“He’s Max Starling.” They all looked up at the back door, taken by surprise.
It was only Tomi Brandt, who leaned against the frame of the open door and grinned down into Max’s face to ask, “Surprised to see me, Eyes?”
Ari said, in an unexcited voice, “I think we’re all surprised to see you. But why do you call him Eyes?”
“Max Starling of the Starling Theater?” Pia asked, and glared at Max.
Tomi answered Ari. “It’s what we called him at school. Which he left in April, to go on tour with his parents, or that’s what he said. Because of his weird eyes,” he explained.
“Your parents are the actors?” Pia demanded. “You went to school with Tomi?”
“What are you doing here?” Max demanded.
“Can he be trusted?” demanded Grammie.
Only Ari was unperturbed. He got up to fetch a fifth chair from the dining room. “Have a seat,” he told Tomi, who did. “Be patient,” he advised Pia, who nodded. “This is up to Max,” he told them all. Then he turned to Max, and smiled in a calm and friendly fashion. “It’s up to you, Max. Don’t you agree, Mrs. Nives?”
“I guess,” Grammie admitted reluctantly. “I do see your point.” She looked across the table at Max, and waited.
Max had no idea how to make the choice between denying his secret, for the sake of the rescue of his parents, or telling these people the whole truth, for the sake of finding the solution he couldn’t find for himself for how to rescue them. It was not an easy choice, but he knew it had to be made and he knew it was his job to make it. He thought. They waited.
Secrecy was the armor his independence wore. However, like any armor, secrecy not only protected but also slowed him down and weighed him down, and if he fell to the ground he’d have trouble getting up, he knew, and if he fell into water he would drown, with the weight of secrecy to take him right to the bottom. But could he be useful to his parents without his secret? And what about the risk to the Solutioneer if even more people knew more about him? Then, what about his independence, would he lose that if he told?
How could he know, unless he tried it? And, he wondered, the questions following one another like the steps in the proof of a Euclidean theorem, was he truly independent if he needed to wear this armor?
Imagining himself without it, stripped of its protection, Max felt uneasy, and small, and in danger—as if he were once again locked in a small room facing a knife-wielding enemy and his parents also in danger half a world away. He felt panic enter his brain. But Max knew from recent experience what he had to do about panic, and how to do it. He stepped back, as far as he could get from his own feelings, to look at the choice only in relation to how it might help him help his parents. Because that was the difficult problem at the center of things, the really important thing, the only important thing. That was the problem that absolutely had to be solved.
Max knew he would have to be in Andesia to solve it, but he also had to admit that he and Grammie could not seem to come up with a workable plan. So on the one hand there was his secret identity, whether as Max Starling, abandoned boy, or as the Solutioneer made no difference, and on the other hand there was the trouble his parents were in and the need to get them out of it.
Really, looked at like that, he had no choice.
So Max told everybody the whole truth about himself, beginning at the invitation from the fake Maharajah of Kashmir and omitting almost nothing. He did keep those buttons a secret, because what use would it serve if everyone, especially Grammie, who was already worried enough, knew about them? Also, he didn’t reveal the amount and location of his father’s fortune, admitting only that they had the coins to finance any enterprise. He concluded by explaining the purpose of the lists he and Grammie had been quarreling over when Ari interrupted them.
When Max finished his story, there was a short silence as his listeners fitted the unknown pieces of information together with the ones they’d already guessed or been given. “You aren’t so old at all,” Pia eventually pointed out, sounding resentful, but Tomi was amused. “If I’d come by sooner, I’d have seen your sign.”
Ari, who had been listening closely and who had not only lost his own parents in South America but also knew something about suddenly becoming a person other than the one you started out being that day, just pulled the papers over in front of him, to consider what Max and Grammie had already thought of. He had just one question. “Is there anyone else, anyone at all, who knows or suspects?”
“Joachim knows; he’s the only one. I take painting lessons with him.”
