The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (26 page)

“Only if he knew it was there.”

Gert sucked his pen, then used it to lift his hairy top lip, exposing his teeth and gums. “He must know,” he said, his words a touch garbled. “This is why he wishes for the cage to come back. This is why you were hired.”

“And what about Buster?”

Gert shrugged. “It is as you said. He is just a bird. A very nice bird. But a bird all the same.”

I shot a guilty look toward Buster. He was gazing up at a chain of fairy lights, mesmerized by their twinkling. Poor little chap. He didn’t seem to be distressed by his recent adventures, but it must have been unsettling for him. I wondered if there was anything I should be doing. Fetching him water. Offering him food. But then again, I was pretty sure he’d speak up if he needed something.

Gert returned to his work. I tried to sneak a look but he crooked his arm to cover the page, like a schoolkid trying to deter an exam cheat. I took the hint and decided to distract myself with a tour of his living quarters instead.

It didn’t feel like a home. It felt more like a lair. I’d never seen so many fairy lights in one place before, but as soon as I took more than a few steps beyond their glow, the blackness of the tunnel was absolute.

I returned to the light and took my fingers for a stroll along a set of metal shelving units. I found all kinds of junk. Military medals. Old army jackets. Stasi uniform patches and embroidered insignia. Interflug luggage tags. Red and yellow DDR pennants and flags. Aged canned goods. Miniature busts of Lenin. Political badges and lapel pins. Leather holsters. Oh, and guns. Lots and lots of guns.

Some were pistols. Some were rifles. Some were shotguns. All of them looked like they belonged in an antiques shop.

I reached for one of the pistols. It had a long, scarred barrel that was badly chipped and dinged. I tried the trigger. It was jammed. Or maybe the safety was on. There were boxes of cartridges on the floor by my feet. I set the pistol aside and sifted through the cartridges, letting the bronzed casings cascade through my fingers. There were crates filled with mines. There were grenades.

“Er, Gert,” I said.

No response.

“Gert?” I stepped out from behind the shelves with a grenade in my hand. “None of this stuff is real, is it?”

He glanced up, then did a fast double take. “Be careful,” he said.

I swallowed. “Is this ammo … live?”

“
Ja,
I think so.”

“You
think
so?”

“I test only some of it. In the woods.”

Lordy. Why had I picked up the damn grenade in the first place? And why was I spending time with this guy? He lived in a dank and dingy tunnel with a volatile and possibly quite deadly electricity supply, and he had enough live ammo and explosives to blow a crater in the middle of Berlin. I was beginning to wonder if he was the smartest ally to have on my side.

“Who does this, Gert?” I asked. “Who keeps a secret cache of guns and weapons in an unused roller coaster tunnel? Who are you really?”

“I tell you already. I am a collector.”

“But you exchange this stuff. You sell it. Doesn’t that make you an arms trader?”

He shrugged, a little awkwardly. “You cannot start a war with these guns. They are too old.”

“And the grenades?”

For some hard-to-fathom reason, I was just witless enough to toss the grenade I was holding into the air, as if it was nothing more than a cricket ball I was fooling around with. Let me tell you, I’ve never taken so much care about making a catch. All my old school training drills came flooding back to me. There was no way I was letting this bad boy hit the ground.

“Please,” Gert said, when I’d cradled it to my chest, “put the grenade down.”

I exhaled, then did as he asked. I placed the grenade back with the others as if I was laying a fragile jewel on a silk cushion.

“Aren’t you afraid there’ll be an explosion?” I dusted my hands off and moved closer to Gert’s desk. “I’m not sure I could sleep next to all this stuff.”

“Then it is good you do not need to. Now, look.”

Gert turned his pad around to face me. He’d flipped over the page he’d been working on and had printed a short message on the reverse. His handwriting was very precise and very clear. It was a shame I couldn’t say the same about the message.

SO I HAVE HIDDEN IT IN THE DEVIL’S MOUNTAIN. IT WILL BE SAFE THERE FOR AS LONG AS NECESSARY. I LEAVE YOU THE SEQUENCE. GOOD LUCK, FRIEND. FAREWELL. C.

I lifted the sheet of paper. Read it over a second time.

“You think this is the coded message?” I asked.

