Judy picked him up and cradled him in her arm like an infant. He immediately climbed up to her shoulder, then slid down her back to the ground. He scurried over to Max’s dresser and disappeared beneath it.
“So, how did you do it?” Judy asked. “The thing at school with the toothpick. Did you have a string we couldn’t see or something?”
Max sighed on reflex. “A magician never tells her secret. It’s the Magician’s Code.”
Judy rolled her eyes and plopped down to reach her hand under the dresser.
Max grimaced at the sense of foreboding she’d just gotten. “He’s probably going to bite—”
“Ow!” Judy pulled her hand out and sucked on her thumb, where the tiny little indentations gave evidence that Houdini had, in fact, mistaken her hand for a free-range rabbit. He was certain that, one of these days, a rabbit would come to attack his beloved human and all of his practice would finally pay off.
“Yup, told you,” Max said.
Judy narrowed her eyes in determination and crouched down to locate the adorable attacker so she could squeeze him and force him to cuddle.
“Are you going to do any tricks at school tomorrow?” Natalie asked, giggling at the prospect of seeing Houdini pulled from under the dresser, clawing at the ground like a forlorn soul being dragged to hell.
“I don’t know,” Max said. “Probably.” She momentarily wondered if she should warn Judy that Houdini had already snuck around the room and was now about to attack her unattended ankles. She decided against it.
“What trick will you do?”
Before Max could answer, Houdini pounced on Judy’s Achilles tendon. Judy released a hasty scream and rolled from her belly-down position into a curled ball. Houdini, now not entirely certain that this wasn’t a rabbit, treated her heels to a flurry of nips and tugs before disappearing into a pile of clothes Max had left for him in the corner.
“Is he gone?” Judy asked over the wild and erratic laughter shared by both Natalie and Max.
“Temporarily,” Max finally forced through her uncontrollable chortling.
Judy, clearly not nearly as amused as the others in the room, rolled over to stand. When she did, Houdini flew from his laundry den to pose another attack on her bobby socks. Judy was ready for him this time, and her hand flew and smacked him on the head. He rolled across the floor, shook the daze from his brain, and scurried back under the dresser.
Max was no longer laughing. “Please don’t break my ferret,” she said.
“He was trying to hurt me,” Judy defended.
“He thought you were playing.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you made that obvious.”
They exchanged a tense glare that Max eventually won, and Judy fell onto the bed to stare up at the ceiling.
Natalie cleared her throat. “Anyway, as I was saying, what tricks are you going to do tomorrow?”
“Good magicians never tell the audience what they’re going to do before they do it,” Max flatly replied.
“Is that another of your dumb ‘Magician’s Code’ things?” Judy sneered. The air in the room had been irreversibly tainted. She couldn’t believe how quickly the adorable ferret had turned psychotic and these girls who were supposed to be her freinds didn’t care. There would be no more civility from Judy that day.
“No, it’s something Adelaide Herrmann always said.”
Judy sat up and looked at her as though she were speaking a language from the least-explored regions of Africa. “Who?”
“Madame Adelaide Herrmann. She and her husband, Professor Alexander Herrmann, were the greatest magicians who ever lived.”
Judy narrowed her eyes. “They sound German.”
“They were,” Max said. “I mean, sort of. Well, Alexander’s family came from Germany. Adelaide’s family was from Belgium, I think. But that doesn’t really matter, ’cause they eventually lived in New York.”
Judy stood and motioned for Natalie to follow. “I think we’re going to leave.”
“Okay,” Max said. “Why?”
“Because now I know why your ferret is crazy.” Judy bobbed her head as only those well versed in the art of disdaining can do. “It’s ’cause you practice Nazi magic.”
“Baloney,” Max yelled. “There’s no such thing.”
“It’s German, ain’t it?” Judy yelled back. She actually said “isn’t,” but Max’s brain filtered the “ain’t” in, as it better represented Judy’s tone. “That’s the same.”
Max shook her head. “All Germans aren’t Nazis, you cowboy idiot.”
