The Apothecary (10 page)
“We don’t mind, sir,” Benjamin said. “If you and Sergei want to sit in the parlour, we’re about to do an experiment.”
Mr Shiskin’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What experiment?”
“We’ll show you,” Benjamin said, with the air of a magician about to do a trick. “It’s
science
. Please, have a seat in there.”
The two Shiskins removed themselves reluctantly to the little front parlour, and Benjamin and I stuffed the crushed leaves into the samovar’s teapot and filled it with boiling water from the urn. We could hear the Shiskins talking together, and I heard the words “science competition” mixed in with the Russian.
“You think it’ll work in the samovar?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Benjamin said. “We’ll have to pour it into something else.”
I handed him the only clean teacup from a row of hooks, and we filled it with the pale greenish brew. “Just don’t smell it yourself,” I said. “Or we’ll start confessing everything.”
Benjamin took the cup in one hand, held a tea towel over his face with the other, and headed into the parlour. I followed.
“The very
fascinating
thing about this herb,” Benjamin told the Shiskins, through the towel, “is the way the smell changes, over time. It starts out very sharp and exhilarating. Here, please try.” He held the cup out.
Mr Shiskin leaned away. “Why do you cover your face?”
“I’m getting a cold, sir. Please, smell the tea before it changes.”
“You smell it first. It might be dangerous.”
“Oh, I’ve already smelled it,” Benjamin said.
“And you are sick!”
“An unrelated winter cold. I don’t want to infect you.”
Mr Shiskin crossed his thick arms over his chest. “We are Russian. We don’t get colds.”
Sergei said something imploring to his father and the older man finally sighed, uncrossed his arms, and leaned over the diminishing steam from the cup. He seemed startled by the smell, and looked up sharply at Benjamin.
“Where did you get this plant?” he asked.
“In—in the park.”
Mr Shiskin lunged from his chair towards Benjamin, surprisingly agile in spite of his size and his wooden leg.
“Chush
sobach’ya!”
he said. “
You
smell it, and then tell me again where you found it!”
I backed into the kitchen, and Benjamin backed up after me, holding the teacup in front of him like a weapon. Mr Shiskin seemed even bigger and more powerful now that he was angry.
Sergei was mortified. “Leave them alone, Papa!” he said. “They’re going to let me on their science team!”
“They are
not
your science team!” Mr Shiskin said.
Sergei ducked in front of his father, arms spread wide, and stood protecting us. “Three years we have lived here,” he said, “and this is the first time my friends
ever
came to visit, and now you chase them out!”
“They are not your friends,” his father said, pushing him aside. “They invent this to get to me.”
I stumbled backward in a panic, and my sleeve caught the silver spout of the samovar. I tried to steady the urn, but it crashed to the floor. The hot water spilled out of the teapot, and the whole kitchen was filled with the bracing, minty smell of the leaves. There was no avoiding breathing it in.
“Where did you get this plant?” Mr Shiskin asked again.
The giddy feeling came over me: the compulsion to blurt out the answer. I bit my tongue until it hurt, but I couldn’t stop myself. “At the Chelsea Physic Garden,” I said. “From the gardener.”
He turned to Benjamin, who still had the towel over his face. “This is true?”
“No!” Benjamin said, his voice muffled. “I don’t know what she’s talking about!
She
doesn’t know what she’s talking about!”
“It’s true,” I said. “On Sunday, you passed a message to Benjamin’s father. Then those men came for him. Who are they?”
Mr Shiskin stared at me. His face turned an ashen grey as the blood drained from it. Then he switched on a radio on the kitchen counter and turned up the volume. “Stupid children!” he hissed, under the sound of cheery dance music. “You think no one is listening?”
I knew about houses being bugged, but it hadn’t occurred to me that this one might be. Shiskin was right: We were stupid children. How had I thought we were equipped to conduct an interrogation?
Under cover of the music, Shiskin whispered, “This is where I have seen you—in the park. Is Marcus Burrows your father? Take down this ridiculous towel.”
Benjamin lowered the towel. “He is.”
“Who else knows you have connected him to me?”
“Only the gardener.”
“Did you see your father taken?”
“We were hiding in the cellar. We heard German voices.”
“Did you see a man with a scar?”
“
We’re
supposed to ask the questions here!” Benjamin said.
“You have
no idea
the danger you are in!” Shiskin whispered hoarsely.
“The man with the scar was there,” I said. “Who is he?”
“He is a member of the Stasi,” Mr Shiskin said. “The East German secret police. But he is working under the command of Soviet security, the MGB. They must have discovered the apothecary.” He slumped into a chair and put his head in his hands. His eye fell on the dented samovar on the floor.
“You know what other thing ‘samovar’ means, in Russia?” he asked. “It is a word for the soldiers who lost their arms and their legs in the war, from shells and exploding mines. Because they look like teapot with no arms and legs, you see? The Soviets sent them to Siberia so people would not see them and know how terrible is the war. My brother was one of these, until he died there. They took his body and then they punished him for it. Losing my own leg, I could accept. But I could not forgive what they did to my brother, a war hero. When he died, I decided to help your father.”
There was a silence while we absorbed the horror of this confession. The dance music jangled along.
“Help my father with
what
?” Benjamin finally asked. “Why did the Soviets want him?”
