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

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Things don’t always go the way we want them to,” Grammie told him gloomily. “You should know that by now, Max.”

  What the Mayor of Queensbridge saw that windy Sunday morning was not what he expected. He had been told by Fredric Henderson—but, he reminded himself, Fredric Henderson had only been repeating what his wife said and the Mayor had met Henderson’s wife, a birdbrain if ever there was one. So she was likely to have gotten it all wrong when she told her husband that this Mister Max was a poor student, a brilliant poor student perhaps but nonetheless threadbare and a little underfed. He’d probably be glad of any kind of work, Fredric Henderson had advised the Mayor. Since this, at least, was just what the Mayor hoped, he was happy to believe it.

  He also discounted the Baroness Barthold’s report that Mister Max was a round little fellow, comical really, dressed in a nasty bright blue waistcoat that might be his Sunday best, but did nothing for his pumpkin-shaped figure. Was he clever? Or merely lucky? The Baroness couldn’t swear to one or the other, but the detective seemed to care about the downtrodden, if the young woman he had brought into her employ was any example, and he had persuaded the Bendiff girl to do some tutoring in her kitchens, and in the Baroness’s opinion that looked like a difficult child to persuade to do anything. So perhaps he was clever. Yes, he had done the Baroness good service but, really, she couldn’t swear that that hadn’t just been luck. Also, he wore this ridiculous pork-pie hat … Noting the Baroness’s advanced age, the Mayor had decided that her eyes must be bad and that her memory, also, could not be relied on.

  So, on balance, he was expecting an impoverished student, although perhaps not quite so thin as Mrs. Fredric Henderson had reported.

  What he saw, however, was a dark-coated figure striding toward him, as slender as a rapier. The man had draped a long white aviator’s scarf around his neck. The wide-brimmed black fedora gave him the look of some kind of artist, some poet probably, some bohemian free spirit. His back turned to the bow of The Water Rat, the Mayor faced the approaching figure. If he hadn’t known that Captain Francis was watching, he might have feared for his own safety, although he couldn’t have said why. There was something dangerous about this man, this Mister Max, this Solutioneer. When the figure came nearer, the Mayor was made even more anxious by the man’s eyes. They were a strange, indefinable color, like the charred timbers of one of the wooden buildings, burned in the recent fires of the old city.

  That thought, however, reminded him of his urgent need for Mister Max, and his hope that the man—of whom he’d never heard until just recently—might be able to do what neither the police nor the various powerful citizens he had consulted had been able to. Even Hamish Bendiff couldn’t help, and something that Hamish Bendiff couldn’t do anything about was a serious problem indeed.

  The Mayor stood up straighter and held his hand out importantly. He might be in need of help, but he was still the elected mayor of Queensbridge, the man chosen by a large majority of the people. He cast a quick look up at Captain Francis, standing at the bridge, took a deep breath to steady his voice against the wind, and said, “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me.”

  What Max saw was an ordinary gray-haired man, dressed in an ordinary gray pin-striped suit, stiff white collar and cuffs showing, a homburg on his head, a narrow briefcase at his feet. He saw the Mayor of Queensbridge, an important man who did not look like such an important person.

  Max had chosen the hat and coat worn by the spy in The Queen’s Man, in part because it seemed to him that was the best role for this morning’s private meeting, and in part because the only other time the Solutioneer had boarded The Water Rat, this was what he’d worn. It would not do to underestimate Captain Francis’s curiosity about his passengers, especially those who were not familiar to him. He strode boldly up to take the offered hand and shake it firmly, asking, “What is it I can do for you, Mayor Valoury?”

  He might be dressed as a subtle and slippery spy, but he was Mister Max, the Solutioneer, on a job.

