The Good Thief's Guide to Paris Read Online Free

I’d heard those words, though usually the person saying them liked to warm up to it first. Not the American. He got straight to the point, casual as you like . . . ”
    So began my most recent book, The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam , and as I glanced up from the copy I held in my hands and scanned the faces in front of me, I had to suppress the urge to pause and check that they really did want me to go on. A year ago, if I’d turned up at the Paris Lights bookshop and explained who I was and the type of novels I wrote, I’d have been shown the door before I could ask if they stocked my work, let alone if they’d welcome a reading. Now all that had changed. With one book, I’d been transformed from a little-known peddler of trash into a little-known author of a faked memoir that was threatening to make me credible. The few critics who’d reviewed Amsterdam had hailed it as a brilliant conceit – not only was the author of a series of pulp novels about a career thief pretending to be a thief in real life, he was also pretending to have written a book about his exploits. There was just one problem: it wasn’t pretend.
    Oh, I’d had to change some things around – names, locations, the nature of what exactly was stolen. But to my mind, my book still felt like more than just an approximation of the truth – every word I’d put down on paper connected me back to what had really happened in Amsterdam.
    Not that the crowd in front of me knew that. Either they’d bought into the whole charade along with everyone else or they didn’t have the faintest idea what my book was about in the first place. And why should they care? I was a writer giving an outdoor reading on a warm spring evening in Paris and that ought to be enough to make even the most cold-hearted soul pause and lend me their ear.
    Perhaps forty people had done just that. Most were students or backpackers, slouched on the green park benches positioned around me. Many of the rest were from the makeshift staff of Paris Lights, a bedraggled lot who slept in rickety beds among the sagging bookshelves at night and who worked the shop floor in return for their board during the day. There were others too: a middle-aged British couple sneaking photographs over my shoulder of the view across the river towards Notre Dame Cathedral; a nun in a taupe habit who was really more concerned with the pock-marked façade of the church of St-Julien-le-Pauvre; and a pair of wizened old Frenchmen in blue dungarees who seemed to be willing us all to vacate the Square Viviani so they could rejoin a decades-long boules contest.
    They wouldn’t need to wait much longer. I was only planning to read the opening chapter of my book and afterwards I might find there was a question or two to answer and perhaps even the odd copy to sign. Then it would be off to a local brasserie with the crowd from the bookshop, where I’d no doubt end up buying enough drinks to obliterate any semblance of a profit I might have made.
    All of which was fine by me, so long as Paige came along too.
    It was Paige who’d invited me to read in the first place, you see, and by happy coincidence she was really quite stunning. Her eyes were what first caught my attention – they were hazel and glistening and ever so slightly too large, as if the manic goings-on inside her brain were almost too much for them to bear. I liked that about her: the feeling of energy she had and the dizzy vibe she gave off. And I liked her delicate frame and her pale complexion, so pale you could see the blue tincture of veins coiled up at her temple, and I liked the ringlets of hair that fell around her shoulders and about her face, and when she spoke, I liked her voice most of all. She was American, from somewhere in the Midwest I guessed, and her speech was flighty and spontaneous and punctuated with shrieks of laughter. And God, did I want to kiss her.
    And you want to know something truly shocking? Turned out I wasn’t alone.