The Good Thief's Guide to Paris (17 page)

“Do you think this man can really do the things he says?” she asked me.

“Yes.” I shrugged. “And no. But I think it’s safer to work on the basis that he can.”

“Have you come across anyone like him before?”

“Luckily, no. He’s a fixer, I’d guess you’d say. People with enough money pay him to get the results they want. From the looks of his clothes and his car, he’s done pretty well by it.”

“He manipulates people? That’s his profession?”

“Absolutely.”

“So he’s a thug?”

“A cultured thug. With fingers in a lot of pies.”

“And paintings.”

“Evidently.” I exhaled and let my shoulders drop. “Tell me, how did Bruno strike you?”

Victoria threw up her hands, as if it was difficult to say. “Nervous. Young. A bit lost, to be honest.”

“Not like a murderer?”

“Hard to tell, isn’t it? But I’m beginning to see where you’re coming from.”

“And he didn’t try to look inside the folio at all?”

“Not even once. As soon as I returned his money, he seemed more than happy.”

“Which suggests he was telling me the truth about the loan-shark. I don’t suppose he gave you my rake back?”

“Incredibly, no. And I didn’t ask him how long it took to get out of the handcuff either, before you ask.”

Victoria gripped the back of the pew in front of her, then gave me a searching look. “Charlie, you know what I’m wondering? Scrap the bank heist idea. The documents we found hidden in the painting – do you think they could be tied into an art theft?”

“An elaborate plan to steal a Picasso from a signature gallery in the heart of Paris, you mean?”

Victoria bowed her head, clearly embarrassed.

“As a matter of fact,” I told her, “that’s precisely what I think.”

TWENTY-ONE

The Place Georges Pompidou was a giant slab of rain-slicked concrete, infested with pigeons, street artists and the occasional pickpocket. We hurried across it with our heads bowed, me feeling conscious of the plastic folio in my hand, not wanting the painting inside to get wet. Ahead of us was the steel and glass edifice of the Pompidou Centre. The entire building was inverted, with coloured pipes and tubes adhered to the outside, carrying wastewater and electricity cables and clean air from one place to the next. Large see-through tubes containing escalators transported visitors up and down between floors. My initial reaction when I’d first seen the building came back to me again – the whole thing was like a scene from a Jetsons cartoon made real.

“This place is huge,” Victoria said, pacing through the rain alongside me.

“Wait until you see the inside.”

It was quite staggering. By fixing all the utility pipes and escalators to the outside, the architects had created a vast interior. The foyer itself was several storeys high and the floor was lined with a smooth, hard-wearing material smeared with shoe marks. The side mezzanines and main walls were hung with large, brightly coloured neon signs, oversized posters and suspended flat-screen televisions. A bank of sleek ticket counters faced us and there were shops and cafés too.

“We haven’t thought this through,” Victoria said, speaking from the corner of her mouth.

“How do you mean?”

“The painting,” she said, nodding pointedly towards the folio in my hand. “We can’t just walk around with it, can we?”

“First of all,” I said, “quit talking like that – you look suspicious. Second of all, how about you buy us some tickets for the modern art museum and I’ll deal with the painting?”

“But –”

“Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

Looking back, I’m not altogether sure that was true but for some reason Victoria seemed to accept it. I left her to air her school French once again and made my way over to the left-luggage stand. The smartly dressed woman behind the bright red counter gestured for me to pass her my sodden jacket but I shook my head and gave her the plastic folio instead. She paused, and for one horrible moment I thought she was going to check the contents, but it turned out she was just searching for a space to stow the folder. My confidence flooded back. They probably got this quite often, I thought. Perhaps artists who came to visit the gallery tended to bring paintings and ongoing work with them, even calling in for inspiration on their way to or from their studios. Maybe Catherine had done the exact same thing. Her apartment was little more than a ten-minute walk from the Pompidou Centre, after all, and the bank branch where she’d stored the painting was closer still. With every new discovery, things were beginning to make a bit more sense.

“Voilà,” said the luggage attendant, handing me a numbered pendant. It was grey in colour, around the size of a one-euro coin, though wafer thin. I thanked her and slipped the pendant into my trouser pocket, then turned round to find Victoria coming towards me, pushing her wet hair away from her face. She was holding two ticket stubs and a paper brochure.

“I got a map. The Picassos are on the fifth floor.”

“Good thinking. I’ve stashed the folio.”

I gestured towards the left-luggage counter with my thumb. Victoria gave me a dubious look.

“Best place for it,” I told her.

“Aren’t you afraid they’ll look inside?”