“My mother has one of his pictures,” Pia announced, “but it’s just some flower.”
“Can you trust him?” Ari asked.
Max almost laughed. “Yes, and besides, he doesn’t know exactly what’s happened to them. He knows that I’m living alone, that’s all. He’s the one who warned me about what could happen if anyone official found out about me, but, really, you have to understand, Joachim’s an artist. He only pays attention to painting. He probably doesn’t even remember what he knows.”
Ari had decided. “Then let’s put our minds to this. But Max has to have the final say. Are we agreed?” He glanced at Grammie and one look at her face made him speak sternly, “You won’t agree to that, Mrs. Nives?”
Grammie shook her head vigorously. “No, no, that’s not it, I was … What it is, is, I never saw you like this before, in a diplomatic mode. I think I’m finally understanding you. You really are the Baron Barthold.”
“Not yet,” Ari said. “Not without Gabrielle and even then not for years I hope. But yes, I probably have to be, sooner or later. I can’t escape the title. But that’s not what matters right now.” And he passed the sheets of paper to Tomi and Pia. “See what you think.”
It was no surprise that Pia was the first to make a suggestion. “We could be a band of fortune-telling gypsies. Write it down, Max, you should write down everything and you already know I can be a good fortune-teller. Or we could be a theatrical troupe.”
Max wrote down both ideas, but he pointed out, “Someone there knows my parents are really actors and that person also knows that I exist. A theatrical troupe would rouse suspicions.”
“We could say we wanted to open a school, in Apapa,” Grammie offered.
“What about a whole family of refugees, not just one person?” Pia asked.
“Why do you keep suggesting things that require a lot of people?” Max asked, although he thought he could guess.
Grammie ignored the interruption. “Ari and I already know how to teach, and Max could offer art and drama classes.”
“But I could never pass myself off as a teacher,” Tomi objected.
“Athletics,” Grammie answered, without hesitation, as if it had already been decided that Tomi would travel with them.
As far as Max knew, nothing had been decided and, besides, wasn’t it supposed to be up to him?
Grammie told him, “There’s no sense in trying to think freely if you don’t include everything.”
“A group of philanthropists?” Ari suggested. “A group of wealthy people who want the native people to have better lives. Who build schools and make sure there is clean water. Who encourage them to produce items they can sell outside of their own country, but things they can make in their own homes. They raise llamas, don’t they? In the mountains. Or is it alpacas? They produce wool.”
“Can anybody here weave?” Pia asked. “Because I can’t. I can’t even knit.”
“There’s shearing and carding and spinning and dyeing, too,” Grammie added. “We’d have to learn all that and we just don’t have the time.”
“How about a scientific expedition?” Ari asked, adding, “Maybe mapping the mountains?”
“Cartographers,” Grammie named them. “Does anyone know anything about surveying?”
Nobody did, but Max added it to the list, anyway. Grammie was right. Ideas produced ideas, like scattered apple seeds grew apple tr
ees that produced apples that had in their cores more seeds to scatter.
Tomi spoke up. “It sounds to me like we should be a group of mercenaries, come to fight for whoever pays us the most money, because unless we actually go into battle nobody will know what we do or don’t know about it.” He turned to Grammie. “You could be the camp cook and you”—he turned to Pia—“could be the drummer boy, and I could be the expert in starting fires and putting them out, Ari would be the captain of course, and Max could be an ordinary soldier. Mercenaries don’t need much by way of costumes.”
They didn’t say anything about this, although Max dutifully wrote it down, including every suggested role.
Ari’s next idea, like his first two, was of a kind that would benefit a small nation and its citizens. “Could we be a scientific expedition from one of the international societies? To catalog flora and fauna, and also to learn how they farmed and suggest improvements in methods of cultivation. We could study their bridges, and how they build houses, while we take notes about plants and wildlife. Probably, they have things to teach us, as well.”
