The Apothecary (27 page)
“Is that a real gun?” I asked.
“Flare,” she said. “For signal.” She shook her head as if disappointed with herself. “I
know
there is trouble. I go tell apothecary.” She turned.
“Wait!” I said. “The trouble isn’t us, it’s Shiskin.”
She turned and eyed us, then stayed and closed the door. Benjamin told her in a whisper what we knew about Mr Shiskin: that he was acting as a saboteur, and that the Soviets had kidnapped his family and were forcing him to disable the boat in Russian waters so that they could quietly capture the apothecary without attracting attention. And that we had promised Sergei we would try not to get his family killed.
Jin Lo listened carefully, then said, “We throw him into sea.” And she vanished out the cabin door.
“No, wait!” Benjamin said.
We scrambled out of the luggage bunk, over trunks and bags, but Jin Lo was already in Mr Shiskin’s cabin and had dragged him out of bed by the time we got there. He had taken off his wooden leg for the night, which gave her an advantage, but still I was amazed at how strong she was. She twisted his arm behind his back in a way that looked painful, and he struggled to stay upright on one leg. She still had the flare gun, and she held it to his head.
“You
bú yàolian
,” she said. “I not know how say this in English. You have no shame.”
“Shame?”
he said, incredulous. “I risked my life for you and you were
careless
. You were discovered.” He couldn’t see Jin Lo, who was twisting his arm behind his back, so he glared fiercely at Benjamin and me. “And my family will not be punished for it.
I
will not be punished.”
“And
I
will not go to Russian prison,” Jin Lo said.
“Then you shouldn’t be interfering with their nuclear program,” Shiskin said. “If I don’t send a radio signal every six hours, they will know I am captured.”
“You think I am fool?” Jin Lo said, tightening the twist of his arm. “I know you signal them to come.”
Shiskin winced. “They’ll come, whatever you do.”
The two of them stood welded together, caught in a stalemate of contempt and fury. “Find rope,” she finally said to us. “We tie him.”
Shiskin tried to struggle away, and Jin Lo looked ready to pull his arm out of the socket. Benjamin and I found a long cord in the luggage cabin, and Jin Lo trussed Shiskin up with the speed of a calf-roping champion, leaving him immobilised and attached to his bunk. On her way out of the cabin, she picked up his wooden leg. Then she closed the door on him and marched us down the hall to the apothecary’s cabin.
The apothecary opened the door sleepily, wrapped in a dressing gown. His eyes looked naked without his spectacles, but then they grew wide. “Benjamin!” he said.
We sat on the spare bunk and told him about Shiskin.
Benjamin’s father listened and shook his head. “You should have told me before.”
“Then you wouldn’t have let Shiskin aboard,” Benjamin said. “And they would have killed his family.”
“We could have abandoned the mission.”
“It’s what you’ve been working for all these years,” Benjamin said. “I want to help you.”
We all sat in silence, listening to the rumble of the engines. The apothecary’s spirits seemed very low. “We have to tell Captain Norberg,” he said.
W
e woke Captain Norberg, who was sleeping in his clothes and came instantly awake on seeing two stowaways on his boat. The apothecary apologised for our presence, and told him that Shiskin had been assigned by the Soviets to disable the
Kong Olav
.
The captain rubbed a hand over his yellow hair and considered the news. “I suppose you could take it as a compliment,” he told the apothecary. “They must be afraid of you. They could have arrested us in Russian waters without sending a saboteur.”
The apothecary shook his head. “They’ve overestimated my powers. I’m no match for the Soviet Navy.”
Captain Norberg studied Benjamin and me. “In all my years at sea, I’ve never had a stowaway bigger than a cat.”
“We’re sorry, sir,” Benjamin said.
The captain sighed. “I can’t lead my men into an ambush without telling them what to expect,” he said. “I’ll wake the ones who aren’t on watch and assemble them on the bridge, and you can tell them where we stand.” He put on his coat and hat and went forward to the crew quarters.