  “You don’t waste time,” the Mayor said with an approving nod. “I like that, and this trouble is certainly serious enough. Let’s sit,” and he led Max over to a set of benches built up against the curving prow of the boat, freshly painted a bright white. The wind that morning was brisk, so the other passengers kept to the cabin, but even if it had been a calm, hot day, the two would have been able to speak privately. These benches, in fact the entire bow, were reserved during the summer months for the exclusive use of any royal party that boarded the little ferry to go from one lakeside village to another, and sometimes even on an outing into Queensbridge. If no royal party was on board, the benches remained empty unless—as happened that morning—Captain Francis awarded their use to someone. “Sit here,” the Mayor said, indicating the space beside him.

  They sat so close together that, were the wind to carry sound back to the main deck, or the passenger cabin, or even the bridge, their words would be confusingly mixed together and thus indecipherable. Max grew even more curious. Whatever could the Mayor want of the Solutioneer? That required such secrecy.

  The Mayor took an envelope from his briefcase. It was a plain envelope, addressed in square capital letters to THE MAYOR. He put the letter on his knees and set the briefcase on the deck, between his feet. Max studied his potential employer.

  The Mayor had a thick, graying brown mustache and lively brown eyes, with bags beneath them. Deep lines ran along his forehead and down from his nose to the sides of his mouth. He was a heavyset, well-fed man, and everything about him was self-assured as he turned to face Max, one hand holding the envelope firmly down, so it wouldn’t blow away. He was a serious man on serious business, and a worried man, too. He asked, “You’ve heard about the recent vandalism?”

  Max nodded. “There have been fires as well.”

  The Mayor nodded. “I suspect—I strongly suspect—that something is going on. For one thing, it’s always some small shop that gets broken into, or where a fire breaks out. Greengrocer, cobbler, newsagent …” He looked out over the lake water, recalling. “A bakery, a milliner, a fishmonger. Is that eight?”

  “Six,” said Max, who had been counting.

  “There are two more.” The Mayor thought. “A butcher and—there was one that surprised me, you’d think that would be the easiest to remember … Yes, it was a florist.”

  “What was surprising about the florist?”

  “The shop was outside the gates, not in the old city. Granted, it’s only four steps beyond the West Gate, but still … All the other victims are in the old city.”

  Max understood the significance of this, the difference between the rabbit warren of streets and lanes and alleys that was the old city and the wider avenues and boulevards of the New Town. “What do the police say?” he asked.

  “That’s the problem. The police don’t have anything to say.” The Mayor sighed and told Max, “They’re suspicious, of course, but nobody will talk to them. Nobody has filed a complaint. Not one. The shopkeepers shrug, bad luck, they say, faulty gas line, some dray horse must have thrown up stones. This would be cobblestones from the streets. What hoof is ever going to throw cobblestones? Up from under flats filled with lettuces and peas and radishes—so they’re all so tossed around and trampled that everything has to be thrown away? That’s a whole day’s earning lost. Lost by a man with five children to feed.”

  The Mayor waited, for Max to take in this information, to think about it.

  After a minute, Max asked, “Where have the attacks—if they are attacks—taken place?”

  “As I said, mostly in the old city, but they aren’t limited to one street, or even to one district, any more than to one type of business. I have a list, names and addresses.” He reached down for his briefcase but Max had a question.

  “Are the shopkeepers all in one family, or joined in any way?”

  “Not a one of them has anything in common with any other, except that each is in business alone and most
of them have families.”

  Max considered all of this. The ferry’s motor rumbled steadily as he thought, and the boat made its way through little waves up to the town dock at Summer. The Mayor waited patiently, as if he understood the value of thinking. Both of them ignored the business of landing—Carlo, the Captain’s son, leaping onto a dock and making the vessel fast before unlatching the low gate to let passengers debark, off-loading whatever boxes or crates or animals the ferry was delivering, and then welcoming new passengers on board before untying the boat and leaping back onto the deck, to fasten the gate behind him and call up to his father, “She’s set to go, Captain.”

  When on board, at work, Captain Francis and his son kept things official. They might go home to the same little house in the evening, and eat supper together, and call one another Dad and My Boy, but once on board, they were Captain and crew and nothing more.

