A skillful biker, Max was not much slowed on the busy streets of the New Town. He crossed the city park, sounding the bicycle’s bell to warn people of his sudden, swift approach from behind, and was relieved to see that the clock on the City Hall tower showed five after eleven. He had more than enough time to make a noon departure even if he’d miss his eleven-fifteen deadline. He raced in front of the cafés and small shops that lined the park to enter Barthold Boulevard, with its tall, three-story buildings, which took him, at top speed, dodging among the trams and carts, carriages, horses and riders, and even an automobile, the long, straight way through the Bishop’s Gate and into the old city. There, the streets became narrow and cobbled. They twisted and crossed, offering dark alleyways as shortcuts to someone who knew the old city as well as Max did. Standing up on the pedals to minimize the discomfort and the difficulties of bouncing along on uneven stones, Max rang his bell and called out, “Sorry, sorry,” to the people who had to jump into doorways to let him pass. They shouted after him, “You! Fellow! Slow down! What’s your hurry?”
He didn’t slow down until he entered the crowded waterfront, where ships were lined up beside docks that protruded like fingers from a hand out into the deep water of the lake. The high metal sides of berthed liners and cargo ships loomed over him like fortress walls as he pedaled past them, checking the names painted on banners hung on the sides of the gangplanks that connected the ships to land. The docks were noisy with sailors and longshoremen carrying out their chores, with businessmen settling last-minute affairs, and of course with passengers arriving in carriages, accompanied by friends come to wave them off. He checked the names on the passenger liners: Eagle of the Adriatic, Lollapalooza, Queen Eleanora, Arctic Sun, and then, in its usual place at the far end of the line of piers, the much smaller boat that ferried people and mail around the lake from dawn until dusk, stopping at one small town after the other, The Water Rat. He knew Captain Francis, of course; everybody knew the round, friendly ferryboat captain, who with his son was always ready to help you carry parcels, trunks, or crates of carrots on board or to herd an unwilling goat into the animal pen for her journey to a new home.
Captain Francis, his blue jacket splendid with gold braid, his white captain’s hat set square on his head, greeted Max. “Why aren’t you in school?”
“I’m meeting my parents on the Flower of Kashmir.” Max was still a little out of breath from his headlong ride.
“That’s right, school’s out for lunch,” said Captain Francis who, like many adults, heard what he expected to from children, which was not necessarily exactly what they said. “Flower of Kashmir?” He scratched at his shoulder, thinking. “You sure about the name?”
“She sails at noon, for India,” Max told him. “Not literally sails, of course, because she’s a steamship.”
Captain Francis smiled, showing big white teeth. “When I was learning the trade? It was all under sail. I crossed the ocean twice under sail, once as a common sailor, once as navigator, and I can tell you, these new liners are a great improvement. Much more comfortable. Safer, too, in rough weather. But you’re cutting it fine, aren’t you?”
“Can you tell me where to find her?” Max asked again.
“Carlo!” called Captain Francis, and his dark-haired son leaned out of the wheelhouse window. “What is it, Pop?”
“Where’s the Flower of Kashmir docked?”
Carlo shook his head. “No idea. You should ask the Harbormaster. It’s his job to know what ship’s where.”
Captain Francis pointed Max to a little brick building, barely broader than its one narrow doorway. “Leave your bicycle here if you like. I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“Thank you, but I’m taking it with me. I’m expected, I can’t—”
Captain Francis didn’t take offense. “You know what? I thought you were one of those painter fellows at first. Must be the beret,” he laughed.
Max was already mounting the bicycle and wasted no more words.
“Then I saw your eyes,” Captain Francis called from behind him.
The Harbormaster was too important to know who Max was and had his feet too firmly on the ground to know anything about any theatrical company. A tall, thin man in a dark suit and stiff white collar, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and sporting thick sideburns, he was on his way out the door when Max arrived.
