The Good Thief's Guide to Paris Read Online Free PDF Page A

muscular man with a confident grin approached the card table. The man snatched the top copy of Amsterdam from the pile and tossed it across to me.
    “Would you like me to sign?”
    “Yes, of course,” he said, his English laced with a strong French accent.
    “Who should I make it out to?”
    The young man flashed me his dazzling grin again. “I would like, ‘To my protégé’,” he said.

FOUR
    My protégé was sat up at the bar alongside me. I was smoking heavily – it’s a French thing – and I was drinking a dense red wine from a very large glass. And I’d had one glass already and I still wasn’t getting it.
    “So, just to be clear, you want me to help you break into your own apartment?”
    “Yes,” Bruno said, looking at me intently.
    “Because I have to tell you, if you want to know how secure your home is, there are firms that can tell you that. You simply contact them and set a convenient time and they send round a guy with a clipboard and a handful of colour pamphlets.”
    “This is not what I want.”
    “Because what, you don’t trust those people but you do trust a guy who happens to have written a book about being a burglar?”
    “Well, I suppose, if you put it like this . . .”
    “It sounds pretty crazy.”
    Bruno pursed his lips and shrugged. It was a good Parisian shrug. He must have been schooled on it since birth, along with every other French kid. Certainly the barman was a fine practitioner of the art. I watched him gesticulate and shrug like an Olympian, meanwhile pouring a shot of absinthe for a middle-aged redhead sat towards the far end of the counter. I got the impression the redhead was a regular and the absinthe was her familiar companion. The barman set the bottle back on the shelf and wiped his hand on his starched apron. No money changed hands.
    I took another lingering draw on my cigarette. I wasn’t smoking Gauloises – I kind of value my throat – but I was definitely smoking a lot more than I usually do. And I couldn’t put it all down to the general ambience in the bar. It also had something to do with my nerves. This was no standard approach, no common request.
    “This really your apartment?” I asked Bruno, eyes narrowing.
    “Of course.”
    “Because it occurs to me you could just be trying to get me to break into a place that doesn’t belong to you.”
    “Look, I will show you.”
    And with that he rooted around in the backpack he had with him until he found a crumpled piece of paper. He unfolded the paper, flattened it on the bar and smoothed the page.
    I scanned the document. My language skills were only basic but I could see it was a printed letter from a French high-street bank, addressed to M. Bruno Dunstan, Rue de Birague, Paris.
    “And that’s you?”
    “Yes,” Bruno said, and pulled a credit card from his wallet with his name on it.
    I took a mouthful of wine, swallowed, then drained the rest of the glass. I motioned to the barman for a refill and returned the letter to Bruno.
    “This protégé thing, is that just to make me feel good or are you serious?”
    “Serious,” he said, and looked it.
    “So why not ask me to show you how to break into an apartment that doesn’t belong to you? We could both make some money.”
    Bruno shook his head and rubbed idly at his bicep. The muscle was bulging from the sleeve of his polo shirt, like someone had forced all the toothpaste into the middle of an oversized tube.
    To my side, the barman uncorked the bottle of moderately expensive red wine I’d been drinking and splashed some into my glass. He gave me a nod and I returned the gesture, then peered at Bruno.
    “You don’t trust me?”
    “Maybe,” he said. “Perhaps you are just a writer, after all.”
    My jaw dropped, somewhat dramatically. “I have to show you my credentials now?”
    Bruno waved his hand, dismissing the point. “It is also about me. I like this idea, being a thief,” he said, whispering the last word, even though we