Mister Max: The Book of Secrets: Mister Max 2

  That thought did not displease Pia. She grinned at Max.

  “Or a hat, could you keep the brim of that hat you wore pulled down low enough so he never sees your eyes?”

  “He wants to meet in the morning, at half past seven. It’ll be light by then.”

  “Do you have any other hats? Can you be a girl? Girls—or ladies—often wear veils and a veil would work. Tess Tardo is making me a hat. I’m going to pay her for it but she’s not expensive. She’s making me a summer hat, to show off my hair, she said.” When she said this, Pia glared at him, daring Max to disagree with Tess Tardo’s admiration.

  “I’m no good at playing girls,” Max admitted. “I tried once and even Zenobia was suspicious.”

  “Really? She trusts everybody. Do you think all cooks are trusting? Because Gabrielle is, too.”

  “Not really suspicious, she just … she looked confused by me.”

  “Did you wear a dress and all?” To explain what she meant by and all Pia waved her hand in the general area of her chest and waist.

  “Of course not. I was—The Baroness thought I was plump so—”

  Pia ignored him. “Anyway, I don’t think you can talk to anyone keeping your back to him all the time, so that won’t work. But if all you have to do is hide your eyes, what if you were all bent over? A hunchback, so you could only look up sideways, or if you were really old and arthritic. Can you act old and arthritic? Do you have costumes for that? That could be a woman, because old men and old women aren’t really very different to look at, do you think? Really old, I mean, not like your grandmother. And blind, can you act blind? An old, bent-over, blind woman would be a good disguise.”

  She stopped to take a breath, but no longer than that. “I went to your grandmother’s library, did she tell you? She wanted me to and so I did, but she wasn’t very friendly. Is she always unfriendly when she’s working? Because she’s been nice when I’ve seen her at home.”

  “Was she unfriendly or grumpy?” Max asked.

  “Maybe grumpy.”

  “Do you have any idea why?”

  That question, Pia stopped to think about before she answered.

  After half a minute of consideration, during which Max finished the gooseberry tart, which was after all very good, and in a more interesting way than a chocolate croissant, Pia began again. “There could be lots of reasons, because she’s not young anymore and sometimes people, my grandparents do this, get sad at, you know, the idea of dying. Unless she’s sick. Do you think she’s sick? Or maybe—she’s your only family, isn’t she? I know you’re almost grown up but you’re still her grandson, is she worried about you? Are you doing something that worries her? Or maybe she’s remembering something terrible, because nobody ever says anything about the rest of your family. Unless she thinks that you’re about to really grow up, leave home, leave her behind and alone. Or—”

  “Pia!” Max cried, almost dizzy with trying to listen to her. “Stop yammering. Just … stop!”

  “You asked me,” she reminded him. “If you don’t want to hear what I think, you don’t have to ask me.”

  “But you’re not thinking,” Max pointed out, perfectly reasonably, he thought. “You don’t think. You just open your mouth and let fly.”

  “Maybe.” Pia was silent for about ten seconds; then she grinned. “But your grandmother told me you told her that my talking helped you to have ideas. You shouldn’t tell her that if it’s not what you mean. It’s hard enough trying to get along with people—and be their unpaid assistant—if they don’t mean what they say. I always mean what I say,” she told him. “Always.”

  “Pia,” Max protested, “you’re doing it again.”

  “I have to go home anyway,” she said, and rose abruptly from the table to leave without even calling a goodbye to Gabrielle.

  Max was so cross at her he didn’t call goodbye after her. Some assistant, he thought. Some help. He got up to pay his bill. “Did Pia pay for her croissant?” he asked Gabrielle.

  Gabrielle, who never spoke ill of anyone and didn’t like to even think badly of people, answered, “She will the next time she’s in. She likes getting her own way.”

  “That’s not news to me,” Max said, but he couldn’t help smiling at Pia’s understanding of her importance to the Solutioneer.

  “Don’t you?” Gabrielle asked.

  “But I know how to hold my temper,” Max said.

