A second, smaller boy came running round the edge of the building, laughing, dragging a thin mattress along the pavement in both hands. He dropped the mattress and called out.
‘Listo! Ready! Hep!’
The boy on the window sill lifted his arms above his head and, before Vita could call out to him to stop, he threw himself upwards and outwards. Vita couldn’t breathe. But he tucked his knees tight into his chest and spun twice in the air, unfurling himself rod-straight just in time to land, feet first, on the mattress. He took a step, toppled to his knees, and sprang up again. The smaller boy gave a shout of triumph, and the taller smiled a small half-smile.
Then he looked up and saw her leaning perilously far out of her window, the ledge cutting against her belly button. For one second all three faced each other, eyes wide in the night air. Then the taller boy smiled that same secret, private smile, and the smaller boy, seeing it, laughed and saluted. Just as Vita was going to shout down to them, both boys took off around the corner, the smaller boy dragging the mattress behind them.
Vita looked down at the pavement, but there was nobody in sight to confirm that a boy had, in fact, just taken flight.
‘Remember them,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Just in case. Just in case.’ As if she could have forgotten.
Vita woke on her first morning in New York to the sound of music outside her window. She spat on her finger to wipe the sleep out of her eyes, and peered out. A man in a hat pulled low over his eyes stood leaning against the tree on the pavement, working away at his barrel organ.
The day was sunlit and bright blue, but cold enough that her breath puffed out in clouds of mist as she washed and dressed in a warm knitted jersey and a bright red skirt she could kick in. She carefully buttoned on her red silk boots, and brushed her hair with her fingers.
In the drawing room Grandpa sat in the armchair, watching the sky. He turned round when she came in, and she saw the effort it took for him to arrange his features into his old smile.
‘Rapscallion! Good morning. Your mother’s left already, to go and speak to my bank manager, and see what can be done. She was wearing her most crusading expression.’
Vita nodded. Her mother, when she focused on something, pursued it with the unswerving determination of a warship.
‘She said she’s afraid she’ll be out a lot, renewing my passport, and transferring what’s left of my bank account to a British one – and so I’m responsible for you and your movements. She made me promise that we would both be sensible.’ He raised one quizzical eyebrow. ‘Have you any plans for what your movements may be?’
Vita said, ‘I’m going to make sausages with ketchup.’ Ketchup was a revelation which she had discovered on the boat and eaten every day since. ‘Would you like some?’
He shook his head. ‘That’s very kind, but not for me.’
‘Or coffee?’ Coffee, Vita knew, was what you were supposed to drink in America. It tasted, to her, like angry mud, but she was aware that others felt differently. ‘I don’t actually know how to make it, but I could try.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘There’s nothing I can do?’
‘Just you being here is enough.’
But it wasn’t enough, she knew, because as she turned to the kitchen, she saw him lean back in his chair, and the hollow look come into his eyes.
She found sausages, and put them in the oven, and was just digging a knife into the ketchup bottle when she heard Grandpa call.
‘Rapscallion? Are you still there?’
Vita went to his side, as fast as she could go. ‘Yes!’
‘Come and sit, while your sausages cook. There’s something important I need to tell you.’ Grandpa’s eyes were staring past her, past the rooftops outside and past the city beyond, and they were angry.
‘What is it?’ When he did not answer, she sat down on the floor and laid one hand on his ankle. To have your ankle held, she had found, can help, if it is the right person doing the holding.
‘I need you to listen,’ he said. ‘You always were a remarkable listener, Rapscallion. For your own safety, I need you to know about Sorrotore. And I need you to know about what he took.’
‘Your grandma made the old castle come alive,’ said Grandpa. ‘She could grow things where no things should be able to grow. There were wild strawberries in the mouths of the gargoyles, roses up the burglar bars and in through the windows. There was an almost inconvenient amount of ivy growing up the toilet bowl.’ He screwed his eyes shut, as if he could see it, and it hurt him.
