‘You knock,’ she said in a quick, sharp voice, and he realized that she was frightened of knocking on the door. But he was frightened as well.
‘What’s your name?’ he said.
She glanced at the door as though not wanting to be heard, not wanting to be part of this, whatever it was.
‘Please?’ he said.
She looked at him uncertainly, and he could see the wavering doubt in her face.
‘Katta,’ she said, and pointed to the door.
He knocked, so timidly that his hand barely made a sound against the wood. He looked at Katta. She nodded, signing to him to knock again. He did, and this time the door opened.
5
Marguerite
Katta watched the cold, pale-faced boy go into the room and the door close behind him. It did not seem right. The tall man with the moon face and the silver-topped cane had scared her. The boy was nothing to do with him. She knew that as clearly as if she had been told it. But there he was, and there she was bringing him up the stairs and leading him to the room.
You know that some things are wrong even without breathing. It’s wrong to tell a lie, but everyone does – sometimes. It’s wrong to take a thing that isn’t yours, or to hurt someone for the fun of doing it. But there are other things too, even bigger. Things that are so wrong that just the thought of them makes you shrink up inside and take a deep breath. That’s how Katta felt as she watched the door close. Instinctively she almost reached out to catch hold of Mathias’s coat to stop him going through, but she didn’t, and then it was too late. The door had shut.
She took a step forward and very carefully put her ear to the wood. She could hear the man’s voice, but she couldn’t make out what it said. Someone began bawling for her from far downstairs. She tried hard to ignore them, to listen to what was happening in the room. But the downstairs voice grew more insistent – angry. She stepped back from the door, not knowing what to do. Then she took her skirt in her hands and ran down the corridor. But even so, she had to stop, just once, and look back. She couldn’t help thinking of the pale boy and the expression on his face. But she was being shouted for, and there was nothing she could do about it anyway.
Inside the room there was a large bed with heavy, dark curtains about it. There was a chest, a wardrobe and a long table. The morning light fell through the small leaded panes of glass in the window and onto the table. All Gustav’s things had been spread out on it. Dr Leiter sat at the table. He had taken off his coat and, with a bowl of water before him and a cutthroat razor in his hand, he was shaving. There were the remains of his breakfast upon a plate.
Mathias took all this in with one quick glance, then the door shut behind him and he turned to see who had closed it. Just for an instant he thought it was a child like him, or like the girl who had shown him to the room. But that impression lasted for only the most fleeting of moments because it was not a child at all. It was a man. He was not much taller than Mathias, heavy set, squashed like a tight barrel. He wore a thick double-breasted overcoat that was fastened high under his chin. His hair was like dirty wire. It hung over the edge of the collar. Despite himself, Mathias gasped. The small man’s face was misshapen, as though it had been quarter twisted when he was made. He looked back at Mathias, cocked his head mockingly to one side and smiled. It was a smile full of malice.
‘Come in, boy,’ said Leiter.
Mathias stepped forward. Behind him the small, barrel-chested man leaned his back against the door, then, in the same instant, quick as a cat, he turned and cocked his head as though he had heard something outside. Carefully he put his ear to the door. What he had heard was the very moment when Katta had put her head to the other side. She hadn’t made a sound – I am afraid to say that she was very good at listening at doors. People who work in inns very often are. But for all her silence, that small man had heard her. Slowly he began to reach up for the door latch, but then a voice called from downstairs, then called again, and there was a sound of running footsteps receding down the corridor. They stopped once, but then went on again. Then there was no noise.
Leiter had seen it all. ‘Has our little listener gone?’ he said quietly.
The small man nodded and leaned his back against the door again.
Mathias did not like the idea of him standing there – as much a barrier to someone coming in as to him getting out. It gave him an uncomfortable feeling down the back of his neck. It was the same feeling as the night before, when he had realized that there was something following him in the dark.
