The Book of Secrets Page 4

  “You do that,” she encouraged him. “It’s a crime to let those gardens go, after all the planning, and work …”

  Max listened hard, perhaps too hard, because she stopped speaking and took a breath, looked carefully at him, this man—a young man, clearly, with eyes the color of the undersides of overbaked cookies. Was he up to no good? Was he what he seemed? But those sad, neglected gardens decided her. She said, “They eat their supper by seven, and then he and the boy play ball, if the weather is fine, or he reads to him, so until the boy goes to bed—at eight I think it is—Simon?” she called over her shoulder. “What time do you go to bed?”

  A high voice answered her. “Eight o’clock and I can read until half past. This is a good cookie, Mrs. Molly. Even better than yesterday.”

  The housekeeper gave Max the kind of glance exchanged between adults when they are amused by a child’s innocence. “So it’ll be late before he can talk to you,” she advised.

  “I can be late,” Max assured her. “Thank you, Missus,” he said again, and turned to walk back down the gravel path.

  “He does need someone, to clear them out,” she called after him. “If they go through the whole season neglected, it’ll be that much more work getting them in order. So you be sure to come back.”

  Max turned to raise a hand to her as he put his hat on his head. “I come back.” He could promise her that. He walked down the lane, toward the lake.

  He was careful to continue in his role as a gardener, shoulders and legs a little tired from a morning’s labor. He even, as he pulled his bicycle out from its hiding place, took the bandanna from around his neck and wiped at his forehead as a man might who had spent hours in the sun. But he didn’t remove his hat to do that. He sensed that the men and boys at the firehouse were watching him, so he carefully reknotted his bandanna and nodded twice, as a man might who had just found himself a job he was grateful to have. Then he mounted his bicycle and pedaled back toward the city.

  “Max?” He heard a voice from behind him and ignored it. He heard running feet. “Max?”

  He didn’t even angle his head. He didn’t shift his shoulders. He didn’t increase his speed. It was someone else’s name, after all.

  The footsteps quickened. Max stood up on the pedals, to push down hard, but his rear wheel was jammed, suddenly, somehow, and he flew off. He smashed onto his left shoulder, and his chest slammed onto the hard roadway. If he hadn’t been wearing the wide-brimmed straw gardening hat, his forehead would have cracked against the pavement, but luckily, the straw cushioned that impact. The Lakeview was the way to the Promontory, where the King had his summer palace, so of course it was kept in good repair, against the summer weeks when the royal family would grace the lake with their presences. It was a good road for fast travel, which made it a bad road to fall down on, hard. Max’s brain was muddled and his reactions slowed, so that before he could gather his thoughts or even turn around to sit up, he found himself pinned down, face against asphalt.

  “I don’t think that’s your bicycle you’re riding,” said a voice. A voice he recognized. Recognized from where? Whose voice …?

  The voice was bold and clear, not angry, just in the right. It was—Max remembered, as if from some time long ago—the voice of Tomi Brandt, who—as Max happened to know because they had been in the same class since level two—planned to be a policeman, or a fireman, or perhaps mayor, and see justice done. Max felt his head clearing now.

  Tomi wanted to make the world a better place. His constant concern with what was right often drove his teachers and friends at school to the end of their patience. Worse, he was the kind of person who did something about injustice, or tried to. If you told Tomi a soccer call didn’t matter, that he should just start playing again (or let the teacher get back to teaching, or give some smaller child his own pencil to replace the one that had been snatched away from him), Tomi would tell you the story of his grandfather and the cow that had been taken away to pay taxes after a year of drought, so that the family had no milk or cheese or butter to sell, so that the next year they could not pay taxes again and the sow was taken, and so on, year after year, chickens after corn crops, blackberry patches after basil seedlings, until the farm had been taken away, lost forever, and the four children had been sent to work in the city and send whatever they could back to the hills to their aging, broken parents. It was a long and dismal story and nobody wanted to have to listen to it more than twice. Tomi’s father had gone for a soldier, so fighting was in his blood; also he was the oldest of six children, and his father often away, so he had early been allowed to run loose through the entire city. He knew people in all kinds of unexpected places. Max guessed he shouldn’t have been surprised that Tomi was one of the boys doing odd jobs at the firehouse.

