The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

Christopher Cook The Pickpocket

From Measures of Poison

My name is Christian Richelieu. A good name, all in all, and famous on both counts, though neither appreciably influenced my life.

That I don’t believe in a Messiah practically goes without saying. The notion that a Saviour will rescue us from loneliness and despair would amuse me if not for the misery. But the yearning I see etched on troubled faces in the street is sincere and I don’t laugh.

The cardinal at least was French, like me, and being a politician and a pragmatist, he did not wait but sought solace in this life. Perhaps he found it. Who knows? Still, he was first a great moralist, then a tireless sinner, and I am neither.

I am simply amoral.

So much for my name, which is more interesting than my appearance. In looks I am suitably ordinary, an advantage in my profession, and that’s all that needs saying.

I have been a pickpocket since I was a boy when Moses Marchant taught me the trade. A native of Algiers, Moses had reached his twilight years by then. He was a stoop-shouldered pied-noir who emigrated to Paris just after the war and lived in the same rundown tenement building as my parents near Place d’Italie. He smelled of patchouli and belched garlic and smoked a filthy clay pipe. He muttered constantly.

Moses lived on the floor above us. I used to watch him in the stairwell, shuffling up the steps in a cloud of tobacco smoke mingled with an incomprehensible amalgam of mumbled Arabic and French. My parents were young and my grandparents were dead, so Moses represented for me that decrepitude of old age so difficult to comprehend in youth. Indoors and out, he wore a tattered burgundy fez.

I must have been fifteen or sixteen when Moses took an interest in me. Cataracts had ruined his eyesight and he was crippled from the arthritis that put him out of business, but he was a good teacher, very thorough and demanding. If I sometimes seem critical of the way others behave nowadays, it’s because Moses taught me that pride in one’s work gives purpose in a world abandoned by both God and man. He preached that tenet tirelessly and I’ve never found reason to disagree.

Back then the practitioners of my trade respected the craft. In the argot, we called ourselves voleurs à la tire, which means “pulling thieves.” When we met one another in the street we tilted our heads in mutual and silent recognition. We were courteous. In those days the civilized world had not yet begun its decline. Even a pickpocket took pride in his profession. He acquired his skills by hard work. It required self-discipline. Initiation demanded a price, a commitment. Frankly, we considered our vocation a kind of art.

In the beginning, Moses made me practice in his apartment. Day after day I played truant from school, learning the tricks on a dummy constructed by stuffing an old suit with a blanket. Then Moses pulled on a red velvet smoking jacket I had never seen before — it smelled of mold and mothballs — and I practiced on him. It was tedious work, very demanding. Moses was especially critical and boxed my ears when my attention wandered. “Learn to concentrate!” he scolded me. “A man who controls his mind controls his destiny.” Naturally, this was difficult. The adolescent mind is a wild horse. But I tried and with time my ears became less tender. The idea of controlling my destiny appealed to me. Even now, after all this time, it attracts me.

After six months, Moses began to drill me in public. He insisted I pick his pockets on the Métro, in the markets, on street corners. Finally he permitted a real pick. He called it my baptism.

I lifted the wallet of a hulking giant of a man in Gare St. Lazare during rush hour. He was running for a train and Moses stepped in front of him. The man tripped and fell, cursing. I helped him to his feet and he angrily pushed me away. In the men’s room I opened the wallet and found six hundred francs, a faded picture of his wife, the telephone numbers of several prostitutes listed with their going rates, and a packet of condoms. I kept everything but the wallet and photo, though his wife was not a bad-looking woman, with blond curls and a sad smile.

That was long ago. I will turn sixty-three next month. The work is exacting but does not wear a person down like physical labor or an office job with its politics. I could retire today if I wished. I have been careful with my money, certainly more careful than others.

To tell my life’s story would take too long. Besides, most of it is humdrum, the same as any other life. I was married but we argued and divorced. My two children are grown now. They lead conventional lives and I see them but they have their own concerns. I live in an apartment. I have been betrayed in love and have acted badly myself. I am quite selfish. I vacation on the coast, watch my weight, eat fish instead of meat, and exercise by walking in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Gravity has exacted its customary dues and my lower back often aches. My prostate acts up, nothing unusual at my age. I live alone but have a mistress who complains and several close friends. I appreciate good wine and enjoy music. I lead a quiet life. I don’t expect much from others and have not been disappointed. So, as I said, it is an ordinary life in almost every respect.

It is the work — my work — which is of interest. No doubt, it seems romantic in a way. No boss, no set hours. Plenty of time to think or daydream. Living by one’s wits, a real challenge. While all that is true, it is still work. It is my profession, my trade, full of demands like any other. I do not let myself forget that. The person who forgets, who becomes lazy, who practices the craft by habit, lands in jail. He becomes his own victim.

