The Gentleman Thief

by Kate Gragg

  “We don’t have time. Alphonse is expecting us.”

  “Alphonse thought this job would take all day. He underestimates me, just like you do.”

  “I could go for a beer,” Gunther shrugged.

  Tosca sighed and nodded.

  “Three beers please,” I said to the bartender, “and make sure the flagons are clean.”

  I slapped the princess’s coin down on the rough gray board that served as a bar top. The bartender squinted at it with his one good eye, polishing it on a corner of his grimy apron, then spat.

  “Can’t spend this here,” he said.

  “Why not, it’s still copper isn’t it?” I protested.

  “Do I look like a foreign johnny to you?” he said, throwing the coin at me. He looked like a warthog, but I took his point.

  “Aw, I’m thirsty,” Gunther pouted.

  “I guess we could –” I motioned to the sack.

  “Don’t you even dare,” Tosca said.

  Defeated, I tossed the coin into a fountain on the way back, wishing for beer.

  *

  Clem the cave troll’s breath smelled a bit like brewery runoff, which is as close as my wish got to coming true. Oh, how did this happen? How did a gang boss whom I had so recently risked life and limb for, and stolen a great fortune for, turn on me so quickly?

  We went straight back to the Penny Mines, just like Tosca wanted. We didn’t spend a single cent of the treasure, even though we passed a wine bar offering a two-for-one special. I hupped that heavy sack all the way back to the farthest cave and opened it up for the old goat to admire, which admire he did. Running his fingers through it, biting a coin to check that it was real gold, letting the coins rain through his fingers while he cackled, the whole parade. And then. And then.

  Ping! A coin falls from the ceiling. This happens all the time in the Penny Mines, so I take no mind and neither does the gang. Said coin lands directly on top of the pile, a dull greenish-gray marring all that wonderful gold. I, for no particular reason besides curiosity, bend over to pick it up. My breath’s been a little raggedy all the way back from the palace, and the smell of a hot spring that Alphonse has been simmering in all day didn’t help. So, as I often do, I cough. And my cough, as the section of the city charter outlawing unlicensed practitioners of magic puts it, “effects a change upon the environment via unnatural means.”

  That is to say, I turned the coins into potatoes. All of them. Potatoes are quite a bit bigger than coins, so out of the sack they burst, a volcano of produce, roiling the water, bouncing off the walls, bruising the criminals. They caught like a tide, bombarding Gunther back against the far wall and stranding Tosca in a maelstrom of floating spuds. Nimble Lisette was the only one to jump away in time, kicking russets and fingerlings under her feet as she clambered up a pinnacle of rock.

  Once Alphonse extricated himself from his tuberous prison like an angry gopher, justice was swift. Ever the efficiency-minded leader, he let Gunther rough me up a bit to fill the time until Clem ate his way through the potato-avalanche blocking his tunnel.

  And now, on the day when something finally went right for me for the first time in my life, I was going to die. The irony is, if I’d run off with the gold like I thought about doing, I’d at least have had a day or two of freedom before Alphonse caught up to me. This is where honesty gets you, kids. There’s a lesson in that.

  The true indignity of it was Clem was taking an eternity to kill me. Alphonse had fed a tardy deliveryman to him just the other day, so maybe his heart wasn’t in it. He was gnawing me a bit with his toothless gums, rolling me around in his mouth like a boiled sweet, but he wasn’t hurting much more than my pride.

  You can get used to anything, my father liked to say, and it turns out he was right. After I wore myself out screaming and pleading, there wasn’t much more to do but wait it out. I could tell even Alphonse was getting bored, chucking potatoes at Clem and ordering him to eat me faster. I was bored too, as odd as it sounds, and when I get bored, I start to get funny ideas.

  I was still wearing the same clothes I’d cleaned the palace chimneys in, of course. It occurred to me that, if I could find a patch where the soot hadn’t been matted down with troll drool, I might be able to make myself cough. And as recently demonstrated, when I coughed, something interesting might happen. Could be better, could be worse, but at least I wouldn’t be a monster’s chewing gum anymore.

