CHAPTER THREE

The sky was moonless and starless that first night, but New York is never dark. Vita rose after midnight to find the city still awake. She crossed to the window; the apartment block was tall, taller than any around it, and she could see the streets below her stretching away towards the great darkness of Central Park. Street lamps, house lights, the basement-window blaze of illicit speakeasies, car headlamps, flashes of cigar-tips; Manhattan shivered and glowed.

Sleep, Vita felt, was impossible. There was a restaurant in the building next door, and from it came the music of two violins, and loud, off-key male singing.

Across the street, the red brick of Carnegie Hall had turned to bronze under the street lights, its facade full of hushed solemnity. Then she blinked, and looked closer.

Right at that moment it was neither hushed nor solemn, because a boy was on the brink of jumping out of the third-floor window.

He clambered up and stood on the sill. He was thin, with dark skin and protruding ears, and he did not look down, but out, across the city.

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.