The Good Thieves

by Katherine Rundell

  ‘I wouldn’t say any of us is normal,’ said Arkady. He sounded insulted.

  ‘I mean that someone feeds you, don’t they? Someone cares about you. Someone makes you sandwiches and washes your clothes and does up your buttons if you can’t reach them. Nobody does that for me.’

  For all her toughness, her sharp elbows and sharp chin, she suddenly looked as breakable as bone china. She glared down at her grubby nails. ‘So, no. I won’t do it.’

  A silence fell. Vita, feeling all thumbs and knees, tried to think of something comforting. She leaned over to where Silk sat, and touched her ankle, briefly, with her fingertips. The world felt unjust, misshapen.

  But Samuel’s face had brightened – had suddenly turned electric and vivid. ‘I know!’ he said.

  ‘What?’ said Arkady.

  ‘Tell us?’ said Vita. His hope was infectious.

  ‘The Lost and Found! Practically every place in this city has a Lost and Found – every movie theatre, every train station, every restaurant. Even the place where they sell tickets for the Statue of Liberty has one!’

  Silk raised her fine blonde eyebrows. ‘People don’t forget their trousers.’

  ‘They do in hotels!’ he said. ‘In all those drawers! All we have to do is scrub ourselves, so we look clean, go to every hotel, and tell them a friend of ours left behind a pair of trousers – or a jacket or a dress or whatever – in the room, and ask if they’ve got any in the Lost and Found.’

  ‘It’s a brilliant idea!’ said Vita.

  ‘When?’ said Silk.

  ‘Tomorrow!’ said Vita. ‘As soon as we can.’

  ‘And then?’ said Arkady.

  ‘Then we’ll be ready to go!’

  ‘Right,’ said Silk. She turned and looked at Vita; at her thin hands, at her bloodied elbow. ‘So if he’s climbing the wall, and he’s taming the dogs, and I’m picking the lock to the walled garden – what are you doing?’

  Samuel and Arkady turned to Vita, as if the question had not occurred to them.

  ‘Well … it’s my family’s emerald,’ she said, reasonably enough.

  ‘But what can you do?’ asked Silk.

  Vita’s brain drew a total blank. She thrust her hands in her pockets, and her fingers met her penknife. She thought of Lady Lavinia, and her sharp-eyed watchfulness.

  ‘Wait a second.’ The mostly devoured loaf of bread still lay on the beer barrel next to the bread knife. She took it, an apple, and an orange, and set them side by side on the mantelpiece.

  ‘My grandpa taught me to do this,’ she said.

  She crossed to the far end of the room, took the bread knife, the steak knife, and her own penknife in one hand, and without pausing to make sure the others were watching her, threw the knives over their heads at the mantelpiece. They yelped and ducked, and twisted to stare.

  The bread knife had sliced a chunk off the apple. The steak knife had stuck in the bread. And her own Swiss Army knife had cut straight to the centre of the orange, filling the room with the scent of the faraway sun. In fact, she had been aiming to slice the apple exactly in two, like Lady Lavinia in Carnegie Hall, but she did not admit it.

  ‘I can do that,’ she said. ‘I’m the just-in-case.’

  They left quietly, moving in single file. The room had filled up since they arrived, and several men sat on stools at the bar, all varying degrees of drunk.

  ‘Hey! Kid … Wha’s yer name? Jack Welles’s grandkid!’

  Vita whipped around. Sitting on one of the stools was Dillinger, even grubbier now than in the Park, his shirt untucked, a saliva-wet cigar hanging from his mouth.

  Samuel stepped forwards, and Silk’s hand was forming a fist, but Vita shook her head.

  ‘Let me,’ she said. Up close, his skin was grey. His fingers were gripping the edge of the bar, as if the room were in motion.

  ‘It’s the girl who plays with fire,’ Dillinger slurred. Spittle flew from his mouth on the s of ‘plays’, and she recoiled. ‘Aren’t you out kind of late, for a kid and a cripple?’

  Vita flinched backwards, then collected her breath, and stepped forwards. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What do I want?’ And he laughed. ‘I don’t want anything. But you want something. You want your granddaddy’s house back. Don’t you?’

  Vita did not move.

