The Devouring by G S Eli & Patrick Wiley

Author:G S Eli & Patrick Wiley [Eli, G S & Wiley, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780692848401
Published: 2020-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

XVII

Escape from Berlin

Simon Roarlock hustled the city of Berlin the entire day. The night had finally come, and it was safe now to go to the park and meet up with his cousins to barter the day’s earnings. It was fun to barter. Sometimes you would steal a cell phone or a piece of jewelry, but instead of spending the next few days trying to resell it, you met up with your family or friends and barter it for something you wanted or needed.

He started to make his way to the park where he and his friends usually met up to barter. The rule was to trade only in the dark of night. That way you could avoid the police.

He began to feel strange walking alone. Normally, he would never do that to hustle the city: that was asking for trouble. You always needed a partner or an accomplice for obvious reasons. He’d lucked out and avoided trouble. The day’s earnings were successful. That morning he’d snatched a purse from a woman who was tending to her child. It was full of money: almost two hundred euros. She also had the new iPhone and a heavy solid-gold bracelet. Then, later that afternoon in the train station, he had managed to strike up a conversation about football star David Beckham with a grungy-looking American teen boy en route to Vienna. He succeeded in slyly picking the boy’s pocket while showing him the latest field moves. Unfortunately, all he got from the teen was a small bag of weed.

Oh well, he thought. Maybe I can trade it tonight at the statue. It was just a few short blocks from where he worked in the old quarter of the city. He didn’t particularly like Berlin, but he would admit to himself and to his friends that the money was good there. After all, the tourists were just as rich as the ones in Paris and Rome. Best of all, in Berlin the number of Gypsies who stole for a living was much smaller than in other large European cities that were magnets for tourists. “So, the gadje aren’t on their toes,” he’d explain.

As Simon slipped through the iron gate of the park with only his thoughts to keep him company, his mind wandered to the events earlier that morning. Everyone at the camp had been too upset by the death of Nasta and the demolition of Buildings A and B to enforce the kris’s punishment. These Berlin Gypsies have it too easy, he thought. No matter. Once they get to Romania, they’ll realize how easy they had it here in Germany.

Simon left the park’s gravel path and headed into the grassy woods, still trying to avoid the police. His thoughts drifted to the past, to the night he fled Romania. He remembered the acrid scent of burning plastic from the garbage-bag roofs, the screams of Roma men, women, and children being burned, and the sight of his wife Layla clutching little Sophia, their skin chalk-white, dead from smoke inhalation.

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