He stopped in the doorway, glanced at Max, and bowed slightly. “Monsieur?” he asked, speaking French because this fellow wore a beret, and a red beret at that. He couldn’t be anything but French, in a red beret. “Qu’est-ce que vous desirez?” the Harbormaster inquired. In his position he dealt with ships from different countries, and he was proud of his ability to greet people in several languages.
“What?” Max asked. He asked this impatiently, as if he were his father playing Banker Hermann in The Worldly Way. “Whatever are you saying, my good man?”
“Oh. Ah.” The Harbormaster switched to English. “How may I help you, Sir?”
“I am expected on board the Flower of Kashmir,” announced banker Max, impatiently.
The Harbormaster’s eyes widened just a little and a hush oozed out from the small room behind him. The two clerks within looked up from their desks, first at Max and then at the Harbormaster. The Harbormaster’s expression grew wary. “The Flower of Kashmir, you say? You’re sure that’s the vessel’s name?”
“Of course I’m sure,” said Max, the man of few words. But his heart grew suddenly jittery.
One of the clerks spoke from behind the Harbormaster. “Sir?”
Without turning, the Harbormaster raised a hand, to silence his underling. With a sharp-eyed glance from behind round lenses, he said, “No Flower of Kashmir is presently berthed in my harbor. What’s her country of registration?”
“India,” Max guessed confidently.
“Nor are there any Indian registered vessels. We have, presently, one American, one Moroccan, one Dutch, one Canadian, and that’s all of them.”
Max considered this. “Which vessels sail at noon?” he asked.
“None, as it happens. Though three left their berths by ten-thirty this morning, so as to catch a favorable tide out of Porthaven.”
Something was very wrong here. But when Max spoke, it was in character. “Give me the names of those ships.”
The Harbormaster rattled off information, proud to have it at his fingertips. “The Miss Koala for Australia, the Eastern Star for China, and the Simón Bolívar for South America. The Australian liner carried four hundred and thirty-five passengers, the Chinese two hundred and twelve, and the South American liner was a cargo ship with only a few staterooms. Those at the docks now will not leave until tomorrow.” The Harbormaster waited for Max’s next question.
Max’s heart grew heavy with dread. This made less and less sense. He asked, “You’re certain there is not, and was not, a Flower of Kashmir?”
“Certain.”
“I wonder,” Max asked, the last thing he could think of, “if a letter was left for me?”
“We are neither a post office nor a message service,” the Harbormaster answered, allowing a little suspicion into his voice.
“Sir?” the voice asked again, from the office.
“Not yet,” said the Harbormaster, keeping his eyes on Max.
Fortunately, Max was tall for his age and, since he was acting his father acting Banker Hermann, he looked straight across at the official, unquelled by the man’s challenging expression. Max did not smile. He did not move to leave. He waited, and tried to think.
But he didn’t know what to think. His heart was sinking fast.
“May I ask, Sir, why you inquired about that particular vessel?” The Harbormaster was carefully polite.
Max was not about to utter out loud what he felt like saying and certainly not the way he felt like saying it. He was not about to wail, like a child, “Because my parents are on that boat!” He kept his dignity and his pretense wrapped close about him. “I am
to sail on her.”
“As I said, no ship of that name has been here,” the Harbormaster observed.
“I was expected,” Max insisted.
“All right, Fenton,” the Harbormaster said. “Now you may come forward.”
The clerk was a pale young man in shirtsleeves. He leaned excitedly around his superior to tell Max, “There was a message. It was a crook-looking fellow left it, stood like a soldier—but not one of our regulars. More like one of those mercenaries, who carry their weapons hidden. Hangs around the docks sometimes, doesn’t he, Sir?”
The Harbormaster didn’t respond. He was watching Max’s face closely.
“ ‘Message from actor man for fellow with bicycle,’ he told us,” Fenton continued. “Exact words. He had a squinty way, didn’t look at me proper. Funny ears. Shifty, he was.”
Max nodded, important and imperturbable. “What was the message?”
