The Book of Secrets Read online

  Behind the shop was the lean-to where spare stock was stored, as well as the outdated papers and magazines awaiting collection and pulping by printers. Nothing was neglected in Stewart McHenry’s shop. Disorder was not tolerated. Even the shop’s waste was kept carefully aside, in a galvanized tin trash bin set on the tiny gravel yard behind the storage shed.

  In all of the old city, this shop was one of the least likely settings for a fire, which made it all the more surprising that early one morning Stewart McHenry had sent to the firehouse for help. The fire engine had arrived on the scene in time to restrict the damage to the storage shed’s rear wall; the waste bin in the yard, where the blaze seemed to have originated; and the shed door, through which they had to hatchet their way. Within four days—four expensive and long working days—Stewart McHenry had repaired the damage, replaced the waste bin, and it was as if the fire had never happened.

  On the other, slower, hand, it took almost two weeks for a building inspector from the city to come around. Not that Stewart minded the delay and not that the inspector’s visit would make any difference, but a man would like his city government to be as well organized and energetic as he expected himself to be. Moreover, the inspector was a nondescript kind of man, neither young nor old, and his uniform was a little haphazard, as if the city had put it together out of leftover parts of other men’s uniforms. Even his hat, which he wore so low on his forehead that it was hard to get a good look at him, seemed to have seen previous service, perhaps on the head of a conductor on one of the trains that ran daily from the New Town down to Porthaven.

  But Stewart McHenry was relieved that this was the kind of man the city sent to examine his repairs and assess any permanent damage done by the fire. This was not the kind of man to ask the wrong questions and notice the wrong things. He didn’t even have a clipboard with forms on it, just a little notebook he pulled out of his jacket pocket. He didn’t even introduce himself, only said, “City Building and Works” as he held out his hand. “I’ve come to see what’s been done.”

  The shopkeeper nodded and led the man through the shop without a word. He planned to say as little as possible.

  Max, wearing the dogcatcher’s uniform he had assembled for his first real job, followed. He’d given the trousers a good starch and press so that they would look like they belonged to a city official on the way up, and left behind the butterfly net the dogcatcher had carried. Wearing the wide-billed conductor’s hat level on his head, his back held stiff, he was as wordless as the man he followed. He mimicked as best he could the important men who had appeared on the stage of the Starling Theater, rich Miser, wise Doctor, King, Banker, Caliph … the world of the theater was filled with such characters. Curious, Max thought, that the two most important actual men he’d met, Mr. Bendiff and the Mayor, were not so stiff and proud as those on the stage. But he didn’t let himself wonder for long about that, because he had a job to do. Instead, he wondered just why this Stewart McHenry was being so silent. You’d think he’d have a lot to say about a fire that had been started on purpose right behind the storage shed where he stored his paper goods.

  Unless he’d started it himself? But what business owner would destroy his own inventory?

  In two steps they had crossed a small back office that had room for only a large desk tucked under a staircase, and exited out the rear door.

  “What does that staircase lead to?” Max asked. He had his notebook open in his hand.

  “I live upstairs,” Stewart McHenry answered.

  “Do you own the building?” Max asked.

  “Rent.”

  The tiny graveled yard was fenced in on all sides. The storage shed leaned up against the rear of the building.

  “Do you live alone?” Max asked.

  “No” was all he was told.

  Max stopped moving. The man turned to face him and he looked … What did he look? Angry? Afraid? As if he were defending himself against some enemy, Max decided. But how had Max—or, rather, the man from City Building and Works that he was playing in this scene—become an enemy?

  They stood behind the shed, where unpainted boards marked the recent fire. Flames had eaten away most of the rear wall of the building, it seemed, and they had scorched some of the larger stones underfoot. Max stepped up close to the shed, studying it as if he understood what he was seeing. He made a few notes on his pad and turned the page over so that Stewart McHenry couldn’t see that he had written only question marks. “I’ll look inside now,” he said.

