The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (5 page)

We were getting close to the apartment building. Close to the female police officer.

It was maddening. I wanted badly to go inside. I wanted nothing more than to burst into the apartment and turn the whole place upside down until I found the corpse and the killer.

And what then, hero?

I heard a burble of static. The noise of the policewoman’s radio. She inclined her ear toward the speaker. I listened as best I could. I didn’t catch it all, but I got enough to understand that she was being given an address. It was an address I was familiar with. I’d been inside the same apartment not so very long ago.

The policewoman stepped out of the doorway in front of us and lowered her head and darted across the street through the rain. The door she’d vacated was starting to close. It was swinging through a slow, steady arc, controlled by a pneumatic hinge. I watched it closing and I tried to decide what to do. I was torn. I was confused. The door had almost sealed when I veered to one side and reached for it.

But Victoria pulled against me. A short, sharp tug. My fingers stretched for the handle. They missed.

“What are you doing?” she hissed. “Don’t you see where that policewoman’s going? We have to get out of here, Charlie. We have to move.”

*   *   *

We crossed the river Spree and boarded an S-Bahn train at the Bellevue station. Our carriage was close to empty. A couple of young men were standing toward the rear with backpacks on their shoulders. They had on glistening rain macs, and their rucksacks were protected by plastic covers. Toward the front, a thin, elderly woman with a drawn face and tightly permed hair was sitting on a long bench with a drenched terrier sprawled on the floor beneath her legs.

The dog had settled in front of the vents that were blowing heated air into the brightly lit carriage. The vinyl benches were lilac in color and covered in hundreds of white logos of the Brandenburg Gate. Transfers of the same logo were repeated on all the windows and doors in a haphazard pattern. I could see a nightscape of Berlin through the glass, hunkered down and lit brightly against the dreary rain.

“Are you nuts?” Victoria asked me, as we sat opposite each other in the middle of the carriage. She shook the rain from her umbrella. “Have you gone completely loco?”

“Huh?”

“For a minute there, I honestly thought you were going to go inside that building.”

I shrugged. “What if I was?”

“Well, for starters, that policewoman might have seen you.”

“So? That could have been a good thing.”

“How?” Victoria wiped rainwater from her face. She glared at me. “You have your picks and your burglary tools on you. You have a scrap of paper with the name and address of Freddy’s number-one suspect in your pocket. The address is for the apartment the police were called from. And they were called by an Englishman sounding very much like you.”

“I saw a woman being killed, Vic.” I glanced down at our wet footprints on the rubber floor. The cuffs of my jeans were soaked. “I can hardly ignore it.”

I wasn’t worried about our conversation being overheard. I was pretty sure anything we said would be drowned out by the chatter and rumble of wheels on track, the screech of brakes and rails, the banging and rattling of the carriage.

Victoria shook her head. “No, Charlie. That’s what you
thought
you saw. But you must have made a mistake.”

I looked up at her. Held her eyes. I could smell the dampness of my clothes. “I didn’t,” I said.

“But the police checked, Charlie. We saw the light go on in the apartment. They went inside.”

“Then the killer must have hidden the body.”

“In five minutes? Come on. And don’t you think the police would have taken a good look around? They’re not idiots, you know. They obviously treated your call seriously. And they wouldn’t have left without a reasonable explanation.”

“The only explanation I can think of is that they screwed up.”

The train was slowing and pulling into the glass and steel expanse of the giant Hauptbahnhof station. It stopped at a platform where a knot of passengers were waiting. The doors on an S-Bahn train don’t open automatically. You have to press a lighted button if you want to get on or off. But so many people were intending to board that all the doors in our carriage shuffled apart. The two backpackers stepped out, to be replaced by many more passengers. The doors shuffled closed. A recorded announcement informed us that the next stop would be Friedrichstrasse.

“I can think of plenty of other explanations,” Victoria told me, as the train began to pull away and a man in a tan raincoat settled down close to her. The man was reading a paperback book. I checked the cover. Force of habit. But it wasn’t one of mine.

