The Good Thief's Guide to Paris (4 page)

FIVE

There are times I wish I’d listened to my own advice. There are times too when I wish I’d listened to my conscience. Days when I regret not listening to either are usually the worst.

The morning after I’d broken into Bruno’s apartment, I woke with a hangover and a head full of regrets. I also cursed the time on my alarm clock because I’d forgotten to set the alarm before falling asleep and I’d have to hurry if I was going to make my meeting with Pierre, my fence. Stumbling towards the handful of cramped units that formed the excuse for a kitchen in my apartment, I dropped two soluble tablets into a glass of tap water and necked the fizzing sludge. The bubbles seemed to percolate in my brain, as if trying to jump-start my grey cells. I wished they’d hurry up and do something about the dull, mushy ache around my forehead and the queasy, hollow sensation in my stomach. Sure, I know I hadn’t drunk that much wine but the truth is I’d been drinking on an empty stomach, a stomach that had stayed that way before I fell asleep and, hell, sometimes there’s no logic to hangovers anyway.

I groaned and circled my fingers at my temple, then looked at the stale baguette on my kitchen counter and pushed any thoughts of eating it to one side. I moved into the bathroom, twisted the hot tap on the shower and stepped beneath the steamy jet. No matter how hard I scrubbed, though, or how much menthol shampoo I applied to my scalp, I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that I was thinking and moving at something like half my normal speed. And I couldn’t shed the concerns that were niggling away at me about Bruno, either.

In the light of day, it seemed like a really dumb thing to have got involved in. And no matter what I’d said to Bruno, I hadn’t agreed to do it because of the money. Five hundred euros might not be pocket change but it would be scant compensation if he got caught trying to break into somebody’s home and happened to give the police my name as the “brains” behind it all. And the sad reality was I had only myself to blame. There I’d been, moping at the bar while Paige made merry with her friends at my expense, and instead of showing just a shred of maturity and walking over to join them in a good-natured way, I’d allowed Bruno to feed my ego, playing the hotshot thief and jumping two-foot into a situation I didn’t feel the least bit comfortable about. All things considered, I’d been a bloody idiot.

Ten minutes later, I left my apartment and began walking at a brisk pace towards the gardens of the Champ de Mars. Actually, it wasn’t too far from where I lived, though I hadn’t told Pierre as much when he suggested it as a rendezvous point. My apartment was just off Rue Duroc, on the edge of the seventh arrondissement, an area popular with lawyers, bankers and diplomats. There were several embassies nearby and on weekends in particular, it was something of a soulless place. But it was central, with half-decent transport links, and, most importantly from my point of view, it contained modern apartment buildings like the one I lived in, where the security was excellent. My building might not have had a CCTV system but it did have a concierge and quality locks had been fitted to all of the doors. Sure, that kind of security meant the seventh arrondissement wasn’t an area where I was inclined to practise my darker arts, but at least I had the comfort of knowing that anything I stole from elsewhere in the city would be relatively safe in my apartment.

As I neared the dusty gravel of the Place Joffre, at the rear of the Champ de Mars, I put on a pair of dark aviator sunglasses. I realised the glasses might look slightly odd to Pierre, since the weather was overcast, but I figured it had to be preferable to having him stare at my bloodshot eyes. The truth, you see, was that I was very keen to make a good impression. By my reckoning, it had been over a year since he’d offered me a decent job.

Naturally, that wouldn’t have mattered a great deal if I’d been sensible enough to hold onto the money Pierre had paid me for the merchandise I’d left Amsterdam with. As it happened, though, just days after I’d received my share of what Pierre had made (which, inevitably, was somewhat less than I’d hoped for) I’d been contacted by one of my old school chums, Miles. Nowadays, Miles works in the City and he’s very good at what he does and we’ve always been more than a little competitive with one another, and so the moment I foolishly bragged about the rather large sum of money I’d supposedly made from my latest suspense novel, Miles had insisted on investing the funds at a very healthy rate of return. I had no reason to suspect he would fail to deliver the kind of profit he’d talked about but the truth was I wouldn’t find out for at least three more years, since that was the remainder of the time my money had been tied up for. So although I was rather well-off on paper, I was currently experiencing something of a lean period in terms of cash flow, and I was really hoping Pierre might change all that.

