The Apprentices (32 page)

Then she heard voices, and she scrambled to hide herself behind a cart. She couldn’t see who was coming, but she could hear them. One of the voices was Magnusson’s. “It’s very frustrating, to own a remarkable thing and not be able to show it off,” he was saying, just as he’d said to her.

“I love what you’ve done with it.” That was Danby’s ironic drawl.

A third voice asked, “Where’s Janie?”

She froze in her hiding place, heart pounding in her ears. It was Benjamin.

“Oh, she’s stowed safely away,” Magnusson said. “I’ll see she’s all right once I get you settled.”

She crept silently forward to peer around the corner and watch them draw away. It really was Benjamin. He was taller now, and broader-shouldered, but that was his sandy hair. His hands were tied behind his back. She was sure the other man was his father, flanked by two guards.

Janie tried to think. Magnusson didn’t know she had escaped, and he was coming to check on her. If he discovered the empty cage, he would raise an alarm and they would find her. She needed Magnusson to remain complacent and unworried. Especially now that they had Benjamin. She had to find a way to set Benjamin free.

As much as she hated the idea, she needed to get back in that cage.

She crept back down the tunnel toward her detested prison. Her foot dislodged a rock, but no one came running. Finally she was at the cage and let herself in, the rusty hinges creaking horribly.

She looked for the padlock, and found the curved bar on the ground, and the heavy casing for the lock itself. But how to reassemble it convincingly? She closed the hasp and put the curved bit through the loop, but the casing would never stay in place. She took her ponytail down and wrapped the elastic around both parts of the lock. It wouldn’t quite hang straight. She would have to keep Magnusson from looking at it too closely.

After a few minutes, she heard his booming voice again, coming closer. He was in a good mood, laughing, and she heard the word
Rumpelstiltskin
. She moved away from the lock and told herself not to look at it and draw attention.

“Janie, my dear!” Magnusson cried. “I’ve brought your old friend Danby. He’s been itching to talk to you.”

“Let me out,” Janie said, gripping the bars. “I’m not your
dear.
”

“You see what a spitfire she is?” Magnusson asked.

Danby was studying Janie with interest. “You’ve grown up,” he said.

“What did you expect? That I’d shrink?”

He smiled. He looked older, too. The shock of white hair was unsettling. “I asked once if you were a Daisy Miller or an Isabel Archer, as an American girl abroad,” he said. “I’ve been through those conversations in my head many times,
you know. You said you hadn’t read the books. I suppose you have now?”

“Yes,” Janie said.

“So you know that one heroine ends up trapped, and one ends up dead. That wasn’t what I was thinking at the time. It was a purely ingenuous question then, when you were simply a new girl at school. But it’s surprising how
apt
it is now.”

“Why do you want an atomic bomb that can’t be stopped?” Janie asked.

Danby laughed. “What a ridiculous question, Miss Scott. That’s the whole
point
of an atomic bomb. If people aren’t frightened of them, we can’t have peace.”

“Is it for the Russians?”

“No,” Danby said. “My love for them has waned.” He turned his hand over to consider his fingernails, as if looking for dirt beneath them, and Janie saw with horror that the fingernails were gone. The skin was healed over, but all of the nails had been pulled out. “My Soviet comrades didn’t treat me particularly well, after your little escapade in Nova Zembla,” he said. “But perhaps all youthful infatuations fade. Yours has faded for Master Burrows, I understand. I hear rumors of a handsome young waiter back in America, with dreams of the stage.”

Janie blushed.

“So the rumors are true!” he said. “You always did turn a fetching shade of pink, Miss Scott. I’m happy to see you haven’t grown out of
that.
”

She wouldn’t let him confuse her. “Is the uranium for the Americans?”

“Never. How vulgar.”

“Who, then? For China?”

“I could never love Chairman Mao,” he said. “And China is too large to need help from someone like me.”

A woman’s voice came from the end of the tunnel. “I know who it’s for.”

They all turned and saw Sylvia making her way toward them in a pencil skirt and high heels, aiming a pistol with a long, fat barrel at Danby. Janie was grateful to see the gun, but impatient with the outfit. Sylvia had a
purse,
of all things, slung over her shoulder. And did the woman own a single pair of flat shoes?

“Move away from her,” Sylvia said.

