Mister Max: The Book of Secrets

1
In which the true story of the Miss Koala comes out and there is work for the Solutioneer
Max Starling, the third principal member of the Starling Theatrical Company was--as far as most people knew--off with his parents on tour, perhaps in America performing for cowboys, perhaps in India riding elephants, or in Russia, where they would surely be kidnapped by anarchists after a performance, but in any case, acting.
Only the acting part was true. For almost six weeks, Max had been acting the role of Mister Max, Solutioneer, as played by Max Starling, twelve-year-old boy. He had been living independently and supporting himself so well that he did not need a single coin of the fortune his father had hidden away. He had been living independently despite the closeness of his grandmother and her insistence that he have dinner with her every evening. For that he was, in fact, grateful--Grammie was a good cook. Also, they could comfort one another.
There had been a lot of cooking and comforting since April 18, the day William and Mary Starling had boarded an ocean liner and sailed off, unexpectedly leaving their son behind. They had been invited by a maharajah to tour India and been given first-class tickets on the Flower of Kashmir. Max now knew that there was no such ship and no such maharajah . . . but nevertheless he had no parents. Max had received two strange messages from his father before his parents had unexpectedly reappeared in a newspaper photograph as the newly crowned King and Queen of Andesia, half a world away. That made no sense, either, but at least he now knew where they were, even if he didn't know why they were there.
And so, late on a Monday afternoon at the end of May, Max Starling was seated on the back steps of his grandmother's small house, looking across the shared lawn and vegetable garden to his own equally small house, thinking about his lost parents while Grammie read the newspaper.
"I wrote him a letter," he said.
"You know that boat that sank?" she asked. "The Miss Koala," she reminded him.
Of course Max remembered. Two weeks earlier a Sunday Extra Edition of the Queensbridge Gazette ("News for the people, of the people, and by the people") had broken the story that the great ocean liner, which set off the same morning that Max's parents had also sailed, had been lost, with all 435 of her passengers and all but three of her crew of 173 on board.
It was a sad and frightening story. After twelve tranquil days, the unlucky ship had crossed paths with an equally unlucky pod of migrating whales. Nobody knew what damage was done to the whales, although the water filled with blood, but both of Miss Koala's great propellers were damaged. Captain Eustace Trevelyn set a new course, heading back toward Gibraltar, but it was not three days later that a fierce storm blew up. The crippled ship floundered, lost her bearings, and was tossed mercilessly about. Battered by winds, pounded by waves, blinded by darkness, she ran onto a rock, or a shoal, or a reef, and foundered. Water poured into her hold, to pull her down into the ocean's depths. Wind-driven waves slammed into her metal hull, to topple her over and drop the human creatures that clung to her decks deep into watery graves.
Miss Koala might have become yet another ship that vanished without a trace had there not been survivors. These were only three, men who endured perilous days on shark-infested seas before being picked up by a passing freighter and eventually set ashore at Lisbon. The Captain, a steward, and a cook were hailed as both lucky and heroic. "Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub," the newspapers joked. The Captain's daughter, who had been awaiting Miss Koala in Cape Town in order to join her father for the final legs of the voyage, rushed northward to celebrate his survival. The steamship company released a list of passengers, and all over the world mourning clothes were purchased.
Max Starling and his grandmother had been as caught up in this drama as the rest of the world, even though they were pretty sure by then that his parents had not been on that ship. Now, not much more than two weeks later, the Queensbridge Gazette was trumpeting a new story, and this was what had captured Grammie's attention. "Look at this," she said, passing the paper to Max. "Honestly," and she sounded disgusted, "some people."