  “Also,” Gabrielle went on, “she plans to make you wait for her to grow up and marry her. How old are you, anyway, Max?”

  Max hesitated. He didn’t know what Ari might have told her about him, and he didn’t know what Gabrielle might have guessed, and he didn’t know how not to say anything without seeming to avoid the question. Then he did know, because it was a line straight out of The Adorable Arabella, and Max spoke on cue. “Too young to think of marrying. Old enough to be flattered.” The elderly suitor had reversed those two conditions, but the idea was the same. He smiled at Gabrielle, a man of mystery, he hoped. Or at least, almost a grown man, someone who wasn’t a twelve-year-old boy.

  Because Max wouldn’t tell anybody more about himself than they absolutely had to know. The fewer people who knew Max Starling’s true situation, the safer he was. And the safer his parents were, too, he thought.

  Max rode his bicycle home slowly, his feet turning the pedals unhurriedly, his mind circling at the same slow pace. He laughed at Pia with her masks and veils and blind old ladies, and he smiled at Joachim with his art-absorbed life. Joachim could spend hour after hour putting on his new glasses, staring at a canvas, taking them off, squinting in the bright light, staring, thinking …

  Max stopped.

  He set his feet on the roadway, straddling his bicycle, and did not move. People and carts and horses and two dogs, as well, moved around him, the way a stream flows around a rock.

  Then he remounted his bicycle and rode off, fast, into the twisting streets of the old city, rode home, ran inside to take coins out of a certain covered bean pot on a kitchen shelf before he ran back outside to mount his bicycle and ride fast to the spectacle-maker’s shop.

  It wasn’t long before Max was admiring a reflection of himself in a pair of brown-tinted glasses. “How much?” he asked.

  “Twenty,” the man said, and before Max could protest at the price but assuming that he wanted to, added, “They’re going to raise my rent. They haven’t said but I know it. With all those people trying to move their shops out of the old city. Scared of what’s going on there and I don’t blame them. If my rent’s going up, so are my prices,” he announced.

  Max took coins out of his pocket and asked casually, “What’s going on in the old city?”

  The spectacle-maker shook his head. “Who knows? It’s a rat’s nest in there and the kind of people who live on those alleys …? They’re not the best sort, I can tell you. Of course there’s all kinds of trouble. I wouldn’t want to have a business in the old city, either. You going to wear these or do you want me to pack them in a box for you?”

  The reports came in on Sunday. Ari’s was the first. He lingered at the kitchen table after his final tutorial lesson with Max, to relate what he had found out.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t find out anything.” It was a rainy day, so business at the ice cream shop would be slow and he could take a few extra minutes before riding William Starling’s bicycle—he consistently refused his great-aunt’s offers to buy him a motorcar—into the New Town to spend the afternoon working for Gabrielle. “They both saw through me. I did warn you, I can’t act. I took out the notebook and everything, but neither one of them was fooled. I’m not a good liar, either. I’m sorry, Max.”

  “Maybe that’s why you’re such a good teacher?” Max suggested. Ari smiled and shrugged.

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  “But the shopkeepers. Were they … were they polite to you?”

  “Very nice, both of them. They seemed amused by me, mostly. They sort of
teased me. What is it you’re really after, young man? is what Mr. Bonelli asked me. Are you hungry? Which was kind of him. Although he did say I don’t look underfed. He offered to give me the last of last year’s potatoes, and an apple, too, because he doesn’t like to see people going without, when there’s food to be eaten. Even if certain customers might turn up their noses at it.” Ari studied the tabletop thoughtfully before he went on. “That was the perfect opening, don’t you agree? So I asked him how he could have anything to give away after the vandalism, which must have cost him a pretty penny, and he said that he doesn’t like to think about that, so did I honestly expect him to talk about it? He told me my wife could make a good soup from the potatoes, and I told him I had no wife, and he said I should get myself one. A fellow like you needs a wife to steady him down, I know, because that’s the kind of young man I used to be. Children, you need children, they settle you down. He gave me the potatoes, anyway, and hoped at least I had a sweetheart who knew how to cook. I could tell him,” Ari announced happily, “that I do.”