  I waited until Clem yawned, giving me space to contort myself until my face was pressed against my knee. I turned my pocket inside out and gave it a snap, letting loose a tiny puff of soot which… wafted in entirely the wrong direction. So much for my brilliant plan.

  Clem closed his mouth again, and I was thrown back into darkness. I realized I had one more option, that would at least put an end to things. I let go of his tongue and let myself slide down the troll’s throat, ready to accept my fate.

  I guess my head bumped a sensitive spot or something on the way down, because Clem hiccupped. I didn’t even know trolls could hiccup. The spasm brought up a gust of air of such face-puckering vileness that I reflexively gasped. And then I coughed, convulsively, harder than I ever have in my life. And I have no idea what I was dredging up out of my lungs, but a lot of strange things started to happen very quickly. There were a lot of colors, a lot of strange noises, some of them from Alphonse, and then I was lying on the potato-strewn floor with a wooden horse standing on my chest. A painted one, like on a carousel, only pawing and snorting like a living horse. So like a carousel that would get the operator beheaded for boosting his attractions with the illicit thrill of black magic.

  “Clem?” I said, my eyes still not entirely in focus.

  The horse burped in my face and galloped off, its wooden hooves making a deafening noise on the tiled hallways.

  I picked myself up gingerly, feeling like I ought to have some broken ribs at least.

  “From the smell of it, that was definitely Clem,” I said.

  No one answered me. All four of them were cowering in the potato pile, looking at me like I was possessed.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re supposed to tell people if you’re a wizard!” Tosca shouted. “You can’t just walk around in secret! It’s illegal!”

  “Illegal?” I laughed. “Aren’t we in a criminal hideout right now?”

  They didn’t find that as funny as I did. Alphonse stood up unsteadily, making misshapen sigils with his hands and muttering.

  “Be gone! Be gone from my house!”

  “Alphonse come on, I’m obviously not a wizard–” I said. He threw a potato at me, which stuck to my drool-soaked shirt.

  “Be gone, devil, be gone! I curse you!”

  “Alphonse –”

  “Cursed!”

  “Those aren’t even the right–”

  “Cursed!”

  There was clearly no reasoning with him in this state, so I decided to be the bigger man and leave until he calmed down. Unfortunately the haunted carnival horse had already caused something of a commotion on the way out, so by the time I made it to the street everybody was on edge, and Gunther chasing after me shouting “He’s a witch, kill him, he’s a witch!” didn’t help anything.

  At the word “witch,” Errol burst out of the entrance to the baths and hurled a bucket of boiling water at me and then stared, obviously seeing if I would melt. The troll slime must have been thick enough to protect me from getting seriously burned, but it didn’t feel great.

  I searched my memories for any more wisdom from my father and recalled one of his favorite sayings: When the going gets tough, leave.

  I ran out of Cheapside at a clip I hoped would have made my dear father proud.

  Chapter Three

  It normally takes about half an hour to walk to my friend Fritz’s house from the baths, but it turns out that if I’m sprinting flat-out the whole time and don’t get too precious about what apple carts or pensioners I might knock over on the way, I can do it i
n ten.

  I bounded up the steps to the side entrance of the genteel townhouse Fritz was living in these days, won, I think, in a game of cards. There was a gleaming brass bell hanging on a red braided silk rope underneath a sign that said, “Please ring for service,” but that was just for cops and other undesirables. As a close personal friend, I knew the secret knock.

  The door swung open on the second rap of my knuckles to reveal the man himself, slouching impressively and drinking water out of a horn cup. I was amazed he was even up, seeing as it was barely past noon.

  He looked me up and down.

  “You’re covered in potatoes,” he said.

  “What’s a potato?” I said, pushing past him. “Can we talk?”

  Fritz’s new digs were downright opulent. Gilded furniture with velvet cushions, fat candlesticks burning away even though the sun shone brightly through the window, a bowl overflowing with ripe grapes centered on a marble-inlaid table, and, hilariously, a portrait hanging above the fireplace depicting Fritz astride a white horse, a crown glinting on his head and a cape billowing behind him.

