The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (8 page)

I reached for the ceiling and Victoria did likewise. She was lurking behind me, treating me a lot like a human shield. I couldn’t really complain. If she’d been the first one inside the room, I might have done the same thing.

“Both of you step forward.” The guy in my chair was growing less patient every moment. “Away from the door.”

“Glad to,” I said. “There’s a nasty draft coming in.”

“Enough with your jokes. You will turn and look at me now.”

I shuffled to my right and finally faced the guy issuing the instructions. His pose was relaxed, with one leg crossed over his knee, and he was much younger and slimmer than the thug with the gun. They say you should dress to impress and he’d certainly done that. His shoes were highly polished brown leather brogues and his tan trousers had stiff pleats ironed into them. His woolen overcoat was neatly tailored and unbuttoned to reveal a navy cashmere sweater over a crisp white shirt. There was a fawn-colored scarf knotted rakishly about his neck and he wore his dark hair in a no-nonsense crew cut. To complete his outfit, he sported a pair of black leather gloves on his hands.

I didn’t like the gloves. Oh, they were beautifully stitched and made from what appeared to be a supple, high-grade hide, but they conjured some unfortunate associations in my mind. Associations that had to do with violence and pain and suffering. With the breaking of bones and the application of pressure and the clean, efficient sort of killing that spoke of a certain kind of professional.

I didn’t like what he was touching with his gloves very much, either. He was holding my badly burned copy of
The Maltese Falcon,
a single gloved finger resting between the splayed pages. He must have removed the book from the picture frame. I was only too aware of how fragile it had become in recent months and I really didn’t want it to suffer any more damage.

“Who are you?” Victoria asked from behind me. “What are you doing here?”

The man looked up from the book with a pained expression on his face, as if we’d rudely interrupted his reading. “Who I am is none of your concern, Miss Newbury.” His Russian accent was becoming more pronounced. So was the unease he was causing me. “But who
you
are interests me very much. I have learned a great deal about you in only two days. You also, Mr. Howard. Forgive me, but you interest me in particular.”

“You’re forgiven,” I said. “I do have a pretty engaging personality. Perhaps we could meet for a drink sometime? Somewhere other than my apartment late at night?”

He smiled thinly. The light from the ceiling bulb bounced off the lenses of his glasses.

“Your book,” he said, in a clipped voice, and lifted it in his hands. “It is burned, yes?”

“An accident,” I told him.

“Ah, yes. Accidents can be so … unfortunate. Especially where fire is concerned.”

The temperature in the room seemed to have heated up all of a sudden. The stocky guy was still pointing his gun at the side of my head, holding it in a two-handed grip. My skin was prickling beneath his aim.

I wet my lips and did my best to keep my voice even. “That’s a threat, right?” I said. “I only ask because I like to be sure about these things. It’s kind of embarrassing to misread a social situation. I mean, it could be you’ve let yourself into my apartment with your rent-a-goon, here, for some sort of spontaneous book club. A quaint little chat about Sam Spade and Dashiell Hammett.”

He closed my book and tossed it carelessly onto the surface of my desk. Then he clasped his gloved hands together and rested them on his knee.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“The item,” the man said, and plucked an imaginary shred of lint from his trousers. “The one Mr. Farmer was so keen for you to fetch.”

I swallowed. Heavily. I didn’t like the way things were shaping up. I didn’t like how much he seemed to know.

“Listen,” I said, “how about you let Victoria wait outside for a while? At least until we’ve finished talking. She really has nothing to do with any of this.”

“So chivalrous, Mr. Howard.” There was a studied cadence to his speech, the minor delay of the translation going on in his mind. “But I am sorry, I cannot grant your request.”

“I won’t call the police,” Victoria told him. “I promise.”

“Oh, but there is no need for your promise, Miss Newbury. Of course you will not call the police. You’ve been helping a burglar. You negotiated a fee on his behalf. Calling the police would be a very dangerous thing for you to do.”

I shuffled my feet. It felt like I was balancing on a high wire. And I really didn’t want to stumble and fall.

“Can we put our arms down, at least?” I asked.

