He had surprised her, he could see. But she was tempted and he could see that, too, tempted by the promise of talking about books as well as the chance to help a boy to overcome hard circumstances.
“He also is alone,” Max added, and then said, “You’ll know him by his hair, which is the color of ripe corn, and I can tell him how to recognize you. I hope I can say you’ll meet him?” he asked.
“Of course,” Nissa said. “Yes, of course you may. I’d like to be of use.”
It was time for the ferry, then, so they rose from the table to walk together down to the dock. “You really are going to Porthaven?” Nissa asked.
“It’s time I moved on in my life,” Max said. “I haven’t had great success as a salesman, so I may try my hand at sailoring.”
“It’s not an easy life. It can make you hard.”
“It can be dangerous, too, I understand.”
“Do you fear danger?” she asked.
“Yes!” answered Max Starling, before either of his other two roles could silence him, and then he laughed. “I’m afraid I do. But I can forgive my fear, even if I can’t approve of it, or want to be in its company.”
Nissa did not answer for several steps. She seemed to be lost in her own thoughts. Then she smiled up at him. “Well, at least we can travel together on this last ferry ride.”
“Won’t your young man be jealous?” asked Max, now the Solutioneer. “I wouldn’t want to cause Carlo to worry. I’ve met him, in the city, and he seems to me a fine and upright man, trustworthy. You must know he’s your devoted servant.”
“Carlo knows not to be jealous,” Nissa assured Max. “If he doesn’t, I can always tell him—and I will, because you’re right about him. I hadn’t thought there was anyone to be trusted, but you’re right, Carlo is better than most other men. I’m glad I met you, Frank Worthy,” said Nissa Trevelyn, “even if you are about to disappear.”
In which the bag is opened and the cat steps out
On Thursday afternoon Max bicycled up along The Lakeview and lingered by the corner of Tassiter Lane until Tomi Brandt appeared outside the firehouse. When he saw Tomi’s familiar stocky figure emerge from a side door, Max crossed over. Tomi was surprised to see him. “I thought you’d disappeared again, maybe for good.”
“I guess not,” Max answered, the Queen’s Spy, the man who knew everything before anybody else even suspected there might be something to know.
Tomi was not impressed. “Not that I want you to.” He grinned. “Just … you like being mysterious and I never know when I might see you, or someone who you might be. Whereas me”—and he gestured to the building behind him—“you always know where to find me.”
“Always? You’re done with school?”
“I’m thirteen now,” Tomi pointed out. At the age of thirteen, the law said a boy or girl could choose to leave school. “So I’m stopping. Like you.”
Max could have corrected this mistake, but was more curious about Tomi’s life. “What do your parents say?”
“Mum says boys will be boys, and my da thinks you can’t grow up fast enough in this world. They know where to find me, if they need me.”
Max guessed from the amused expression in Tomi’s eyes that Tomi enjoyed his irregular life, and this, Max guessed next, more than their common age, was why he felt at ease with this boy. “So you’ve decided to be a fireman?”
Tomi shrugged. “It’s a trade, it’s smart to have a trade, it’s good to know how to put out fires, and it’s exciting, even dangerous. Sometimes.” That those were the times he liked best was clear.
“I have a favor to ask,” Max said, and took a few steps away from the building, to be absolutely sure they wouldn’t be overheard. It would seem, he thought, as if the two boys had moved forward to enjoy the lake, which shone blue in summer sunlight. A westerly breeze carried the smell of water to them. “Can I ask a favor?”
“Sure,” Tomi said. “If I can. You have an interesting life, and I don’t mind being included. What do you want?”
“Do you know where to find Colly?”
“He’s where he always was, with those grandparents. They won’t let go of him. So yes, I can find him.”
“Can you take him a message from me?”
“From you Max Starling? Or you the policeman? Or you Bartolomeo? Or is it from you the escaped, not-dead, kidnap victim?”
Max hadn’t thought of that. “Does he know I’m not dead?”
