There was no reason Max couldn’t try drawing people, was there? And Simon’s father was the best person to practice on, of all the figures out there. Not only did his legs make it easy to identify him, but he was standing still. Sometimes he would follow the pack down the field, at a loping trot, but then he would stop again and stand, hands held a little out in front of him as if ready to catch the ball.
But the rules said you were not allowed to use your hands unless you were tending the goal. Max might not be an athlete, but he knew that. You had to trap the ball with your feet. Soccer was a game for feet, and balls, and—Max watched this admiringly—running. The men were constantly running up and down the grassy field, back and forth across it, kicking and chasing the ball. Thunk, thwap, and someone might call out, “I’m free!” or “Over here!” or even, once, “You clumsy fool!”
That last remark was directed to Mr. Melakrinos, who had somehow managed to be hit on the shoulder by the ball so that he whipped around in surprise and tripped one of the other men, who grabbed at a third to keep his balance, and so all three lay tangled together on the ground. While somebody else took the ball up the field, away from them.
Mr. Melakrinos had been looking up and off, toward Tassiter Lane, when the ball came at him, and that was how the accident had occurred. Max could hear him apologizing while the other two men burst up off the ground, already running after the ball. Mr. Melakrinos stayed down, his knees bent, one hand wrapped around an ankle.
One of the two men who stood watching at the sidelines hurried up. “Andros? Something wrong?”
“I think I twisted it. It’ll be fine in a minute. Maybe.”
“Let me give you a hand up. Hurt much? It’s not broken but … Listen, Andros, tell you what. You go sit with that fellow there, find out what he’s up to. I’ve never seen him before and you’ll be doing us a favor if you suss him out while you see how bad the ankle is. Would you do that?”
“Sure,” Simon’s father said. “It’ll make a change to do something useful.” He looked over at Max.
Caught out, Max raised the hand holding the drawing pencil. He became, in his own imagining mind, Joachim, a real artist, and at work.
“By the way,” the man said, “it looked to me like you were moving with the play a little better today. Like you had a better understanding of where the ball would go next. You’re coming along, Andros, slow and steady, just keep it up and you’ll be fine.” And then he ran away up along the side of the field, to get closer to the players, calling, “Peter! You’re offsides!”
Max kept his eyes on his sketch pad, but he turned the page over and made some fresh marks that might, if you knew what they were supposed to be, look like players on a field. He looked up, as if studying the scene before him—just the way Joachim studied the particular angle from which a blossom or leaf stood out from its stem. Then he started, as if surprised to notice the long-legged man limping toward him.
Mr. Melakrinos loomed over him and Max had to crane his neck backward to look at the round glasses, and the eyes behind them. Neither of them spoke for a moment. Joachim never spoke unless he had something to say, and anything that Max had to say—such as, “Why don’t you tell your little boy where you’re going? Do you know how worried he is?”—would be out of character. So he stared up for a minute, nodded, then turned back to the sketch, to draw more lines. He drew the ball, a round dark thing, alone in the grassy field, waiting to be kicked.
“Mind if I sit?” Simon’s father asked. He had a soft voice and he hesitated, as if he expected to be turned away.
Max shook his head. He didn’t mind. The opposite, in fact.
Simon’s father sat down beside him. He turned his face to the field so that he could watch the play and also, Max suspected, so that Max wouldn’t feel he was being pried at. This seemed to be the kind of man who would think about other people’s feelings.
Except his son’s, it seemed.
Max told the man, “I’m drawing.”
Mr. Melakrinos nodded. “I thought you were an artist, you have the look. The beret, I mean, the pad. Anyway. It must be hard. Getting all that movement,” he said. “I mean, hard to draw a soccer game.”
A man with imagination, too, Max thought. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m not sure I’m up to it. But it doesn’t matter if I’m not,” he added, as Joachim, who believed in doing, rather than sitting around talking about.
