When he had counted the right number, he came to a landing with two doors opening from it. He listened at the first. He could hear the sound of a man and a woman talking inside. Then the woman laughed. He moved across the landing and put his ear to the other door and there was silence. As he touched the door, it moved. It hadn’t been properly shut. He pushed it with one finger and it swung slowly open. The room inside was in complete darkness. It smelled stale and damp.
‘One step, Mr Liar,’ said a voice from the dark, ‘and I’ll blow your brains out.’
Koenig didn’t move. He couldn’t work out where the old man was – whether he was near enough for him to reach before he had time to pull the trigger – so he stood quite still.
‘I want to speak with you, Jacob,’ he said.
‘You can say what you like from where you are,’ came the answer.
He had where the man was now. He was in the furthest corner of the room. It was too far to reach.
‘The boy really believes that Meiserlann was his grandfather,’ said Koenig.
‘Liar.’
‘I did not say it was true. I said it is what he believes. He knew him by another name – Gustav.’
There was a long silence.
‘Are you still there, Jacob?’ said Koenig.
‘Go on,’ said the old man.
‘Meiserlann died. Sewn into his coat was a piece of paper – half a piece of paper. The boy found it. People have tried to kill him to get it. I want to know why.’
There was another long silence, then the sound of movement and a flint being struck on a tinderbox. A flame flared. Jacob had lit a lamp.
‘Come in, Mr Liar,’ he said.
The room was squalid and small. There was a filthy bed, and an unlit stove. Jacob, wrapped in his coat, sat in a chair with a pistol cradled awkwardly between his thumbless hands.
‘You live alone here?’ said Koenig.
The old man looked around at the dirty room. ‘You call this living?’ he said.
Koenig shook his head. ‘No.’
Jacob lifted the pistol a little so that it pointed at Koenig’s heart. ‘There was a fat man,’ he said. ‘He came to the theatre just to watch Meiserlann. He sat in the very best box. He would buy Meiserlann meals and give him presents. He never knew how Meiserlann laughed about him behind his back – at his little handkerchief and his perfumed shirts. He was Meiserlann’s very own private joke. You know what his name was?’
‘No,’ said Koenig.
‘Gustav. How did you come by that name, Mr Liar?’
Slowly Koenig held his two hands up, palms out to show Jacob that he had nothing in them. Then, one hand still held like that, he reached slowly into his coat with the other and drew out his flat leather wallet. He opened it and held up the piece of paper for Jacob to see.
‘What I want to know is why this is worth so much, Jacob.’
‘It is worth nothing, Mr Liar,’ said the old man, and then he smiled, a crooked, clever smile. ‘Unless you know where the other piece is.’
‘How much would it be worth then?’
Jacob shrugged. ‘It might just be enough to save your life,’ he said. He shifted his grip on the pistol. ‘Meiserlann said he would come back. I believed him. I was more afraid of losing him than I was of losing my thumbs. So I said nothing, even when they cut them off. Now you tell me he is dead. Who are you to know, Mr Liar?’
‘I found the boy.’
‘Then let him tell me himself,’ said Jacob. ‘Because I don’t believe you.’
Koenig slipped the piece of paper back into his wallet. ‘Where shall I bring him?’ he said.
‘Here,’ said Jacob. ‘Bring him here. Then we shall see.’
Anna-Maria and Lutsmann sat staring at Mathias. It was too good to be true, like finding a solid gold watch in a ditch. Anna-Maria had taken the precaution of tying his wrists with a thin, biting rope, one end of which she’d fastened to a hook in the roof, higher than he could hope to reach. But she needn’t have bothered. Mathias didn’t have the strength to do anything. He lay in a crumpled heap on the floor.
‘So,’ said Anna-Maria. ‘You ran away, after all the trouble we took for you. You ungrateful little scab!’ She slapped his head.
‘Let the boy speak, my plum,’ said Lutsmann in a false, brandy-fumed voice. ‘Didn’t he come back to us all on his own? He must have wanted to tell us something very much.’