Judy stepped toward her. “I’d rather be a cowboy idiot than a Nazi-loving Yankee snob.”
“Those insults don’t even go together,” Max growled.
Judy clenched her fists.
Houdini, now certain that the big-footed creature hovering over his human was a vile bunny, flew from under the dresser and latched on to Judy’s ankle.
Judy screeched and kicked her foot in the air as she bounced in a circle. It took four kicks, all of which elicited barely repressed snickers from Max and Natalie, before Houdini flew off onto Max’s bed. When Judy put her foot back on the floor, it was only to launch herself on the path out of the room and back home, safe from Nazi magic and demon-possessed ferrets.
Natalie watched her leave, seemed to debate her loyalties, and then followed. “I’m sorry,” she called out as she hurried down the hallway.
Max sighed and checked Houdini for internal injuries. He licked her nose, doing the same. After they were both quite certain the other was still in fine health and only slightly distressed from those odd girls/bunnies, they collapsed on the bed and rested for the entirety of a ferret’s attention span. Hence, when her mother came in a minute later to check on Max, Houdini was already off playing with his human’s homework.
“Is everything okay in here?” Mrs. Larousse said.
Max was practicing rolling a silver dollar across her fingers. “Right as rain. I made friends today.”
Her mother sat on the bed next to her. “Those girls that just left? The ones who called you a Nazi-lover?”
Max nodded. “Judy and Natalie. You missed Margaret, she did her escape routine down the block.”
“I don’t know if I’d classify them as friends.”
Max smirked. “Things have changed since you were my age, Mom. We’re in another world war. Civility is old-fashioned nowadays.”
Mrs. Larousse pulled Max into a hug that knocked the silver dollar off her knuckles. Max didn’t mind. She needed a little Motherly Magic.
“There’s always tomorrow, sweetie.”
Max blinked away a pesky tear that threatened to reveal the feelings behind the curtain. She sensed it was time for some conversational smoke to hide her emotional mirrors. “At least you made a friend, right?”
“Mrs. Morris?” Mrs. Larousse stifled a laugh. “Oh, no. She’s our neighbor and the head of the Ladies Auxiliary. She was ‘welcoming us to the neighborhood’ and checking to see if I’d be attending their next meeting. In her own words, ‘If men like my son can work morning-to-night patching up the wounded soldiers from this horrible war, the least we can do is bake some pies and pack some blankets.’”
“I don’t think that’s actually the least you can do. I can think of ten things that are less involved than that.”
Mrs. Larousse tousled Max’s hair. “Still, we must keep the neighbors happy. There’s not enough of them to pick and choose, like back home—I mean, back in Brooklyn. Besides, I am the major’s wife, and that apparently comes with certain expectations. So there’s going to be a lot of pie baking in this house very soon. Are you up for peeling apples?”
Max had actually earned the moniker THE AMAZING MAX from her skills with a peeler long before she discovered a magic wand. Still, after she’d moved on to illusions, she’d tried to let her apple-skinning skills flounder on the wayside. But her mother was adamant that Maxine not forget her roots. And persuasion was the
most powerful of the Motherly Magics. Max nodded against her will.
“Good. Then, since you still need to practice piano today, we’ll start tomorrow,” Mrs. Larousse said. “It’ll give you something to focus on until those girls forget about your Nazi sympathizing.” She winked at Max.
Max smiled. “I’m pretty sure Judy had pretzels with her lunch today. She’s more of a Nazi sympathizer than I am.”
Mrs. Larousse covered her mouth in mock horror. “She was eating Hitler Twists? Oh sweet Mary.” She stood to go back to the living room.
“Hey,” Max called her back, suddenly realizing what had been slipped into the conversation covertly. “When did we decide I was going to practice piano today?”
“We didn’t,” her mother said with a smile. “Now, get your things.”
Motherly Magic was terribly, terribly dangerous in evil hands.
