He looked up.
“I’m glad to see you like the dessert, but isn’t Pia your official assistant? Why not send her to one of the places? See what she can find out.”
Ari agreed. “It could be that someone official makes people nervous. You know, the way when you see a policeman, even if you know you haven’t done anything wrong, you still feel guilty?”
“I don’t,” Grammie said.
“You’re not like most people,” Ari laughed. He turned to Max. “Pia could do it and she’s about the opposite of a city official. She’s just a girl, and a schoolgirl at that.”
Max considered the idea, which wasn’t a bad one except that Pia was already pushing her way into his solutioneering business and he didn’t want to encourage her to push any harder. “Why couldn’t I be a schoolboy?”
Grammie was quick to point out the risk of that. “Not if you want people to keep thinking you’re off with your parents.”
“I’ll ask Pia,” Max grumbled, because of course Grammie was right. “She’s going to want to wear Adorable Arabella’s dress,” he predicted gloomily.
This prediction proved accurate, which gave Max no satisfaction. Being right meant he had another quarrel with Pia. “If I look like a grand lady, maybe even a countess, won’t they pay more attention to me?” she asked.
“It’s not attention I’m after. It’s information,” Max said. They had met, as usual, at Gabrielle’s ice cream shop. On this warm June afternoon they were enjoying bowls of ice cream. Pia had three scoops of different flavors, strawberry, pistachio, and lemon; Max had three scoops of chocolate, covered with rich chocolate sauce. There was plenty of time for quarreling as they ate.
Pia reminded him, “I was perfect as a lady when we scared off Madame Olenka.” She had loved the dress, its purple panels, the importance of its lace. Also, she had enjoyed playing the role of a woman of mystery.
“This is entirely different,” Max told her.
“How different can it be?” she objected.
“What’s wrong with you today?” he demanded. Then he asked, “Is something wrong?”
She shook her head and her pale pigtails slapped gently against her cheeks. She glared down at her ice cream. “Not one thing is wrong,” she muttered.
Max couldn’t help it. He laughed. “I can tell.”
Pia glared at him, her blue eyes as fierce as her father’s. Then she grinned and admitted, “I liked being Adorable Arabella.”
“This time I need you to be yourself. Or, almost yourself,” he specified. “Remember the first time we were in here and you talked with Gabrielle and she told you things about herself? Things she hadn’t told me although I met her before you.”
Pia took a satisfied spoonful of pistachio. She remembered.
“I’m hoping these people will talk to you like she did. Just you, just a girl, nobody at all worrisome or dangerous, just normal and not a bit important. I know,” he said quickly, “you are important, everybody is, even children, but you know what I mean.”
“I don’t care about being important,” she pointed out, but not crossly.
“These are the two shops I want you to visit. They’re both in the old city. I don’t know if your father’s car …”
Pia agreed. “It’s too fancy, too noticeable. I’ll take my bike. I’ll wear a summer dress, a cotton print, and sandals. But, Max? What would a girl be doing in these places?” She looked at the slip of paper he’d given her. “Why these two?”
“There was a fire at the bakery—”
“Bakery ovens are hot. And they’re probably kept hot almost all night and day,” Pia pointed out. “A fire would always be possible, wouldn’t it?”
“It could be there’s nothing in it. That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Max repeated patiently. “There’s been a lot of this kind of trouble recently, a rash of fires, and vandalism.”
Pia nodded. She read the newspapers.
“All in the old city, or once, right beyond a gate. Every single one involving a small shop. And,” he concluded with the strongest argument, “there hasn’t been one complaint made to the police.”
“It’s suspicious,” Pia agreed. “My father has dogs on the restaurant site although nothing’s ever happened there.”
“That’s suspicious, too, isn’t it?” Pia opened her mouth to object, but Max continued. “Think about it. A big, empty building? People who break into places just to do damage? Arsonists who like to start fires? That would have been a perfect place for them, don’t you think? All those piles of wood, and pipes, and window glass?”
