The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (15 page)

“I
think
so.”

“Either you do or you don’t, Vic. There’s no ‘think so’ about it.”

“How do you even know that’s the right building?”

“Because it stands right out,” I said. “Because it’s one of the only Bauhaus properties left in the area. Everything else looks like it’s straight out of Moscow in the 1980s. It’s practically the only thing that isn’t gray or green.”

The building I was pointing toward was a pale pinkish red. To me, it was as clear as a ship’s distress flare. I could have mentioned the color to Victoria, but the truth is I already had. Twice. And if she wasn’t seeing it now, I didn’t believe she ever would.

We were facing the wide concrete band of Karl-Marx-Allee. The imposing boulevard speared out from Alexanderplatz toward the giant circular crossroads at Frankfurter Tor. I knew the Allee was a couple of kilometers in length, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that if the Fernsehturm were to come loose from its foundations and topple forward right now, it would fit perfectly into the space, like a tall dessert spoon in a chest of silverware.

The Allee was lined on either side by vast, boxy apartment complexes. There were many more blocks and towers all over the eastern side of the city. Looking down on them, I was struck by how ordered it all appeared. Everything was a straight line or a rectangle or a square, reminding me of a giant Airfix model. If I just pressed my thumb against the glass, it seemed as though I might be able to pry the individual pieces out of their giant plastic frame, ready to build a new model city somewhere in the Cold War depths of the USSR.

The boulevard was streaming with traffic. Cars and vans and buses, mostly. The vehicles looked like die-cast toys on a huge patterned rug. Belowground, U-Bahn trains would be shuttling fast along concealed railway lines. Thousands of people heading to destinations unknown, for reasons unclear. Most of those reasons would be law-abiding, though in a city the size of Berlin, I doubted I was the only one planning a crime. Mind you, I don’t suppose there were many thieves casing their target from a mile away in one direction and several hundred feet up in the air.

“Is this helpful at all?” Victoria asked.

“Not in the slightest,” I told her. “I just thought you might like the view.”

She stepped away from me and rested her hand on a floor-mounted telescope. I thought about feeding a couple of euros into it and inviting her to study the cleaner’s building through the magnified lens. But what if she didn’t see it then?

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s take a look at the rest of the city.”

We strolled around the precarious sphere, watching the world revolve slowly below us. The gray blocks and gridded streets of the east gave way to a more organic layout as we moved west. Color seeped in. Red roofing tiles. The blackened river Spree. The dirty brown of railway tracks. The egg-yolk yellow and new-sneaker white of a street tram.

“So I take it you’re not planning to spend the entire afternoon up here,” Victoria said.

“I thought we’d go home,” I told her. “Take a few hours to ourselves. You’ll be pleased to hear I have some writing to catch up on. And I need to gather some equipment.”

“For later?”

I nodded.

“So, I’ve been thinking,” Victoria said. “I’d really like to come with you this evening.”

“Thought you might,” I told her, and smiled despite myself. “But as it happens, I’m afraid you can’t. Truth is, Vic, I have something
much
more important for you to do.”

NINETEEN

I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t work when we got back to my place. I shut myself in my chilly bedroom and slept for a couple of hours instead. Naturally, I told Victoria that I was writing, and I even carried my laptop and my notes into my bedroom to try to create the right impression. Somehow, though, I doubt it worked. Victoria’s a long way from stupid, and she would have spotted that she couldn’t hear the tippety-tap of my fingers on my laptop keys, let alone the frustrated pacing or hopeless playacting I tend to engage in when I’m battling a new scene.

I didn’t care. Right then—book or no book—I needed to rest. True, I was capable of making mistakes at the best of times, but even I knew that it would be a really bad idea to try to break in to a highly exposed apartment building in the early evening when I was barely half awake.

Of course, if by some unexpected fluke Victoria really had believed that I was hard at it, then the urgent bleat of my alarm clock would almost certainly have given the game away. And my subterfuge was hardly helped by the fuzzy-eyed stagger I made past the open doorway to her bedroom on my way to the bathroom, or the distinct pillow imprint I happened to find in the side of my face when I squinted into the mirror above the sink.

