The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (31 page)

“Buster says hello. My name is Buster. Buster says hello.”

I didn’t feel much like responding. Victoria mumbled a greeting and slumped down onto the floor next to his cage. She clutched her head in her hands.

“What a mess,” she said.

I didn’t think she was talking about the pile of sunflower seeds.

“Do you think Freddy knows that woman is dead?” she asked.

“Not unless he was the killer.”

Victoria looked up sharply. I summoned a tired smile.

“Bad joke,” I said. “The guy I saw through the window was way too thin and way too tall.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m certain. But Freddy did tell me that Jane had been missing since the night I witnessed the murder. He’d held back on us before.”

Victoria exhaled loudly. She rested a hand on Buster’s cage. “I wonder what she was doing here? Why did she come to this apartment in the first place?”

“That’s what I need to think about.”

I peeled my gloves from my hands and stuffed my hands inside my pockets. I gazed up at the ceiling. I really needed to focus. To concentrate.

“Wanna sing a song?”

“Give me strength,” I said.

“Wanna hear Buster count?”

“Shut up,” I yelled.
“Shut up. SHUT UP.”

Buster twittered once, then fell silent, like someone had cut his power supply.

“Hey, go easy on him,” Victoria complained. “None of this is his fault.”

“Actually, it kind of is.”

She pouted at Buster. “Poor thing. You didn’t ask to be stolen, did you?”

“He might as well have, going on like that all the time. And more to the point, if he hadn’t been stolen, I wouldn’t be caught up in this situation. I’d be home finishing my novel.”

Victoria snorted.

“What?”

She shook her head. “Who do you think you’re kidding, Charlie? You’re not even close.”

“You reckon?”

“I know. I’ve been waiting for you to tell me you need an extension.”

“Well.” I let my shoulders drop. “I might need one now.”

“And you can forget it.” Victoria wiggled her fingers at Buster. “Your publishers will never agree.”

Great
. More bad news.

“Listen, do you want to hear why I think Jane Parker was here?” I asked Victoria.

“Oh, like you wouldn’t believe.”

So I told her. I spoke slowly at first, then faster as the pieces of the puzzle started to slot into place in my mind. I hadn’t been sure how it was going to fit together when I began, or if it even would, but the more I explained and teased out my thoughts, the more I began to believe I could be on to something.

Jane had come here because of the code in the top secret file, I said. Yes, it was an assumption, but it was a solid one. There were plenty of people scrabbling around Berlin trying to get their filthy mitts on its contents. So she’d hidden it in her hotel room and then she’d come to this apartment to meet somebody when she was due to be preparing for an embassy function.

My guess was that she was trying to sell the file. The complete code was worth money. There was no question about it. That was why Freddy had been willing to pay me such a generous amount to find Buster. That was why Nancy Symons had offered to double my fee and had covered her options by kidnapping Victoria.

“Wait,” Victoria said. “Could the Americans have killed her? Or the French guy or the Russians?”

“I don’t think so. If they had, they wouldn’t have been chasing around after me. The Russians wouldn’t have broken into my apartment. The Americans wouldn’t have snatched you. And besides, the killer didn’t look like anyone I’ve seen so far.”

“So maybe he worked for another foreign power?”

I nodded. I agreed it was possible. Then I moved on to discussing the venue for Jane’s murder. I mentioned that she’d only been in Berlin for a short time, so I doubted she’d picked the location herself. My best guess was that her killer had suggested where they should meet. And since the chances were good that her killer was working on behalf of a foreign government, I thought it likely that the empty apartments might belong to one of the many embassies in Berlin. After all, the Tiergarten was close to the city’s diplomatic quarter, and it was common for embassies to provide accommodation for their staff in the vicinity. Take the first apartment I’d been tasked with breaking in to: Daniel Wood’s home was situated just across the street.

“So,” I concluded, “if we can find out which, if any, embassy owns or rents these apartments for their staff, we can tell Freddy where to look for his killer.”

“And how does that help us exactly?”

Funny. Victoria always did have the knack of asking me the one question I really didn’t want to contend with.

“It doesn’t,” I admitted. “At least not directly.”

“And indirectly?”

