The Good Thieves

by Katherine Rundell

  At the word ‘troupe’, Morgan Kawadza raised a hand. ‘No!’ he said. ‘For the three of you, yes, if you wish. I’ll help train your boy for you, Lazarenko, if he wants to know about horses – there might be talent there. But I know what you’re thinking. And my answer’s no: not Samuel. He is the heir to my act. And he’s my responsibility; I swore to take care of him. I will not expose him to the carelessness and cruelty of the world.’

  Samuel stood alone, his arms twisted and entwined. ‘I want to fly,’ he said. ‘It’s all I want. I know it won’t be easy and I don’t care, not even slightly.’

  ‘It’s impossible,’ said Kawadza. ‘So the boy can climb a wall and swing from a rope!’

  But Vita was looking, not at Kawadza, but at Samuel, standing in the middle of the ballroom. The same clarity that she had seen on the trapeze was coming over his face.

  ‘No,’ said Samuel.

  ‘No is not—’ said Kawadza.

  ‘OK! Fine! Then, yes,’ said Samuel. ‘Yes, Uncle, I know you want to keep me safe. But it’s not enough. And yes, I know it will be hard – harder than what’s fair, harder than for anyone else – maybe so hard I fail.’ And he untwisted his arms. ‘But I’m going to fly anyway.’

  And he took a run at the window, three storeys up.

  ‘Stop!’ shouted Kawadza.

  But Samuel didn’t stop. Samuel was not born to stop. His feet reached the window sill and he launched himself into the air. He dropped, pin-straight, and as he dropped he seized the flagpole that jutted out of the wall of Carnegie Hall. He spun around it like an Olympic gymnast, twice, three times. For one second he paused, his feet pointed to the sky. Then he let himself go again, twisted in the air, his arms crossed tight across his chest, and came to rest, right way up, on top of a parked car. He slid down to the pavement below.

  He saluted.

  Morgan Kawadza stared down at the New York City street – at the people bustling past each other, at the oblivious paperboy waving a newspaper, and at Samuel, standing shining and alone despite the stream of people, his head up to the sky.

  Vita looked harder at the paper boy. She could just see the headline: the words ‘BUSINESSMAN’ and ‘HUDSON’ and ‘INFERNO’.

  A tear ran down Kawadza’s cheeks. ‘He flies,’ he said. ‘A boy who flies.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The fire was investigated. Some things are impossible to brush under the carpet, and the story that soon spread, of a fire in a castle cellar and a gang of children with knives at their belts and wings on their feet, was one of them. Vita unpicked the signet ring from her skirt, and handed it to the investigators.

  Sorrotore was in the hospital when he was arrested. The fire had been extinguished before it could spread to the rest of the castle. The skin on Sorrotore’s scalp had suffered the worst of it, and his hair was almost entirely scorched off, leaving raw red skin behind.

  A murder investigation was opened. Sorrotore’s apartment was raided, and the paperwork discovered, along with a great deal of illegal bootleg liquor. Other fires connected with Sorrotore’s properties were revisited, and a chain of fraudulent insurance claims and demolitions under eighteen different listed companies were discovered.

  Dillinger was tracked down and arrested in a speakeasy. It was unclear whether he was sober enough to understand as he was read his rights, but, had anyone looked closely, they might have thought there was relief on his face.

  ‘Playing with fire,’ he said, and made a noise that may have been a laugh or may have been a choke.

  ‘So Hudson Castle is back in your father’s hands,’ said Mr Lazarenko to Vita’s mother. He had invited Vita and her mother to his dressing room in Carnegie Hall, ‘to talk business’. Business talk was clearly something Lazarenko thrived upon; there was a sheen to him as he beckoned them in. ‘Will you go and live there?’

  ‘In theory, we’d love to,’ said Julia. ‘But you can’t live in a theory. It’s crumbling. No, we’ll sell it. Apparently the ornamental lake is one of a very few of its kind, which makes it valuable. There are some developers interested.’

  ‘I want to live there,’ said Vita. ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Why not,’ said Lazarenko, ‘if you’d like to?’

  ‘Well, it’s falling down,’ said Julia. ‘Woodworm, dry rot, leaking roof.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And then, of course, my daughter set fire to the cellar.’

  Lazarenko nodded seriously. ‘There’s that, yes.’ But his eyes were beginning to shine with the light of an idea taking shape.