No matter. I washed my face and wet my hair and tidied my clothes, and then I breezed into the living room and snatched up my telephone. My landlord’s number was scrawled on a pad right beside it, and I punched in the digits and waited a few moments for him to answer. Our conversation didn’t take long, and it was every bit as productive as I’d hoped it would be. Once it was concluded, I returned to my bedroom and gathered together the equipment I’d be likely to need on my latest felonious escapade, and then I went and talked to Victoria as I fitted my arms through the sleeves of my raincoat.

Whether Victoria was impressed by my multitasking, I couldn’t say, but she left me in absolutely no doubt that she didn’t appreciate the special mission I’d assigned her. I can’t pretend I was surprised. Nobody enjoys waiting around for a tradesman to arrive. But hey, my bedroom window wasn’t going to fix itself, and
somebody
was going to have to deal with the glazier.

*   *   *

Some forty minutes later, I emerged from the Weberwiese U-Bahn station onto Karl-Marx-Allee. I’d ridden up on a slow-moving escalator without paying attention to my bearings, only to discover that I was on the wrong side of the street. Not normally an issue, I grant you, but when the street in question is strikingly wide and happens to be divided by multiple lanes of fast-flowing traffic, it becomes more of a challenge.

I set off in search of a crossing point. The pavement was about the size of your average motorway, but part of it had been torn up for maintenance work. I weaved around the construction site and between a line of plane trees, all of them stripped of their leaves by the October winds and rain. It wasn’t fully dark just yet, but the evening sky had faded to a dusky half-light, and the vehicles streaming by had their headlights and brake lights flaring.

The building on my left was a monumental apartment block that had the appearance of a huge office complex. It was so long and so high that I felt as though I was shrinking as I paced alongside it. Shops, bars, and businesses were located right along the ground floor, facing the street.

Running just above them was a bright pink industrial waste pipe. I’d seen the pipes elsewhere in Berlin, and it was a sight I was still struggling to adjust to. The pipe was held together by no-nonsense rivets and supported on metal columns, painted in the same garish pink. It stretched as far as the end of the apartment complex before hooking to the right, snaking up in the air and crossing over the lines of speeding traffic to the opposite pavement, where it continued into the far distance.

There was a pedestrian crossing nearby, and I pressed the button and waited for the lights to change. This wasn’t the kind of place you wanted to make a run for it, especially since jaywalking is seriously frowned upon in Berlin. I can’t tell you the number of times that elderly German women have appeared, as if from nowhere, simply to berate me for setting a bad example to the city’s children. It’s happened so often now that I honestly believe they’d be more understanding if they disturbed me while I was in the process of stealing from their homes in the dead of night.

Eventually, the green Ampelmännchen appeared, halting the traffic. This jaunty little fellow used to be confined solely to the eastern sectors of Berlin, but these days he pops up most places in the city, and not just at pedestrian crossings. With his wide-brimmed hat, swinging arm, and confident stride, you’ll find him on all manner of souvenir merchandise. In popularity, he ranks right up there alongside the Fernsehturm, which it just so happened I could see as I glanced to my right while crossing the street. The tapering concrete tower was lit vividly from below, lending the panorama globe the appearance of a hovering spaceship.

I hopped up onto the pavement and followed the pink spaghetti pipe work as far as the apartment building I was interested in. It was five stories high, with a peach and white façade. There were balconied corridors all along the front, and two main entrances with glass doors, where the central stairwells were located. There was a newsagent and a general store to the right, and a line of ground-floor apartments to the left.

I vaulted the low brick wall in front of the ground-floor apartments without breaking my stride, grumbled at the painful twinge in my bruised stomach, then walked to the door at the end of the line. I tugged a scrap of paper from my pocket and made sure I had the right place. Then I glanced around quickly and ducked below the wall.

Resting on my haunches, with my back against the stippled plaster, I eased my customized plastic gloves onto my hands and took a closer look at what I was up against.