The Harbormaster nodded to the clerk, who took from his shirt pocket a sheet of paper, folded in half. Fenton gave it to the Harbormaster, who passed it on to Max, saying, “A rather odd message, if you ask me.”
“You read it?”
“Of course. Anything out of the ordinary could be a danger to the harbor.”
Max very carefully did not look either surprised or dismayed, although he felt both. All he said was “I see,” and he unfolded the paper to read the message quickly, allowing himself no change of expression, a wily banker who knew more than he was saying. The note, written on heavy vellum embossed with the now-familiar arrangement of upside-down Vs, was only half a page long and made no sense.
Dear boy,
As the greater WS says, there is a tide in the affairs of men. You, it seems, will not be riding on this one with us. A pity, since we are in such a de-luxurious situation here, the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, such luxury as we are in. Ours alone will be the adventure. And you? You must wait, wait with your grandmother, wait to hear. We wish you farewell!
WS the lesser
You will be glad to know that our adorable Arabella has engaged herself to Banker Hermann.
Max read quickly, nodded importantly, once, twice, pocketed the paper, and held out his hand to the Harbormaster. “Thank you for the information, my good man. You have been most helpful.” So. They had sailed without him. His heart hit bottom. He had well and truly missed the boat. But what boat headed for what destination? And why had he been lied to about the time? Max turned to leave, walking his bicycle the way a grown man would, moving at a stately pace among the people and vehicles crowding the busy waterfront.
The Harbormaster and his clerk watched him go.
“What do you make of that, Sir?”
“Something’s going on, I’m pretty sure. But not on my docks and not in my harbor, so it’s not my problem,” the Harbormaster said.
“Who was that fellow?”
“He was not who he seemed to be,” answered the Harbormaster thoughtfully.
“Could this be a police matter? Maybe we’d better write down a description?”
“Good thinking, Fenton.”
But neither of them could remember what their visitor had looked like. He hadn’t left any clear impression, except for his red beret. “And his eyes, of course,” the Harbormaster said.
The clerk agreed. “Never seen eyes that color, have I? You neither, Sir, I’ll bet. Not gray, not really, and you couldn’t say brown. Like—like the undersides of mushrooms. You’ve seen them, haven’t you? The undersides of mushrooms?”
This reminded the Harbormaster that he was hungry and had been interrupted on his way home for the good lunch his wife would have waiting for him. “I believe somebody’s pulling my leg,” he told the clerk, “and I am not amused.”
By then, their visitor had disappeared into the crowd. They looked for him but saw only a boy in the distance, a boy riding a bicycle, his schoolbag hanging off one shoulder and a bright red bandanna jammed into his rear pocket. The boy rounded a corner and was out of sight.
In which Max and Grammie wonder what happened, and what to do about it
As soon as he was safely out of sight around two corners, Max stopped. He could go no farther. He put his leaden feet on the ground and collapsed over the handlebars. The carpetbag thumped onto the ground.
Max felt as if a wagon had whammed into him. A wagon loaded with heavy stones, a wagon pulled by huge-hooved Clydesdale horses thundering along so fast they didn’t even swerve for the boy on a bicycle as they whammed into him. He felt flattened, and stunned, and frightened.
He made himself breathe deeply, the old cure for stage fright, once, twice, three times. Then he took three more slow, deep breaths, just to hear the echo of his father’s voice in his head: “One, two, deep breaths, Max, deep, good, three, good.”
Then a cart did rattle up behind him, its wooden wheels loud on the cobblestones. “Hey, kid! Outta the road!” a man’s voice bellowed. A heavy boot kicked the carpetbag aside and the carter pushed by, muttering angrily, “As if these streets weren’t narrow enough. These kids, think they own the world.”
There were no sidewalks in the old city, so Max had to pick up his carpetbag, pull his bicycle into a doorway, and huddle there.
He couldn’t take it in, what had happened. He felt as if he were floating in a sky with no moon and no stars, just black airless space. He felt hollow as space, empty, frightened.