‘My great-grandfather would be ashamed of me,’ said Grandpa. ‘He thought, when he died, he left us in luxury – carriages, horses, jewels. The jewels! Diamonds, rubies, sapphires. It was almost all lost. My grandfather gambled away most of it. But what I’ve done is worse. I’ve lost our home. And, my God – what would Lizzy say, if she knew?’
‘She would say it wasn’t your fault,’ said Vita sternly. ‘I know it.’
‘We had so much glory in us when we were young. The last jewel was a necklace – an emerald pendant, large as a lion’s eye. We had it valued, when we needed money to mend the roof; it was worth thousands. Oh, Rapscallion – if you could have seen us! She’d put on her emerald, and we’d go out dancing.’
Vita tried to keep her face mute, unexcited. ‘Did you say, thousands of dollars?’
‘She looked so beautiful. I took a photograph of her in it – my Liz, she loved it …’ He ceased speaking, and choked. ‘When she died, I didn’t know what to do – so I hid it. I couldn’t bear to see it. It’s still there, in the old hiding place. Oh, Vita.’ He took a deep, shuddering breath, and tried to compose his face.
An emerald necklace. The thought ran like an electric shock through Vita’s body. She could not take back a house; but an emerald was different. An emerald, as large as a lion’s eye, worth thousands of dollars, could change everything.
I can get it back. I can steal it back.
And I could sell it. I could use the money for a lawyer and force them to give Grandpa back his home.
‘It’s impossible,’ she told herself. But, whispered a small voice inside her, impossible doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.
Vita placed an apple on top of the chest of drawers. She sat on her bed facing it, held her penknife in her hand, and focused on the very tip of the apple’s stalk.
Colours flickered behind her eyes, and she pushed away her daily thoughts, the busy smallnesses, searching for the still steady place in her mind. Grandpa had always said, ‘If you put your mind in a position where an idea can find you, an idea will always come eventually.’
‘Of course,’ he had added, ‘the idea will not necessarily be practical, nor legal.’
The plan which began to take shape in her mind was neither.
She sat for a long time, staring straight ahead, barely breathing. She had never been so still in her life. The constant, thrumming pain in her foot no longer reached her. She thought her way around corners and back out of dead ends.
The plan took on capital letters and italics in her head. It became solid.
Vita blinked, and shook herself. She flicked open the blade of her penknife, and threw it hard across the room; the handle was weighted unevenly and it spun, yet the blade sank with a thud in the very heart of the apple. The apple toppled on to the floor.
Vita smiled one of her six smiles. Then she took from her luggage a red notebook, and, her eyes still hot with concentration, she wrote two words:
THE PLAN.
She underlined them.
Next she flipped the book upside down, to begin on a blank page from the other side, and started to write:
The day Grandpa and Grandma went back to America was the day I got my penknife.
I didn’t want to watch them go, so I went to the woods to be alone. I was trying to hit a knot in a tree with a handful of stones, but I kept missing; I couldn’t see.
A voice behind me said, ‘Concentrate.’
/> And I said, ‘I am!’
He said, ‘You’re sad, Rapscallion, and angry. I know. But if you can learn to transform anger and sadness into something – into work, into kindness – then you will be remarkable. Put your sadness and anger into your wrist, and throw it.’
‘How?’ I said. ‘I don’t see how.’
He said, ‘It’s a trick that takes a lifetime to learn. Try again. Imagine shifting your sadness out of your chest and into your hand. Throw.’
I tried. I pushed my heart down into my hand, and threw the stone, and I hit the knot, right in the middle of the tree. I turned round, and there he was, sitting on a tree stump and smiling. And he said, ‘Close your eyes.’
And he put a red penknife into my hand.
He said, ‘It was mine, when I was your age. It’s called a Swiss Army knife. To remind you, you are an army unto yourself.’
I opened it. It was perfectly oiled. A long blade, scissors, a pair of detachable tweezers tucked into the top.
‘Use it as a tool, not a weapon,’ he said. ‘Your weapon in life is not going to be a knife – it will be something far more powerful and original. But the tweezers will come in handy. Good tweezers are not to be underestimated.’
