The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti Page A

something new. Over the winter he’d told Ren about the jobs he’d pulled: impersonating sea captains, doctors, and men of the cloth; selling items from a catalog that would never arrive; forging wills and false deeds. They all followed a similar pattern: winning over the mark, a fast exchange of property, and then leaving town as quickly as possible. When they needed to stay in one place for a while, Benjamin and Tom turned to the graveyards, where the marks were more agreeable and did not take pains to pursue them.
     
    Ren closed his book. “I want to do it.”
     
    Tom looked worried. “I don’t think he’s ready for this.”
     
    “Nonsense,” said Benjamin.
     
    “He’s only a child. He’s going to get us caught.”
     
    Benjamin sat down on the mattress, leaned back, and pulled the blankets over him. He closed his eyes and let out a puff of air. “Not yet.”
     
     
     
    That afternoon Benjamin went to find some supper and Tom and Ren set to changing the labels, from Doctor Faust’s Medical Salts for Pleasant Dreams to Mother Jones’s Elixir for Misbehaving Children . Ren soaked the old bottles and scraped the paper away with a knife while Tom set himself up at the table with pen and ink and wrote the new words out, taking a sip of whiskey between each finished piece.
     
    Before they left Granston, Tom had trimmed his beard and purchased a new shirt. Now he tucked a napkin into the collar to keep it from getting stained and carefully pushed up his sleeves. The light from the candle flickered across his face. He appeared calm and nearly sober.
     
    Ren could see that his penmanship was distinguished. The ends of the letters curled into patterns; his dashes and crosses fell in waves of varying thickness. When the labels were glued into place, they looked quite professional. Tom poured himself another drink and stretched his ink-stained fingers.
     
    Ren leaned over the table, admiring the words. “Why’d you stop teaching?”
     
    Tom frowned. He ran a hand over his face, leaving streaks of black ink on his forehead. “Do you have any fellows?”
     
    “I used to,” Ren said. “They were twins. Brom and Ichy.”
     
    “And do you miss them?”
     
    “Yes,” said Ren. As he said it, he knew it was true. He missed everything about the twins, from the way they made him laugh in chapel to their secret codes over dinner. He even missed the parts he’d always hated, like the way Brom would continue to punch him, even after he’d given up, and the way that Ichy liked to confess to things he hadn’t done.
     
    “It’s a damned shame to lose your fellows.” Tom took another drink. There were tiny red scars on his arm, left over from the chicken pox. He pulled his sleeve down over them, then wiped his nose against the cuff. “I had a fellow, once. We grew up together, and it was just as Aristotle said: One soul, two bodies. A true friendship. You don’t get many of those in this life, I can tell you now.
     
    “We loved the same girl and asked her to choose between us. I was a teacher and didn’t have much money; Christian had some land and an inheritance. So she got engaged to him. But she continued to meet me in the woods at night. And God help me, I would have done anything she asked.”
     
    Tom lifted the whiskey to his lips and finished it, keeping the glass there for a moment, his teeth biting down on the edge.
     
    “He shook my hand in church, smiling with her arm through his. And right under his nose, she still reeked of it, like a buttered bun. I had too much to drink one night and told him everything. I said, ‘Do you know what her skin tastes like?’ I said, ‘Can you smell me on her fingers?’ He took a pistol out of a drawer. He told me to stop talking. I said, ‘Don’t you think we laughed at you?’ He pointed the pistol at his own head then and screamed at me to stop, and I said, ‘Pull the trigger,’ and he did.”
     
    Ren gripped the empty bottle of Doctor Faust’s