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 caught 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.

‘Everything all right, Westerwicke?’ said Sorrotore. ‘Did it go as planned with Louie?’

Westerwicke nodded. ‘I believe so. Right, Dillinger?’ And he turned to a younger man standing at his elbow, with sparse sandy eyebrows and a sullen look. The man turned deep red, but nodded.

‘I guess.’

‘And the proof?’ said Sorrotore.

Dillinger reached inside his breast pocket and pulled out a small brown envelope. He tipped a gold signet ring into his palm and held it out. ‘Here.’

‘Fine.’ Sorrotore took it. ‘I’ve got to deal with this –’ he gestured at Vita – ‘but I’ll be right out.’

‘Don’t hurry on my account.’ Westerwicke looked down at Vita and smiled: it was the smile of someone who does not like or trust children.

Sorrotore led her into a dark, wood-panelled room. The fire was smoking, and its scent was unfamiliar, as if he had doused the wood in perfume. Vita shook herself, hard, flexing her fingers inside her pockets; the party and the smoke together were making her feel dizzy, unmoored from herself.

A movement in the corner of the room made her jump.

‘Don’t mind the animals,’ said Sorrotore.

She stared, as from behind a sofa came two tortoises, one as small as a side-plate, the other as large as a bicycle wheel. They moved cautiously, slowly, slipping a little on the polished wood. As they came closer, she saw with a jolt that they had gems set into their shells. The larger one had a word spelled out in sparkling white stones: ‘IMPERIUM’. The smaller had a word spelled out in red. She saw with a shock that it said: ‘VITA’.

‘Rubies,’ said Sorrotore. ‘And the white ones are diamonds. Not particularly high quality carat, but I think they’re rather charming. Imperium is Latin for “power”. Vita –’ and he gave a swift, hooded look – ‘means “life”. Power is life, life is power.’ Vita’s forehead creased. ‘Only those who have power really live. I don’t like to forget it. They help me remember.’

‘Doesn’t it hurt them?’ asked Vita.

‘Hurt them? Don’t be crazy – they’re animals.’

Two armchairs stood on either side of the fire. Sorrotore placed the signet ring on the mantelpiece and sat down in one chair, gesturing Vita to the other. She sank into it with relief; her foot was beginning to shake and burn.

‘Now.’ The jocularity had gone out of his voice. ‘Tell me why you’re here.’

‘I’m the granddaughter of Jack Welles,’ she said.

He sighed. ‘Obviously I knew that, or you’d be down in the street by now.’

‘I’m here to ask –’ and Vita tried to make her voice sound tough-minded and official – ‘to see the paperwork relating to my grandfather’s home.’ The words came out too high and thin.

The smaller tortoise nipped suddenly at the back of Sorrotore’s heel. He gave a hiss of shock, and kicked his foot backwards, sending the tortoise skittering over the varnished floor. It bumped against a wall and landed on its back, its feet waving in the air.

‘Your tortoise!’ said Vita.

‘What about it?’

Vita said nothing. She got up, crossed the room, trying to hide her limp from him, and set the tortoise the right way up. Sorrotore gave a bark of unamused laughter.

‘I see I’ve got a little Saint Francis on my hands. What do you mean, you want to look at the paperwork?’

‘I want you to prove that you bought Hudson Castle legally. I want you to show me.’

‘Prove? You expect a grown man to engage in some ridiculous game at the order of a child?’

He did not meet her eyes as he spoke, and Vita felt her temper rise to match his. He was a cheat, underneath the brilliantined hair and the gold watch; she felt sure of it. ‘You took my grandfather’s house, and everything in it.’

‘Took is not the right word. He sold it to me – cheaply, admittedly, but that was his choice. It’s built, as you may or may not know, on an extremely rare and beautiful ornamental lake. I would be stupid not to take the opportunity.’

‘No! He said he would rent it to you—’

‘Are you accusing me of lying?’