The apothecary stood in the middle of the corridor and stared morosely at the floor. “We should abandon the plan,” he said.
“No,” Jin Lo said. “We have come so far.”
He shook his head.
Benjamin and I left them there and went to wake Count Vili. We explained the situation while he pulled a burgundy silk dressing gown over striped pyjamas and knuckled sleep out of his eyes.
“Shiskin? I trusted that man!”
“They kidnapped his family,” I said.
The count yawned. “That’s why it’s best to be free of attachments. Much safer that way. How did you get aboard?”
“Invisibility,” Benjamin said.
“Ah,” the count said. “You’re hardier than I thought, running around naked in this weather. You’ll do well on that freezing rock of Nova Zembla—if we ever get to Nova Zembla.”
“Does anyone live there?” I asked.
“Samoyeds,” the count said. “They were reindeer breeders on the mainland, the best in the world, until the Soviets moved them to Nova Zembla and forced them to work on collective farms. The people rose up, so the Russians shot them down from aeroplanes. Charming, no?”
“How can the Soviets test a bomb where people live?”
The count shrugged. “You Americans have done it, too. And if the Soviets were willing to shoot unarmed citizens from aeroplanes, perhaps they don’t care if the rest are poisoned by radiation. Do you suppose it’s cold on the bridge? What an ungodly hour for a meeting.”
“
You
should talk to the crew,” I said. “You could be convincing and inspiring. The apothecary seems . . . discouraged.”
“Oh, he’ll be fine,” the count said, pulling his fur-lined trench coat over the dressing gown and taking up his black walking stick.
But I wasn’t sure. The crew crowded into the wheelhouse in varying degrees of sleepiness and disarray. A piratical sailor with silver hoop earrings in both ears had the wheel. There was also a skinny boy who looked about seventeen, the sun-bleached Ludvik, a man with a nose like a lump of dough, and the old cook, who looked ready to retire. They all looked as if they had better things to do than spend the rest of their lives in a Siberian prison.
The apothecary, standing in front of them, polished his spectacles anxiously with his sleeve. The count found a spot inside the wheelhouse, but Benjamin and I had to stand in the galley with Jin Lo, the men’s backs partly blocking our view of the apothecary. I wished we had coached him, wished we could have given him some of the fervour Benjamin had against the lunch lady.
He put on his spectacles again. “As you know,” he began, but the engines and the wind drowned him out.
“Speak loud,” Jin Lo said.
The apothecary coughed. “As you know,” he said more loudly, “our plan is to contain an atomic bomb being tested on Nova Zembla, and to counteract its destructive effects. That is the task we have been working towards for many years, and I am confident that we have the correct approach.”
The men waited. They knew this part, and he sounded like a boring teacher. I wished he would use fewer long words. He was going to lose them. “But now it seems that our friend Leonid Shiskin has been sent by the Soviet authorities to stop us. He is restrained in his cabin at the moment, but we are exposed. The Soviets know we are coming.”
The men looked at one another in silence.
“I know that many of you have children in Norway,” the apothecary went on. “I realise that the danger of the trip is now heightened to the point of impossibility, and I can’t ask any man to risk his life for me. My best advice to you is to take us back to England, and go home to your families.”
I winced. It was one thing to lose the men’s faith, but another to
try
to send them home. He was supposed to talk about the radiation, the fish, the reindeer, the Samoyeds, the children!
“Actually, that’s my request to you,” he said. “That we go home. It’s the only rational thing to do.”
A clear, loud voice came from beside me. “This
not
our request,” Jin Lo said. She was standing very straight. “Not mine.”
“It isn’t mine either,” Count Vili said, his fur collar up, leaning on his walking stick just inside the door.
