Tom was standing outside the middle shop, talking through its open door to its current occupant, a pretty young girl with sky-high cheekbones, tent-pole waist, and freshly minted silicone breasts. Her short blond hair bobbed playfully around her face as she talked, lips painted Chinese red, her bright blue bra, panties, stockings, and garters smoldering against her milky-white skin.
Tom bent toward the girl, who had stepped forward and was now leaning seductively against the door frame and whispered in her ear. She laughed, her voice pealing up the alley like a glass bell, her head thrown back so that her hair kissed the tops of her shoulders. As she laughed, Tom handed her what looked like several hundred Euro, discreetly folded so that she could quickly close her delicate hand around the clean, crisp notes. More than enough, in these streets, for sex.
Still giggling, the girl stepped aside and Tom brushed gently against her as he entered the shop. She followed him inside, closed the door and pulled the thick red curtains shut. A thin ribbon of light danced tauntingly around the window’s edge.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Jennifer walked unsteadily back onto the street.
“You bastard.” She mouthed the words, closed her eyes, pushed the back of her head against the wall, her stomach churning. She knew that really she had no right to be upset or even surprised. Tom was, after all, a thief. Why should she have expected him to behave any differently from all the other sleazebags she’d come across over the years?
And yet, she did feel upset. Upset with him because the little she had found out about him had made her hope for better. Upset with herself that, much as she hated to admit it, her instinctive response on seeing him go inside had been jealousy, not anger. She dismissed it immediately. But the feeling nevertheless remained, an uncomfortable ache in her stomach that she couldn’t quite get rid of.
“Hashish? Ecstasy? Co-ca-ine?” Jennifer looked up in surprise at the dreadlocked Rastafarian. In the darkness, she could only make out his wide, staring eyes and the fragrant smell of the joint that hung down from the corner of his mouth.
“No, thank you.”
“It’s good sheeeet.” He stretched the word, flexing it playfully between his teeth. And then, as if to prove his point, he took a long drag on the joint, his eyes rolling back in his head as he held the smoke in his lungs before gently exhaling through his nose, a dizzy smile on his face.
“No, thank you,” she whispered firmly.
Muttering and shrugging his shoulders, the man shuffled off down the street, the reflective heels of his white sneakers winking in the streetlights every time he lifted his feet.
Shaking her head, Jennifer peered round the corner again and gasped. The curtains of the shop that Tom had disappeared into only moments before had been drawn back. The blond girl, her blue underwear dyed purple by the red lights, had lit a cigarette and was sitting on a steel-and-leather stool in the middle of the front room. Ready, it seemed, for her next customer. What the hell had just happened?
Jennifer turned down the alley and walked slowly into the square. As she drew level with the middle shop, the girl smiled at her lazily, the smoke coiling around her coquettish head. Beyond her, in the rear room, the carefully folded white sheets lay undisturbed at the foot of the bed. The room was empty.
Jennifer sprinted across the rest of the square and down the opposite alleyway, emerging onto the street that it gave onto. There was no sign of Tom. He certainly hadn’t come back the other way past her. How had she missed him?
She retreated across the square past the blond girl, who was already in the middle of a negotiation with another potential client, back up the alley and onto the main street. What now? she asked herself. In the end, she knew that she only had one option: head back to the hotel and confront him there when he returned. If he returned.
“Hoeveel?”
“What?” asked Jennifer, startled by the large man who had suddenly appeared out of the darkness in front of her.
“How much?” he asked in accented English this time, lowering his face to hers so that his warm breath, laden with beer, washed over her face.
“What do you mean?” Jennifer took a step back.
“For a suck and a fuck. How much?” He gave her a toothy smile.
“No,” she said through clenched jaws. “You want to try down there.” She jerked her head back toward the alley just behind her.
“You know what they say. You’re not a man till you’ve had some tan!” He gave a wide laugh and grabbed her around the waist, lifting her a few inches off the ground.
Jennifer knew that a punch with the heel of her right hand against the man’s exposed throat would bring him down as if he’d been shot. But she didn’t hit him. Something she’d seen over the man’s right shoulder stopped her. A figure had emerged at the top of the steps of a house about fifteen feet away from her, the light from the hallway swirling out onto the street.
It was Tom.
Her brain clicked. The hooker’s shop must have had a connecting door at the rear that led to this house, presumably allowing people to enter or exit unobserved. But why had Tom used it? What was he doing there?
“Three hundred Euro,” Jennifer said to the man. He dropped her as if he had been bitten, his broad shoulders concealing Jennifer from Tom’s eyes as he looked up and down the street and set off.
“How much?” he asked faintly.
“Three hundred. Or back there, fifty.” The important thing was to stay out of sight until she could see where Tom was going. In front of her, the man was rocking uncertainly on his heels, his eyes darting from Jennifer, to the alley, back to Jennifer. With a sheepish nod he stumbled past her toward the alley and the girl in the blue underwear.
Tom was already fifty yards in front of her now. He seemed to be heading back toward the hotel. She could see that he had changed and was now dressed in black, with a large backpack slung across one of his shoulders that he hadn’t had before.
It was only then, when Tom veered off to the left, that she noticed him. A shape slipping between the shadows ahead of her. A shape that was following Tom.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Typically, he would have spent several months planning a job like this. Getting to know the layout of the rooms, what systems were in place, where they were housed, how they were controlled and maintained. And also the guards — their names, their routines, their quirks, their weaknesses.
Tonight he did not have that luxury. At any other time this would have been an unacceptable risk. But this was different. Five years ago he’d spent two months in Amsterdam planning a job at the same place he was going to hit tonight. That time, his target had been a small Dürer sketch. He’d planned out the whole job, covered every angle, every eventuality. But then Archie had called it off. Apparently, the buyer had been murdered by pirates while sailing up the Amazon.
Tom had never known how Archie did what he did. How he seemed able to come up with blueprints and technical drawings and specifications for alarm systems. But he always did. In fact, Tom had never known Archie to be wrong when it came to a job. That was why Tom was willing to take the risk now. Archie said that the systems had not been changed since Tom had planned the job five years ago. He said that although the guards had changed, their routine hadn’t.