The Book of Kings Page 2

  “You’ve been told that I’m not taking any new work,” Max reminded her.

  “You never told me. It was some assistant telling me that, some secretary.”

  “And she was correct,” Max said.

  “There’s no time to waste. Who knows what the girl will do? What if she marries? And has to raise children when she should be…” But here, words failed the old woman and she waved her hands in the air, as if gathering in some unseen flock of possibilities. “Tess could be one of the great milliners, like me. But no, the girl has her own ideas. She wants to make hats anyone can afford, even servants and secretaries, even schoolteachers. Well, she’ll have learned her lesson by now,” R Zilla concluded, with satisfaction. “However, she is, as I said, stubborn. I need to know what it will take to persuade her to return to me. Surely you can accomplish that without much effort?”

  “I’m not accepting any work.”

  “I’ll expect to hear from you. You can reach me at the shop, on Barthold Boulevard.”

  Max had exhausted both his patience and his faith in a mannerly approach to this woman. “Go away,” he said to her. Then he couldn’t help but add, “Please.”

  “Not until you agree,” she said.

  He had no choice. He adjusted the red beret, causing her to sniff her disapproval, and turned his back to her. He picked up his paintbrush, dipped it into water, then color, and applied it to the paper. For several minutes, he simply ignored her.

  At last he heard a rustle of skirts and her voice. “I’ll be back.”

  At that moment, Max didn’t care if she did return. At that moment, all he cared about was that she stop telling him he had to do something he’d said over and over he wasn’t going to do.

  Once she had gone off down Thieves Alley, the quiet of the day rose up to wrap itself around him until he was floating along in solitary silence, as if he were himself a cloud. Max put down his brush. He sat on his front steps, elbows resting on the step behind him and legs stretched out in front of him. He turned his face to the light and closed his eyes.

  The Solutioneer was thinking. What could he say to persuade the King? How might some nobody make his way into the presence of Teodor? He pictured a theatrical scene in which he stood before the King, and tried to hear the lines the King would speak, and think of how he might answer them. In the quiet morning, wondering, almost dreaming, Max was about to have an idea. He knew it. He could feel himself almost having an idea. He could almost see the idea approaching, like a ghost materializing in a mirror…

  “Max?”

  A screen door slammed and Grammie came clattering out of his house, onto the porch behind him.

  “There you are. I’m glad I found you. I didn’t know where you were.”

  She plumped herself down on the step beside him. The idea dematerialized and disappeared, an offended ghost.

  Max gathered in his legs and held his tongue.

  “I’ve got tickets,” she told him. Seeing confusion on his face, she explained, “Two staterooms on the Estrella, one for us, one for Ari. We sail August seventeenth for Caracas. We’ll have to find some kind of ship to carry us to Maracaibo, and from there we go overland into Andesia. We’ll need mules and porters and guides for the last part of the trip, but we should reach Apapa by mid-September. Barring accidents,” Grammie added. “Winter will be over, so we won’t have that to contend with. You’ll need to buckle down to your study of Spanish,” she warned him.

  Max didn’t speak.

  “And I need one of those bags of gold coins,” she concluded.

  He hadn’t asked her to find a boat, or to buy tickets. In fact, he had asked her to let him figure out the rescue mission, and Ari had agreed that it was Max’s business and responsibility, and now she had gone ahead on her own, without even telling him she was thinking of it. Without asking him.

  “We can’t just sit around doing nothing,” Grammie told him.

  “I’m not.”

  “Maybe. But nothing is happening,” Grammie pointed out.

  Max, who until just a minute ago had been confidently awaiting the arrival of an idea, jumped to his feet to keep himself quiet. He reminded himself of how worried Grammie must be about her daughter, and her daughter’s husband, too. He reminded himself that now that she wasn’t going to work every day, she didn’t have anything to distract her from her worries.

  “You know enough Spanish now so that when we’re alone that’s all we should speak, and don’t give me that face, Max. This is serious,” she told him, as if he were in any danger of forgetting that. “So how about getting me those coins,” she said.