“You’re right,” Pia said. “That is pretty curious.” Her tone of voice told Max his assistant was now entirely on the job. “I see,” she said, and then, “But how am I going to get them to talk to me? And exactly what do I ask?”
“I don’t know. Mostly I want to find out if they’re hiding something, some information. If they’re keeping something back. If so, then”—Max stopped himself from saying my but he wasn’t about to say our—“the next step is to find out what it is.”
“It’s very suspicious,” Pia announced with satisfaction. She scraped at the edge of her bowl, to get the last of the ice cream. She licked at the back of her spoon, thoughtfully, and looked to the rear of the shop, where Gabrielle was filling a big glass platter with fruit tarts. She said, “I suppose a girl might have a mother who was particularly fond of pastries and she could be looking for something new to surprise her mother with, couldn’t she? For a birthday treat, maybe.”
Max’s imagination kept pace with Pia’s. “And she would have heard about all the troubles in the old city …”
“And she’d be curious …”
“And she would ask the baker about …”
“Exactly,” Pia said. “But what would a girl, a schoolgirl I mean, be doing in a millinery shop?”
“Milliners sell hats, don’t they?” Max asked.
Pia stared at him. “Do you see me wearing a hat? Did you ever?”
She was making Max cross again. “This is serious, Pia.”
“A milliner makes fancy ladies’ hats. My mother always goes to R Zilla for her hats, because she likes having something different from everyone else. R Zilla makes only one of each of her designs. They’re very expensive. Even my father notices the R Zilla bills. I don’t like most of my mother’s hats,” Pia admitted, “but a couple look good on her. And all of them get noticed.”
“Couldn’t you be looking for a birthday present there, too?” Max suggested. “You could be a girl trying to find something special for her mother, couldn’t you?”
“I could.” Pia was doubtful. “But should I be the same thing twice in a row?”
“And”—Max did not let himself be distracted—“if you were someone whose mother might buy a lot of hats if she liked the one you found for her, then the shopkeeper would be happy to talk with you.”
“That might work,” Pia decided. “I can see how to do that. I think I’ll wear my blue dress with flowers and just a band of lace on the collar, and a hair band. With my hair loose I look more like that kind of girl,” she explained. “That would be the right way to look, don’t you think? And I should be—not shy, just … modest. A well-brought-up girl, don’t you think? You remember that blue dress, don’t you?”
Of course Max didn’t, but he wasn’t foolish enough to tell Pia. “That sounds like just the right costume. I want you to write everything down after you leave each shop so nothing gets forgotten,” he told her.
“You don’t have to act like I don’t know anything.” Pia was impatient at his lack of faith in her intelligence, impatient about the way he kept ignoring her cleverness in dealing with Madame Olenka, impatient to be gone and begin her assignment.
“So we’ll meet again tomorrow?” Max asked.
The spoon clicked sharply against the bowl as Pia set it down. “I’ll let you know.” She rose from the table. “I’ll send a note,” she announced, and before he could
ask when, added, “Or I’ll come by on my bike. I’ll do it as soon as I can do it well,” she said, as if he had been nagging at her for hours and days. “I said I’d do it, didn’t I?”
Max shrugged. It wasn’t as if he really was her boss. Pia was an unpaid, part-time assistant who was doing him a favor by helping him out. However, he wanted to be very sure she understood the assignment. “I need to find out if—”
“I told you, I know.” Pia huffed and puffed and left, snapping the shop door shut behind her.
Gabrielle came from behind the counter to collect their bowls. Her smile was friendly, and amused. “Pia looked happy.”
“She could have fooled me,” Max said.
“Not Mister Max, she couldn’t,” Gabrielle answered.
Max had to laugh. She was right. “Where’s Ari today?”
“Right now, he’s in class but he’ll be here later.”
Max waited, but the young woman said no more, so, “I guess he’s being a help around here,” he hinted.
