Toymaker, The Read Free

corpse? What better place to hide than a travelling circus,what better companion than his grandson? How could such a person know anything?
    When Gustav joined Lutsmann’s circus, he had actually been a very good conjuror. If people do not understand how a thing is done, they are prepared to believe that it might, just might, be magic. If I were to open my hand and, where a moment before there had been nothing there was now a bird, you might not understand how I had done it but you would guess that somehow I had put it there. But if I were to ask you to turn
your
hand over, peel back your fingers and in your palm was a bird – now how could that have got there? That is what Gustav could do. That and many more things too. He could make a tight scarf appear around a man’s throat if he had called out from the crowd and made him angry. ‘Take care,’ he would say, ‘or next time I will make it a rope.’
    It was not magic, but how could it have been done?
    He was a finer conjuror than Lutsmann could ever have expected to find, and Lutsmann snapped him up having seen only part of what Gustav could do. He took him, child and all, and no questions were ever asked. But Lutsmann knew a man with a pastwhen he saw one. What did it matter to him? He had a conjuror and Gustav had somewhere to hide – what more did either want?
    Well, I’ll tell you what Lutsmann wanted – what Anna-Maria wanted. They wanted to know what it was that Gustav had to hide. Why else would a man like him have come to them? Why else would he never show his real face?
    This was the life that Mathias led in the circus. Preparing the things the performers would need. Helping them dress and undress, and never any thanks given. Estella, the lady contortionist, was the worst. Mathias would avoid her when he could. Sometimes he couldn’t. She would call him ‘my pretty boy’ and put her hand beneath his chin as though to pet him, but instead she would dig her finger hard into the top of his throat so that he hung there upon her nail as if upon a single spike. ‘My pretty boy,’ she would say, and then her voice was like a cat snagging silk with its claws. He fetched their water, he cleaned and mended, and did all the things that a child shouldn’t have to do. But he had no choice. There was no one else to look after him.
    When they came to a place that was large enough for a show, Lutsmann would stop the brightlypainted carts. The side of the second cart would be lowered so as to make a stage, and there Lutsmann would stand in his fine clothes, black boots and red coat, shouting until he had a crowd. Beside him stood the man who ate fire. He would thrust a lighted torch into his mouth and blow out a jet of flame that lit a twist of straw Lutsmann held in his hand. He could swallow swords too. He could put five of them down his throat at once, one after the other. While this was happening Gustav would be on the stage too, whirling cards out of his hands in ribbons and drawing them back in, spreading them like fans, making them loop the loop. Estella would fold her body around and sit on her own head, and all the time Lutsmann would be shouting and beating a drum while Anna-Maria went amongst the crowd and sold tickets for the show. For this wasn’t the show itself; this was just enough to make people want to come. The real show would only happen when the light faded and the burning torches were lit. Then everything was in shadow, and in the flickering light people didn’t see the cheaply painted carts; they saw what they wanted to believe.
    In the light of the flaming torches, Lutsmann would introduce each act before it came on. Thestrongman would come first. Like most circus shows, not all was what it seemed. While he was showing his muscles to the crowd, it was Mathias’s job to crawl into a secret space beneath the cart and, at the right moment, hook to an iron bar beneath the floor the huge weights the strongman was to lift, so that when Lutsmann