CHAPTER EIGHT
Vita waited until the sun had fully set before she scattered the birdseed on the inside window sill. The day birds had all gone to roost, and no pigeons came to peck at it.
She sat next to it and waited; and waited. She was almost asleep when there was a flurry of wings and of bright eyes, and a crow landed on her window sill and began to devour the seed.
The bird had a tiny roll of paper tied to its foot.
Taking a letter off a bird’s foot is infinitely harder, Vita discovered, than it is made to sound in books. The bird flapped round and round her room with Vita in gently urgent pursuit, and it was not until she thought to offer it the ginger snap she had been saving that it stayed still long enough for her to unwind the three wraps of string that held it in place.
The note read: ‘Come to the entrance of Carnegie Hall at 11.20 p.m. Don’t be even a minute late. Eat this note.’
Vita looked at the note, which had suffered somewhat from its proximity to the bird’s rear end, and decided not to eat it. She flushed it down the lavatory instead.
Arkady was waiting behind one of the front doors of the Hall, watching through a crack, and he pulled it open before she could wonder whether to knock.
‘Come! A night guard patrols, but he only does the ground floor. He’s just gone past. Quickly!’
He led Vita through the great hall, lit only by the street lamps outside, and into the lift. ‘Second floor,’ he said. ‘The Chapter Hall.’
‘The what?’
‘It’s like a tiny stage: just two hundred people. The main hall takes nearly three thousand. There’s a rig in the Chapter.’
‘What kind of rig?’
‘Trapeze, obviously!’ He looked shocked at her ignorance. ‘The rig belongs to the Sabatini Sisters, but they don’t mind Samuel using it. Or at least, they wouldn’t mind if they knew. It has to be secret.’
‘What does?’
‘Samuel! He’s training to be an acrobat.’
‘Why does it have to be secret?’
‘Because he comes from a horse family.’ He shook his head at her, as if this were obvious. ‘He has to join his uncle’s act. It’s why he’s here – to learn horsemanship.’
‘But couldn’t he just ask—’
‘No. Circus families work like royalty – you do what your parents did, by birthright. You get no more choice about it than Tsar Alexander had about being Tsar. Which is OK for me – I’ve always known I wanted to work with animals: with dogs and horses and birds.’
Vita thought of how his face had shone, bright as torchlight, as he rode Moscow across the sleeping city, and nodded.
‘But the problem is, Samuel is a great aerial artiste,’ said Arkady. She smiled at the word ‘artiste’, but his face was utterly serious. ‘He taught himself, by watching – like people teach themselves tunes on a piano, you know? Except on his own body, and now he can’t unlearn it. So.’
‘But that’s not fair!’ said Vita.
Arkady shrugged. ‘I know. But have you tried saying that to an adult recently?’
‘That doesn’t mean you can’t change it. Nothing’s unchangeable!’
But Arkady was running ahead. ‘Come – here!’
The room was wooden-floored with wood panelling and a high ceiling. Chairs were laid out along three sides of the room, a single lamp was lit. The room smelt of sweat and chalk.
In the middle of the room were what looked like four rugby goal posts. Attached to the two posts at either end were platforms; from the middle two hung what looked like small iron swings. Beneath them was a net. At the top of one platform was a boy, standing on one leg, the other held high above his head.
‘Samuel!’ called Arkady. ‘She’s here.’
The boy turned, and grinned, but went immediately back to his stretching; and Vita quietly reminded herself to blink.
Samuel was beautiful; and his beauty was of the kind that makes your lungs temporarily forget their function. He was clad entirely in black – black cotton trousers, a black singlet, black bands at his wrist, black ballet shoes. His hair was cropped close to his head, and his cheekbones slanted across his face like twin cliff-edges. He set both hands on the platform and kicked himself into a handstand.
‘Talk now or later?’ asked Arkady.
‘Later,’ said Samuel, upside down. He barely seemed to have registered Vita’s presence. ‘I’m trying something new.’ His accent was New York, but with something else: a length and depth to the vowels that suggested a different mother tongue.
Samuel flipped upright, dipped his hands in chalk, picked up a long pole with a crook at the end of it, and, leaning out over the edge of the platform, used it to draw the iron swing towards him. He caught hold of it with one hand, leaning out over the net with just his heels on the platform.
He looked down at Arkady, and his face was rigid with concentration.
‘Call me in?’ he said.
Arkady shouted back, ‘Listo!’
‘Listo?’ whispered Vita.
‘Spanish for “ready”.’
Samuel shifted his weight. ‘Ready!’
‘Hep!’ called Arkady.
And Samuel cast himself off into the air, both hands on the bar of the trapeze, flying. At the peak of the swing, he let go, somersaulted in the air above the bar, and hooked back on to it with his knees. Vita’s stomach lurched.
The boy spun upright, grasped the ropes on either side of the swing, and stood up on the bar. He swayed his body back and forth, and the swing soared, so high that at its peak he was facing directly downwards and Vita caught a fleeting glimpse of his face. Then, without the slightest noise, he let go and dropped forward, spinning a full circle in the air, up and over the swing with only his ankle hooked over the bar.
