Mister Max: The Book of Lost Things: Mister Max 1

  “Is that the truth?” asked Ari.

  “Of course it is.” And because it was the exact and precise and honest truth, Max could demand, “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Ari said, rubbing at his temples with his fingertips. “I think she doesn’t know you at all, to say that to you about exorbitant fees. I think she’s a terrible old woman.” Then he ran his fingers through his hair again, as if it had been messed up and he was tidying it. “I think I’m so tired I’m seeing ghosts.”

  Max asked, “What do you suppose she wants?”

  “You, apparently,” his tutor said, and yawned, and—finally—smiled. “Mister Max.”

  The Lost Spoon

  • ACT I •

  What the Baroness Barthold, seated in the carved ebony armchair that had enthroned the Barons Barthold for over five hundred years, saw standing before her was a rather un-noteworthy person in a definitely un-stylish brown suit, hair slicked down across the crown of his head, pork-pie hat held awkwardly in front of a round stomach over which his bright blue waistcoat stretched tight. This was neither a distinguished nor a dashing figure; he was not the kind of person you would want to be introduced to. She studied him and he studied his boots, which while clean had obviously not been polished.

  Neither of them spoke. Each was waiting for the other to begin.

  The Baroness couldn’t even have guessed the detective’s age, although that, she knew, could be the result of her weakened eyesight. His portliness, his rounded shoulders, his clothing, all seemed those of middle age, but his skin looked unexpectedly youthful. Perhaps he wore makeup? Detectives were such questionable types. Their work brought them into the company of the worst kinds of people doing bad things; and the Baroness had lived a long time, so she knew just how many worst kinds there were, and how various were those bad things. She cleared her throat. The man looked up.

  For a moment she was distracted from her own interests by his eyes, a most unusual and perhaps unpleasant color, like certain dirt-and-lichen-encrusted rocks in the forests of her childhood. “I am having my doubts about you,” the Baroness said.

  Max, in the costume of one of the unsuccessful suitors from Adorable Arabella, was not surprised by the bad manners of the old woman, with her sharp beak of a nose and her clawlike fingers gripping the side of the massive black chair before which he stood. Her white hair was pulled back tight along her narrow skull, her dark blue dress had no adornments, neither jewels nor lace, and her narrow lips looked as if it had been years since a smile had been asked of them. Her eyes gleamed like vengeful coffee beans, and she added, “You don’t look like much.”

  The unsuccessful suitor, too middle-aged and dull and unhandsome and humorless for the lively, lovely, spoiled young Arabella, did not argue. Max said, “Maybe I’m not much.”

  “That’s not what I’ve heard,” the Baroness snapped. It seemed that she didn’t want him to agree with her.

  “Then maybe it will depend on what you want from me,” said Max.

  The Baroness shifted in her seat. The chair didn’t, now that he looked more closely, appear at all comfortable; the bumps and angles of all those carved high mountains with long-necked cranes circling their peaks would stick into your back. In fact, this whole room didn’t look comfortable. Like the other great rooms of the castle he’d glimpsed on his way to this one, it looked expensive and important and magnificent, altogether the opposite of welcoming. The large fireplace, for example, with its thick stone mantel, might be big enough to stand up in, but it didn’t do a very good job of producing warmth. Many portraits of many men, all dressed in one sort of uniform or another, military or civil or church, stared out from many thick gilt frames on the dark walls. The stone floor was thickly covered with dark oriental rugs; dark, fat-legged tables held atlases and painted globes. The room needed books, he thought, it needed windows, it needed something. It had no life in it, just things, things and this unpleasant old woman.

  However, Max was not his own self. He was on a job. So, patient and humble as the unsuccessful suitor, he waited to hear what the Baroness would say next.

  “I will ask you to find something that was lost many years ago,” she at last announced. “I have no hope that you’ll succeed, but I’ve reached the point—reached the age, more accurately—where even an unsuccessful attempt to find it, or find out what happened to it, is better than doing nothing.”

  Max continued to wait in silence. She hadn’t actually told him anything, and she hadn’t asked him to pull up a chair and sit. There was nothing for him to say or do.