  Max was not to be distracted. “So he wasn’t unfriendly?”

  “Not a bit. He was nice.”

  “Not frightened, either?”

  “Why should he be frightened of me? Neither was the cobbler. Boots Wallack? He didn’t believe me for a minute when I told him I was a reporter. He said I should go back where I belonged and stop slumming around. He could tell by my shoes, he said. I was no reporter and I was nobody looking for work, unless I wanted to hire him to make me a pair of fine boots. So I did,” Ari admitted.

  Max had to laugh. He guessed Ari really couldn’t act.

  “Riding boots,” Ari added. “The most expensive riding boots Great-Aunt’s money can buy.” And he laughed, too. Then he stopped. “But it was strange—even maybe suspicious? What neither of them would talk about. Boots Wallack, when I tried to ask, looked puzzled, the way you do when somebody doesn’t seem to understand something everybody knows. Does that make sense to you?”

  “It might,” Max said. “I’m not really sure, not yet, but it might.”

  “What are you getting mixed up in, Max?” Ari asked.

  “I’m just finding things out, for the Mayor. I’m not doing anything about anything. Do you think Gabrielle would be willing to talk to the butcher whose shop was—”

  “No.”

  Ari spoke so sharply that Max fell silent.

  “Not a chance. I don’t want you to even mention it to her, Max. I don’t like the smell of it and I don’t want her put at risk in any way. I may have failed to protect her before, but never again,” Ari announced—and at that moment he looked as formidable as any of his ancestors.

  “I won’t,” Max assured him. “You have my word.”

  Ari relaxed. “That’s all right, then. But you can let me know if there’s anything else I can do? Because … something wrong is obviously going on. Don’t you think?”

  Max did think. And he thought, further, that he was beginning to get an idea of just what it was.

  Grammie joined Max in the garden at midday that Sunday to tell him, “She’s a good businesswoman, that Annarinka. She has done so much with just the one cart, plus a kind of tent behind it for the actual shop. It’s all legal, she has the license. When her husband died, she took their savings to start up this little business. She’s not young, but she’s not old, either, and she manages well enough to be feeding, clothing, and housing two growing children. I have to admire her determination. Her enterprise. It’s not easy being a widow with children.”

  The soil around the plants had been tamped down by the rain. Max loosened it and Grammie trailed behind him, pulling up weeds, tossing them onto a pile in the grass.

  “It made me wonder,” she said.

  “Wonder what?”

  Max was uncostumed and had no part to play; he was only himself, Max Starling, an ordinary twelve-year-old. After he finished in the garden he planned to set up his easel and try getting the particular blue of the June sky, which was friendlier, somehow, than the blue of other months. But even out of costume, he was still the Solutioneer, so he was listening closely to everything Grammie said.

  “Wonder if I could have done something else when your grandfather died.”

  “Was there something else you wanted to do? I always thought—they always told me—that you liked being a teacher. I thought you said that, too. Wasn’t it true?” Max couldn’t imagine his grandmother not working with books, and reading. “Don’t you want to be the City Librarian?”

  For a long few minutes, Grammie weeded without answering. Then she gave a little soft laugh and said, “No, there was nothing and you’re right, I did, I can’t say I have regrets. But I may want to think of something else to do now. Like a little shop of my own, selling … I know a lot about books,” she said. “Annarinka told me, and this might interest you, that this isn’t the best time for anyone to open up a shop. She didn’t say why, and when I asked her what exactly she meant, she began to babble, the way people will when they’ve said something they didn’t mean to, telling me how summer is the best season for shops, with tourists coming to the lake, and especially when the royal family is in residence, was I going to watch the arrival? And the procession from the station out to The Lakeview, had I ever …? Just babbling. I pretended I didn’t notice.”

  “But you did notice,” Max said.

  Then Grammie looked up from her weeding and directly at her grandson, who looked so ordinary but—was it his unordinary childhood that made him this way?—understood more about human nature than many grown-ups. She wanted to make a report that would be useful to him, as if he were some library patron who had asked her for information, and not someone she had known since the first day of his life.

