out before they knew it.
Perfect. The older pickpockets would take note – that’s where they kept the cash.
But Birthday Jones had an extra secret weapon. His eyes. An amber-gold colour and yes, damn it, sparkling; he would beam those eyes into yours and all of a sudden you’d forget he was barefoot and dirt-smeared. In fact, suddenly, he looked great, and it seemed like a good idea to buy him a meal, some shoes, a bed. Sam had watched him work plenty of times, and when Birthday brought out the big guns – his dimples – the tourists started speaking seriously about adoption and the plight of Romanian street children. Sam was at once sympathetic and repulsed by that attitude. Sure, she could understand the attraction of bringing this particularly cute street kid into western suburbia. These tourists would suddenly become the Angelina Jolies of their suburb in a single post-softball weekend barbeque. But what about the smaller kids they looked right through? Andre, with the cleft palate, only eight this year, and three when Samantha first met him. He was still begging, and had three years to go before he graduated to pickpocket. And Belinda, now fourteen – Samantha hadn’t seen her once in the last two years. Word was she was in Russia now, and was owned by the mafia.
Birthday was wearing his Invisible Outfit: black cargos, blue T-shirt, runners. Today, with his sunshine curls tamed by a black trucker cap, and those eyes hooded by its curved visor, he was just another street kid. He was making certain to keep the dimples in their holster. He didn’t want to stand out.
‘Can you see their handler?’ said Mirela.
‘Fat cow,’ said Samantha. ‘She’s right there. Stay down. She hates me.’
They squatted by a row of concrete rubbish bins separating the mall from the street. Birthday Jones had had the same handler for the past three years. Cici Illiescu. When Samantha had seen the woman beating the kids because they didn’t bring in enough cash or food, she’d sworn in protest and tried to jump in to help them. But Birthday had yelled at her, told her she was making things worse.
‘It doesn’t even hurt,’ he’d said later. ‘It’s just a bit of hose. But if you get her angry, she’ll tell Drago and then we’ll really cop it. She’s nothing. We all laugh about how winded she gets just giving out five.’
‘We can’t sit here in the gutters all day, Sam,’ said Mirela. ‘This is getting boring.’
‘Chill,’ said Samantha. ‘I’ll get his attention in a second.’
A shopkeeper on the other side of the street made a show of catching their eye and spitting onto the footpath. He swept the air theatrically with his broom to shoo them away.
‘Why do they call him Birthday, anyway?’ said Mirela, smiling languidly at the shopkeeper. It’d take the Gaje police to get her to move from a public street, and even then she’d give them plenty of chat.
‘It’s his actual name,’ said Samantha. ‘They don’t just call him that.’
‘For real?’ said Mirela.
‘Yep. He was dumped at the hospital on the day he was born. And he had no blanket, nothing. Some wise-arse at the hospital decided to memorialise the moment, I guess, and wrote down Birthday Jones as his name on his birth certificate.’
‘Nice,’ said Mirela, grinning.
‘It’s not funny.’ Samantha nudged Mirela’s foot with her shoe.
‘Hey! I know. It’s pretty mean.’ Mirela laughed. ‘It’s a cool name, though.’
Samantha glowered and turned back to watch the crew work the mall.
‘Maybe that’s why you like him so much,’ said Mirela. ‘On account of… you know… how you came to
Samantha said nothing. She was sure that had to be part of it. When she’d first heard his story and the tales of some of the other kids out there, she’d felt guilty for having been so lucky as to have been left with Lala. Sure, there’d been some hard times growing up around Milosh, but it was nothing compared to life as a child in a Romanian orphanage. Even the streets were better than that, and that’s where most of them ended up.
‘Hey, get up,’ she said. ‘He’s coming this way.’
The restaurant strip was the most upmarket in Pantelimon, and a few of the restaurateurs did their best to warn their customers – mostly tourists – about the pickpockets and beggars. The kids would stay away from these cafes, concentrating their trade around the outdoor tables of the other venues, whose owners saved a fortune buying stolen goods from the street kids – often items thieved to order.
Right now, Birthday Jones was making his way through a cluster of people checking out the signposted menu of one of these establishments. Samantha watched him brush past a tall, slim woman in an expensive leather jacket. Waiting for a table with a shorter woman in a red sundress, she barely glanced at him, and didn’t notice that her handbag swayed slightly as he walked away.
From their concrete hideout, Samantha grinned. She gave their whistle. Birthday looked up, spotted her instantly. Other than a slight tilt of his trucker cap, his expression didn’t change at all.
‘Hey, hoodlum,’ she said when he reached the bins.
That got her the dimples.
‘Hey, yourself, superstar,’ he said, looking down at them. ‘Mirela,’ he added.
Mirela nodded. ‘What’s up?’ she said, blushing.
‘Well, you two should know. You’re the talk of the town.’
Samantha frowned. ‘Huh?’
‘Don’t get up,’ he said. ‘Cici will see you and then we’ll all have a very bad day. Just wait here a second. I’m gonna bail. You guys hungry?’
‘Always,’ said Mirela.
‘So you got any money?’ said Birthday Jones.
Samantha really was hungry now. The sights and smells of the food at the outdoor market always drove her crazy. They walked past a particularly fragrant stall. Mounds of deep-brown, sandy, red and golden-coloured ground spices filled the air with cinnamon, cloves, cumin, paprika. She took a deep breath. She felt like burying her face in one of the bowls.
‘You’ve always got money, Birthday,’ said Mirela, smiling up at him. ‘Can’t you buy us something to eat?’
She blinked lazily, her dark, thick lashes as long as Tamas’s. Samantha laughed. Mirela was only thirteen, but she could make most boys do exactly what she wanted.
‘Not right now, I don’t,’ he said.
‘But what about Mrs Leather Jacket?’ asked Sam.
She stopped in front of the glass cabinet of a stall selling fat, sticky chunks of chicken threaded onto skewers with sweet, charred onions.
‘I had to give that to Cici,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry about it. Wait here. I’ll be back in a sec.’
They watched him approach a table of backpackers, all laughing and speaking over one another in a language Samantha couldn’t identify. Under a red, striped umbrella, dressed in singlets and shorts, they drank beer and ate with their fingers and bread from plates and bowls covering almost every inch of the table.
Samantha watched Birthday, trying to predict his hustle. Backpackers were usually tricky. They kept their cash in their shoes, or strapped tightly around them in zipped belts. Birthday would have to get pretty close to one of them to lift a wallet.
In the end, he must have agreed – she watched him walk right past the group, his trucker cap low. He passed close to the next stall, selling boots, belts and other leather items.
‘Oh man,’ said Mirela. ‘What’s he doing now? Shopping for a key ring?’
‘Nope, a wallet,’ said Samantha, grinning, suddenly understanding. ‘Watch this.’
When he’d cleared the leather goods stall, Birthday Jones cut sharply left and ducked back around behind it. Before they knew it, he was standing at the rowdy table with the backpackers.
‘Hey man,’ they heard him say, leaning in over the loudest male in the group. ‘Did you drop this? It was right behind you.’
The big guy stood, swaying slightly. Blindingly blond in the bright sunshine, he towered over Birthday Jones, who, Samantha realised, had reached almost six foot this summer. The blond giant’s nose was sunburned and appeared to have been broken more than once. He wore a frown and half of his lunch down his white singlet, and he looked to have a good beer buzz going on.
‘What did you say?’ he asked with a heavy accent.
Birthday held something up.
‘It’s a wallet,’ whispered Mirela. ‘Why doesn’t he bring it over here?’