  “Where’d you get that bicycle, Mister?” Tomi’s voice demanded.

  “Bicycle mine,” Max muttered into the pavement, trying to think out how to play this scene. He definitely did not want word to get back to the school that he was still in the city. Once school let out, word would not spread, but until then the risk was high. Max lay on his stomach with the weight of the short, square, muscular Tomi on his back. Out of his right eye—the only eye with vision at the moment, the other being blocked by the brim of his hat—he saw only black macadam and a grassy verge beyond. Max thought fast and hard, every muscle tight to spring up should Tomi relax his grip. Then, thinking, he made himself relax. He loosened every muscle, starting with his clenched jaw, loosened his arms, back, and legs, loosened even his fingers, in surrender. If Tomi thought Max had given up, he’d allow him to get up onto his feet. It wouldn’t be fair not to.

  “Off?” Max grunted. He was Greek Jonny, the immigrant day laborer. He was a nobody, at the mercy of everybody, like Tomi’s grandfather. “Up?” he puffed.

  Tomi climbed off his captive’s back and tried to give the man a hand up, but it was refused. Tomi looked at his own hand as the tall fellow scrambled to his feet and pulled his hat angrily down on his head, and decided that if he had been accused of being a thief he wouldn’t accept any helping hand from his accuser, either. This man was tall, but not muscular; he stood with his workman’s hands jammed into his pockets and his head bent, as if he was used to being yelled at, like a troublesome student in a classroom. Tomi felt an unexpected confusion, and wondered if he was being unfair.

  “Why you do that?” Max muttered, without looking up.

  “I know this bicycle,” Tomi answered, but all of the accusing, I know I’m right tone had left his voice.

  “Is mine, this,” Max said, which couldn’t help but sound like the truth.

  “There’s only one bicycle I’ve ever seen with a basket like that,” Tomi insisted, “and it belongs to … to a boy I know.”

  That, Max couldn’t deny. His bicycle basket was, in fact, a discarded prop from The Adorable Arabella. He had claimed the deep wire container, too large for Arabella to carry her bouquets of flowers in, and attached it to the front of his bicycle to make a basket deep and strong enough to hold a large pad of watercolor paper, boxes of paints, and a pencil box. All Max could say was, “Is mine, this.”

  “Where did you get it?” Tomi insisted.

  By then, Max had found his story. “On docks. Near big boats. Was long time past, lots of weeks. Was—on ground, was—didn’t nobody own it. Is mine now.”

  He could see that Tomi half believed him. “But I know who really owns that bicycle. He’s—he goes to school with me.” Tomi pulled at the short, wheat-colored hair just behind his ears as he thought it out. “It doesn’t make sense for Eyes to just leave his bicycle out on some street, even if he was leaving the city for a long tour.”

  Max shrugged, a simple man who either didn’t care about such fine points or, maybe, didn’t understand everything that was said to him. Whatever else, Max didn’t want to raise suspicions. He was going to have to do something about his bicycle basket—another problem for the Solutioneer to deal with. In the m
eantime, he could only wait for whatever Tomi would say next, or do.

  Max thought he might just have time to grab the bicycle and leap onto it and ride off, and he would do that if Tomi decided to call back to the firehouse for help. Really, however, he wanted Tomi to decide that this gardener person was telling the truth. He bowed his head a little more, to look downtrodden and weak. To look like somebody who would never in a hundred years dare to rip a bicycle out of the hands of a healthy twelve-year-old boy.

  “I’ve never seen you,” Tomi said. “You live around here, Mister?”

  Max nodded. “Yes, live here.”

  “Then I can find you,” Tomi warned him. “If I find out you’re lying to me, I can find you. Do you understand me?”

  “Understand,” Max said. “Is mine, this,” he said again, hoping to convince Tomi that he had not, in fact, understood but that he was telling the truth about the bicycle.

  “Maybe it is,” Tomi granted. He stood with his hands in his pockets, watching as Max bent—trying to move like a tired day laborer—to pick up the bicycle by its handlebars. Then Tomi thought of something else.