  Max would do as she wanted. “Will Ari be home for supper?” he asked hopefully. His tutor-tenant-false-Ambassador-to-be wasn’t bossy, or female, and that made him the very person in whose company Max wanted to be.

  “It isn’t even lunchtime yet,” Grammie answered, “and the garden needs attention if you don’t have anything better to do.”

  Gardening was an activity that encouraged thinking, and problem solving, and plan making, so Max went out back, to pull the weeds growing up under the tall tomato plants. His fingers loosened the soil around the weeds and his mind grew loose as the soil, as he thought about the King and pictured Teodor in his summer palace, up on the promontory, with only the one drive leading up into the grounds and a guarded gatehouse at the start of the drive, and he wondered how a schoolboy—or dogcatcher or university student—how anyone might make his way—

  That was when Pia, who although younger was just as female and just as bossy as Grammie and R Zilla, arrived bringing the morning mail delivery out to the garden.

  “Word must be spreading that you aren’t taking new cases,” Pia complained. “There are only two letters, which isn’t at all fair to me, if you think about it, if I’m your assistant. Part-time assistant,” she corrected as soon as she saw the look on his face. “You know, Max, if you had a phone you could read your own mail and then telephone to tell me you don’t need me and spare me the trouble of riding my bike into the city to hear you say to my face you don’t need me, even if a case comes along that I could perfectly well solve. Or probably. So get a telephone.”

  Max had an urge to rip a tomato plant or two out of the soil and just throw them onto the ground.

  Pia had an opinion about the situation to once again share with him. “It’s not fair that just because you’re going off I can’t do anything but answer letters. And do you know what? If people stop talking about the Solutioneer for a while, and it won’t take very many weeks, they’ll forget about you and there won’t even be letters for me to answer. That’s just basic business sense. And if you’re out of business, what will I do? It’s not as if I want to learn how to draw or play the pianoforte—a word she pronounced through pursed-up lips—“or dance a waltz or…do needlework,” which was, from the sound of her voice, no different from being drawn and quartered. “Although I wouldn’t mind learning how to drive a motorcar. They can go really fast, over twenty miles an hour, did you know that? Don’t you want to learn to drive one? I bet it’s easier than driving a carriage. Don’t you think?”

  Rather than destroy perfectly healthy plants, not to mention the tomatoes ripening on them, Max thought he’d like to pull Pia up, out of his garden, the way he’d uprooted R Zilla earlier. He pictured himself doing just that, and grinned.

  And there it was. An idea. A great idea. A two-birds-with-one-stone idea.

  “I want to talk to you about the R Zilla job,” Max said.

  “Don’t bother. I don’t know anything about hats and I don’t want to,” Pia announced. Then, “What does it have to do with me?” she asked, with both hope and suspicion, reminding him, “I already turned it down for you. Twice.”

  “I thought you might work on it,” Max said, and thoroughly enjoyed the moment of stunned silence from Pia.

  Of course she spoiled it. “You’re taking my advice!” she crowed. “You’re listening to me!”

  Ma
x shrugged. Maybe it hadn’t been bad advice, but what had really decided him was the chance to get rid of R Zilla and Pia together, bird one and bird two. There was, however, no reason for Pia to know that.

  “I’ll notify her that you will be coming by to talk with her,” he said. “She can explain her problem to you, and you can figure out a way to solve it.”

  “And you won’t interfere?” Pia asked.

  “Not unless you ask.”

  “I won’t ask,” she promised, and leaped to her feet. “I’m going now. I need to think about…,” she mumbled, and took a quick glance back at Max from the doorway. “Don’t worry, you can just go ahead with your expedition to South America and I’ll take care of R Zilla before—”

  Pia stopped speaking as abruptly as if someone had put a plug into her mouth. She turned hastily to leave, then turned back to demand, with a wouldn’t-you-like-to-know, sly-cat smile on her face, “You don’t think she’ll make me wear one of her hats, do you?” Then she went off at a run, leaving Max to wonder what she was up to. Because Pia was up to something, he was sure of it, and not because he was the Solutioneer and so clever, but because Pia was terrible at being subtle.

