The Book of Kings Read online

  His caller was Joachim, Sunny at his side. Max invited them in and led them back to the kitchen. Something must be wrong, he thought. Joachim had never come to his house before.

  Joachim dropped down onto a chair. “It’s all your fault,” he said. “She’s all your fault, and the woman won’t leave me alone.”

  “R Zilla,” Max guessed, and Joachim nodded. “Didn’t she buy a painting?” Max asked.

  “Two, but—” Joachim shrugged that unimportant fact away. He slumped in his chair, like a farmer whose crops have been destroyed by drought, or a teacher whose students have all failed an exam. “I don’t want any fancy-dancy beret with a Z on it. I don’t want a bigger house with a bigger garden and bigger studio, and a wife to go with it.” He sat up straight and glared at Max. “I only want to paint. I’m a painter!” he cried.

  That said, and off his mind, Joachim took a couple of the snickerdoodles and rose to look out at the garden, where tomatoes hung down from their leafy vines. Absent-mindedly, the way he talked when he was thinking about a painting, he said, “Good cookies. Did your mother make them?”

  “My grandmother,” Max told him.

  In the same distracted voice, Joachim asked, “Are your parents back? Are they ever coming back? You don’t know, do you?” But this didn’t interest him, not really. What really interested him was “That tomato there, see how its color shines?” He turned around briskly. “How about you take Sunny for a walk? Take her down along the river, beyond the city limits, where she can run free. I can wait here. You have a sketchbook, don’t you? And a pencil? Get them for me and I’ll be fine. Take as long as you like.”

  He reached down for another cookie.

  Actually, Max thought, a walk by the river, with nothing to distract him, might be even more effective than a bicycle ride. As he went through the front door, the large dog pulling him out toward the street, Max called a warning to Joachim: “R Zilla knows where I live.”

  —

  It was another fine day, especially fine for a riverside ramble, with a good breeze to keep the air from becoming uncomfortably hot. Sunny at his side, Max went first down Thieves Alley into the heart of the old city, where they stopped in the little square in front of the Starling Theater, so Max could satisfy himself that the building was undisturbed, dark and empty of life, the locks and chains on its doors all secure. That done, he and Sunny wound along through the narrow streets, toward the River Way.

  As they came to the end of Eel Lane, two girls rushed up to Sunny. They were about Pia’s age, he guessed, ten or eleven, in summer pinafores and sandals, their long hair in braids. The dog, of course, wagged her tail and nuzzled them and welcomed their caresses and cooings. The girls were enchanted. “What’s her name?” and “Where did you get her?” they wanted to know. “How old is she? If she has puppies, can I have one?” they asked. “May I hold the leash? Please?” Sunny seemed to bring out the friendliness in people, and Max could have been a lamppost for all the attention they paid to him: the perfect thinking situation.

  When Max and Sunny came to the road that led south out of the city, following the river’s path, their progress slowed. They ambled along by the blacksmith’s forge, past the warehouses and chandleries, with Sunny tracking down every new smell, to find out what it was and if it was good to eat, while Max looked into shop windows and let his mind drift. Opposite B’s, the gates to its courtyard closed at this hour of the day, Sunny pulled Max across the road and onto the grass. He let her off the leash and she ran down to the water’s edge to drink, ran on ahead, biting happily at the air, ran back to check up on him, then ran ahead again, ears flopping with every bound. Max followed. He was in no hurry. He was drifting through the morning like some cloud afloat in a clear sky. He watched the river water flow by, murmuring to itself as it went. Little fishing boats, a day’s work already behind them, rested at their moorings, booms lowered and sails furled. A tugboat chugged its way upriver to the Queensbridge docks, perhaps having taken an oceangoing vessel safely down to the sea. In only three weeks, Max would be boarding just such a vessel, he thought, and unless he could talk to the King, and talk him into helping out, it would be just the three of them—himself, Grammie, and Ari—doing their best not to look like the pretenders they were.

