“I know what you mean,” Grammie said.
How could she know that?
But Grammie’s attention was still on the Miss Koala. “It’s amazing, sometimes, what rotters people can be,” she said. “It’s discouraging.”
Why was Grammie getting so worked up about this Captain and his dishonesty instead of being relieved that everybody was known to be safe? He suspected there was something else bothering her. He wondered suddenly if she had found out something more about his parents, or Andesia. Something bad. “Did you find out anything?” he asked.
He didn’t need to say what he was asking about. Grammie knew. “No.” She shook her head. “Nothing about them. Nothing new about the country, either, or General Balcor.” She sighed. “Some days, everything is pretty discouraging.”
Max thought then that he would distract her with a change of subject. “Aren’t you going to read the Mayor’s letter?” he asked.
“What’s it to you?” Grammie answered quickly.
Quickly, Max noticed, and also quite crossly.
In which Max and Pia work together, sort of
When Max rode off on his bicycle the next morning to deliver a message to the Bendiff mansion, he was the Solutioneer, in disguise. He had dressed himself in the shabby brown suit of an unsuccessful suitor in The Adorable Arabella and stuffed a pillow under the bright blue waistcoat. With a round pork-pie hat set square on his head, he became Inspector Doddle, the unflappable, unassuming detective from An Impossible Crime who, although he moved unnoticed along the edges of the action, discovered the guilty party and brought him to justice.
Of course Max enjoyed playing the various roles his solutioneering work required, wearing the various costumes, trying to think and sound like various people, even, once—although it wasn’t his most successful impersonation—a female. He enjoyed it and it was useful, too. He needed to be as unseen, unrecognizable, and most important, unknown in his work as in his life.
Later that day, Max wore a struggling university student’s floppy gray trousers and frayed cotton shirt while he waited for Pia to arrive at their usual meeting place. In the little shop, nobody paid any attention to him where he sat, alone by the window, cap on his knees. The customers were interested in ice cream or whatever pastries Gabrielle Glompf had been inspired to bake that morning.
At this hour of a warm afternoon, when schools were getting out, business was brisk. Max had treated himself to a lemon tart and a bowl of chocolate ice cream, savoring the tangy sweetness of lemon and the buttery sweetness of the pastry, alternating these with spoonfuls of the rich, smooth sweetness of chocolate. Beyond the window, the street was busy and the sidewalk crowded. Inside the small shop, shiny clean pots hung on a wall over the ovens. Shiny clean pans were stacked on the shelf over a long worktable. Shiny clean bowls were nested beside them and on top of them, while two pottery jugs on the shiny clean worktable held mixing spoons and wire whisks and spatulas. Gabrielle moved efficiently, serving ice cream in bowls and cones, putting pastries into boxes, taking payments, and making change. Max recognized the red hair of the man behind her, who was bent over a deep sink, washing bowls and plates, forks and spoons, cups and saucers. The man’s presence surprised Max, although, when he thought about it, he wasn’t surprised at all. The man was his mathematics tutor and tenant, Ari, who happened as well to be the next Baron Barthold. More significantly, the man was courting Gabrielle, trying to show her how much he had changed, trying to earn her trust so that he could once again win her heart.
Six weeks ago, Max had known none of this, neither the people nor the place. Sometimes it dumbfounded him how much everything in his life had changed, in a mere six weeks. What with one thing and another, one thing after another—
Pia Bendiff, whom he had also never seen or heard of six weeks ago, charged through the shop door. She wore the uniform of a Hilliard girl—boring blue cotton blouse, boring blue pleated skirt, and high boring blue socks—but she had tied a rebellious red ribbon at the end of her long white-blond braid.
She plunked herself down in the chair facing him and demanded, “What’s the case?” Then she popped up from her seat. “I’m going to get some ice cream. Wait here,” she told him, as if she was the Solutioneer who had called this meeting and he was only the part-time assistant, instead of the other way around.