And he kissed the top of my head and walked away without saying anything.
That’s the kind of man that Grandpa was, before Grandma died. Before Sorrotore.
Vita drew a line under her writing, and put the book away under her pillow.
She did not remember the sausages until much later, and although by then they were largely charcoal, she ate them anyway, with plenty of ketchup, followed by the apple. The plan had brought back her appetite, as plans so often do.
CHAPTER FOUR
Later that day, Vita crept out of the apartment, leaving Grandpa sleeping, and took a cab. She took it alone, which she had never done before, and she took it with her fists balled up inside her coat pockets and her heart beating hard.
Her first attempt to summon a cab had failed; she stood on the street outside Carnegie Hall, holding up her thumb, but when the driver who slowed saw there was no adult with her, he swerved away and drove on. On her second attempt, she wrenched open the door and threw herself into the back seat before the driver could leave without her.
She pressed her face against the glass. It was early evening and the streets were crowded. The car hurtled across 59th Street and up Central Park West, the lights of a cinema illuminating the name of a film, Wild Bill Hickok.
Vita felt the bite and kick of New York spark through her. She reached into her pocket. There was a map of the city, borrowed from her grandfather, and, under it, her penknife. She closed her fingers around it, and it gave her courage.
Abruptly the cab pulled up beside the pavement. ‘This is you, kid,’ said the driver. ‘The Dakota!’
He told her the cost for the journey, which sounded enormous. Vita knew Americans tipped everyone, but had no idea how much, so it seemed safest to give him all the money she had with her and dart away down the pavement.
She stood looking up at the building. It was vast; a castle of a place, with crenellations and turrets in the four corners, and light pouring from its windows.
As she stood there, a grey-haired man and a tall woman swept past her. The wind rose in a sudden gust and the woman laughed, lifting her hand to her hair, which was swept up with a diamond-studded swan’s feather.
‘Do try not to be dull, honey, or talk endlessly about politics,’ said the woman. She spoke with a strong New York accent. ‘Victor’s parties are always so fabulously it.’
Vita’s heart swooped with the luck of it. She didn’t let herself hesitate – she followed them, keeping as close as she dared. The man and woman passed through a door, nodded at a doorman (Vita nodded too, trying to make her smile doorman-appropriate) and got into a lift. Vita stepped in with them, attempting to look haughty and unconcerned, as if she belonged in oak-panelled elevators. The woman glanced down at her, saw her left foot, and turned instantly away.
The lift opened on to a corridor. At one end were six marble steps, and an oak double door. The couple knocked, the door opened, there were shrill cries of delight, a burst of music leaked out, and they disappeared inside. From behind the door came the tail-ends of dozens of conversations. Sorrotore was indeed having a party.
‘Run,’ said every instinct in Vita’s body. I could come back another time, she thought. Her stomach enthusiastically backed up the idea.
But her feet disagreed. Vita’s feet were braver, at that moment, than the rest of her. They carried her up the five remaining steps, and her fist, the bravest of all, gave three short raps against the door.
The door opened immediately and a heavy-browed, white-gloved footman stood there with a professional smile. His black boots were so shiny they reflected a mirror image of his nostrils up at him.
His professional smile faltered at the sight in front of him. Vita fixed her eyes on him with disconcerting ferocity. Her cheeks, she could feel, were red with cold, and her jaw quivered, so tightly were her teeth set against each other.
‘Yes? What do you want?’
Vita straightened her back, to gain a few inches. ‘I would like to see Mr Sorrotore.’ She tried to pronounce it as her grandfather had: ‘Sorrow-tore-ae’.
‘He’s having a soirée – as you can see.’ Behind and to the left, a double door opened on to the room Vita had seen. It was even larger than she had thought, and a cacophony of voices and laughter filtered through into the hall. ‘Come back tomorrow.’
‘Can you ask him, though, if he’ll see me?’
‘You want me to risk making him angry?’