  “What’s your name, Mister?”

  “Bartolomeo,” Max said, and quickly mounted the bike, as awkwardly as might someone stiff from a long day’s work in hot sunlight. He rode away before Tomi thought to ask for a surname, not going fast, but not going slow, either. At the first bend in the road, he risked a look back.

  He shouldn’t have done that, because Tomi was still standing right where he’d left him, staring after the fellow riding off on the bicycle that once belonged to someone in his class at school, wondering if an injustice hadn’t occurred.

  Max couldn’t worry too much about Tomi, however. He had other problems to think about. He had the problem of how to ride off after supper to see if Mr. Melakrinos left the house tonight, after he had put Simon to bed, in order to follow the man to wherever he might go. Luckily for Max, these were the longest days of the year, but he also had the problem of how to convince Grammie that he wanted to paint the evening sky over the lake, which would certainly be better than trying to sneak off after supper. It wasn’t as if he had to have permission, or as if Grammie loomed over him like some cliff. But he was, as she had said, the last of her family she could be sure was safe, and of course she wanted to keep him that way. And he felt pretty much the same way about her. Maybe that was why he was determined to help Simon Melakrinos—because he knew just about exactly how that little boy felt.

  Simon’s Job

  • ACT II •

  That evening, Grammie looked across the table at Max and decided, “I have my doubts about you roaming the streets at this hour.” She turned to Ari for confirmation. “Don’t you?”

  “No,” Ari said.

  “You don’t? With all that’s been going on in the old city?”

  “No,” Ari said again. He had been eating his baked lake fish with full attention but now he set down his fork and knife and looked at Grammie. “In the first place, there’s light until nine or half past at this time of year. In the second, the trouble’s all in the old city and Max is heading to the lake. In the third, he’ll have his bicycle, so he could make a run for it, if he had to, which he probably won’t. Besides which, in two of those big houses out on The Lakeview, they know who he is.” Ari turned to look at Max and add, “Insofar as anybody knows who he is.”

  Max grinned at his tutor-tenant. “I’ll be fine,” he promised his grandmother.

  “Nobody can be sure of that,” Grammie grumbled.

  “You’re getting as gloomy as Joachim,” he said.

  “Joachim is no fool,” she answered.

  “I don’t know about gloomy,” Ari interrupted, “but it seems to me that you’re worrying more about Max than you used to.”

  “I’m not worrying at all, not about anything,” Grammie maintained, and put a forkful of rice into her mouth so she couldn’t possibly say anything more.

  Ari looked at Max but Max shook his head: he had no idea. So, “You could fool me,” Ari said. “You know, don’t you, Mrs. Nives? I’ll do anything I can if there’s anything that needs doing.”

  Grammie swallowed. “I know, and I’m grateful, and I don’t mean to be gloomy. It’s just … And I do know you’re old enough to decide things for yourself, Max,” she said in apology. “You’ve certainly proved that. So go ahead and get that picture painted. I’m being foolish.”

  “I’m not painting, just looking, preparing,” Max said. He didn’t want to have to produce a painting of the evening sky at the end of the night.

  As soon as Max had exited the old city through the Royal Gate, the lake breezes washed the air clean of the smells of dust and roasting meats and garbage set out in the summer heat to be carried away, unless the dogs got to it first, or the feral cats, or the vermin in which a waterside city can abound. Away from the dark, crowded streets, the air glimmered with the rosy gold light of a long June evening. Max had his sketch pad in the bicycle basket in front of him and his red beret on his head. He wore a pair of loose, paint-stained trousers and pedaled at a sedate pace up to the firehouse and toward the long fence opposite Tassiter Lane. Riding past the firehouse, he was reminded of Tomi and the problem of his all-too-recognizable bicycle basket.