I removed my hands from my pockets and showed her my palms. “I guess the British embassy might feel like they owe us some thanks. They might help us to get out of Berlin safely.”

Victoria made a noise that suggested she wasn’t altogether overwhelmed by our prospects.

“There’s something else I don’t get,” she said.

“Go ahead. Kick a guy when he’s down.”

“Why was Jane trying to sell an incomplete code? She only had four pages.”

I frowned and shook my head wearily. “Maybe she didn’t know it was incomplete. Or maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she figured she’d make some quick cash and disappear before her buyer caught on to her.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Victoria said. “She can’t have been offered vastly more money than the Americans offered you. And that wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to walk out on a successful career with the British government and start a new life somewhere else. Especially if she’d betrayed her country and risked being caught for it.”

I removed the photograph of Jane from my pocket. I stared at the image. I couldn’t tell how long ago it had been taken. Two or three years, perhaps? She looked untroubled, bright and alert. Back when the shot had been taken, she’d been anticipating a long and promising future.

“So she didn’t know it was incomplete,” I said, offhand now. “She found the file and she took a chance.”

“Hell of a chance. It was positively reckless.”

“Perhaps she didn’t know what she was getting herself into. She could have been as clueless as we were when Freddy hired us.”

“Don’t count on it.”

Hell, as soon as Vic uttered the C-word, I knew I was going to regret it.

“Wanna hear Buster count?”

“No,” I snapped. “No one wants to hear Buster count. And no one wants to hear you sing, either.”

Buster ignored me. He’d been waiting too long to demonstrate his numerical prowess. He hopped up onto his very top perch, raised his head, opened his throat, and began to chant in a rapid falsetto.

“Sixthreeeightfourtwosevenseventhreesixtwonine.”

“Oh, terrific.” I smacked my forehead with the heel of my hand. “You can’t even do that right.”

Buster seemed thrilled by his performance. He flapped his wings. Shifted his weight between his feet. Puffed out his chest.

“That’s marvelous, Buster,” Victoria told him.

“No it’s not,” I complained. “That’s not counting. It’s just saying a bunch of numbers in a random order.”

Buster blew me a raspberry.

“Wow,” I said. “So you understand criticism, at least.”

“Sixthreeeightfourtwosevenseventhreesixtwonine.”

“More random numbers! Wow, that really is impressive.”

Victoria was waving her hand at me. She was trying to get me to shut up. But I was on a roll.

“What next?” I asked. “Is little Buster going to scramble the alphabet? Are you going to talk backward?”

“Hush,” Victoria said.

“Sixthreeeightfourtwosevenseventhreesixtwonine.”

“She said,
be quiet,
” I told Buster.

“No, you idiot.” Victoria jabbed a finger at me. “Listen to him. Pay attention to what he’s saying.”

She lowered her face to the cage. She smiled and batted her eyelids. Buster tucked his head beneath his wing and nibbled on his feathers, acting sheepish.

“Count for us, Buster,” Victoria cajoled. “Be a clever boy, Buster. We wanna hear Buster count.”

“No we bloody don’t.”

“Hush,” she said again, glaring at me. She turned back to Buster and adopted a soft, coaxing tone. “Buster count. We wanna hear Buster count.”

“Sixthreeeightfourtwosevenseventhreesixtwonine.”

“Ha.” Victoria clapped her hands and grinned at me. Her eyes were wide with some kind of awareness I appeared to be lacking.

“What?” I snapped.

“My God, you still don’t get it, do you?”

I shook my head. I really didn’t.

“The numbers aren’t
random,
” she said. “He’s repeating the same sequence. Every time.”

“He is?”

“Yes.”

Buster had my interest now. I crouched down and clicked my good fingers at him.

“Do it again,” I said.

Victoria tutted. “Not like that. Ask him to count.”

“I’m not going to ask a bird to count. He doesn’t understand me.”

“Yes he does. Buster count. Come on, Buster, sweetie, count for Charlie.”

“Sixthreeeightfourtwosevenseventhreesixtwonine.”

“Good boy!”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

“Somebody taught him that,” Victoria assured me. “It’s the same every single time. He memorized it.”

“You think?”

“I do. But what could it mean?”

