The Book of Lost Things Read online

  Max laughed. “Not a clue.”

  Ari ran his fingers through his red hair. “Neither do I. She isn’t exactly predictable, the Baroness Barthold.” That, however, didn’t worry him, not one bit.

  With Ari gone and the urge to paint temporarily satisfied, the whole day stretched out empty in front of Max. He decided to do schoolwork. He mastered Euclid’s fifth proposition, using a ruler and compass to construct isosceles triangles, and then made—as he said to himself, standing up to admire it—an elegant drawing of a plant cell. After that, it was time to eat. He’d had enough of sitting in the kitchen and carried his lunch of soup, bread, and cheese into the dining room, where he sat in his father’s chair. Sitting, slowly eating—because what would he do with the afternoon?—Max was almost sorry that the Long-ears were no longer around. They had made things lively and given him something interesting to do.

  Then he realized that the Long-ears had left him a possible mystery. He could wonder if his father was speaking some form of the truth, if not the literal truth, about dining in the company of a fortune. Certainly those three accomplished crooks had believed it. Between one spoonful of soup and the next, Max looked up at the many posters on the dining room walls and all the books lined up on their shelves. He didn’t want to think about how few coins he had in his pocket and how few days of independence they represented, and he didn’t want to remember who should be sitting in the chair he occupied and who in the chair opposite, so he sent his mind wandering over to the unlikely possibility of a fortune. It wouldn’t be vast. How could the manager and lead actor of a small theater in a small city in a small country earn a fortune? But it might be something—if his father was the saving sort. He hadn’t ever heard that about his father, and William Starling was an announcing sort of person, so Max would have heard that, wouldn’t he? But it wasn’t impossible.

  The Starling Theatrical Company usually played to full houses, and it did make a profit, Max knew. Perhaps there was a precious edition of one of the plays standing on the shelf like any ordinary book, hidden in full view, Shakespeare or Molière. Grammie could teach him how to research rare editions and maybe he would ask her to do that. Or could it be the posters? It was his mother who had designed them, and a lithographer friend of Joachim’s had produced three dozen copies of each, advertisements to put up around the old city and the New Town as well as to display beside the entrance to the theater. There was no chance that the posters would turn out to be the work of some famous artist, Rembrandt, for example, or Goya, or even one of the modern painters, maybe Cézanne. But could their frames be valuable antiques?

  Max chewed his bread and cheese and doubted that. Even the intricately carved vines and flowers that wound around the poster of A Soldier’s Sweetheart couldn’t be valuable enough to count as a fortune, Max was sure. And the wide, gilded frame around Adorable Arabella—which was his mother’s best role, the one she was most famous for and enjoyed the most—with its checkerboard of squares and thick knobs that looked like pawns in a chess game, even that frame was no more than a curiosity, or at best a unique piece of craftsmanship.

  Max finished his lunch and leaned back in his father’s chair, thinking idly and inattentively … and the idea came to him. The idea floated to the surface of his mind like a photograph appearing in developing liquid, a clear image where just seconds ago there had been blankness. He surged up from the table. He could kick himself for not noticing at the time what Pia had asked about. Granted, it was one of her many and many inquiries, but hadn’t he already realized by then that among all of her chatterbox questions there was often one that he would be smart to answer? He could kick himself harder for being so slow to understand what the marriage of Arabella to Banker Hermann might mean—because hadn’t his father talked about that impossible event in both messages?

  Mostly, however, he would have liked to kick his father. There was no need, no need at all, for William Starling to have been so … so flamboyantly secretive. As if it was all a game, he thought angrily.

  Then Max remembered the Long-ears and thought maybe his father’s games were necessary after all.

  Carefully, he took the image of the pretty young woman in her striped purple gown down from the wall and laid it on the table. The frame was heavy, even heavier than he’d guessed. It was also thick, much thicker than any of the others. The only reason for its weight, Max guessed, taking a gentle, experimental tug at one of the knobs, was if the frame was made of something very heavy.

  Was the frame solid gold? Could his father’s fortune ever mount up to the extent of that much gold? That seemed unlikely.

  And in fact it was unlikely. Because when the little door pulled free of its fitting, like a knobbed piece pulled out of a toddler’s puzzle, Max saw a little leather bag hidden in the space behind it. The leather bag held gold coins, five gold coins, and it fitted exactly into its little box of a hiding place. Max replaced the bag of coins and the door, then tried another knob, which pulled its square of wood free from the frame to reveal another little leather bag.

  Max felt as if he had been tossed up into the air by some energetic explosion beneath him, some volcano or waterspout erupting, tossing him up into sunshine. He closed his eyes and heard his father’s voice telling strangers in a restaurant, “My fortune? I break my fast every morning in its company!”—a brilliant actor playing a merely vain and bombastic one. Smiling, Max returned to the frame.

  Not all of the knobbed squares hid coins. Some hid only bags of gravel. Max thought that his father had planned to gradually exchange the gravel for gold coins when he had them. Only a dozen of the little knobbed boxes held gold, but that was wealth enough. On that amount, Max could live comfortably while he completed his schooling, and his university studies, too. There was more than enough to last several years, until Max was old enough to earn a living in some chosen profession. Max was dumbfounded. How could it be that his father had accumulated so many gold coins? And what was Max supposed to do with them?

