“WHY can’t I just stay at home?” Van asked the next morning, as he scurried along the sidewalk in his mother’s lily-scented shadow. “I don’t want to spend a whole Saturday at your rehearsal.”
“You know why,” said his mother. “You’ve shown me that I can’t trust you to stay where you’re supposed to. This is a big, dangerous city, and you’re very small and very special.” She placed a hand on Van’s head in a way that made Van squirm away. “Besides, I happen to know that Peter will be there.”
The memory of Peter’s ice-water eyes—and the thought of the stolen squirrel and the little blue glass bottle, both of which were currently hidden in his treasure box—pulled Van’s stomach into a knot.
“Peter hates me,” he said.
“I’m sure he doesn’t hate you,” said his mother. “But maybe you could be especially nice to him to make up for disrupting his party.”
“Maybe,” said Van doubtfully.
“Charles and I would love it if you two spent a little more time together,” his mother went on. “You’d be good for each other.”
“Good for each other?” said Van. “Like . . . broccoli?”
“Like broccoli and broccolini!” sang his mother.
For a second, Van thought about making a break for it. He pictured himself taking off like SuperVan, his body a caped streak bulleting through the city. . . . But even his imaginary self couldn’t outrun his real mother. She’d have nabbed him by the next corner.
Van slumped over and stared at the sidewalk.
Wads of old gum. Bottle caps. A few crumpled flower petals. And there, under a shrub, something with glittering black eyes.
Van crouched so suddenly that his mother nearly knocked into him.
“Giovanni, what on earth—” she began.
But Van wasn’t listening. He edged closer to the thing in the leafy shadows. Maybe it was Jack’s raven, with its beak like a sharpened pencil. Maybe it was one of Nail’s rats. Whatever it was, it was something alive. Something that stared back at him. Heart thumping, he reached out and swept back the branches.
Beneath the shrub was a tiny, trembling ball of gray fuzz.
“It’s a baby bird!” cried Van. The bird blinked at him with ink-drop eyes. One crooked wing gave a twitch. “I think it’s hurt!”
“Oh,” said his mother. “It must have fallen out of its nest. Poor thing.”
“What should we do?”
“Giovanni . . .” His mother sighed. “These things happen. And we have to go, or I’ll be late.”
Van pulled his arm out of his mother’s grasp. “We can’t just leave it!”
His mother sighed again. “It’s outdoors, where it belongs. Don’t touch it. I’m sure it has mites or rabies.”
“Birds don’t get rabies,” said Van, who actually wasn’t sure about this. “We have to help it!”
“Giovanni, it’s a wild creature. You can’t just bring home a crow or a sparrow or a—a—”
“A baby robin,” said a polite voice.
So quietly that Van hadn’t noticed it, a man in a white suit had stopped beside them. Van looked up and found himself washed in the warmth of Mr. Falborg’s crinkly smile.
“You have sharp eyes, Master Markson.” Mr. Falborg beamed. “And Signorina Markson, what a pleasure to run into the world’s greatest lyric soprano two days in a row! My lucky stars must be aligned.”
“That’s very sweet of you, Mr. Falborg.” Van’s mother glowed back at him. “Van and I were just on our way to the opera, as a matter of fact.”
“I wasn’t,” said Van. “I’m not leaving the bird here.”
“Giovanni,” said his mother, in a voice that began to take on that cathedral ring.
“May I make a suggestion?” Mr. Falborg asked. “I could take the robin to an excellent animal hospital nearby. It’s where I bring my Renata for her annual checkup. Renata is my Persian cat. Like Renata Tebaldi, she’s quite the diva.” His smile shifted back to Van. “And if it’s all right with you, Signorina Markson, I’d be happy to take Van with me.”
Van whirled around. “Can I, Mom? Please?”
“I’ll bring him directly to the opera house afterward,” Mr. Falborg offered. “If you say yes, that is.”
He paused, waiting for an answer. Mr. Falborg’s face looked so warm and crinkly, Van didn’t know how anyone could have said no.
Van’s mother didn’t say it either. “All right.” She bent down to give Van a kiss on the forehead. “But you behave yourself. Do you hear me, Giovanni?”
“I hear you,” mumbled Van.
“It’s a good thing you spotted that little creature,” said Mr. Falborg as Ingrid Markson hurried away. He tugged a blue silk handkerchief out of his vest pocket. “Without you, he probably wouldn’t have survived. There.” He bent down and swaddled the bird in the handkerchief. “It can think it’s safe in the sky.”
The animal hospital was just two blocks away. On the walk there, Van found a quarter and a Lego knight, which made the morning seem even sunnier. They left the baby robin in the care of a friendly veterinary technician, who promised that the bird would be cared for and released into the wild, and Mr. Falborg asked her to send the bill to his home address, and he and Van strolled back out into the street.
They gave each other job-well-done smiles. Then Van thought of Peter Grey, and of the rehearsal room at the opera where everything was loud and blurry and boring, and of all the other things he could be doing on a sunny summer Saturday. He let out a sigh.
