CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Arkady was struggling. Silk, of all of them, was   supposed to be indestructible. Arkady’s voice strained so hard to be cheerful it came out three octaves higher than usual. ‘She’ll be fine! I mean, she can pick any lock! So she’ll be fine, right?’

They had run, all three of them, once it was obvious it was useless to stay; they had left Silk in the hands of the law. They stopped outside Carnegie Hall. Pain and shame and breathlessness had made Vita’s face turn scarlet, and she rounded on him now. ‘How is she going to be fine? Don’t say stupid things just to make yourself feel better.’

‘Don’t call me stupid for hoping our friend is all right!’

‘Don’t fight.’ Samuel spoke quietly, but there was ferocity in his voice. ‘We don’t have time to fight. We don’t have any time at all. Vita only means Silk doesn’t have tools.’

‘Exactly! She’s wearing that stupid coat – she doesn’t even have a hairpin. She can’t pick a lock with her fingers.’

‘Fine.’ Arkady scowled at Vita. ‘We’ll get some tools to her. Simple!’

‘How are we going to do that? We don’t even know where she is! There must be dozens of police cells she could be in!’

‘I know where she is,’ said Samuel.

‘How?’

‘I saw the serial number on his badge. I know which police station he belongs to.’

‘How on earth do you know that?’

‘My uncle always said it pays for us to know the ways of the police: ever since I was a tiny kid. She’ll be in Brooklyn.’

‘Well, let’s go then!’ said Arkady. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘We have to have a plan,’ said Vita. Arkady stared at her, but she sat down on the kerb and began to spin her penknife around her fingers, her jaw set with angry concentration. ‘This isn’t the circus. This is serious. This is real.’

‘I know that.’ Arkady sat down next to her. His shoulders were hunched, and he scrubbed at his face with his sleeve. ‘I do take it seriously. I take her seriously.’

Vita glanced at him and saw with a jolt that his face looked ancient: haggard and old and weary. With gut-deep effort, she forced a small smile. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I know.’

The minutes passed. And slowly, very slowly, Arkady’s face began to transform, until it looked thirteen years old again.

‘Can I say something?’ he said.

Vita winced. ‘You don’t have to ask. I’m sorry, I—’

Arkady interrupted. ‘Listen, then – I’ve got a question.’

‘What?’

‘The tweezers in your penknife – are they shiny?’

A crow flew in through the front door of the police station the next morning as calmly as if it were coming in to report a missing package.

Arkady, who had carried the crow on a streetcar down to the Brooklyn Bridge, stroking and crooning to her all the way so she wouldn’t take flight, cast her in through the doorway. He whispered, ‘Good luck! Ydachi!’ and ducked out.

The bird alighted on the desk, and for a split second, nothing happened.

Then someone began to scream. ‘Get it out! Get it out, it’s unlucky!’

‘Don’t be stupid, that’s magpies!’

‘I don’t care, it’s filthy! They carry diseases!’

The policeman behind the desk took a great swipe at it, and the bird took off. She swiftly became affronted and confused. Crows, when affronted, are apt to dive-bomb the nearest living thing, and soon pandemonium reigned.

Silk sat on the bare bed of the barred cell she had spent the night in. She radiated despair. At the shrieks, she looked up, and saw the bird.

Her black feathers stirred a memory, and Silk’s eyes widened.

Silk approached the bars, a slow and steady presence in a room of screaming and flailing. And Silk, who remembered everything she saw, who memorised the faces on the street so she never robbed them twice, remembered the crow’s name.

‘Rimsky!’ she called, and the bird, harried now and panicking, swooped towards her, her beak still clamped around her prize. Silk stretched her arm out through the bars of her prison. The bird landed on it and dropped her cargo, nipping at her thumb before taking off again.

Silk winced. Bird affection, she thought, was a painful thing.

Eventually the panic died down, and Rimsky was caught in a tea towel and cast ignominiously into the street.

Nobody saw Silk slip something silver-grey into her stocking, and sit back, quiet and hunched and dejected, in the corner of her cell. She unplaited her hair, and let it fall, a protective curtain, over her eyes.

It was a good thing nobody saw her face. Because, try as she might to disguise it, Silk radiated hope. All that Friday afternoon and night, Silk radiated waiting, and hush, and count-down.

At last, as the clock struck three in the morning, the officer on duty laid his head down on his folded arms for an illicit nap. Silk slipped the tweezers out of her woollen stocking, twisted them four, five, six times in the lock, and crept on soundless feet towards the door.

A man in the cell next door, ex-army, ex-almost-everything now, with soot in his nails and a dog on a string, saw her go, but he only rose to stand, snapped to attention, and raised one hand in a salute he hadn’t used for many years. And Silk returned the salute, as she slipped out into the New York night.

*

That night the city was swept by a premature winter. An ice snap froze the water in the pipes. Sleet washed down the city, swept the detritus of the mud and old newspaper and furious cats out from murky alleyways into the main roads.

And through the hail and sleet, glaring defiantly at the weather, came a lone figure, its shoulders hunched against the cold, walking towards Carnegie Hall.

Up in Vita’s apartment, Samuel, Arkady and Vita sat in her bedroom, their eyes on the clock, waiting. Vita’s mother had blinked slightly at the sight of the two boys, but had agreed, rather than send them home in the dark, to let them spend the night in the sitting room.

‘It’s nice that you’ve made some friends,’ she had said to Vita. ‘Next time give me a little more warning.’

Vita was just about to give up hope when the window began to intrude on her consciousness. It didn’t open; it didn’t become any less dark outside – but the darkness seemed to be watching her. It made itself suddenly felt.

She crossed and looked out. On the street below stood a figure, her long blonde plait drenched to grey in the rain.

The figure grinned up at her.

‘I came to drop off your tweezers,’ called Silk.

Ten minutes later, all four children were sitting on Vita’s bed, and Silk was eating a sandwich made of everything sweet Vita could find – butter, peanut butter, honey, chocolate shavings, and a sliced banana. Vita had suggested adding ketchup, but Silk had refused.

‘So,’ said Silk, ‘tomorrow’s Saturday. Are we still on? We go tomorrow?’

‘I’m still in,’ said Samuel.

‘So am I,’ said Arkady. ‘Of course!’

They looked at Vita, their faces alight. They could have powered a factory, so brightly did they shine.

Vita looked at the red book in her hand. It felt far heavier than the paper it contained. She weighed the secret she had been carrying around in her chest since she had met Silk. She made a decision.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There’s something I’ve not told you …’

And she spread the book out in front of them, and began to explain, carefully, meticulously, the final part of the plan.