Read Online The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura - Free Book Online

pattern so that I could put things inside without undoing the zip.
    Once the boy saw my hand move he kept glancing at the bag.
    “Grab the edge of my coat,” I told him. “Pretend I’m your father and stay right beside me. Your body will help hide the bag.”
    I put a couple of packed lunches into the basket as camouflage while I filled the bag. This time the store detective was a woman in glasses, close to retirement age. The basket of her shopping cart was loaded with stuff so she’d look like a normal customer, but since she had to be onduty for a long time there were no perishables among them. She was keeping an eye on a woman in her forties with dyed brown hair who was walking along the aisle, her long white down jacket swinging from side to side.
    “Stay there, but watch that woman.”
    Holding her basket in one hand, the woman in the white jacket quickly shoved a box of chocolates in her pocket. The security guard missed that one but kept following her as though she was sure the woman was up to something. They disappeared around the corner.
    “Probably she’s sick.”
    “Sick?”
    “Stealing stuff without realizing it. There are people like that.”
    I was careful to keep my expression neutral.
    “Maybe it’s Pick’s disease. That’s also called early-onset
dementia
. But it’s strange, a complete mystery. Why does the subconscious mind make people steal? Why does it have to be stealing? Don’t you think it’s something deep-rooted in our nature?”
    The boy shook his head to show that he didn’t know.
    “But now’s our chance. It’s crowded and that store detective isn’t here.”
    I put everything that was on the list into my bag, and beer, water and ham into the basket. Then we paid at the checkout and left.
    WE WENT TO a park, and when I handed the boy one of the lunches he started eating without a word. I passed him a bottle of water but he barely touched it. Meat, omelet—he shoveled the food down so fast I thought he’d choke.
    I opened a beer and chewed some ham. Dirty clouds were gradually closing in, blocking the light from the sun. In the distance a group of children clustered around a bench with Gameboys in their hands, all focused on the screens.
    “As a kid, you have to choose what to take when you shoplift,” I told him. “Otherwise it’s too hard.”
    He looked at me between mouthfuls.
    “Sweets, or at most soft drinks. It’s pretty hard for you to take veggies from a supermarket.”
    I touched his windbreaker.
    “What you could do, for example, is sew a pouch inside your jacket. Then you make a hole in your pocket so that itopens into the pouch. Or you can make a slit along the zip in the front so that it’s hidden by the flap. You put everything in the pouch, and you stop before it gets too full.”
    Before I knew it he’d finished his lunch.
    “Or a bag. A school bag is too conspicuous. A satchel like you would take to cram school is good. If you make a cut in a bag like the one I was using, you can put all sorts of stuff in. Then there’s stealing. Wallets.”
    “I’ve done that.”
    He was watching the gang of kids on the other side of the park.
    “On a crowded train with my mom.”
    “Really?”
    “This wallet was sticking out of an old guy’s pocket. I thought it looked like I could take that, I wondered if I could take it, and I took it. It had seven thousand yen in it. I’ve done it a few times since then. On trains by myself.”
    “Let’s try it.”
    I put my own wallet in my back pocket and stood up. He bumped my left leg, as if by accident. Shifting his weight to his left, he took my wallet with his right hand.
    “Not bad, but you should stop. I mean, it’s still just for fun and you’re not used to it. Anyway, you really do it likethis, with two or three fingers. You don’t use your thumbs like that. I guess you can’t help it, though, since your fingers are short and you still don’t have much strength.”
    I finished my beer.
    “You could