Mister Max: The Book of Secrets: Mister Max 2

  “Well,” answered Max, the Important Banker seeing a clever way to turn things in his own favor, “maybe so that I can offer you a better deal if you let me out?”

  Colly laughed, sharp and blue, like the icy waters of the lake in winter. “That’s not the kind of person I am. And if that’s the kind of person you are, I’d be trading in Kip for someone just as bad. Or maybe worse. At least I know what Kip is like.”

  “You can’t blame me for trying,” Max said, although clearly Colly did.

  “Besides which, I told Kip I was in with him. I gave him my word. Unless he decides to kill you, of course,” he reminded the prisoner.

  Colly had nothing more to say.

  Max shifted his position, leaning back against the door, to think. Deep within the empty building, the quiet was complete.

  Max considered the plaster walls. He stared up at the window. He studied the faucet curved over the sink and the short chain hanging down above the toilet. Then, playing the only role possible at that moment, which was the Absentminded Professor, who was always thinking his own thoughts whatever might be going on around him, he wondered how he would go about painting a skyscape of what was visible through the window, how to paint the glassy sheen so that anybody who saw the picture, even without a wooden frame to give them the clue, would know that they were looking through a pane of dirty glass at the sky over a city. The bathroom was on the same side of the theater as the private entrance, beside which Max’s bicycle still waited—or so he hoped; the bicycle was about his only chance for escape, if he could get that far—and it was closed in by the building next door, so that there was, really, no sky visible, just light from the sky. It was a real painting problem.

  After what felt like a long while—although he couldn’t be sure—he tired of that subject and turned his attention to the Pythagorean theorem. He held all the different steps of the proof together in his imagination. He constructed squares on the sides of a right triangle, visualizing the parallelograms and triangles, and then he recited the necessary proofs of congruence to himself, one after the other, deducing the relationship of the three lines of the original right triangle and ending with a silent, victorious QED: a2+b2=c2.

  Then he wondered—for how long, he couldn’t tell—how he might get himself out of this situation, or if all he had to do was wait. The worst thing would be the hunger, but there were worse things than hunger, and Max did not want to think about them. Although he wondered if he was foolish not to.

  Of course, this made him think about his parents, and their journey to Andesia. How had they traveled? Had they been prisoners or accomplices? Had they wanted him with them or had they been glad that he was safe, as they imagined, at home?

  Max didn’t want to think about his parents. He didn’t know what to think about them.

  If it had not been summer, he could have made an accurate guess at the time by the quality of light in the window, but he only knew that it was coming up on four-thirty in the afternoon by the sounds of Blister arriving. Blister’s steps stopped and he asked, in a breathless and colorless, watery voice, “Am I late? Don’t be angry.”

  “You’re in good time.”

  “Kip said I was going to be late.”

  “You know Kip,” Colly’s calm blue voice said. “He likes to—”

  Blister interrupted him. “If it wasn’t for Kip, I’d be dead meat. For the crabs.”

  “That was years ago.”

  “I’ve seen meat the crabs got at,” Blister persisted. “And he lets me live in his yard. And he gives me food when he can. You shouldn’t say bad things about Kip.”

  A silence greeted this remark.

  Blister said, “Not to me anyway.”

  More silence.

  “Even if it’s true, but where else would I go?”

  “It’s a big world.”

  “He’d find me.” Of this, at least, Blister sounded confident. “He doesn’t think you’re a good gang member anymore, Colly.”

  Colly laughed. “I never was. But thanks for the warning. I’ll watch my back.”

  Max heard footsteps go along the corridor again, but this time the person was walking away. He thought he heard Blister lean up against the other side of the door, and he stayed seated, listening hard. He pictured a boy out there, alone in a big, empty building, the empty rooms along the corridor, the empty stage stretching unseen in front of him, and beyond that was row after row of empty seats, with the high dark space over the stage, lights dangling down … Emptiness closed in around Max, but it was a familiar emptiness. He could imagine how it might feel to Blister.

  The clever young reporter in The Worldly Way had the trick of asking questions that threw people off balance by suggesting that he knew more than they wanted him to. So Max asked, “How long ago was it that Kip saved you, Blister?”

  “I never said,” Blister’s voice protested from the other side of the door.

  “But what happened?” Max asked.

  “I can’t remember. I never remembered. I was little and he pulled me out of the water and he says I didn’t have a name, but that was a long time ago, years and years. But I must have had a name, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe not, if someone threw you into the river,” Max said, as unsympathetic as the young reporter had been to Important Banker Hermann, who was trying to persuade him to conceal the truth of things, or scare him into cooperating, or bribe him to not write the story. “But why did Kip pull you out?”

  “They wouldn’t let him have a dog. They said he was too mean so he said he’d have me instead. At first, he hid me in the cellar but then I got to live in the shed because they washed their hands of him,” Blister reported. “Like they washed their hands of me,” he explained. “In the river.”

  “So where am I now?”

  One of the other things the reporter was good at was switching topics so suddenly that the Banker had given away one of his secrets before he realized it.

  But Blister had been told what to do and he did what he was told. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “Kip doesn’t want me to talk to you,” he added, sounding so watery and pale that Max actually felt sorry for him.

