‘The first time, I was still very young when I was caught. I was put away for four straight years. My youth and inexperience were to blame. My father was a tailor by profession, a first-rate cutter. A suit he made was like a poem. You can take my word for it: he was head tailor for the Bergner family for years. But he didn’t like the work. Some people aren’t made for work. They’d do anything rather than sit and work for a set number of hours every day. And you can’t do a thing about it! It’s a question of temperament. In my opinion, human beings are divided into horses and riders, and my father wanted to be a rider. In addition, he happened to be excessively fond of jewellery, especially gold rings set with precious stones. Not to wear them, mind; he didn’t care about that at all: he liked to feel them, to feast his eyes on them, to play with them like a child with his toys. Just holding them in his hands gave him tremendous pleasure. And one fine day he gave up tailoring and began trading in gold jewellery: he would buy some ring (there’s a special bourse for gold, you know), feast his eyes on it for a few hours or even a day, and then sell it again at a small profit, sometimes even at a loss, and buy another one. But his main source of income at the time was cards. He had a Romanian friend: a certain Chornotescu. A striking-looking man, with impressive manners and dandyish clothes. I can still remember his appearance perfectly: tall and well built, with a clean-cut, masculine, young-looking face, although his thick hair was going grey. This grey hair in conjunction with his young face gave him an air of aristocratic distinction. And, in fact, he had a weakness for adding various titles to his name — once it would be Count Chornotescu, once Baron Chornotescu, and so forth. And I must tell you that everyone believed him. Otherwise it would have been impossible. People were actually astonished if someone said that he wasn’t really a count or a baron. Even his foreign German accent had something aristocratic about it. He was fluent in a number of languages, by the way. Besides German and Romanian, he spoke French and Italian and a little English. As far as I was concerned, at any rate, he was a symbol of manliness, elegance, and worldliness. In any case, this Chornotescu was a permanent fixture in the big cafés, the Bristol, the Ritz, and so on, where he sat and waited for his prey. His first choice was the young and the foreign. He would approach them, introduce himself, and get into conversation. He was never at a loss for a subject: there was nothing he couldn’t discuss with intelligence and discrimination. He had lived in all the big cities of Europe and had even been in America for a while. Once he had studied his game and found him worthy of his attention, he would invite him to dine at some expensive restaurant and play a hand of cards with him afterwards. In the meantime he would let my father know. And that evening, at a pre-arranged hour, my father would turn up as a perfect stranger in the gaming room of the café in question, station himself behind the Romanian’s opponent and observe his cards as if in idle curiosity, and convey the information to Chornotescu by means of signals agreed between them. You can imagine the results. The victim had no chance of winning, and within a couple of hours he was usually cleaned out. And if he demanded a return game the next evening, Chornotescu would always find some excuse to get out of it. He never played with the same person twice. He was far too careful. Sometimes my father would be the one to find the victim — he was an expert at it too. Then he would play while Chornotescu watched, and the results were the same. They also went to the famous spas, Carlsbad, Marienbad, Ischl, and so on. Each of them would put up at a different hotel — the best hotels, naturally — and the game would begin again. They usually raked in big profits, but their expenses were high too. Apart from which, there was a “dead season” here too, just as in other professions, when they had to live off their cash and sometimes go short. My mother had died when I was a boy, and I had no brothers and sisters. My father wanted to make me into a merchant, and after I finished school he apprenticed me to a big textile firm. But I only stayed there for a few months. Fifty kronen were lost and I was fired. I wasn’t sorry — sticking to one thing was never my strong point. I did nothing for a while and then my father apprenticed me to another firm. I didn’t last long there either, nor in the third, the fourth, or the fifth place — it was always the same story. At the time when my father abandoned tailoring, I was already eighteen years old and had been working for a big export firm for six months. I was a bright, willing lad; I knew the job, and was earning a hundred kronen a month, not a bad salary; and my bosses were pleased with me. But I had other plans; I wasn’t interested in small beer. I waited for the right opportunity — and I didn’t have to wait long.