“He’s smart. He knows things weren’t the way they seemed, but he doesn’t know exactly what went on. He’s too busy these days to think much about it, with his new job.”
“I can’t imagine washing dishes and sweeping floors is all that interesting for him.”
“He’s not doing that. He’s learning how to keep the books. The owner—that Bendiff guy?—he talked to Colly before he hired him and I guess—well—anybody who talks to Colly has to see how smart he is.”
Max decided. “You can tell him it’s a message from his prisoner, and then he can be sure I’m alive.”
“He’ll be glad to know for sure. So, what’s the message?”
“Tell him he should take the ferry up to Summer on a weekday afternoon, and wait on the plaza until—it’ll be sometime around half past four—he sees a young woman, alone. She’s usually dressed in dark colors, she wears a hat, she sits by herself at a café and has coffee and reads the newspaper until the five o’clock ferry comes in. Her name is Nissa, and if he asks her, she’s someone he can talk to about books, and other things, too. She’s well educated and—if he’s interested—she also knows about paintings, and art. She’s expecting him,” Max told Tomi. “She’ll know who he is.”
“Colly certainly wants to learn and to go on,” Tomi said. “I’ll tell you, he might just figure out a way to become a lawyer. He’d be a good one, too. He’d keep people from taking advantage of the law for their own purposes, I bet. He’s ambitious, which I’m not. What about you, Eyes? Are you ambitious?”
Max shrugged. “I have no desire to be a judge, or mayor, or rich,” he said. “But I do want to be … independent. To do what I want. I expect that’s pretty normal.” Was it also normal to talk to somebody like this? About this kind of thing? In this way? As if you were just and only yourself?
“I’m ambitious to be useful,” Tomi told him. They stood shoulder to shoulder, looking out over the water. “To make the city a better place for everyone to live in, not just the lucky ones with good jobs and big houses or old families, I mean. Plumbing, for example,” Tomi said, and his face lit up with enthusiasm. “What if nobody had to use outhouses? What if every house had its own bathroom? You’d have to put in pipes, under the streets probably, to carry all that wastewater away—and if everybody had water, hot and cold, running into their houses … If things are clean, and all the water comes from clean sources, and people are clean, then the chance of outbreaks of things like typhoid and polio goes way down. Everybody knows that but nobody takes the necessary steps.”
“You want to be a plumber?” Max asked.
Tomi hadn’t thought that far. “I want to be someone in a position to make things better,” he said. “City engineer? Or mayor, fireman, policeman … I want to make things better, that’s all.”
“Or a teacher,” Max offered.
“I don’t want a boring life,” Tomi argued.
“But any life can be un-boring, can’t it?” Max asked. He wasn’t sure, now that he’d asked it, if he knew the answer to that question.
“Or any life can be boring,” Tomi said, as if he was listening to a new idea.
They were both quiet for a minute. The lake water rippled gently. Then Max got back to work. “You’ll tell Colly?”
“Sure. Right away. So I guess, all in all, you could say it was a good thing they decided to kidnap you,” Tomi Brandt said. “As long as I was there to rescue you, that is.”
Seeing the expression on Max’s face, Tomi just laughed. “Relax, Eyes, it was a joke.�
�
“Not at the time it wasn’t,” Max admitted. “You really did rescue me.”
“Maybe, but you get credit for all the rest of it,” Tomi assured him. “I don’t know what it is you’re up to and”—he held up a hand—“there’s no need for you to tell me.”
Max didn’t know what exactly the mischief dancing about from Tomi’s eyes to his mouth and back meant, but he knew it was mischief. If he hadn’t been so sure that he could trust the boy, he’d have been worried.
