the editor talks with you

We stepped out of our hotel one warm morning into September sunlight. It was a few days before the first anniversary of the 9-11 terror attacks and we had talked about attending a memorial service at the American Cathedral on Avenue George V that evening.

We walked a block to the entrance to the Paris Metro and descended on the steep, narrow escalator to the train platform.

Few people were waiting for the train.

A group of teenagers were standing together talking in rapid French.

I wondered why they were not in school as it was well after 9 am. They were dressed casually in clean clothing, not the uniforms many academic children wear.

Their leader was an older boy, perhaps 15 or 16. The girls were younger.

AS the train pulled into the station and the doors opened, I felt a hand under my jacket. I knew what it was. I immediately stepped back into the teenaged boy. He lost his balance and fell backward.

I stepped into the train and turned my back to the closed doors on the other side.

I felt under my jacket. In a split second, he had unbuttoned my back pocket but my wallet was till in there.

All of us wore money belts under our clothing. Our passports and cash were safely tucked away. In my wallet was less than 50 Euros to pay for lunch and entry to the Louvres Museum where we planned to see the Mona Lisa and other celebrated art.

Had the boy been successful, he would have been disappointed and thrown my otherwise empty wallet away.

As the children passed by me to the front of the car, they assembled around an older man, bearded and in a black beret and horn-rimmed spectacles.

He was their Fagin, the man who had taken them in and taught them the survival skills of pocket picking and other crimes.

I thought of how Charles Dickens may have shared similar thoughts in London more than 150 years ago.

His master villain Fagin did little to improve the squalid lives of the children he teaches to bring him their illegal booty.

What would their day be like? I wondered. Would any of them be pinched and end up in jail? How well did Fagin care for them? Would he treat them as badly as Dickens’ Fagin treated Oliver Twist, the Artful Dodger and his other homeless waifs?

I could not condemn these teenage truants working their skills in the Paris Metro.

Where had they come from? What had their lives been like before they met Fagin?

This was 16 years ago. The children would be in their early 30s now, some of them perhaps in prison or still plying their criminal trade in the Metro.

How about Fagin? He appeared to have been in his 60s. He would be in his late 70s or 80s, perhaps in prison or the grave.

How chlldren are lured into lives of crime may have been their best or only option.

For most of us, this is beyond our undertanding. I find it difficult to condemn them.

At best, we should be careful that we simply don’t become their victims.

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