  “Not exactly chatty, are you?” she complained. “It’s the Cellini Spoon. Of course. You’ll have heard of the Barthold Cellini Spoon?”

  Clearly, Arabella’s unsuccessful suitor was not the right role for this situation, so Max shifted to Inspector Doddle from An Impossible Crime and asked cagily, “Why don’t you refresh my memory? I like to hear things firsthand. It can be of use.”

  She looked at him sharply, suspicious, as if she had just noticed something unpleasant about him. Apparently, she was deciding what to do about him, and apparently, what she decided was not to have him shown out of the room. The Baroness leaned forward in her great chair to say, “I don’t believe in wasting words myself, either. Benvenuto Cellini, 1500 to 1571, born in Florence, Italy, and died there, too, but for most of his life he didn’t live there. A scoundrel and a trickster but a gifted craftsman. In many ways an artist.”

  That word reminded Max of Joachim, and he wondered what the painter had done about the dog he’d left out in his garden last night. He could only hope … but he didn’t know what he could hope for from his teacher in regards to an uninvited dog in the garden. However, thinking about that distracted Max from his present work, so in order to gather his thoughts again he took a small chair from beside the wall and carried it over to where the Baroness was enthroned. He sat facing her, the round hat balanced on his knees, and hoped that the pillow at his waist would not slip off sideways.

  Displeased, or maybe just surprised, the Baroness stared at Max for a long moment. “Or perhaps,” she said eventually, “Cellini was only a rapscallion. Greedy, like everyone else; that, too. Have a seat,” she added sarcastically.

  “Thank you,” said Mister Max, playing the imperturbable Inspector Doddle looking alertly at his hostess, awaiting the rest of her story.

  “My family, that is to say, the Barons Barthold, has had in its possession for over a hundred years a Cellini Spoon. This is not a teaspoon, nothing as ordinary as that, but a large serving spoon, one of a pair that Cellini crafted to gain favor from a pope. Paul the Third, I believe it was.” The Baroness looked at Max as if waiting for what he had to say about that.

  “Hmm,” Max said importantly, confident that Grammie would know about these Cellinis and popes. “Yes. I see.”

  “The Moses Spoons,” she went on. “So-called because, on the handle of each spoon, Cellini depicted a scene from the life of Moses. The Barthold Spoon pictured the infant Moses about to be discovered by the daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt, who—as you know?—adopted the child and raised him as a prince in the royal household. Moses’ mother and sister, who had contrived this plan to save the infant’s life, can be seen peeping out through the bulrushes. It is a magnificent piece of art.”

  “I can imagine,” Max said.

  “You can do better than that—you can see it. Right there,” and she pointed. “In the portrait of my great-grandfather, who”—she hesitated, then decided—“brought it into the family.”

  Max rose to go searching among the portraits that lined the walls to find a man with a spoon.

  “Do not be so hasty,” the Baroness snapped. “Sit down.” She continued: “The whereabouts of these spoons, about which Cellini boasts in his autobiography (although it must be acknowledged that he boasts about all of his works), has always been known. That is, until ours was lost. Was stolen. Disappeared.”

  “Where
is the other?” Max asked, too curious to stop himself.

  She ignored the question. She had her own way to tell the story. “Almost a century ago, the pair of spoons was being sent as a gift from the Vatican to Napoleon, a bribe most likely; but the ship was attacked by Barbary pirates, and the young French officer entrusted with the spoons offered them up in exchange for his life.” She sniffed. “The act of a coward.”

  “That’s as may be,” said Inspector Doddle. If Max’s parents had been taken prisoner by pirates, he would be glad if they had something in their possession with which they could purchase their lives and freedom.