  Max leaned against the locked door, listening and thinking, and after a while he asked, “Did Kip say that I can’t talk to you?”

  Blister took a minute to think about that. “No,” he finally answered, and his voice had a watery smile in it. “He didn’t, did he?”

  Max had been raised in the theater and knew the power of words. “I could tell you a story,” he offered. “Or sing you a song or recite a poem for you.” If he could get Blister to relax his guard again, he might learn something to his advantage. At the moment, that was the only thing Max could think of to do, the only plan he could come up with.

  It took no time for Blister to decide. “A story,” his voice said. “With animals in it.”

  “Wild animals or tame ones?”

  “Animals that live in a shed,” Blister said.

  Max chose “The Bremen Town Musicians,” and he used all the dramatic skills he’d learned. His voices weren’t very good, he knew, but his descriptions were—of the four animals and how each came to be fleeing for his life from a master who planned to get rid of him for being old and useless, of the little house where the robbers lived, and of the great fright the four animals gave to the robbers. “After that, the robbers were never seen in the forest again,” Max concluded, “and the four friends lived there together for all the years that were left to them.”

  After a long silence, Blister’s voice said, “I like that. Do you know one about another dog?”

  The only story Max could think of was Aesop’s fable about the dog in the manger. This struck him as an uninteresting choice but Blister enjoyed it. “He could have slept under the manger. Or he could have let the ox eat and then jumped back up to sleep on the straw that was left. Couldn’t he?” There was much less hesitation this time before he requested a story about birds, and Max rel
ated the one he had read recently in his study of Greek myths, the sad tale of Icarus, the winged boy, which included not only Daedalus, the father (“I don’t have one,” said Blister, his voice even more colorless and watery than usual), but also the Minotaur trapped in his labyrinth (at which Blister giggled, before suggesting that he was going to build one of those for Kip and then he’d be the one bringing bread and leaving it in the doorway).

  “A cow,” Blister asked next, without hesitation.

  “A cow?” Max racked his brains but had no idea. “Why a cow?”

  “They’re nice,” Blister explained. “I saw a cow at the dairy shop. She had her baby with her.”

  The only cow Max could remember at that moment, in that situation, was in a nursery rhyme. “Hey diddle diddle,” he recited, echoing the warm and gentle voice in which his own mother used to tell him nursery rhymes, “the cat and the fiddle. The cow jumped oooo-ver,” he said, dragging out the O sound and—since he couldn’t make the gesture with his hands—moving his chin up and around in an arc, “the moon.”

  When he’d finished the short poem, Blister asked immediately, “Again.”

  The voice from beyond the door asked “Again” and “Again” so many times that Max—after reciting for the twelfth or perhaps the twentieth time, he had lost count, “and the dish ran away with the spoon”—refused to repeat it.

  He waited to hear Blister’s response to the refusal.

  The voice coming through the door was so faint and watery he couldn’t distinguish the words.

  “What?” he asked. “What did you say?”

  “I said, I remember. I remember that cow. From before.”

  “Before what?” Now Max was simply curious.

  “Before Kip. I wasn’t sure … I couldn’t remember … There really was a before Kip, wasn’t there?”

  Max was about to tell Blister that of course there was a before Kip and (hoping that after all these stories the boy would want to do what Max asked) to suggest that Blister unlock the door and allow Max to take him to an after Kip, when something thumped in the corridor.

  The floors in the theater were wooden and footsteps thundered well on them. Max didn’t need Blister’s cry of “I’m sorry, Kip! Don’t—!” to know what was going on.

  “I knew I couldn’t trust you,” Kip’s purple voice said. “I’m disappointed in you, Blister. I’m going to have to do something bad to you. I don’t want to but you’ve made me have to. To help you remember to do as you’re told. Again.”

  “I’ll remember, Kip, I will. Honest, I promise. He tricked me,” Blister said.

  Kip ignored the other boy. “I’m going to be sure everything’s as it should be in there,” he said, and the key turned in the lock.

  Max backed away, toward the throne. Maybe he could reach up and pull down so hard on the chain that the water box above would rip out of the wall and surprise Kip enough that Max could get through the door before Kip realized it. Maybe.

  The door was pulled open and a figure looked in it.

  Kip was the big, broken-nosed whistler, not the corn-yellow stocky boy. He stood in the doorway and smiled at Max while Blister—his dark hair sticking out wildly—crouched against the wall opposite, his legs pulled up protectively against his chest.

  Kip looked ordinary enough. He wasn’t a giant or a monster. He wore his brown hair short and he had round dark eyes. His smile showed a lot of teeth and it seemed frank and friendly, until you noticed the one snaggletooth, which made you look more carefully into the brown eyes to see how they gleamed with meanness, waiting, watching, close on each side of the broken nose. Kip had a dangerous look to him. You couldn’t guess what this boy might do.

  Kip was scary and Max was frightened.

  The boy saw this, and it pleased him. Without taking his eyes off Max, he said to Blister, “I told you not to talk to him.”