  ‘I am looking for somewhere to settle, you know,’ he said. ‘Somewhere for the winters. Arkady needs to be in one place, to work with his creatures. I’ve been moving him for too long. I’m looking for somewhere to train the young ones, scout for new talent: a school.’

  ‘I didn’t know that, no,’ said Julia.

  ‘I was thinking, perhaps somewhere upstate,’ said Lazarenko. ‘Somewhere on the Hudson. Somewhere with space for the children to run.’ He smiled at Vita. ‘But the place I have in mind would need work. And it would need someone to oversee that work – and to manage things, when I am away. Hypothetically, would you and Mr Welles be interested in such a job?’

  ‘But … you don’t know me,’ said Julia.

  ‘Vita has a formidable organisational mind. I assume, from what she says, it must be from you. How would you feel, hypothetically?’

  ‘Hypothetically?’ said Julia, and she took in a vast breath of air. ‘Hypothetically, I can imagine nothing more hypothetically wonderful.’

  ‘Good,’ said Lazarenko. ‘I shall write a non-hypothetical cheque.’

  There was a general agreement that the IMPERIUM tortoise did not need to be returned to its owner.

  And, in the midst of the confusion, Grandpa took Vita’s passport to the police station, and explained that the other tortoise it was holding as evidence belonged to his granddaughter. The proof of ownership was right there, spelled out in rubies on the tortoise’s back.

  With the greatest care, Arkady plucked the jewels off the two shells with Vita’s tweezers and tipped them into her hands. They weren’t, it turned out, nearly as valuable as they looked; like a great deal that had belonged to Sorrotore, they were largely show. But there was enough: enough to buy one small elephant, and to put it on a boat to a sanctuary in India, where nobody would trouble it with iron-pointed rods, and it would be left alone, among the deep green and the high skies it had been born to.

  It was spring when they set out from Carnegie Hall. They went on foot to the train station, and for once New York City stopped in its tracks. It turned and stared to watch them go. A waiter froze with his finger in his nose. A pair of young men put down their briefcases and gawped. A toddler no taller than a Labrador gave a shriek of joy and went running down the street after them.

  They went in their flying colours: Arkady in red. Cork walked at his heels, nipping at his hand if he paid too much attention to the two German Shepherds walking on his other side. A crow rode on each shoulder. Moscow came behind, unridden, bedecked in white ribbons, occasionally dipping her muzzle to Arkady’s ear.

  Silk came in her training clothes: a leotard, wrap cardigan and skirt. She refused to take them off, and they had to be prised from her for laundry days. Her hair was brushed out and freshly washed. It fell, the white-gold of faraway suns, shining, to her waist.

  Julia Marlowe walked with Morgan Kawadza. Both gave an arm to Grandpa.

  Samuel wore sky-blue trousers, a singlet, and black practice shoes. His wary expression had not gone – it never would, until the day he died (not world-famous as he deserved, but also not alone. The year after his death, his grandson danced at Carnegie Hall). But Samuel had the look, that day, of someone who knows what it is to fly. He did not travel on the pavement – it was a day to remember, and so to fix it in his memory, he spun from the top of one lamp post to another, slid across the roofs of cars: flew.

  Vita wore her r
ed silk boots, and her red skirt, and at her throat a necklace of green glass.

  They boarded the train at Grand Central Station, taking up an entire carriage. The horse caused a small uproar, but nothing insurmountable.

  When the train pulled into the tiny station – unfamiliar in the bright sunlight – the children looked, automatically, to Vita. But she drew back, and Grandpa stalked forwards, halting on his stick.

  ‘This way.’ They clambered into cabs and drove out along paved roads, Arkady riding alongside on Moscow, Cork and the German Shepherds trotting behind. They got out at the beginning of a dirt road and walked past briar roses cascading down into the dust, past birds calling and replying overhead.

  Vita grinned at Arkady, at Silk and Samuel, and left them, moving to take her grandfather’s arm and keep pace with him.

  ‘Rapscallion,’ he said, and his voice was very low. ‘What if it’s impossible?’

  ‘What if what is?’

  ‘What if I can’t go home, without her?’ he said. He looked up at the castle, across the lake. ‘She was my home. How can I return without her?’

  Vita had no words, for there were none. She only held his arm tighter.

