Free The Good Thief's Guide to Paris by Chris Ewan Page B

have the table for two days.”
    I hitched my eyebrows as elaborately as possible. “That many, huh?”
    Paige nudged me. “Hey, that table’s a big deal. You should thank me.”
    “With dinner?”
    Paige smiled and shook her head, as if I was a hopeless cause. Then she crossed her arms in front of her chest, assessing me with narrowed eyes.
    “There is something I wanted to ask you, as it happens,” I told her. “At the bar the other night, after my reading, I was talking with a guy. Name of Bruno.” I glanced around the shabby interior, on the off chance of seeing him. “I don’t think he works here but I wondered if you knew him at all?”
    “Bruno?” Paige scrunched up her face. “I’m not sure. What does he look like?”
    “Bit taller than me, maybe,” I said, raising my hand an inch or so above my head in the direction of the rotted ceiling beams. “Kind of muscular. Short, brown hair. Unshaven. He was wearing jeans and a blue polo shirt. Had a backpack too.”
    “No,” Paige said, shaking her head and chewing her lip. “I know a Bruno, but he’s black.”
    “Not the same Bruno.”
    “Sorry.”
    “Not to worry. It was a long shot anyway. But now I think of it,” I went on, knocking my temple with my knuckle, “could you do me a favour and ask the others who work here?”
    “Sure,” Paige said, uncertainly. “You lose his number or something?”
    I smirked, wagged my finger. “Nothing like that. He mentioned he can sometimes get tickets at Paris Saint-Germain’s ground. I was thinking of going to a game.”
    “Oh, fine,” she gushed. “I’ll ask around. And say, can I ask you something in return?”
    “Sounds reasonable.”
    “It’s just, all that stuff in your book,” she began, “about picking locks and all. Can you really do that?”
    I met her gaze. It was a question I’d been asked more than once over the years and I was yet to come up with the perfect response.
    “I’ve practised a bit at home. Character research, I guess you’d call it.”
    “Oh, swell,” Paige said, releasing a breath and then finding her feet. “Come with me?”
    I did as Paige asked and followed her to the rear of the store, beyond a compact single bed that had been covered for the day in a moth-eaten quilt and upon which a selection of Keats’ poetry had been displayed. The books we passed along the way were crammed into every available space, packed one on top of another on uneven wooden tables and bowed shelves, piled precariously on the tiled floor and stuffed into plastic crates and cardboard boxes that showed signs of water damage. There was a staircase on our right and countless paperbacks had been inserted beneath the treads and between the banister rails. The staircase shook as Paige began to climb and I wondered whether the whole thing would one day come crashing to the floor if a customer happened to remove the wrong book in the wrong place.
    I went up behind Paige, distracted from the books scattered haphazardly on the treads by the swaying of her bottom in front of me. She was wearing a long skirt that hugged the contours of her body in a quite understandable manner. Below the skirt I could glimpse her ankles; bare and slightly chaffed and tantalisingly close.
    Paige turned at the top of the stairs and walked along a narrow corridor, again lined with books of every conceivable size and shape and colour, as well as a cramped writer’s nook with a battered manual typewriter. She passed a doorway on her left and sang out a “Hey” and I looked in as I passed to see a dusky parlour room furnished with a threadbare couch and a scattering of pastel-coloured cushions and frayed rugs. There were four people in the room, reclined in various positions, reading books and scribbling on foolscap notepads. There was also a silver tea urn and what looked like a very old and unsanitary bong on the floor beside the guy with the skullcap whom I’d seen in the bar-café with Paige. He was reciting