Toymaker, The (10 page)

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘He seems to know you,’ said Koenig. ‘He’s left money at the inn for anyone who finds you. Quite a lot of money, actually.’

‘So you’re going to take him back,’ said Katta. Her voice was full of contempt.

Koenig smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t left nearly enough for that. Your tunnel came down on all my things – I’ve been back to see it. There’s no digging them out. Even if there were, they are no good to me now. I can’t sell spoiled goods at a profit.’ He shook his head. ‘No. It would have to be a great deal more than that.’

‘How much more?’ said Katta.

She could see where Koenig was leading. He would beat Leiter’s price up as high as he could, then sell Mathias for that.

But he shook his head and looked at her with bright, intelligent eyes. ‘That’s the wrong question,’ he said. ‘The question should be, “Why does he want our young friend back at all?” The story in the stables is that he stole something from this man and
you ran away together. So what did he steal that could possibly be worth so much trouble?’

‘I didn’t steal anything,’ said Mathias.

‘It’s a piece of paper,’ said the Burner woman quietly. ‘The girl has it in the pocket of her apron.’

Only then, too late, did Katta realize that the woman had understood every word they had said – understood every word, all the time. She had been tricked by a stinking, filthy Burner. She didn’t think. She leaped at the woman’s face with her fingers crooked but Koenig caught her – which was fortunate because, quick as a snake, the woman had the small sharp knife in her hand. Koenig pushed Katta away roughly.

‘Tashka did no more than I asked her to,’ he said. ‘And she’s fed you and seen to your friend. He’d be dead without her. So you stay there and shut up!’

She knew he was right, but she wasn’t going to let him see that, thief that he was, setting this woman to spy on her, so she stared right back at him and spat at the woman. It was a mistake. With fierce coal-black eyes the woman stepped towards her, the blade of the knife held flat between her thumb and finger. Koenig put his hand out and touched the woman’s arm. She stopped at once. Still holding onto her, he
lifted his other hand to Katta and slowly, so there could be no misunderstanding what he meant, he said, ‘Don’t ever do that to her again, or she will kill you and there will be nothing I can do to stop her. She will wait until I am gone and then, if you are still here, she will kill you. Do you understand?’

‘Give it to him,’ said Mathias quietly. ‘It’s more trouble than it’s worth.’

Katta looked at Mathias, then at the hard-faced woman, and her mouth was suddenly dry as ash.

‘Please,’ said Mathias.

Slowly Katta put her hand into the pocket of her apron. She could feel the sharp edge of the stone, hard and heavy. She looked at Koenig, then at the woman again. But there was nothing she could do. She let the stone drop through her fingers and, drawing the folded paper out, gave it to Koenig. He took it from her, and the woman stepped back and put the knife away.

Carefully Koenig teased one end of the paper open, then, where the shaft of light fell through the door onto the tabletop, he unrolled it and flattened it out between his hands. For a while he said nothing. Then he looked up at Mathias.

‘Tell me about this piece of paper,’ he said.
‘Whose is it?’

‘It was my grandfather’s,’ said Mathias.

‘Was?’

‘He is dead.’

‘Do you know what is written on it?’

Mathias shook his head.

‘Then come and see,’ said Koenig. ‘This is what you nearly died for. It must be worth seeing for that alone.’

Mathias didn’t move. Koenig held his hand out to him.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come and see.’

‘He can’t stand,’ said Katta.

‘He can stand,’ said Koenig.

Mathias put his feet on the ground and stood up. He felt so giddy. There was a buzzing in his ears. He shook his head to clear it. Koenig held out his hand and steadied him.

The piece of paper on the table was no wider than a small letter might be, and not as long. It had been torn off halfway, so that the bottom edge was deeply ragged and uneven. It still had the crease marks from where it had been folded tight and sewn into Gustav’s coat. There were other marks too that Mathias knew were from when Gustav had put it in
his mouth. For a moment he was in the dark stable again beside the dying man, with the dirty straw on the ground and the bowl of milky white water. It was the same piece of paper, he had no doubt about it, but there was something that made no sense, made no sense at all. He picked it up and turned it over, but it was the same.

