Rome-I should have known better.
It wasn`t that I didn`t know Rome. I`d been here many times, had mastered a halting but functional command of the language, had even driven in the city without getting lost. At my hotel, I`d been teasing a group of middle-aged tourists for their qualms about riding public buses and the subway.
A few hours later, I was eating those words, bitterly sauced.
We got to the Gesu, that marvelous church that all the textbooks name as a landmark of the baroque style, but it was still closed over the lunch break. We hung out for a while in the Piazza Venezia nearby, laughing at the ridiculous Victor Emanuel monument that all Romans call the Wedding Cake, and at the tourists gee-whizzing by. Then it was time to visit the church. Then it was time to head back to the hotel.
No. 64, the sign said, was the bus that would get us closest to the hotel. No. 64 came along, jam-packed, but we pushed our way on anyhow. My wallet and passport were in a place as safe as I could contrive, in a zipper pocket of my lambskin leather jacket. The jacket itself was probably a mistake, however; my one good piece of apparel in a basically off-the-peg-at- Sears wardrobe, it radiated affluence.
Later, my friend told me he had noticed a couple of large and thuggy characters who kept pushing their way through the crowd on the bus. I had merely stood still and tried to hug my zippered pocket.
Fending off the intruder
Then it happened. I felt some fingers rummaging around in my right trouser pocket, rather clumsily I thought. I tried to shift position. Less than a minute later, I looked down at the floor. My passport was lying there. My pocket had been unzipped. My wallet was gone. In just that moment of fending off the intruder in my right pocket, I had lost concentration on my zippered pocket. It was time enough. Very neat.
The hotel clerk had plenty of experience in such matters: four a month, he said. First, I have to go to the police, ”foreigners` section,” an easy walk. Then he will make the necessary phone calls.
At the police bureau, I filled out a form: Place: between Piazza Venezia and the train station. Time: Sunday, May 19, 1730 hours. How: crowded bus. Loss: wallet, credit cards, ID, about $200 in cash, another $200 in traveler`s checks. The woman made a second copy of my statement, this time in Italian; a clerk stamped them both, put one copy on a large pile of documents on his desk and gave me the other: finito.
Sympathetic hotel clerk
Back at the hotel, the clerk was duly sympathetic. Yes, Rome is full of pickpockets, he told me, most of them Chilean or Yugoslav. By now, he went on, they`ve probably dumped your wallet, credit cards and all, in a trash bin. Maybe they`ve kept your AT&T card to call relatives back home, but mostly they`re only after cash. They`ll almost never keep your passport; that`s their way of keeping the police from cracking down too hard.
The clerk couldn`t have been more helpful; apparently this is all routine by now at Italian hotels-and in hotels of major cities in Europe, from Stockholm to Madrid and in between. The clerk made two phone calls: one to American Express and one to an agency that handles MasterCard and Visa.
The clerk called me a few minutes later. American Express could have a new card for me the next morning, if I cared to stop by. No thanks, I told him; I had my passport and most of my traveler`s checks. It could have been worse.
Back home a week later, I found new issues of all my lost credit cards waiting for me. One more phone call, and my missing traveler`s checks were ready for pickup. The bank did request proof that I had reported the theft to the police. I showed the teller the Italian police form. She smiled and handed me my money.