“A big help,” Gabrielle agreed. “But I don’t think he’ll want to come with me when I switch to Mr. Bendiff’s restaurant, do you? I don’t blame him, either. How many dishes and pots can you expect the next Baron Barthold to clean?” There was no complaint in her voice and neither was it, really, a question.
Max treated it like a real question anyway. “For you? I guess, as many as you ask, as many as you need.”
Gabrielle didn’t say anything to that but as she turned away, Max saw that her cheeks were pink and a smile pulled at the corners of her mouth. She looked almost pretty then, like a little round brown mouse who had been given a big chunk of doughnut. She turned around briefly to tell Max, “Before anything else, Ari has his studies to finish. He’s a good student, I think.”
“He’s a good tutor, I know,” Max agreed, and her smile broadened.
Max intended to report this to Ari at supper that evening, but just when he was about to, and anticipating how happy this would make his tenant-tutor-friend, Grammie looked at him over a platter of roasted lake fish and roasted potatoes to ask, “Have you had any response to that letter you wrote? To your father.”
Max had been trying not to remember about the letter. “Maybe he hasn’t gotten it yet. If he’s even going to get it.”
“You wrote to him?” Ari asked. “But I thought … I thought you didn’t want anybody—anybody at all, here or there—to know anything about you.”
“I pretended to be a schoolgirl.”
“Named Maxine?”
“Named Aurora Nives,” Max said. “I used Grammie’s name. And address. So,” he told Grammie, “you’ll know before me if he does answer.”
“I hope it’ll be soon,” she said, almost as if she was warning him. But what would Grammie have to warn him about that she wouldn’t just say outright?
At his painting lesson the next morning, Max painted a cloudless sky where four different shades of blue faded one into the other. He worked fast, concentrating on his picture. He was only half aware of Joachim, at an easel across the garden.
Joachim was working in the new style he had discovered when the dog, Sunny, in friendly excitement, had brushed her long golden retriever tail over the wet paint of a picture done in the old style. First, Joachim painted the branch of a flowering quince bush, as precisely as he could—and that was very precisely. Then he took a gray seagull feather to—tenderly, softly, gently—sweep up and down on the wet paint, which made the picture look misty, windblown, a little faded. That done, the painter stepped back from his easel to study the effect. “I don’t know,” he said, and took off his glasses. “I don’t think,” he said, and put them on again, remarking, “I’d do better to stick to the tried-and-true.”
Max, his red painter’s beret on his head and one of his father’s old shirts hanging loosely down from his shoulders, did not look up from his own picture. Joachim talked like this whenever he came to the end of a painting.
“Max? What does this look like to you?”
Max put the three finishing streaks of the densest blue at the bottom of his paper before he put down his own brush, to see what Joachim had done. He looked at the painting, which the sweeps of the seagull feather had blurred so that neither flowers nor leaves had clear edges. He looked at it and looked at it and eventually decided, “It’s as if I’m crying … as if … It looks like quince blossoms seen through tears.”
“That’s all right, then,” Joachim said, and he signed the painting in small, dark letters, at the bottom right corner, joachim, then took it inside to dry.
When his teacher came back out to the garden, Max had a question. “Can I ask a favor?”
Joachim answered without hesitation, “I’d rather you didn’t,” and Sunny trotted over to put her muzzle under his hand, as if to comfort him or maybe to stand beside him in this time of trouble.
“You can always say no,” Max reminded him. Although he couldn’t see why anyone would refuse a request as simple as the one he was about to make, and especially Joachim, when it was Max who was responsible for not only the company of the dog but also, indirectly, the new painting techniques the dog had shown Joachim, and the new glasses through which to see it.
“I guess that’s true,” Joachim admitted. “All right, what favor is it? I’m pretty busy these days.”
“It won’t take long, only—”
“With this dog you’ve foisted off on me.”
Max didn’t argue that point. Joachim was just grumbling, and they both knew it. “It’ll only take an hour, probably less. I want you to go to the flower stand just outside the West Gate—”
“Can’t you buy your own flowers?”