“Turns out—doesn’t it?—there’s not much that does matter,” Simon’s father said sadly. “Not that really matters, I mean. Problem is,” he went on, “that the things that do really matter? They really, really matter.” He leaned down then, unlaced his shoe, and pulled it off, with a little grunt of pain. He peeled down his sock and considered his ankle. He poked at it with a forefinger, where Max could see that it was starting to swell up.
“Can you move it?” Max asked.
“Yes,” Mr. Melakrinos said, gently rotating his foot, just once and with another small grunt. “It’s probably just a sprain. So. I guess I won’t be playing for a few days, but what I’ll tell—” He looked over to Max and said in a voice that was even sadder than before, “I knew something like this would happen.”
“Something like what?”
“Getting injured. Injuring myself. I’ve always been clumsy, even as a boy. I was never good at games. Are you young enough to remember what happens to boys who aren’t good at games?”
Max nodded. He remembered.
“If it happens also that they are good at numbers? Good at school, in fact? Just …” Simon’s father fell silent, like a windup toy that had run down.
Max finished the thought for him. “Just not very good at being a boy.” Max had always had the Starling Theatrical Company to make him look all right, or at least to make him envied, but he knew enough about being different to make him sympathetic.
Simon’s father nodded. “I’ll have to think of something to tell Simon.” He laughed unhappily. “You don’t happen to be a clever liar, do you?” Then, looking at Max’s sketch, he laughed again. “Never mind.”
Max laughed, too. He agreed, and it was, after all, pretty funny. There was nothing at all clever about this drawing.
They sat side by side, looking at the field while the sun moved down toward the hills across the lake. They were talking without turning to face one another, as if they were old friends. Max thought hard, to find a way to advise Mr. Melakrinos without giving himself away, or giving Simon away, either. This was the kind of problem the Caliph’s Doctor faced all the time, trying to cure the Caliph’s aches and pains and diseases without acknowledging that anything was wrong. The Caliph was Caliph and Caliphs never fall ill, they have no weaknesses, so he had to be tricked into a cure. But it was Max’s father who always played the doctor, not Max, and Max wasn’t sure he could fill his father’s shoes. Then he had an idea, and said, with perfect honesty, “I am clever enough. Look,” and he turned back a page.
Mr. Melakrinos looked. “That’s me,” he said. “Isn’t it? Is that me? I didn’t know I looked so … so awkward. It’s the legs, isn’t it? I am such a stork, no wonder I can’t …”
Max tried to sound surprised, as if he had just realized something. “You want help in thinking about how to explain your twisted ankle?”
Mr. Melakrinos nodded.
“Who’s Simon?” Max asked.
“Oh. Simon’s my son.”
Max waited, just a couple of seconds, to give the impression of taking in new information. Then he asked, “Why not tell him the truth?” His hand, holding the pencil, was stilled. He listened to hear the heart of the problem.
“Simon’s only seven. He’s a little boy.”
Max shook his head, as if he were confused, as if he were a passing stranger and knew nothing about the Melakrinos family. “Little boys love soccer, don’t they? I did.” This was not exactly true. At seven, Max had loved fencing and wanted to become good enough to be in a sword fight with his father, but it w
as true enough about little boys and their love of one sport or another.
“Simon certainly does and I can’t bear to disappoint him. He doesn’t know that I can’t—” The man waved a hand toward the field, and the men running around on it. “He doesn’t know I’m—” He gestured toward the picture of him that Max had drawn. “A seven-year-old boy doesn’t care if his father is chief bookkeeper for all the Bendiff companies and well thought of in his office. He wants a different kind of father. You see, I’m all Simon has left,” he said, and his voice, to Max’s surprise because he didn’t think it could get any sadder, got sadder still.
Max thought, and his hand started to shade in the sky over the head of the long-legged man in the drawing. Then he asked, “You’re all he has? What about his mother? What about brothers and sisters? What about the rest of the family, like a grandmother?”
“His mother died. Last winter.”