He took three more slow, deep breaths, and the idea came to him: That note made absolutely no sense, made so little sense that it had—somehow—to make sense that it made no sense.
Grammie, he thought, the fact of her like a candle in the darkness. Maybe she knew something.
Because on fine days Grammie took her lunch out into the garden behind the library, that was where Max found her. He was glad she was alone. She took one look at his face and knew. “They’ve gone.”
Max dragged words up from deep in his stomach. “Without me.” He thrust the note at her. “The boat had already sailed, and there wasn’t any boat with that name anyway.” He sank beside her onto the wooden bench. “Someone was lying all along.”
Grammie dropped the uneaten half of her sandwich onto her lap and read the note.
The bench was under a magnolia tree, and the air was sweetened by the perfume of its blossoms, but neither of them noticed that. After Grammie read the note, she covered her face with her hands, wrinkling the paper against her nose and mouth.
Max’s own hands were fists on his thighs. “Do you think they knew?”
Eventually, Grammie uncovered her face. “What has he gotten her into now?” she demanded. “What do they expect you to do?”
“Be independent,” Max told her glumly.
“Eat the rest of this sandwich, please. I seem to have lost my appetite.”
Max shook his head. He wasn’t hungry. He thought, in fact, that he might never be hungry again. They sat on the bench for a long time, not speaking, not looking at one another, each thinking unhappy, anxious thoughts. “You’ll live with me of course,” Grammie said thoughtfully, “but what was that invitation about?” The clock tower rang twelve slow notes.
“And what do you mean there was no boat?” she asked. “If they’ve gone off, there had to be a boat.”
Max answered, “I was on time.”
Grammie shook her head, as if to clear her thoughts, and took off her glasses to rub at her eyes. Max waited. Grammie was the steady person in his life, the one who almost never got upset or excited.
“And that note,” Grammie grumbled. “Take your things to my house, and after that you should go down to the docks again and find out everything you can,” she decided. “Maybe something will make sense out of this latest … this latest imbroglio of your father’s.”
His mother had been just as eager, Max thought; but he didn’t say this to his grandmother. He felt incapable of having a single opinion of his own, and he didn’t want to have to make decisions, so he got up from the bench
and went to do as he’d been told.
“Be back in time for supper,” Grammie called after him.
Grammie made spaghetti for their supper, telling him, “It always used to cheer you up to have spaghetti, and I guess you need some cheering up after the day you’ve had.”
On the red-and-blue-striped tablecloth there was also a bowl of salad made with early greens from the garden the two families kept in their adjoining yards. The two little houses were so close together that if Max had looked out his grandmother’s kitchen door he would have seen the black shape of his own house, where no light shone in any window.
He didn’t look.
“Thanks, Grammie,” he said. “I’m hungry enough, but I don’t think it can cheer me up.”
“Well then, it can fill you up,” she told him, twirling spaghetti around her fork. Grammie was now so matter-of-fact about everything that Max became curious to know what she might have been thinking of, over the course of the afternoon.
“You know what?” Grammie asked, as if surprised by her own idea. “They could have gotten off the boat at Porthaven. They might be riding the evening train home.”
“Do you think so?” Max asked with sudden hope.
Grammie thought about that, and sighed. “I’d be surprised, given that note he left,” she admitted, and Max had to agree. “We’ll find out soon enough if that’s what’s happened. Meantime, you’ll stay with me,” she said again.
Max had done some thinking of his own that afternoon about where he’d sleep that night. The trouble was, his grandmother was bossier than you’d expect from seeing her soft silvery hair worn up in a bun that kept slipping to one side or the other of her head, and her soft grandmotherly shape in the pink and mossy green grandmotherly colors she liked to wear, the loose sweaters and long scarves, the full skirts that swirled around her ankles. However, if you noticed the bright blue eyes behind their heavy tortoiseshell spectacles, you wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that before she was a librarian she had been a teacher and had some very bossy habits.