  There was no response, just a turning around and going up to a narrow door. The shopkeeper stepped back to allow Max entry into a narrow space.

  The only light came through the open door, but it was enough to see by, if not enough to see clearly. Max took four steps and was at the rear wall, where new shelves had been built along the repaired section. Boxes and cartons were piled up on the floor, some empty, some unopened. The shelves were still only partly filled, with boxes of stationery paper and packets of shiny gift wrap. Once again, Max stepped close. He reached between two shelves to knock on the new wall. He pressed down on the shelves, testing their strength. He nodded, and made more question marks on his notebook, and turned another page.

  Stewart McHenry said nothing. He lingered in the yard just beyond the door, waiting for the inspector to finish doing his job and go away.

  Max stood in the dim light, thinking.

  At last, the shopkeeper could keep silent no longer. “You’re not going to find any fault with my repair work,” he announced.

  Max made a final note (two exclamation points) and folded his notebook closed. He stepped back out onto the gravel and considered the high fence, the narrow gate with a bright new wooden bolt across it. He said, “Everything looks good.”

  Stewart McHenry led Max back through the shop to see him gone.

  “Funny that a fire started out there,” Max remarked to the man’s back. “You’re obviously a very careful man.”

  Silence.

  Max waited for a good while before he asked, “How’d you happen to catch it before it did much damage?”

  They were at the street door by then, and the shopkeeper held it open so Max could make his exit. But this was a question he could look the City Building and Works inspector in the eye to answer. “I get up at half after four, every morning, when the papers are delivered. So I saw the smoke.” When he looked right at the man for two or three long seconds, he noticed the odd eyes; but what was so strange about them?

  “You were lucky,” Max said.

  Stewart McHenry looked over the inspector’s shoulder, maybe at someone across the lane, maybe at nothing, and nodded without a word.

  “Well, thank you,” Max said. “For your time.”

  He was not surprised that there was no response. Stewart McHenry seemed to be a man of very few words, and none of them mere unnecessary pleasantries.

  Max walked away from the newsagent’s shop with the unhurried gait of a man going about his daily business, one task accomplished, moving on to the next on his list. He did in fact have a list, now down to seven names and addresses, but he couldn’t feel that he had accomplished much. In fact, he felt uneasy, as if he had failed to see something that was right in front of him.

  When Max felt uneasy, and if he had the time, he painted. Painting both soothed his spirit and loosened up his brain—setting out his easel, fixing the block of watercolor paper onto it, dipping his brush into the glass of water and then into a pot of sky color, setting to work. At lessons with Joachim he always felt alert and relaxed, ready. Joachim was a professional, a real artist, and Max was curious, so he had once asked his teacher, “Do you feel like that?”

  “Sometimes,” Joachim had answered, without taking his eyes off the canvas he was working on. “Good times,” he added, still without looking up. “Not often enough,” he concluded gloomily.

  Joachim was never one to look on the bright side, look for the silver lining, wear rose-colored glasses
, Max knew. The painter had cheered up with his new spectacles and his new dog, but these hadn’t changed his essential nature. You could count on Joachim to look on the dark side and tell you what he saw, without sugaring anything over.

  Max didn’t know what his teacher would have to say about this interview with the newsagent. He didn’t know, really, what he had to say about it himself, not yet. So instead of going straight on to the next name on his list, Flora Bunda the fishmonger, he went home to paint for an hour and let the back of his mind work on the problem of what there was to learn from the silence of Stewart McHenry.

  That day, a blue sky was veiled by pale white clouds, so filmy and so still that it was almost like trying to look through a steam-fogged window. Max worked for almost an hour to try to reproduce the way a darker color shone behind the lighter one, but he couldn’t do it. However, as he washed his brushes clean and set three disappointing attempts on the dining room table to dry so that he could study them and perhaps learn something from his failures, he did understand something about the vandalism/arson problem: He understood that he couldn’t begin to even guess what was going on without more information. He needed to know more. So he took off the painter’s shirt and red beret and got back into the City Building and Works costume, and rode on his bicycle down toward the docks.