“Such as?” I asked.

“Such as perhaps they were rehearsing for a play.”

“A play? Are you kidding me?”

“Or perhaps it was”—Victoria shifted forward in her seat and leaned toward me over the aisle—“
sexual
. Maybe that’s why they closed the blind. Maybe it was getting too heated.”

I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

“I know it sounds weird, but some people are into that kind of thing.”

“They were fully clothed, Vic. The guy was in a jacket or an overcoat. The woman was in a sweater and a skirt. Oh, and she was fighting for her life.”

The man next to Victoria snatched a look at us over the top of his paperback. I got the impression he was finding our conversation a lot more interesting than his book.

“But think about it, Charlie.” Victoria’s body was rocking with the movement of the train. The vibrations were modulating her voice. “You were looking at a distant window at night, in the rain, through a slatted blind. You have to admit that’s not a perfect view. There’s plenty of scope for things to get scrambled up.”

I jerked my chin toward the doors nearest to us. The train was braking and juddering to a halt. I got to my feet, grabbing hold of a rubber strap to keep my balance.

“This is our stop.”

We didn’t have far to go. Just a short stroll and a few flights of stairs to a platform on another level. We waited beside a stall selling newspapers and magazines and snacks. Victoria was clutching her folded umbrella in one hand and her transport ticket in the other. I never bother with a ticket myself. There are no barriers or turnstiles to contend with in the S-Bahn and U-Bahn stations. The whole Berlin network operates via an honor system, and as you might imagine, it doesn’t exactly play to my strengths.

Victoria was different. She couldn’t stand the idea of being caught and embarrassed by an undercover ticket inspector. I’d tried to convince her that the odds of that happening were really quite slim. After all, it’s been my misfortune in life to have stumbled across a number of corpses. But ticket inspectors? Never happened.

I glanced up at the electronic information board above our heads. “One minute until our train,” I said. “Want to wow me with any more explanations?”

“Would you listen to them?”

“Probably not. I know what I saw. And to be perfectly honest, I’m having a hard time forgetting about it.”

“Then perhaps it’ll help if I give you something else to ponder. Like, for instance, why you’re an idiot.”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t remember?” She sighed. “Charlie, when you came into that bar, I told you that you were an idiot.”

“You’re always telling me things like that.” I kicked the sodden toe of my baseball trainer into the ground. The water had soaked through to my socks. “And I
was
a little distracted, Vic.”

“Well, me, too. I’d just used my phone to check my e-mail. And I hadn’t liked what I’d seen.”

Before she could continue, I felt a blast of gritty air against my face and hands. I turned to see our train approaching. We stepped aboard. There were seats available but not many, and we opted to stand and share a handrail. Our bodies shifted rhythmically with the carriage as it began to pull away.

Victoria raised her mouth to my ear so that I could hear her over the noise of the train and the rattling of the doors. “I had three new messages in my inbox.”

“Only three?”

“Just three that should concern you.”

“Me?”

“That’s right. They were all from editors at different German publishing houses. When I was in Frankfurt, I pitched
The Venetian Cat
to five German editors.”

“Right. And is this your way of telling me that three of them have turned me down?”

“Actually, no.” She stared hard at me. Her face was drawn, her skin pulled tight. “Quite the opposite, in fact. All three have expressed an interest in buying the German rights. Two have even made pretty generous offers.”

I flashed her a grin. “But that’s great news, Vic.”

“No, it’s bloody not.”

“Oh. And why’s that?”

“Because they all felt encouraged to make an offer due to a strange coincidence.” She stepped a little closer. Spoke a little lower. “Obviously, it goes without saying that they liked the book—or rather, they could see its commercial potential. But all of them, quite separately from the others, mentioned that something had happened to them that made it seem like fate.”

“Really,” I said, trying to lighten the tone. “And what might that be?”

Victoria stabbed the point of her umbrella into my toe. “As if you don’t bloody know.”

“Ow.”
I leaped out of her range and clenched my foot in my hand. Bad idea. Now my hand was covered in rainwater and soggy dirt. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” I said, massaging my toe with my thumb.