On both sides, the piece of paper was completely blank.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Mathias.

He thought that he was missing something obvious and looked at Koenig, expecting to see the answer, but Koenig didn’t understand either. He was holding the paper, a puzzled look on his face.

Katta came and stood by the table. ‘All the writing’s come off,’ she said.

Koenig lifted the paper up to the daylight. Each different town made and marked its own paper. Where the light showed through, he could see the watermark of the Guild of Paper Makers for the town in which it had been made, but there wasn’t even so much as the ghost of any writing to show that there had ever been anything written on it at all.

‘It can’t be this that they want,’ said Katta. ‘It must be something else.’

In that moment it crossed her mind that Mathias had taken something else, something that he hadn’t told her about. She looked at him distrustfully, but he shook his head. He knew that whatever this paper was, it was what Gustav hadn’t wanted anyone else to find.

‘It must have some trick,’ he said.

Koenig looked up at him. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

Mathias faltered under the scrutiny of those hard grey eyes. ‘It’s a conjuror’s piece of paper,’ he said.

He looked at Katta as though she might be able to explain it better, but she didn’t know what he meant either.

‘He was a conjuror,’ he said. ‘There must be some trick to it. Maybe you have to hold it in a special way before you can see the writing.’

‘How?’ said Koenig, tilting the paper so that the light fell onto it at different angles. ‘What sort of thing might he have done?’

Mathias frowned. He tried hard to think but nothing would come. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe you have to hold it over a flame.’

It was possible.

Koenig lit the stub of a candle and they watched
as he carefully passed the paper to and fro above the flame. Katta stood waiting for words to appear but nothing happened.

‘It’s just a bit of paper,’ she said contemptuously. ‘You want it to be something else, but that’s all it is.’

Koenig didn’t look up. ‘Things aren’t always what they seem,’ he said. ‘You should have learned that lesson by now.’

He turned and spoke in Burner to the woman. Then he listened to her long answer. Katta guessed that he’d asked the woman to tell him what she’d heard Mathias saying and tried to follow it, but the words were just sounds to her. Sometimes Koenig would interrupt with a question, and then the woman would think about it before saying some more. Finally, when she was done, Koenig picked up the piece of paper again and looked at it carefully.

‘Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,’ he said.

Then Katta had an idea. It came to her so suddenly that it slipped out before she could stop it. ‘Maybe it never had writing on it at all,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s only half—’ She shut her mouth tight. But she’d already said enough for Koenig.

‘Half,’ he said, turning the new idea around in his head.

He put the paper back down on the table so that the torn, jagged edge that had been at the bottom was now at the top.

‘What if there is another piece,’ he said, ‘that matches this tear.’ He drew his fingernail along the odd, ragged line. ‘Matches it exactly.’

Katta looked down at the paper. Turned like this, it did look like the bottom part of something, not the top part of it at all. Her idea had been that
maybe the writing was on the other part, but then why keep the wrong bit, the bit that was blank?

Now, turned the other way, the tear had a meaning. Even if you were in a hurry, you could tear paper much neater than that if you wanted to. This tear was quite deliberately done. Koenig was right. It wasn’t just a tear at all. It was meant to match another piece.

‘What if it never had writing on it at all,’ he said quietly, weighing that thought. ‘What if all it was meant to do was fit?’

Mathias had stopped thinking. His shoulder throbbed and his chest ached. All he wanted to do was lie down. ‘What good would that be?’ he said, and sat on the bed.

Koenig glanced up at Katta. She’d already worked out the answer to that, but she wasn’t going to say.

He took a flat leather wallet from inside his riding coat – Katta caught the flash of a fine silk waistcoat beneath. Carefully folding the paper so that the edge was safe, Koenig put it into the wallet.

