The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (23 page)

In case there was any doubt, I’d spotted a small brass plaque on the front of the cage.
Presented to His Excellency, the Right Honourable Donald Chambers, with warmth and appreciation from the people of Sri Lanka.
The plaque was the reason I’d spun the cage around at the earliest opportunity that had come my way. It was also why I’d been so willing to cover the cage back up with the black cloth.

I have to say I was impressed. It couldn’t have been easy for Stirling to snatch Buster and smuggle the cage out of the embassy. Mind you, getting it out of Stirling’s apartment was no walk in the park, either.

I swung the cage around in a hurry and knocked the ceramic table lamp onto the floor. The lamp base smashed. The momentum carried the cage on, spilling Buster’s feed and his water. The cage clattered into a chair. The chair toppled over.

Bam.

I glanced back toward the bathroom door. A wooden panel had splintered, and a black boot had burst through the timber. Vladislav’s lower leg was attached to the boot. It thrashed against the torn wood.

I dodged the table and rushed across to the elevator. I pressed the call button. The button lit up. The doors didn’t open.

Bam.

Vladislav was kicking the door again. Obliterating it, maybe.

I pressed my ear against the elevator doors. I could hear a fast whirring. A meshing of gears. Then the merciful ding of the carriage arriving.

The doors slid apart. I jumped inside and turned around with the cage in front of me. I punched the button for the ground floor. No need for my picks this time. The elevator wouldn’t require a key when it was summoned from the penthouse.

Bam.

There was the wrench of wood against metal. A thud. A judder. A loud, violent curse.

I punched the button again.

Bad mistake. The doors had just started to close, and now they stopped and shuffled back open.

I hammered the button a third time.

Nothing.

I looked wildly about the room. I was just about to leap out and search for a hiding place when the doors started to close once more.

My breath caught in my throat. Vladislav careered around the corner and barreled into the glass table. The table shunted sideways. He spotted me and reached for his jacket pocket. He snatched at his gun.

The doors were closing far too slowly for my liking. They still had a ways to go.

Vladislav pushed himself up from the table. He raised his gun. His wrist danced and I ducked and the mirror behind me exploded into a billion itty-bitty pieces.

The doors sealed. The elevator was still for a moment. Then it began to descend.

I felt a tugging sensation. Something was pulling against my hands.

I raised my head and squinted out through half-closed eyes as the heavy black cloth was lifted clear off Buster’s cage. The more the carriage went down, the more the cloth went up. It was trapped between the elevator doors. I didn’t see it for long before it was sucked clean out of the carriage.

Buster was crouched on his middle perch. His head was buried beneath his wing. He glanced up tentatively and blinked, and I did much the same thing.

Little shards of mirror glass fell from my shoulders. I brushed them out of my hair and off my raincoat. They tinkled against the ground and crunched beneath my shoes. The elevator zoomed downward. Floor four, floor three …

“Oh, my goodness,”
Buster said. Then he whistled. His whistle started high and went low. He sounded like a broken kazoo.

“Close call,” I said.

“Close call,”
he agreed.

“Are you okay?”

He elongated his neck and ruffled his wings. He twittered and whistled.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” I told him.

The elevator reached the ground floor. The doors parted.

A woman was standing in front of me. She was wearing an immaculate white cashmere coat and carrying a collection of shopping bags from the KaDeWa department store. Her jaw fell when she saw the devastation inside the elevator.

I didn’t linger to try and explain myself. The Russians would be coming fast behind me, and if they’d found an access point to the stairwell, they could be halfway down already.

I skirted the horrified woman and lugged the bird cage toward the front of the building. I shoved the door open and it slammed into someone coming the other way.

A man howled and reeled back on his heels. He waved his arms. He lost his balance and crashed onto his backside.

Now sure, I was in a hurry, but I like to think that normally I would have helped him back up. But I wasn’t about to help this guy. It was Henri, the French pickup artist who’d surprised me in the foyer of my apartment building.

I lurched to my left and broke into a run, then quickly broke out of it again.

