The Thief (8 page)

“You were laughing at me. Like you can’t have sex with a pro. It’s not like I enjoy it. I haven’t done anything wrong. You suck.”

As I listened to her I felt something stirring inside me. My breathing quickened.

“No, I don’t think like that. For one thing, I’m a pickpocket. Can a pickpocket laugh at a hooker? Look, I—”

She was staring at me in amazement. I realized I was acting a bit strangely, so I lit a cigarette and tried to calm down.

“I really am a pickpocket, so I know what I’m talking
about. If the kid carries on shoplifting like that, he’ll get arrested. If that happens the cops will be knocking at your door. Then you’ll be in trouble too. So don’t make him do it any more.”

“But….”

“If you need money, I’ll give you what I’ve got here. About two hundred thousand yen. If I’m lucky, I can get that in one day. So don’t make him.”

“Really?”

Her tired eyes shone and she turned slowly to stare at the money as if I wasn’t even there. At that moment she seemed to be lit by an overhead spotlight. Looking at her narrow shoulders, the curve of her body, the gentle gleam of her eyes, I felt a sense of panic.

“Take your clothes off. I’ve changed my mind. As payment.”

She smiled faintly in satisfaction. Then she looked at my face.

“Okay, I won’t make him steal anymore. And I’ll make sure he eats properly.”

Without hesitation she moved closer, taking off her sweater and undoing the hook of her skirt. Then she reached into her bag and took out some pills.

“These are great.”

I held up my hand in refusal. She looked like she was about to say something so I lied again.

“Pickpockets can’t do drugs.”

AS I PUSHED her down on the bed I was thinking of Saeko. I’d spent a lot of time with her until four years ago. Even though she had a husband and a child, she frequently came to my place. She often told me she should never have gotten married. When we had sex Saeko used to cry.

Sobbing, panting, shaking, grabbing my hair, repeatedly sticking her tongue in my mouth. Thin but beautiful, her body would catch the light, seeming to pulsate all over. Her mouth opened in a swallowing motion as she cried, and then unexpectedly she would laugh fit to burst, as if she was expelling some unspecified emotion.

“Sometimes I want to destroy everything around me that has any value. I wonder why. I know it doesn’t do me any good. Sometimes I don’t understand what I’m trying to do. Is there anything you wish for?”

Saeko never looked at me when she spoke.

“You’re a pickpocket, right? That’s cool. But you don’t do it for the money, do you?”

“Maybe the end,” I said abruptly.

“The end?”

“What will happen to me in the end. What happens to people who live the way I do? That’s what I’d like to know.”

That time Saeko didn’t laugh. For some reason she climbed on top of me without a word and starting making love to me again.

“I HAVE THIS dream. Even when I’m daydreaming, it’s always the same.”

Saeko told me this one month before she left me. We were lying on a bed under the red lamp of a hotel room, too lazy to get dressed, looking up at the walls and ceiling.

“It’s somewhere way, way underground. I’m surrounded by old rotting walls and it’s unbelievably damp. I’m falling, deeper and deeper, and at the very bottom there’s a bed. A bed with no one in it. Since someone’s put a bed there I know there’s nothing beneath, that it really is the bottom. The bed has a hollow, and my body fits that hollow
perfectly. As I lie there the hollow slowly starts to squeeze me, like you guys wrap me in your arms. As the hollow in the bed squeezes me, like it’s comforting me, how can I put it, I get incredibly turned on. All sorts of conventional values are trampled and my body grows hot, like a flame, and I come again and again. I’m crying, laughing, smashing things, sticking out my tongue, and even though my body won’t stop spasming it’s like I’m still not forgiven. I pass out, then wake up again straight away. My outline becomes vague. I’m like gray smoke. But even in that state I’m still conscious. I can still feel every single one of those tiny gray particles and even beyond them so intensely that it hurts. And then I turn white with the heat. But at that moment this tall thing appears.”

I looked her in the face.

