The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin Read Online Free

glinted in the electric lamplight. Oh, and the whole thing was covered in a colorful array of graffiti. Layer upon layer of names and slogans and profanities and symbols, almost as if we were playing on a horizontal slab of the Berlin Wall.
    Graffiti could be found most places in Berlin, and there was plenty of the stuff surrounding us now. It had been sprayed on tree trunks, on litter bins, on benches, and on the green metal pissoir just outside the perimeter railings of the Platz . It covered every square inch of the spare table-tennis table where Victoria was perched, her chin tucked down inside the collar of her red down jacket, her hands buried in her pockets and her legs dangling in the murky shadows beneath. She seemed to be enjoying the way Freddy was thrashing me. I was pretty sure she was smirking every time I had to turn my back and wander off to collect the silly little ball from whichever area of unlit pea gravel Freddy had dispatched it to.
    “So,” I said, on one of my many treks back to the table, “do you think we might talk now?”
    I swatted the ball toward him and Freddy looped it back, high and gentle. I almost lost it in the sodium glare.
    “Let’s talk and play,” he said. “We’ll rally.”
    “Don’t you think that might be a bit distracting?” I asked, blinking hard and returning the ball on a similar, if less certain, trajectory. I’m not very good at Ping-Pong. Having two arthritic fingers on my right hand makes holding the bat a real challenge.
    “Not at all. I daresay we can build up a good rhythm.”
    Oh, we had a rhythm, all right. The ball papped and popped between us. It blipped and it bopped. And as it arced to and fro, Freddy finally began to explain himself.
    “I work for a company,” he said, dispatching a sliced forehand. “Here in Berlin. And in the last few days, something was stolen from the office of our head man.”
    I mirrored his shot with a sliced forehand of my own. It was a mistake. The arthritic knuckles on my middle and fourth fingers felt like they might pop. “What was stolen?” I asked, through gritted teeth.
    “We’ll come to that.” His eyes were wide open in concentration. His mouth was a gaping void. I would have loved to smash the ball deep inside it. “The important thing is that we’ve narrowed down the suspects to four employees. They all had access to the office in question during the time the theft must have occurred.”
    “Just four?” Victoria asked, her head swiveling from side to side as she tracked the ball’s movement.
    “That’s the good news,” Freddy said. He was panting like a dog by now. Steam was rising from his body and he was perspiring heavily. His shirt was marked by two dark half-moons of sweat beneath his armpits.
    “And the bad news?” I asked.
    “The bad news is that we need the item retrieved. Quite urgently.” He moved sideways to use his backhand. “But confidentiality concerns mean we don’t wish to involve the police, and we can’t risk alerting the culprit that we’re on to him—a factor that prevents us from seeking a solution via the internal procedures or more predictable options available to us. Our problem has arisen from inside our organization. We need help from outside . Specialized help. Unconventional help.”
    “Which is where I come in, I presume.”
    “Quite so. We’d like you to reclaim the item and identify the guilty party.”
    “Reclaim it?”
    “By searching the homes of each of the four suspects.”
    “Hmm,” I said, and patted the ball back to him. “How do you know that whoever took this thing is still holding on to it?”
    His feet scuffled in the dirt as he adjusted his stance to reach my somewhat wayward shot. “As I said, it’s sensitive. If the item had passed into the wrong hands, we’d have heard about it by now.”
    “You’re certain that it’s been stolen? It couldn’t have been borrowed, say?”
    “No. Nobody had any right to take this item. And it