A car had screeched to a halt in front of me. It was a Trabant, pale cream in color, aside from a mismatched green hood. The driver leaned across the front seats. He thrust the passenger door open.

“Get in,” he yelled. He was a stringy guy with long brown hair and a fuzzy beard.

I hesitated.

He revved the Trabbi’s engine. Noxious gas spewed out of the exhaust. Onlookers craned their necks to watch us from the train station and the street cafés.

“Herr Howard,” he yelled. “Please. You must trust me.”

Goodness, there were an awful lot of people in Berlin who were keen for me to do that. Not one of them had earned my trust just yet. And this fellow merited it least of all. His voice sounded terribly familiar. I was all but certain that he was my late-night caller.

I looked over my shoulder. Henri was on his feet, straightening his clothes. Then he was back down again. The door to the apartment building had swung open fast and caught him full in the face. There was blood on the glass. He clutched his hands to his nose and moaned and squirmed on the ground, and the two Russians stood in the doorway scanning the street.

What did I have to lose?

I jumped inside the Trabant with the bird cage on my knees, and my driver roared away before I’d had chance to close my door. He accelerated in the direction of the archway running under the train station, and the Russians opted not to leap in front of him. Cars weren’t allowed to drive through the archway. There was a yellow tram coming from the right. Another closing in on our left. I heard the clamor of tram bells. The wail of metal brakes. I shut my eyes. There was a shriek of rubber, and I felt myself being thrown sideways toward the driver. When I opened my eyes again, my door had closed of its own accord and we were slaloming past a new obstacle.

It was a blacked-out town car. It had stopped very sharply in front of us. The front end was bearing down on its brakes. The rear end was fishtailing.

I screamed very loud and very high. We slewed to the left and just skimmed it, trading paint, and then we straightened up and zoomed alongside the ponderous river Spree. I turned my head and considered the chaos we’d left behind.

The driver of the town car was standing in the street. He had one elbow braced on the roof of his car, and he was shielding his eyes with his free hand, staring after us. Another familiar face. Duane, Nancy’s driver. Well, he’d be pleased to know that he’d succeeded in making me squeal, though not in the way he’d imagined. Our near collision had made me yelp like a little girl. One who was in serious danger of upchucking.

TWENTY-NINE

“My name’s Buster. What’s your name? What’s your name?”

Buster was one step ahead of me. I wanted to know the same thing. I stared at the guy driving the Trabbi.

“What he said,” I told him, gesturing toward Buster.

He was a gangling fellow with a pale, lean face. His light brown hair, flecked with streaks of blond, was tied into a ponytail, and his beard was rangy and unkempt. His trousers and jacket were aged brown corduroy. The jacket was a little tight in the shoulders and a touch short in the sleeves. It revealed the flared cuffs of his paisley shirt. And from what I could gather so far, he wasn’t a big fan of deodorant.

I leaned my head toward the open window and gulped down some air.

“My name is Gert,” he said, eventually. “Gert Hackler.”

“Okay, Gert, meet Buster. And you already know my name.”

Gert offered up a quick salute. “Hallo, Buster.”

Buster hopped onto his uppermost perch and shifted his weight between his feet.
“Wanna sing a song?”

I ignored Buster’s suggestion and fixed my attention on Gert. “So now that you two have been formally introduced, can I have my friend back?”

Gert’s mouth formed a perfect O. His eyelids fluttered. He had long, dainty lashes, like those of a little girl. He stared at me in confusion for so long that I had to reach out and prod his hairy chin until he focused on the road again.

“Victoria had better be safe,” I told him. “I might not look like much, but if you’ve hurt a hair on her head, I’ll never let you forget it.”

He stared across at me, even more gormless than before. “Wait. You think that I have her?” he finally asked.

“I don’t
think
it. I know it. You’re the guy who’s been calling me in the middle of the night.”

“
Ja,
I call you,” he said, lifting his angular shoulders and glancing back at the road. “But I do not have your friend.”

I paused. Tried to swallow my temper. “Then who does? Some accomplice of yours?”

