The Good Thieves

by Katherine Rundell

  Vita’s hand went deep into her pockets, looking for something to throw. She pushed aside the red book, and her penknife – that was precious, that was her own, that was not for moments like this – feeling for something, anything else. There was only the leaflet from Carnegie Hall, rolled into a tight little tube, and some fluff.

  The shorter boy turned back to Silk. He took both her fists in one hand, and held them tight. ‘Hand over the wallets, and we’ll let you go.’ And he twisted one of Silk’s arms in a sudden jerk, up and round behind her back.

  Vita’s heart gave a lurch of rage, and without stopping to think she charged at the boy.

  He swiped a fist the size of a brick at her. It caught her in the temple, knocking her backwards, filling her eyes with red swirls, but he had to let go of Silk to do so. She darted back down the alley – to a dead end. She let out a gasp, swiftly swallowed.

  Vita heard the gasp; and it made her anger roar up and overspill. People do not expect a small girl to be willing to take or inflict pain. So surprise, she knew, was the only thing she had on her side. She hauled herself back up, and kicked out at the short boy’s instep with her right foot, holding the wall for balance. She had five seconds, she thought, before the shock of being attacked by a five-foot-nothing with fox-red hair wore off. As he bent forward in pain, she jabbed her knee into his groin.

  ‘Run!’ she said to Silk.

  Silk did not run. Instead she turned to the tall boy, looked him full in the face, launched forwards, and bit his collarbone. He yelled in surprise, and the two of them closed against each other, kicking and spitting.

  The short boy straightened up, dust on his knees, and his hand became a fist with real intentions. Vita ducked sideways and it slammed agonisingly into her shoulder. He grabbed at her arm. She lashed out with her feet, and her free hand reached into her pocket, seized the tightly rolled leaflet, and pushed it as far as it would go up his nostril.

  He let out a yell as his eyes filled with water, and Vita bit down at the grasping hand. He struggled free, and stared at her, wild-eyed. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  Footsteps came pounding down the alley now. Vita wiped the hair and sweat from her eyes, locking her thumbs into her fists in readiness. Around the corner came Samuel, followed by Arkady, Rimsky flapping above his head. Arkady’s arms were raised, ready to fight, and Samuel’s eyes were vivid with anger.

  They halted for a second, taking in the scene, then came at a sprint down the alley. Arkady let out a high war cry as they went straight for the two boys.

  It was too much for Short. He turned and ran, darting past Arkady, followed by Tall, his mouth open with fear. Rimsky followed, dive-bombing them as they went.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asked Arkady.

  Vita nodded, unable to catch her breath to speak. There was a long silence as Silk spat a small amount of blood against the wall, and Vita rearranged her boot.

  Silk spoke first. ‘You didn’t need to do that.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, I—’

  ‘No, I mean – I would have been fine. I didn’t need help.’

  Various retorts, few of them polite, ran through Vita’s imagination. With immense effort, she chose none of them. Instead, she said, ‘Will they come after you again?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Silk. ‘Probably. If I keep working their patch.’ And then, seeing Vita’s face crease, she added gruffly, ‘Or maybe not. Not worth their time, more likely.’

  ‘You can borrow Rimsky,’ said Arkady, ‘if you need her. She’s like a guard dog.’

  Samuel spoke. ‘You’re bleeding.’

  ‘Who? Me?’ said Vita.

  ‘Both of you.’

  Vita twisted to see that blood was trickling from her elbow, out through a hole in her coat, torn when she’d fallen. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. She turned to Silk. ‘You’ve got some there, on the side of your head.’

  Silk felt, and made a face at the blood on her fingers. ‘Ugh.’

  Arkady fished out a handkerchief and handed it to Silk. It looked as though cleanliness was a distant memory, but Silk dabbed at her head with it anyway. She looked from Arkady, panting and scowling, to Samuel, brushing off his hands, to Vita, who was watching Silk, her stare unblinking.

  Then, very slowly, Silk’s mouth began to twitch.

  ‘OK,’ said Silk.

  ‘OK what?’ said Vita.

  ‘OK, yes. OK, I’ll join you. I’ll be one of your crew. Just, OK.’

  Warmth – enough to beat back the cold of the night – rose in Vita’s chest. But she said, ‘I thought you never worked with other people.’