“Long, glistening, towering. It’s like I’m outside somewhere. Then as I’m looking at it I’m thinking, ‘What is that?’ It’s pure, higher than the clouds, the top hidden from sight. And then I realize that I can’t go there, that this hot smoky whiteness is my high point. But just because it’s my peak, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll reach it. What I mean is, it’s my limit. It feels wonderful. I destroy all those values and I exist solely as sensation. I become
unbearably hot and then vanish. That tall, shiny tower is a long way off, but I die happily under its ruins. Of course it’s high and beautiful, and I can’t help longing for it, but that’s because it represents my greatest desire.”

PERHAPS BECAUSE OF the pills, the woman cried out several times, digging her fingernails into my back, my shoulders, my stomach. After we finished she kept her tongue in my mouth for a while. I was still thinking about Saeko.

“Actual ruins, though,” she had said to me once, “aren’t abstract like that. Ruins are always boring. Solid, concrete and boring.”

When the woman finally got off me, she lit one of my cigarettes and inhaled deeply. She moved close again and put her hand on my heart. The rain had stopped and everything was quiet. In the distance I could hear a shrill siren.

“Um, will you see me again?” she said, resting her nose on my shoulder. “It wouldn’t have to cost this much, less would be fine.”

“No.”

“It was good, wasn’t it?”

Her voice grew louder. For a second it seemed to blend
into Saeko’s voice and I looked away.

“It was good, wasn’t it? I bet it was. Absolutely.”

“It’s not that it wasn’t good,” I said. “You know they say that prostitution is the oldest profession?”

“The oldest? Hm. What’s the second oldest?”

“Pickpocket. Stealing. That’s the truth.”

“Picking pockets is a profession?”

I grinned.

“I don’t know, but if you’re going to screw up your life, do it on your own. Don’t get the boy involved.”

The siren grew gradually louder and finally stopped somewhere nearby.

“Okay. I won’t make him go shoplifting any more. I send him out when my boyfriend comes round. That’s all right, isn’t it? Sometimes he hits him, see.”

“Hits him?”

“Not badly. Just a tap, when he’s drunk.”

“Anyway, shoplifting is out.”

“Got it. But let’s get together again, eh?”

She looked at her watch, put on her clothes and snatched up the money.

• • •

EVEN AFTER SHE left I kept thinking about Saeko. When she told me she couldn’t see me any more, she was weeping.

“When I’m really fucked up—not that I’m not pretty fucked up now—but when I totally fall apart, then will you see me again?”

She certainly seemed to be serious. I didn’t look away, wanting to hold onto her face for just a little bit longer.

“Next time we meet,” I said, “I’ll be more screwed up too. As bad as you.”

Saeko smiled weakly.

“Yeah. I’d like that. Because you never look down on anyone.”

But she died alone without getting in touch with me. She disappeared and when her husband found her she’d overdosed. She didn’t leave a note.

The night I heard about it I went out in the street and stole indiscriminately from rich and poor alike. Burying myself in the crowd, I took wallets and cell phones, even gum and receipts and handkerchiefs. Breathing raggedly, with tension and pleasure running through me, I took them all. High overhead shone a white moon.

11
I ventured outside for the first time in ages. The wind was blowing a fine rain and everything looked blurry, like in a fog. I passed a group of foreigners in laborers’ clothes, then a woman in an extremely short skirt talking loudly on her phone. I realized that the kid was following me but kept on walking, figuring that if I ignored him he’d give up. For no particular reason I was clutching my cell phone. I bought a can of coffee from a vending machine and warmed my hands on
it. My temperature had gone down but I still had a headache. I drank the coffee and tried to decide where to go.

I thought checking out a nearby hotel or sneaking into a function somewhere would be better than going to Haneda Airport. In a convenience store I bought a magazine to check out what was on. When I came out with my bag the boy was standing in the parking lot behind a small truck with muddy tires. I went into a run-down coffee shop to read my magazine and to make him give up. The interior was dark and damp with a low ceiling. I ordered a coffee, even though I’d just finished one.

The waitress was wearing a short skirt and black stockings. She reminded me of the boy’s mother. Just then he came into the shop. The glass door was wet from the drizzle. Like me, he had no umbrella.

He sat down at my table. When the woman in the miniskirt came over with a smile, he asked for an orange juice. I lit a cigarette and looked at his dirty clothes.

“Go home.”

He ignored me. Then he spoke in a small voice as if he was opening the conversation.

“She took my money.”