  He wondered if he could become an embassy himself, a one-person embassy, sent to King Teodor III from an exotic, previously unknown foreign land. He could wear the potentate’s robes from the Starling Theatrical Company production of The Caliph’s Doctor, and he could say that his visit concerned the Cellini Spoon. He happened to know something about the Cellini Spoon, didn’t he? The scene played out in his imagination: Caliph’s Ambassador Max, a gold turban on his head and gold chains draped around his neck, being presented to King Teodor, saying…saying what? What lines might he speak that would persuade Teodor to hear a private appeal? he wondered, dreaming at the edge of the river while Sunny ran back and forth, nose to the ground, tail high and happy. She barked, for the joy of it.

  A little ways down the bank, two men seated on an overturned rowboat mending fishing nets looked up, then called out to the dog. She loped up to satisfy her curiosity about these new smells and the people attached to them, and Max thought dreamily that if he ever wanted to guarantee himself a welcome, he should have Sunny with him. Sunny was the real diplomat here, he thought, and the idea surged up under his feet like some monster rising out of deep water, and Max was riding on its broad back, swept forward through foaming ocean waves.

  —

  He raced home to find Joachim seated on the back steps, pencil in hand, sketch pad on his lap. Before Joachim could say anything, even grumble a greeting about being interrupted at work, Max asked him, “Can you teach me to draw landscapes? Not paint them, just make pencil sketches.”

  “Probably,” Joachim said, folding the sketch pad closed, “but why? You’ve never done anything but skyscapes before. Why the sudden change? Is it one of your jobs?”

  “No,” Max said.

  “Well, sort of,” he allowed.

  “Will you teach me?” he insisted. “Can you?”

  “Of course I can, but not here. I teach in my garden. You can explain there, tomorrow. Today, I’m going to try painting this tomato.”

  —

  By the next morning, Max had his explanation ready. Without going into any details about the exact kind of trouble his parents were in, or the messages he had finally deciphered, he could keep it simple. “You remember that my parents disappeared?”

  “Why would I forget that?” Joachim asked.

  “We’ve found out that they’re trapped in South America. To help them get out, Grammie and I have the idea of pretending to be an embassy from King Teodor, with Ari—who can look the part, because he’s a Barthold, the next Baron in fact—with Ari as the Ambassador. Grammie has already booked passage on the Estrella, which leaves me only three weeks to figure out a way to persuade the King—”

  “Your grandmother is going, too?”

  “It’s her daughter, plus I’m her grandson. We’re all the family she has. If I can’t persuade the King to send Ari officially—”

  “He probably won’t. The royal family refuses to have anything to do with the Bartholds. Even I know about that, and nobody blames them.”

  “Grammie says we’ll go anyway, make do with fake credentials. Or maybe just the two of us will go, and she’ll be an eccentric old botanist or geologist and I’ll be her assistant or her secretary. But if it’s a genuine diplomatic mission, we’d have the best chance.”

  “She’s intrepid, isn’t she? Your grandmother.”

  Max had never thought about it in those terms. “She does what needs doing, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But what does all that have to do with landscapes?”

  When Joachim put it that way, Max was no longer so confident that he had a good answer. But since it was the only answer he had—the only plan he’d been able to come up with—it was the answer he g
ave. “If I’m an artist sketching the gates that guard the drive up to the promontory, maybe I’ll be able to get onto the grounds. If I can get onto the grounds, maybe I can find a way into the summer palace, and if I can get in, I might be able to talk to the King. Maybe, if I can talk to King Teodor myself,” Max concluded, “I might be able to persuade him. To make us an official embassy.”

  Max couldn’t help but hear how many mights and maybes there were. “It would give us our best chance,” he explained.

  “Sounds pretty wild-eyed to me,” Joachim commented.

  “And I need to borrow Sunny, because everyone likes her,” Max explained.

  “But your grandmother has a sensible head on her shoulders,” Joachim commented.

  “To be a distraction,” Max explained.

  “What are we waiting for?” Joachim asked, adding, “I hope you brought good pencils. A real artist always has good pencils.”