Max waited for Grammie to point out to Ari, as she had so quickly to him, that they would have to spend at least a year studying these various subjects before they could hope to pass themselves off as scientists, but Grammie was just staring at Ari. She didn’t say a word.
“I think gypsies is the best idea,” Pia announced. “You don’t have to know anything special and you can look ragtag, and I can learn tarot cards in about ten minutes, I bet, or at least within—”
Grammie interrupted. She started to speak, slowly, as if the idea was just taking shape in her mind, like egg whites slowly taking shape in the frying pan. “If,” she said.
“I was talking,” Pia complained. “I was saying—”
“A diplomatic mission,” Grammie went on. “If there was a diplomatic mission from King Teodor to the King of Andesia …” Her speech resumed its normal rate. “Diplomacy is a guaranteed introduction into the court, and, Ari? You’d be the head of it, like an ambassador, and besides a secretary of some kind, your diplomatic party could be as large or small as we wanted. And, Max?” She turned her attention to her grandson, who was about to remind her that they were his parents, he should be the ambassador, it was his decision. “You don’t want the leading role. You want to play a minor part, so you’ll be free to wander, to be too unimportant for anyone to pay much attention to, but with a known identity so you’re not mysterious and maybe dangerous. You could talk to whoever you want to talk to and nobody would notice if you were young and beardless because … because an ambassador’s private secretary, like the cabin boy on a ship, is often a young relative, a cousin, a nephew. It would be perfect, if Ari will do it, if Ari asks the King—”
Grammie suddenly stopped speaking. It was the look on Ari’s face. “What?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
Ari held his hands up, palms outward, to say, “It’s not possible.”
Grammie sighed. “It would be a lot to ask, I guess. I can understand that you don’t feel you can leave Gabrielle again, especially now. So it looks like our best bet is the rich old lady and her grandson, Max,” she said.
“It’s not that, Mrs. Nives,” Ari said. He brushed his red hair back and leaned toward her, across the table. His handsome face was troubled. “That’s not it; it’s not that I don’t want to help. It’s because … the royal family shuns the Barons Barthold. They refuse to have anything to do with the family.” He could see in their faces that some explanation was needed. “The past Barons have been not only cruel, and rapacious, and insatiably greedy, they’ve been lawless, too, when they could get away with it. Sometimes, everybody knew they had committed crimes but they were too powerful to be brought to justice, or too rich, or they bribed judges, or—the Barons Barthold have been famously corrupt. The royal house can’t legally take away the title or the lands, because they’ve never been proved traitors. But Teodor can refuse to have anything to do with us, and he does. I don’t blame him,” Ari concluded.
“Your great-aunt isn’t a criminal,” Max objected. “She’s not cruel, either; she’s just … She’s just not at all nice, is all.”
“Her father was vicious, however, and his father before him, and his father before him,” Ari pointed out. “If you think about it from the King’s point of view, this is the only way he can make it clear to all the other powerful and wellborn people, who like being privileged, that you don’t get off scot-free even if you can get away with things.”
“But your great-aunt didn’t do—”
“Think about it, Max,” Ari said. “She hasn’t returned the Cellini Spoon, has she? It’s been weeks since you found it for her and she knows that it belongs to Teodor, or at least to the Royal Museum. She knows it’s stolen goods.”
Max was silenced.
“I’m sorry,” Ari said, and Max believed him. “If you send me to the King to ask for diplomatic credentials to present to a foreign government? Even if he’d receive me, which he wouldn’t, he’d never believe me. The plan would fail before it even began.”
“What if my father were to promise the King that you’re not like the rest of them?” Pia asked.
Nobody wanted to say it, so it was Grammie who had to. “Your father is a fine man, and remarkably successful, but he’s not someone the King would grant an interview to. Except for the Bartholds, nobody else around the lake is … significant enough to have a claim to the King’s attention, not while he’s on his family holiday. He might have to entertain other heads of state while he’s here, and he’ll be surrounded by his most intimate courtiers, but nobody else gets near him.”