  Silk shrugged. ‘I’ll make an exception.’ And they each smiled sudden smiles, mirror images of surprise.

  ‘I’ll pay you,’ said Vita. ‘As soon as we sell the emerald – enough to make it worth it, I swear.’

  Silk shrugged one shoulder. ‘I’d rather not be paid. Not this time.’

  A wet drop landed on Vita’s face; it was beginning to rain. ‘Let’s go somewhere we can talk,’ she said.

  ‘Can we go somewhere with hamburgers?’ asked Arkady. ‘I could eat an entire kitchen.’

  The diner on the corner was full and bustling, but when Arkady approached, Silk shook her head. ‘This place won’t let me in. Most places won’t, around here.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Arkady.

  Silk scowled. ‘Why do you think? Here. Down this alley.’

  Vita risked a question. ‘Why were you there, at Carnegie Hall?’

  Silk shook her head again. ‘We shouldn’t talk here. Wait.’ And she led the way at an almost-run, down two more streets, towards a shop door. ‘In here, quick, before we get soaked.’

  Arkady stopped, his face flushing. ‘We can’t go in there!’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They sell … brassieres.’

  Vita looked at the window. He was right: the shopfront was a riot of lace and satin, and a mannequin with the eyes of a Major General modelled a corset.

  ‘I thought you said there was food?’ said Samuel. ‘I’m not eating underpants, not even in the name of friendship.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! There’s a speakeasy in the basement,’ Silk said.

  ‘A speakeasy?’ said Vita. ‘You mean … a bar? But … isn’t it illegal?’

  ‘Obviously! Just to remind you, you’re looking for somewhere to discuss a crime.’

  ‘Will they even let us in?’ asked Arkady. ‘Don’t you have to be twenty-one?’

  ‘They’ll let me in,’ said Silk, ‘and you’re with me.’

  Vita looked doubtfully at Silk, and down at the blood on her own elbow and the tear in her coat. But it turned out to be true. Silk marched through the shop, brushing past a row of knickers, and nodded to the supremely respectable-looking old woman behind the counter.

  ‘Evening, Bette,’ she said. ‘How’s business?’

  ‘Evening, Susan.’ The woman nodded back, unsmiling. ‘Not as good as it could be, not as bad as it might be.’ Her accent, like Silk’s, had Irish edges to it. She pressed a button under the counter. The wall behind the cash desk clicked, and swung back on a hinge, revealing a flight of rough wooden steps leading downwards. ‘Quick, now, before you bring cops poking in among my corsets.’

  Silk led the way down the stairs towards a thick black curtain, through which music filtered.

  ‘Who’s Susan?’ asked Arkady.

  ‘Me, technically,’ said Silk. ‘But not for years. It’s Silk.’ She pulled open the curtain, and Vita stepped out on to a gold-lit dance floor.

  A four-man band was playing on a tiny stage, and on the marble floor a dozen couples danced. It was not a dance Vita knew – it was something fast and virtuosic, with jerky arms and legs. More couples sat at small circular tables, eating, drinking and, in one case, kissing so enthusiastically they looked, Vita thought, to be welded together. A fire burned under a vast marble mantelpiece, and the room was blissfully warm.

  A man behind
a counter looked up in surprise as they approached. ‘Silk, kid! What are you doing here? You better not be working.’

  ‘I wouldn’t work in here,’ said Silk. ‘You know that. Anyway, I’ve given up – almost.’ Her voice had changed slightly – her vowels were rougher, and harder. ‘We’re hungry. You got anything?’

  ‘Ah, Silk, not now! I’m in the middle of my shift – and besides, if the cops come and find a bunch of kids round here, I’ll be—’

  A red flush was spreading up Silk’s neck and cheeks. ‘You owe me, Tony, since I stole back your grandmother’s urn off those kids. You said so yourself.’

  Tony sighed. ‘How hungry are you?’

  ‘Very!’ said Samuel.

  ‘I could eat a horse,’ said Arkady.

  ‘Really? You mean that?’ The sudden light of the inventor came into Tony’s eye. ‘I ain’t got no horse, but I been experimenting with green turtle hearts and mushroom gravy – you want to try some?’

  ‘Um …’ said Arkady.

  ‘Or can I do you a fishtail fricassee?’

  There was a silence so large and so polite it filled the fireplace and went up the chimney.