  Flora Bunda, fishmonger, did business just a block behind the long docks where the fishing boats came in to offer the day’s catch to fishmongers and restaurants, as well as to the men and women who prepared meals in the homes of the wealthy. Hers was a very small shop, so small that she set two long ice-filled wagons out on the street in front of it, where she displayed the silvery fish and long black eels she had on offer. From just after dawn until midafternoon, her rangy, muscular figure could be seen either standing in the doorway awaiting custom or inside, bent over the sink and the long butcher-block table that took up almost all of the interior space. Flora Bunda could gut a fish and scale it and even bone it—after weighing it, of course—in ten seconds flat.

  If there was anybody nearby, you could count on it that Flora Bunda would be talking. Her talk was like the final frantic flapping of a fish on a line, fast and furious and usually pointless. However, unlike a caught fish, Flora Bunda did not eventually fall still.

  “Living alone like I do, what do you expect? Do you expect me to not want to talk when I’m out in the world?” she asked anyone who happened to suggest that perhaps she might like, just sometimes, to listen. “I’m an orphan child and no longer young and have no brother nor sister, not a one, and the only thing I know in this world is what my own mother taught me, how to know fish.” Here, if she were talking to a customer, she might hold up one or two silvery choices. “Oh, and how to keep fish fresh, and where the narrow bones lie in their bodies, and how to hone a blade. And did you know I sharpen my own knives? None of your itinerant grinders for Flora Bunda: I can produce a blade so sharp all the butchers in the city would envy me, if they knew about it. But what do butchers know? Wanting people to eat meat,” and she pronounced the word as if it were almost too heavy for her tongue to carry, “rather than sweet light fresh fish.” And so on.

  When the man approached in his uniform and long-billed hat, Flora Bunda welcomed this new pair of ears. Seeing her in her doorway, he held out a hand and she wiped her own right hand on the long white apron she wore and reached out. “City Buil—” was as far as he got.

  “And you look to me like a young man who knows the good taste of a fish stew,” Flora Bunda told him, with a flirtatious smile that did not suit her stern features and the dark hair she kept severely contained within a white kerchief. “Fish is brain food, everybody knows, and anyone can see you’re a young man with a brain. Although”—and she looked carefully into Max’s face for a long minute—“I’m not sure about those eyes. They’re like the skin on a monkfish, you’ve got monkfish eyes, young man, and now I notice them I don’t find them at all pleasant. So what can I get you today?” she asked. “Not that I’ve seen many monkfish, not here upriver, but they have them in most of the seaport markets. Tasty they are, but you haven’t said what you want.”

  “City Building and Works,” Max managed to get out.

  She nodded. “Are you married? You don’t have the look, but you’re too young for me and besides, I have my eye on someone suitable. Perfectly suited to me. A certain ferryboat captain who shall remain nameless. A man shouldn’t stay a widower for too long, do you think? It’s not healthy, and there’s no need, when you have a grown son who’d probably like to marry someone himself but doesn’t want to leave you all alone in an empty house. No need at all, when there’s someone perfectly suited, with her own business, so she wouldn’t be a drain on your purse.”

  “About your tables,” Max said.

  “My wagons, yes. They’re wagons. Well, they’re old, I can tell you that. They were built by my father when he just started out and my mother kept them after he died. Young, he died young, before he even knew me. Not as a person, I mean, a child was all he knew and what child can remember anything from so young an age? My mother kept the business going and—anyone can see—display wagons are needed with a shop this small. But wood rots, everybody knows, it’s not stone, is it?” And here she smiled, with a sidelong glance at Max, who had crouched down as if inspecting the workmanship of the wagons, the fit of the spokes into the wooden wheels, the joints holding the corners together. All of the wood was bright and new except—he peered up underneath—the wide boards that formed the bed. Those were weathered gray, and stained by years of melting ice. Max rose to his feet and took out his notebook.