Gert nodded. “It makes sense,
ja
?”

“Not a great deal,” I told him. “What do they mean by the Devil’s Mountain? It sounds like something out of
Lord of the Rings
.” I hummed to myself. “Wait. Could it be one of the rides in this theme park?”

Gert smiled and shook his head. “You really do not know?”

“Know what?”

He leaned back in his creaking chair and clasped his hands together behind his head, his jagged elbows poking outward. “The Devil’s Mountain is the Teufelsberg. It is a hill that overlooks Berlin.”

“Spooky-sounding hill.”

“It is called the Devil’s Mountain because it was built after the Second World War. A lot of the rubble from the bombing of Berlin was piled there. There was so much rubble it became a hill.”

“Holy cow,” I said. “So if something was hidden there, it could be right at the bottom of this pile of rubble?”

Gert toyed with his ponytail, fiddling with the elastic band that held it in place. “No, I do not think so.”

“You don’t? How come?”

“The Teufelsberg is not just a hill. It is in the west, but it overlooks Berlin
ost.
During the Cold War, this was useful to the Americans and the British. They built a listening post there.”

“Huh. And does this listening post still exist?”

“
Ja,
but now it is empty. A ruin.”

“A big ruin?”

Gert nodded. There was amusement in his eyes, as if he was a teacher watching an average student finally grasp a difficult concept.

I read back over the message he’d decoded.

IT WILL BE SAFE THERE FOR AS LONG AS NECESSARY. I LEAVE YOU THE SEQUENCE.

“Gert,” I said, “if something was well hidden, do you think it could still be at this listening post even now?”

“For sure, it is possible.”

“And the sequence this message refers to? Any idea what that means?”

“I am sorry, no.” He nudged the faded sheet of paper dejectedly. “The code does not say.”

“But this is only part of the code,” I reminded him. “I already found the first four pages. The Russians stole them from me. Maybe the pages the Russians now have contain the sequence. Maybe they explain what was hidden, too.”

I broke off to give the matter some thought. I rested my hand on Buster’s cage and glanced down at him.

“Who’s a clever bird?” I asked.

“My name’s Buster.”

“I know, buddy.”

“Wanna sing a song?”

“Not right now, pal. I’m thinking.”

Buster put his head on one side and blinked at me. His movements had a jerky, mechanical quality, like the windup robot on Freddy’s office desk.

From what I could gather, the code really had been what everyone was after, and the top secret file I’d found in Jane Parker’s hotel room truly had been important. Did that mean Freddy had lied to me when he’d dismissed the photographs of the code that I’d shown him, or was he really in the dark, too? Had he truly believed that getting Buster back was all he’d hired me to do?

I didn’t think so. Sure, he’d come across as a touch bumbling, and I’d been willing enough to buy the act. But I doubted he really believed it was reasonable to pay me upward of ten thousand euros just to recover a talking bird. He had to know there was something more going on. He had to suspect, at the very least, that Buster wasn’t the end of the story.

He’d held back from me. He must have. And any sense of patriotism I might have experienced was leaving me fast. So sure, I had the option of contacting Freddy and telling him that I’d found the final page of code. I could ask him for his help to get Victoria back safely. I could even demand that he tell me the full story of what I’d become drawn into.

But I didn’t want to do any of that. My priority was securing Victoria’s safe release. I didn’t altogether care about the code. I wasn’t concerned with what was hidden up at the Devil’s Mountain.

So I reached for the prepaid mobile Gert had given me and I punched in Nancy Symons’s number.

THIRTY-THREE

We arranged to meet in the early evening, just inside the main entrance to the amusement park. The entrance was sadder and more sorry-looking than anything I’d seen so far. The curved sign above the gates was missing random letters and welcomed people to the
S EE ARK
. The gates themselves were buckled in the middle, as if someone had barged them with a truck, and they were threaded with coils of rusty barbed wire. Heavy-duty chains and industrial padlocks had been used to secure the gates together. To the untrained eye, they probably looked daunting, but a simple glance told me they were about as secure as a length of spider thread.

“What do those warning signs say?” I asked Gert, pointing through the sketchy dusk toward some bright yellow boards attached to the gates.

“Your entrance is forbidden.”