That afternoon, Max wrote to Carlo Coyne to reassure him—as he had the young man’s father two weeks earlier—that there was no danger stalking the person for whom he had so much concern. Mister Max was confident that in not too long a time, Nissa would confide in Carlo, and that he, Carlo, would then understand everything. He enclosed his final bill, sealed the envelope, and put it into the mail. That last job having come to an end, Max turned his full attention to his newest, most serious, most urgent, and most troubling problem: Andesia, and how to get himself there, and what self to be, once arrived, and—this most likely to be the most difficult—how to come into the presence of the King and Queen of that land in order to figure out what could prove impossibly difficult, a plan for their rescue.
He and Grammie had agreed to meet in Max’s kitchen on Sunday afternoon, and Max wanted to be as ready as he could be with as many possibilities as he could think of. He took out the little notebook and considered what he had already listed. Then he added Journalist, Butler, Valet, Footman, Import/Export Salesman, and, although it was not at all likely, Tourist. None of his ideas seemed good enough. He hoped Grammie had managed to think of some better ones. When they had settled themselves across from one another at the kitchen table and exchanged lists, however, what Max noticed first was that all of Grammie’s suggestions required two people.
He looked up at her.
She was looking at him.
He did not say what he was thinking, and he suspected that she, also, was holding her tongue. Instead, he studied her list some more, and waited.
Finally, Grammie spoke. “It would take you at least a year of study to learn enough to be able to pass yourself off as a geologist. You know that, don’t you? I don’t think we have a year.”
Max couldn’t object.
“So I’ll just cross that off, shall I? And a banker presents the same difficulty, except you’d have to learn economic theory as well as banking practices. Agreed?”
Max agreed and then he pointed out to her that while she might be qualified for the position, he could not be part of a pair of teachers, for the same reason.
Grammie couldn’t argue. She announced, “I won’t have you acting a mountaineer, which takes years and years of practice, and even then it’s deadly dangerous. Besides, anybody would see how untrained you are. I wonder, too, about this collector of folk tales. Because,” she explained, and Max had to admit that as a librarian she would know, “the people who do that are scholars. They know every kind of story from all over the world, and while you are familiar with fairy tales and sort of with the Greek gods, that’s all you know. Also, these collectors—anthropologists is what they are—talk about stories in a particular way. I might just be believable as an anthropologist, maybe for a day, because I’ve read a lot, but then what reason would there be for you to have tagged along? As for butler, or any one of the menservants … the trouble is, Max—and it’s not your fault, there’s nothing you can do about it—you don’t have a beard. Not any kind of beard and all of these are grown men, who would have beards growing.”
“Nobody’s noticed that before,” Max pointed out.
“Maybe,” Grammie allowed. “But Andesia is going to be different. You’ll be on view for longer, and you’ll be stared at, as strangers are. It’s not like here where you appear and then disappear as soon as possible.”
“We don’t have any puppets and we don’t know how to work them, if we did, besides not having a puppet stage, so I don’t think puppeteers is going to work, either,” Max said, with his own forefinger now on her list. “I could always be a tourist,” he added.
“On your own? Nobody would believe it.”
“They might,” Max grumbled. He knew what she wanted and planned: Grammie wanted and planned to go along, and interfere, or—worse—run the show.
“I suppose we could both go as tourists,” she said now. “On an around-the-world tour, which would explain our showing up in a remote place like Andesia.”
“Aren’t you a little old for a trip around the world?” Max asked, by then quite annoyed with his grandmother.
“Or maybe—this is better—I could be a rich, eccentric old woman who wants to visit every country in South America or—even better—who wants to see all the great mountain ranges of the world before I die. That wouldn’t be a total lie. I would like to see the Himalayas and the Andes, the Rockies, the Alps. There are some wonderful single peaks, too—Mount Fuji, Mount Kilimanjaro. We’ll have to spend your father’s fortune, or a fair amount of it, for me to be convincingly rich,” she warned.
Grammie’s stubborn insistence on being in charge was getting in the way of solving this problem. “You’re forgetting about me,” Max grumbled.
“No I’m not. You can be my grandson—which you are, after all—who is traveling with me. Or a paid companion, if you’re worried about your independence,” Grammie snapped. She was getting impatient with him.