I found Pierre some distance along the Champ de Mars, sat in a green metal chair within the perimeter of an outdoor café, adjacent on one side to a fairground carousel, a basketball court and a children’s play area, and on the other side to a stretch of lawn where, on brighter days, families would be sprawled on picnic blankets. A china espresso cup was positioned in front of Pierre, a clean ashtray off to the side. As I approached, he caught the attention of a pretty waitress clearing a nearby table and ordered me a café crème. He stood to shake my hand, eyes narrowing as he registered my sunglasses.

“You are turning European on me Charlie, no?”

“It’s infectious,” I said. “Ça va?”

“Oui. And you?”

I let go of his hand. “I’m fine. I’ve been working on a new book.
The Thief and the Fandango
.”

“Ah, très bien.” He gestured for me to sit down. “And where is the great Monsieur Faulks?”

“Currently, Rio. He moves to Cuba in chapter sixteen.”

Pierre frowned. “Cuba? To steal something?”

“I don’t know yet. But Faulks needs somewhere to hide.”

“And a woman?”

“He usually knows where to find one.”

I winked, said nothing further. For many years I’d only dealt with Pierre over the telephone so it still struck me as somewhat odd to be able to meet him in person. Part of me wondered if we might have been better sticking to the old routine, keeping things as business-like as possible. It’s true, we’d always been cordial with one another, but recently I’d sensed we were on the verge of new territory, where friendship might enter the equation. In my experience, that tended to make things awkward because there was more pressure not to let the other person down.

Strangely, in all our years of conducting business over the telephone, Pierre had been one of those rare people of whom I’d never fashioned an image in my mind. He was just a voice on the end of the line, shrouded in mystery. So I suppose it’s odd that I should have been surprised by his age when we first met – he was pushing sixty – or by the mauve birthmark that clouded the skin around his left eye. Like a permanent welt, the birthmark gave his face a disjointed appearance – as if the right side was coming towards you while the left side backed away into the shadows. If that makes Pierre sound sinister, it shouldn’t. More than anything, the birthmark gave him an air of innocence. And a man who dressed like Pierre could never be thought of as threatening. Today he had on a lemon sports shirt with a blue silk scarf knotted loosely about his neck, a pair of tan chinos and some cream-coloured loafers.

I took a seat and, out of habit, checked the tables near to us. As it happened, there were barely any customers. I clocked a middle-aged French woman in Jackie O shades, surreptitiously feeding her lapdog morsels of croissant, as well as a stern, distracted chap with an expensive-looking digital camera. Closest to us was a gentleman sat perhaps five metres away. I say gentleman because he was dressed in a linen three-piece suit with a straw boater upon his head. Since he was facing our direction, I was able to glimpse the gold chain of a pocket watch when he lowered his
Le Monde
newspaper to turn a page. A compact radio was positioned on the table in front of him, beside a half-empty cafetière, and since he appeared to be listening to the radio through a pair of discreet earphones, I didn’t think our privacy would be compromised.

“You have something for me?” I asked Pierre.

He nodded, sipping from his espresso. “Would you be interested? I thought maybe with your book . . .”

I waved his concern aside. “I’m interested.”

“Good.” He paused while the waitress set my coffee down. The coffee smelled dark and strong, even through the cap of foamy milk. “And your hand?” Pierre asked, screwing his face up as if he regretted the need to ask.

“It’s fine,” I said, instinctively moving my right hand beneath the table, then smiling at my mistake.

With a shrug of my shoulders, I raised my hand for Pierre to see and he beckoned for me to pass it over to him. I reached across the table and allowed him to turn my hand palm up, to feel around the swollen, inflamed knuckles on my middle and fourth fingers. The fourth finger had begun to take on a slight crook in recent months and the truth is the way it looked had been bothering me more than the pain of the gouty crystals beneath my skin. Pierre gently squeezed the distended tissue just above my knuckle and I tried not to wince.

“I have medication. Pills, an injection if it gets bad.”

“Too bad to work?”

“Not yet,” I told him, withdrawing my hand. “I can still type. And I can still turn locks. My index finger is unaffected, that’s the main thing.”