“Oh,” Max said. He hadn’t thought of that possibility. Poor little Simon. And poor sad Mr. Melakrinos, too. This was—Max could imagine how bad they felt. “Oh,” he said again. “I’m—”
Mr. Melakrinos interrupted. “Simon doesn’t know she’s dead. How could I tell him a thing like that?” He pushed his glasses up onto his forehead so he could bury his face in his hands. “I’m all he has,” he said in a small, muffled voice. “And you see the kind of father I am, who can’t even go out on a soccer field without getting himself injured.”
Max didn’t say anything. He thought, and his hand moved and he shaded in a sky with a slender crescent of white moon already hung in it. With the empty sky behind him, the figure in the picture became solitary, and brave in his solitude against the darkening sky, and strong.
“Look.” Max turned the picture to the man, who uncovered his eyes, adjusted his glasses, and looked. “I think you should tell Simon the truth,” Max said.
Simon’s father stared at the picture. “Tell him I can’t play any sports at all?” he asked.
“Tell him about his mother,” Max said, although he suspected that the man knew perfectly well that was what he meant. “I think you should go home, and tell him right now.”
“How can I?” Mr. Melakrinos asked. He had his excuses ready. “He’s only seven. He’s already sad enough just thinking that she’s disappeared. He’s asleep by now.”
Max shook his head. “Keeping it secret isn’t good for him, or for you, either, and you know what? I bet he’s not asleep. I bet he’s awake, lying in his bed, waiting for you to come home so he’ll feel safe enough to go to sleep.”
Simon’s father stared at him for a long time, but Max didn’t stare back. He signed his drawing Mister Max, wrote For Simon across the top of it, and then tore the page out of his sketch pad. He folded the paper carefully in half, making it easy to carry. He passed it to Simon’s father and then he did look at him.
The man’s face was serious and unhappy. But the eyes behind the round lenses had a glimmer of hope in them. “How could I not have thought of that?” he asked. “But who are you? Do you know Simon? Are you from Hilliard or something?”
Max smiled and stood up. “No, I never met him. I’m just—” But he couldn’t think of how to end that sentence.
Luckily, Simon’s father was standing up, too, impatient now, and reaching out to shake Max’s hand with the hand that wasn’t holding the folded drawing. He wasn’t listening. He didn’t care who Max was. “All right, then, I’ll just do it.” He laughed. “And I’ll tell Simon this is a present from some would-be artist with funny eyes.”
Max laughed with him. “I don’t imagine he’ll care about that.”
He walked away then, making his exit at normal speed, not walking fast and not slowly. He raised a hand over his head in farewell but didn’t turn around. It wasn’t until he had picked up his bicycle, placed the pad in the basket, and reached the firehouse that he did turn and look back, to see a tall figure, long-legged as a stork, crossing The Lakeview at a swift limp.
The air had just darkened to purple when Max set his bicycle in its place up against the kitchen door of 5 Thieves Alley. The lights were on in his kitchen. He could see Ari at the table, a textbook open in front of him. Across the garden, in Grammie’s house, kitchen lights also burned. He set his beret and sketch pad down on his own back steps, then went to show his grandmother that he was home safe.
Grammie had a plate waiting for him, with a slab of peach and blackberry crumble on it. “That looks good,” he said, and “I planned for it to tempt you,” she told him, pouring him a glass of milk from the jug in the icebox before she sat down to face him, across the table. “Was it a successful jaunt? Whatever it really was, I mean, because you don’t think you fooled me for a minute, do you?”
Max’s mouth was full, so he only nodded in answer to her first question and shrugged in answer to the second. When he had swallowed he admitted, “I wasn’t sure you’d let me go out at night, for work.”
Grammie sighed, as if she were tired or as if she were too worn out to fight on. “Well, you might be right about that,” she admitted. “I do want to hear about it. I am interested in your cases, and how you solve them. What were you up to?” she asked. “Can you tell me?”
And so Max explained about the father and son who needed to talk.
The Mayor’s Job
• ACT I •
SCENE 1 ~ QUESTIONS
Then came several days during which the Solutioneer had no work. Long day followed long day with neither postcard from Andesia nor letter for Mister Max; dinner followed dinner with little to say and nothing to report. Max waited. What else could he do but wait? He studied his Spanish verbs and vocabulary; he studied the history of all the South American countries and waited. He studied Euclid and waited. He painted June morning skies and waited.