  As The Water Rat chugged back out into deeper water, now moving around the base of the Promontory from the top of which the summer palace overlooked the peaceful scene, Max broke his silence to ask the Mayor, “What about places that haven’t been vandalized? Where there haven’t been fires? Is there any pattern to those?”

  His question apparently came as a surprise, but it didn’t take long for the Mayor to realize, “None of the warehouses, no larger stores, not the theater—Do you know the Starling Theater? It’s empty, will be for weeks I gather, maybe months, everybody knows. But nothing’s happened there. You’d think, thieves? You’d think they’d at least take building supplies from that restaurant of Bendiff’s. All the renovation he’s doing. Although I think he has dogs there, now, but they never went near it, even before the dogs, even with all that lumber and piping in piles, just asking to be stolen. You’re right, Mister Max. It’s curious. Why only small shops? What do you think?”

  “Why are you so sure there’s something going on?” Max asked now. He himself agreed. There had been too much vandalism and too many fires for it to be a coincidence. But he wondered why the Mayor seemed so certain.

  The Mayor nodded his head, as if he had hoped for and expected this question. “When there had been—I can’t remember, maybe four? or five? and not one complaint? I got curious. Worried, really. I called in one of our best young policemen and asked him to look into things, ask around, keep his ear to the ground. He knows the old city. He grew up in it, went to school there, lives there.” The Mayor sat up a little straighter, to tell Max, “Just because his own home and his offices are in the New Town, that doesn’t mean a mayor doesn’t care about all of his citizens. And maybe, the less important citizens—not that any one of us is more or less important than the other, you understand. I never think that.”

  Max smiled. The Mayor obviously thought of him as a voter.

  “These are my people, these shopkeepers. Everyone is my people and it’s my job to take care of my city. Also …” He hesitated, as if he didn’t want to have to say it, but he made himself go on. “Not three days after I asked Officer Torson to look into things, I received this.”

  He held the envelope out to Max. Max took it, and removed the sheet of paper from it. The words had been cut out from the Queensbridge Gazette and pasted onto plain paper.

  Mr. Mayor, You will do yourself and Queensbridge a favor if you forget about sending your policeman around asking questions. People don’t want to hear those questions, in case you hadn’t noticed. So call off your dog and you can tell him we know where he lives, we know his pretty wife and their three children. Things can get worse, Mr. Mayor.

  Max looked up, across the sparkling water of the lake. They were approaching Graffon Landing, close enough now so that he could see the small waterfall that tumbled down the rocks into the center of the town, tossing tiny rainbows out into the air. The houses of Graffon Landing were painted in bright colors: whites and yellows, mossy greens and rusty reds. The houses gathered together, like friends around a campfire, between the steep cliffs and the blue lake, under a sky that shone with warm sunlight, and was home to a flock of soft little clouds.

  It would have made a perfect watercolor sky for the month of June, for Max’s imagined calendar of skyscapes, and for a moment Max was sorry he was on The Water Rat being the Solutioneer instead of being himself, a twelve-year-old boy who was learning from Joachim how to paint skies, in watercolor.

  The scene was lovely but the note he held in his hand was ugly and he asked, “Has Officer Torson seen this?”

  The Mayor shook his head. “How can I show it to him?”

  This, Max was sure of, and he said it plain and clear, “You should.” Saying it, he was Mister Max, the Solutioneer, who knew trouble’s ugly face when it popped up in front of him. Even if he’d never before seen trouble like this.

  The Mayor sighed again. “You’re right. I’ll tell him first thing tomorrow morning. Because if anything happened …” He couldn’t finish that sentence. “Will you help? We’ll pay anything you charge, there’s no problem with paying you. Can you help us?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Find out what’s going on and who’s behind it. Figure out a way to stop it.” The Mayor had been ready for that question. He smiled a tired smile, removed another sheet of paper from his briefcase, and snapped it shut. Then he looked at Max, looked right into Max’s eyes. “You’re my last hope, Mister Max.” He gave Max the list. “And we only have five weeks before the Royal Family arrives. I will not have my city in disarray, especially not while the King is here.”