  “Humph,” she said, and glared for a minute, her fingers clutching the carved arms of her chair. Then she went on. “The pirates, for once, kept their word and set the officer ashore, which is how we can trace the whereabouts of both spoons. When, not many years later, that same pirate captain was captured, one of Cellini’s Moses Spoons was among the treasures in his possession. He was brought to land to be tried and hanged, but the Governor of that colonial island—a man who had been a successful general in his younger years, a hero of his country—made a startling appearance before the tribunal. He testified that this pirate captain was in fact a spy, whose information had saved many lives. Nobody believed this, but nobody has ever dared stand boldly up to a Barthold, so the pirate was given a generous reward and sent off to South America, for his own safety. The booty he’d taken belonged, by law, to the crown.” The Baroness watched Max’s face as she concluded her story: “There was no mention in the inventory of that treasure of the Cellini Spoon.”

  “Hmm,” Max said. “Yes. I see.” And he did. Almost as if it were at a play, he saw the filthy, unshaven pirate offering the many-medaled official a large spoon, and he saw the Governor place it in a desk drawer, then lock that drawer with a small key and turn back to the pirate, but not to shake his hand. No handshake concluded that particular deal.

  “That Governor,” the Baroness announced defiantly, “was my great-grandfather. It was only after his death that his son, that is to say, my grandfather, dared to exhibit the spoon. The Barthold Cellini. They tried to claim it for the Royal Museum, but my grandfather refused to part with it. No king,” she announced with satisfaction, “was ever powerful enough to bend a Baron Barthold to his orders. They tried and they failed.” This drew what might have been a smile from her, but it might have been only indigestion. “Uncontrollable, that’s our reputation—and no king ever hesitated to make use of a Barthold to govern some wilderness of an island or to lead some marauding army. They despised us, but that didn’t stop them from using us when they needed our kind of help. My grandfather took great pleasure in displaying the Cellini Spoon on its carved wooden holder—and knowing it was in his possession, not the King’s. The spoon was priceless, of course.”

  “Of course,” Max agreed, although he didn’t think it could literally have been without price, since it had already been enough to purchase two lives and since, as well, there were people rich enough to pay any price for something they wanted. He waited, but the Baroness did not go on.

  “I think you said there was a second spoon?” Max asked.

  She didn’t seem displeased at the proof of his grasp of the situation. “One of the pair was immediately sent as tribute to the Grand Bey of Baghdad. It is known that in exchange for the Ottoman Empire looking the other way, as they say, the pirates put a portion of their takings into the Bey’s coffers. That spoon is presently displayed in the Pinacoteca of Baghdad. I have never seen it.”

  Max inclined his head. A true inspector—he had seen his father play the role—said as little as possible and was always aware of his own importance. He stood up again. “The portrait?”

  The Baroness did not rise—and now he wondered if she could stand or walk. She indicated with an outstretched arm and a pointing finger the portrait of a handsome red-haired man in a green military uniform with gold epaulettes at his shoulders, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword, his glance resting on something in the distance behind Max. “There has always been a Barthold in his country’s service,” the Baroness told him. “Which is why I am—as far as I presently know—the last of the line, since so many men chose military service and, as you would predict, died with their boots on. My grandfather had himself painted as a wedding gift for his bride. Her name was Lily.”

  Max went to stand in front of the picture. He knew enough about the craft of painting to recognize a bad portrait when he saw it, especially in the stiffly awkward gesture of the soldier’s free hand toward the items on the table beside him—a spray of lilies of the valley in a small glass vase and beside it, on a wooden stand, the spoon in question. The flowers, however, were wonderfully well painted—their ghostly white color, the delicate small curves along their bell-shaped blooms, the sweep of leaf up from the pale, slender stalk. For a moment Max admired the flowers, and then he turned his attention to the spoon. This was indeed large, long enough to reach stuffing out of the belly of a roasted turkey. On its shallow bowl the gold gleamed as smooth as water. The painter had copied the famous carving with care, so Max could make out tall bulrushes at the top of the spoon’s long handle and the hidden faces of two women who looked anxiously at a basket that floated nearby. The basket had not yet been seen by the tall, crowned woman who was approaching the riverside, up the length of the handle.

  “What do you think of him?” the Baroness asked from behind him.

  “The baby?” But the baby could not be seen over the rim of the basket. Only a trailing blanket told you that there was a baby within. “Or do you mean the spoon? The spoon must be a wonder.”