‘Are these all your grandfather’s things?’ asked Leiter. ‘Come,’ he said, beckoning to him. ‘Take a good look at them.’
Mathias stepped slowly forward, not sure what it was he was supposed to say.
They were all there. The hollow spheres that Gustav had made glow and float, before sending them out over the heads of the crowd. All his tricks and illusions. His clothes. It all looked lifeless and empty without him. Every single thing on the table had been pulled apart or turned inside out.
‘There is nothing missing?’ asked Leiter.
‘No,’ said Mathias.
‘Are you sure? Look again,’ Leiter said.
Mathias shook his head. ‘It’s all there,’ he said.
Leiter shaved the last of the soap from his face. Mathias could hear the hard bristles against the edge of the razor. Then Leiter patted his skin dry with a towel. Mathias stood waiting with his hands in his pockets, the small roll of paper held tightly in one fist. He had no doubt about it at all: this was what Leiter was looking for. He felt certain too that, if he once let that show upon his face, Leiter would see it. He tried hard to think of nothing at all.
‘Your grandfather,’ said Leiter. ‘Did he ever give you anything to look after for him. Or tell you something very special or secret that you had to remember?’
‘No,’ said Mathias.
‘No little keepsake or letter?’
Mathias shook his head dumbly.
‘Perhaps we should just see,’ said Leiter.
He reached down to the floor beside him and lifted a small, battered, green leather box onto the table. It was not very big, like a shoe box, about a foot high. He took a key from his pocket and opened it. The front folded out in two hinged doors. Inside, snug in the rich blue velvet lining, was a doll. She wore a fine court dress with the smallest flowers and birds woven into it.
‘This is Marguerite,’ said Leiter, carefully lifting the doll onto the table.
Mathias found himself leaning forward. The doll was quite perfect, like a very small, living person but with her eyes shut, as though fast asleep. He had never seen a toy like it before.
‘Marguerite always travels with me,’ said Leiter. ‘I find her so helpful if people try to lie to me. You see, she can do something wholly remarkable.’ He looked steadily at Mathias with his hard dark eyes. ‘She can tell the difference between the truth and a lie. It is extraordinary. But she is never wrong. I will show you.’
Leiter took from the box two small cards, a blue one and a red one. He laid them on the tabletop in front of the doll, then, with his fingernail, tapped on the table in front of her. For a moment she did not move, then, to Mathias’s astonishment, as though she had been deep in other thoughts, she shook her head daintily and looked up at Leiter.
‘Marguerite,’ he said, and the little doll gave a curtsey and looked intently at him with her hands folded across her lap.
‘This boy is called Ludovic.’ He pointed to Mathias and the doll turned her head to look. Then she bent forward and very lightly laid her hand on the red card. Her face showed no expression as she did so.
‘Ah,’ said Leiter. ‘Marguerite knows that is not true. Tell her your real name, boy.’
‘Mathias.’
Marguerite bent forward and this time touched the blue card.
‘You see,’ said Leiter. ‘Marguerite can hear what is true. The two things must sound very different to her, and she can tell. It
matters not how you try to say it. She can always tell.’
He looked at Mathias and suddenly Mathias understood what was about to happen. Leiter was going to ask him the questions again, only this time the doll would hear too.
‘Did Gustav ever tell you a secret?’ he said.
Mathias hesitated. ‘No,’ he said.
He watched wide-eyed as Marguerite bent forward, but unhesitatingly she touched the blue card. As she did so, Mathias realized that she was right. Gustav had never told him the secret. He had only ever said that he knew one and that was something quite different. Mathias hadn’t told a lie.
Leiter sat back in his chair and thought for a moment. ‘Then did he give you anything to look after for him?’ he said.
This is going to be easy, thought Mathias. Because he didn’t give the paper to me.
‘No,’ he said, this time more confidently.
Again Marguerite touched the blue card.
‘Did you ever hear or see him tell anyone anything secret?’