  When he said that, he sounded quite fierce. “I don’t want anybody in the entire royal party to even start to suspect. Think of the uproar.” His eyes flashed as he imagined it. “Soldiers stationed all over the city. Or they’d pack up and leave and take all the coins they would have spent here away with them. We don’t want that,” the Mayor announced.

  Max sat and thought. He didn’t agree to take the job, and he didn’t refuse it. He thought about it. Eventually, he asked, “Officer Torson couldn’t find out anything?”

  “Nothing. But he noticed that they got right to work rebuilding, repairing, mending, restocking their shops, as if—as if they knew it wouldn’t happen again. He’s a good policeman. Smart. Observant. I trust him.”

  So did Max. Grammie had taught Sven Torson in grade school and she thought well of him, but he didn’t tell the Mayor that. Instead, he thought some more. “I don’t know quite how I will go about finding anything out,” he said.

  “So you’ll do it?” the Mayor asked. “You’ll try? I’m a little desperate,” he added unnecessarily, and held out a purse. “Here’s an advance of double what they said is your usual fee,” he said.

  Mister Max, the Solutioneer, costumed out as the Queen’s chosen spy, a dangerous man who knew how to take care of himself in almost any situation, pocketed the purse. He smiled reassuringly. “I’ll do my best.”

  The two shook hands, sealing the contract.

  Captain Francis watched this from his position at the bridge, at the helm. He had known the Mayor was meeting with someone. Every now and then the Mayor had such private meetings on the foredeck of The Water Rat. Usually, Captain Francis knew the men with whom the Mayor wanted such private conversation, or who didn’t want to be known to have an appointment with the Mayor. But this man he didn’t know. Although, he remembered seeing him once before, earlier in the spring, accompanying a lady up to Graffon Landing and then later in the day and still in the same lady’s company, making the return trip to Queensbridge. Captain Francis had already been curious about the man—artist? foreigner? confidence man? dancing master? He couldn’t tell. Now he was even more curious. He looked down on the dark hat and dark-coated shoulders, and wondered. He couldn’t remember the face. Possibly, he’d never really seen it.

  When they docked at Queensbridge, Captain Francis called down to Carlo to make the boat fast and then make it ready for the afternoon passage around the lake. “I won’t be long,” he called, but said no more. “Put in
a few extra stores, it’s Sunday, there’ll be the afternoon trippers. Can you manage?”

  “Sure thing, Captain,” Carlo called back. “I know what to do.” Carlo didn’t ask where his father might be going or what he might be doing. That wasn’t their way. When parent and child lived so close together, and worked together as well, it was important that each should have his privacy. Carlo himself had slipped off alone, several times recently, and Captain Francis had not questioned him about that. His son was a grown man, after all. Probably it had to do with a woman. Captain Francis hoped so. They had been living alone, just the two of them, since the death of his wife, when Carlo was just a boy, just twelve years old. A woman would be a welcome addition to the family and Carlo would confide in his father when he was ready, when there was something to confide. Captain Francis just wished he could be sure exactly what was going on, because Carlo had seemed low-spirited in the last two or three weeks, slow to laugh and quick to fall silent, maybe even anxious, which wasn’t like him. Young men, Captain Francis knew, could get themselves into trouble, and they were often too proud, or kind, to ask their fathers for help.

  For now, however, Captain Francis’s attention was on the Mayor’s mysterious companion, who had melted into the group of passengers crossing the ramp from the ferry down to the dock, well behind the Mayor, who had been the first off, in deference to his position in the city. The stranger crossed behind the large berthed vessels like someone who knew where he was going, but Captain Francis crossed behind him like someone just out to enjoy the warm midday sun.

  In this way they wound their way through the streets of the old city, until the stranger turned into Thieves Alley and went through a gate and up the pathway to a small stone house. Captain Francis strolled on to the end of the street, just a passerby, a wandering Sunday passerby. But he had read the sign that hung on the gate through which the man went: MISTER MAX, SOLUTIONEER.