Page 103 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
reserved for policemen on Belzunce Square. The interior was full of Marseilles cops, in uniform and in civilian clothes. The canteen fascinated me. They were snakes coiled up and rubbing against one another in a familiarity untroubled—and perhaps furthered—by abjectness.
Guy walked along impassively. Did he know that the pattern of his mouth was too flabby? It gave his face a childlike prettiness. Though naturally blond, his hair was dyed dark. He wanted to pass as a Corsican—after a while he started believing he really was one—−and I suspected that he liked make−up.
“They're after me,” he said.
A thief's activity is a succession of cramped though blazing gestures. Coming from a scorched interior, each gesture is painful and pitiful. It is only after a theft, and thanks to literature, that the thief hymns his gesture. His success sings within his body a hymn which his body repeats later. His failure enchants his distress. To my smile and my shrug, Guy replied, “I look too young. You have to look like a man with the other guys.”
I admired his utterly unbending will. He told me that a single burst of laughter would betray him. I felt the same pity for him as I would for a lion that was made by its trainer to walk a tight rope.
Concerning Armand, of whom I speak little (modesty prevents me, as does perhaps the difficulty of telling who he was and what he meant to me, from giving an exact notion of the value of his moral authority), his kindness was, I believe, a sort of element in which my secret (unavowable) qualities found their justification.
It was after I had left him, after I had put the frontier between him and me, that I felt it. He seemed to me intelligent. That is, he had dared, not unconsciously, to depart from moral rules, with the deceptive ease of men who are unaware of them. On the contrary, he had done so at the cost of a mighty effort, with the certainty of losing a priceless treasure, though with the further certainty of creating another, more precious than the one he had lost.
One evening, in a bar, we learned that a mob of international gangsters had surrendered to the police —“like cowards, without a struggle", as the Belgian papers put it—and everyone was commenting upon their behavior.
“They didn't have guts,” said Robert. “Isn't that your opinion?”
Stilitano didn't answer. He was afraid of discussing panic or boldness in front of me.
“You're not answering. Isn't that your opinion? They claim they pulled off big jobs, bank robberies, attacks on trains, and then they give themselves up to the cops like good little boys. They could have defended themselves to the last bullet. At any rate, they're done for since they're going to be extradited. France wants them. They'll get theirs. I'd have...”
“Stop shooting your mouth off!”
Armand's anger was sudden. He was glaring indignantly. Robert replied, more humbly, “Why, don't you agree with me?”
“When I was your age, I'd done more jobs than you and still I never talked about men, especially those who'd been nabbed. The only thing left for them to look forward to now is the courts. You're not big enough to judge.”
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