Still, the idea of my livelihood intrigues people. They want details, the more exotic the better. I have overheard victims of pickpockets actually boast of their misfortune, having received a kind of vicarious thrill. But as with any job the extraordinary events occur infrequently. Between, there are protracted lulls, even monotony.

How then to dispassionately describe my vocation? Perhaps it would be easiest to recount three incidents which I readily recall. Each in its own way better describes what I do than anything I might otherwise tell.

The first incident concerns the things people carry. Most of what I find in wallets is routine: credit cards, photos, ticket stubs, receipts. If contents are a gauge, then the average life is remarkably mundane, even more so than mine. No wonder so many feel restless! Pockets also contain scads of things I never take — passports, lighters, pens. If I was a burglar, I might be a millionaire. People are surprisingly careless with keys.

But on occasion something catches me off-guard. In a wallet at Gare de Lyon only last week I discovered a small bag of heroin. Once at Musée Picasso I was flabbergasted to see I’d filched the ID card of an FBI agent. He was part of an American tour group. I left the museum immediately, having heard enough about those cowboys to give wide berth. Another time I reached into a pocket on an escalator in Les Halles and felt a gun. That provoked another well-timed retreat. I know how to calculate risks. Violence does not interest me.

Everything but cash goes into the nearest safe trash can. Moses twisted my ear that first day in Gare St. Lazare when I kept the prostitutes’ numbers and the condoms. “You think they’ll visit you in jail?” he asked. “Show some sense!” Disgusted, he took his cut of the money and threw the other things away. He had forgotten the carnal desires that surge through a young man day and night. Just think how many flames three hundred francs might quench! But I learned the lesson. The trash can gets all but the cash. It is an unfortunate policy, I know. People who lose their wallets are terribly inconvenienced. Replacing official papers and credit cards is a bother. All the same, it is an absolute necessity and part of the self-discipline. To permit sympathy to override this requisite is to invite disaster.

Of course, most in the trade these days keep the credit cards and fence them. For several years after Moses died, when credit cards came into common use, I did, too. But now such fraud has become big business. The people you meet in that line seem sleazy. They run in packs and can’t be trusted. Among those thieves, there is no honor. I avoid them. This may sound strange, but whenever thieves become organized they also become corrupt. Better to work alone.

The incident I have in mind occurred at the Centre Georges Pompidou several years ago. The curators had put together an exhibit of Brassai photographs that I admired. While leaving the gallery, I bumped into a man and reflexively picked his trousers pocket. I wasn’t even working that day. In the toilet I was disappointed to see less than twenty francs. If the pick had required effort it wouldn’t have been worth it. From the condition of the wallet, I gathered the man was either mindless of appearances or down on his luck.

What caused me to look further I am not sure. But tucked carefully into a corner of the wallet was a folded sheet of paper. I opened it. It was a letter written on hospital stationery and dated the previous year. I read it. It was from the man’s wife. Apparently she had written it just before dying. She did not say but it appeared she had a cancer. She had sent her husband a last love letter.

What she wrote was very moving. She described her love for him and said his affection had made life worth living. That same deep affection now made death manageable. She had endured great pain, that much seemed obvious. The final weeks had been a torment. She regretted to die so young. She worried over failings. There was so much left unaccomplished, so much she had postponed. Then there was the physical pain, to which she only alluded. Yet she spoke of when she first met her husband and remembered their first tender kiss. She mentioned a vacation they once took to a beach in Spain. She repeated her devoted affections in every paragraph. This dying woman even managed a private joke, adding, “Ha! You know I’m only kidding!”

Over and again the woman expressed concern for her husband. She urged him to be brave and reassured him that wherever she was after death, she would still be with him. He would never be alone. Their love, she wrote, would conquer death. A trite sentiment, perhaps, but in her letter it seemed plausible. Despite my own opinions on such matters, I found myself believing her. Who possesses the nerve to deny a dying young woman? If she had been my wife, I would have agreed to anything. Her signature was barely legible, a weak scrawl.

Upon finishing the letter, I was overcome with remorse. My hands began to tremble. I sat on the commode and gazed at her signature. Then I began to weep. I knew the letter must be returned to its owner. I carefully refolded it and placed it in my pocket.

What might have been simple became complicated. The man no longer lived at the Montparnasse address in the wallet. I posed as a friend and a neighbor gave me his new address near Gare de l’Est, an unsavory area. But he had moved from there, as well. I finally got another address from the concierge and found him in a fourth-floor walkup in the ghetto of Aubervilliers. With each move he had found cheaper quarters in a more dilapidated building. I supposed that since his wife’s death he had fallen into that kind of decline only an unimaginable grief might cause.