Again when Mathias answered, the doll touched the blue card. How did she do it? he thought. But it didn’t matter because Leiter couldn’t ask him anything else, or so it seemed to Mathias.
But he was wrong.
Leiter had been about to put the doll back into its box when it seemed that, almost as an afterthought, he said, ‘Have you ever taken anything that belonged to your grandfather?’
Mathias felt the blood drain from his face. His mouth went suddenly dry. ‘What like?’ he said, but his voice was unsteady.
Leiter heard it and looked up at him with dangerous attention. ‘Just answer the question,’ he said slowly.
Mathias swallowed. ‘No,’ he said.
The word came out as little more than a whisper, but it was loud enough for Marguerite to hear. She bent slowly forward and touched the red card.
‘Ahh,’ said Leiter in a voice like honey. ‘A liar and a thief. Tut tut. I wonder what it was you took. Do you still have it, boy?’
Mathias could feel the hard fold of paper in his fist. ‘No,’ he said.
Marguerite bent down and touched the red card.
‘Well,’ breathed Leiter. ‘You had better show it to me.’
Mathias looked from Leiter to the door as though he might try to run, but the small man stood in his way. ‘But the doll’s wrong,’ he stammered.
Leiter shook his head. ‘Marguerite is never wrong,’ he said.
Seemingly unmoved, the little doll folded her hands neatly across her lap. Then she parted her pretty lips and smiled, but all her teeth were pointed, like a row of small, sharp needles.
‘You had better give it to me,’ said Leiter, and he held out his hand, ‘or Valter will have to take it from you, and you must believe me when I tell you that you really would not want him to do that.’
Mathias looked at the small man. He had already guessed who it had to be. Valter’s eyes had taken on a cold, unfocused glaze. It was the expression you would see on an executioner’s face if you looked at it at the very moment he let the trapdoor drop.
‘Give it to me,’ said Dr Leiter.
Katta knew whose voice it was – it was the cook’s. The kitchen was at the back of the inn. It had low dark ceilings from which hens and geese, still in their feathers, hung on hooks in the rafters, ready for the pot. Even this early in the day the place was full of steam and smoke, thick with the smell of cut vegetables and roasting meat. The cook should have been a large, smiling, fat woman with red forearms like hams, and cheeks like apples, but she wasn’t. She was a slattern who spat on the fruit to clean it. Katta had seen her lift the meat from plates already on their way to table and, just for the spite of it, lick it and put it back, laughing. Katta hated her. Once she had made Katta, without a cloth for her hand, lift a full pot that had been standing above the fire, just because Katta had been too slow pulling the feathers from a goose. She still had the marks of the burn on her fingers.
A tray of breakfast had been made ready to carry. On it was a pot of scalding coffee, sliced meats, butter and bread.
‘Take it upstairs,’ said the cook, wiping her hands upon her dirty apron. ‘The old man, at the end above the arch.’
Katta had done as she was told. She carried the tray back up the stairs, but when she came to the top, she stopped. One way led to the old man’s room – she knew which one the cook had meant: he’d been there for three days already and always had his breakfast this way; the other led back to the room where she had left the boy. Not entirely certain in her own mind why, she turned and went that way instead. It was some unthought thing, to do with wanting to be sure that he was safe. Bad things can happen in closed rooms – she had learned that to her cost. But this wasn’t a conscious thought at all. It was just something she found she was doing. She even knew what she was going to say – that she had brought the breakfast to the wrong room. She would see that the boy was all right, and she would come away.
But it didn’t happen like that. What happened was this.
She knocked on the door and pushed it open with the tray, all in one practised movement. The tall, moon-faced man was standing in his black silk waistcoat and white shirt sleeves with his back to her. The short coachman – she had seen him only once – had the boy gripped by the neck and was shaking him like a rat out of the open window. The boy was kicking and gasping for breath. His face was blue.