The spit of the fire and the scent of the room made Vita want to retch. Her head was lurching from thought to thought. Desperately, through the growing mist in her mind, she tried a different tack. ‘At least let him go back to pack his things. There’s an emerald necklace, and if you don’t let him fetch it, that’s illegal—’

She tried to bite back the words. But he seemed to have barely registered them. He stood and glanced in the mirror, rearranging the way his oiled hair fell across his forehead.

‘This is a joke that I have no time for. I will show you out.’

‘No!’ She tried to summon herself back, to remember what she knew to be true. ‘You’re a thief!’

Sorrotore looked at Vita, and the look pushed her backwards against the armchair. ‘What did you just say?’

‘I said you’re a thief,’ said Vita, in a voice that was just above a whisper.

‘How dare you?’ he breathed.

His face was full of something like disgust. She had prepared herself for a denial, but not for such anger, and she felt herself straining not to cry.

‘Do you know what happens to people who come to my apartment and accuse me of lying to my face?’

Before Vita could answer, there was a knock, and the butler put his head around the door. ‘Mr Westerwicke is being called away, sir – he’d like to see you for a second before he leaves.’

Sorrotore swore, grunted, and strode out of the room without looking at Vita.

Vita’s breath was hot in her chest, but she forced herself to stand. ‘Get up,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Don’t be pathetic. This is what you came for. Reconnaissance. You’ve got to know the enemy. Look around. Something, anything, could be useful.’

On the desk was a pile of papers, at least fifteen pages. She fumbled through them. At the top of each document were the words ‘Deed of Sale’. All of the sums were $200 – astonishingly low. She noted, puzzled, that they were not addressed to Sorrotore, but to corporations with carefully boring names. She leafed through: Expedient Constructions was buying The Old Hotel on Columbus Avenue. North Manhattan Enterprises was purchasing a block of apartments of ‘architectural significance’ on East 23rd. The list was long.

She crossed to the mantelpiece, on which stood several invitation cards, and a photograph of a beautiful woman, signed ‘Darling V! love, Lillian Gish’. She picked up the ring Sorrotore had set there; the gold disc, engraved with the initials ‘LZ’, glinted in the firelight. It was too large for any of her fingers, so she slipped it on to her thumb and held it out, to see it spark red and yellow.

There were footsteps in the room outside. She tugged at the ring. It stuck below the joint of her thumb. The doorknob twisted and Vita bit at the ring, trying to drag it off with her teeth. The door opened. Panicked, Vita shoved her left hand in her pocket, and darted to sit down again.

Sorrotore came back in, and this time his face was sad. ‘Now, kid – listen to me. Glance around you. I imagine you noticed I’m a rich man.’

Vita did not need to glance. She knew the whole room looked like money.

‘So why would I need to steal? Your grandfather said the Castle was a burden. He wanted to be free of it. I bought it. To be a canny businessman isn’t a crime. It’s mine, and I will not give it back, but nor –’ and his eyes darkened – ‘will I have it spread around town that I’m a common thief.’

‘Grandfather swore he didn’t! He wouldn’t lie.’

‘He lies because he regrets it. He lies because he’s embarrassed. He lies because he feels like a foolish old man.’ His voice became an intonation: a hypnotic, dark-voiced burr. ‘He lies because he is a foolish old man.’

‘He doesn’t lie! I know him!’ but an edge of doubt was creeping in; she could hear it, and flinched away from her own voice.

‘You know, in your heart, that it’s true. I think it would help you to say it out loud. Your grandfather lied.’ And again, slower, ‘Say, “My grandfather lied.”’

‘He didn’t!’

‘You’ve built a fantasy of wrong-doing and injustice around an old man’s mistake. Admit it. Say, “My grandfather lied.”’

Horror and embarrassment and something new, unidentifiable and unspeakable, flooded over Vita.

Renunciation, whispered the harsh, bitter little voice that lives in the dark depths of the heart. Say he lied, and you won’t need to worry any more. Poor foolish Grandpa. You can take him back to England. You can forget the plan. It’s so simple.

Say it, and you’ll be free.

The fire flickered, and Vita shrank further into her chair. She bit her lips together, holding back the words, and shook her head.

‘It will help you, Vita. Say, “My grandfather lied.”’

Vita’s mouth opened to speak.