When he came to the door I explained myself in a rush of words. I mentioned finding the letter on a bus seat. It looked important, I said, and very personal. Beginning with the hospital, I had tracked him down. I began to perspire and my voice cracked. It was the profound emotion of that letter, no doubt, which I had somehow absorbed. For a moment I lost my head and even said that my own wife had died of cancer not long before. That wild statement was intended to establish motive for all my trouble, I suppose. Surely my efforts to find this man would appear peculiar and invite suspicion.

But he had no such reaction. Instead, he took the letter and broke down sobbing. He was a young man, poorly dressed. He held the paper to his chest. Thank you, thank you, thank you, he cried. He wailed and whimpered like a child. Between the deep sobs and groans, he wiped his nose on a coat sleeve.

I stood in the doorway feeling quite awkward with all the commotion. While the letter from his wife had touched me deeply, his shameless grief now struck me as pathetic. His wife — who was, after all, the one dying — had asked him to be brave. She would always be with him. Their love would conquer death. Yet there he was completely without courage, a broken man.

I saw then how thin he was, the wretched lines of despair eating deeply into his narrow face, and the gloomy disheveled apartment strewn with litter and smelling of decay.

Without saying a word more, I turned on my heel and left. I beat it double-time, taking the stairs three at a time. I needed some fresh air.

Afterward, I realized why my policy of dumping everything into the trash is a good one. What people carry is their own concern.

As you might expect, I do much of my work on the Métro. A salesman has his territory, I have mine, and any territory has its downside.

The city underground is nothing like the one above. Without question, the Métro is a cheerless place. The trains burrow through the tunnels like huge distended worms, their bellies full of commuters, disgorging and engorging the contents at each stop. The people remain silent and disengaged, their sensibilities dulled by the crowds, the noise, the constant motion. The place is dark and humid, a world of hollow shadows and impersonal fatigue, and it smells like a sewer. The boys who spend their days there hawking newspapers resemble rats. In those pinched faces the pale eyes peer furtive and sly. These repulsive creatures scurry from car to car in search of crumbs. The passengers lift their feet and avoid them.

Perhaps I am too harsh. In truth, at times some Métro stations assume the festive milieu of a carnival. Music, gay and loud, echoes through the corridors and up and down the stairwells. Accordions, guitars, saxophones, trumpets, you hear them all. North African marabouts offer to tell your fortune. For a few francs more they’ll improve your love life and increase your sexual stamina. Angry young men deliver orations about famine, drought, war, unemployment. Puppeteers perform. Feet stamp, lovers smooch. Beggars without legs rattle their cups on the quai.

And the peddlers! Legions of vendors wangle peanuts, floral bouquets, and cheap jewelry. These immigrant salesmen have big dreams. From the subterranean atmosphere of beggary and vagrancy there is no direction but up. There in the Métro, budding entrepreneurs become inured to thievery and vice, good training for a career in business.

Altogether, this teeming, clamorous world is not unlike a raucous scene from Dickens or Hugo’s lunatic rabble in the Court of Miracles. Ironically, there is little violence. Petty graft prevents serious crime, as any policeman knows. When violence does rarely occur even the most hardened hustler is shocked.

In any case, this underground circus exists and I work there. For a short time, it is intriguing. It appeals to one’s fascination with the perverse, like a freak show or blue movie. Repulsive though it is, one cannot help but watch. Of course, the novelty wore off for me long ago. Now when it begins to irritate me, when my eyes grow dim and my skin feels clammy, I seek sunlight. I work Right Bank streets and tourist sites.

I mentioned the Métro musicians, which reminds me of a particular incident I wish to relate. Like the vendors, these musicians are everywhere — in the stations, the corridors, the trains. Some are superb. I think of a courtly old man who plays a violin in the Châtelet station, or a somber young woman in a blue evening gown who sets up her harp at St. Michel.

There are bad ones, too, naturally. A man who played the trumpet once got on the Number 4 line and punished everyone from St. Placide to Les Halles. People held their ears and griped. They got off the train just to escape. On that same line, a tall blond woman with enormous red lips performs as a one-person band. She wears high heels and puts her hair in a beehive. She plays accordion and sings while blowing a harmonica, kazoo, and steel whistle. A tambourine hangs from one arm, a bracelet of bells jangles on an ankle. She is awful but people applaud her energy so her purse overflows with tips.

