Page 66 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
“Why do you ask that?”
“Anyone can see that he's your guy.”
I hugged him and wanted to kiss him, but he moved away. “You're crazy. We're not going to do that together!”
“Why not?”
“Huh? I don't know. We're the same age There'd be no fun.”
That morning he got up late. We had breakfast with Stilitano and Sylvia, and then Robert went to get his pay and tell his boss that he was giving up his job at the merry−go−round. We spent the whole night drinking. During the week of Armand's absence we had received no news from him. I first thought of running away from Antwerp, and even from Belgium, and taking his things with me. But his power acted from a distance and I was held back, not by fear but by the attraction of this mature man, matured in evil, a genuine bandit, capable, and by himself alone, of drawing me, almost carrying me, into that frightening world from which I believed he had emerged. I did not move out of his room, but my anxiety increased daily. Stilitano had promised me not to tell him about my passion for Robert, but I was not sure whether the boy himself would not be so malicious as to tell on me. Robert acted very much at ease with the cripple. Relieved of all embarrassment, he was playful, bantering, even a bit impudent. When they spoke of possible jobs to be pulled off, I noticed that his face all at once grew attentive, and when the explanation was finished, Robert crowned it with a precise gesture: his thumb and middle finger seemed to be insinuating themselves into the inner pocket of an invisible jacket and delicately withdrawing an invisible jewel. The gesture was light−fingered. Robert outlined it in the air slowly, with broken movements: one, when the hand seemed to be leaving the pocket of the victim; the other, as it entered his own.
Robert and I served Stilitano the way one serves a priest or a piece of artillery. Kneeling before him, each of us would lace one of his shoes. It grew complicated when it came to the single glove. Almost always it was Robert who had the privilege of pressing the snap−button.
An account of the few operations we carried out would not teach you anything about matters of this kind. Generally Robert or I would go upstairs with the queer. While he was asleep, we would throw the money down to Stilitano who was posted beneath the window. In the morning the client would accuse us. We would let him search us, but he dared not lodge a complaint. In the beginning, Robert tried to justify his thefts. A novice crook always wants to punish a louse by robbing him.
“Those people,” he would say, “are degenerates.”
His attempts to find fault with the queers he robbed made him boring. With brutal frankness Stilitano recalled him to order.
“If you go on preaching like that you're going to wind up as a priest. There's only one reason for what we're doing and that's dough.”
This kind of language loosened Robert up. Sure of being upheld by Stilitano, he really let himself go. His talk became very funny. He amused Stilitano, who went out only with him. My mood became greyer and greyer. I was jealous of my two friends. Finally, Robert, who was fond of girls, started smiling at all of them. They liked him. As a result, I felt that, with Stilitano, he was not against me but rather out of reach. In order, since he was better−looking than I, to make it easier for him to attract men, Stilitano gave him my clothes. Robert
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