  ‘Is that a no?’ said Tony.

  ‘Do you have anything more …’ Samuel hesitated.

  ‘Normal?’ said Arkady.

  The man sighed. ‘Go in there,’ he said, gesturing to a door to the left, ‘and don’t make a racket. I’ll be through in a second.’

  The room was empty of people, and much quieter. There was sawdust on the floor instead of shining tiles, and a number of upturned crates, a beer barrel in place of a table, and a smell of paraffin lamps. It was warm. Vita felt her shoulders relax, and drew in a great breath.

  ‘This is where the waiters come for their breaks,’ said Silk, sitting on one of the crates. ‘But they’ll have just started their shifts – they won’t be off for hours. We can talk here. Nobody’ll hear.’

  ‘Good,’ said Vita. ‘Tell me – why were you at the circus this evening? It wasn’t coincidence, was it?’

  ‘No,’ said Silk. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a large brown leather wallet, about the size of a paperback book. ‘I wanted this.’

  ‘Sorrotore’s?’ said Vita, though she already knew. The leather had the kind of shine on it that means money.

  ‘Yeah. I followed him to Carnegie Hall from the Dakota and waited outside.’

  ‘You must have been freezing,’ said Samuel.

  Silk shrugged. ‘I wanted it,’ she said again. She put the wallet on the upturned beer barrel.

  ‘So you took his wallet,’ said Arkady. ‘Why?’

  ‘He didn’t pay me, that night I worked his party. I stained the uniform they gave me, and he said it was worth more than my night’s wages.’

  ‘You broke a statue, too,’ Arkady pointed out. ‘Vita told us about it. And you stole from his guests.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Silk, and she fixed Arkady with a sharp glare, ‘but he doesn’t know that. So it was still an injustice. And besides …’

  ‘Besides what?’ asked Vita.

  ‘Men like that, they keep a lot in their wallets. And … then, what you’d said, about what he did. I kept thinking about it. About how men like him always win.’

  Vita nodded, and their eyes met, and understanding flickered between them.

  ‘So I thought I’d take a look, and if there was anything worth knowing, maybe I’d find you. Except … you found me.’ And she picked up the wallet and handed it to Vita.

  Vita took it gingerly. The leather was soft to the touch; expensive, sleek – like its owner. She felt an unexpected urge to run out to the other room and throw it on the fire.

  Instead, she took out the folded dollar bills and handed them to Silk. There were a few receipts, too, and an unopened envelope addressed to ‘Mr Victor Sorrotore, The Dakota’.

  She was just about to look inside the envelope when the door burst open. Vita barely had time to slip the wallet into her coat and out of sight before Tony barged into the room backwards.

  ‘Here.’ He was carrying a tray, which he banged down on top of the beer barrel. ‘You kids got no food inquisitiveness, that’s your problem. Pedestrian! That’s what I call it.’ And he stalked out, pulling the door shut behind him.

  On the tray were heaped chunks of hot meat, and, next to it, half a loaf of bread, some apples, a couple of California oranges, a slab of butter, and several slices of cheese, each large enough to cover Vita’s palm. Standing in the middle of it all was a bottle of ketchup.

  ‘Beefsteak!’ said Samuel. ‘Excellent.’

  There were four jam jars filled with frothing white liquid. Vita sniffed one warily.

  ‘Milk,’ she said, relieved. She drank deeply; it was so cold it made the space between her eyes ache. It gave her courage, rising from her stomach outwards.

  They ate with their hands, spreading the butter with the bread knife, and using a pencil Samuel found in his pocket to get the ketchup out of the bottle. Vita ate in vast, ravenous bites, swamped by the pleasure of it. They cut the cheese with her penknife and found it rich and salty.

  Gradually they slowed, until only Arkady was still going. Samuel, impatient, kicked up into a handstand, one foot leaning against the wall. Arkady reached for his eighth piece of bread.

  ‘Ark, you can’t still be hungry?’ said Samuel, upside down.

  ‘I believe you should keep eating until it comes out of your ears. Otherwise it’s rude to the chef.’ He already had a small piece of butter on his chin. At last he finished chewing, and turned to face Vita. Two more expectant pairs of eyes followed suit.

  Vita reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the red book. She hesitated for just a moment: looked from one pair of trusting eyes to another, felt her heart roaring in her chest. Then she opened it.

