The Book of Secrets

by Cynthia Voigt

  Nissa was slender, in her fitted jacket and swinging skirt, and she walked with quick grace, her head sometimes raised to look around her but not, Max thought, to enjoy the shop windows, or the variety of people on the streets. No, Nissa looked around her the way a squirrel down from its nest to find food looks around itself, ready to bolt up the nearest trunk to safety. She looked up and around, quickly, briefly, then down again. It wasn’t until she was emerging from a tea and coffee shop that Max actually saw her, but when he did he understood how Carlo’s heart had been so immediately and completely won.

  It was her eyes, he thought at first, but almost immediately noted also the round chin and broad forehead, her short, straight nose, and the spun gold hair under the cloche. Her eyes were simply what you noticed first. Nissa’s large, round eyes were set deep into the delicate bones of her face. They were a smoky green color and her lashes were golden, and their expression struck him, as sharply as an arrow. The wide innocent eyes of the young woman looked out at the world in sad surprise, as if she had not yet forgotten that she once hoped for good things, things now forever lost. Once Max had seen her eyes, he could see that there was a haze of sadness all around her. The drab color she wore could have been mourning. But her hair was the color of spring sunshine and the little smile with which she looked back at the tea merchant, who had called some pleasantry after her, seemed more suited to a person for whom the world is a pleasant, easy place to live, a person who would brighten any room she entered, who would have a life full of gladness but yet—such was her gentle goodness—would arouse no envy.

  An interesting character, thought Max, an interesting story, probably. Also, a story she kept secret, from Carlo and, Max guessed, from everyone. He had seen her face and, like Carlo, he wanted to help this young woman, whatever her trouble. Secrets, he had learned, were the very soil that sorrows grew most easily out of. He already knew what his next move would be: he would be waiting in Summer when she arrived for her day’s work. If he knew where she was employed, he might be able to figure out some way to be introduced to her.

  That settled, he hurried back through the streets of the old city, to outfit himself for his meeting with the Mayor.

  The Mayor’s Job

  • ACT I •

  SCENE 5 ~ THE SOLUTION

  Mayor Richard Valoury arrived at the stage door accompanied by Officer Torson, and Max was glad he’d thought to wear the tinted glasses. The light in the alley was dim, but he didn’t underestimate Sven Torson’s curiosity. As the heroic spy from The Queen’s Man, in his long dark overcoat and wide-brimmed hat, wearing tinted glasses and a silly long white silk scarf, waiting behind the little wooden porch, he was probably not going to be recognizable. He looked nothing like the gardener, Mister, whom Officer Torson had met only twice before.

  In fact, both the Mayor and Officer Torson were so wrapped up in their own concerns that if there had been anything suspicious about this Solutioneer, they wouldn’t have noticed it. Without any polite chitchat, without even introducing Officer Torson, the Mayor strode up to Max and demanded, “Well? What have you discovered?”

  Max reported the conclusions he’d drawn: “I believe the culprits are boys, school age or slightly older, probably. I suspect they are forcing the small shop owners to pay for protection.”

  “Protection from what?” asked the policeman.

  “From the damage they’ll do if they aren’t paid off,” Max answered.

  Mayor Valoury turned to Sven Torson. “It’s what we were afraid of.”

  “But now we have some idea who to look for,” the policeman said.

  “Can you tell us any more?” the Mayor asked. “Because time’s running short. If anything is going on that might in any way endanger the royal family, we have to warn the palace.”

  “Of course,” Max agreed.

  “If we can’t keep the royal family entirely and absolutely clear of danger, danger of any kind, it means soldiers everywhere,” Officer Torson added, in case this Solutioneer didn’t understand all the consequences. “Soldiers cause trouble and they don’t always help.”

  “Generals like to be in total control,” the Mayor added. “The army doesn’t care about ordinary citizens. Not like a mayor does.”