“Not in the slightest. Come on.”

We took the external glass escalators up as far as the entrance to the modern art museum on the fourth floor and then climbed a flight of internal stairs towards the permanent exhibitions. Victoria consulted her map and turned left at the Rothko canvas in front of us, leading me alongside a glassed terrace at the front of the building, through which I could see a number of sculptures and, beyond them, the pale rooftops of Paris, the curved outline of the Musée d’Orsay, the distant shimmer of the Grande Arche and the knot of skyscrapers at La Défense, not to mention the blurred pencil stroke of the Eiffel Tower. The gallery walls were painted a brilliant white, in stark contrast to the honey tones of the wooden floors beneath our feet. Slatted benches were positioned here and there, inviting visitors to sit and ponder the works of art.

The Guitar Player was in the second gallery space on our left, hanging amid a collection of other cubist works by Picasso and Georges Braque. I hovered a few feet away from it with Victoria alongside me, the pair of us not speaking a word, just standing together in the cathedral silence. Sure, I couldn’t hold the painting in the folio up beside the original for a true comparison but there was no denying how alike they seemed. I guessed Victoria was thinking the same way because she made a clucking noise with her tongue.

“My God,” she said, under her breath.

“Similar, right?”

“I’ll say. And to think, this one is worth millions. How much would you say the one downstairs could fetch?”

“Sold as a straight-up reproduction? I’m really not sure. A lot of the value is in Picasso’s name, of course.”

“Of course. You know, I’m starting to see what you mean about the painting now. Standing here, looking at it from a distance, I’m beginning to spot new things emerging.”

“You mean like pound signs?”

She grinned, shook her head.

“Picasso was a pretty cool guy,” I told her, crossing my hands behind my back.

“You mean he was a womaniser.”

“That too. But really, I have a soft spot for him.”

“Kindred spirits?”

I gave her a sideways look. “You don’t know the half of it. Want to hear my favourite Picasso quote? ‘If there’s something to be stolen, I steal it’.”

Victoria rolled her eyes. “I very much doubt he meant it in a literal sense.”

“What other sense is there?”

She shook her head at me, as if exasperated, and I took the opportunity to approach the painting for a closer look. The frame that contained it was relatively plain but it appeared heavy, constructed from a quality timber that had been turned and varnished with great care. A sheet of protective glass had been inserted at the front of the canvas and possibly the back too. I couldn’t see how the painting was attached to the wall. If it had been hanging on wires from the ceiling, I would have been fairly confident it wasn’t alarmed. Instead, there was some kind of fixing behind the frame, which meant it could be suspended from an everyday hook or a complex pressure sensor or even bolted into position. I leaned my head to the side and tried to peer around the edge of the frame but I couldn’t catch sight of anything. It might have been different if I could have pressed my cheek flat against the wall and used my pocket torch to illuminate the space but I had a funny feeling that might attract the attention of the female museum attendant who was sat on a black plastic chair beneath the main archway into the room.

Bearing the museum attendant in mind, I backed up and contemplated the painting once again; the muted browns and greys and blacks, the sharp, deliberate angles. By itself, each individual ‘cube’ appeared curiously meaningless but as soon as I refocused on the whole thing, the picture began to make fleeting sense. Kind of like the clues of the greater mystery I was caught up in, I guessed.

I swivelled to find Victoria gazing up towards the exposed ceiling space above our heads. She titled her head and chewed her lip, then turned a complete circle and scanned right around the perimeter of the room, from where halos of light were being projected by a collection of spot bulbs. I watched her walk to one side of the gallery space and poke her head out through an archway that led into an adjoining corridor. She returned to me with a glint in her eye.

“I forgot to tell you,” she began, trying but failing to sound casual. “I got those photographs developed.”

“The negatives from the back of the painting?”

“Uh huh. I put them into a one-hour place before I went to the bank. I think you might be interested to see them now.”

“Really?”

“Think so.”

She bowed her head and reached for her handbag, delving around inside until she came up with a glossy yellow envelope. She peeled back the envelope seal and removed six colour photographs. I didn’t take the photographs to begin with – I was too preoccupied with what else I’d seen inside her handbag.

“That brown envelope,” I said, fighting to control the strain in my voice, “tell me it’s not the one from the back of the painting.”

“Why?”

“Victoria,” I said, wincing, “you should have left it at the hotel.”

“I thought we might need it. And I thought it would be safer with us.”

“What if your bag got snatched?”

“I’ve never had a bag snatched in my life. Why would it happen today?”

