The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (32 page)

“You’re beginning to run out of countries it’s safe for you to be in.”

“Tell me about it.”

More silence. It lasted no longer than thirty seconds. But there was a tension in the air. I felt like I could almost hear Victoria’s thoughts shifting around inside her head.

“Would you do me a favor?” she asked. “Would you consider London for once? I could keep an eye on you there. Make sure you hit your deadlines. And it would be good for your writing career.”

Would it? I guessed she was probably right. And in some ways, it wasn’t quite the unwelcome prospect I might have imagined.

But it was still mighty scary. Undeniably so. It was terrifying because I was tempted. And I felt that way because of her.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Will you, though?”

“Sure,” I said again.

“I’d like that.”

A long, weighty silence followed her words. She lay still for a while, and I began to think about pushing up from the floor onto my hands and my knees and crawling over to stretch out beside her in the dark. I thought about resting a tentative hand on her hip. About nuzzling her neck.

Oh, I thought about a whole bunch of stuff besides. Of decisions and actions and risks. Of responses and consequences and repercussions. Of good outcomes and bad. Of those things that would never be the same again. Of the changes that could never be undone.

And truth be told, I was just rolling over and levering myself up with my elbow when I heard her first slow, nasal inhalation. It was light. It was a barely there sniff. But it was completely unmistakable.

She was snoring. She’d drifted away into sleep. And my sudden resolve drifted away with her.

I propped my head on my fist and watched over her for a long time. Watched her chest rise and fall. Watched her mouth open and close. Watched the hair across her face shift gently with her breathing.

And then, when I couldn’t bear it anymore, I eased my shoes off my feet and padded across the room in just my socks toward the window, where I parted the slats in the blind and peeked out at the street below. I supposed this might be the last time I’d watch over Berlin at night for quite a while. I guessed it was possible that I might never see the city this way again. And when I lowered my eyes to the building across the way and fixed my gaze on the unlit window of Daniel Wood’s apartment, I cursed myself for ever having been stupid enough to step inside it in the first place.

FORTY

Come the morning, it was raining. Again.

I stumbled out of the apartment building, followed by Victoria, and the rain instantly beaded on my hair and my clothes. It was drifting on the air in a fine mist and had settled into a glistening film across the exterior of the Trabbi.

The Trabbi was achingly cold inside. I sparked the exposed wires beneath the dash, just as Gert had shown me, and once the engine was turning over I discovered that the windscreen wipers didn’t work. I clambered back out and smeared the screen with the sleeve of my coat, and then I drove across the city in a grim silence, crouched forward over the steering wheel, peering hard into the watery dawn light.

Victoria was huddled beside me in her tracksuit with Buster’s cage on her lap. She didn’t look altogether rested and refreshed. Her eyes were swollen and pouched, her skin was ashen, and her lips were pressed together into a thin, puckered line.

I wasn’t in tiptop condition myself. My mind felt as gray and dreary as the weather. I hadn’t slept at all. Not for one minute. Not for one second. My eyes were scratchy and sore, my neck was cricked, and my stomach was aching from where I’d been pummeled. My morning breath, when it wafted back from the windscreen, smelled like I’d been chewing on the sawdust in the bottom of Buster’s cage.

“Do you really think they’ll be gone?” Victoria asked, in a shaken voice. “All of them?”

I clenched the steering wheel and squinted out at the dissolving world on the other side of the glass. “I hope so. Though there might be people watching, I suppose.”

“Boy, that’s reassuring.”

I glanced across at her. “If you’re seeking a confident, sunny outlook, you’ve come to the wrong guy. The wrong city, for that matter.”

It seemed foolish to pretend otherwise. As morning had arrived, and the rain had floated in, my optimism of the night before had failed me as surely as my search for a pack of gum in the pockets of my overcoat. I felt like I was relying on the slimmest of chances. And based on what? The haphazard chanting of a talking bird. Nothing more. Nothing less. I must have been mad.

