Mister Max: The Book of Secrets: Mister Max 2

  “May I have a taste of that, please?” he asked, all politeness.

  She cut a thin sliver of pale yellow cheese and offered it to him, on the wide knife blade. He took it, ate it, and smiled again. “That, too?”

  She gave him an equally thin slice of orange cheese, which he also ate.

  The shop bell rang and two women entered together, to buy cream and eggs and a packet of butter. They paid and left. The girl, with a glance at Max, put the coins into her apron pocket, not into a money box.

  No money box was in sight and he couldn’t see where it had been hidden.

  “I wonder if I can taste your milk?” he asked with the same pleasant smile.

  She looked as if she was beginning to doubt this smiling, but three more housewives came in, each carrying an infant, one after the other, to fill their pails with milk and buy chunks of cheese. From the open door behind the girl came the lowing of cows.

  When the shop was empty again, the coins once again added to her apron pocket, he asked, “The milk? Please?” And he smiled.

  “I’m not sure,” the girl said. Her brow was furrowed, now, with worry. She pushed the ends of her mouth up in what was supposed to be a friendly way and asked, “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “School? With summer so close? Why would I go there when the vacation is about to start? You do a good business here, don’t you?” he went on. “Enough, I’m sure, to give me a taste of your milk and have the loss count nothing.” He smiled.

  The girl twisted her hands in her pocket, muffling any clanking of coins. “I have to ask my pa. I’ll be just a minute.”

  “Don’t hurry on my account. I’m happy to look around,” Max assured her.

  He was not surprised that the dairyman himself burst into the shop almost immediately, wiping his hands on a cloth and not smiling. Like the girl, he had a short nose and very pink cheeks. “We don’t give samples of milk,” he said, before Max could utter a word. “We’re not a café, or restaurant, with clean glasses and cups to hand.”

  “You look to be doing well, even without the cups and glasses,” Max observed.

  “Looks can be deceiving,” the man answered sharply. “Can I sell you something? Or are you leaving?”

  Max took a long, slow, last look around the small shop and out through the open doorway, where two cows and a calf were visible. “I think I’ll be back,” he said. “At a later time.”

  The dairyman’s face grew wary and his mouth stiffened into a straight line. His fingers clutched at the cloth he held. But he did not say a word more and Max went out, back onto River Way.

  He walked through long grass beside the river now. This was the river down which his parents had sailed, back in April, to their unforeseen destination. Max wondered if there would ever be a letter from Andesia, and at that unhappy thought he looked across the road, to distract himself from worry.

  He had just come to a blacksmith’s shop where Milk Lane entered River Way. On impulse, he crossed the street and sauntered toward the wide doorway, studying the fire pit with its anvil, and the row of mallets and horseshoes hanging from nails on the wall behind it. Two men who waited in the yard beside their horses saw him, and then the blacksmith—his face grimed with smoke—looked up. The blacksmith didn’t set down the mallet with which he was pounding a curve of metal but he did stop hammering. He shifted his grip on the mallet handle. The boy at the bellows turned around when the hammering ceased. The horses stamped their feet. The only sound now was the stamping of hooves on the dirt yard and the soft hiss of flames. Everybody stared at Max.

  “You’ll be moving on,” the burly blacksmith called out to Max, and there was no mistaking the threat in his voice. “And what’re you gawping at?” he asked the boy at the bellows.

  The boy looked down to say, “Nothing, Master,” and then looked immediately back at the man’s face, afraid he hadn’t said the right thing. He began a vigorous pumping of the bellows at the same time the blacksmith said to Max, “I’m waiting, boy.”

  Max moved on.

  That afternoon, when he was alone in the house, Max wrote to the Mayor. He rode his bicycle into the New Town to deliver his letter by hand, wearing no disguise, just a cap. He was any boy on his way home from school, earning a coin by delivering a letter. It asked that the Mayor be at the stage door of the Starling Theater at seven on Wednesday evening, at which time the Solutioneer would present his conclusions.

