out over the side of the table. The ball started to curve back in, but not nearly enough. It cannoned off the table edge and skittered away beyond the cone of lamplight to settle among the blackened roots of the graffiti-riddled tree.

I went and hunted for the ball, grumbling sourly to myself, and when I finally found it, I wrapped it in my fist. I was through with his silly game—both of them. I leaned forward over the table, arms straight, my bat in one hand, the ball in the other. The graffiti-smeared concrete was cold against my knuckles.

“Enough fooling around,” I said. “What exactly is your proposal?”

Freddy pouted, very much like a kid who wanted his ball back from a dreaded neighbor but was too afraid to ask.

“Very well,” he said. “There’s a company function this coming Tuesday night. Our chief exec is receiving an important dignitary at nine o’clock, and all four employees will be on duty at our headquarters from eight
P.M.
to help with preparations and, in some cases, to attend as guests. We want you to search each of their homes, in the order of our choosing. We’ll pay you for every place you search until you find the item we’re looking for.”

I glanced across at Victoria. She was chewing her lip in thought.

“How much?” she asked. “For each place, I mean.”

“Two thousand euros.”

I felt myself rock back a little. It sounded like a pretty good deal to me. A potential fee of eight thousand euros was a handsome return for one night’s work. But there was a downside, too.

“What if I find this secret object in the first apartment?” I asked. “I’ll only receive one installment.”

“Thought you’d spot that,” Freddy said. “So we’re offering you a bonus—a finder’s fee, if you will. Five thousand euros for retrieving the package. It’s a generous deal, I think you’ll agree.”

I was certainly inclined to—despite my earlier misgivings, money tends to have a soothing effect on me—but Victoria spoke up before I had the opportunity.

“I’m not comfortable with this,” she said, wagging a finger at Freddy. “Think about it. With every theft Charlie carries out for you, his chances of being caught increase. One burglary in a night might be okay. But four separate burglaries—particularly when he doesn’t know the locations involved and you haven’t said just yet what he’s meant to be searching for—well, that’s a different scenario entirely. So a fair deal, in my opinion, would include a sliding fee.”

“A sliding fee?” Freddy repeated.

“That’s right,” Victoria said. “But nothing too exploitative. Let’s say an extra five hundred euros for each subsequent burglary Charlie carries out after he knocks over location one. So that’s two thousand for the first place, like you suggested. Then two thousand five hundred, three thousand, and three thousand five hundred for locations two, three, and four.”

Freddy paused. His chubby face clouded over. I daresay I was wearing a similar expression. I was tussling with the math in my head. Unless I was very much mistaken, Victoria’s suggestion would give me a total of eleven thousand euros for all four burglaries. An increase of three thousand on what I’d originally been offered. Stack that together with the bonus Freddy had mentioned and I’d have a very respectable sum indeed.

I was still checking my calculations when Freddy surprised me by shuffling toward Victoria and offering her his hand.

“Deal,” he said.

They shook on it, and then Victoria winked at me and smiled her wonky smile.

I tried not to let it distract me. I needed to concentrate. Arithmetic has never been my greatest talent, and it took me a long moment to appreciate why Victoria appeared quite so smug. Then I got it. Our agent-author agreement gives her twenty percent of any foreign deals she negotiates on my behalf, and I had the distinct impression she intended to claim her share of this particular transaction. Twenty percent of eleven thousand was, oh, just over two thousand euros. And that would put my own fee almost back to where it had started.

I raised my hand and scratched the side of my face with the pitted rubber of my table-tennis bat. I was holding the bat in a modified pencil grip and my fingers were spread in a conspicuous
V
. Victoria seemed to grasp my point.

“Don’t be too hasty,” I said to Freddy. He’d collected his overcoat from the bench and was threading his stubby arms through the sleeves. “You still haven’t told me yet what it is you’d like me to steal.”

And that was when Freddy sucked air through his teeth, and looked at me apologetically, and, well, you’ll recall just how unsatisfactorily that part of our conversation had evolved.

“Please try to understand,” he said, once he’d finished explaining why he couldn’t possibly tell me what it was he was hoping I’d find. “This situation is very troubling for our company. For our chief exec in particular. If for any reason you fail in your assignment, we couldn’t possibly afford to have the information get into the public domain.”

“Charming,” I said. “You don’t trust me.”

He smiled awkwardly. “Forgive me, Charlie, but we’re hiring you precisely because you’re a thief. Surely you can understand a little hesitancy on our part?”

He dropped his table-tennis paddle into one coat pocket and removed a mobile telephone from another.

“Give me your number,” he said, “and I’ll pass on all the information you’ll require as and when you’ll need it. I’ll start by texting you the first address and the identity of suspect number one.”

“No you won’t,” I told him. “I don’t have a mobile.”

Freddy reared backward, as if I was certifiable.

“No mobile? But how can you possibly—”

“Don’t exhaust yourself,” Victoria said, and hopped off the table-tennis table. “I’ve nagged him about this enough times to know he’s not going to change.”

“They’re dreadful contraptions,” I explained. “One never knows when they might go off.”

“One could always switch them to silent.” Victoria fished around in the back of her jeans and removed her own phone. “Here, I’ll give you my number,” she told Freddy. “You can text the information to me and I’ll pass it along.”

Freddy seemed more than pleased with her suggestion. He rushed to input Victoria’s number into his mobile, and I shifted my weight between my feet as the dinky gadget blipped and beeped and shone brightly in the darkness. Then he jabbed it with his thumb and wafted it in Victoria’s general direction, and a moment later Victoria’s phone lit up and issued a beep of its own.

“Got it,” she said.

“Excellent. And you’ll text me once Charlie has searched the first apartment?”

“Whether or not he finds the item,” she confirmed.

“Marvelous.” Freddy beamed at Victoria and dug his hand inside the chest pocket of his overcoat. I heard the telltale rustle of stiff paper and watched him pass Victoria a thick white envelope. “Here’s two thousand to start you off. As a gesture of our goodwill.” He began to back away with a deft little bow, like a besotted courtier in some sappy costume drama. “It’s been an absolute delight meeting you.”