*   *   *

Our prospects only looked bleaker when we parked at the base of the Devil’s Mountain. The wind had picked up and the rain was falling hard, banging and drumming off the fragile shell of the Trabbi, lashing the windscreen.

Buster didn’t like it. He was darting around his cage and flapping his wings in an agitated fashion. He squawked and squeaked and burbled and twittered.

“We can’t leave him here alone,” Victoria said.

I didn’t reply.

“We
can’t,
” Victoria insisted. “Look at him. He’s scared.”

He wasn’t the only one.

“Listen, if you want to bring him,” I told her, “then you can carry him.”

“Fine.”

Except it wasn’t fine. Halfway up the hill, with the wind rattling the tree limbs above us and the rain soaking down through the autumn leaves, Victoria held Buster’s cage out to me with a pitiful expression on her face. She was thoroughly drenched and visibly shaking. Her dark blue tracksuit was soaked and clinging tightly to her body. I suppose I should have been a gentleman and offered her my raincoat, but I had a feeling she was about to exhaust my goodwill.

“Can you take Buster?” she whined.

“Already?”

“He’s
heavy.
”

I was tempted to tell her that Buster wasn’t heavy in the slightest. That he was, in fact, about as light as it was possible for a living organism to be. It was just his huge, stupid cage that was the issue. But I wasn’t about to get into an argument about it.

I snatched the cage and lugged it up the hill ahead of me, feeling bad about how soaked and bedraggled Buster was becoming, and not a lot better about how Victoria and I were faring.

Eventually, after a lot of muttering and griping, after slipping and sliding on greasy leaves and boggy mud, and after banging Buster’s cage against my knees and shins more times than I really cared for, we made it to the top of the slope and approached the listening station.

I couldn’t see anybody monitoring the area through the downpour, though I guessed it was possible a lookout might be sheltering inside. We advanced with caution, stepping over loose rubble and litter toward an opening in the concrete structure at the base of the complex.

The interior had the appearance of a multistory car park and the echoing, empty feel of a building half constructed or half demolished. Every surface was layered in graffiti. The walls. The ceilings. The support pillars. Even the floor, in places.

But it was a relief to be out of the rain, and I spent a few moments catching my breath and wiping the water from my face and hair, gazing back toward the squally deluge.

“This place gives me the willies,” Victoria whispered.

Buster cooed softly, like he was in complete agreement.

“I don’t picture anything being hidden out here,” I said.

“Where, then?”

“Farther inside, I guess. Maybe in the listening domes themselves.”

I paced toward a red metal door set into the wall some distance ahead of us. It was weighty and the hinges were rusty. I barged into it with my hip and stepped through onto a scattering of broken glass, decaying fast-food containers, empty beer cans, and used syringes.

Victoria covered her nose with her tracksuit sleeve. “Smells charming,” she mumbled.

“Could be worse.”

“Oh?”

“Whoever dumped this stuff could still be here.”

I guess it wasn’t the most sensitive of observations. Victoria’s jaw gaped as she gazed at the rotting litter and the cement staircase that lay ahead. There was an elevator shaft to the side, containing nothing but a cavernous hole and some lengths of frayed steel cable.

“We should keep moving.” Victoria swallowed thickly. “It can’t all be as bad as this.”

But some of it was, and some of it was worse. There were signs everywhere warning us of the perils of falling masonry, unguarded ledges, and electric shock. The complex was very large, and it was mazelike and confounding. It was hard to know where to start, and easy to get lost. It would have made sense for us to split up and tackle different zones individually, but neither of us suggested the idea. This wasn’t a place you wanted to wander around by yourself, still less when there was a chance that a bunch of ruthless foreign agents might return at any moment.

As for what we were seeking, that was simple enough. We were looking for numbers. We were trying to locate the exact combination Buster had repeated over and over—63842773629. I still had the numbers entered into the phone Gert had given me so that we wouldn’t forget.