  “Doing well, I take it?”

  “Ah, it’s all on credit,” Fritz said, “You’re in the private chamber, you see. The front rooms are all austere and conspicuously nondescript.”

  “You’re not running the deposed prince gag again, are you?”

  Fritz had been the brightest of us street kids, and while I’d overstayed my welcome as a chimneysweep and made attempts to move up the ladder in thievery, clever Fritz apprenticed himself to a conman and learned a far more lucrative trade. You have to have a strong stomach for investments though. Fritz was always in debt up to his ears, because the inescapable fact was that the rich only liked to give their money to other rich people.

  Fritz ran a hand through his luxurious golden curls, affecting a stoic yet tragic pose. “It’s just terrible what happened to my country, but I vow that someday I’ll return and overthrow my dread uncle, just as soon as I can repay my men the salaries that usurper stole.”

  “It would be an honor to help such a noble cause,” I said in my poshest vowels. I pressed a coin into his hand.

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” Fritz replied, pocketing my coin. Then he got a quizzical expression and pulled the coin back out again.

  “This is an Emberhale shilling. Where the hell did you get this?”

  I blinked and took it back from him. Fritz was right. It was the coin the princess had given me that morning. I couldn’t imagine how it was still on me. Even if I’d absentmindedly pocketed it during the potato crisis, I would have thought Clem would have swallowed it.

  I relayed the saga of my ill-advised theft and expulsion from Cheapside. Fritz listened intently, in that pensive way of his, head cocked to the side, patrician brow furrowed.

  “Hmm,” he said, tapping his chin. I’d have to tell him about the Duke’s whole thing with his beard. He could probably use that when he was in character.

  “Hmm? That’s it?”

  “Well, if what you say is true, and I have no reason to think that it isn’t,” Fritz said, stretching, “then I think that you’re cursed.”

  “Cursed?”

  “Oh yes, happens all the time.”

  “I don’t think Alphonse really knows any curses. He likes to talk about how his mother was a hillwitch, but I met her once and she’s just a crabby old lady.”

  Fritz stood up and propped an elbow on the mantel, adopting a pose I remember from Brilliant Professor Who Only Needs a Little More Cash to Finish His Miracle Engine, a production I played a small part in as Laboratory Assistant Who Must Break the Bad News About the Cog Shipment.

  “No, no, not him, if Alphonse had magic powers neither of us would be living today. But think about it, Joe. Insignificant seeming object that you can’t get rid of, a run of bad luck after receiving it, a green-eyed woman –”

  “Green eyes? That’s evidence of a curse?”

  “Oh yes. Had she had blue eyes I’d be leaning towards a hex, but the evidence is undeniable.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose.

  “You think the Duke’s daughter is a secret practitioner of black magic?

  “It’s always who you least suspect, Joe.”

  “But why? She seemed all right. And I don’t think I gave her any reason to –”

  “Want a reason? You were stealing from her. You had the impertinence to talk to her. You’re a commoner and her sort like to make our sort squirm like bugs. Take your pick, Joe. It could be any reason or all of them, or more,” Fritz said. “Now, would you shuck off the good earth there before you sit down and mash something? What’s that glue you’re covered with, anyway?”

  “You’re happier not knowing,” I said, stepping into a small washroom Fritz pointed me toward.

  It took a few tries to peel off my clothes. The soot and the troll excretions had hardened into a sort of cement, and there were a lot more potatoes stuck to me than I had realized. I tried to scrape off the top layer of grime and lamented the fact that I’d probably never be welcome in the Penny Mines again.

  I stepped back out wearing a velvet robe embroidered with a ridiculously overwrought and entirely fictional royal crest, feeling marginally better. Less sticky, at least. Fritz had made use of the interval by pouring us both a drink, which I gratefully accepted.

  “So, you’re banished to roam the lands until you rid yourself of this curse, and the first thing you thought to do was bring your misfortune right to my doorstep?” Fritz said.

  “What are friends for?” I shrugged.