Despite the jolly peach plaster, the apartment was quite drab. There was a single window on the right of the door and a double window on the left. The door was dark gray, fitted with a security peephole in the center and a standard dead bolt lock at the side.

I didn’t anticipate the lock posing a problem, and since I was down on the floor already, I was able to get a good look at it before selecting an appropriate pick and a likely torsion wrench from my spectacles case. That only left one unanswered question. Was anybody home?

TWENTY

Part of me was reluctant to knock. I didn’t want any of the neighbors to hear me, and I most especially didn’t want anyone to answer my call. But I couldn’t see a way of avoiding it. I had to know what I was, quite literally, letting myself in for. And although there were no lights shining from behind the chintzy net curtains in the windows, that didn’t mean there wasn’t somebody occupying a room in the rear.

I waited until a delivery lorry was thundering by before standing and banging my fist on the door. Then I fought my natural instincts and made sure that my head was perfectly aligned with the peephole. Sure, my feet were pointing in the opposite direction, toward the street and my likely getaway, but I was doing my best to hold the position. I counted to ten. I continued to twenty. When I reached thirty, my knees went from under me and I dropped back down to my cover.

Short of lurking there until I evolved some kind of X-ray vision, I knew as much as I possibly could, and it was time to go in.

You want to know the truth? This is the part I like most of all. First, there’s the charge of excitement that comes with the anticipation of doing something that’s expressly forbidden. But it’s more than that. It’s also the satisfaction I get from doing the job right. It took me years to master the craft of picking locks. It’s taken me years since to develop my skills as a burglar. It’s not an easy profession—trust me, it requires a lot of nerve and a lot of careful thought, and even then an awful lot can go wrong—but just now I was about as good as I was ever going to get. I knew most locks inside out, and until the day that the arthritis in my fingers seized my knuckles for good, I was every bit as dextrous as I needed to be. I’d refined and reworked my approach to searching a place, so that I was as methodical and as error-free as possible. I was still young, and despite my lingering addiction to nicotine, I was passably athletic. I was still ambitious. I was still greedy. And I still craved the buzz that came from stepping over a stranger’s threshold and discovering something that I could never have expected to find.

I cracked the lock in question easily enough. Almost too easily to take genuine satisfaction from it. Then I reached up and poked the door open ever so gently. There was nobody on the other side. No obstruction whatsoever. I pocketed my tools, reached for my torch, and eased the door open until the gap was just wide enough for me to slip through.

I pulled the door closed behind me without the slightest sound. Then I straightened and stretched the aching muscles in my legs and back. I felt a smile creep across my face and I sucked a deep breath in through my nostrils.

And then I sneezed. Hard and fast and loud.

The sneeze came out of nowhere. An involuntary reaction. There’d been an itch and a tingle in my nose, and then there’d been the sneeze. Nothing in between. No warning at all. I hadn’t even raised my hand.

I raised my hand now, as if to ward off a blow or to take the whole thing back. I was standing very still. Not even my heart was beating. I stared in horror toward the end of the hallway. There was movement across the far wall. A wavering shadow. Someone
was
here, lurking behind a doorway. And thanks to my damn sinuses, they’d definitely heard me.

My limbs felt leaden. My reactions slow. So much for the wonders of youth and adrenaline. Forget fight or flight. I felt about as nimble as a statue.

The shadow moved again. It was low down on the wall, but it was growing in size. The person behind the doorway was edging closer. He was going to confront me.

My lungs were burning. I needed to breathe. But I was scared to inhale.

I tried to resist, but I couldn’t hold out for very long. I felt myself weaken and I began to draw air through my nose. I opened my mouth wide and squeezed my eyes tight shut. But it didn’t help. The moment the breeze whistled through my nostrils, I knew I was doomed. There was a very particular scent in the hallway. A pungent, musty aroma. The air was thick with it. It was something familiar. Something unpalatable. I was trying to place it. Trying very hard. And all the while I could feel the tingling and the agitation getting worse. I was definitely going to sneeze. There was no way around it.