  “And how could the royal family have their usual holidays, free from public duties and cares for these summer weeks, if there were always soldiers around? Never able to just take a stroll, have an ice cream, fly a kite in the meadows, hunt in their forests, or even go out on the lake, just for a morning’s fishing? Never able to be as private and free as the rest of us.”

  “I see the difficulties,” Max said. “I wish I could have been more helpful.”

  The Mayor turned to look at Officer Torson, who had turned to look at the Mayor. They nodded at one another, as if approvals had been asked, and given. Then they both turned to the Solutioneer, a slender figure, almost invisible in the poor light in his long dark cloak, with his hat pulled so low that you could barely see his glasses, and why would he wear tinted glasses in this light, anyway? It was the Mayor who made the request.

  “Actually,” he said, “you could give us more help. We think. If you were willing.”

  “How?” Max asked.

  “The shopkeepers are all too frightened to talk,” Officer Torson began. “And we need to smoke these hoodlums out. I can’t do it because everybody knows …” He hesitated, apologizing, “I’ve got a reputation for—” He faltered.

  “Honesty,” the Mayor finished when the policeman seemed unable to say the word. “Integrity. They know he’d never be susceptible to bribes or to—” and the Mayor faltered.

  Max guessed that the Mayor had kept secret from the policeman the threats that had been made against his family. Without hesitating, or thinking, he turned to demand, “You didn’t tell him?”

  Some secrets were so dangerous that they should never be kept.

  “Tell me what?” the policeman asked.

  “Not yet,” the Mayor mumbled.

  “You have to,” Max said.

  “Tell me what?” the policeman demanded.

  “I know,” the Mayor admitted to Max. He turned to Officer Torson. “I’ll tell you as soon as we’re done here.”

  “That you will,” the policeman said, not at all the way an underling usually speaks to his superior.

  Mayor Valoury turned back to Max. “Officer Torson is known to be too honest and I’m too public a figure, and unmarried, too. Besides which, it would be much more dangerous to threaten me, or try to blackmail me. Not that there’s anything they could blackmail me about,” he added quickly.

  Max was afraid he could guess now what was going to come next.

  “So I thought … that is, we wondered if …” The Mayor turned to the policeman again, as if for assistance, but Officer Torson only said, “My family? The children?” in a shocked voice.

  “We thought that if you were to go to the shops that have been attacked and tell them the rates for protection were going up, that they might then turn to the police for help. Be willing to give us some information about the hoodlums, descriptions, names.”

  “Of course,” warned Officer Torson, who was honest even when it might work to his disadvantage, “if you do that, the hoodlums might hear about it. You’d be like bait in a trap.”

  The Mayor continued his argument. “We have to identify them, and take them into custody, and bring them to trial. The trial wouldn’t be until fall, so that the royal family need not hear even a whisper about it, because—it would be truly disastrous for Queensbridge if they lost faith in the lake as a safe place. If the guilty parties are in custody, and we put out the word to the shopkeepers, quietly of course … We’ll pay you, of course. For the extra time. We’ll pay double the usual,” he offered, trying to read the expression on what he could see of Max’s face.

  They hadn’t asked Max how he had reached his conclusions. They agreed with him, so they didn’t wonder. They didn’t know, therefore, th
at he had already tried something very like their plan, and without success. “But I—” he began.

  The Mayor interrupted. “Also, it seems to me that the city needs to have a private investigator permanently available. He’d need his own office, of course, and we would provide that. We’re going to be decentralizing the city library, opening smaller libraries in different areas of the city, and perhaps even one or two of the lakefront villages, libraries that will be more convenient to more of the people, so there will be office space available in the city library building,” he offered.

  Aha, Max thought, distracted by this information. That’s what’s—

  “You’d be doing your city a real service, and your King, too,” the Mayor continued. He was using any argument he could think of. “As well, I would be able to recommend your services to anyone who needed them, without specifying how it is I have come to know your excellences, of course. It wouldn’t do for this situation ever to get out, in any way.”