The men both stared, as at an apparition, and didn’t move.

“I love you, Magnus, I really do,” Sylvia said. “But if you don’t move now, I will shoot you both. I promise.”

Magnusson and Danby backed slowly away from the cage. “Sylvia,” Magnusson said. “Be reasonable.”

“I kept trying to put it all together,” she said. “And finally I did. Danby is buying the uranium for Kim Il-sung, in North Korea. I can put up with a lot. I
have
put up with a lot. But not with that. Not with helping the country that killed my brother build an unstoppable bomb.”

She reached with one hand into her purse, producing a pair of handcuffs, which she tossed to Danby. Startled, he caught them.

“Put those on,” she said.

“No.”

Sylvia shot at the ground half an inch from Danby’s foot, and he leaped away. The gun made a strange, muffled sound, and Janie realized that the long barrel was a silencer. “I grew up in Texas,” Sylvia said. “I’m a very good shot. Put them on.”

Danby did as she said. She tossed a second pair of handcuffs to Magnusson, who put them on also.

“Now move away from the cage. Over there.” She handed a key through the bars to Janie.

“I don’t need the key,” Janie said, taking the elastic off the ruined lock. She opened the door and stepped into the protected space behind Sylvia.

Magnusson looked surprised.

“I told you not to underestimate the girl,” Danby said.

“You two, inside,” Sylvia said.

Magnusson lunged toward Sylvia, reaching for her with cuffed hands, and she shot him in the heart. Again, the odd, stifled sound from the gun. He crumpled to the ground: the great bulk of his body laid out, the ruddy face astonished, the blue eyes looking up at his mistress. “Sylvia,” he moaned, blood beginning to pool.

Tears sprang to Sylvia’s eyes. “In the cage, Danby.”

Danby obeyed. Sylvia produced a new padlock from her handbag and handed the lock to Janie, who mentally apologized for thinking the purse ridiculous. It was a
very
useful purse. As she locked the cage, Danby grabbed her wrist, handcuffs clanking on the bars. “This isn’t over, Miss Scott,” he hissed. “I
promise.
”

“Let her go,” Sylvia said, and he did.

“I told Magnusson not to trust you,” Danby said.

“Well, he did anyway,” Sylvia said, her eyes still bright and wet. “Love is blind. I ought to know. Empty your pockets.”

Danby didn’t move.

“Empty your pockets and throw everything out, or I’ll shoot you like I shot him,” she said. “I’m not a sentimental girl. Maybe you’ve noticed.”

Danby turned his pockets inside out, revealing a money clip and a gold pen. He threw them out of the cage, at Sylvia’s feet. She swept them up with one hand and tucked them into her handbag.

“Now, where are the boy and his father?” she asked.

“In the mill,” Danby said.

Sylvia started back toward the main corridor, negotiating the rough ground in her high heels.

Janie looked at Magnusson lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Opal had never been able to please him, and now she would never have a chance. Janie crouched beside him. “Opal was really smart,” she said. “You just made her think she wasn’t.” But Magnusson didn’t seem to be breathing now, and she didn’t think he could hear her.

“Janie,” Danby said.

She looked up. His hands clutched the bars of the cage.

“In Siberia,” he said, “there is a tribe of people whose word for the future means ‘to go back.’ Their word for the past means ‘to go forward.’”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Janie said.

“It does, because you can’t see the future coming,” he said.
“All you can see is the past. We stare at the past, we analyze it, we replay it, while the future sneaks up behind us, unseen.”

“Okay,” Janie said.

“I’m trying to make a better future for all of us, Janie. You have to believe me.”

Janie looked at him, mesmerized by the thought of moving blindly backward into the future, and then she shook her head to clear it. She shouldn’t be listening to Danby. He was slippery, and might talk his way out of the cage. She turned to run after Sylvia.

“Janie!” Danby called, but she didn’t look back.

As they approached the mill, Janie saw billowing dark smoke coming out of an industrial-looking steel door. Two uniformed guards stumbled out, coughing and squinting, and ran toward the elevator.

Sylvia handed Janie her silk scarf. “Tie this over your mouth and nose,” she said. “And stay low.”