Just as she finished speaking, Buster’s throat made the warbling noise of a ringing telephone. He tipped his head over to one side and considered me with an inquiring gaze.

“Holy cow,” Victoria said. “Is it a telephone number? Maybe it’s for the ambassador. You know, in case Buster ever got lost.”

I pouted. It was possible, I supposed. I pulled out the prepaid mobile Gert had provided me with and tapped in the numbers Buster had reeled off—638 427 736 29. But the phone didn’t connect. The call didn’t lead anywhere at all.

“Hmm. Then what could it mean?” Victoria pondered, as if to herself.

“Sixthreeeightfourtwosevenseventhreesixtwonine.”
Buster flapped his wings insistently.
“Sixthreeeightfourtwosevenseventhreesixtwonine.”

I could see the numbers in my head by now. They were scrolling through my mind as if they were appearing on an electronic display …
63842773629, 63842773629, 63842
 … Surely they had to
mean
something. It couldn’t just be a coincidence. Could it?

“Oh,” I said, suddenly. “Oh, that could be brilliant.”

“What? What’s brilliant?”

I picked up a handful of sunflower seeds and scattered them from a great height into Buster’s cage.

“Eat up, buddy,” I said. “I think you’ve just given us the answer.”

“The answer? The answer to what?” Victoria asked. “Charlie, tell me. Please.”

And so I did. And the more I talked, the crazier and more speculative it sounded. But I was past caring. I was going with my instinct. With my gut. And I felt a sudden and overwhelming surge of confidence, the like of which I hadn’t experienced in days.

THIRTY-NINE

We couldn’t act straightaway. We needed to wait for daylight. So once I’d finished talking things through with Victoria, I told her we might as well try to get some sleep.

“Sleep?” she said, as if I was crazy. “Where are we going to do that, exactly?”

“Right here.”

“You expect me to sleep on the floor?”

“Hey, I’d offer you a bed if there was one. Or I suppose we could snoop around and try to find an empty apartment with some furniture in it.”

Victoria gave me the kind of look that could leave permanent scarring.

“I’ll turn the lights off,” I said. “That’ll keep Buster quiet. I’ll even sing you a lullaby, if you like.”

“But this floor is too hard, Charlie. And it’s cold in here.”

“Humor me, why don’t you? Give it a whirl.”

I flipped off the lights and plunged the room into darkness. Then I spread myself out behind the front door, lying on my back, with my hands laced together beneath my head.

To begin with, the darkness seemed very intense. But after a minute or so, the uniform blackness began to fracture and weaken. Tilting my head, I could see thin bars of light sneaking through the slats in the Venetian blind from the street lamps outside. The ghostly light rippled across the ceiling like moonlit water. Closer still, I could glimpse the outline of Buster’s cage and Victoria’s prone body. Buster was scrabbling along his perch, finding just the right spot to take a nap.

Victoria exhaled sharply and slapped her palms against the floor. “Exactly how long do you expect us to stay like this?”

I checked my wristwatch. It was fitted with a luminous display. “It’s close to midnight,” I said. “I think we should aim to leave here in five hours or so. Unless you want to snooze for a little longer.”

She grumbled. She cursed. She curled herself into a ball on the floor, her face resting on her hands.

“I won’t sleep,” she said again. “Not in this apartment. Not now we know a woman really
was
killed here. And not with her body just across the hall.”

I didn’t reply. I knew just what she meant. Every time I closed my eyes, all I could see was a vision of poor Jane propped up in the bath, her skin as white as the bathroom tiles that surrounded her, her eyes glassy and flat, her throat a dark, swollen mess.

“Try,” I told Victoria. “Rest your eyes, at least.”

A couple of minutes passed. The ticking of my watch was loud in the room. The occasional ruffle of Buster’s feathers was like a billowing sail.

“Charlie?” Victoria hissed. “Are you still awake?”

I waited a moment, trying to decide if I should respond. “Yes,” I said.

“What will you do?” she asked. “When this is over, I mean. Where will you go?”

“I don’t know, Vic.” I adjusted my weight on the floor. I was already uncomfortable and her question only made it worse. “I haven’t allowed myself to think that far ahead.”