  It was a plan, and if he revisited some of the vandalized shops it could work, Max thought. If what he had deduced about the protection racket was correct, that is, and he was pretty confident about that. Just what might happen when the criminals were being smoked out, he had no idea. That was one thing that made him hesitate. He didn’t want to risk his own secrets. Another thing that made him hesitate was his grandmother. Because if anything happened to him … If he made himself a target where something might happen to him, or where he might be exposed as Max Starling, twelve-year-old abandoned child, Grammie was the one who would be the most hurt by that. And now that he might have discovered what had been worrying at her, the secret she had been protecting him from, he wanted to spare her further worry.

  On the other hand, Max did want to finish this job up well, and help the Mayor, and the city, too. Then, too, if he succeeded in stopping these criminals he could ask that Grammie keep her job. He could probably think of some way to make that request that wouldn’t give away his relationship to her.

  And maybe he could even think of a safe way to discover who the boys were. He wondered what Tomi Brandt, who roamed all the streets of the city, might know. He wondered what Pia might say that would get him thinking in new ways, if he told her about it. This problem could be solved without putting himself at risk. Maybe. Possibly. Most problems had more than one solution, after all, more than two even, more than three sometimes. And wasn’t that what he was good at? Wasn’t he, after all, the Solutioneer?

  “I will need some time to think about this,” he said to the two men. “I’ll be in touch. It won’t be long,” he assured them, and walked away, with no more emotion than the Miser had shown, leaving his poverty-stricken neighbor after having refused the request for help, at the end of the first act of A Miser Made Miserable.

  Sven Torson called after him, “I’ll watch out for you, day and night, if you’ll do this,” then Max heard him demand, in an entirely different tone of voice, “Just what is it, sir, that you should have told me?”

  Striding along the docks with his coat billowing behind him, turning up into the winding streets that would take him to Thieves Alley, Max was lost in thought, wondering how to find Tomi, who just might know something. Max knew how little chance he had of approaching Tomi without revealing his secret. Tomi had seen through one disguise already. Could he trust Tomi Brandt? On the other hand, was there any other way the Solutioneer could approach this problem?

  The Mayor’s Job

  • ACT II •

  SCENE 1 ~ THE CAPTURE

  Max didn’t sleep well that night. The next morning, he couldn’t concentrate on his painting. His mind jumped from one thing to another, like a frog trying to find his dinner, hopping from one lily pad to another, chasing one bug after another, always leaping and landing and looking hungrily about. There was his father’s letter and the problem of how to find some not-dangerous way to discover who was threatening the shopkeepers of the old city. There was the question of Nissa, and how to discover her secret, and also the question of whether he would be wise to try to talk to Tomi Brandt, or if it would be wiser to continue keeping his own secrets. Not to mention, now that he knew what she had been keeping from him, what he should say to Grammie. Not to mention why his father had written that kind of letter, which was probably because it was dangerous for someone—for Max? for his parents?—to write the plain clear truth. And there was that maddening button.

  Hop. Hop. Hop. And not one fly in range of his long tongue.

  The Mayor’s request at least was not an elusive mystery. However, Max didn’t know if he owed his first loyalty to his grandmother, in which case it was honorable and responsible to decline the job, or to the city where he lived, in which case the honorable and responsible thing was to agree to be the bait in the Mayor’s trap. He knew what the heroic Lorenzo Apiedi would do, but he thought he also knew what the Absentminded Professor would say, being, as he was, a humanist and believing, as he did, that the most important thing in life is to harm no one, especially your own family.

  Unfortunately for Max, he could see the wisdom and rightness of both of these points of view.

  Maybe he should try to find Tomi Brandt, after all, go into the old city and look for him …

  He didn’t bother with any disguise that morning. That morning, he was a boy on a bike, in a boy’s dark trousers and a boy’s cotton shirt, with a boy’s blue cap on his head. He was twelve-year-old Max Starling, not Mister Max, the Solutioneer.

