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fast.
    SOME
FACTS ABOUT RUDY STEINER
     
    He was eight months older than Liesel and had
     
    bony legs, sharp teeth, gangly blue eyes,
     
    and hair the color of a lemon.
     
    One of six Steiner children, he was
     
    permanently hungry.
    On Himmel
Street, he was considered a little crazy. This was on account of an
event that was rarely spoken about but widely regarded as “The Jesse
Owens Incident,” in which he painted himself charcoal black and ran the
100 meters at the local playing field one night.
    Insane or not,
Rudy was always destined to be Liesel’s best friend. A snowball in the face is
surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship.
    A few days after
Liesel started school, she went along with the Steiners. Rudy’s mother,
Barbara, made him promise to walk with the new girl, mainly because she’d heard
about the snowball. To Rudy’s credit, he was happy enough to comply. He was not
the junior misogynistic type of boy at all. He liked girls a lot, and he liked
Liesel (hence, the snowball). In fact, Rudy Steiner was one of those audacious
little bastards who actually
fancied
himself with the ladies. Every
childhood seems to have exactly such a juvenile in its midst and mists. He’s
the boy who refuses to fear the opposite sex, purely because everyone else
embraces that particular fear, and he’s the type who is unafraid to make a
decision. In this case, Rudy had already made up his mind about Liesel
Meminger.
    On the way to
school, he tried to point out certain landmarks in the town, or at least, he
managed to slip it all in, somewhere between telling his younger siblings to
shut their faces and the older ones telling him to shut his. His first point of
interest was a small window on the second floor of an apartment block.
    “That’s where
Tommy Müller lives.” He realized that Liesel didn’t remember him. “The
twitcher? When he was five years old, he got lost at the markets on the coldest
day of the year. Three hours later, when they found him, he was frozen solid
and had an awful earache from the cold. After a while, his ears were all
infected inside and he had three or four operations and the doctors wrecked his
nerves. So now he twitches.”
    Liesel chimed
in, “And he’s bad at soccer.”
    “The worst.”
    Next was the
corner shop at the end of Himmel Street.
Frau
Diller’s.
    AN
IMPORTANT NOTE
     
    ABOUT FRAU DILLER
     
    She had one golden rule.
    Frau Diller was
a sharp-edged woman with fat glasses and a nefarious glare. She developed this
evil look to discourage the very idea of stealing from her shop, which she
occupied with soldierlike posture, a refrigerated voice, and even breath that
smelled like “
heil
Hitler.” The shop itself was white and cold, and
completely bloodless. The small house compressed beside it shivered with a
little more severity than the other buildings on Himmel Street. Frau Diller
administered this feeling, dishing it out as the only free item from her
premises. She lived for her shop and her shop lived for the Third Reich. Even
when rationing started later in the year, she was known to sell certain
hard-to-get items under the counter and donate the money to the Nazi Party. On
the wall behind her usual sitting position was a framed photo of the
Führer.
If you walked into her shop and didn’t say “
heil
Hitler,” you
wouldn’t be served. As they walked by, Rudy drew Liesel’s attention to the
bulletproof eyes leering from the shop window.
    “Say ‘heil’ when
you go in there,” he warned her stiffly. “Unless you want to walk a little
farther.” Even when they were well past the shop, Liesel looked back and the
magnified eyes were still there, fastened to the window.
    Around the
corner, Munich Street (the main road in and out of Molching) was strewn with
slosh.
    As was often the
case, a few rows of troops in training came marching past. Their uniforms
walked upright and their black boots further