“No, you can answer my question. Did you find the item?”

I could feel Victoria staring at me. Urging me to provide the answer the man wanted.

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

“Then I’m afraid, too, Mr. Howard. I’m afraid that you are lying to me.”

He reached one gloved hand inside his overcoat and removed it again very quickly. Now he was holding a pistol of his own. It had a suppressor screwed onto the barrel.

I might not have the sharpest of minds, but even I could tell the situation was deteriorating.

“I will ask you again,” the man said. “And if you lie to me, I will shoot you in the leg.”

“Which leg?”

“Five seconds, Mr. Howard.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Five.”

I shook my head. “I honestly can’t believe you’re giving me a countdown.”

“Four.”

“You struck me as such a sophisticated guy. But now you’re engaging in the worst sort of cliché.”

“Three.”

“Charlie,” Victoria hissed. “Be serious. Please.”

“Two.”

“The common hoodlum I could live with,” I told him, with a nod toward his scarred friend. “But a countdown. It’s just so … predictable.”

“One.”

He tightened his finger on the trigger and released a faint sigh, as if he was disappointed by my attitude but not unduly troubled by its consequences. I realized then that he was serious.

“Okay, wait,” I yelled, waving my hands.

He relaxed a fraction and raised his head above his gun.

“Just so I’m clear. Are you shooting on zero, or are you saying zero, and then shooting?”

He clamped his lips together and shook his head. Then he unfolded his legs, planted both feet on the floor, and leaned forward in the chair. He squinted along the gun barrel, drawing a bead on me.

“This will be a very painful joke, Mr. Howard. I will shoot your right leg, I think. Just below the knee. There is a lot of bone there. Not so much flesh. It is likely to be excruciating.”

“All right,” I told him, and this time I meant it. I spread my fingers, as if to signal the shift in my attitude. “You’ve made your point.”

“The item, then.”

“I have it,” I said. “But it’s stuffed down the back of my trousers. If you’ll just let me lower my hands, I’ll pass it to you.”

“That will not be necessary.”

He issued a series of commands in rapid-fire Russian to the scarred Neanderthal. The stocky guy stuffed his gun inside the leather jacket he had on and paced over to me with his knuckles scraping on the floor. He lifted the tails of my soggy raincoat and roughly tugged my shirt out of the waistband of my jeans. He snatched at the folder and delivered it to his boss.

Then he turned back to face me again. He stepped close and raised himself up on his toes so he was breathing right in my face. His breath was foul. I could feel the heat coming off him. He was sweating inside his leather jacket and he fairly reeked of testosterone. I daresay that if I’d lit a match, he’d have ignited like he was dowsed in petrol.

I tried to hold his gaze but not all that hard. It may surprise you to hear that I’m not such a manly chap. I’ve never been very skilled at lifting weights or flexing my muscles, mainly because I don’t have many muscles to flex.

He drew back his right hand and faked a punch to my jaw. I flinched and jerked backward and accidentally clipped Victoria in the temple with the back of my head. The guy enjoyed my reaction very much. He enjoyed the way Victoria yelped even more. He chuckled and split his slanted lips and grinned at me. His teeth were awful. They were yellowed and gapped, and he was missing his upper-right incisor altogether. The missing tooth really shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, you can’t call yourself a true bovine thug unless you have a missing tooth to go along with your disfiguring scar.

Talking of surprises, the guy delivered another one. He punched me with his left fist, hard into my stomach. I’d like to be able to tell you that I have a washboard gut, honed by many hours at the gym and countless thousands of sit-ups. I’d love to be able to say that my abs are so well defined that the guy hurt his knuckles more than he hurt me. But the last time I’d visited a gym was after-hours when I was checking to see if there was any cash in the till. And my waistline had definitely softened with all the dense German food I’d been enjoying just recently. Regular plates of currywurst and mashed potato had a lot to answer for.

So the moment he hit me, I crumpled and dropped onto my side on the floor. I clutched my hands to my stomach. My gut was in spasm. I gasped for air. I did a lot of moaning and some uncontrollable drooling.