  In other words, he was a little careless.

  If he couldn’t have any ideas about how to solve any of the problems facing him, Max said to himself as he pedaled vigorously along the narrow street, he could still be sure that the Starling Theater was safe. He didn’t think it was in any danger but checking would give him something useful to do. After he had seen that everything was all right with the theater, he decided, he would walk to the baker for a roll and stop at the cheese store, so he could have a quick sandwich for his midday meal. He hoped that while he walked something about his feet landing squarely on the ground in a regular rhythm, thunk-thunk-thunk, would jar ideas loose in his brain. He hoped that if he was looking around him at the people on the streets and the goods displayed on carts and in shop windows, an idea might come out from hiding and introduce itself to him.

  At the theater, everything looked as usual, which was just what Max expected. He leaned his bicycle against the wall and made a slow tour all around the building, just to be sure, across its blank rear face, through the alley by the stage door, across the chained and padlocked front entrances, and back to the office doorway where his bicycle waited under the high bathroom window farther along the alley. Satisfied, he got his roll and a chunk of cheese, and sat down on a doorstep to enjoy lunch, looking at the people who moved along in front of him but not really seeing them. If he were to agree to be the bait in the trap, he wondered how Officer Torson planned to guarantee his safety, and he wondered just how that trap would be laid. Also, he wasn’t sure how he would keep the scheme a secret from his grandmother, and he wasn’t even sure he should. He chewed and swallowed and tried to think of another way to discover the identity of the three extortionists.

  It wasn’t until he glimpsed a stocky figure and felt a rise of hope that he realized that he was actually expecting to accidentally run into Tomi Brandt. Certainly he’d glimpsed the boy often enough—too often, he’d thought, worrisomely often—in the weeks since he’d left school. Max wondered about confiding his secret to Tomi, and asking for his help. Tomi wasn’t a gossip. His sense of honor meant—probably—that he could keep a secret. That is, if it seemed honorable to him to give his word. He took two steps toward the stocky figure, thinking of what to say first.

  But it wasn’t Tomi. It was some boy Max didn’t know and had never seen, with a shaggy head of corn-yellow hair, oddly black around the ears and forehead, as if he had colored it to appear in a play and failed to wash it completely out. But why would a boy color his hair? And r
eally, the boy didn’t resemble Tomi at all, except in his build. Max resumed his seat and his lunch.

  After he had finished his sandwich, Max sat for several minutes, still half expecting to see Tomi. But Tomi didn’t appear, and the only other idea for identifying the culprits that Max had come up with involved asking Pia to ask her father to bribe one of the shopkeepers, pay him more money than he could resist, to identify the boys. Given the sound of that letter to the Mayor that so boldly threatened harm to Sven Torson’s family, Max wasn’t sure even Mr. Bendiff had enough money to buy that information. He needed to walk some more.

  Also, he needed not to be worrying at that problem, like a dog worrying a bone. He distracted himself from the Mayor’s problem by thinking about his parents.

  What did they want him to do? Or did they want him to do nothing?

  When Max saw that he was about to cross in front of the berth where The Water Rat rested—and he wasn’t wearing any kind of disguise!—he turned quickly up a side street, heading away from the docks and into the heart of the old city. He walked along at a brisk pace, by cafés and bars and boardinghouses, food shops and notions shops and stalls that sold used clothing, making his way back toward the more residential sections, and the little square, and the Starling Theater. No longer lost in his own thoughts, he was puzzled by the looks he got from some of the people on the streets, who stepped aside to let him by before he even thought to ask them to move, or offer to move himself. Apparently there was something in his face or in his gait that made people want to step aside and let him pass.

  It was all making Max uneasy, and he was glad to step out of Barrow Street onto Park Lane, where two-family houses replaced narrow buildings with their shops on the ground floor and apartments stacked above. Here, fewer people were out on the roads. He could hear his own footsteps again, but curiously blurred, a thunkity-thunkity sound, as if there were an echo.