  But he didn’t have time to think about Pia, not right then. What he should do was get away from where everybody could come and interrupt him. After a quick lunch of bread and cheese, an apple, and a glass of milk, he got on his bike. He would have liked to give himself the treat of lemon raspberry cake, or maybe a lemon tart, but Gabrielle Glompf, the girl Ari wanted to marry, had left her job in the ice cream shop and gone to be pastry chef at Pia’s father’s new restaurant, B’s, so instead of stopping in the busy center of the New Town, Max rode out to the quieter university area. He would sit in Joachim’s garden and think. His teacher was not female, and neither was he bossy, and neither was he a talker. Joachim was a painter, an artist, and, except for the skyscapes, had no interest in what Max did. At the alley behind Joachim’s house, he dismounted and leaned his bicycle against the fence, then let himself into the garden.

  “I’m working,” Joachim, who stood at an easel, greeted his student.

  “Hello, Sunny,” Max called to the golden dog, curled up in front of the open door into the house. Her tail wagged. “I just want to sit,” he told his teacher.

  Joachim ignored him.

  That afternoon, Joachim wasn’t painting a flower from his own garden. Instead, he had a long-stemmed bloom of Queen Anne’s lace set in a jar on a tall table. This was such a surprise that Max had to ask, “A wildflower?” He tried to decide if it looked more like a burst of firecracker against the night sky or a dusting of snow on the wide branch of a spruce. Mostly, he decided, it looked exactly like itself and nothing else: That was what was wonderful about it. “When did you start painting wildflowers?”

  “Quiet, please,” Joachim grumped. He stepped back to study the picture, in which each tiny blossom of the lacy white head was painted in perfect detail. Each threadlike stem was there, too, and a section of the rough central stem as well, although in the painting the flower seemed to float against a silky background the dark green color of ivy.

  Max sat cross-legged on the ground, and Sunny came over to settle herself down beside him, her head on his thigh. Obediently, he started to stroke her silky skull and pull gently at her floppy ears. Her feathery tail thumped against the ground.

  “Although there isn’t anyone who’ll want to buy this,” Joachim announced, breaking the silence.

  Max hadn’t settled into thinking, so he was happy to try to cheer Joachim up. “It’s summer,” he said. “There will be all kinds of tourists around, for weeks and weeks, as well as everybody in the court who travels with the King. You’ll sell some paintings.”

  “Worrying all the time about earning enough is hard on a person, Max,” Joachim said, as if Max didn’t already know that himself.

  Max understood what his teacher meant. Most painters don’t earn a lot of money for their work. In fact, most painters don’t earn a living by painting. They have to paint for the joy of it, and the challenge of it, and to share with anyone who cares to look—even if only a few people care to really look—their vision of the world, of its shapes and colors and creatures. It’s not easy to be an artist.

  “Did you ever think about finding a patron?” Max asked.

  Joachim snorted, disgusted at Max’s thickheadedness. “A patron’s the last thing I want. Think about it, Max. I’d be terrible at having a patron and having to get along with him. Or her. It’s a buyer I want.” Joachim turned his gloomy gray glance from the painting to Max. “But I might as well be making hats, for all anyone cares about what I paint. I don’t know why I bother.” He shifted his position and raised his brush. “Why don’t you go away?” Joachim asked, without looking at Max. “Why don’t you take Sunny and go away? Don’t come in when you bring her back. Just open the front door and let her through. I need to work on this.”

  Max understood that need to work on something, and maybe taking the dog for a walk in the park would get his brain going along a useful track, so he went off happily enough to get her leash.

  On a hot summer afternoon, the city park was almost deserted—although Sunny, as usual, made new friends, a pair of nursemaids taking their charges out for some air. The two women cooed over Sunny, who always welcomed attention, and Max stood back, watching, thinking.

