He strolled up to stand beside the mannequin, looking from side to side as if he was observing the traffic in a street. Meanwhile — without ever so much as glancing at his quarry — his hand moved very, very slowly toward one of the handkerchiefs just barely hanging out of a pocket. Thread by thread, almost, he delicately removed it, and when it fell free of the mannequin's pocket, he whisked it into his own so quickly it seemed to vanish. As slowly as it had seemed to move, the whole business had not taken very long — certainly it was reasonable to think that a target would have remained standing beside the thief for that period of time, especially in a crowd or at the side of a busy street with a lot of traffic on it.
“Tha's th’ 'ard way,” Bazie told Skif, who watched with wide eyes. “Raf, 'e's th' best I ivir showed. 'E's got th' touch, fer certain-sure.”
Now Raf sidled up to the other side of the mannequin, still casual and calm; he pretended to point at something, and while the target's attention was presumably distracted for a moment, out came a knife no bigger than a finger, and between one breath and the next, the strings of both belt pouches had been slit and knife and pouches were in Raf's pocket.
And all without jingling a single bell.
Now it was Lyle's turn, and he extracted the remaining handkerchief without difficulty, although he was not as smooth as Raf. “I'm not near that good,” Deek said, “So I'm got t' do th' shake'n'snatch. Tha' takes two.”
He got up, and he and Lyle advanced on the mannequin together. Then Lyle pretended to stumble and fell against it, setting all the bells jingling; as it fell into him, Deek grabbed for it. “ 'Ey there, lad!” he exclaimed. “Steady on! An' you — watch where yer goin', you! Mussin' up a gennelmun like that!”
Skif would have expected Deek to pretend to brush the mannequin off, and get hold of his goods that way, but Deek did nothing of the sort. He simply set it straight. They both moved off, but now the mannequin no longer had the kerchief around its neck, and Deek held up both the kerchief and the pouch that had been tucked inside its tunic triumphantly.
“Tha's th' easy road, but riskier,” Bazie noted. “Chance is, if mun figgers 'e's been lifted, 'e'll send beaks lookin' fer th' shaker — tha's Lyle.”
“An' I'm be clean,” Lyle pointed out. “Ain't nothin' on me, an' beak'll let me go.”
“But if 'e knows th' liftin' lay, it'll be Deek 'e'll set beak on, an' Deek ain't clean. Or mun might even be sharp 'nuff t' figger 'twas both on 'em,” Bazie cautioned. “Ye run th' shake'n'snatch, ye pick yer cony careful. Gotta be one as is wuth it, got 'nuf glim t' take th' risk, but one as ain't too smart, ye ken? An' do't when's a mort uv crowd, but not so's ye cain't get slipput away.”
Skif nodded solemnly.
“Na, 'tis yer turn. Jest wipes, fer now.”
Skif then spent a humbling evening, trying to extract handkerchiefs from the mannequin's pocket without setting off the bells. Try as he might, with sweat matting his hair from the strain, he could not manage to set off less than two. And here he'd thought that he'd been working hard, hauling water and doing laundry, or going over walls and roofs with Deek! That had been a joke compared with this!
At length, Bazie took pity on him. “That'll be 'nuff, lad,” he said, as Skif sagged with mingled weariness and defeat. “Ye done not bad, fer th' fust time. Ye'll get better, ye ken. Put yon dummy i't' corner, an' leave 'im fer now. Time fer a bit uv supper.”
Skif was glad to do so. It was beginning to occur to him that the life of a thief was not as easy as most people believed, and most thieves pretended. The amount of skill it took was amazing; the amount of work to acquire that skill more than he had imagined. Not that he was going to give up!
I'll get this if't kills me.
“So, wha's news, m'lads?” Bazie asked, deftly slicing paper-thin wafers of sweet onion. This was going to be a good supper tonight, and they were all looking forward to it. Deek and Skif had done well for the little gang.
Lyle sliced bread and spread it with butter that Skif had gotten right out of a fancy inn's kitchen that very morning. He and Deek had been down in the part of town where the best inns and taverns were, actually just passing through, when one of those strokes of luck occurred that could never have been planned for.
The inn next to the one they had been passing had caught fire — they never found out why, only saw the flames go roaring up and heard the hue and cry. Everyone in the untouched place they'd stopped beside, staff and customers alike, had gone rushing out — either to help or to gawk — and he and Deek had slipped inside in the confusion.
Somehow, without having a plan, they'd gotten in, snatched the right things, and gotten out within moments. For one thing, they had gone straight to the kitchen as the best bet. Taking money was out of the question; they didn't know where the till was. There was no time to search for valuable property left behind in the confusion. Without discussion, they had gone for what they needed, where they knew they would find something worth taking.
The kitchen.
