My Uber driver is from Egypt, something he tells me only when he sees the library book I’m reading as we leave the airport. Maybe he thinks I’m getting ready for international travel. “Don’t use a purse,” he says. “Too easy to steal. You want to keep things in your pockets, but deep inside. With buttons or zippers to close them.”
“You seem to know a lot about picking pockets.”
He waves a hand. “Everyone knows a lot. It’s the only way you don’t get robbed. There’s no place on earth with more thieves than Cairo.”
That makes me think of the Thieves Club, the semi-ironic name that four men in Tanglewood gave themselves. Hugo and Sutton. Blue and Christopher. Because every dollar they earn must be taken from somebody else. “Is that why you moved here?”
“It was the killing,” he says frankly.