“
Nein,
you do not understand. I call to warn you, this is all.”

“You threatened me!”

“Nein.”
He shook his head fast and his ponytail lashed around his weedy neck. “I help you.”

Buster seemed to like Gert. He twittered merrily at him.
“Wanna sing a song?”
he asked again.

“No, Buster,” I snapped. “Nobody wants to sing a bloody song.”

“Wanna hear Buster count?”

I sighed loudly and glared at Gert. “I just want to know what’s going on.”

“Then I tell you,” Gert said, and checked his rear mirror. “But not here. I take you somewhere safe,
ja
?”

“Good luck with that,” I told him. ‘The people I was running from are seriously connected. They have a habit of tracking me down. So you might want to ditch this car. I’m pretty sure at least one of them saw your number plate.”

“No problem.” He turned to me and grinned disconcertingly. “The plates, they fall off a long time ago.”

*   *   *

Gert drove me across the city and parked alongside some wooded scrubland that was enclosed by a chain-link fence with razor wire coiled along the top. The location seemed very remote. The only noise was the clatter of the Trabbi’s two-stroke engine and the rustle of the wind through the trees.

I realized I’d been reckless to get in the car in the first place, and chances were, I’d be foolish to stay. I didn’t know where I was. Nobody knew I was here. And I had no way of telling if Gert was dangerous or not.

“You will come with me, please,” he said.

I watched him get out of the car and approach the fence. His trousers were too tight and far too short, the cuffs hanging way above the battered white gym shoes he had on.

I looked at Buster. Buster turned his head away, burrowing under his wing.

“What do we do?” I whispered. “Buster? Should we run?”

Typical. The one time I wanted him to speak, Buster didn’t make a sound.

Gert was beckoning me toward him. He’d found some kind of split in the fence and he was using his meager body weight to hold it open.

I hesitated. But did I really have a choice? The only other move I could think of was to return Buster to the embassy direct. But if I did that, I’d have nothing to exchange for Victoria. And my faith in Freddy’s ability to help me had been seriously shaken. I was being pursued by at least three groups of people I knew of, and Gert
had
got me away from them.

I found myself opening my door and walking toward him. He smiled encouragingly, then gestured for me to duck my head, and I scraped through against the stiff wire, carrying Buster’s cage in front of me. Gert followed, heaving the fence back into position behind him. Then he pointed in the direction of the trees, and I waded through the overgrown grass alongside him. Buster flitted around his cage, whistling and warbling.

Gert patted the air with his bony hand. “We must be quiet now.”

“Oh, really. Why’s that?”

He raised a finger to his lips and shushed me. “There are guards, sometimes,” he whispered. “And dogs.”

I stared at him. “Where the hell
are
we?” I hissed.

“Be patient. I show you.”

“Are we trespassing?”

He walked on, shaking his head, his ponytail swishing across his gawky shoulders. “
Ja,
but do not worry, Mr. Burglar. You will be safe if you stay with me and you do not make too much noise.”

“What about the bird?” I asked. Buster was still twittering away.

“He must stay quiet, also.”

Oh, brilliant. That was all right then. I mean, any casual observer could see that in our short time together, I’d developed absolute control over when and where Buster decided to speak.

“Ssshh,” I whispered. “Buster. Hush up.”

I rattled his cage. He lifted his orange beak in the air. Whistled louder.

I gave up. Birdsong would be okay, I guessed. It wasn’t exactly unusual in a grassy, wooded area.

Gert led me through the trees, taking long, rangy steps. I blundered through nettles and brambles, dead branches snapping beneath my feet.

Then the trees began to thin, and we stepped out into a grassy clearing where I came face-to-face with a dinosaur. And not just any dinosaur. It was a triceratops. A very big, very bulky triceratops, with a thick gray hide, a spiky neck frill, and a spiked horn on the bridge of its nose. It was bent low, with its jaws parted, like it was chewing on the grass.

I froze.

“What the hell is this place?” I asked. “Jurassic Park?”

Gert smoothed his hand over the flank of the triceratops. “The Spreepark,” he said.