‘That’s his,’ said Katta fiercely. ‘It’s not yours to keep.’

‘No,’ said Koenig, putting the wallet back inside his coat. ‘But if his friends come by, they will have a
little more trouble taking it from me than they would from him.’

Katta looked at Koenig – at his slate-grey eyes and hard-edged face – and knew that he was more than probably right.

He stood up, put his hat on and buttoned his coat.

‘What will you do to us now?’ said Mathias.

His head had drooped and he was staring at the floor. Katta put her hand into her apron pocket and gripped the stone.

‘Nothing,’ said Koenig. He patted the front of his coat where the wallet lay. ‘This little riddle needs solving. You have been the cause of more trouble for me than you know. Let’s hope this piece of paper turns out to be worth enough to put it all to rights. Then we shall see.’

He went through the door and whistled for the big bay horse to come to him. It trotted out from the shelter of the trees on the other side of the clearing, shaking its head and mane. Mathias felt so very tired. Tashka must have seen. She came across and, laying him down, covered him over with his coat, but as she did so, she didn’t take her eyes off Katta, and Katta found herself wishing very much that Koenig had not gone quite yet, and that he had not left
her alone with this Burner woman and her sharp knife.

It was very dark and cold. Mathias lay asleep on the small bed, his coat pulled across him. Katta lay on the floor, but it was so cold. In the end she had climbed up onto the bed and, tucking her knees behind Mathias’s for warmth, pressed herself as close to him as she could without waking him. But it was a long, miserable night. At some point a Burner man came into the hut and spoke to the woman, but he didn’t stay. In the dark, Katta thought she recognized his voice as that of the man who had carried Mathias in. She wondered whether this was his bed and the woman was his wife. After he had gone, the woman had wrapped herself in a thick shawl and fallen asleep in a chair next to the embers of the fire. Katta watched her, not sure whether it was safe to fall asleep, so she stared up into the shadow shapes that flickered against the bracken roof, pinching herself awake when she felt her eyes closing.

‘What does it mean?’ whispered Mathias.

Katta hadn’t realized that he had woken. ‘Go to sleep,’ she said.

‘Do you know?’

‘Maybe.’

She was wiser now. She wasn’t going to risk the woman hearing. Slowly she lifted her head, but the woman didn’t move. She put her lips close to Mathias’s ear and spoke in whispers that only he could hear.

‘Someone once left something with Tahlmann – he kept the inn: he had to keep it safe and then give it to someone else, but he didn’t know who that would be. So that’s what they did. They tore a piece of paper in two – Tahlmann kept one half and the man took the other. I was sweeping up. They didn’t mind me and I heard it all. Then, weeks later – weeks and weeks – a stranger came and asked for the package. He had the other piece of paper, and Tahlmann put the two together on the table and they fitted just so. So he gave the package to him, and the stranger went away. What if it’s like that?’

‘But the other piece could be anywhere,’ said Mathias. ‘I don’t know where it is.’

‘Maybe that’s why they want it,’ whispered Katta. ‘Maybe they already know where the other piece is.’

‘Then why don’t they just take whatever it is?’

Katta wasn’t sure what the answer to that was, so she said, ‘Maybe they can’t.’

Mathias didn’t say anything for a moment. It made no sense to him. None of it made any sense. Then he turned his head so that he could see the outline of Katta’s face in the dark.

‘You won’t leave me, will you?’ he said quietly.

It hadn’t occurred to her until then that he was frightened that she might.

In answer, she pulled the coat up so that it was warm around him. ‘You can’t even stand up,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I ain’t got no choice, have I?’

‘But you don’t know anything,’ he said.

‘Know about the piece of paper, don’t I? Tahlmann would sell me as quick as quick if he knew that. And this one’ – she meant Koenig – ‘he ain’t goin’ to want anyone else to know about it, is he? So he ain’t goin’ to let me go.’