  Because his father did want him to find them. That was the secret of the two messages he’d been sent. And Max had solved the puzzle! Also clear was his father’s opinion that Max might need them, and that was worrisome.

  Max hung the heavy poster back in its place on the wall. He returned to his father’s seat at the table. From there, he stared across at Adorable Arabella, just as his father had so often done, but without his father’s exuberantly smug expression. This was a real problem.

  He knew perfectly well it shouldn’t be a problem. It should be a solution. It should be the solution to all of his problems and troubles, having enough to live on. But it wasn’t, not really. Because if he had enough to live on, then he didn’t have to work as the Solutioneer.

  If Max wasn’t the Solutioneer, how could he be independent?

  Moreover, if he didn’t have other people’s problems to solve, Max would be left with just his own.

  He had no interest in the coins, Max decided, and he wasn’t going to tell anyone about them, not even Grammie. He wasn’t about to let a fortune ruin his life. He would, however, sleep more soundly, knowing the coins were there if he needed them.

  But in the darkness of deep night, the sound of the fire wagon, bells clanging and hooves thundering, woke him. The Theater? was Max’s first thought. Until he heard the direction they were going in. But awake now in the darkness, he found his heart still pounding: His parents must have known as soon as they got on the boat that there was something wrong, wrong and dangerous, going on. They must have wanted to reassure him, without putting him in danger, and also to make sure he had enough to live on. They must have been trying to take care of him, in case they wouldn’t be there to do that themselves. What had they gotten themselves into?

  The afternoon mail the next day brought him two unexpected letters, almost as if, now that he could wait, the world decided it needed him, and right away. The first letter asked Mister Max to call at the office of a lawyer in the New Town, on a priva
te matter, at his earliest convenience. The second letter was from a boy at the Hilliard School who wanted Mister Max to prove to everyone that Madame Celestine always gave girls better marks than boys, which wasn’t fair, was it?

  Max was trying to decide how to answer this second letter and what to wear in response to the first—the disreputable detective’s suit? the town official’s uniform?—when Grammie burst into the kitchen. He rose, both letters in his hand, to tell her this good news. Then he saw the disarray of her hair and the frightened—or was it excited?—expression in her eyes. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Grammie? Are you all right?”

  She put a newspaper down in front of him, right on top of his letters.

  “What are you doing?” he cried. “What’s wrong?”

  “Look. Just … Look!” He looked.

  It was a newspaper published in Rio de Janeiro. Grammie held it folded open to one of the back pages. Her finger pointed to a photograph.

  The black-and-white picture was blurry, but he would have known those smiles anywhere. He had seen them hundreds of times on stage, accepting applause. No matter how his parents might be feeling, no matter how well or badly either one of them might have performed that evening, they always smiled just this way, smiled out over the audience with just these same proud and joyous expressions, as if never before had applause been so welcome. There could be no doubt: It was his parents.

  His father wore a close-fitting military-style jacket with gold braid on the shoulders and cuffs and a broad sash, hung with many medals, diagonally across his chest. His mother wore a tiara that gleamed white in the photograph and a pale low-cut gown with long pale gloves that went up to her elbows and jewels around her neck and wrists. They stood, smiling, each with one arm stretched out wide and welcoming, the other hands clasped between them.

  “What is this?” Max whispered, without taking his eyes from the picture. “Who is that?” He pointed to the only other person in the photo, a shadowy figure in what looked like a military uniform standing off to stage right, behind his father.

  “Read it,” his grandmother advised, and moved her hand so that he could see the caption under the picture.

  “It’s in Spanish!” Max protested.

  “Oh. That’s right,” said his grandmother, the librarian and former teacher, so disturbed and distracted that she had forgotten that important fact. “I had to go to the University to find a translator.”

  Max kept his eye on the photograph while Grammie recited, “The newly crowned King and Queen of Andesia.”

  Max looked up at his grandmother. “That’s all?”

  Grammie nodded, not happily.

  Max thought. “Well … at least? We can be sure now they weren’t on that boat,” he said.

  Grammie nodded and after a long minute reminded him, “The Miss Koala.”

  “That one,” Max agreed, without taking his eyes off the photograph. Then he looked up. “Andesia?” he asked. “Where’s that?”

  “South America. It’s a tiny country, mountainous, situated at the point where Ecuador and Colombia meet, not far from Peru. The soil is thin and rocky, so for a long time nobody cared about it or wanted it, just the people who lived there in their villages, with their animals. But silver and copper were discovered, and with the mines everything changed. These days, the common people barely scrape a living, while the people who own the mines are extraordinarily wealthy.”

  Max raised his eyebrows.