But the particular musicians I have in mind are a group of South American Indians who frequently appear in the Montparnasse station. They play that eerie, wind-driven music from the Andes. Two bamboo flutes, a guitar, a mandolin, drums, and a gourd rattle. They usually perform during evening rush hour when the money flows best. For fifty francs they sell a recorded cassette tape. They call themselves Andes Wind.

I first heard them from a stairwell in the station. The music was indescribably sweet, both joyful and sad, simple and complex at once. The sound called to me. Irresistibly, I was drawn toward it. Finally I saw them near the central escalator — seven smiling men, short, stocky, with dark skin and thick black hair. Some wore colorful woven ponchos, others beaded cotton jackets. I took a position against the wall and listened. I soon entered into something like a trance.

How is it that some kinds of music make a person feel happy and sad at the same time? Those Andean songs spoke to me that way. I was overcome by a deep melancholy yet felt completely at peace. Though I am not by nature maudlin, now and then the poignancy of profound melancholia has the effect of a purgative. For more than an hour I listened.

In the end, I moved away from the wall to the front of the crowd, as near the musicians as possible. I basked in the exquisite illumination which swelled over them and flowed through all who listened. It really was quite extraordinary. An open guitar case cluttered with coins and paper notes lay on the floor at their feet. I first put in one twenty-franc note, then another.

The band finally took a short rest. One of the flute players, a heavyset fellow who wore long hair in a ponytail, edged through the crowd accepting donations and selling cassette tapes. When he gave change, I noticed he carried a large wad of bills in the left pocket of his beaded jacket. He stopped near me.

On impulse I spoke to the young man and mentioned how the music seemed quite special. I said it struck me as otherworldly, celestial, even mystical. I felt a bit embarrassed by my enthusiasm, especially the triviality of my words, but they were sincere and he agreed with a simple naturalness that put me at ease. I noticed then that his face emanated the same quality of deep, meditative serenity with which the music resonated in my breast. When he gazed at me, it seemed for a moment as if something preternatural passed between us. In my experience, the event was unprecedented. Then someone touched his arm and he turned away.

I faded into the crowd and left. I went for a long walk down Rue de Rennes and along St. Germain, still listening to the ethereal modulations of the flutes reverberating in my head. The curious sensation stayed with me for the longest time.

When I stopped for couscous in a Tunisian café, I stepped into the toilet and counted the money. It was a decent take, almost a thousand francs.

I wondered if the serene young musician had lost his composure. I hoped not. But he really was so careless and the temptation was too great. Even artists should show a little responsibility.

The final incident pertains to the current state of my craft. Forgive me if I complain. It dismays me to watch the people in the trade today, especially the younger ones. They are clumsy and unprepared. They have no self-respect.

Practice, much less real apprenticeship, never occurs to them. One need only see them work. One morning they decide to become a pickpocket, that evening they grab for a wallet. These impostors have no idea what is required. They lack subtlety. Instead of skill they depend on violence. If their victim protests they pull a razor or knife. They pick on the elderly, on single women. They work at night. Naturally, their takings are small, so they double their efforts. Soon everyone feels frightened.

In my opinion, this decadence parallels the decline in the culture. We French are a democratic culture built on aristocratic forms. Hugo warned against erosion, Spengler predicted it. Who listened? Now the debasement of form has become a popular pastime, a disease we import. We send the sun to the west, it sends darkness back.

No doubt some will express astonishment to hear a pickpocket deploring the loss of values, quoting Hugo and Spengler. Such incredulity merely reflects the decline to which I refer. Nowadays we presume only intellectuals and the upper crust are literate, and the latter I seriously doubt. It wasn’t always that way. In my generation, even thieves and pimps read books, went to the theatre, listened to Mozart as well as Piaf. I knew a burglar who was a closet poet. Genet became a famous author. So much for stereotypes.

But occasionally a young pickpocket completely surprises me. I recall one day when I had worked the tourist crowds on the Right Bank. Tourists are easy marks for the most part, especially Americans. I always know where an American keeps his wallet. He touches it too often. He is so excited to arrive in the City of Lights that a kind of elation overcomes him and he neglects to think. The brochures warn him but he ignores the precautions.

He is a strangely naive creature, this American. Everything takes him by surprise. He expresses great optimism and is continually disappointed. He considers pessimism a weakness. But he is well organized. In that respect he surpasses even a German. Such a view contradicts orthodox notions, but it is true.

On the day to which I refer, my work had gone especially well. It was the height of tourist season. Sidewalks along the Rue de Rivoli were crowded. Wallets leaped from their pockets. My fingers had never felt so nimble. Near the Louvre, I went from one mark to another. It was like picking grapes. At one point I went home and emptied my pockets, then returned to the street.