Chapter Six
There were few tasks Max found as tedious and superfluous as practicing the piano. She was not talented at it, and the very fact that she could admit her lack of a gift was proof of just how bad she truly was at playing. Her fingers were deft and skilled at slight-of-hand and pickpocketing, but when set to the piano keys, they rivaled only an elephant’s in lack of grace and rhythm.
This would have been worrisome but for the fact that Max wasn’t particularly fond of music, either—at least not enough to view performance as anything approaching art or entertainment. They had a record player for those rare occasions when she felt particularly deprived, and other than that, she was content to make do with what she heard at the theater in Looney Tunes shorts. If she wanted a live concerto, she’d buy a player piano someday. Technology had made musicians obsolete, by her assessment.
Unfortunately, her mother did not share the same opinion. She believed it was necessary, for the sake of developing a civilized intellect, that every young person learn to play an instrument, no matter what dire effects such knowledge would have on the general reputation of music in the future. Hence, Max had taken piano lessons since she was five. And she had hated every second of it.
When her mother sold their piano back in Brooklyn, Max had hoped she would finally find a reprieve from all the horrible piano practicing she was forced to do weekly. Sadly, this was not the case. Instead, Max was forced to sit in the rec hall on base and run through her scales and arpeggios on the upright piano that was used for everything from Sunday hymns to vaudevillian comic opera. All while GIs and the occasional prisoner sauntered through on their way to an assignment. And every single one of them paused to listen for at least three measures, which was humiliating enough. Then they realized there was no skill to be found in her playing and walked away, unanimously chuckling at her mistakes.
She made a mental note that the single most important trick she still had yet to learn was how to make herself disappear. Without a proper escape plan, she had to find hope somewhere else. At least she only had to endure this pain for thirty minutes, and surely she was almost done. She turned to look at the clock.
No, she’d only been practicing for five.
She crossed her arms and plopped them down on the keys. It was the most expressive she’d ever been on the instrument.
“Wow, Squirt, you’re a magician and a musician?” the almost-giggling voice of Gil piped up from behind her, accompanied by an uninvited rib poke.
“If failing miserably at something is the same as being good at it, then yeah, I am,” she said as she sat up straight to ward off any further poking. “I’m also really good at making friends, and I’m the perfect specimen of high fashion, by those standards.” She felt slightly obligated to be civil since he’d helped her out of the Nazi shadows the other night.
He pushed her along the bench and sat next to her. “Don’t be bashful. Play me something.”
She sighed. “I’ve taken piano lessons for six years and couldn’t play you anything even if I wanted to.”
“You’re lying,” he said. “Surely you know something. ‘Chopsticks’? ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’?”
“Honestly, absolutely honestly, I’m terrible at this thing.”
“Yeah, me too,” he said. He put his fingers on the keys and, with grace and skill that would bring a music lover to tears, proceeded to run through the first few measures of Chopin’s “Nocturne in E-flat Major.” Even her music-indifferent ears could tell he was far from an amateur. “See what I mean?” he said when he was done. “Terrible.”
“I ought to turn you into a toad,” she said. “Now you’ve made the rest of my practice time even worse.”
He patted her on the head. “Just giving you incentive to pay attention to your piano teacher a little better.”
“Considering she’s all the way back in Brooklyn, there’s only so much I can do.”
He feigned a heart attack. “No, no, no, this cannot be. Now you’ll never realize your full potential.”
She was poised to fire a snarky comeback when he grabbed her hands and moved them onto the keys. Suddenly she forgot every witty phrase she’d ever devised.
“I shall be your teacher,” he said with bravado. “You will not be left in the wilderness of music without a guide.”
As he began to count and move her fingers through the scales better than she’d ever seen her fingers move on their own, she couldn’t fight off this single, embarrassing thought: I never noticed how good-looking this obnoxious boy is. She took a second to imagine him as her beautiful assistant and then allowed herself to enjoy these fleeting moments of pedagogy.
Suddenly Gil stopped playing. He stood up. “Dang it.”
“What?”
“A gosh darn Kraut has been watching us through the window.”