  They climbed into boats, and crossed to the jetty, and walked towards the gate into the garden. Grandpa’s legs quivered, and he reached out for the gate to steady himself. He raised a foot, put it down again.

  Vita was suddenly terrified he would not be able to go in; that his legs or his heart had failed him. She made to step forwards – but he reached into his breast pocket, and from it he drew the picture.

  ‘You and me, girl,’ he said.

  And Lizzy raised an eyebrow back at him from the photograph.

  And he smiled, and stepped into the garden, blooming now in every colour, with red roses springing up the walls.

  They walked down the path towards the walled garden, Vita leading, her mother after, the circus following. They went in. The fountain was alive now, cascading water up among a sea of roses, and in front of it there was a plaque.

  Nobody spoke. Then Vita read it aloud.

  ‘Elizabeth Ailsa Welles. Beloved, beloved, beloved.’

  Grandfather stood, his head bowed. A tear dropped down his cheeks and wet the dry ground.

  Samuel moved first. Slowly, almost noiselessly, he began to turn backwards and backwards through the flowers, flipping at walking pace, his hands in the soil. Arkady followed him, and then Silk, a trio that had always spoken with their hands and their feet, dancing as if they had just that second invented bravery.

  Grandpa leaned on Vita’s shoulder, and used her strength to straighten his spine; and her left leg shook but she stood firm under the weight. He looked at the plaque as if memorising its every scratch and line. He turned to watch the children spinning through the grass, and then up at his home, and, last, down at his granddaughter, who stared up at him, her face ferocious with love.

  ‘What a thing you’ve done, Rapscallion!’ he said. He pushed her towards the dancers. ‘Go and join them.’

  He watched her go, leaping, limping, casting up the earth under her feet. He blinked, long and slow.

  His eyes, when he opened them, were those of a man who has wandered in a barren land; of one who has, against all odds, rediscovered something like abundance.

  ‘What a thing!’ he said. ‘What a miraculous, unthinkable, unsensible thing!’ And he thumped his stick on the summer earth, and started towards the house.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I always think, this next book will be easier, and I’m always impressively wrong: that it exists at all is down to the following people. I owe more to them than I can say.

  To Ellen Holgate, my editor at Bloomsbury, and Claire Wilson, my agent, I owe my greatest thanks. Both are endlessly sharp-eyed and sharp-minded, and wildly generous; they have been the two greatest strokes of luck in my professional life.

  To everyone at Bloomsbury, and in particular Fliss Stevens, for wrestling with the labyrinthine entity that this text became.

  To everyone at Simon & Schuster USA, for such discerning editing and for making Vita’s walks through New York geographically plausible.

  To my big brother, for being such an unfailingly kind reader, and for pointing out my near-clinical addiction to the Oxford comma. To my mother and father, for everything and for always.

  To the wonderful community of children’s writers in the UK, and especially Cat Doyle, Abi Elphinstone, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Ross Montgomery, Lauren St John, Piers Torday, Katherine Woodfine and Katie Webber.

  To my gang of young readers, who made superb suggestions and were far kinder about the book than I had any right to hope for.

  To Cerrie Burnell, who read the manuscript early: I am enormously indebted to her kindness. To Tlotlo Tsamaase and Marcus Ramtohul, who acted as perceptive and generous sensitivity readers.

  To Dmitri Levitin, for acting as my Russian authority; Max McGuinness, my New York specialist, and Jeremy Seysses, who ensured that the wine my villain drinks is of the best possible vintage.

  To the trapeze teachers at the Gorilla Circus Flying Trapeze School, who taught me to spin upside down by the knees.

  And to Charles Collier, who walked with me over a hundred miles of countryside, talking about stolen gems and unruly children, and who told me so much about the story that I did not know.

  Winner of the Costa Children’s Book Award 2017

  ‘Utterly splendid … Katherine Rundell is now unarguably in the first rank’

  Philip Pullman

  And another exciting adventure awaits!

  ‘The kind of novel that reminds you why books are worth reading and life is worth living’

  Lauren St John

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  This electronic edition published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CHILDREN’S BOOKS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Text copyright © Katherine Rundell, 2019

  Illustrations copyright © Matt Saunders, 2019

  Katherine Rundell and Matt Saunders have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author and Illustrator of this work

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  ISBN: 978-1-4088-5489-1 (HB)

  ISBN: 978-1-5266-0813-0 (TPB)

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