  His earlier ideas for approaching the King had come to nothing: Mr. Bendiff had flatly refused to let Max be a temporary waiter the night the royal family came to dine at B’s. Pia had returned from the Mayor’s office with the depressing news that a letter would take at least five months to make its way through all the city and national checkpoints that surrounded the King. None of the city’s three elected Assembly representatives could hope to make a personal request of any of the courtiers before October. And there were no jobs in the town of Summer where a boy might hope to meet his King strolling down a street, no jobs in kitchens or gardens or taverns and especially not on the grounds of the summer palace, no matter how willing a worker that boy was.

  Max watched Sunny trying to tempt a nursemaid into a game of throw-the-stick and tried to think of something, anything at all, that might work. He might well fail again, but he wasn’t giving up yet. All he needed was an idea.

  It was late afternoon when he got home again. If he kept being interrupted out front, painting, and out back, weeding, then he would stay inside, pacing. Sometimes pacing could give a person ideas, even if his house was so small that going from the front parlor through the dining room to the kitchen and back again might make him dizzy. Sometimes, if he glanced at the framed posters advertising the Starling Theatrical Company’s performances that hung on the dining room walls, Max might find an idea in one play or another, or one character or another, or one plot twist or another. He drank another glass of water and set about pacing. Thinking. Picturing.

  A sharp rapping at his front door was followed by the opening of the door and the arrival of another alarming hat. This hat was peacock blue and so wide it almost filled the doorway. Its Z was a black satin streak holding a bouquet of raven feathers to its crown. R Zilla didn’t greet him. She didn’t look around the entry hall and she didn’t hesitate. “The man needs someone to look after him. He shouldn’t be encouraged to work a minute longer in that wishy-washy style. It’s not what he’s known for, and why he has a dog…I ask you, what does a painter need with a dog? The man should have a wife, but not some needy, admiring little creature. A man like Joachim needs someone independent. With a life of her own. And a business, and a large house, especially if he must have a dog. Why haven’t you begun the job?” she demanded. “Do I have to tell you again I’m not taking no for an answer?”

  She glared up at him.

  “I’m not giving no for an answer,” Max said, rushing to have his say before she decided she knew what he was going to say and could argue with it before he’d said it. “My assistant—”

  “A snippy p
erson,” R Zilla told him. “You didn’t read the letter I was sent.”

  “I will not be taking the job myself,” Max said firmly, in the manner of the young patriot Lorenzo Apiedi announcing his resolution to name no names to the judge, to die alone. “My assistant will be able to present your case to Tess Tardo. It’s the assistant or no one,” he declared.

  R Zilla stood absolutely still for a full half minute. Then she nodded, a swooping event of peacock-blue hat. “We’ll see,” she decided. “If this assistant isn’t up to the task, you’ll have to take care of it yourself. But you can tell that painter this: He should think about marrying me.”

  She left abruptly, and when the little house was quiet again, Max allowed himself a long, theatrical groan. The voice from upstairs surprised him. “Max? Are you all right? Who was that?” Ari ran lightly down the stairs, his red hair freshly combed, his face alight with happiness, as it always was these days, tucking a fresh white shirt into dark trousers. “What do you say? It’s time, shall we go see what your grandmother is feeding us tonight?”

  And all Max could do was laugh. Maybe when he went to bed there would be a chance, in the long, dark silence before he fell asleep, for an idea to make its way forward, and come close enough for him to get a good look at it, and get a good grasp on it.

  In which Sunny proves useful

  The next morning, Max sat at the kitchen table with a plate of cookies to help him work his way through a list of Spanish words for household objects, such as frying pans and linens, including four kinds of spoons (soup, tea, serving, mixing) and two kinds of sinks (kitchen, bathroom). He planned to finish the vocabulary list and then disappear on his bicycle. If he could only have a couple of solitary and undisturbed hours, he was sure he could figure out a way to talk to King Teodor. After that, he could wonder what to say. He worked with full concentration, and fast, and was at the bottom of the list (towels, soap) when the bell rang.