  ‘Well, you ain’t going to get it, kid. And pretty soon you won’t want it back, not when he’s through with it.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  But he was laughing again, amused at some thought that had bubbled up from the grimy recesses of himself. ‘You’ll find out. He was searching for that necklace you told him about. You was real helpful – you know that? – filling him in.’

  Vita only stood and waited.

  ‘But now he’s gotten tired of treasure-hunting. And he’s worried about the questions being asked. And when he gets worried he gets mean. Business ain’t going as easy as it was. So he’s set a date.’ Dillinger belched, and winced. ‘Next week.’

  ‘A date for what?’

  Dillinger peered at her. ‘He’s got something against you. It’s not just that you took that ring, though he’ll get you for that, for sure. But I never seen him like this. I never seen him hate a kid before. You really got under his skin, you know that?’

  ‘Next week what?’ asked Vita again.

  But he turned to the barman. ‘A scotch on the rocks,’ he said, ‘and don’t be shy with it.’ He thumped the bar and his eyes, unmoored by drink, rolled briefly backwards leaving only the whites showing.

  Vita turned away, but he called after her.

  ‘Did you hear what I said, kid? It’s fire you’re playing with. Don’t get burned!’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Vita’s mother was waiting up when she got home, and she was white with fear and anger. Vita had known she would be. The ensuing conversation was bad – somewhere, Vita thought later, when her tears had dried, between thunderstorm and miniature apocalypse.

  ‘I can’t be here to watch you, not like at home!’ said her mother, and there were tears in her eyes, too. ‘And you know you’re not strong!’

  ‘I am!’

  Her mother bit her lips together; her face was still wild with residual fear. ‘You’re a child! I told you I was trusting you and Grandpa not to get into trouble – please, Vita, don’t make me regret it! I couldn’t bear it!’

  At last the storm abated.

  ‘Promise me you won’t do it again?’ asked her mother, once she had bathed Vita’s cut, and Vita said, ‘I promise,’ and kissed her mother and ran to her bed before she could be asked to define exactly what it was she was promising.

  Vita was in bed and half asleep, with the red book under her pillow, before she remembered Sorrotore’s wallet. She sat bolt upright and listened to the apartment. All was quiet; the only sound was the thrum of the city outside.

  She crept down the hall and grabbed her overcoat from its hook. The wallet, when she fished it out, had that faint scent to it: leather, and some kind of perfume; and power.

  She pulled out an envelope, folded in half, and a few receipts.

  The receipts told her nothing except that Sorrotore had expensive tastes – one was for twelve bottles of Perrier-Jouët 1904 champagne – so she tore open the envelope.

  A single sheet of headed writing paper was wrapped around scraps of newsprint.

  All of them were news reports about fires: buildings destroyed, across the city.

  The covering letter read:

  Victor,

  Progress on various projects; see enclosed. Keep me updated on your latest. Don’t waste time. Fair Homes is waiting to move in and make the Hudson Castle Hotel a reality.

  Yours, in haste,

  Westerwicke

  She spread out the enclosed press cuttings. They seemed to have no connection to Sorrotore, or to one another. They were all old buildings, and old buildings catch fire easily. Except, she saw, as she read on, that one company
seemed to be building on the burned-out spaces, post-fire: Fair Homes Enterprises.

  Fair Homes, according to the newsprint, claimed to produce ‘affordable housing for hardworking New Yorkers’. But Vita frowned as the article went on: it seemed the buildings it constructed were all luxury apartments, with doormen and gold-plated swimming pools; the kind of buildings that suggested it was your duty to refrain from being poor.

  She read closer. The articles mourned the loss of buildings that had been protected: churches and theatres, places that should have shaped the history of the city. Buildings that took up valuable space in the heart of the most desirable areas.

  She stared down at the list. A block of apartments on East 23rd Street had caught fire overnight; one person had been injured, and an elderly man had died later of smoke inhalation. The street name was familiar; had she walked down it? She read on: The Old Hotel, Columbus Avenue, had burned beyond repair.

  The name prickled with familiarity. She took her penknife in her fist, flicking at the tweezers with her thumb, thinking, digging backwards in her memory – and then it came to her.

  The papers on Sorrotore’s desk.

  The Old Hotel had been sold for $200. And now it was gone.