Max read the headline, TRUTH WILL OUT, and the headline in smaller print under that, THE CAPTAIN WHO DIDN'T. When he read on, he understood Grammie's disgust. The real truth of the "heroic" Captain and his two "stalwart" crew members was a shameful tale of three cowards who jumped into a lifeboat before anybody else had even been notified of the disaster. There was, however, heroism aplenty on the Miss Koala among the abandoned crew and passengers, though of a more ordinary and practical kind. Foremost among these quiet heroes was the First Mate, who as soon as he knew the ship was aground asked for volunteers from the crew--and there had been several--to lower one of the lifeboats into the stormy waters and assess the exact damage and danger to the ship. Discovering that their vessel was impaled on a rock and thinking that, thus anchored, she might ride out the storm, they returned to calm the passengers and give them hope. Those hopes were realized in a stormy dawn, when they sighted land, not too far distant. As soon as the seas and winds permitted, fishing boats came out to rescue all of the 605 people aboard the ship. Everything movable was then carried safely to shore.
It was because their good luck, as blind as the previous bad luck, brought them to shore at the most remote of the remote Canary Islands that it took so long for the survivors to reach the mainland and for their story to reach telegraph wires. The newspapers seized joyfully on this new, and for a change happy, excitement.
Max passed the paper back, and envied the children who had just discovered their relatives weren't lost after all, the families that would be joyfully reunited.
"Who'd have thought it?" Grammie murmured, then, "That poor, motherless girl." She shook her head. "I don't blame her one bit."
"Are we absolutely positive that my father isn't of royal blood?" Max asked, his mind veering back to his own lost relations. "He wasn't born around here. You never met any of his family, did you? What do we actually know about him, except what he told us, which is almost nothing? He said he ran away from home when he was twelve, but he never said anything about where home was or who lived there. What if he really is the legal King of Andesia?" Max had glanced through the day's mail but there had not been a second postcard from his father. "What if he is? Like in Whatever Happened to Princess Gloriana?" Max reminded his grandmother. "Or if there was some nefarious plot when he was just a baby, like in The Queen's Man?"
Those were two plays Max always enjoyed putting on, for the elaborate costumes and for the many minor parts he got to play and especially for the swordfights. Those scenes were a display of his father's fencing skills, and included duels in which Max sometimes took part although, of course, he never prevailed.
Grammie looked at him over the top of the newspaper, because she had, in fact, been listening. "What did you say in the letter? Why would he only write nonsense to us if he was king?"
Max had been listening, too, and asked, "What poor motherless girl?"
Grammie shook the newspaper, as if it were the one behaving badly. "That Captain Trevelyn's daughter." There was a flash of anger in her eyes.
"What's happened to her? What's she done?"
"Never showed up, that's what. Never arrived in Gibraltar and it serves that man right, after the way he . . . The Captain," Grammie announced, outraged, "is supposed to go down with his ship."
"But he's her father," Max pointed out. He was rather acutely aware of how irreplaceable parents were. Personally, he would have preferred that his father not go down with the ship, if there was a choice. Max might be able to live just as independently as his father had so confidently claimed a twelve-year-old could, but he would prefer to have his parents home, and safe, and in charge. Would he feel the same, he wondered, if he was a grown-up and if his father had done something so . . . so bad?
Grammie snorted, "What would you do, with a father like that and no mother? No other family, either, it seems."
"I'd have to think about it," Max admitted.
"Probably, that's what she's doing," Grammie decided.
Max returned to the mail.
Grammie had two letters from libraries in other countries, one of them Brazil. She had written to the capital city librarians in each South American country--except Andesia, which had no library, either public or private--for information about the nation of which her daughter now seemed to be the queen. There was also a water bill for Grammie, and something with the Mayor's official seal, perhaps a research request, perhaps notice of some meeting. For years, Grammie had been the City Librarian, in charge of the big stone building across the square from the bigger stone building that housed the municipal offices as well as the courts. She was often asked to supply information the Council needed to reach its decisions. Besides his own water bill, for his father of course, there was only one letter addressed to 5 Thieves Alley, but that was for Mister Max, Solutioneer.
Max passed Grammie her mail. Without hesitating, she set aside the envelope from the Mayor's office, as if it was too predictable to even look at. Her muffled "Hummph" made him look carefully at her, but all he could see was that she had erased all expression from her face. Max didn't let his grandmother distract him from his own anticipation. The Solutioneer had a letter, maybe a job.