“Oh, really.” She waved the umbrella in my face, like an old lady cursing me with a walking stick. “Well, Charlie, allow me to enlighten you. The fact is that all three editors live in Berlin. And it seems that every one of them was burgled while they were out of town at the Frankfurt Book Fair.”

The train eased to a stop at Unter den Linden. Victoria lowered the umbrella. A young, skinny man with a bicycle boarded our carriage. He was wearing leggings, a luminous jacket, and a cycling helmet. The doors closed and the train started up again.

“My, that
is
a coincidence,” I said.

“It’s not a sodding coincidence. I can see it in your face. You ripped them off!”

“Moi?”
I batted my eyelids. Pressed my hand to my heart. “I think you must have me confused with somebody else.”

“Oh? And did that somebody else have access to my business folder before I went to Frankfurt? Were they able to check the names of the three Berlin-based editors I’d be meeting? Honestly, Charlie, you used that information without my permission. You
used
me.”

“Actually,” I said, holding up a finger, “your information was kind of patchy. It didn’t include their home addresses. I had to find those for myself.”

“You
moron
.” Vic tried to stab me in my other toe. I jumped clear, parting my legs, and in that instant, I could see that she was tempted to swipe the brolly up and inflict a far more grievous injury. I backed away, waving my hands. The cyclist seemed to find it very amusing.

Victoria’s eyes narrowed, and she lifted her umbrella until the point was aimed toward my belly button.

“Now, now,” I said.

“But using me wasn’t even the worst of it,” she told me, stiff-jawed. “Publishing is a small world, Charlie. At some point, these editors are going to talk to one another. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not in the next few days. But trust me, sometime, someplace, they’re going to get around to chatting about how much one of them paid for your stupid manuscript. And then they’re going to mention the strange coincidence that led them to try and buy the thing in the first place. And do you know what they’re going to discover?”

“That they missed out on a surefire hit?”

“No,” she hissed. “They’re going to discover that all three of them were burgled while they were in Frankfurt. And then they’re going to put two and two together.”

“Or even three and three?”

“And then they’ll send the police after you. And how funny will you find that? Hmm?”

“Oh, relax,” I told her. “You worry too much.”

Victoria glowered at me as the train pulled into Potsdamer Platz. She kept glowering in silence all the way to Anhalter Bahnhof. I pressed the button to open our doors and ushered Vic off onto the platform, catching the eye of the smirking cyclist as we left.

“Good luck, comrade,” he muttered to me in German, and I responded with a casual salute as the doors closed behind us and the train began to glide away.

“What did he say?” Victoria snapped.

“No idea,” I told her. “But I know what
I
want to say.”

“And is that sorry, by any chance?”

I shook my head. “Actually, I wanted to ask if I could borrow your phone.”

SEVEN

The rain had stopped by the time we emerged from below ground. Water dripped from the trees and the streetlights and the green lollipop sign for the S-Bahn station. It ticked off the metal bollards and the parked cars and the many bicycles that were locked to the nearby racks and railings. The gray concrete office building of
Der Tagesspiegel,
the German broadsheet, towered above us. To our left, a shabby Turkish restaurant marked the corner of Schöneberger Strasse.

We took in the scene without speaking. There was a very good reason for that. Victoria was giving me the silent treatment. Actually, she was giving me a variation of the silent treatment. She was huffing a lot, and clucking her tongue a lot, and making a sort of dry rasping noise in the back of her throat whenever I tried to communicate with her. In short, she was leaving me in absolutely no doubt that she was miffed. But there was nothing wrong with her hearing, and when I asked again if I could borrow her phone, she dumped it in my hand.

I knew Victoria expected me to apologize for breaking into the homes of the three German editors. But really, I wasn’t sure why. Yes, I’d done it. But that shouldn’t have come as a surprise. I was a burglar. Stealing things was what I did. Victoria had known that for a very long time. And though I don’t mean to shock you, I wasn’t the least bit sorry.