  She looked back at the press cuttings, and, slowly, she began to piece it together. Sorrotore bought old buildings, under the names of different companies; he burned them; then Westerwicke built on them.

  How many buildings had he promised to save, the way he had promised to save Grandpa’s? How much money, she wondered, were he and Westerwicke making?

  Her arms and hands were cold, but her heart was hot. She thought of Dillinger’s glee at his own words: ‘It’s fire you’re playing with …’

  A drunk with a pun. And what else had he said? ‘He’s set a date. Next week.’

  That was it, then, she thought. That was why Sorrotore wanted Hudson Castle; to burn it to the ground. And she had almost no time at all. ‘Next week’: that could mean any time from Monday, or even Sunday. Today was Wednesday.

  She fell asleep with the red book clutched to her chest. Sorrotore went stalking through her dreams, his face bearing ever closer; a cold and unlovely bedfellow.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The next day the raid on the Lost and Found boxes of New York City began.

  ‘We need to move fast,’ said Vita. She told them, as briefly as she could, about the papers; about the fresh jolt of urgency running through their plan.

  ‘But what is he actually doing?’ said Arkady.

  ‘I think he cons people – threatens them, cheats them, I don’t know – into selling old buildings – beautiful ones, in beautiful places – very cheap. Places it would be illegal to knock down, because they’re protected. And then gives orders for them to be burned down, so he can build something new.’

  ‘So did your grandpa sell his house?’ said Silk.

  ‘No, no, no! But it’s the same thing: Sorrotore’s going to set it on fire. And there’s no time.’ The panic rose in her, and she forced it back down, away from her heart. ‘Let’s split up. We’ll meet back here tonight.’

  They walked and ran, between them, almost the length and breadth of New York. Silk, who knew the city best, split it into sections on Vita’s map. She did not glance at Vita’s foot, but gave her the places nearest to Carnegie Hall.

  Silk uncovered one small adult’s grey jacket in Chumley’s speakeasy in Greenwich Village, which almost fitted Arkady, and Vita found an ankle-length blue velvet dress at the terrifyingly marble-and-gold Waldorf Hotel. The dress was hideous and too tight, but it radiated sweetness and nursery rhymes. It also came down to the floor, hiding her left calf and ankle. Samuel found an entire suit of boy’s clothes, in a thick brown material, recovered from the Algonquin Hotel.

  He looked victorious, and angry. ‘They wouldn’t give it to me at first, so I told them I was a houseboy for the family. Then they handed it over without blinking.’

  Arkady looked at his friend: at his fury, and the hurt in his eyes. ‘Chyort,’ he said. ‘I hope you spat on them.’

  Samuel tried to smile. ‘That wouldn’t have helped much,’ he said.

  Finally, just as Silk was beginning to despair, it occurred to her to ask at the Lyceum Theatre if anyone had left behind a coat in the cloakroom in the last month. She was rewarded with a white hooded cloak trimmed with swan feathers, which reached almost to the ground. It was a little greying at the sleeve and neck, and the swan feathers were possibly a bit much, but it was undeniably smart.

  ‘Let’s meet somewhere posh!’ Vita had said. ‘As a test! If people don’t stare, we’ll know we look right.’

  ‘The Plaza Hotel. It’s just on the edge of Central Park – it’s the smartest place in New York,’ Silk said. She was using Vita’s penknife to trim back the swan feathers from her cuffs. ‘The old women who go there for tea can guess how rich you are by the way you sneeze. If nobody stares at us there, nobody ever will.’

  Samuel hesitated. Then: ‘People will still stare,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Vita.

  ‘People will still stare. At me. If we try to go somewhere rich. Even if I’m dressed up, they’ll still stare.’

  Vita felt herself colour, a flood of red rising up her cheeks. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I should have thought of that. Let’s—’

  ‘No,’ said Samuel. He fingered the brown cloth of the suit jacket. There was doubt in his face, but something else, too: the same determination that had once allowed a four-year-old boy to do secret backflips across a pitch-black bedroom. His jaw worked as he set his teeth. ‘We’ll go anyway. I want to. If they stare at me, I’ll stare back.’