Vita wondered, suddenly, if she should have kept back some of her money. Did footmen expect to be bribed?
‘He might be just as angry if he finds out you sent me away. Tell him … my grandfather is Jack Welles.’
The footman looked hard at her. He pulled off a glove, and scratched his eye, the tip of his little finger brushing the eyeball. Then he sighed. ‘If he’s angry, I’ll make sure it’s you who deals with it.’ He crossed into the brightly lit room. As he pulled the glove back on, Vita saw a tattoo, between his thumb and forefinger, of a spitting cat.
Vita, left alone, stood waiting; then she pushed open the door into the drawing room, following the scent of perfume, sweat, and cigarette smoke.
It was like looking into a kaleidoscope. Couples dressed in bright colours danced in the centre of the room, or stood in groups around the edges, the women wearing diamonds large enough to kill a man, drinking hard and laughing loud. They wore splashes of rouge high on their cheekbones, and not one of them was not beautiful.
It was so hot the windows had misted over. But despite the heat, Vita wrapped her arms around herself and shivered: the laughter was too loud, as if covering over something: fear, or panic. The party seemed feverish, on edge. The women looked more like ornaments than flesh and blood. Alcohol, Vita knew, was illegal in New York under the law of Prohibition, and yet one woman sat staring at the wall, too drunk to stand.
A few noticed Vita, and she saw their eyes flick down to her ankle and their expression take on a familiar look of pity. She summoned her most unblinking glare, but she felt herself turning scarlet around the ears and neck.
She was edging back into the hall when one of the maids – a tall girl with a dirty white-blonde plait and a sharp, sullen face, barely older than Vita – said, ‘Excuse me,’ and edged past her with a tray of champagne. Vita flattened herself against a wall, out of the way.
As Vita watched, a large white-haired man reached out to take the last champagne glass. He looked oddly familiar. The maid bobbed a curtsy and was moving back into the crowd with her empty tray when she stumbled over her own boot and brushed against the man. The girl’s fingers flickered against his left wrist, and suddenly there was bare skin where his wristwatch had been.
Vita caught her breath. She was about to shout, to warn the man, when the girl c
aught her eye. She shook her head, once, urgently, and turned away, but not before Vita saw her expression. She looked like a cornered animal: trapped.
Vita was still hesitating when a voice spoke at her right ear.
‘Are you the child asking for me?’
The man who addressed her did not look like his photograph, but she had no doubt at all that it was him.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And you’re Victor Sorrotore.’
He was taller than she had expected, and though his suit was exquisite, his nails were bitten right down to the quick, and bloody at the edges. His hair was carefully coated in brilliantine oil, but his eyes were shadowed by dark circles, as if someone had pressed two black inky thumbs against his face. The eyes fixed themselves on Vita’s, and she felt the muscles in her chest contract.
‘What is it you want?’ he said. She hesitated for a moment, and he went on, ‘I hope you didn’t come all this way to tell me my own name?’ His voice was deep, American, but accented with a European edge.
‘I’ve come to ask you for something.’
‘You interrupted my party to ask a favour?’ He spoke as if to a much younger child. She stared back, and tried not to blink.
‘It’s business,’ she said.
‘Business! If it was business you wanted, why didn’t you come during business hours?’ He snorted, and there was cruelty in it. ‘I would have offered you a cigar.’ He looked her over, and she could see that he was performing some intricate, chilly calculation. ‘Since you’re here, let us go and find a desk and some leather furniture, so you feel sufficiently businesslike.’
He led the way. Out of the corner of her eye, Vita saw the maid with the waist-length plait make her way, stony-faced, among a group of laughing women. The diamond bracelet on one of their wrists disappeared.
Sorrotore stopped by the white-haired man, whose picture, she realised, she had seen in the American newspapers on the ship. A retired politician, she thought. Or, no: a retired Chief of Police. He was now a city developer and ‘leading philanthropist’, the papers had said, which sounded like a skin disease but presumably wasn’t.
The Good Thieves Page 2