Max grinned to himself, watching her square, sturdy shape. Her face matched her shape, being square in jaw and forehead. She had dark blue eyes and dark eyebrows, despite her hair being so fair, and her personality was as square and contradictory as her face. Pia Bendiff kept things hopping.
When she returned to the table, she carried a bowl holding scoops of dark chocolate and bright pink raspberry ice cream, topped with a triangular sail of cookie, and she was laughing. “I asked Ari what he was doing and he said”—she picked up her spoon, preparing to dip into her treat—“he said he was showing Gabrielle that he isn’t a useless slug. He’s washing dishes,” she told Max.
“What’s wrong with washing dishes?” asked Max, who had done his share of dishwashing.
“He’s a University student, for one thing, and he’s grown up, even older than you,” Pia told him, between bites. “And he’s the next Baron Barthold. He could hire somebody to wash Gabrielle’s dishes.”
“That wouldn’t be the same,” Max pointed out.
“That’s what I’m saying.” Having, as she felt, won that argument, Pia repeated her opening question. “What’s the case you want me for?” Her eyes shone with eagerness.
“Not a case—a job,” Max answered patiently. He had given up repeating that he was a Solutioneer, not a detective, but continued to insist that he had jobs, not cases. He told her about the boy’s letter. “This Simon’s got to go to Hilliard to have heard of me,” he said, and was about to continue when Pia interrupted.
“Let me see it.”
“Why would I bring somebody’s personal letter with me?”
“If you expect me to help you—” she began.
“Nobody is making you,” Max countered.
Pia went back to her ice cream, not giving in, but no longer actively arguing. So Max went on to tell her what the boy had written in his letter, about the missing mother and the wandering father. “But he didn’t know to sign his last name, or give a return address. He must be very young.”
“What do you expect me to do?” Pia asked, her attention on the ice cream in her bowl.
“Can you find out who he is? And where he lives?”
She shook her head. She pushed the bowl away. It was as if what he had said took away her appetite. All the eagerness left her face. “You know I can’t do that. I can’t find out things at school. You know that, you know nobody talks to me, they just want to call me names and … and … try to make me cry. Which,” she announced fiercely, “they can’t do. You should give me something else to do,” she said, angry now. “Like when we went to scare off Madame Olenka.”
“You could try,” Max suggested.
She shook her head again. “You were only there for the one midday recess. You don’t know what it’s like. If nobody likes you. I mean, really doesn’t like you and you have to go to school with them, every day.”
“But I do know,” Max said, and it was the truth.
Pia didn’t believe him. “You’re not the kind of person anybody would have disliked,” she told him, as if it had been years, instead of weeks, since he had sat alone in a classroom being ignored by the other students, or sat alone on a playground, with nothing to do but memorize lines. Pia thought he was years older than he was, possibly because he had been acting a grown-up when he first met her, or maybe just because he was tall for his age. Max was happy to let her continue thinking that.
“You’d be surprised,” he said, but didn’t explain. Instead he said, “Well, if you can’t, you can’t,” as if he had given up. “I’ll find another way, don’t worry.”
“You should at least give me a chance,” she com
plained.
He put a lot of doubt into his voice. “I don’t know …”
“It’s not fair if you don’t even let me try,” she told him. “I’m your assistant.”
“All right,” he agreed, with still more doubt, as if now he didn’t think she could do it.
“It might take me a couple of days,” she warned.
“All right,” he repeated, and then asked, “How’s the tutoring?”
Pia pulled her half-empty bowl back toward her and started eating again. “Slow,” she admitted. “Nance isn’t very smart and nobody ever sent her to any school, ever …”
“That’s why you’re helping her,” Max pointed out. He had arranged for this, and he wanted it to go well.
“We’re just at the beginning, with three-letter words,” Pia said, “and that Baroness? She isn’t exactly friendly, is she? But she said the cook should have lessons, too—but the cook is as simple-minded as Nance, so it’s no problem, it’s no extra work. But I haven’t made my mind up about that Baroness. Have you? Is she as bad as everyone says? It’s hard to believe she’s related to Ari, isn’t it? Like me and my mother, we’re—” She stood up abruptly. “I’ll meet you back here in two days,” she announced, “same time,” and almost ran out of the shop, with a banging of the door and a clanging of the shop bell.