  “I looked up anything I could find about Andesia,” Grammie explained. “I’ve gone back over old newspaper reports. It seems that the Andesian royal house was the worst kind of monarchy, greedy and cruel; it treated the people—except for the mine owners, who only had to pay heavy taxes—like animals. Last summer, the people got up in arms—well, spades and pitchforks, mostly; they couldn’t afford weapons, knives, too, probably, scythes, hoes—and revolted, and no wonder, but … The ruling powers in the neighboring countries got together to offer political asylum and a safe home to the royal family, and then they sent in their own joint army to reestablish peace. They put a man whose mother was Andesian and father Peruvian in control, as military governor. Temporarily, they said. Ha!” Grammie had lived too long to believe everything she was told.

  Max was not to be distracted by what nations said, or newspapers, or politicians. He touched the photograph with the tip of a finger. “It’s them, isn’t it.”

  “Max?” At this point Grammie sat down beside him, as if her legs could no longer hold her up. “I read the articles carefully. More than once. This man they put in power? His name is Balcor. It’s probably him in the picture.” She set her finger on the shadowy figure.

  Grammie spoke slowly now, as if she didn’t want to be telling this part of the story. “First, this General Balcor announced that the royal family had been betrayed, tracked to their mountain fortress and murdered in their beds, all of them. It was a gang of gypsy robbers, he reported. All the jewels and treasures the royal family had taken with them into exile were stolen by those same gypsies. It was a national tragedy, a tragedy for all of South America, and the General promised that he would find the culprits and hang them. He swore to return the jewels and treasure to the people of Andesia. He said the people of Andesia needed a king to lead them, and when the Andesians said they’d take him for their king, he declined. But I don’t trust him, not for a heartbeat.

  “Then he announced, this was last March, it was in the newspapers, he announced to the country that there was a distant cousin of the late king, now living in a foreign land, and with the death of the entire royal family, this cousin was the heir to the throne. Do you see where this is heading?” Grammie asked.

  Max did.

  “What have your parents gotten themselves into?” Grammie wondered, and Max thought he had never heard her sound so upset, so anxious, so helpless, and he had only the vaguest idea of what kind of trouble his parents might be in. All he knew was that it was trouble not of their own choosing.

  “They were tricked,” he said. He couldn’t take his eyes off the two smiling people in the newspaper photograph. “Do you think they’re prisoners?”

  “Whatever his plan is, this General Balcor needs them alive and well,” Grammie said, sounding a little calmer, now that she had shared her fear.

  Max agreed. “So they’re probably safe enough for now.” He hoped that was true, because he had noticed—and decided not to tell his grandmother—the way his father held one of his mother’s hands clasped tightly in one of his own as they opened their free arms to accept the praise of their people. This was the bow that meant trouble. Whatever performance they were in, it wasn’t going well.

  Grammie said, “So our problem is, What do we do? Or is that your problem? You’re the Solutioneer after all. I’m just your librarian, just an information source.”

  “I don’t know what we can do,” Max answered, “not right away, not until we know more. I only know we can’t say anything to anyone. Absolutely no one. Not even Ari, not even Pia. Not even Joachim.”

  “Yes. Because this General Balcor needs to think he’s getting away with whatever he’s up to. As long as he thinks that, he needs your parents. I wonder what his plans are,” Grammie said, studying the photograph.

  Max looked at the situation from a different angle. He wondered if he could get a message through to his parents and, if he could, how he could, and what it would be.

  He reminded himself that not only were his parents alive but also they had been located. That had to be good news. It was good news, mostly. Because if you know where someone is, you know where you have to go to get them out of whatever trouble they’re in. You might not know just what, precisely, the trouble is, but how to discover that was Max’s next job.

  He’d done all right with problems so far, he told himself reassuringly. If this one was more distant, and difficult, that didn’t make it insoluble. He looked up at his grandmother, and smiled doubtfully.

  She looked ba
ck at him, and smiled doubtfully.

  We’re in this together, Max thought.

  “At least we’re in this together,” Grammie said.

  “We know where they are,” Max reminded her.

  “Yes,” Grammie agreed. “And we also have the Solutioneer on our team,” and now her smile had no doubt in it at all. “This isn’t getting dinner on the table,” she said, and turned to leave.

  “I think I’ll go outside,” Max said, and he was already thinking hard. “And paint.”

  Dear Mister Max,

  Your name was given to me by one of our prominent lawyers, Fredric Henderson, who offered as reference also the Baroness Barthold. Both parties spoke of your perspicacity and your discretion. Those are qualities I am in need of. I will be aboard The Water Rat Sunday morning when it leaves the city docks for its nine o’clock circuit of the lake. I will be standing at the bow, regardless of wind and weather. I ask you to meet me there, where we can talk privately on a matter of importance to the city, and to the welfare of the country, too, quite possibly. Thanking you in advance I remain yours sincerely,

  Richard P. Valoury

  Richard P. Valoury, Mayor, was typed underneath a signature so scribbled that among all the letters, only the V was recognizable.

  Grammie was reading over his shoulder and “Why do people have such terrible handwriting?” she demanded. “Maybe I should go back into the classroom, and improve things.”

  Max was surprised. “Do you want to teach school again? I thought you really liked the Library, with all the books and magazines and newspapers, with all the different tasks the job needs you to be able to do.”