‘The only thing I want him to tell us,’ hissed Anna-Maria, and she put her face close to Mathias’s – so close that he could smell the perfumed powder, the peppermint breath, ‘is what Leiter wanted to know.’
Mathias closed his eyes; his head drooped on his shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ he said in a whisper.
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Anna-Maria in a voice silky quiet and full of menace. ‘I don’t think you are telling me the truth.’
‘I am,’ said Mathias. But he couldn’t look at her.
‘Do you know what I do to filthy, dirty, lying little boys who don’t tell me the truth? I do this.’
She put the heel of her hand on Mathias’s broken chest and leaned all her weight down on it. The pain was unbearable. Mathias let out a long broken cry. Anna-Maria sat back and watched him.
Lutsmann went quite white. ‘P-p-people will hear,’ he said.
‘Let them,’ said Anna-Maria.
‘But—’
‘Go outside if you haven’t the stomach for it,’ she snapped. ‘If anyone comes, tell them we have the barber here, pulling the boy’s bad tooth.’
She looked back down at Mathias, who was doubled up with pain. ‘I don’t think it will take us that long.’
She leaned forward and, with gritted teeth, pushed even harder.
Lutsmann stood outside in the dark street with his coat wrapped around him and his fingers stuffed in his ears. Every now and then he would take them out just a little to see if it was all over yet, but then there would be another long scream and he would quickly jam them back in. But no one heard. No one came. And while he stood there, over the roofline of the town, fireworks began to burst in great flowering balloons. Fingers stuffed in his ears, he tipped his fat face up to the sky and watched them.
Then Anna-Maria came out. She came down the steps and stood beside him in her thick coat with its high fur collar. Looping her arm comfortably through his, she smiled at him, and they stood like that, side by side, and watched the fireworks together.
Anna-Maria had found out everything. She knew about the piece of paper and Katta. She knew about Koenig and Jacob. She knew it all.
The question now was, what was she going to do with what she had found out?
19
Anna-Maria and Lutsmann Pay a Visit
The day of the Feast of the Angel dawned ice cold. There was not a breath of wind, not a cloud in the sky. Bells rang out over the waking city – clamorous and discordant. With each passing minute more were joined until the air was thick with the noise of them. There wasn’t one corner of a room, not one bucket in a yard, that the sound didn’t fill.
Katta hadn’t slept. She’d watched the day come in slow creeping light, heard the very first bells ring. Now, that seemed hours ago. She pushed at the food, steaming hot in the bowl, but she couldn’t eat it.
The night before, Koenig had arrived back at the inn to find only Stefan by the fire. Katta had followed, almost on his heels, ready to enjoy what happened next. But it didn’t happen.
There was no Mathias.
They’d gone straight back into the streets, Koenig carrying a burning tar flare to light their way – but where were they to start? Everywhere they went was crowded with carnival-masked men and feather-faced women. They looked down into the empty dark alleys where the revellers wouldn’t go. But Mathias was nowhere to be found. As they searched the streets, the sky above them filled with bursting fireworks. Then even the fireworks were over, and one by one the people drifted away until the streets were bare, but still they hadn’t found hi
m. Finally they had to accept that there was nothing to do but go back to the inn and start again in the morning. There was always the chance that Mathias had found his way there and would be waiting for them. But he wasn’t.
Then had come the recriminations.
Now they sat silent over their bowls of food.
‘We will start where we were last night,’ said Koenig. ‘I will go one way and you two will go the other.’
Katta couldn’t even begin to say what was in Koenig’s mind. Whether it was that he’d needed to take Mathias to Jacob and they’d lost him, or whether it was the harm that might have befallen the boy. She wasn’t even going to try to guess. She felt sick. If she hadn’t stayed in The Bear, none of it would have happened.
She glanced up at Stefan. Koenig caught her do it and, as though reading her thoughts, lifted a warning finger in front of her face.
‘This time, you stay with him,’ he said. ‘This time, you will do as you are told.’
She hadn’t ever seen him look more dangerous. It was not a time to argue.