Mr Shiskin fought the urge to answer; I could see the muscles in his neck distend. There was a loud trumpet solo on the radio. “There are two other scientists working with your father,” he said. “They have come to London to take part in his plan.”
“Is Jin Lo one of them?”
Mr Shiskin was purple with the effort not to speak. “Please stop asking questions. I don’t wish to compromise your father. If he and Jin Lo have been captured, I am in grave danger from both the British and the Soviets. So is your gardener. And so are you. I beg you to stay away from my son.”
“But Papa, they can’t!” Sergei said. “We’re on the science team together!”
“There
is
no science team!” Mr Shiskin barked. “They lie to you!”
Sergei cowered for a moment, then said meekly, “Then they could join chess club instead.”
“Mr Shiskin, I need to find my father,” Benjamin said. “Tell us how to do that, or we don’t leave Sergei’s side. It’ll be science team practice all day long.
And
we’ll join chess club.”
Shiskin hesitated, but the combination of truth serum and blackmail must have been too much for him. “I don’t know where he is,” he said. “We are to meet in two days, at the Port of London. If your father is not there, we will be finished.”
“Finished
how
? And what’s the plan?”
Shiskin shook his head, reached into his pocket and produced a tiny capsule.
“Cyanide!” Benjamin said, diving to stop him. “No!”
Shiskin knocked Benjamin to the floor with one powerful arm. Then he put the capsule between his teeth and crushed it. “It is not cyanide,” he said. “You have read too many stories. It will only make me mute, for a time. I thought I would use it against the MGB and torture—not a boy and a pot of tea.”
“Just tell me why Soviet security would be interested!”
“I only want peace,” Shiskin said. “Just leave my boy al—” Then his voice vanished. There wasn’t even a whisper left. He couldn’t make a sound.
“Wait! I need to know!” Benjamin said.
The jitterbug ended, and silence fell briefly over the radio.
I heard a whimper from the corner. Sergei was sitting on the wet kitchen floor with his grandmother’s dented samovar in his lap and a devastated look on his face. His father was in danger, he was not a member of a science team, and still no one had come to his house, in three long years, as a friend. Another song started up.
Mr Shiskin all but picked up Benjamin and me by the scruff of our necks, propelling us into the hall, past the stairs and the hanging coats. He could be eloquent in silence: There was nothing mute about the way he deposited us outside like two bags of rubbish and slammed the door.
T
he one urgent thing we knew, from Mr Shiskin, was that the gardener was in danger and we had to warn him. The Physic Garden was closed for the night by the time we got to Chelsea, and the gate was padlocked. Benjamin made his hands into a sling for my foot so I could climb up onto the brick wall. I pulled him up after me, and we dropped down onto the grass below.
It was fully dark, and we walked straight for the corridor of green with the hanging flowers that led to the inner garden. The lushness of the plants seemed sinister in the dark, instead of verdant and springlike.
Under the carved Azoth of the Philosophers, we peered through the gate. A light was on in the gardener’s little house.
“Hullo!” Benjamin called.
“If he’s inside, he can’t hear us,” I said.
We climbed that gate, too, dropped over, and made our way towards the house. As we passed the sundial in the shadows, I thought it looked strange. The metal triangle that indicated the time was missing. It had been snapped off at the base. I touched the rough edge of unoxidised copper. “How could that happen?”
We both looked at the house. It seemed innocuous, a light burning somewhere inside. We crept quietly towards the door, which stood ajar, leaving a vertical line of light.
“Should we knock?” I asked.
Benjamin pushed at the door and it creaked, making both of us jump back. The house was silent. “Hullo?” he called again.
He pushed the door open, and we stepped inside.
“I don’t like this,” I whispered. “We should leave.”
A lantern with a glass shield sat lit on a chair by the door, as if someone had planned to take it outside. The gardener’s oilcloth coat was hanging on its peg. The table was set meticulously for one, with a place mat, a folded cloth napkin, and a white bowl, none of which had been used.
There was a woodstove at the other end of the room, with a pot on it. Benjamin picked up the lantern and held it over the pot. Some kind of soup had been simmering there, but the fire had gone out in the woodstove and the soup was congealed around the edges.
As I moved away from the stove, my foot hit something on the floor and I bumped into Benjamin, rattling the lantern’s glass shield.
The spill of light caught the sole of a rubber boot, which I had tripped over. Then a second boot. I held my breath as Benjamin raised the lantern to reveal two legs in wool trousers, stretched out on the floor, suspenders over a wool shirt, and then the gardener’s grey beard.
A scream caught in my throat. The gardener’s shirt was dark with something wet. I started to see spots around the edges of my eyes, breaking up the room, until I could only see straight ahead. In that small circle of vision, I could see the jagged, broken pointer of the sundial sticking out of the gardener’s chest. I didn’t faint, but fell to my knees beside him.
“Janie!” Benjamin said.
I had learned in First Aid, for junior lifesaving, that you were never supposed to remove an impaled object, because the person might bleed to death, but it seemed unthinkable to leave the horrible thing there, and anyway he was already dead. I reached for the sundial to pull it out, but a hard and callused hand caught my wrist and gripped it.
I screamed.
“Shh,” the gardener whispered, still holding my wrist. His palm felt like it was made of rough bark, as if he had become one of the trees he planted.