“I could be a refugee,” Max said, “hoping to escape from somewhere there’s civil war, or from an oppressive regime. It wouldn’t matter then how old I was, and that I was alone. They couldn’t turn me away,” Max said.
“Maybe not. Or maybe they could. They’re a government, after all, and governments aren’t like individual people. They don’t care about being good, or kind, or about what their neighbors will say. Refugees might well just be thrown in jail, as a possible danger to the country,” Grammie argued. “They certainly wouldn’t let us talk to the King. No, being refugees won’t take us where we need to go.”
“Where are you going?” asked Ari, coming in through the dining room. Then, because he was quick to notice things, he said, “Are you quarreling? Would you like me to leave?”
Grammie looked at Max, and Max looked at Grammie. They both knew they’d used up all their ideas and they both had to admit, to themselves at least, that they hadn’t had a good enough one.
“Or maybe I could help?” Ari suggested, still standing in the doorway. “I don’t know what it is you’re talking about,” he began, smoothing things over the way he could by not using the word arguing or even disagreeing, “but I do know that sometimes a new point of view—”
“I always have a new point of view,” came Pia’s voice. She jostled Ari into the kitchen. “What’s going on? What are you two doing and why do you have—Are you fighting? Are they fighting, Ari? But what do they have to fight about? Does anyone else want a cookie? I can’t stay long, my mother has invited guests for tea, but there are things my father said he had to see to at B’s, although if you ask me he just wanted to get out of the house for an hour. Of course, nobody asks me. He says I can ask a guest to the opening night, he said a friend but I don’t—So, Max, do you want to come with me?”
“No!” Max cried. The last thing he wanted to do was go out in public, where people might recognize him as the Solutioneer or as Max Starling. Being recognized as either would ruin everything.
“You don’t have to be awful about it,” Pia said. He’d have thought she’d be angry, but it wasn’t anger he saw on her face.
“It’s not what you think,” Max said.
“How do you know what I think? You have no idea, no idea at all, Mister Max, whoever you are, smart as you think you are. I didn’t want to take a guest, anyway.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Max said, as smooth as Ari, “because I was just wondering if it wouldn’t be fun for you to have Nissa be your guest.” As soon as Max made the suggestion he knew what a good idea
it was.
“My mother would hate that,” Pia answered sulkily.
“Nissa might make a …” he hesitated, to choose the right word, “an interesting …” probably not a friend, because Nissa was a grown-up, “cousin kind of person. I bet. I’ve talked with her and she knows a lot about the world.”
“My mother would really hate it,” Pia said, but now she was smiling. She sat down at the table, and before they thought to stop her, she pulled the papers over in front of herself. “What’s this?” she asked. “Unless … Ari, would you be my guest?”
“I’m sorry, Pia, I’ll be out in the kitchen. In case they need an extra hand. It takes a few days for a restaurant to settle into a routine, and if Gabrielle needs me, I want to be there.” He, too, sat down at the table—but he didn’t take possession of the pieces of paper.
“I know that, and I know my father wants everything running right for when the royal family comes. The Mayor’s asked him to lead the welcoming parade from the train station all the way to The Lakeview. Our car, I mean, but that’s also my father, but I’m not going with them. I’m going to watch from our gates and see everybody. What’s this list, Mrs. Nives? What are you two getting up to? We have an old puppet theater in the nursery. I used to love puppets and I’m good at working them. I could help out.” She looked from Max to Grammie to Ari, then once again around at each of them. Unable to stop herself from asking, she demanded, “What? What is it? What do all of you know that I don’t? I can tell there’s something.”
Max studied Pia’s face, and thought.
“You think I just talk,” she told him, “but if you think again you’ll notice that I’ve never told anyone that I work with you, or about the way you wear costumes or who you are or—or anything,” she said. “I haven’t and you know it.”
The Book of Secrets Page 25