  The Water Rat Jobs

  • ACT I •

  For Captain Francis, it was the last long morning of waiting and the fourth since he had written to this Solutioneer—Mister Max, whoever he was. The first morning, the Captain had turned eagerly at each sound of footsteps, and each time he’d been disappointed. The second, he’d waited confidently. By the third, he was beginning to wonder. What if the Solutioneer—and what did that mean, anyway?—what if the fellow was not interested in helping him?

  Captain Francis was worrying what he would do next, without the Solutioneer’s help, when the figure approached and stopped right in front of him. Captain Francis was so lost in his own thoughts that he was entirely surprised to see the man.

  The stranger was no taller than Captain Francis, who was not a tall man, and he was slender compared to the muscular, compact ferryboat captain. He was younger than Captain Francis expected, closer to Carlo’s age than his own, and he wore that dark overcoat despite the warm, overcast June morning. The white scarf hung loose around his neck, its long, tasseled ends dangling at his hips, and the same wide-brimmed black hat was set low on his forehead. He wore brown-tinted spectacles, even though at this hour and with the clouds covering the sky his eyes needed no protection from the sun’s glare. Had he worn glasses when he met with the Mayor? Captain Francis couldn’t be sure.

  The man was so freshly shaven his skin looked as smooth as a boy’s.

  “You came,” Captain Francis said—pretty stupidly, he thought. He smiled, foolishly he was sure, at his own clumsy greeting. You’d think he was the oddball, spooking around the city in a long black coat and aviator’s scarf and tinted glasses. Why should he be feeling such a fool when he was the one with a normal job and normal life?

  Why, Max wondered, should the ferryboat captain be so uncomfortable? Captain Francis flushed and jammed his hands in his jacket pockets, then jerked them out again. Just what was the problem he wanted help with? “You asked me to meet you,” Max reminded Captain Francis, pitching his voice lower than its normal range. He was grateful, once again, for all his years with the Starling Theatrical Company, for all the roles he had been called on to play. Taking pity on the man, he added, “What can I do for you, Captain?”

  “Let’s walk along the docks, so we can talk in private,” Captain Francis suggested, but immediately changed his mind. “No, let’s go this way.” And he turned into one of the alleys that ran away from the waterfront. “I don’t want my son to see me.”

  “Whatever you prefer,” said Max, in the voice of a man who could be patient.

  They walked in silence for ten or twenty paces, until Captain Francis spoke, without slowing his pace or turning to look at Max. “It’s my boy. It’s Carlo. Do you know Carlo?”

  “He’s not a boy,” Max pointed out.

  “I’m a father, he’s always a boy to me, and he’s bothered by something. Or he’s up to something. Or there’s something he doesn’t want me to know about, and that could be because he knows it’s wrong, or he thinks it will worry me. Or something—somebody?—is worrying him, threatening him? Threatening me?”

  “He’s a grown man,” Max said, because if a grown man wanted to keep a secret from another grown man, it seemed to Max that he should be able to. As long as nobody was going to be cheated, or hurt, or taken unfair advantage of, that is. Even children, he thought, should be able to have their own secrets.

  “I know, but I know him, and he’s not happy and that’s not like him. Carlo has always been a happy person, boy and man, but these days … He d
oesn’t laugh, he’s not cheeky the way he usually is, he almost never smiles. Even in our saddest hours, when we had just lost his mother, he didn’t seem to have lost hope, but now … He goes out at night, it’s not like him. None of this is like my boy,” Captain Francis said. “I’m worried about him.”

  “Have you asked him?” Max wondered.

  “He says there’s nothing wrong.”

  “What do you think it—?”

  Captain Francis stopped in his tracks and grabbed on to Max’s coat sleeve. “Can you find out what it is? So I can help him if he needs help.”

  “But what if—?”

  “If it really is none of my business, you don’t have to tell me. If it’s just … something ordinary, some girl has broken his heart or … But it could be that he doesn’t want to keep on working with me, working on The Water Rat with me, being a ferryman, don’t you see? He wouldn’t want to tell me that, but he should. I don’t know what he does when he’s gone, nights, probably he’s up to something on his afternoon off, too, but I just don’t—I’ll pay you whatever it costs, Mister Max. All I want to do is see that Carlo is all right.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” Max said, but he had to go on. “I’m just not sure—”

  “What do you charge?” the Captain asked, pulling a purse out of his pocket and opening it.