As if she didn’t want someone to know where she’d been, or with whom, Max thought, watching her through the window. A large black automobile with a familiar gold B painted on its door was pulling up to the sidewalk and Pia entered it quickly. Max wondered if Pia could succeed with her assignment, and, if she couldn’t, how he might go about finding the information himself. Maybe Grammie would know?
Max didn’t need to consult Grammie, because when he and Pia met two days later, at the ice cream shop where Ari was, once again, washing dishes and spoons and pots and pans and cooking trays, the girl plopped herself down in the chair opposite Max with the expression worn by those who have successfully completed a task they think you thought was too difficult for them. A so there! expression, half smirk, half smile, and all self-satisfaction. Of course, being Pia, she didn’t simply tell him what she’d found out.
“My father says you should be paying me,” she said.
What could Max say to that? He’d thought he was doing her a favor, giving her a sort of job, but maybe he should pay her. He just nodded and said nothing. He was the Solutioneer and she was only the Solutioneer’s Sometime Assistant; he would make up his own mind in his own time about any payment. He waited. It was a rainy day and he had put on the stained oilcloth jacket worn by the signalman in Trouble on the Tracks, a man who knew his job and knew his worth and didn’t need anybody’s father telling him what he should or shouldn’t do.
Pia hesitated, then chattered on. “He says his restaurant will open in July. He’s found a chef he likes and a carpenter to put in the wood flooring, and my mother is helping him with the furnishings, and Gabrielle is definitely going to be his pastry chef, so after next month this shop won’t be offering pastries.” This was not good news, her voice said, but Max was going to have to take it like a man.
Max nodded, slow and thoughtful as any experienced signalman. If he were on the stage playing this role, he would pull out a pipe and load it with tobacco as he waited, for the midnight express to roar through or to hear whatever she had to tell him, whichever came first.
“I’m going to get myself some hot tea, and maybe something else, too,” Pia announced then, and burst up from the table. She had left her umbrella by the door, and her shoulders and skirt were dry although her shoes were rain-spattered.
A rainy, chilly afternoon did not make people want ice cream, so the shop was empty. Ari came out from behind the counter, to say hello to his landlord and pupil. He wore an apron tucked into the waist of his trousers and a smile on his handsome face. His red hair was stuck to his temples from the steam of hot dishwater. “How are you?” he asked, standing beside the table.
It wouldn’t do for the dishwasher, even if he was the next Baron Barthold, to sit down with a customer.
Max asked, “Has it been a slow day?”
Ari nodded. “Which is fine by me since it gives me more time to talk with her. I think she’s starting to come around. I think she’s starting to forgive me.” He looked over his shoulder to the round little mouse of a woman who was talking to Pia, writing down the girl’s order and laughing a little, with a look in her eyes that said that Pia was a person she positively enjoyed.
This was the way Gabrielle looked at everyone, and every look was sincere. Gabrielle was the kindest person Max had ever met, and the best pastry cook, too. “I don’t think she ever didn’t forgive you,” he said to Ari.
“Then, maybe, starting to be able to think she might marry me,” Ari said. He had not taken his eyes off the young woman, as if he feared that she would disappear from his sight and he’d have to spend another seven years in regret and searching. “However, there’s a huge heap of mixing bowls … On a rainy afternoon, people will want pastries for their desserts, and cookies, not ice cream, for their treats, and she’s been baking nonstop …” Still talking, he turned to take up his position at the sink, with a wave of his hand. As he passed by Pia, Ari stopped to say a word and she nodded, glancing over her shoulder at Max.