  “No, him, my grandfather. Never mind, don’t tell me. You’ll just utter some pleasantries, some lie, about how handsome he is. All the Barthold men are well featured, but you know what they say about redheaded men and their tempers. However, he did us the favor of dying of fever, during an African campaign, not long after his marriage, which was a mercy for his wife and the two children she had already produced for him.” Now the Baroness spoke sharply: “Do stop that staring. You’ve seen the portrait—Sit.”

  Max did as he was told. “The Cellini Spoon,” he said, nodding thoughtfully, once again Inspector Doddle. “It will have come into your possession?” he hinted.

  “The Baron,” she continued, as if he had not spoken, “left those two children, a son and a daughter. The son became my father and inherited the title—and I his only child—while the daughter, my aunt, married badly. Married for love, married against her brother’s wishes. Her son, handsome like all Barthold men but soft as his mother, died young, in an earthquake in South America on a climbing holiday with his wife, leaving their young son to me. That boy was my heir, as you can imagine. To the title, the fortune, and all the properties.”

  A real inspector, Max sensed, would take charge now, but what about a hired detective? Would he just sit and listen, or ask his question yet again. “The spoon,” he decided. “What about the spoon?”

  She sighed. “Disappeared seven years ago.”

  Inspector Doddle nodded. “Stolen, you said.”

  “I believe so.”

  “Do you suspect anyone?”

  “Oh, I know who took it. The kitchen maid. Martha.”

  “It was a woman you called Martha who showed me to this room. Is this the same person?” Max was wondering if the Baroness was in her right mind, and how you could tell if so old and important a person was not in her right mind.

  “All of my maids,” announced the Baroness, “are called Martha. I do this for my cook. Zenobia has been with me since we were both girls. Zenobia is not clever, except in the kitchen, but she is loyal as a dog and I promise you, loyalty is much undervalued these days. Zenobia is not good with names, a handicap in a house with so many servants, so it is a condition of service in this house that the girls—I hire no men—take the name of Martha. None complain.”

  If they did complain, Max guessed, they would be immediately
let go. The old lady seated across from him glared, daring him to question her right to do exactly as she chose, with the same expression that appeared on several of the portrait faces. Looking at the portraits, as Inspector Doddle rather than as a novice painter, he observed, “There are no portraits of women. Weren’t there any women in the family?”

  “Don’t play the fool with me. After all my time and trouble, you aren’t going to prove useless, are you? That Mrs. Henderson is charming, I’d never say otherwise, but she’s not … she’s not solid. I couldn’t tolerate her company more than once or twice a season, and she must feel the same about me. But she seemed sure of you. Naturally there are portraits of my ancestresses, but they hang along the upstairs gallery. They are not for just everybody to see.”

  She didn’t have to tell Max that he was less than a just everybody. He also knew better than to ask if her own portrait had been done, when she was a younger woman; that would be too personal a question for her hired detective to ask of a baroness. So he said, again, “The spoon. It was stolen by the kitchen maid. What did the police say?”

  “The police were not brought into it.”

  Max sat silent.

  The Baroness, too, sat silent.

  Silence suited that dark room.

  Finally, the Baroness lifted a hand from the arm of her great black chair, then lowered it again. “It was the last dinner I ever held. After that occasion, I didn’t have the heart for another, and why should I? That night there were twenty-four distinguished guests at my table, the finest Sevres, the best wines poured into Venetian glass goblets. With every course Zenobia outdid herself. It was a splendid dinner, a great success—except that the spoon was never returned to its accustomed place on the sideboard. Zenobia had last seen it in her dishpan. She always washed the goblets, the silver, and the Cellini Spoon herself. It had to be that Martha. All the other servants had been in my service for years, so I knew it couldn’t be any of them. Moreover, that Martha bore a grudge. Against me. As if I would let my great-nephew and heir marry into the scullery and the girl nothing but a round little scrap of a nobody. What he saw in her I never understood. She didn’t even have the wits to flee the house before the theft was noticed.”