Pierre nodded, backing away from me again. He blinked, the movement fractionally delayed around his left eye. A fine pair we made – a fence with a blemished face and a thief with early-onset arthritis.

“The job is simple,” Pierre said. “But my client . . . cautious.”

“They don’t want mistakes.”

“
Exactement
. And you must take only one thing.”

“Which is?”

“A painting.”

I felt my eyes widen. It had always seemed to me that paintings were exactly the sort of item a professional thief should be hired to steal. Cash, for instance, could feel a little sordid by comparison, and I refused to get involved with drugs of any description. But good paintings, especially portraiture, appealed to me. And besides, stealing art was often a neat way of working. Either the client wanted the work of art for their own personal enjoyment, in which case it would never draw any public attention, or Pierre would be asked to sell the painting on his client’s behalf, in which event he could call on one of the better-established and more trustworthy networks in the business.

“Which artist?” I asked.

“It is signed Maigny. Early twentieth century.”

My excitement dropped down a notch. Everyone has ambitions, I suppose, and I hoped one day to take something really special. A Degas perhaps, or even a Cézanne. Well, not this time.

I let out a breath. “You have a description?”

Pierre reached into his shirt pocket and removed a Polaroid photograph. He slid the photograph across the table to me and I picked it up and had a good look. I couldn’t see as much as I would have liked. The image of the painting had been obscured by the camera flash when the shot was taken.

“It is oils, naturally,” Pierre said. “A street scene of Montmartre. There is a flower seller and a young woman with a parasol . . .”

“Looks awful.”

“It is worth ten thousand to you.”

I hitched an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Oui.”

I whistled and glanced up over Pierre’s shoulder. Behind him, above the roof of the café and the rows of quivering horse-chestnuts, I could see the uppermost two-thirds of the Eiffel Tower. The burnished ironwork of the tower looked lace-thin against the brooding grey clouds, the yellow elevators slowly ascending and descending like jaded commuters. I caught sight of a blur of people moving around the highest viewing platform, the spark of camera flashes into the gloom. I was confused by what Pierre was telling me and bothered by the money involved.

“What’s your fee?”

Pierre reacted as if I’d insulted him, squaring his shoulders and puffing his chest. “The same as yours, naturally.”

“So your client pays twenty thousand euros. For a nothing painting.”

“It may be worth it.”

I shook my head. “Not on the open market.”

“Who is to say? Perhaps my client is a collector, n’est-ce pas?”

“And just who is your client?”

Pierre paused. He held my eye.

“Oh come on. You’re kidding me, right?”

Pierre hunched his shoulders and showed me his palms. “They call on the telephone. They will not meet.”

And didn’t that sound like a great way to do business.

“A man?”

Pierre nodded.

“Know anything else?”

Pierre just looked at me again.

“How about the photograph?”

He pouted. “Sent to my post office box.”

“And you’re comfortable with this?” I asked, jutting my head forwards.

Pierre tapped the edge of the table with his fingernail. “Maybe it is not ideal.”

I rolled my eyes.

“But what is, Charlie? You tell me. The business these days, it is tough. Competition, oui?”

I sighed and reached for my cigarette packet. I removed a cigarette and began to light it. Pierre motioned for me to hand the packet to him and I passed him the lit cigarette instead. He took a draw, then stifled a cough. The last time we’d met he’d been giving up.

I leaned back in my chair and thought some more about what had been said. The feelings that were stirring in me had echoes of Amsterdam. Something didn’t feel right about the money we were being offered and I didn’t like that Pierre knew so little about his client. Sure, that wasn’t exactly unique, but I don’t know, I was having doubts.

And yet, I was tempted too. Tempted to the tune of ten thousand euros for just a few hours’ work. Back in my apartment, pinned up on the wall above my writing desk, there happens to be all kinds of information about the latest Michael Faulks novel I’m writing. I have a time-line and a plot summary and a list of characters. The character list is broken down on another piece of paper where I’ve drawn up a table with a series of questions. “
What is their main goal?
” “
What is their main strength?
” “
What is their main weakness?
” Now, if I were to put my own name into that table, the weakness box would be easy to fill. “
Greed
”, it would say. And maybe beneath greed I’d add, “
Risk-taker
”.