  The R Zilla Job

  • ACTS I, II, AND III •

  It was a girl that R Zilla expected, in part because of the secretarial position an assistant occupied and in part because the snippiness of the notes that had turned down her job sounded female to her. So when she saw the boy loitering outside her window that Monday morning, she was suspicious. There might have been assurances from the Mayor’s office that the vandalism that broke out in the spring had been taken care of, but R Zilla made a habit of not believing everything she was told, especially when it was a man telling it to her. And she had been proved right, time and again, the most recent example of which was that she was still waiting for this Solutioneer’s Assistant to make her appearance.

  Reminded, she looked again at the boy outside the window, who appeared to be studying the hat on display. He was too young to have a sweetheart he might give such a gift to—a schoolboy, really. Unless he might be shopping for a gift for his mother? He was certainly well-dressed, despite the informality of a tennis sweater. She could see that, although ill-fitted, the linen trousers were stylish, and made of good fabric. The disorganized strands of tow-colored hair emerging from under the red-and-blue-checked cap were just what she would expect from a boy.

  Of course the Solutioneer would hire only boys. Now that she thought of it, she was not surprised. She stood behind the long sales table in her showroom and waited for the boy to enter. Impatiently, she considered his face, the dark straight eyebrows drawn together in concentration and resolution; then—had the boy seen her watching?—he reached out to open the door. The shop bell rang and R Zilla waited until he stood silent in front of her, his dark blue eyes staring.

  R Zilla was not about to permit unmannerly behavior in her own shop, even if this was a person sent to solve her difficulty. She said, “Don’t you know enough to remove your hat when you come inside?” and was pleased at the hasty and, she hoped, embarrassed grab he made for it, and the nervous way he held on to it. His cheeks were flushed and he couldn’t seem to think of what to say—not a bit like that cheeky Solutioneer—but she didn’t feel sorry for him. She might just fire him on the spot. He wasn’t even looking at her hats.

  —

  Pia almost turned around and walked out, and if she had she would have made sure to slam the door behind her. R Zilla was even less likeable in person than she was in writing. Pia squeezed the cap she now held in her hands. And why hadn’t she just refused to take it off? She exhaled abruptly and thrust her right hand at the woman. “Lorenzo Apiedi,” she said, and reminded herself to have a boy’s firm grip.

  The old bat had a pretty firm grip of her own.

  “Can you do it?” R Zilla asked. She gave Pia’s face a quick, birdlike glance, then announced, “He didn’t tell you anything, did he. He just sent you over. Did he tell you to get me out of his hair?”

  Pia badly wanted to say yes, and say it with the kind of smirky grin her brother Elgar had on his face when he’d grabbed the last piece of bacon off her plate and swallowed it before she could do anything to stop him. But she was the Solutioneer’s Part-Time Assistant, on her first case, so she took a small notebook from her rear right pocket—Elgar’s right rear pocket, if he only knew—removed a small pencil from the left, and asked, “Just what is the problem?”

  R Zilla had more to say. “Your barber should be drummed out of business. That haircut is slipshod work.”

  Pia shrugged. She had chopped off her braids that morning. Standing in front of her mirror, she held each braid stiff with one hand while the other wielded the scissors, after which she’d trimmed her hair all around to even it up. Her mother had been too shocked to say anything, and her father had looked at her for such a long time that Pia became a little anxious. But it had always been part of her plan to chop off her hair. The R Zilla case had just made it happen sooner, and she was pretty sure that if her father had guessed what she was planning, he’d have put his foot down, immediately and hard—which he hadn’t done, so she was safe enough for now. She wasn’t really worried.

  “I’m not here about my hair,” she pointed out, and stared back at R Zilla as intently as the woman was staring at her, as if they were equals in age and importance and anything else that mattered. She knew how to win a staring contest.

  “You might do,” R Zilla concluded. “We’ll see.”

  “Tell me what you expect of me,” Pia said.

  “I expect you to return my niece to me. I want her back, here, working for me. A contract was signed and I would be within my rights to take the law to her. She could drive me to that. She should know that about me, and about the contract, and about the law especially. I promised her mother I’d teach her the milliner’s craft,” R Zilla said. “The girl knows that’s what her mother wished for her.”