“Something wrong?” asked Mr. Falborg.
“Just . . . I don’t really want to go to the opera. And rehearsal doesn’t get done until three, so I’ll have to sit there for hours.”
“Hmm.” Mr. Falborg looked thoughtful. “What if you were at the opera house long before the end of rehearsal, but you spent the rest of the time at my home instead?”
Van felt his face crinkle into a Mr. Falborg kind of smile. “That would be good.”
Mr. Falborg’s house, like Mr. Falborg himself, was tall and tidy. Its five stories of white brick were wreathed by a yard of sculpted bushes and trees, and its door was painted the same shade of sky blue as Mr. Falborg’s handkerchief.
“Please come in,” said Mr. Falborg, as they stepped over the threshold into a high-ceilinged foyer.
Van, who had expected to see numbered apartment doors on either side, let out a little gasp. “You have the whole building?”
“It’s been in my family for quite some time. Ah! Gerda!” Mr. Falborg exclaimed, as a middle-aged lady in a neat gray suit appeared at the other end of the hall. “Let me introduce Giovanni Markson, son of renowned soprano Ingrid Markson.”
“People just call me Van,” said Van timidly.
“Ni-yis to meet you.” Gerda spoke with a swoopy accent that Van couldn’t quite identify. She gave him a warm smile. “Mr. Falborg . . . tree calls from the Venetian dealer dis afternoon.”
“Thank you, Gerda.” Mr. Falborg turned toward Van. “Would you excuse me for just a moment? Please make yourself comfortable in the front room.” He ushered Van toward an arched doorway. “Perhaps Gerda can find us some refreshments.”
Gerda strode down the hall toward the back of the house, Mr. Falborg turned to the right, and Van was left to tiptoe through the arched doorway.
He found himself inside a large front room. The walls were white, and chandeliers hung from the white ceiling, and white armchairs were arranged around a large fireplace whose bricks and mantelpiece had all been painted white. But that was where the whiteness ended. Jungly ferns poured from hanging baskets. Built-in bookcases shone with worn, warm-hued hardcovers. The walls were covered with frames of all shapes and sizes, and each frame held something different: a cut-paper silhouette, an antique postcard, a bunch of butterflies pinned in place.
More curios covered every flat surface. Glossy seashells. Wooden ships in bottles. Old metal toys. Lifelike flowers carved out of stone. Very carefully, Van touched the trunk of a cast-iron elephant. The trunk bent down and snapped back up into place. Van jumped.
“Lemonade and ginger cookies,” said Gerda’s voice, making Van jump again. “Please help yerself.” She set a tray on a table and whisked back out the door.
Van sidled around the low white couch and took a nibble of one of the cookies. It was so brittle and spicy that it seemed to be trying to bite him back.
“. . . see . . . fresh mints every . . . ,” said Mr. Falborg’s voice over his shoulder. I see the refreshments have arrived.
Van turned. “Mrs. Gerda . . . um, Mrs. . . . your wife brought them.”
“I hope my wife wouldn’t call me ‘Mr. Falborg.’” Mr. Falborg smiled. “Gerda and her husband, Hans, help run my home. They also help to manage my business matters—sales and purchases and so forth. And they make this big place less lonely. Otherwise, it would be just me and my collections.” He gestured around the room. “They take up plenty of space, but they aren’t much company. Mechanical banks, stamps, marbles, hair wreaths—”
Van was pretty sure he’d heard this wrong. “Hair wreaths?”
“Victorian arrangements made from human hair,” Mr. Falborg explained. “I’ve only been collecting them for the last decade or so. But some of my collections are the work of a lifetime. My opera albums, my paperweights . . .” His blue eyes grew even brighter. “You can see for yourself, if you’ll come with me.”
Mr. Falborg led the way through another arch, around a corner, to a pair of closed doors. He threw the doors open and flicked on the lights. The entire room twinkled to life.
“Ohhh,” Van breathed.
The room was packed with lighted glass cabinets of the kind that Van had seen only in fancy jewelry stores. Each shelf of every cabinet was filled with glass bubbles, all different colors, all glinting softly. Van’s mind flashed to the chamber full of shimmering bottles . . . but Mr. Falborg was opening a cabinet and lifting something out, and Van quickly dragged his mind back.
“This is one of the oldest in my collection,” Mr. Falborg said, holding out an orb of green glass clustered with gold spirals. “I found it in an antique shop in New Orleans when I wasn’t much older than you are. With that, I was hooked.”
Van gazed around at the galaxy of paperweights. Some were filled with frozen cyclones of bubbles, some with layers of colored glass that looked like jellyfish legs, some with flowers that must have been picked a hundred years ago. “Wow,” he murmured.
“Collecting is a slippery thing,” said Mr. Falborg, bending down beside him. “The whole world becomes a curiosity shop. Your next discovery could be anywhere. And you know that looking at the world this way is making you distracted and strange, but you can’t help it, because the minute you stop looking, you might miss a genuine treasure.”