  “Wait.” Max held up his hand. Captain Francis fell still. He waited quietly and Max thought. He thought about what the Captain was asking, and about how Carlo had already written to him, so he already had some idea of what was troubling Carlo. He thought about how even without a meeting with Carlo he could probably answer the father’s questions—and he wondered if, in that case, it was honest to take money for, really, not doing anything.

  Captain Francis waited.

  Max thought. If he refused to take on the job, Captain Francis would probably turn to somebody else and a thing that was a simple problem might turn into a great boiling pot of misunderstandings and unintended betrayals. You couldn’t act in a lot of plays and not learn in how many different ways people could fall into misunderstandings, which led to unintended betrayals and general misery.

  So he decided to quote the usual rates to Captain Francis. “It’s twenty-five to start with and another twenty-five if I find a solution.”

  Captain Francis put the coins into his hand without hesitation. “You’ll start right away?”

  “I’ll start as soon as I can. There’s something else, another job … How will I let you know any results?”

  “Do you know Flora Bunda? The fishmonger on Stink Alley? She’ll bring any message to me; she’s a good friend.”

  To this, Max only nodded, because what could he possibly say?

  Captain Francis went on. “All I really want to know is, is there anything I can do? When there’s only you and your boy in the family, you worry,” he told Max.

  Max nodded. That was how Grammie probably felt about him, right now.

  “If you tell me I don’t have to worry, I’ll believe you,” Captain Francis said.

  That afternoon, a letter from Mister Max to Carlo Coyne was put into the ferryman’s hands by a dirty-faced fellow in overalls, wearing a wide straw hat, who just said, “For the son,” and walked away. The letter suggested a meeting, early that same evening, and asked Carlo to send a message if he couldn’t be there. The meeting place was the alley by the stage door entrance to the Starling Theater, which, the letter said, “is closed indefinitely, and that will allow us to talk privately and without interruption.” What the letter did not say was that in that place, at that hour, it would be difficult for Carlo to see the Solutioneer clearly.

  Max changed into the blue waistcoat and gray suit Inspector Doddle wore, fixed the pillow firmly over his stomach, and settled the round pork-pie hat on his head. He scuttled out of his own front door and rode his bike quickly around the corner. Grammie was probably in her kitchen, making supper, but he wanted to take no chances of being stopped and questioned. He leaned his bicycle against the wall in the alley on the other side of the theater, arriving early to position himself in the deeper shadows beyond the stage door. He didn’t have long to wait before Carlo Coyne arrived, a young man so distracted by his own worries that if Max had been disguised as himself, Carlo might well not have noticed.

  Carlo was built for strength, like his father, and he moved with a sailor’s agility. He rushed up to Max, taking off his cap and holding one hand out in greeting, and before Max—or Inspector Doddle—could say a word, the young ferryman was speaking.

  “Will you help me?” he asked, an eager expression on his face, desperation in his voice. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what I can do and I’m so worried about—”

  He stopped speaking and stared at Max so intently that Max was afraid he’d been recognized.

  Carlo, however, only went on speaking. “She’s friendless. There’s only me. But she won’t tell me anything.”

  Max shook the offered hand and waited to hear more, patient Inspector Doddle, not put out by the meaningless phrases the young man had spoken to him.

  Carlo rubbed at his temple, as if to organize his thoughts, and ran his fingers through his thick, curly hair. “I know I’m not speaking sensibly. It’s just that—I’d do anything, anything—to make her happy. But I don’t know how.”

  Max took out the little notebook in which Inspector Doddle wrote down the things he wanted to remember, or—more accurately—pretended that was what he was doing. As he fished the small pencil from his pocket, he thought how alike Carlo and his father were, both of them wanting to help someone out. Captain Francis was doing it for love, but Max hadn’t yet been told Carlo’s motive.

  He had a good guess, however, and Carlo’s next words confirmed it. “I’m not asking her to give me anything in return; I’ve told her over and over. But I don’t think she believes me. She knows how glad I’d be to marry her but not if she didn’t want to marry me, I promise you. She says she’ll never marry. She says she doesn’t know how long she’ll be in Queensbridge. She doesn’t know where she’ll go next. She has no home, no family, no hope or plan for any future. And she is such an extraordinary person, how could this be? What could have happened?” he asked, and then he put the question differently. “What could she have done? From which she wants to run away? Or who could she be hiding from?”