All in the same moment that she took the sight in, the man heard the sound of the door opening behind him and spun round. Katta screamed and dropped the tray with a crash. The coachman turned his face towards her and, quite deliberately, opened his hand. The boy made one wild grab at the window frame, missed it, and dropped from sight like a stone.
6
The Pile of Barrels
Mathias felt quiet and strangely warm, as though he were wrapped in the blankets of a deep, soft feather bed. He could feel the weight of them pressing down upon his chest, holding him so that he couldn’t move at all. Dimly he understood that something had happened to him, but he didn’t know what. Didn’t know, until it started to hurt. Then he opened his eyes and the world was suddenly cold and sharp and hard – and he couldn’t breathe at all. He was lying flat on his back on the frosted ground, looking up at the blue morning sky and an open window high above him. He saw a head lean out, then disappear back inside. In that instant, like dropped picture cards, he remembered everything.
Dr Leiter. The doll. The dwarf.
He knew he had to get up and run, but he couldn’t move. Every last atom of breath had slammed from him as he hit the ground. Now his lungs were crying out for air, but his chest simply would not work. All he could manage was small, teaspoon sips of breath. He pulled himself onto his side and began to crawl. He could feel bone grating on bone in his chest and knew that something there had broken. But crawling was too slow. He knew he had to get up and run. He lifted himself onto his knees, and cried out in pain as the ends of his snapped ribs ground one against another. Then, bent double and stumbling, he tried to find somewhere to hide. If they caught him, it was very simple – they were going to kill him.
Giddy with pain, he looked around at the swimming world and tried to make sense of it. He had been dropped from a window at the back of the inn. It was a wonder the fall hadn’t killed him outright. It was only the filth and dirty straw on the ground that had saved him. There was an old barn, its door hanging open. He knew it would be the first place they looked. Behind it though was rough ground and then the edge of the forest. He could see the deep cover of trees and bracken. If he could only reach the trees. He tried to straighten up and run but his chest hurt too much. He could hear noises from the inn – people shouting. He wrapped his arms around himself and, squeezing his chest as tightly as he dared, stumbled towards the trees.
He had nearly passed the open door of the old barn when a hand reached out from it, caught hold of his coat and snatched him in. Blindly he lashed out, felt his fist in a face, but whoever it was pulled him
down and he hadn’t the strength to stop them. He cried out, and a hand went tight over his mouth to silence him. He bit it as hard as he could, heard the person whimper, but the hand pressed tighter still.
‘Sssh!’
In the half-light a face pressed close to his.
‘Sssh!’ the voice said again.
Then he saw who it was. It was the girl, Katta.
When Katta dropped the tray, Leiter and Valter had both stared at her for a moment. Then Leiter spun on his heels and leaped for the door, Valter close behind him.
‘Thief!’ Leiter shouted, and they were out of the room and down the hall, Leiter still shouting at the top of his voice. ‘Thief! Stop him!’
But Katta knew that wasn’t what she’d seen happening.
She took one quick look from the open window – it was her head that Mathias had seen: the boy was lying motionless on the ground and she thought that he must be dead. But then he moved. She didn’t stop to think. The two men had gone the wrong way if they were going to get behind the inn before she did. She knew a much quicker way than that. She ran from the room, along the gallery and down the back stairs that led straight to the stable yard. Holding her skirts up, she tore across the yard and through a gap little wider than she was. As she squeezed through the other end, she could see the boy on his feet, stumbling towards the trees. She felt a wave of relief that he could stand. But she could hear more voices now. They were coming. He had no chance at all of reaching the wood. But if she could get to the old barn before him …
Still not thinking why she was doing it, she ran back the way she’d come, ducked through a hole in the barn wall and, pushing her way in the dark past the piled rubbish of barrels and timber, reached the doorway only seconds before Mathias did. There was just enough time to snatch hold of him and pull him down into the shadows. She barely felt him hit her or bite her hand.
Toymaker, The Page 4