It had seemed perfectly clear the previous night. It had appeared obvious to me that it was the very final piece of the puzzle. The last page of code had included the words “I leave you the sequence.” It seemed logical to suppose that the “sequence” could have been printed on another scrap of paper, a code card, or something else entirely. But however it had been left by the author of the code, my betting was that the sequence in question was the eleven-digit number Buster had been trained to recall.

Problem was, now we were inside the listening post, prowling its derelict rooms and dank, unlit spaces, its canvas-covered spheres and featureless staircases, finding whatever the sequence related to seemed close to impossible.

Oh, we found numbers. Plenty, in fact. But none of them matched the combination Buster had reeled off.

There were random digits on doors and above doorways. On heavy concrete hatches located in floors and in ceilings. On signs, in graffiti murals, and branded on old wooden packing crates that had been left to rot.

We’d been searching for close to an hour when I started to fear it was hopeless. I could tell Victoria was feeling the same way. She was grouchy and irritable. She was murmuring an awful lot.

Finally, she stomped her foot and said, “Charlie, this is impossible.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you.”

“Then can we just go? We should get out of here while we still can.”

“Out of this building? Or Berlin?”

“Either. Both.” She threw up her hands. They were white with cold. “I honestly don’t care anymore. I’m tired of solving improbable mysteries. I’m tired of putting our lives at risk. I just want to go home to London, and I want you to come with me and write a big chunk of your new book before your deadline is due and I have to explain to your publishers why we have nothing to show them.”

“Gee,” I said. “Why don’t you just tell me how you really feel?”

Her shoulders slumped. “
Please
. Can we just quit? Just this once?”

“Okay.”

She paused. She frowned. “Say again?”

“I said,
okay.
Just as soon as we’ve climbed up as far as the final dome.”

The final dome was at the very top of the central tower. The tower was six stories tall.

“Oh, crap,” Victoria said. “Are you serious?”

“Humor me.”

“I’ve
been
humoring you. I spend my
life
humoring you.”

“Another half hour. Thirty short minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”

She scrutinized me closely. “And then can we get out of here?”

I held up my arthritic fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

Victoria was far from convinced, but after rolling her eyes halfway inside her head, she trudged past me toward the cement stairwell and started to climb.

I followed her to level one, where we stepped out onto a circular floor space. Back in its prime, the tower had been enclosed by the same white tarp as the listening domes, but decades of howling winds had ripped the sheeting away, like skin being flayed from a body. The few torn strips that remained flapped loudly in the gusting breeze, snapping and popping in the air.

The smooth concrete floor had been drenched by the pounding rain and it was wet and slippery, puddled in places. The gusting wind scoured the surface of the pooled water and buffeted against me.

I carried Buster’s cage in my left hand and crooked my free arm in front of my face, leaning into the soggy wind. Concentric wires were stretched taut between a series of metal pillars that were evenly spaced around the circumference of the floor. The wires didn’t look very sturdy, and they were only waist high. I was beginning to understand why there’d been so many signs warning us of the dangers of falling.

I stayed clear of the edge and battled the wind and rain to the opposite side of the tower, where I sheltered behind the stairwell to catch my breath. I found myself looking out over the tops of countless blurred trees toward the brown concrete bowl of the Olympic stadium where Jesse Owens had won four gold medals in 1936.

Victoria leaned against the wall beside me. Her hair was soaked, hanging in matted rags and knotted tendrils. Water was dripping from her sodden tracksuit, the fabric sagging away from her lower arms. Her white trainers were shiny with damp. She turned and gazed up at me, her face as clammy as if she had the flu.

I was about to make some dumb crack about how immaculate she looked, when something caught her eye and she squinted hard at a spot on the wall above my shoulder. She looked perplexed. Then she looked astonished. She patted my cheek with icy fingers and tilted my chin until I could see exactly what had intrigued her.

There was a metal fuse box fitted to the wall above our heads. It was dull blue in color, a little corroded and a touch askew. A collection of heavy-duty electricity cables were snaking into and out of it. Some of the cables had been trimmed and tied off into loops. Others stretched away across the wall and over the ceiling.