  ‘This is it. This is what we do,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve written it out?’ said Silk sharply. She took it up and turned the pages: diagrams, train timetables, to-do lists. ‘Is that a good idea? What if someone finds it?’

  ‘I’ve used initials – no real names. And I keep it on me all the time,’ said Vita. ‘Nobody can get to it.’

  Swiftly she ran through the plan. They’d all three heard it already, but even so they listened with tense and frowning focus.

  ‘Can we have code names, instead of initials?’ asked Arkady. ‘I’ll be Mr Redhanded.’

  ‘No,’ said Silk firmly.

  ‘And exactly where’s the fountain we have to dig up?’ asked Samuel.

  ‘In the walled garden.’

  ‘And where’s the walled garden?’

  She turned to the next page, where she had copied the blueprint.

  ‘Here.’ She pointed. She took Samuel’s pencil, and circled it.

  ‘Draw an “X”,’ said Arkady. ‘There’s always an “X” on a treasure map.’

  Vita scratched a deep ‘X’ into the blueprint. ‘Emerald necklace,’ she wrote.

  As she did so, Tony the barman came back into the room, and she pulled the book into her lap. He looked at the almost empty tray, at Arkady’s liberally buttered countenance, and nodded.

  ‘Good. I don’t like waste.’

  But as he bent to pick up the four empty jars, Vita saw his eyes look them up and down – an elevator glance – and saw him frown. He opened his mouth to speak, then grunted, and went out.

  Samuel had seen it as well. He turned to Silk. ‘He’s not going to report us, is he?’

  Silk, too, had been watching. ‘I don’t think so. I didn’t like his face, though. I think he thinks we look weird. Strange.’

  Vita looked at the boys, and at Silk, and tried to imagine how they would appear to a stranger.

  Arkady wore a jersey of such bright red wool you could see him for miles. He had never given back her scarf, which was royal blue, and the two together made him look like a battle flag. Samuel, under his coat, was dressed all in black – sleek, acrobatic clothes, designed not to impede
movement. Silk was better, clad in a too-small woollen skirt and a heavy knitted jumper, but her clothes made her look uncared for, ragged – and Vita knew that people fear those who look unsmart, as if they fear poverty itself were contagious. And she, Vita, was most noticeable of all, with her foot arching inwards, in her bright silk boots.

  Samuel’s thoughts had followed hers.

  ‘What we need,’ he said, ‘are disguises.’

  ‘Yes!’ said Vita. She needed a skirt that would come lower, and hide her left leg.

  ‘Disguises?’ said Arkady. ‘Why?’

  ‘What you wear changes the way people treat you,’ said Samuel. ‘You know – some clothes say, Love me, and some say, Believe me, and some say, Oh just ignore me.’

  ‘We need the kind of clothes that say, We’ve never had a dangerous or illegal thought in our lives,’ said Vita. ‘If anyone sees us on the journey to the house, we need people to approve of us and then just completely forget us.’

  ‘What sort of clothes are those?’ asked Silk. She looked down at her bare knees defensively.

  A picture came to Vita of the kind of clothes the Royal children had worn at home.

  ‘Expensive, I think,’ said Vita. ‘Nobody suspects the rich. Clothes that say, My surname is the same as the name of a bank, and it’s not a coincidence. That kind of look.’

  ‘Grey,’ said Silk firmly. ‘Grey or brown – those look respectable. Mud colours. Grey trousers and jackets for the boys, dresses for us.’

  ‘Right,’ said Samuel, ‘How are we going to do that?’

  ‘Mug a priest?’ suggested Arkady.

  Vita glared. All eyes turned to Silk.

  She flushed. ‘I’m a pickpocket, not a pick-entire-bloody-outfit,’ she said.

  ‘Couldn’t you steal enough cash for us to buy new clothes?’ said Arkady.

  ‘No.’ Silk’s face was hard and blank. ‘Or … yes, I could. But I don’t want to.’

  ‘But—’ began Arkady.

  ‘I’m sick of it, all right?’ Silk’s shoulders rose high, and she spat her words. ‘I don’t want to trick and twist and lie and run! You don’t know what it’s like, all the time, to have your heart in your throat like a stuck chicken bone. I want to be like you three. I want to be a normal kid.’