  Max thought of what his first question should be, and chose two. “What is the lady’s name? How did you meet her?”

  That the answers to those simple questions were not simple did not surprise him. Carlo Coyne was obviously in an emotional state, not capable of organized thought. “It was a Friday, the midmorning run, she boarded The Water Rat at the docks. It was a round-trip ticket she had. Late May it was, and cool on the water, but she wore only a thin sweater and she was standing out on the deck. Alone. She got off at Summer—that village below the Promontory. It starts getting ready in May for the holiday season and maybe she has work there? She didn’t come back on board until the last run of the day and she was waiting on the dock. I don’t know how long she’d been waiting. Still with a carpetbag. Still alone. I didn’t know how to approach her. Usually I’m easy with people but”—he ran his fingers through his hair again—“she isn’t like anyone else, she’s—Her name is Nissa. Just Nissa, she says, no other name, but what kind of a name is that? Have you ever heard it before? It’s not a name, is it? She has fine manners. She speaks like an educated person. I’m a simpleton next to her. She’s not highborn, I don’t think, but she should be. Or maybe she’s a lady or duchess in another country? She asked me if I knew of an inn where an unaccompanied female might sleep in safety, and I escorted her to The Dog’s Tooth, where the innkeeper’s wife was a friend of my mother’s and …”

  Max waited. Carlo seemed lost in thought, or in some memory, looking out into the fog. In the silence, Max thought he heard … What? Footsteps that suddenly stopped? In the little square across the street from the theater entrance?
At this hour, however, on a weeknight, when the theater was dark and silent, everybody had arrived home to their dinners in their own warm, well-lighted rooms. Had Carlo been distracted by something in the park? Max stared out toward the street. Was that a moving shadow? Or moving figures? Suddenly he was reminded of a glittering gold button. Suddenly he was afraid. He wasn’t used to feeling unsafe, not in the old city, not anywhere in Queensbridge. But these fires, and the vandalism, too, had made him just as uneasy as any of the shopkeepers he’d tried to talk with. He would be glad to hand over that problem to the Mayor tomorrow evening.

  To gather himself together, and get his mind focused on the present job, Max manufactured a theatrical cough, and cleared his throat, as he cleared his mind to learn whatever he could from Carlo’s rambling story. What he learned was: Nissa had found work in one of the great houses along The Lakeview, but Carlo did not know which one. She lived alone in the old city. She never talked about either her coworkers or her employers. She rode the ferry to Summer every morning and back to the docks every evening. She was given Sundays off, and only once had she agreed to share a picnic dinner.

  “We ate by the lake. There’s a field, just past the firehouse near Tassiter Lane. The men play soccer there some evenings but not Sundays, and it’s peaceful, and beautiful, the little towns across the lake, farmhouses just visible on the hillsides, the way the sun gilds the water. I roasted a chicken and we had grapes, too, with two of Gabrielle’s tarts. Nissa has a good appetite,” Carlo announced proudly, his face bright with the memory of the afternoon. Then his smile faded. “But …”

  After a long minute, “What does your father think?” Max asked.

  “What does my father have to do with it?” Carlo demanded. “She’s sworn me to secrecy—and I’m breaking my word to tell you, which I wouldn’t do if I weren’t so … so worried about her. Besides, my father—he saw her the first time and decided she looked like a gypsy. A gypsy, just because she’s a stranger and she carried a carpetbag. My father would think the worst because he doesn’t know her, doesn’t know her family, and once he makes up his mind … Gypsy is what he calls everybody who looks at all different, everybody he takes against, he said she must have bad blood, he said she has to be up to no good or why would she be alone. He doesn’t know I see her, and I’m not going to tell him. I hope I’m not wrong about telling you but … If I only knew that she was safe … She doesn’t have to let me love her, she doesn’t have to care about me in return, I only want her not to be so sad. And afraid, because I think she’s afraid. Can you help me, Mister Max?” Carlo asked again, peering into Max’s face.