  The Plaza Hotel was the kind of place you expect to find people clad in velvet and swan’s feathers, who pitch their voices low and their eyebrows high. It was for people who did not walk but swept.

  Vita did her best to sweep as she made her way up to the vast door. She nodded to the doorman and went in, keeping her chin as high as it would go.

  A man followed behind her. His eyes, had she turned to see them, were unsure: they studied not her face but her feet, covered by the floor-length dress. His hand was tattooed with a spitting cat.

  ‘Over here!’ called Arkady. The three stood inside the Palm Court, by the central bar, on which stood a vast golden statue of the Greek god Hermes. Across the ceiling, hanging from sturdy ropes, were autumnal wreaths and bowers, so that the room appeared to be half dining room, half exquisite forest. Vita stared. Money shone from the faces of every person there.

  A family group, dining on pressed chicken and savoury jellies, glanced over at Samuel, then looked away. Samuel lifted his chin and glared back. It was, Vita thought, the kind of glare that could boil ice.

  ‘Trees and leaves indoors,’ said Arkady. He wrinkled his nose at the potted palm trees that filled the room. ‘But no birds. Ridiculous.’ Then he held out his jacket to Vita. ‘What do you think?’

  Vita looked them up and down. Both boys wore ties; all four of them were scrubbed clean. ‘If we looked any more innocent,’ she said, ‘we’d be arrested for it.’ She felt the excitement rise in her. ‘We’re ready. We go tomorrow! It’s going to happen!’ And she spun around, so her dress flared out around her shins, showing her bright red boots.

  Across the room, the man with the cat tattoo nodded to himself, and quietly stepped outside.

  ‘Guys,’ said Samuel. He spoke without moving his lips. ‘I think we should go.’

  ‘Why?’ said Silk. ‘Are people staring? Show me, and I’ll—’

  ‘No. I think someone’s recognised us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Recognised Vita. Let’s go.’

  But as they moved for the vast glass doors out to the street, the man came back in, with two others following behind, both clad in grey suits. Their eyes were fixed on Vita. She felt her body seize up.

  Samuel looked from Vita’s face, to the men, and back.

  ‘Run
!’ he whispered. ‘I’ve got an idea. Ark, I need your help.’

  ‘But—’ began Silk.

  ‘Just run!’ Samuel had that same sharp, unswerving look that Vita had seen on his face as he jumped out of the midnight window. ‘Go!’ he said. He pushed past the other three, rubbing the inside of his elbow, rolling his shoulders, as if about to mount the trapeze and fly. Arkady ran after him.

  ‘Come on,’ hissed Silk. ‘I know a way out.’ And she darted to the left, towards the kitchen entrance. Vita ran, trying to keep her weight on her right foot, but three men were coming after them, moving as unobtrusively as they could through the tables.

  Arkady turned to Samuel. They had three seconds in which to whisper, their eyes on the men.

  ‘Listo, Sam?’

  ‘Ready,’ said Samuel.

  ‘Hep!’ said Arkady, and held out his two hands, fingers intertwined. Samuel bit his lips together, set his foot in the stirrup of Arkady’s hands, and leaped like a ballet dancer into the air.

  He landed sitting astride the shoulders of the statue of Hermes, scrambled up into a crouch, leaped again, and seized hold of one of the ropes that bore the autumnal wreaths. Leaves showered down across the room. A woman in a pearl-dotted beret choked on her tea. A small child cheered. A fluffy white poodle barked.

  Samuel swung on the rope, casting his weight back and forth, then let go and flew across the room. He pointed his feet, stretched out both arms, and landed in the uppermost leaves of one of the palm trees, which fell with a crash. It overturned two tables and a visiting Russian Ambassador, striking one of the grey-suited men on the shoulder.

  Several waiters yelled and swore, and staff came running out of the kitchen to find out the cause of the chaos. People were crowding round, but Samuel was up, disentangling himself from palms, dodging hands, running towards the kitchens.

  The tattooed man pushed aside a shouting waiter and reached out his hand to grab at Samuel’s back. Arkady whistled, and the miniature poodle barked. He pointed, and the man found a small ball of toothy fluff flying at his upper thigh.

  The two boys sprinted to the kitchen, dodging past staff coming in the other direction, then hurled themselves out of the back door into an alley.