She looked in the direction he was glaring, but the view was empty of any peeping eyes. That did not keep Gil from running out the door, however. Somehow she had a feeling that Major Larousse had given the guards a lecture similar to the “no fraternizing with the Nazis” one he’d driven into her brain. Except in place of the word “Nazis,” he’d said “my daughter.” Which meant the Nazi from the window had just acquired powerful negotiation material from Gil’s transgression.
Such is life. I may never find an assistant.
She couldn’t bring herself to resume the scales on her own, particularly now that she’d experienced what it was like to actually play them well. Instead, she turned on the bench and examined the stage behind her. She imagined how she would set it up if she was performing a show. Where she’d put her table, and her curtain, and the not-yet-built boxes and apparatuses that made for a perfect presentation.
She could picture it vividly. The crowd in the chairs. The heat from the spotlight. She could almost feel the silk cape on her shoulders and the stiff collar on her neck.
And the applause. She could hear the roar of the applause echoing around the room. A standing ovation for THE AMAZING MAX.
Her heart raced at the thought.
The door to the rec hall banged open, and she jumped out of her daydream.
A man came in, breathing heavily, with perspiration stains growing on his gray jumpsuit. He sat down in a chair and struggled to catch his breath. He looked at her from across the room for a moment, then looked away. His blue eyes, even in that brief glance, seemed to ask the same question she had in her head: Why do we keep running in to each other?
Max breathed another magical curse at herself to calm down and then walked over to him.
“Were you the one watching us through the window?” she asked.
He looked up at her, then dropped his gaze to the floor. “Apologies, fräulein,” he said, exactly as he had in the hallway.
“Apology not accepted,” she said. She leaned over to make eye contact with him. “Why were you watching us? Are you trying to get Gil in trouble?”
He raised an eyebrow and hid a slight grin in his mustache. “I wouldn’t dream of it. I am merely a lover of music.”
Now she hid a grin. “Then listening to me
is a bad idea.”
The door banged open again and the breathless form of Gil dashed in. He didn’t waste a moment before he grabbed the prisoner by the jumpsuit and pulled him up to stand.
“What’s going on, Felix?” Gil said, his mouth an inch from the man’s nose. “Why are you spying on me?”
Felix dropped his head and stared at Gil’s shoes. “Apologies. I meant no harm.”
Gil glared at him, then shoved him so hard that he nearly tripped. Gil grabbed Felix’s jumpsuit again and pulled him close. He spoke into Felix’s ear. “You might have people fooled around here, but you don’t fool me. I know you’re nothing but a weasel. I heard what you did to those Austrian prisoners from before. And I’m not afraid to dig up enough evidence to make things worse for you.”
Felix nodded. “Of course. Apologies.”
Gil turned him and pushed him toward the door. “Now get out of here so this little girl can practice in peace.”
Felix moved toward the doorway. He stopped at the exit and turned to look at Max. “Madame Herrmann would be happy that you are learning her ways. Just remember, Anfangen ist leicht, beharren eine Kunst.”
Gil rushed forward and pushed Felix out the door. Felix nodded and disappeared outside.
Gil turned back to Max. “I’m real sorry about that. I don’t know what Nazi curse he just tried to put on you, but you’re a good, God-fearing girl, so you don’t have to worry.”
She thanked him for his concern and went back to the piano.
She wished he had cursed her. But, thanks to Grandma Schauder, she knew he had done the opposite. What he’d said was, “To begin is easy. To persist is art.”
And the fact that a Nazi was trying to encourage her in the art of magic was perhaps the most discouraging thing she’d ever heard in her life.
Chapter Seven
“If not for school, kids would have no idea what soldiers go through in the war.”
—Max’s Diary, Friday, March 10, 1944
It was only her second day in school, but Max already felt as weathered and beaten as Major Larousse had looked when he’d first arrived back in the states from Casablanca. But there would be no Purple Heart awaiting her at her desk. Instead, when she sat in her seat, she discovered that an open pint of milk had been sitting there first.
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