They crawled through the open door onto a clean concrete floor, the air heavy with acrid smoke. A man in a white coat lay dead or unconscious. The smoke was coming from beneath a second door. When Sylvia reached to open it, Benjamin tumbled through from the other side, dragging his father’s body.

Janie felt her heart skip at the sight of Benjamin. He looked anguished. “Help me!” he said. “We need someplace he can breathe!”

Janie helped him carry his father out into the mine, but the body was lifeless and heavy. They struggled past the
tunnel that led to Danby’s cage, and two of the Malay miners emerged. One had bony cheekbones, but the other’s face was soft. They must have seen Magnusson dead and Danby caged, so they would know that everything had changed.

“Please help us,” Janie begged. Her arms ached and the smoke stung her throat.

The miners glanced at each other, then took up the burden, one lifting the apothecary’s shoulders and the other his feet. They were strong, and carried the unconscious body toward the elevator as if it weighed nothing.

Janie and Benjamin followed, and she reached for his hand, which was sweating in the underground heat. She hoped it wasn’t too late.

T
he Hungarian had appeared in the Manila apothecary shop unannounced, and Vinoray feared that he was there to steal the Pharmacopoeia. Guarding the ancient book had made him anxious, and kept him from sleeping. He wished Marcus Burrows and his son would come back.

The Hungarian, in an expensive linen suit, asked a lot of questions and swung his blackthorn walking stick within inches of the rows of glass bottles, making Vinoray wince. But finally he got to the point. “Where are Burrows and the boy?” he asked.

“I have no idea what you mean,” Vinoray said.

The Hungarian put a telegram on the counter. It asked the recipient to come to Vinoray’s shop, and was signed Alistiar Beane. “It’s from Burrows,” the Hungarian said. “I had a hell of a time getting here. So let’s not play this game.”

“You are a true colleague of Marcus Burrows?” Vinoray asked.

“True as true.”

“Then do something.”

The Hungarian raised his eyebrows. “A party trick?”

“A demonstration,” Vinoray said. “So I know you are no impostor.”

The Hungarian frowned, then struck the tip of his blackthorn walking stick twice against the floor. Vinoray’s open account book riffled its pages in an arc, and then the heavy leather cover closed. The book slid, untouched, across the glass counter.

Vinoray watched, amazed. He couldn’t do that. “Come upstairs,” he said.

* * *

They went through the things Marcus Burrows and Jin Lo had left behind, including a map tucked inside a book about the anthropology of the Pacific Islands. The count—for the Hungarian was Count Vilmos Hadik de Galántha, of whom Vinoray had heard many stories—unfolded the map and studied the pinpricks in it. “There must be a way to determine which pin was put in the map
last,
” he said. “Which molecules of the paper were disturbed most recently. That might tell us where they are.”

“Perhaps,” Vinoray said.

The count picked up the book about the islands and let it fall open where it would, to a photograph of a man in a loincloth. He peered at the photo. “Now, that might be the last page that was held open, or it might just be someone’s favorite page,” he said.

The bell rang downstairs. Vinoray excused himself and received a telegram from a messenger boy. He took it back upstairs to show to the count.

The Hungarian glanced at the telegram and then ran down after the boy. He was very spry for such an ample man.

Vinoray, meanwhile, took the Pharmacopoeia from the wall safe behind the photograph of his mother and laid the book open on the table. He emptied the little glassine packet of powder into a glass of water, as instructed. There was not much powder left, but Vinoray hoped it was enough. He drank the solution down, sat before the book, and waited.

Nothing happened.

The count returned, pink from running up the stairs, and unfolded the map again. “The telegram from Burrows originated here, in Malaya,” he said, pointing. He noticed the Pharmacopoeia, the glassine packet, the water glass. “What are we doing?”

“It’s a sort of telepathy,” Vinoray said, keeping his eyes on the book. “The boy designed it.”

“Benjamin?”

“He wished to see the girl in America.”

“I see,” the count said.
“Mater artium necessitas.”

“Marcus Burrows now wishes to use it to read the Pharmacopoeia, through me,” Vinoray said, turning a page of the book.

“How do you know you’re on the right page?”

Vinoray had wondered the same thing. “I don’t. It’s an incomplete science. One can only see and hear in one direction.”

“I see.”

They waited. Nothing. No buzz of connection, but Vinoray had been warned that he might feel nothing.