He didn’t really have to worry about money, he knew, but since his earnings equaled his independence, he did worry, day after jobless day. So that when a letter finally arrived for Mister Max, it felt like a Christmas present, and Max, like anybody who has been hoping for weeks for a gift to be presented, was suddenly unwilling to open it and end the anticipation.
Seated on Grammie’s kitchen steps in the warm afternoon, Max turned the letter over and over in his hands. It was Grammie who noticed who the letter came from, and sucked in her breath. “Whatever does the Mayor want with you?” she wondered, her voice casual but her eyes fixed on the envelope.
“No idea,” said Max. It was addressed to MISTER MAX, 5 THIEVES ALLEY.
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
It wasn’t like Grammie to hurry him. “Are you worried about what it says?” Max asked.
“Why should I be worried?”
“Or do you already know what it says?” Max held up the envelope. He remembered that all surprises aren’t happy ones. “Is it something I won’t want to hear?”
“What would there be for me to worry about at the Mayor’s office?”
“That’s what I’m asking,” Max said. He’d rather hear bad news from Grammie than from somebody official who didn’t know anything about him, or care about him, either.
“Why don’t you just open it?” she demanded.
Also, it wasn’t like Grammie to get so easily cross, and at him, and over nothing. However, she obviously wasn’t going to tell Max anything, so he shrugged and opened the letter. Its message had been typed under the city seal on heavy stationery.
Dear Mister Max,
Your name was given to me by one of our prominent lawyers, Fredric Henderson, who offered as reference also the Baroness Barthold. Both parties spoke of your perspicacity and your discretion. Those are qualities I am in need of. I will be aboard The Water Rat Sunday morning when it leaves the city docks for its nine o’clock circuit of the lake. I will be standing at the bow, regardless of wind and weather. I ask you to meet me there, where we can talk privately on a matter of importance to the city, and to the welfare of the country, too, quite possibly. Thanking you in advance,
I remain yours sincerely,
Richard P. Valoury
Richard P. Valoury, Mayor, was typed underneath a signature so scribbled that among all the letters, only the V was recognizable.
Grammie was reading over his shoulder. “Why do people have such terrible handwriting?” she demanded. “Maybe I should go back into the classroom and improve things.”
Max was surprised. “Do you want to teach school again? I thought you really liked the Library, with all the books and magazines and newspapers, with all the different tasks the job needs you to be able to do.”
“Things don’t always go the way we want them to,” Grammie told him gloomily. “You should know that by now, Max.”
What the Mayor of Queensbridge saw that windy Sunday morning was not what he expected. He had been told by Fredric Henderson—but, he reminded himself, Fredric Henderson had only been repeating what his wife said and the Mayor had met Henderson’s wife, a birdbrain if ever there was one. So she was likely to have gotten it all wrong when she told her husband that this Mister Max was a poor student, a brilliant poor student perhaps but nonetheless threadbare and a little underfed. He’d probably be glad of any kind of work, Fredric Henderson had advised the Mayor. Since this, at least, was just what the Mayor hoped, he was happy to believe it.
He also discounted the Baroness Barthold’s report that Mister Max was a round little fellow, comical really, dressed in a nasty bright blue waistcoat that might be his Sunday best, but did nothing for his pumpkin-shaped figure. Was he clever? Or merely lucky? The Baroness couldn’t swear to one or the other, but the detective seemed to care about the downtrodden, if the young woman he had brought into her employ was any example, and he had persuaded the Bendiff girl to do some tutoring in her kitchens, and in the Baroness’s opinion that looked like a difficult child to persuade to do anything. So perhaps he was clever. Yes, he had done the Baroness good service but, really, she couldn’t swear that that hadn’t just been luck. Also, he wore this ridiculous pork-pie hat … Noting the Baroness’s advanced age, the Mayor had decided that her eyes must be bad and that her memory, also, could not be relied on.
The Book of Secrets Page 5