  It was the streaks of color on his trousers, moving up and down over his pumping knees, that gave him the idea, and he was so pleased to have it that he wasn’t even curious about the odd thunking sounds that came from behind the fence, as if a housemaid was haphazardly beating dust out of a carpet. Neither did he wonder about the grunts and indecipherable cries that accompanied the thwacks, as if the housemaid every now and then just lost her temper at the puffs and clouds of dirt flying out of the rug. As he turned onto Tassiter Lane, his mind was on those streaks, in colors from the various theatrical flats he and his father had painted together. If he left the bottom of his basket black but painted the top half white, then the basket would look as if it was the normal depth and Tomi Brandt would probably not recognize it, in the unlikely event that he ran into Tomi again. Max was pleased with the cleverness of this solution to the problem, so pleased that he almost didn’t see the man emerging from the Melakrinos house, gently pulling the door closed behind him. As Max rode by, the man looked anxiously up at a dark second-story window, then turned to scurry down the street toward The Lakeview. The man didn’t even look at whoever-it-was, going down his street on a bicycle.

  Max didn’t stop until he had passed two more houses. Then he dismounted and turned around. You couldn’t use a bicycle to follow a man on foot so when he had reversed direction, he went back down the street pushing his bicycle, not riding it. He glanced up at the dark upstairs windows of Simon’s house and thought he saw a movement, as if a curtain had been pushed gently aside. He lifted one hand in greeting, in case Simon was watching his father walk away, and worrying, and wondering if Mister Max would answer his letter.

  But what kind of father would leave his young son all alone? And who knew for how long? And at night?

  Max followed.

  Mr. Melakrinos crossed the wide road and walked alongside the tall fence, going quickly. In a hurry to get to the city, Max thought, and begin searching for his wife. There was something of the rag doll about Simon’s father, something flappy and floppy. His hair flopped on his head and his pants flapped around his legs as he rushed along. On the opposite side of the street, Max followed.

  Then Mr. Melakrinos turned at the corner of the fence and headed for the lake, which took Max entirely by surprise. Just at that time, two carriages, one close behind the other, came along at a quick trot, and he had to wait. Each carriage was occupied by a well-dressed couple and driven by a groom in livery, and they were both traveling north, out of the city, carrying dinner guests at one of the big houses, Max guessed, or courting couples on a romantic ride to watch the sun set behind the distant hills across the lake before sitting down to supper at one of Summer’s little cafés. By the time
they had passed him, Mr. Melakrinos was out of sight.

  Max ran across the road, hampered by his bicycle. As soon as he could, he dropped it onto the ground, grabbing his sketch pad from the basket. His mind was working so furiously that he didn’t even hear the sounds from behind the fence. He needed an excuse, so he had to carry the pad, but he couldn’t bother trying to hide the bicycle, not if he planned to keep his quarry close.

  And he did plan to keep Simon’s father close. Because what would a man rush to do at the edge of the deep lake, at this late hour?

  About halfway across the grassy meadow, the fence ended. Max stopped, looking around for the long-legged figure. The thumps and thwaps and voices were louder there, and clearer. He turned, to see twenty or thirty men scattered around the grass, kicking at a ball and running after it in a disorganized pack. Then he recognized Simon’s long-legged father standing at one side of the grassy field, talking to two men.

  Quickly, Max sat down. He leaned back against the fence and opened the sketch pad, bracing it against his knees, and studied Mr. Melakrinos.

  The man wore glasses, the lenses round on a narrow, bony face. He was rubbing at his ear and he seemed uneasy, maybe even afraid. He looked back, in the direction of Tassiter Lane, as if expecting trouble from that direction. Then one of the two men clapped him on the shoulder and Simon’s father ran out to join the pack of running men.

  Now Max recognized it: a soccer game. Now he understood what was going on: Mr. Melakrinos was leaving home in the evenings to play soccer. But why wouldn’t he just tell Simon what he was doing?

  Max took a drawing pencil out of his pocket. Just because he was out solutioneering, that didn’t mean he couldn’t do a little drawing as well. He’d never tried to draw people, only skies. But if he concentrated on this sky, the thin clouds stretched along the horizon waiting for the sun to sink into them like a tired man sinking down into a good night’s sleep, he wouldn’t see what happened with Simon’s father. He might miss something that would explain what was going on. So he looked at Mr. Melakrinos standing out in the field, leggy and awkward, a little apart from everyone. Mr. Melakrinos had fixed all of his attention on the movement of the ball.