‘So long as he don’t hurt me,’ she said. ‘Tell him he can’t hurt me. Tell him so as he knows. Say he can’t touch me.’
For a moment Koenig said nothing. Then he turned to Stefan. ‘Ne tzima loy,’ he said. ‘Dash jah?’
Stefan looked up at her; even he wasn’t going to risk a wrong word now. He nodded. ‘Dash jah.’
But he said it as though it was a very hard thing to be asked not to do. ‘Ne tzima loy.’
Anna-Maria and Lutsmann sat waiting in a fine marble hall. Lutsmann was staring around at the gilded ornaments and furniture with his mouth open and his eyes popping wide. Anna-Maria, momentarily disconcerted, sat very still beside him. It was not what they had expected at all.
When they’d set out, leaving Mathias tied and gagged in the cart, they’d expected to find Dr Leiter in a small house in the town. Something with a brass bell pull, a few stone steps up to a polished door – but not this. They sat uneasily, looking about them at the colonnaded pillars and the paintings on the ceiling and walls. But it was where Leiter had said that word was to be sent to him. They’d asked the way, so there was no mistaking it.
As they’d come up through the town, the bells had been ringing and the streets were almost empty. The few people already about were church-dressed and sombre-faced. The day of the Feast of the Angel was a much more serious affair than the mayhem that had gone on the night before. They’d made their way through the lower streets and up to the fine buildings at the top of the hill, where the Duke’s palace stood and the great church of the Angel of Felissehaven watched over everything below.
Once admitted, they’d been left in the marble hall to wait for whatever was going to happen next. They could still hear the bells ringing outside. The morning light flooded in through great high windows, making the gold more golden and the paintings more brilliant.
‘Are we sure this is the right place?’ said Lutsmann uncertainly.
Before Anna-Maria had the chance to tell him that he was a fool, a door at the end of the hall opened and a man came through. But it wasn’t Dr Leiter. It was merely someone to take them to him. They followed the man across the marble floor and up a wide staircase. Portraits of stern-faced men looked down on them. A large chandelier hung at the end of a gilded chain, and suddenly Anna-Maria didn’t feel quite so certain of herself as she had been. Not as certain as she’d been in the cart when she’d finished with Mathias and first thought of what they were going to do next. This was all much more grand than she’d expected. But she told herself that she’d met Leiter before. She’d dealt with him then, and she’d deal with him again. But all the same, she was uneasy. Only powerful people lived in houses like this, and powerful people were dangerous.
The man stopped at a door. He tapped on it and, without waiting for a reply, opened it and ushered Anna-Maria and Lutsmann inside. Then he made a small bow and, withdrawing, closed the door behind him.
The room was as magnificent as anything they’d already seen. Dr Leiter was sitting at a large table in the middle of it, his fingers steepled to his lips. He had been interrupted in his morning affairs. He had church to attend. Then the procession of the Duke. But this was important.
He watched them come in. He didn’t say anything until the door had shut.
‘What brings you here, circus man?’ he said.
Anna-Maria began to sob. She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘It’s the boy,’ she breathed. ‘What has become of the poor boy?’
Leiter’s face might have been carved from stone – its expression gave nothing away. ‘Why do you need to know?’ he said.
What Anna-Maria wanted to know was why the piece of paper was so important, and in that she had a start on Leiter. She had the boy. But she wasn’t going to let him know that.
With great difficulty, she controlled her tears a little. Lutsmann guided her to a chair and she sat down.
‘We heard that he was lost – the lamb,’ she sniffed. ‘We thought that we might be able to help you find him – he is like our own son. We know little things about him that might be of use to you in looking.’
Leiter’s expression did not change. ‘Like what?’ he said coldly.
‘Oh, his little ways.’ She dabbed at her eyes again. ‘Little things he told us about Gustav.’ She watched Leiter through the lace of the hanky as she said the name. ‘Just little things.’
Lutsmann put a comforting arm about her shoulder. He knew what was required of him.
‘Little things,’ said Leiter to himself. ‘I wonder how little?’