“Yeah?”

“But only a hundred thousand yen. That’s all she found. I’ve still got a hundred and twenty thousand left.”

“Ah.”

When his drink arrived he stared at it seriously, like it was precious to him, and stuck the straw in his mouth.

“I don’t care,” I said. “Go home. I’ve got things to do.”

He went on drinking as though the orange juice was the only thing in his world.

“Show me how you do it.”

“No. I told you. You’d get in the way.”

He finished his drink and looked at my coffee, fiddling with the paper wrapper the straw had come in.

“I’ll just watch from a distance. It can’t hurt if I just watch, can it?”

“Nothing doing.”

“Why not? If I’m a long way off, I won’t be in the way.”

He was a lot more talkative than before.

“If you don’t like being at home, go to the library and read a book or something.”

“Did you do it with my mom?”

The dim lights of the shop reflected off the surface of the water in my glass. I was a bit taken aback, but I kept my expression neutral. I breathed in slowly.

“Look, you know how it is. I’m not your guardian angel. I’m just like all those other guys.”

“It’s okay, I don’t care.”

He looked down, went on playing with the paper.

“I’m used to it. I’ve even seen them at it.”

“But I bet you don’t like it.”

“It’s gross. But….”

He rubbed his thighs, started to say something else and then changed his mind. The ice in his glass had melted into the little bit of orange juice that remained, and he sucked it up noisily with his straw. A Christmas song was flowing out of the speakers.

“Better you than him.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Don’t you like her?”

“What about your dad?”

“I don’t know him.”

I wondered why I was bothering to ask him questions. I picked up the tab and left. The kid came with me.

WE CAME OUT the east exit of Shinjuku Station and walked under the neon signs, avoiding the main crush of
the crowd. When I leaned against the wall of an office building and lit a cigarette, my eyes met those of a homeless man walking toward me. The boy looked scared and mover closer. He started to clutch at my sleeve but then thought better of it. I gazed at the herd of people streaming by while I smoked.

“People don’t concentrate all the time. Every day they get distracted dozens of times.”

“Yeah.”

For some reason the kid had brought along the colored cardboard coaster from the coffee shop.

“If someone calls their name, for example, or there’s a loud noise, most of their attention is drawn to that. Just like you were looking at that bum a second ago. There are limits to people’s awareness. More exactly, they’re sensitive when they’re breathing in and when they’re holding their breath, but when they breathe out they relax.”

The boy glanced at my sleeve.

“Pickpockets know this and we take advantage of it. The classic technique is to take the wallet at the moment you bump into them. But actually picking pockets isn’t a one-man job. You need partners. Three people is standard. One person to jostle the mark, one person to block
other people’s view, one person to lift. And jostling doesn’t mean hitting them as hard as you can. Just brushing them with your shoulder is enough. In a crowd like this, if the person walking in front stops suddenly, the person behind will lose their balance, right? That’s all you need. The person who does the actual lift stops anyone seeing him from the left, and the blocker shields the right and from behind. The one who takes the wallet immediately passes it to his partner, who hides it. If you do it like that you’ll never get caught.”

A host, a sleazy guy standing outside a ladies’ bar trying to entice customers, was pestering a woman chatting on her cell phone as she walked. His ugly face was impossibly tanned, horrible enough to take your breath away.

“If you’ve got five people, two of them start arguing, and while everyone’s focused on that the other three can steal the spectators’ wallets. I’ve also heard of a street performer and a pickpocket who worked as a team. A long time ago, when I was teamed up with that guy I told you about, the one who took ten million yen, we used a whole range of tricks. He’d pretend to be drunk and put his arm round the mark. Then I’d step in to stop him and take their wallet. Or I’d trip someone up and run away. He’d steal their wallet
while he was helping them up. Sometimes we paid some bum to shout that there was a pickpocket in the crowd. Every single person would instinctively put their hand on their wallet. We’d know exactly where each one was, so they were easy to steal. A kid like you couldn’t get a wallet from inside someone’s coat. You’d have to stick to the back pocket of their trousers. I don’t like tools, but you could use a small blade. If you cut along the stitching of the pocket, the wallet would just fall out under its own weight. But anyway, the basic thing is how you’re going to distract the target.”