“Of course, but—”
“Who are you buying flowers for anyway? Is it your grandmother’s birthday?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Then why ever would you send me to a flower stall?”
“To talk with the owner, about vandalism. Her stand was smashed up, a couple of weeks ago, and—”
“Then it’s probably closed down. I would, after something like that. Why are you interested in vandalism? And why ask me? Why not go yourself?”
“Because you paint flowers so you can talk naturally with her, and ask about what happened, while you’re looking at her flowers. She probably even knows who you are.”
“That would make it worse,” Joachim said. He was silent for two long minutes, scratching Sunny behind her ears and studying the watercolor. Then he’d made up his mind. “I’m not going to do it, Max.” He gave his student a sharp look. “Unless you can give me some urgent reason to.”
But Max didn’t think he was supposed to tell anyone what he had been hired to do, and he’d already told Grammie and Ari. Besides, Joachim didn’t know that he was Mister Max, Solutioneer. He decided not to say. Joachim’s refusal was an inconvenience, not a roadblock, and, in fact, he wasn’t surprised by it. Not really. “It was just an idea,” he said.
“I wouldn’t put it past you to try to fix me up with some flower-shop-owning woman,” Joachim grumbled. “Like you fixed me up with Sunny here.”
“I never even thought of that,” Max said. “Would you like to be fixed up?” He wondered how old Annarinka Friedle was and what kind of a personality she had. She already knew a lot about flowers, which would be a big plus with Joachim. But that was another idea for another day, sometime when the Solutioneer had no other problems to solve. For right now, Max needed to figure out who else he could ask to investigate the vandalism at the flower stall and find out what, if anything, the florist had to say about it.
Also, he hoped that Pia might have a report to make about the baker and the milliner, and he hoped, further, that she might have found out something useful. Pia might not get along well with people her own age—and Max could understand why that was—but she was the kind of young person older people enjoyed talking to. Adults would often tell things to young people like that, explain things. Max was a little bi
t like that but Pia was a lot.
However, when Pia summoned him to their usual meeting place the next afternoon, he found that she hadn’t learned anything about the arson/vandalism. She told Max at length about her investigations, and in detail, but they both realized that she had been given no useful information. Karl Vantassel, the baker, was a short, wiry man, with a short, wiry wife who worked in the kitchen beside him, while two of their three wiry children served the customers and made change and the third washed the pots and baking pans and trays, then set them out to be used again. Nobody, not a one of them, had looked Pia in the eye. She had chosen, and tasted, breads and sweet rolls and coffee cakes. “I told them I was an assistant manager at the Hotel Iris, and that we were thinking of serving breakfast to our clients. I was looking for a good, reliable bakery to supply us with breakfast baked goods, I told them, so they didn’t make me pay for anything,” she announced proudly. “None of them spoke to me except for the father, and mostly he told me how good his products were and how bad everybody else’s were.”
Max interrupted with a question. “Including Gabrielle’s?”
“Especially hers,” Pia laughed, and took another bite of the tall slab of angel food cake on her plate. “I didn’t contradict him. I was all business, all serious. I tasted and nodded and made notes. Then I asked him—and you have to say this was brilliant—if he could guarantee daily deliveries. What do you mean by that question? he asked, and he was suspicious, but I just told him I’d heard about some trouble in the old city and hadn’t he had some trouble himself? A fire, a chimney fire? If that happened once, if his chimneys were old, I said to him, wasn’t there danger that it could happen again? How long had he had to close down, after the fire? I asked. I only missed two days, that’s what he said to me, and then, It won’t happen again.”
“And the rest of the family didn’t say anything? Not even to one another?”
“Not a word. They kept their eyes glued on Mr. Vantassel. Even the children just waited to hear whatever he’d say. So I told him I’d let him know and thanked him for his time and left. He never even suspected that I wasn’t an assistant manager,” she reported proudly, and finished the last bite of cake before she announced, “Nobody bakes even half as well as Gabrielle. Certainly not Karl Vantassel.”