Victoria shrieked but not for long. The guy stamped his foot, like a Big Unfriendly Giant who was coming to get her, and she choked her scream down and dropped to her knees beside me. She was muttering a lot. She was swearing repeatedly.

I made some more noises, mostly of the groaning and moaning variety. I stayed down. I did a lot of teeth clenching and fast breathing.

Scarface didn’t seem impressed. He snorted in disgust and bent down to prod my cheek with a big, dirty finger.

“Get up,” he said, in slow, measured English, delivered with a thick Russian tongue.

“Can’t,” I said.

“Up,” he commanded, and then he grabbed me by the collar of my jacket and hauled me to my feet. “Up.”

My legs were rubber. But Victoria hooked her hands under my armpits and fought to keep me on my feet.

The thug smiled nastily, his scar tweaking his expression into a snarl.

“This is all that you found?”

The question came from the man in my desk chair. He didn’t seem the least bit interested in my suffering. He had the buff cardboard file open on his knees and he was sorting through the loose pages inside. He was still holding the silenced pistol in his hand, but he wasn’t aiming it as studiously as before.

“I swear,” I said, panting. “You can search me if you like. There’s nothing else.”

“No, Mr. Howard.” He closed the file. Pushed himself up out of the chair. “This will not be necessary. I believe you.”

“Glad to hear it,” I managed, and swallowed a gob of hot saliva.

“Myself, also.” He pulled a face, like he was disgusted by my pitiful state. “I do not like hurting people. It can be so …
messy.
But please believe me when I say that if you are lying to me—if I find out that you have lied in any way at all—then I
will
kill you. And Miss Newbury, too. I make you a promise of this.”

I felt Victoria’s grip tense.

“You look like a man who keeps his promises, Mr.…”

“You may call me Pavel,” he said. “And this is my colleague, Vladislav.”

“Pavel and Vladislav. And are those your real names?”

“Nyet.”
He shook his head. “But you do not wish to know them. If I tell you our real names, it suggests we must meet again. And you do not want this, believe me.” Pavel tucked his pistol away inside his overcoat. “Thank you for this,” he said, lifting the folder in the air.

“Pleasure,” I told him.

He circled around us to the door and his stocky pal followed, shifting sideways like a crab. He faked one final punch, jinking his right shoulder forward, and if Victoria hadn’t been holding me up, it would have been enough to floor me. He grinned his crooked grin and showed me his missing tooth. He seemed proud of it. I guess he felt like he’d earned the right to be proud of most things.

They left my apartment and I listened to their footsteps on the stairs. They were steady. Unhurried. Then I heard the front door to my building open and close.

“Holy crap,” Victoria said. “What do we do now?”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m likely to faint.”

I broke free of Victoria’s grip and staggered across the room, doubled over with one hand clutched to my stomach. I made it as far as the window and looked out at the street below. A sleek black town car was parked alongside the railings of Kollwitzplatz. Pavel climbed into the rear and his henchman with the fast knuckles got into the driver’s seat. A few moments later, the headlights came on and the car pulled away from the curb and sped off along the rain-soaked street.

“Are they gone?” Victoria asked.

“They’re gone,” I told her, collapsing onto the windowsill.

But long after they’d left, their presence still lingered. Two strange men had broken into my home. They’d paced my rooms and pawed my things. Threatened my security. Scared me half to death and pummeled me halfway to the hospital. And yeah, I know, I’m a fine one to talk, but the truth is, I didn’t like it in the slightest.

ELEVEN

Victoria collapsed into my desk chair and gripped her head in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking. I wasn’t sure what to do. I could hobble over and hold her, I supposed. That would be the gentlemanly response. But it was fraught with danger.

“There, there, Vic,” I said, from over by the window. “Try to relax.”

“Relax? Are you serious?”

“They got what they came for. They won’t be back.”

“But why on earth did they come in the first place? Who were they? And how did they find out about you?”

“Us,”
I said, and immediately regretted it. Victoria lowered her hands. She was gaunt and slack-jawed. “Shall I get you some water?” I asked.

“I don’t want any water. I want to know what’s going on.”