What worked best in his favor was that he did not look homeless. Little Radu was the epitome of an adorable foreigner — often pretending to be a lost Italian or Portuguese boy looking for his parents. With all the tourists frequenting his city on their way to visit all places that mentioned Vlad Tepes of the legend of the Order of Dracul, it was easy to pick up on their accents and the way they acted. Radu had become an accomplished actor by now and he was rarely ever nervous anymore staging his cons.
After he had gone to the park fountain to wet his hair and wash his face, he returned to the beer garden where the loud Germans were still sitting. Pretending to be the son of one of the establishment’s patrons, Radu simply walked in and hovered around a large table near the corner tree where a local company had their year-end function. All the people at the long wooden table chatted in small cliques as the third round of drinks were already kicking in. Nobody paid attention to the fresh face among the children playing around the tree, running about the whole time. Radu used the opportunity to blend in, because the staff of the company did not know one another’s families well enough to notice that this child had no parents present.
From here Radu eyed the Germans, making sure that they saw him playing there so that they would assume the same as the waiters and guests. A while after he had joined the party, the young boy cordially asked one of the waiters where the restroom was and of course, they were only too happy to direct him there. All this was Radu’s way of building an alibi. Being a child just made his criminal activities easier. With his dirty sweater turned inside out and tied over his shoulders the Romanian boy looked like a proper little yuppie, fooling anyone who did not care to check his fingernails or socks.
On his way to the restroom, Radu checked his surroundings for witnesses. It was at the back of the beer garden where the all the vehicles of the patrons were parked. Once he determined that there were no prying eyes to blame him, he took two rocks, climbed into one of the trees and, from the shelter of the high set branches, he picked two luxury cars. Honing his aim, Radu flung the first rock at the wind shield of a brand new red Mercedes. As the alarm started to scream, he rapidly hurled the other rock at another posh set of wheels well away from the first, the make of which he could not determine from the vantage of the tree.
At once there was an unholy cacophony of screeching car alarms coming from the parking lot and as he expected, it immediately drew the urgent attention of all the establishment’s patrons. With their focus on what was happening, some running to check on their cars and other watching the panicking runners, the people at the beer garden presented an easy pick-off for the unremarkable little boy. Without hesitation he swept the one German women’s bag from under her seat in the stride of his walk as he casually sauntered past the table while she was leaning across the table to see what was ensuing in the parking area.
By the time she noticed that her bag was stolen it was too late. Radu was long gone; he had left during the madness and stopped only to slip on his sweater and ruffle up his hair. There were many things he learned quickly on the streets, but one of these was paramount. Never run.
Running through a crowd of slow pacing people drew attention. He learned to take his time moving through people to get away from a scene where he had committed a theft, because for some reason police officers had the mistaken idea that all thieves sprinted. Radu smiled as he slipped into the back yard area of a petrol station where he emptied the bag. From the contents he kept the cash, discarding the woman’s wallet. He did not want to look at her ID. He did not want to know her name, because then she would be a person, not a target. If he knew her name she would become someone’s mother, someone’s daughter, someone’s widow, even. Then he would feel guilty about stealing from her, because his mother taught him that only hard work gave a man pride in his money. Stealing would then be construed as quite the opposite according to his mother’s law.
“I know you understand, Mama,” he said quickly, looking up. “Her husband will give her more.” Making amends to his late mother’s spirit when he robbed people did not bring much peace of mind, but he did it anyway because he knew his mother was watching.
Radu found some things in the woman’s purse he had not found before in any of the others he had swiped.
For one, he found a strange key that resembled a dragonfly, bronze in color and far too large to unlock anything smaller than an unsolvable riddle or a universal secret. It was not even considered for a door’s lock, not any door, anywhere. He marveled at the piece with a gaping mouth. It felt somehow magical between his fingertips, yet it did not exhibit any of those traits magical things possessed — not obviously anyway. To Radu the strange key felt heavy, not in weight, but in substance. He decided to keep it.
The rush of his thievery had the child sweating, so he pulled off his sweater and put it on the ground next to him before he opened another compartment of the woman’s bag and shoved his hand inside.
Another oddity he pulled from the purse was a card, missing from the rest of its deck. It was much bigger than the cards he was used to playing with some of the hobo’s in the park and it looked more like a painting than a mass produced item with two dimensional suits and numbers upon it. This one looked like it was hand painted by a consummate oil paint artist from one of the museums in Bohemia or Italy. His mother used to give him art books to page through while she prepared dinner or washed their clothing, hoping to cultivate a taste for culture in her son. One of her books featured the art museums and galleries of the Louvre, Prague, Rome and Vienna, among other ancient cities and countries of artistic treasure. This card could easily have represented a replica of any of the pieces he had seen in their inventory, expertly hand drawn by any of the grand masters whose names were revered by scholars and philosophers of the ages. The picture upon it frightened him, yet he stared in a state of thrall and thrill. It depicted a boy about his own age holding an eyeball upon one open supine palm, the eye being his own. Above him a pitch black circle with rays like tentacles to which his other hand was reaching.
Radu got the sensation of treasure from it and he imagined that the card was charged with some form of life force. He could feel the current of tiny electrical sparks permeate from the card into his fingers, playing gently with his nerve endings in such a way that it caused a playful sting throughout his hands. Had he known better, Radu would have interpreted the sensation as a mild shock, but his curiosity doused his alarm and kept him spellbound. With the money he could eat for two weeks, but still he was ransacking the inner pockets of the bag for more loot.
To his disappointment, the owner of the purse had nothing more than crumpled tissues, sunglasses, cosmetics and a hairbrush to offer. For a moment Radu was extremely curious to learn her name, just this once. He opened the other section of her wallet slowly so that he could still resign from his silly idea should he feel that knowing her name would ignite his guilt. But what he saw immediately struck fear into his little heart, from tales told by his grandparents when he was small.
Long before they died, his mother’s parents talked about the terrible misdeeds of the Austrian man who led the German army in the days of their youth, who attacked their villages and committed unspeakable atrocities on the Jews. Radu’s big dark eyes blinked rapidly with uncertainty and terror as the red Swastika presented itself under his thumb, securely held back by a plastic pocket as if he feared that its evil would char his skin. He shut the wallet and cast it aside to display his displeasure and revulsion at the contents, but like the big card he had claimed, the object seemed to call to him, speaking from where it lay abandoned.