“Still asleep?” my friend asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’m hungry,” said Bass, slapping himself on the stomach.
“So why tell me?”
“Well, you’re my friend!”
“Sure as daylight, I’m your friend. But it’s time you learned to earn your food some other way than playing potbellied small fry at dice and cards!”
“Ah!” Bass sighed in disappointment and sat down on the edge of the straw mattress. “Just because you’re twelve and I’m only eleven, it doesn’t mean that you’re cleverer than me.”
“Well, if that’s not so, why are you nagging me about food?” I chuckled.
“There’s a job.”
“Well?” I stopped studying the ceiling and sat up.
“This man won a lot of money from Kra at dice…”
“How did you get in there?” I asked in surprise.
They didn’t like to let us into the gambling den. Kra didn’t make any profits out of juvenile pickpockets like us. We just got under everyone’s feet and cleaned out the decent customers.
“I managed it,” said Bass, screwing up his blue eyes cunningly.
Bass had earned his nickname of Snoop. He could get in anywhere at all—it was another matter that my friend quite often got in trouble for these escapades of his.
“Well, what about this man?”
“Ah! Well, basically, he was playing Kra at dice and he won three gold pieces!”
I whistled enviously. Only once had I ever managed to fish a gold piece out of someone’s pocket on the street, and Bass and I had lived in clover for two whole months. And this was three all at once!
“Do you think you can get them off him?” I asked Bass cautiously.
“I don’t think so, but you could,” my friend admitted with a sickly smile.
“Right,” I said morosely. “And if something goes wrong, it’ll be me they grab, not you.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Bass declared nonchalantly. “This character looks like a real goose. If anything happens, I’ll help. We’re a team!”
He was right there. We’d been through a lot together in the two years we had known each other and lived in the slums of the Suburbs. And there had been bad days as well as good ones in that time.
Compared with me, Bass wasn’t too good at delving into people’s pockets on the street. He didn’t really have any talent for lifting purses, and that burden was always laid on my shoulders. But then Snoop did have other talents: He could sell a bill of goods to the Nameless One himself, con and swindle his nearest and dearest, fix a game of dice or cards, and point me in the direction of a man with a pocket bulging with coins.
“All right,” I sighed. “Where is this golden gent of yours?”
“He’s sitting in the Dirty Fish, guzzling wine.”
“Let’s go, you can show me,” I said reluctantly.
We still had one silver coin and five copper ones, and there would have been no point in risking my neck if not for the three gold pieces. For that kind of money it was worth getting up off the mattress and going out into the cold.
We slipped out of the crooked old hovel that was home to more than twenty souls. The people who lived there were all homeless tramps, like us.
Avendoom was in the grip of early spring—there was still snow lying on the ground, the nights were still as fiercely cold as in January, when many people who had no roof over their head froze to death in the streets, but despite the cold weather, the unfriendly gray sky, and the snowdrifts everywhere, spring was in the air.
There was an elusive smell of opening buds, murmuring streams, and mud.
Yes, mud! The mud that appeared from out of nowhere every year in the Avendoom Suburbs. But of course the mud was a mere trifle, a minor inconvenience and nothing more. The important thing was that soon the weather would be warm and I would finally be able to throw away the repulsive dog’s-fur coat with tears in five places that I’d stolen from a drunken groom the year before.
It had faithfully kept me warm all winter long, but when I wore it I was less agile and quick, and that enforced clumsiness had got me into trouble more than once. The week before I’d very nearly ended up getting nabbed by the guards because my feet got tangled up in the thing.
The Dirty Fish, a crooked old tavern, was right in the very center of the Suburbs, beside Sour Plums Square. No sane man would ever go to the Fish to fill his paunch—the tavern’s sour wine and abundant bedbugs were enough to frighten away any decent customers.
We halted on the other side of the street, opposite the doors of the tavern.
“Are you sure your man’s still in there? What would he be doing in a puke hole like that with three gold pieces? Couldn’t he find a better place?”
“Obviously he couldn’t,” Bass muttered. “He’s there, and he has two jugs of wine on the table in front of him. I don’t think he could have guzzled all of it while I ran to get you.”
“You simply don’t know how good some people get at guzzling wine,” I retorted. “He could be more than a league away by now.”
“Harold, you’re always panicking over petty details,” Bass snorted. “I told you, he’s in there!”
“All right,” I sighed, “let’s wait and see.”
So we waited in the frost. Bass and I leapt up every time the door of the tavern opened, and every time it turned out to be the wrong man.
“Listen,” I said, losing patience after two hours’ waiting, “I’m frozen to death.”
“I’m almost frozen solid, too, but that man’s definitely in there!”
“We wait for another half hour, and if he doesn’t come, I’m clearing out of here,” I said firmly.
Bass sighed mournfully.
“Maybe I should go and check?”
“That’s all we need, for Kra to give you a good thrashing. Stay where you are.”
The frost was licking greedily at my fingers and toes, so I stamped my feet and clapped my hands, trying to warm myself up at least a little bit. Several times Bass wanted to go into the tavern to check how the owner of the three gold pieces was getting on, but every time, after wrangling with me for a while, he stayed where he was.
“Maybe the guy’s had too much to drink?” my friend asked uncertainly; I could feel my fingers turning to icicles.
“Maybe…,” I replied, with my teeth chattering. “I don’t want anything anymore except to get warm.”
“There he is!” Bass suddenly exclaimed, pointing to a man who was walking out of the tavern. I studied him critically and gave my verdict: “A goose.”
“I told you so,” my friend said with a sniff. “Oh, now we’ll really start living!”
“Don’t be in such a hurry,” I said, watching our future victim’s progress. “Did you see where he keeps his money?”
“His right pocket. That’s where his purse is.”
“Let’s go.”
We tried to behave so that he wouldn’t take any notice of us. Trying to get into his pocket just