Van turned away from the cabinets and stared up into Mr. Falborg’s face. There was a funny prickly feeling in his spine—very much like the feeling he got when he noticed something special waiting for him on the ground.
“And once you do spot that treasure,” Mr. Falborg went on, “you simply have to have it. You need to add it to your collection, because—”
“Because it belongs there,” said Van.
Mr. Falborg’s eyes sparkled. “Exactly.” He put a hand on Van’s shoulder. “I knew I’d spotted a fellow collector. And what is your passion? What do you collect?”
“Just . . . little things that I find,” said Van. “Stuff other people drop or throw away.”
“Intriguing,” said Mr. Falborg. “Would you care for another cookie? Or would you like to see the hair wreaths?”
“Hair wreaths,” said Van quickly.
Mr. Falborg guided Van back through the doorway, around several corners, past many more closed doors, and up a long staircase.
Mr. Falborg’s house was much twistier on the inside than Van would have guessed. Every hall seemed to split in several directions, and every nook and shelf was cluttered with strange treasures. One stretch of wall was hung with hundreds of masks. Another stretch was coated with old circus posters. An entire hallway was filled with the glimmering bodies of stuffed and mounted snakes. By the time Mr. Falborg threw open a door, Van had nearly forgotten where they were going.
This room was narrow and long, with dark paneling and red velvet curtains that shut out most of the light. Brass contraptions sat on polished wooden tables. Van saw something that looked like a typewriter, and something that looked like a very old cash register, and something that might have been a sewing machine or a dentist’s drill. Mr. Falborg turned on the chandelier, and Van could suddenly see that the walls were covered with hanging glass boxes, each one holding something that looked like fancy embroidery without any fabric behind it.
Van moved closer.
Instead of colored threads, the embroidered things were made of thousands and thousands of human hairs. The hairs had been knotted and coiled into tiny buds and trees and leaves and stems—things that should have been green, or pink, or white, but that were all a sort of dusty brown instead.
“These are weird,” Van said at last.
Mr. Falborg nodded. “They are indeed. And just imagine the Victorian craftspeople picking strands out of their hairbrushes night after night.”
“Really weird,” said Van.
“If we had more time, I would show you my music boxes—but they’re down in the cellars. Perhaps on another visit.”
Van smiled up at Mr. Falborg. “That would be great.”
Mr. Falborg smiled back.
And then, just over Mr. Falborg’s shoulder, something caught Van’s eye. In the farthest, darkest corner of the room, inlaid with panels of painted silk and nearly hidden by the red velvet curtains, stood a pair of gleaming black doors.
“What’s in there?” Van asked. “Another collection?”
“Ah.” Mr. Falborg glided between Van and the gleaming black doors. “That is a collection I don’t show to guests, I’m afraid.” He gave Van an apologetic smile. “It is the most valuable of all my collections. Its safety is paramount.”
Curiosity—and Mr. Falborg’s kindly face—made Van bolder than usual. “I’d be really careful,” he promised, with another look at the doors. “You can trust me.”
But he’d barely finished speaking before several secrets loomed up in the back of Van’s mind.
Peter’s stolen squirrel. The way he’d sneaked inside the dingy collection agency, through the endless underground halls, into the chamber full of bottled wishes. The blue glass bottle with its spinning silver wisp wedged into the treasure box under his bed. Of course he would never steal from Mr. Falborg . . . but he hadn’t meant to steal anything from Peter Grey or the underground collection either. Maybe he couldn’t be trusted.
“Oh, I’m certain I can trust you,” Mr. Falborg said, in a voice that made Van feel steadier. “But there are others who . . .”
Mr. Falborg stopped. His eyes locked on a tiny spot on the wall, not far from the half-hidden black doors. Van followed Mr. Falborg’s eyes. When he squinted, he could tell that the spot was a small brown spider, holding perfectly still.
Mr. Falborg whipped the blue handkerchief out of his pocket. With a vicious thwack, he smashed the spider against the wall. Van winced. The sound of Mr. Falborg’s hand against the wall was surprisingly loud, even to Van. Louder than it needed to be to smash a tiny spider.
Mr. Falborg turned away from the wall. His gaze landed on Van, and the look of cold distaste on his features melted quickly back into a smile. He dropped the handkerchief onto the nearest table. “Not all creatures are our friends,” he said. He glanced at his wristwatch. “Oh, my. The time has gotten away from me. We’d better make our way to the opera house.” He gestured to the door. “After you, Master Markson.”
The walk to the opera was short and lit by streaks of afternoon sun. Mr. Falborg kept up a stream of stories about unusual marbles and extremely rare stamps that Van could only half hear, and Van found an old-fashioned key in the gutter, and by the time Mr. Falborg opened the opera house’s lobby door for Van and bowed good-bye, Van couldn’t quite remember why the tiny seed of a strange, unsettled feeling had rooted deep in the pit of his stomach.