The Bicycle Thieves

Bruno didn’t know what to do at first; his face was flushed with fear.

“I think they stole my bike seat. There’s no way this can be possible,” he said to himself in shock.

It was a sunny September Monday evening in the West Village. The wind was calm but stiffening slowly.

Bruno called his friend to cancel their dinner reservation.

“Listen, somebody stole my bike seat,” he explained. “And I have to chase him down.”

“You are just going to ride around and look for him in the neighborhood?”

“I have a tag on the bike, so I know where he is.”

Bruno was riding around seatless, pedaling anxiously, checking over his shoulder constantly. On speed bumps, he was careful not to let the aluminum frame sneak up his ass.

The more he thought about the possible identity of the thief, the more furious he grew.

Bruno alerted the cops next, who asked for his whereabouts. After finding out the information, the cops admitted to having more urgent tasks to handle.

Bruno was pedaling on Canal street when it was beginning to become dark and the wind was as stiff as Norwegian wood. He had been riding, seatless, for an hour, eyeballing every bicycle seat that crossed his sight.

Every time he pinpointed the location, the thief would somehow slip away.

The location had been in the same place for several minutes in front of an empty office building, as he speeded in pursuit. On his way to the address, about a mile from his starting point, he spotted a group of six cops, circling one homeless man in the street. Bruno carefully approached the cops, seeking out help.

The cop kept one eye on Bruno and one eye on the homeless man.

“The address should be around here somewhere, but we are busy right now so we can’t help,” the cop said.

“Well, we don’t have any hero cops that want to solve a crime,” Bruno thought sadly.

Bruno found the address, inspecting every bike seat on his path. There was a rack of twenty bikes, but he didn’t detect anything unusual. Perplexed, he didn’t know what to do next, until he noticed a suspicious soul with a black backpack stepping away from the scene.

“Did you steal my bike seat,” Bruno accused forcefully.

The man was confused.

“Did you steal my bike seat,” he repeated with more force than before.

He still looked confused.

Bruno realized that he didn’t understand English well, if at all. He pointed to his missing seat, “Do you have my bike seat,” he said, looking at the man’s backpack, as if he was hiding the bike seat in there.

The accused thief muttered a language that Bruno couldn’t understand, as he turned his shoulders.

Bruno stalked him up the block, studying his movement as he ordered a hot dog on the corner. Then, Bruno checked his phone and saw that the tracker had moved again. He realized he had accused the wrong guy.

Now it was completely dark and unsafe to be riding around without a bicycle light.

Bruno couldn’t understand why he couldn’t catch the thief. They must have either had an electric bike or been traveling by car, he thought.

As he reached in his pocket to call his girlfriend, his front wheel dipped into a pothole. The back wheel flipped over his head as the pedestrians crossing the street looked on. He dusted himself off quickly, feeling embarrassed to be seen falling by other people.

“Just come home, it’s not worth it,” his girlfriend pleaded on the phone.

The tracker was on 14th and 7th avenue, which was beyond his limit.

As he was snapping a couple of photos of the bike at home, he realized that the front reflector was missing too. “It really is the concrete jungle here,” he thought. “Every man for himself.”

Bruno answered the door in his pajamas while his girlfriend hid quietly in the bathroom, as two officers arrived to his apartment to follow a report.

One officer asked the questions while the other jotted down notes.

“Roughly how much would you say the bike seat is worth?” the officer with the black wedding ring asked.

“It’s an expensive bike,” Bruno exclaimed. “It’s probably a hundred or two hundred dollar bike seat.”

The cop gave Bruno a blank look for a moment. “Let’s say a hundred dollars.”

“So is there anything you guys can do. I have the address. I know exactly where he is.”

“Not really. There’s not much we can do because we can’t know exactly where it is in the building, especially if there are multiple units. Your best bet is to find it on the street out in the open.”

For the rest of the week, Bruno followed the thief’s movements throughout New York City like an owl watches the night.

On Tuesday, the thief was in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. On Wednesday, he was in Long Island City, Queens. On Thursday, he was in Turtle Bay, Manhattan. Bruno waited patiently for the thief to come to a neighborhood closer to his apartment.

On Friday morning, he received his wish.

Bruno woke up that morning at 6:30AM just as the sun was beginning to rise. He checked the tracker and to his surprise, the tag was in front of the Whole Foods in TriBeca.

A lustful fire grew in his eyes.

As soon as his morning shift ended, he sprinted on a seatless bike toward Whole Foods. On his way there, he pocketed two Allen keys in case the bike seat was collared. He also prepared himself mentally for a confrontation. It could get physical, he thought, and he had no plans of backing down.

He checked under a row of bicycle seats, seeking the tracker and the poor masking tape job that was keeping it attached to the bike seat.

He recognized his seat on the third bike that he checked. Before taking it, he had surveyed the crowd looking for anyone guarding the seat. After a few minutes of preparation, he made his move.

When he approached the bike, he came in on angle so that the tree would block his entrance from the crowd. He pulled the seat off of a bike which looked like it had been rescued from a junkyard. To his surprise, he pulled off the bike seat without any resistance.

When he returned home, he took a selfie with the bike seat like it was the World Series trophy, then sent it to his friends.

“Did you leave a note,” one of his friends asked.

Bruno grabbed the first pen he could find, tore out a piece of paper from a notebook, and began writing.

It was noon and the sun was at it’s highest point of the day.

“Don’t ever steal my seat!!! Next time I will take the seat and shove it up your ass!”

He texted a picture to his friend, who suggested to add that he knew where he lived.

Bruno picked the pen up again.

“BTW I know where you live too…” he penned.

Bruno folded the note up neatly and biked back to Whole Foods; this time the seat was back on his bike. He stuffed the note in the hole where his bike seat spent the last five days, ensuring that the note was deep enough not to get blown away by the wind.