Out on the street, the rain continued to fall. Max looked at the heavy gray sky stretched above the buildings and the park opposite; even if you didn’t see raindrops falling, you would know what that sky was doing. It was flat, with no visible clouds, and it crowded down close over the rooftops of the New Town. Max wondered how a watercolorist might go about making a picture of a rainy sky in May. He hoped Joachim could show him the technique at his next lesson, asking himself as he studied the low clouds if it was a matter of brushstrokes or if it was how you prepared your paper.
His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of a crowd of school-age boys and girls, some with a parent in tow, some without, wanting cookies and turnovers. They formed into a chattering line and Pia returned to the table, carrying a plate and cup. “You can have half the chocolate cake,” she announced, seating herself across from him, “but I don’t want to share the almond croissant. What’s the Pythagorean theorem anyway? Because Ari”—she held a second fork out to Max—“says he expects you to know it by tomorrow. What happens tomorrow?”
Max answered things in order. First, “Thank you,” he said, taking the fork. Then, “It’s Euclid, he’s teaching me geometry,” and at last he could ask, “Did you find out anything about that little boy?”
“It wasn’t easy,” she answered. “Do you know how many Simons there are at Hilliard?”
Max just raised his eyebrows.
“Eleven,” Pia said. She took a big drink of her tea. She picked up her croissant, bit into it, and chewed slowly. She was enjoying herself. After a leisurely swallow, she told him, “Only three of them are young enough to write the kind of letter you described. Little kids don’t mind me,” she said then, with an expression he had never seen before on her face, part confusion, part amusement, and part surprise. “All I had to do was ask one of the little girls, out on the playground. It wasn’t a bit hard,” she admitted.
He nodded patiently.
“His name is Simon Melakrinos,” she said. “Don’t you want to write it down? I’ll spell it for you.”
Max took out the small notebook Inspector Doddle always carried, and the stubby pencil the inspector preferred.
“S, I,” she started.
“I can spell Simon.”
“How am I supposed to know that?” she asked, but at the expression on Max’s face, she hastily spelled the boy’s last name. “He lives on Tassiter Lane. It goes off The Lakeview, just inside the city limits. Do you know the road?”
“I can find it,” Max told her.
“It’s just past the firehouse, off to the right of course, since the lake is on the left. There are just houses on that road, no stores,” she
reported. “The houses aren’t as small as yours but they’re not big, and they all have gardens but they grow flowers, not food. Don’t you want to know how I learned all this?”
“You want to tell me,” he pointed out.
“What’s wrong with that? I was only lucky, I know, but the little girl I just happened to pick to ask is in his class. She lives on the same street and she says his mother did go away. In the winter, she thinks. She said the mother just stopped being there and none of the other parents said anything. Even if you asked, they wouldn’t tell you anything.”
“What about the father?” Max asked. “What about Mr. Melakrinos?”
“He’s like all the other fathers. He goes to work in the morning, he comes home for supper. He wears a suit and a hat, she told me, but you know little children. They never know anything about what fathers do.”
Max folded the notebook closed and put it back in his pocket, with the pencil. “Thank you,” he said again. “That’s just what I needed to know.”
The noise level in the little shop had gone up and up, in volume and in pitch, so they had to lean their heads close together to be able to talk.
“I did a good job,” she told him.
“You did,” he agreed, and she smiled, content. She picked up the last piece of croissant, and opened her mouth.
And then, out of nowhere it seemed, although actually it came out of the crowded confusion behind them, a large hand came to roost on Pia’s shoulder.
Her head whipped around, and Max stared up at the big man who had loomed into sight behind her. Max was alarmed, alert for trouble. The man was both tall and broad. He wore a bright yellow slicker, with a yellow fisherman’s rain hat on his square head, and he stared down at Max.
“You’re early,” Pia said crossly.
The man ignored her. Keeping one hand on Pia’s shoulder, and thus keeping Pia pinned in her seat, he leaned over to hold out the other. “So you’re the famous Mister Max,” he said, eyebrows as inky dark as Pia’s drawn together, not exactly in frowning suspicion but awfully close. His eyes, like Pia’s, were small, and a dark, sapphire blue.
Mister Max: The Book of Secrets: Mister Max 2 Page 2