Vita gasped. It wasn’t just the way he dropped through the air, as if gravity had granted him a special dispensation; it wasn’t just his flight. It was the look that had transformed his face.
Samuel’s jaw was set, and he did not smile, but there was something strange and prodigious and ferocious on his countenance. It was the joy of someone doing the thing they were born to do.
Vita did not know for how long Samuel swung, and spun, and cast his body kaleidoscope-wise. She only knew that she didn’t want him to stop. Then, as the swing rose higher and higher, he let go and spun in a double somersault, falling as the swing fell, reached out to grab it, missed, and fell into the net.
He sat up, his eyes shining.
‘New trick?’ called Arkady.
‘Didn’t work,’ said Samuel, standing in the net and brushing off his hands. ‘Did you see what went wrong?’ Up close he was slight and lean, but with large hands and feet that said he would be tall, some day.
‘You were on the downswing,’ said Arkady. ‘I think maybe two-thirds of a second too late,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know if it’s possible to do a double somersault.’
‘It is!’ Samuel shook his head. ‘But I could feel I was off.’ He jumped down from the net, wiping his forehead with his shirt. His flight had changed him; his whole body was looser, less wary.
‘You’re Vita,’ he said. ‘Ark said you need something.’
Vita felt for the red book in her pocket and gripped it tight. She straightened her spine. ‘I need a team,’ she said. And as swiftly as she could, she explained: about the Castle, and the emerald pendant, and the need for money and armies of lawyers to bring Sorrotore to his knees.
‘I need to get over a wall, maybe fifteen or twenty feet.’
‘Why can’t you just take a ladder?’
‘Because the wall rises straight out of a lake. A small one, but still a lake. It needs a rope.’
‘A lake?’ said Samuel.
‘A real new trick!’ said Arkady. His enthusiasm made his words pile up against one another. ‘We’re going to be thieves!’
Samuel frowned.
‘No, I know what you’re thinking,’ said Arkady hurriedly, ‘but it’s stealing back what was already stolen. Good thieves!’
‘Necessary thieves,’ said Vita.
‘And it’s out in the countryside,’ said Arkady, ‘way out in nowhere, so we won’t get caught. Probably, anyway.’
Samuel did not look convinced. ‘Why, though? Why are you doing it?’
Vita looked up at the trapeze, which still swung back and forth above their heads.
‘Because nobody else is going to do it,’ she said.
‘That’s not actually a reason,’ said Samuel. ‘You could say that about almost anything.’
Vita bit her lip. ‘Mama says we have to be sensible. She wants to make my grandfather come back home to England with us, whether he wants to or not. And Grandpa goes blank if you try to ask him about it. His whole face is like a door slamming shut.’
Vita closed her eyes, to hide from the thought – and then opened them.
‘But if we just pack up and go home, Sorrotore will have won. He’ll win, just like men like him always win. So I don’t want to be sensible.’
She looked down at her left shoe, at the twist and arch of her foot, at the breakable thinness of her left leg. She thought of all the well-meaning adults, with their sit-down, take-care, not-you-dears. She shook her head, and straightened every bone in her body. ‘Just once, I don’t want to do what I’m told! I want to fight. I’m going to fight.’
Samuel looked at her for a long, thickly laden moment. ‘My father’s at home in Mashonaland, in Africa,’ he said. ‘He gave everything he had to send me out here, when I was a tiny kid, to tour with my uncle: to join the act. If I don’t, I’m letting down the whole family: cousins, aunts: everyone. But – when I was three, I taught myself to backflip. I loved the way it felt when I landed back up on my feet: like a magic trick. I can’t give it up.’ He stared at his hands, which were covered in chalk. ‘So – I can understand not wanting to do what you’re told.’
And then he smiled, and the smile rose up to his ears and his disconcerting beauty vanished in favour of glee: the glee of the usually careful turned reckless. ‘Exactly how wide is the wall?’
‘I don’t know. Quite wide, I think.’
‘And exactly how tall?’
Vita shook her head. ‘About fifteen feet. Maybe twenty. I don’t know.’
‘I need to know exactly. For the rope. Do you have a blueprint?’
‘A what?’ said Arkady. ‘I don’t know that word.’
‘It’s an architectural plan of a house,’ said Samuel.
‘I don’t have one,’ said Vita, ‘but I can find one.’ Her voice, she noted with relief, sounded far more confident than she felt.
‘If you find one,’ said Samuel, ‘then I’m in. I’ll join your heist.’ And he wiped his chalky palms on his black trousers and stuck out his hand.
Arkady clapped his hands above his head and whooped, but an unexpected surge of hot guilt rose up in Vita’s chest. The two boys stood, shoulder to shoulder, identical grins. They had never seen Sorrotore, nor seen the ice in him. She had not told them about the newspaper headline.
She pushed the guilt down, down where she could not feel it. She laid her hand in Samuel’s and shook it.
‘When do we go?’ asked Arkady. ‘Soon! Tomorrow!’
‘Soon,’ said Vita. ‘But not tomorrow.’
‘But why not tomorrow?’
‘There’s still a lot to do,’ said Vita. ‘Like Samuel says – every heist needs a blueprint.’