  “Did you have trouble finding someone to replace the wooden wheels? After the vandalism,” he said, scratching a row of question marks on a fresh page and then snapping the notebook shut.

  “Vandalism? Is that what they call it in your fancy offices in the New Town? They’re fine now, as you see. Nothing for me to worry about. It won’t happen again.”

  “Who—?” Max tried to ask.

  “You can’t be in business without meeting a few people,” Flora Bunda told him confidingly. “Carpenters, wheelwrights, everybody likes to eat fish, and a fish stew will feed a whole family without emptying anyone’s purse. I don’t think people appreciate fish enough, do you? What about you, do you prefer beef? Lamb? Pigs and chickens aren’t even in the contest, if you ask me. You can’t think highly of a chicken, nobody could, and pigs—well, pigs are pigs. I have a bit of nice fresh eel here, netted this morning in the river, if you like eel. Do you like eel?”

  Maybe, Max thought, it was time for a direct question. She didn’t seem to take time to think before she spoke. “Any idea who—?”

  “Of course,” she said. “It was Jacob, Jacob Fitz.”

  Max opened his notebook and wrote down the name, Jacob Fitz.

  “He lives just inside the Royal Gate, it’s a boardinghouse, he’s never had his own house or even his own room, and you’d think he’d want a wife, wouldn’t you?”

  Max said nothing, just waited, notebook opened, pencil poised.

  “He’s been fishing the river all of his life, never wanted to go to sea, doesn’t trust the lake, says it’s too wide, too deep. He’s the one I get all my eels from and they are always fresh, I can promise you that. All of my fish are always fresh,” she announced triumphantly.

  Flora Bunda was Max’s height and she looked directly into his face when she said that, as if he had accused her of trying to sell him a fish that had turned bad.

  Max closed his notebook and did not sigh, although he felt like it after all of that listening. “Yes, ma’am,” he answered, as crisply as the young recruit in A Soldier’s Sweetheart. He only just stopped himself from saluting her, before he turned on his heels and walked away. The docks were well behind him and he had entered Thieves Alley before it struck him: all of those words and absolutely no information.

  The Mayor’s Job

  • ACT I •

  SCENE 3 ~ HINTS<
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  For dessert, Grammie had made a strawberry-rhubarb brown betty, and she had a creamy custard sauce ready to be poured over the succulent-tart-sugary treat. “Max knows how I find excuses to make custard sauce, and there’s all this rhubarb in the garden,” she said, in answer to their compliments about her cooking skills, “and I had the time.” But she wasn’t complaining about that. In fact, she looked entirely content and even pleased with herself, maybe even smug, which was a happy change from her recent mood, which in turn was something of a puzzle.

  At that moment, however, Max had his own puzzling story to tell, and he hoped that by telling it, he could figure out what to do next. While they enjoyed the brown betty, he described the two interviews.

  “They believed you were a city official?” Grammie asked.

  “Yes,” Max answered.

  “Why did you start with those two?” Ari wondered.

  “They were first on the list,” Max explained. “They happened first.” He took a bite and waited to hear what they thought. He had never before asked for advice in his solutioneering, and wasn’t sure he’d done it the right way. Also, he wasn’t sure he really wanted any help, because hadn’t he done just fine so far on his own? On the other hand, serious damage had been done and also, as the Mayor said, it wasn’t long before the royal family would arrive in Queensbridge. This job was more urgent than any other he’d had. There wasn’t a lot of time to stand in front of an easel, painting the sky and waiting for a brainstorm to float by as naturally and easily as a cloud in the sky.

  Max, too, had a weakness for custard sauce, especially custard sauce over a tart-and-sweet fruit dessert, and he was concentrating so hard on the flavors in his mouth that Grammie had to say his name twice. “Well, Max,” she began, then sharply, “Max?”

  He looked up.

  “I’m glad to see you like the dessert, but isn’t Pia your official assistant? Why not send her to one of the places? See what she can find out.”