  “Come on Joe, do me a little respect. No ‘you owe me one’?” No ‘what about old times’?”

  “Eh, we’re not that old,” I said.

  “Speak for yourself.”

  Fritz paced the room, his ermine-trimmed cape fluttering behind him. He always looked regal when he was angry. Probably why the prince scam worked so well.

  “Have you tried getting rid of the thing?” he asked.

  “I mean, I spent it, I threw it in a fountain, I fed it to a troll,” I counted off on my fingers. “it’s still here.”

  “Let me see it.”

  Fritz polished the coin on his sleeve and looked at it closely, squinting at a tiny inscription underneath whatever head of state had been immortalized on the face of it, some guy with piles of curly hair and a beaky nose.

  “Quarere aeternium. Huh.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  Fritz threw the coin out the window, where it bounced off the awning of a passing market cart, careened off a lamppost, and zipped right back through the window, where it rolled across the thick carpet and came to rest against the clawed foot of a painfully chartreuse sofa that only a rich man would buy.

  “It means ‘seek eternally,’” Fritz said.

  We stared at each other.

  “That could still have been a coincidence,” I said.

  Fritz was openly impressed. “It seems like a thing like that could be useful in the right circumstances. You ever try tying a string to it, seeing where it goes?”

  “Fritz, I’ve been half-killed on three separate occasions today and it’s not even dinnertime,” I said.

  Fritz threw up his hands. “All right, all right, no time to be curious, I get it.”

  I heard a diffident cough in the doorway and turned to see a liveried footman done up as even more of a caricature than the Duke’s servants had been. The poor fellow was strapped into a skin-tight vermillion silk suit complete with breeches, white stockings, and profusions of lace spouting out of every cuff and collar.

  He bowed far more deeply than any real footman would ever bother to and turned to Fritz with a click of his patent-leather heels.

  “My liege, there’s been a troubling letter from the capital,” he said.

  Fritz waved him off. “It’s okay, Nev, it’s just Joe.”

  Nev the footman dropped the act immediately.

  “Hallo, Joe, you’re from the neig
hborhood then?” he said, shaking my hand warmly. “Somebody boost your skivs?”

  “Joe’s been cursed,” Fritz said, pointing at the coin. “We’re just trying to figure out what to do about it.”

  “Ah, bad luck,” Nev said. “My dad robbed a carriage once, he was a highwayman y’see, and unbeknownst to him there was a witch inside, yeah? Anyway, long story short he’s got donkey ears now, but it could have been worse, that’s what me mum always says.”

  Fritz snapped his fingers. “Is it, though?”

  “It sure is. Go out to Thatcher’s Hollow and ask her yourself,” Nev said, fluffing his lace indignantly.

  “The coin,” Fritz said, rolling his eyes. He grabbed the coin from my hands and polished it on his sleeve. “You said you sneezed on it, right? And it’s obviously enchanted. Shouldn’t something have happened to it?”

  “Are you the lad what sneezes things into p-?” Nev started.

  “It’s not always potatoes,” I snapped.

  “I was going to say problems,” Nev said. “And it would be more useful if it was. Can’t eat enchantments. Not twice, anyway.”

  “What’s happened to you since you got the coin?” Fritz asked. He flopped onto the sofa and leaned back thoughtfully in a pose I recognized from Tormented Poet Who Only Needs a Muse, a surprisingly lucrative con.

  “Well, I got eaten by a troll,” I said.

  “Not all the way though,” Fritz pointed out.

  “Got kicked out of Alphonse’s gang.”

  “Technically you were never in that gang.”

  “Got soaked in boiling water…”

  “Which scrubbed enough troll spittle off you to permit admittance into the finest house on Tulip Street,” Fritz said expansively.

  “Sounds like yer luck’s all right to me, mate,” Nev said.

  I thought about it, about how well the heist had gone, and then how badly everything had gone since then.

  “Mmm, no. I’m definitely cursed. I have to get rid of this thing.”

  “There’s only one way then,” Fritz said.

  I waited, not giving him the satisfaction of prompting him. He rolled his eyes at me.