The time was six fifteen. The bustle of the market as the traders fixed their pitches for the day was not the world of catalogues. But Joseph’s mission was quite clear. City folk were easy pickings. Rich and careless. Weak. Those pampered noses on the carriage glass could sneeze banknotes. Those clerks and secretaries in their cars had gaping wallets, purses, cash to spare. He’d never had the chance to steal off strangers before. It would be easy, he could tell. He’d not be caught. He wouldn’t have to turn his village pockets out for every city coin that got lost. He had no face. He had no name. He had no reputation. It was his lucky day.
He’d known such careless crowds at country fetes and auctions, so all the bump and jostle of the Soap Market was nothing new to him. He was not lost, or overawed. The stalls and market paths had logic. That distant office building on his right gave him his bearings. He knew that empty barrows wheeled by porters led to the outskirt streets where produce vans were parked. The country boy is used to mapping routes, in hop plantations, forests, in the pleats of fields, in mazes made from furrows, fences, dykes. So Joseph stored and sifted signs — the stall that sold shallots, the music of a radio, the trader with the piebald beard, the Man in Cellophane, the diadem of coloured lights, the breeze — to keep a tab on where he was, and where he’d need to run, or hide, if he should chance upon some luck.
He was surprised, it’s true, by such a city landscape, fashioned out of repetition and conformity, with matching buildings and matching streets and people dressed the same. He was surprised there were no gradients, no sea, no streams, no fertile land. Some fool had built this city on the flat between the pebble and the clod where nothing grew except the appetite. Some fool, in fact, had built this city on the worst of sites. Where was the fish-stocked estuary, the river bridge, the sheltered harbour, the pass between two hills, the natural crossroads in the land where ancient settlements were meant to be? Where was the seam of coal to make the city rich? Where were the hummocks and escarpments to make the city safe? Where was the panoramic view to make the city spiritual, a holy place? What made this thirsty, ill-positioned city — too southerly to benefit from hops, too northerly for grapes — so rich and large? The answer crowded him at every step. It caught his shins. It bustled him from side to side. The marketplace! A city with no natural virtues is reduced to trade. Seas, rivers, hills, coal seams make fishing, farming, metal-bashing, tourist cities. But cities like ours have little choice except to buy and sell and deal, except to do what Joseph planned to do, to make a living out of theft.
If he had been a wiser man, he would have waited for a while before he embarked on his chosen trade. It was too early for the careless shoppers. The only people in the market at that time were marketeers. This was their habitat. This web was theirs. They noted him — not as a thief, but as a scrumper, one of those who came to breakfast gratis on the fruit. He was never unobserved. And so his luck ran out. He’d seen his chance. The soapie Con had moved an envelope with the one red word ‘Rook’ written on it to the back pocket of his trousers so that he could bend and lift more easily. It wagged invitingly as its owner embraced a sack of carrots. Joseph was fast and skilled, but obvious. His fingers wrapped round ‘Rook’. He got the envelope — but not before three voices had called out a warning, ‘Look out, Con!’ Con’s hand shot back and caught Joseph by his trouser leg. He fell. In seconds he was pinioned to the ground. A crowd had formed. His suit was stained by soil and fruit and leaves. He took the first kick of the day.
‘You’ll pay for this,’ Con said, already seeing opportunities for cashing in on this young fool’s misfortune.
So there was Joseph, a few hours on, paying for his short-lived, bungled life of petty crime by undertaking the ‘contract robbery’ of a man called Rook. Was this the big-time opportunity he’d dreamed about? Was this — so soon — his golden chance? As instructed, he’d first dogged Rook along the mall, to get to know his face. And now he waited for his return in the tunnel under Link Highway Red. He squatted on his haunches, smoking, and studying the picture Con had given him — a snapshot of a market stall. The man amongst the vegetables and fruit was a younger Rook, smiling, scarf unknotted at his throat, his clothes all black. Here was the man to ambush, frighten, rob. Con’s promise was, as he despatched young Joseph to do his business on the mall, that Rook — as he returned from the Soap Market to Big Vic, and not before — would carry money, hidden, maybe, but cash and notes in large sums. There would be an envelope as well, the one he’d failed to steal. Brown, sealed with tape, and marked in red with Rook’s name. Con showed the envelope again to Joseph. ‘Remember it,’ he said. ‘The man you’re looking for will have this somewhere on him as he heads back to work.’ All Joseph had to do was wave his knife and take the envelope, unopened, back to Con’s market stall. Anything else he found on Rook was his to keep. If he did this task efficiently, there’d be no police involved. The pocket-snatching rashness in the marketplace would be forgotten. Joseph’s identity card, which Con had confiscated as security, would be returned. ‘Perhaps, there’d be a proper job for him as well. What job? Con wouldn’t say, except ‘a market job, a job where muscles like the ones you’ve got won’t do you any harm’.
Joseph, now out of cigarettes and more hungry in the walkers’ tunnel than he had been upon the streets, once more fixed Rook’s much younger face onto his memory, and then bent more eagerly to study a second picture in the oscillating light — the illustration from the clothing catalogue. Now he and the model in their matching suits were cousins, at the very least. The longer Joseph stared at all its appetizing detail — the suit, the upturned hand, the third and unattended glass — the more certain he became that soon he would be drinking at the bar.
Quite soon Joseph was tired of sitting on his haunches in the gloom. He was hungry, damp, and desperate for nicotine. He was embarrassed, too, by the way the elderly woman who had passed him in the tunnel did so with such nervousness and haste that she had missed the pleasant smile he’d given her. He’d never met a woman of that age before who did not know his name and family, who did not stop to swap a word or two. He called after her. At first a cheerful greeting. Then abuse. She did not turn. She did not seem to hear. Perhaps she was the sort that hates the young.
He was impatient now to prove himself a citizen. He walked towards the daylight spilling down the steps from the street in the hope of spotting Rook amongst the faces in the crowd. Much easier to follow Rook and rob him from behind. But as he turned to mount the stairs he saw Rook descending, in his path, three steps above. His victim was not looking well. He held his chest. The pallor on his face suggested fever or anxiety. He was breathless, too, from walking fast and from carrying through crowds what looked like burgher laurel branches and a ribboned box, a pyramid, which, thought Joseph, promised riches of some kind. That was the moment Rook and Joseph met. Rook, recognizing who it was, alarmed and startled, stepped aside to let his ne’er-do-well climb past. But Joseph did not move. He let Rook step a pace or two into the stench and echo of the tunnel, then placed his left arm round Rook’s thin throat and held him — plus a bunch of laurel — as tightly as the model held the bar girl’s wrist. ‘I’ve got a knife,’ he said. And to prove that he was honest in his way, he held the flick-knife, last used to stop tomatoes at their crowns, in his right hand and sprang it open just a little distant from Rook’s nose.
‘Drop the box,’ he said.
Rook let the pastries fall.