Grammie sighed again, and Pia said, “That makes gypsies the best,” but Tomi objected, “Soldiers can always find work.”
“I know something about science,” Grammie told Max, as if they were alone in the room. “We could go as amateur botanists. I’d gather specimens and you’d paint them. If I were a wealthy, eccentric old woman, it might work. Nobody is surprised by anything old women take it into their heads to do,” she pointed out.
Max nodded, maybe agreeing with Pia, maybe with Tomi, maybe with Grammie, but it was just something to do to keep people distracted while, inside of his head—as if he were the director of a Starling Theatrical Company production—the drama began. The proud, handsome, redheaded Ambassador, shining in a red jacket and glittering with medals, an elegant, aristocratic man, so important a personage that he traveled not only with a personal secretary and a bodyguard, but also his own cook/housekeeper to arrange his every comfort. Such a man would command attention whenever he came on the scene. All eyes would be on him, wondering if he was to be feared, to be flattered, to be trusted, wondering what his secret mission might be, mistrusting the interest a king in a distant country might have in their small nation. While this Ambassador was strutting about in the spotlight at the center of the stage, being charming and ominous, his secretary would be in the shadows, unnoticed. Grammie was absolutely right about that. The secretary could go anywhere, could be doing anything, talking to anyone. This unimportant person would have a freedom the major players in larger roles could not hope for. This insignificant person might actually be able to do something.
But the Ambassador had to be genuine. He couldn’t be a costume, a pretense, an act. He needed the King’s seal on his papers, the letters of introduction, the state credentials. And if Ari couldn’t ask for these …
What about Max? Why couldn’t Max explain everything to King Teodor, or even, maybe, could he manufacture some urgent reason for the King to send a diplomatic mission to Andesia? But how would Max find his way into the King’s presence?
Well, wasn’t he the Solutioneer?
“Max?” Grammie asked. “Why aren’t you saying anything? Don’t you agree?”
“Maybe,” Max said. “Maybe I do, if I have to. But before that, there’s something I want to try …”
“What?” asked Pia. “What do you wa
nt me to do? I can help, can’t I?”
“We don’t have much time,” Grammie warned him. “It’ll take weeks to get there, remember, and we don’t know just what’s going on, what that Balcor has planned. We don’t have any time at all.”
“I know,” Max said, and he did. But this sense of urgency, the need to hurry, to be doing something it didn’t matter what, didn’t make for good planning. He hoped to keep urgency in its place, which was in the background, causing as little disturbance as possible. “I know.”
Grammie sighed a third time, in frustration. Then she looked at him more carefully. After all, she was the person here who knew him longest and best. She could tell when he was hatching some plan. “All right,” she agreed reluctantly. “I’ll wait.”
“How can you give up so easily?” demanded Pia. “And I know gypsies make a better disguise than eccentric old ladies.”
Max defended his grandmother. “How can you be so stubborn?” he asked Pia, before explaining to her, “I’m thinking.” He explained it to Tomi and Ari, too, because none of them knew him as well as Grammie did. “I’m solutioneering. That’s my job and I’m good at it.” He rose from the table and announced, “I’m going to paint.”
“Now?” they objected.
“And think,” he said. He had to think of something, and fast. He didn’t want to still be in Queensbridge when the next gold button arrived. “Alone,” he told them, because that was the way he worked best, at the start of a job. “Can we talk about this later? In a day or so?” he asked. He was sure that the worst way to try to rescue his parents would be to do it on his own, and he knew he could trust these people, sitting around his kitchen table and looking up at him.
They all watched him, waiting. Grammie had been with Mister Max all along, Pia had glommed on to him almost as soon as he’d laid eyes on her, Ari had recently become an active ally, and Tomi had been on his tail for weeks: Max accepted that he was no longer acting alone. Together, he thought, they might just be able to do it. Together, they’d already shown they could make the plan and execute it, write the play and perform it.