The apothecary looked surprised by the objections. I wondered if he had worked alone for so long, getting only letters from disembodied scientists, that he’d forgotten he had colleagues and friends. “Well,” he stammered. “I suppose—I suppose we could go on. That is what I intended to ask you to do, in the first place. But the immensity of what we are facing . . .” He trailed off and I realised he had caught sight of Benjamin, standing behind the men. He hesitated, and his eyes softened, and something seemed to shift in him.
When the apothecary began speaking again, his voice had become oddly strong and thrilling. “You have children,” he said. “And you want to be able to protect them. I want you to be able to go home and protect them. But I believe what my colleagues are saying is this—that we should not stop at our desire to protect our own children in their immediate world. We want the streets they walk to be safe, and the walls around them to be sound, and we want to be able to put food in their bellies. These are natural desires.” He paused.
“But if we truly want them to be safe and well, we must make the greater world a different place. As it stands, we are all threatened, at every moment, and nothing we do to lock our own doors and earn our pay and tuck our children in bed will make the slightest difference. I believe we can achieve a safer world, on this voyage, if we succeed. But I can’t guarantee success. The Soviet Navy, as I have said, is waiting for the
Kong Olav
. They have our description and will be very difficult to elude. So I leave you all to make your choice.”
No one spoke, and we kept moving north towards the waiting Soviet ships. Suddenly, I heard my own small voice in that crowded wheelhouse of grown men. “Could we make the boat invisible?” I asked. The men turned to see where the voice had come from, and I felt myself blush.
The apothecary shook his head. “It’s too big, I’m afraid.”
The sailor at the wheel with the earrings said, “We could disguise her.”
“I’m sorry?” the apothecary said, blinking behind his spectacles.
“The boat,” the skinny young crewman said, understanding. “We could disguise the boat, like pirates and warships used to.”
“That would be difficult,” the apothecary said.
“Not so difficult,” Jin Lo said.
“It can’t hurt to try,” said the captain.
“We need paint,” Jin Lo said. “Not blue, not white.”
The crew sprang into action, opening the storage bins on deck. They produced two cans of red paint from beneath piles of rope, plus several paintbrushes.
“Not those,” Jin Lo said, dismissing the paintbrushes. “Too slow.” She took the paint cans to the little galley, where she chose the largest cooking pot and dumped the paint into it.
“But I make the oatmeal in that pot!” the cook complained.
“Your oatmeal already tastes like glue,” Ludvik said. “So what if it tastes like paint?”
There was a strange air on board of anticipation and growing willingness. The apothecary brought his black leather bag from the cabin and joined Jin Lo, who took a bottle of grey powder from him and tapped some into the pot.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Is like magnet,” she said. “But not magnet.”
She stirred the pot, smelled it, and added something else from the apothecary’s bag. The paint seemed to move almost restlessly in the pot. She let it run in ribbons off a wooden spoon to test the consistency. The red liquid was a little less bright now, and a little runnier. “It’s good,” she said.
The apothecary helped her decant the heavy pot back into the paint cans. The boat was still moving north into the wind through the dark night, and Jin Lo asked the captain to bring it nearly to a stop. He nodded to the man with the earrings and the boat slowed. Then she carried her can of paint forward to the bow and leaned over the starboard rail. She waited for the men to gather around her—she had a sense of occasion, and knew her audience—and then she carefully tilted the paint over the lip of the steel hull. The red colour didn’t drip or run down, but spread so rapidly and evenly over the vertical side of the boat that it looked like water spreading over a flat floor. It continued, as far as I could tell, beneath the surface of the waves, unaffected by the water.
The men watched, mesmerised. They’d spent
years
of their lives scraping and painting boats, but this paint moved on its own, as if drawn to any surface. “Can you teach us to do that?” Ludvik asked.
“After Nova Zembla,” Jin Lo said. “
Then
I teach you.”
She took the second can to the port side to run the paint down over the hull, watching it spread and wrap itself around the hull, then studied her work. She found that she had missed a spot, and poured a little more until she was satisfied. At the stern, she poured the last of the paint, and the boat was entirely red. The words
KONG OLAV
were gone.