  Max watched Blister. The boy looked at his knees to say, “Wasn’t. I wasn’t, Kip.” Then he looked up to see how this had been received, cringing a little in anticipation of its having been received badly. He looked down again, to tell his knees, “It was him talking to me,” and looked up again. Kip gave him a quick, sharp glance, and Blister backed down. “I’m really sorry. I won’t ever again.”

  “Go away, Blister. Go back to your kennel and wait for me.” Kip turned to Max but continued to threaten, “It’ll be the worse for you if you’re not there when I’m through here.”

  Blister didn’t look at Max, or at Kip, either. He scrambled up and skittered away down the dark corridor.

  Kip’s smile didn’t change. “I don’t know anything about you,” he said to Max. He put his big right hand into his jacket pocket and closed it around something.

  Probably, Max thought, the knife. “Where am I?” he demanded desperately. Maybe he could get Kip talking.

  It seemed he might have guessed right. Kip’s smile widened. “It’s our hideout—a place nobody but us knows about,” he said. “So no one will ever find you here. There’s no hope for you. No use in not telling me what I want to know.” Lorenzo Apiedi at that point would stand up straight and boldly defy the tyrant, Max knew, but something told him that it was smarter to let Kip see how frightened he was so that maybe Kip wouldn’t come at—

  Then an idea came to Max, came fully formed and complete, and he didn’t even want to think about it.

  He lowered his head and ran straight at Kip. Like a bull, or a goat, he rammed his head against the larger boy’s chest. He would take Kip by surprise, knock him over, and be running down the corridor before Kip figured out what had happened. Max knew this building; he had at least two directions to go off in and three doors to escape through. If he could just get to his bicycle, he could get away.

  In his mind, he had already wormed past a surprised and stumbling Kip and started down the hallway when he felt the thump of his weight jammed into Kip’s stomach and the other boy’s instinctive thrust of both hands, to push Max back, off, away.

  It was Max who stumbled, surprised, and lost his footing, and cracked his head against the hard porcelain of the throne.

  He was knocked out for only a few seconds, but he had been the dead body at the end of The Queen’s Man, the murderous younger brother slain in a sword fight by the Queen’s spy, as played by William Starling, often enough to know how to stay limp and take shallow breaths, shallow and invisible breaths. Max knew how to play dead and that was what he did.

  Although he couldn’t help but wish he’d landed facedown.

  “Stupid git,” Kip muttered.

  Max didn’t move.

  After a few seconds, Kip spoke again. “You’re not fooling me.”

  Max didn’t move. He was dead meat, he was a cooked noodle, he was a cloak hanging on a hook.

  “I’ll bring you back to life,” Kip said.

  Max heard heavy steps coming close. He tried to think of what to do if the boy decided to test Max with a sudden jab of the knife, to force Max to react. But Kip kicked him instead. Hard. In the hip.

  This was so unexpected that Max didn’t have time to react to the blow. He might have been surprised, but the shock of the blow froze him. He continued being dead.

  Then came a long silence. He sensed Kip, standing above him. He could feel the boy’s presence, hear his breathing. Sometimes, Kip uttered a few words, thinking aloud: “—stupid Blister’s fault,” and “—can’t be dead, I didn’t do nothing,” and, finally, “I’ll see better in the morning.” Then there was the sound of heavy footsteps and the door, closing. The key turned in the lock.

  For a long time after that, Max lay unmoving.

  The Mayor’s Job

  • ACT II •

  SCENE 3 ~ HELP! HELP!

  All Max could feel was relief that he wasn’t lying on the floor spouting blood from a knife wound. That had been a real possibility, Max knew. Blister’s fear was only one sign of what Kip was capable of. The men who owned the shops, that butcher for instance, would never have b
een so frightened by Colly and certainly not by Blister. Most of the time, when people are that cowed into submission, there’s a good reason.

  That there are people in the world who have no sympathy for others, who can’t seem to imagine how it feels to be helpless and weak, Max knew. He also knew that there are people who enjoy being unkind and even cruel. He knew this not only from his own experience but also from the plays he had performed in. His father often claimed that the villain was a more interesting role than the hero, more complicated and bold, but those were villains like Robin Hood, as much heroes as villains in their own stories, or Important Banker Hermann, who only behaved badly around money. Villains like Kip—and Max suspected that in real life, most villains were closer to Kip than Robin Hood—you could neither admire nor enjoy nor sympathize with. Certainly, you never wanted to meet up with them and have to worry that they would take out their knives—for no good reason, because what good reason could there be for slicing someone up?—and cut pieces off you. Or kick you, when you were lying unconscious on the floor.

  For a long time, Max enjoyed that feeling of relief, of not lying in his own blood with no help in sight. No help in sound, either, he thought, and laughed at his own joke, and sat up.

  The light at the high window was still bright, so he knew it wasn’t much past suppertime, which meant that he wouldn’t yet have been missed. No one would notice his absence until Grammie gave up waiting at a table where his seat was, once again, empty. He wouldn’t blame her if she thought he’d gone off somewhere, again, breaking his word to her. She would be as angry at him as worried about him. Max couldn’t guess what the Mayor and Officer Torson would think when he hadn’t gotten in touch with them as he had said he would. He could only hope that they would suspect something.