In the mid-afternoon I passed an hour in a café. Things were going so well, I had become nervous and needed to calm my nerves. I went back to work and found nothing had changed. I was at the top of my game. Nothing was safe. My fingertips had eyes.

Normally I keep a sharp watch for undercover cops. They are easy enough to spot, like unmarked police cars. Still, one must look for them. Some are cagey and hide behind posts or doorways. That day I felt so confident that when I saw one standing near the Hotel Meurice, I passed behind him and took his wallet.

Such insolence! How audacious! I never would have dared but was possessed by a kind of euphoria, like a golfer who follows one hole-in-one with another. My only regret was that I could not loiter to watch him discover the casualty. I felt tempted to approach him and ask for change just to see his face. But I showed some common sense and resisted. I had had my pleasure. Why tempt fate?

At the intersection of Rue de Rivoli and Place des Pyramides I saw a young man bungle a pick. The pigeon was a stout German tourist wearing loose trousers and a Hawaiian shirt. He started across the street when the signal was still red and jerked the young man’s hand. That sort of mistake denotes a novice at work. Never depend on a mark to behave predictably. The German jumped back to the curb and yelled, pointing into the crowd.

But the young man had disappeared. On that score, he performed admirably. I followed him along the sidewalk for several blocks. He turned right onto Rue d’Alger, leaned against a plastered wall, and lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking.

When I approached him he almost bolted. He thought I was an undercover flic. He denied the entire affair, claimed he hadn’t been near the Place des Pyramides all day. He was adamant. In that way, at least, he showed good judgment. He had reason to be afraid. He easily could have ended up in jail.

I smoked a cigarette with him. He calmed down. We talked. He was a handsome kid, dark hair and blue eyes with long lashes. He had the angular and delicate boyish features so many women seem to favor in men. At the same time, his bearing exuded a certain brazen confidence that appealed to me. He wore a gold earring in his left ear.

It turned out the young man was from Lyon, had recently arrived in Paris, was determined not to work in a deadly nine-to-five job. I took him over to the Au Chien Qui Fume on the Rue du Pont Neuf and bought him dinner. He evidently had not eaten in some time.

Afterward we walked in the Jardin des Tuileries and I gave him some pointers. It was basic information: how to recognize an undercover cop, not to try anything on an elevator where there’s no escape route, never work the same place two days in a row. These I had learned from Moses Marchant long ago. For me they had become second nature. Repeating them brought back fond memories of Moses, and I began to consider taking on the young man — his name was Sebastien — as an apprentice, much as Moses had done for me.

But something Sebastien said turned me against the idea. He said he intended to get rich quick and retire to Corsica. Before the age of thirty, he said. He was quite serious. He wanted to live on a boat and lie in the sun all day sipping pastis.

If there is a single greatest danger in my trade, it is greed. A greedy person takes absurd risks, puts himself in peril too often. Inevitably, he gets caught. Before that happens, he is apt to hurt someone. He is in too much of a hurry. Usually such impatience results from ambition and youth. But ambition can be too large and youth can fail to mature. That dangerous mixture was the weakness I detected in Sebastien. In the end, I kept my thoughts to myself and wished him luck. We parted by the garden gate at Place de la Concorde and I walked home.

The day had passed magnificendy. Never had I worked with such precision or felt so much the master of my craft. As for Sebastien, I had not let nostalgic sentiment carry me away. I had made a wise decision. I whistled all the way home. There I put Bach’s Violin Concerto in A Minor on the stereo, opened a bottle of La Bacholle Camay, lit a cigarette, and stretched out on the sofa.

As soon as I relaxed, the most unusual feeling came over me. I sat up and went to my coat, which lay draped over the back of a chair. I reached into the pocket where I had put my afternoon earnings. The pocket was empty.

At first you could have tipped me over with a feather. I felt dizzy, forgot to breathe, took one step sideways, staggered, caught myself. Once I found my breath, I fell into a rage. I paced up and down swearing. I pounded my fist and slapped my thighs furiously. Such an outrage! I cursed Sebastien, then cursed myself. I kicked the door, the sofa, the chairs. I even bit my fist like a madman. It was quite a scene, with no one to see it.

Finally, I settled down. For a while I stood by the window shaking my head with disbelief. I watched the passersby below on the street. I smoked a cigarette. I smoked another.

Then I began to laugh. It was marvelous. He had really fooled me, that young man, a remarkable performance.

In the end, I lay back on the sofa, finished my wine, and listened to Bach.

I had lost half a day’s take. But what can you do? The world is full of thieves.