I just looked at her, unsure what to say next. I didn’t want to come across as a control freak or have the museum attendant concentrate unduly on us, but I really wasn’t happy about the situation either.

“Listen, don’t take this the wrong way, but would you mind if I held on to the envelope?”

She scowled at me.

“Hey,” I went on, “if I lose it now it’s my own fault, okay? It’s all down to me.”

“Whatever you like,” she told me, in a churlish voice, meanwhile pulling back the flap on her handbag and removing the rather crumpled envelope. She handed the envelope to me and I slid it inside my jacket pocket. I took a deep breath and gave her my best smile.

“So, can I see the photographs now?”

“I suppose.”

I took the photographs from Victoria’s hand and leafed through them. Moments later, I looked up and held her eye. We both smiled.

“Thanks for getting these. I forgot to remind you and –”

“It’s no problem. I can be trusted, you know.”

I did know. And now I also knew that the photographs were interior shots of the exact same room we were stood in. But instead of taking illicit photographs of the paintings, the photographer had focused on the uppermost corners of the room. In each of the angled shots, they had managed to capture the spotlights, the water sprinklers, the exposed ventilation shafts and metal beams, as well as the somewhat blurred image of the security cameras.

I followed the same route Victoria had taken to the edge of the room and passed out through the side archway into the narrow corridor beyond. The walls were hung with a selection of framed newspaper and magazine articles about Picasso and Braque. I glanced right and saw the floor-to-ceiling glass panels at the front of the building. I also saw a fire extinguisher, a fire hose and a red bucket full of sand. Beside the fire safety equipment was a pair of glass emergency exit doors that led out onto the terraced walkway beyond. From just above the doors, a security camera was pointing down at me. It matched one of the scenes in the photographs exactly. I turned and was about to say something further to Victoria when I noticed that the museum attendant was staring at me, her brow furrowed.

I smiled back as pleasantly as I could, then slipped the photographs into my jacket pocket along with the other documents. I approached Victoria and took her by the arm, leading her past the attendant, out through the central archway and into the main gallery corridor beyond. I didn’t pause to admire the bronzed sculpture of a horse immediately in front of us or the oversized Picabia abstract hanging on the facing wall. Instead, I steered Victoria to the right, past the Matisse room.

“Let’s get a coffee,” I said. “We can talk this stuff through.”

Victoria gave me a puzzled look, but I just winked at her and ushered her through the crowds of visitors in the direction of the museum exit. From there, we took the glass-encased escalators up to the sixth floor and made our way to the terraced café on the far right of the building. As we walked, I explained about the museum attendant and how we should be careful not to make ourselves appear too suspicious, especially given the photographs and the documents I happened to be carrying in my pocket.

“So we’re agreed then, the documents are all part of a plan to steal The Guitar Player?” Victoria asked me.

“I guess. Although they’re hardly the most comprehensive set of plans.”

“It is pretty odd. But when you factor in the painting from the vault in Catherine’s bank, it begins to make more sense. The idea must be to switch the original for the forgery.”

“I agree. But what doesn’t add up is why everyone has been trying to get hold of these documents,” I said, patting my jacket pocket. “Without the forgery – well, they’re useless.”

“Maybe not useless. They could always just snatch the original without trying to conceal the theft.”

“They could. But if they were content with some kind of smash and grab, I’m not sure they’d need any of these plans in the first place.”

I guided Victoria towards a quiet table that was adorned with a single red rose and happened to be situated on the edge of the café terrace, beside a reinforced glass screen that looked out over the city skyline. Victoria settled into one of the white plastic chairs but I remained standing and consulted the printed menu card.

“You mind ordering me an espresso?” I asked. “I need to go to the gents.”

“Won’t you have anything to eat?”

“Not right now. Just find me an ashtray and I’ll be fine.”

She squinted at me. “You should eat, Charlie. You’re looking pale.”

“Maybe later. I need to go and throw some water over my face first. Wake myself up a bit.”

I gave Victoria a tight smile and headed out of the café, beyond a temporary exhibition space to where I’d seen a sign for some toilets. The toilets were sleek and modern-looking, with grey walls and red floors that contrasted with the clinical white of the sink and the urinal. None of the stalls were occupied. I had the whole place to myself.

I stood before the urinal, thinking. It was more than a little odd to be inside such a famous building, admiring such a famous painting, and knowing all the time that some kind of scheme existed for a quite outrageous theft. It was the stuff of make-believe. Actually, come to think of it, it wasn’t all that far removed from a plot strand in my first Michael Faulks novel.