Max Starling had become the Solutioneer out of necessity. It was necessary for him to earn a living, because his parents were gone. It was also necessary for Max Starling to be as invisible as possible. A visible Max Starling would be in danger of being carted off to an orphanage. Max couldn't go to school, and he couldn't take a job where anybody had the right to know anything about him, any little fact--such as who his parents were and where he lived.
In fact, Max was continuing to live in the little house he and his parents had occupied together for all of his twelve years. He even had a tenant, who taught him mathematics--Euclidean geometry, to be specific--in exchange for room and board, an arrangement that made it possible for Max to go on living in his own house. Ari knew the truth about Max's situation, and often joined him for dinner with Grammie. Besides those two, the only other person in whom Max had confided was Joachim, his art teacher.
Max's deeper secret about the hoard of gold coins, kept even from Grammie, raised troubling questions. The first was, Why hadn't his father told him they were so wealthy, and the second was, Did his mother know? Finally, there was the most disturbing question of all: Where would William Starling have gotten so many coins, and in gold? However, as long as nobody but Max knew that he had enough money for both him and Grammie to live comfortably on for years, he was free to have to work for a living, and the way Max saw things, unless you were self-supporting, you weren't really independent.
Thus, a letter for the Solutioneer was always welcome, even if he didn't take on all the jobs he was offered as satisfied clients spread the word about his services. Unfortunately, many letters came from students at the Hilliard School, where a dissatisfied client boasted about getting the best of the famous Mister Max. Most of these were silly requests, like "Can you make them give us bigger servings at lunch?" or unkind and unpleasant ones, like "Dear Mister Max, Can you get Pee-pee in so much trouble she gets expelled? She smells bad and she is so stupid she ruins classes with all her stupid questions." Max happened to know that Pee-pee, really Pia Bendiff, did not smell bad and was certainly not stupid. He suspected that anyone who wrote a letter like that probably wasn't overly concerned with the truth of things. He didn't even answer those requests.
Today's letter, however, troubled him. "Dear Mister Max," he read, on the kind of lined paper students use in the early grades, when they need help in keeping control over their pencils.
My da goes out after supper. He thinks I am asleep but I'm not. I don't know where Da goes. He never says. I think he is going to find my mother. She went away last winter. We are waiting for her to come back, Da says. But what if he doesn't come back too? I can't wait alone by myself, I am too little. Can you help me?
The letter was signed Simon. At the end the boy had added: PS, I always save my allowance so I can pay you.
There was no return address and the boy had not given his last name, but this was not a request Max wanted to ignore. "Hmmm," he said, thinking.
"I know what you mean," Grammie said.
How could she know that?
But Grammie's attention was still on the Miss Koala. "It's amazing, sometimes, what rotters people can be," she said. "It's discouraging."
Why was Grammie getting so worked up about this Captain and his dishonesty instead of being relieved that everybody was known to be safe? He suspected there was something else bothering her. He wondered suddenly if she had found out something more about his parents, or Andesia. Something bad. "Did you find out anything?" he asked.
He didn't need to say what he was asking about. Grammie knew. "No." She shook her head. "Nothing about them. Nothing new about the country, either, or General Balcor." She sighed. "Some days, everything is pretty discouraging."
Max thought then that he would distract her with a change of subject. "Aren't you going to read the Mayor's letter?" he asked.
"What's it to you?" Grammie answered quickly.
Quickly, Max noticed, and also quite crossly.

2
In which Max and Pia work together, sort of
When Max rode off on his bicycle the next morning to deliver a message to the Bendiff mansion, he was the Solutioneer, in disguise. He had dressed himself in the shabby brown suit of an unsuccessful suitor in The Adorable Arabella and stuffed a pillow under the bright blue waistcoat. With a round pork-pie hat set square on his head, he became Inspector Doddle, the unflappable, unassuming detective from An Impossible Crime who, although he moved unnoticed along the edges of the action, discovered the guilty party and brought him to justice.