There was a worn green leather box on the table beside him. He undid the brass clasp, opened it, and set Marguerite down in front of him. She turned her pretty head and looked up at him as he laid out the two cards, first the blue one, then the red.
Mathias had told Anna-Maria many things – she’d made sure of that. But she hadn’t quite made sure enough. Small details had slipped by her.
Marguerite was one of them.
Anna-Maria looked at the doll and then at Lutsmann. ‘Ah-ha, ah-ha,’ she sobbed, and dabbed the hanky to her eyes again.
‘Why are you here?’ said Leiter.
‘Oh, Doctor Leiter,’ gasped Anna-Maria, ‘we just want to help.’
Marguerite touched the red card.
‘You don’t happen to know where the boy is, do you?’ said Leiter.
‘Oh, that we did!’ said Anna-Maria, looking up at Lutsmann’s face and grasping at his hand for support. He patted her reassuringly. ‘We have not seen him since that sad parting.’
Marguerite touched the red card.
‘How sad for you,’ said Leiter. ‘Did you know that the wretched boy took something that was not his before he ran off?’
Anna-Maria’s painted face became a picture of shamed outrage. ‘Oh – oh! The scoundrel!’
‘I want it back,’ said Leiter coldly. ‘You wouldn’t know where it is, would you?’
‘How could we?’
Marguerite touched the red card.
Leiter leaned forward. There was a small silver bell upon the table. He rang it and sat back. The door opened and the man who had brought them up the stairs came in. He made a small bow.
‘Has my servant returned yet?’ said Leiter.
‘Yes, Doctor Leiter,’ said the man.
‘Have him come to me.’
The man bowed again and closed the door.
‘How may we be of help?’ said Anna-Maria. She wanted to move the matter along more to her liking.
But Leiter didn’t answer. He pushed back his chair and walked to the window. From it he could see the roofs of the town laid out like patchwork below him; the narrow roads, the glittering ice in the harbour, the islands beyond. The bells were ringing in the cold, clean air.
‘Sometimes people make mistakes,’ he said. ‘They pretend that something is true, when it isn’t true at all. Like you have just done.’
Anna-Maria look
ed up at Lutsmann.
‘I assure you, good sir—’ Lutsmann began, but he didn’t finish whatever it was he was going to say.
In the panelled wall behind Leiter, a door opened and a barrel-squat figure, smaller than a man, larger than a child, stepped into the room.
‘If you tell me the truth now,’ said Leiter. ‘No harm will come to you. You have my word.’
Behind him, on the table, Marguerite smiled her prettiest, sharp-toothed smile and touched the red card.
*
The gag dug tightly into the corners of Mathias’s mouth. Anna-Maria had wanted to be certain that he wouldn’t make a sound. She’d tied his wrists and ankles and pushed him into a corner of the cart behind the cot bed; next, she’d covered him with the rag rug that was spread on the floor, pushing a chair against it all so that he couldn’t be seen. Then she’d painted her face – lips dark as blood – put on her best cloak and, making sure that Lutsmann was ready, set off to find Leiter.
But someone had watched them go.
Estella had had enough of Lutsmann and Anna-Maria. That slap around the face the night Gustav died had been the last straw. She’d decided that she would take her things and go. She’d just needed the right place and the right time.
Felissehaven was both.
She’d gathered together the few things that belonged to her, and then thought to take a few that belonged to Lutsmann – or, better still, to Anna-Maria. It seemed only right.
She’d thought that she would have to choose a moment when their backs were turned. She couldn’t believe her luck when she saw Anna-Maria painted to the nines and Lutsmann in his shining black ringmaster’s boots lock the door and come down the steps of the cart. Anna-Maria slipped her arm through Lutsmann’s, and off they went together. Estella watched for several moments, but they didn’t come back.
The lock on the door wasn’t enough to stop her. She knew that, slung beneath the cart in a box, were the various tools they used to set up the stage. She opened it and took out a long sharp chisel, which she jammed between the door and the frame, working it from side to side until the lock gave way. Then she slipped through the door, closed it behind her and looked about.
Toymaker, The Page 13