  “I bought a nice little bouquet, then, and we had a long talk about flowers, and gardens, and growing vegetables, and raising children alone. It was as I was about to leave that I asked her if she took her cart into shelter in the evenings, took down the tent. Why ever would I do that? she asked. The cart’s heavy, the tent’s clumsy, why would I want to move them every day? I said I’d read about her misfortune in the newspaper, so I thought she might be nervous about leaving them up when she went home at night. She lives in the old city, just three blocks from the gate, with an unmarried sister,” Grammie explained. “The shop is empty all night.”

  That was exactly what Max was interested in. “What did she say then?” he asked, and he thought he could guess at the answer.

  “It won’t happen again,” Grammie reported. “Saying that got her babbling again and she told me all about police patrols of the area and how she has good neighbors who keep an eye on everything, so she didn’t need to worry.” She returned to her weeding. “Is that what you wanted me to find out? Does it help? What do you think of my detecting skills?” she laughed. “Although I don’t see that I found out anything.”

  “Annarinka wasn’t worried about talking with you?” Max asked.

  “No, not a bit. Why should she be? I told her about the horticulture books we have in the library and she said she’d like to come look at them, so I expect to see her again,” Grammie told him, but Max wasn’t listening. He was now almost positive that he knew what was going on.

  Max ran his final test the next morning, a drizzly June Monday, at the butcher shop belonging to Bert Cotton.

  To begin, Max loitered in the street in front of the shop, as if admiring the shine of the new glass windows. Their wooden frames had not yet been painted the green of the doorway. He loitered, for everyone to notice, walking back and forth in front of the shop until the housewives had all gone off with their chosen cuts of beef and lamb and pork, their chickens and ducks and geese. When the shop was empty except for Bert Cotton himself, Max sauntered in. He was wearing gray trousers and a blue cotton jacket; he did not respectfully remove the cloth cap he had on his head. His boots needed a polish and he kept his hands in his pants pockets, jingling the few coins he carried. He was an
unemployed youth, loitering.

  The butcher was at his wooden table, cutting chops off the carcass of a pig. At the sight of Max, he fell still, the cleaver high in the air. Bert Cotton was a rangy man, who did not look strong enough to lift whole sides of beef onto the hooks in his storeroom, but he must have been because he had no sons to work with him, only daughters. His grip on the cleaver was relaxed, comfortable, familiar.

  He said nothing. He did not lower the cleaver onto the chopping block. His eyes narrowed with dislike, and distaste, and fear.

  Max smirked, the aristocratic suitor so sure Arabella would accept him that he did not even phrase his proposal with a please. He watched the butcher.

  Bert Cotton lowered the cleaver, but he did not put it down. He straightened up to his full height. “Your kind of vermin is not welcome in the shop,” he said, slow and clear. “Not you and none of your friends, neither. If you have something to say to me, you can go around to the back door like the rest of your kind.”

  Max smirked for a few more seconds, and then he turned around abruptly and left. He stopped to scrape sawdust off his soles on the doorsill.

  “I won’t have you in my shop,” the butcher called after him. “Nor your three friends, neither.”

  Suspicions confirmed, Max wound his way over to Eel Lane and then followed its curves until the alley came out onto River Way, not far downstream from the former city workhouse that Mr. Bendiff was transforming into B’s, a restaurant where a king would want to dine. On that section of road, beyond the warehouses but before the farms, there were small houses with spacious yards used as market gardens and animal pens. There, he entered Willson’s Dairy Shop and smiled at the young woman behind a table, beneath which large rounds of cheese were lined up on a shelf, and on which a scale waited. Pails and jugs for milk and cream stood behind her. Half a dozen thick rectangles of butter floated in a wide bowl where chunks of ice melted. The girl looked up. Max took off his cap and smiled, just a boy, any ordinary boy, with a few coins in his pocket and a thirst for good fresh milk, or maybe a hunger for cheese.