“No, not those. The ones with the lightning bolt and the little man falling over.”

“Oh, they say the gates have electricity in them.”

I swallowed. “And do they?”

“Usually, no.”

Usually.
Hmm, that wasn’t quite the reassurance I was seeking.

“And you’re absolutely sure the guards have gone?” I asked.

“Yes. I see them leave already. They do not return.”

“And the dogs?”

“One of the guards takes them, too. I promise, if they were here, you would know this. They would be hanging from your nuts,
ja
?”

Gert jabbed me with his bony elbow. His laugh was a high, wheezing number. I can’t say I was feeling quite so merry.

“Fine,” I said, and swallowed again. “I suppose I’d better go and pick open the padlocks.”

“Yes, you do it.” Gert clapped me on the back. “I will watch.”

Of course he would.

I walked stiffly toward the gates and took my sweet time selecting just the right pick and the perfect torsion wrench. Then I flexed my fingers and sucked in a couple of steadying breaths and reached out a tentative hand. I paused. My fingertips were just shy of the gate. I couldn’t feel any static. There was no telltale buzzing or humming. I tensed my body and squeezed my eyes tight shut and finally grasped for a padlock.

The moment I touched it, my heart thrashed around in my chest. But it was the only thing doing any thrashing. The padlock was cold and inert. It wasn’t wired into the mains, and I wasn’t in the process of being fried.

My stomach had turned to water. I could feel sweat in my hair. I released a long, grateful sigh, and forced myself to focus. A few minutes later, my nerves were almost back under control and I was freeing the chains from the padlocks and parting the gates.

I turned. The park didn’t look any more cheery from this angle. The old ticket office was closed and boarded up. So were the fairground stalls that flanked the wide avenue of cracked and weed-choked asphalt ahead of me. Some of the booths were canted to one side, as if they were kneeling low. Their paint was faded and flaking. Drifts of litter and fallen leaves and mud and scum had collected around them. The whole place seemed utterly abandoned, like a ghost town that wasn’t fit to be haunted. If something went wrong now, Gert would be my only witness. But what use was a witness if I wound up dead?

*   *   *

Some twenty minutes later, a pair of headlights crawled along the twilit road leading toward the park. In another half hour it would be fully dark. I was shivering. A damp breeze was gusting around me, slamming into my back. It was rocking me on my toes, and the tails of my raincoat were flapping around my legs.

I had one of Gert’s ancient pistols tucked into the waistband at the back of my jeans. It was loaded, but it didn’t bring me a great deal of comfort. I was no marksman, and if I needed to shoot, my chances of hitting what I was aiming at were close to zero. That was assuming the pistol even worked. I hadn’t tested it. I hadn’t wanted to. The thing looked like it belonged in a museum, and I was beginning to wish it was in one right now.

I could say the same about the hand grenade I’d stuffed into my coat pocket. I was holding it tight, running my thumb over the ridged exterior and being very careful not to dislodge the looped pin. I’d grown used to its weight and heft and feel. I was pretty sure I could throw it with a fair degree of accuracy. But I was absolutely certain I didn’t want to. If I found myself lobbing a grenade, then things would have gone very wrong indeed, and I guessed there was a reasonable chance it would be the last thing I ever did.

In my other pocket, I fingered the aged scrap of paper with the final page of code on it. Hard to believe it was worth all this trouble. If I’d found it sooner, I would have gladly handed it over to save Victoria any distress. I just hoped she knew that. And I badly wanted to know that she was okay.

“You see them?” Gert hissed.

“I do,” I said. “Stay quiet now. Don’t speak again.”

Gert was hunkered down in one of the decrepit fairground stalls behind me. He’d loosened a board and crawled inside through an old serving hatch, and now he was peering out through a split in the timber. He was under strict instructions to stay put and remain silent at all times. I didn’t appreciate how he’d ignored my orders already. This was a perfect example of why I normally worked alone. I could trust myself to break my own rules when the occasion demanded it, but I didn’t feel that way about anyone else.

Instinctively, I took a step forward and away from him. I was smoking a cigarette but taking no pleasure from it. My mouth felt dry and my lungs brittle. I flicked the cigarette onto the ground and killed it with a twist of my shoe.