  Pia was beginning to feel sorry for this niece, with her mother and this aunt ganging up on her. “What is her name?” she asked, pencil poised above the notebook page.

  “Tess Tardo. She’s a young woman who can’t stand not to get her own way, that’s the all of it. You’ll have to manage her.”

  “You employed her?” Pia asked, hoping her face didn’t give away the furious activity of the mind hiding behind it. In fact, she had met Tess Tardo and had rather liked the young woman, who had a small millinery shop in the old city.

  “She’s my apprentice, didn’t I just tell you? I am teaching her the trade because talent isn’t enough, not by itself. However talented you might be.” R Zilla spoke solemnly; this was the heart of things. “You might not know anything about my art—you’re a man, or will be—but any man can understand that it’s not just talent that makes the kind of success I enjoy. Or earns the kind of fame I have. I expect the Queen will bring Princess Melis by, any day now.”

  Pia wrote down Tess Tardo and announced, as if it were a logical guess and not something she already knew, “She will have founded a rival business—”

  “Can you believe that? After only three years! With two years still left on the contract, let me add, the contract she signed herself. She said she understood things I didn’t.” R Zilla snorted, and slammed an angry hand down flat on the table. “She said my hats were fit only for fat old rich ladies. I don’t deny that many of my clients are neither young nor slender, but there are others.”

  Pia quoted her father: “It is the business of a business to make a profit.”

  The milliner stared into her face for a long, uncomfortable moment. “Is there more to you than meets the eye after all?” she asked.

  “Of course.” How could there not be? Pia almost asked, but stopped herself and merely glared at the milliner. She asked, “This niece, this Tess Tardo, is she copying your designs?”

  “She’s too proud to do that. No, Tess believes that every woman should be able to buy herself a pretty hat, and she thinks stylish hats can be as easily made out of cheap straw and felt as out of silks and satins, and she says she prefers the look of flowers to feathers. She says this to annoy me.” R Zilla puffed and huffed and was, clearly, annoyed.

  Pia couldn’t
help but wonder, “Why do you want her to return?”

  “She’s my niece, didn’t you hear me? I promised her mother. Do I have to repeat everything? Her contract has two more years to run. It’s the law.”

  Pia waited. She had seen the Solutioneer in action and knew a couple of his tricks.

  “As well, she is not without a certain ability,” R Zilla admitted.

  Ha! Pia thought.

  “And I still have much to teach her, whatever she may think.”

  Now Pia understood. This was a matter of somebody wanting her own way, trying to work things out to her own advantage. Pia was on Tess Tardo’s side in this quarrel, even if it was R Zilla who was paying the Solutioneer’s bill.

  “What work did your niece do here?” she asked, pencil poised above paper.

  “She wasn’t with me in the salesroom, I can assure you of that. Her manner was entirely too familiar for the ladies who come to buy my hats. No, I kept Tess in the workroom.”

  Pia gestured toward one of the closed doors, as if it were a question.

  R Zilla nodded. “When she came to me, she knew nothing. Nothing. And now, after only three years? Now she’s decided she’s good enough to produce her own hats.”

  “You don’t agree.” This was not a question.

  R Zilla folded her arms across her chest, as if everything had been explained and no further words were needed. She asked, “Well, young man? Can you do it? Can you get her back and spare me the expense of a lawyer?”

  “Would you really take her to the law?” Pia asked.

  “I would certainly be within my rights in doing so,” R Zilla said, which was no answer, really. She looked at Pia, suspicious. “You think I’m a greedy, vain old woman, and, moreover, you probably don’t care for my hats. Well, you needn’t think that surprises me. How can a mere boy appreciate my great achievements? In my designs, in my success, in my life.”

  For some reason, this claim Pia did believe. R Zilla spoke with such energy and authority that Pia could now see her not as a foolish woman taking advantage of the even greater foolishness of other women, but as someone like her own father: someone who had ideas and did all the work necessary to turn those ideas into reality, someone who believed that the work he did was important. Pia turned to look at the hat in the shop window with new eyes. It was still outrageous, but it wasn’t unintelligent.