by Maile Meloy
“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.
CHAPTER 12
The Return to the Garden
The 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 o
n 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.
“You’re alive!” I said.
“You must run,” he said. His voice was faint and hoarse, and his eyes were fixed on me cloudily.
Benjamin had crouched beside me on the floor. “We have to call for help.”
“No,” the gardener said, rousing himself to make the effort. “Can’t . . . trust police.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head.
I thought of the Physic Garden outside, all those medicines, brought back from all over the world. “Isn’t there some herb that can make you better?” I asked. “We can go get it!”
He squeezed my hand, but I could tell he was weakening. “Veritas,” he managed to say. The Smell of Truth. We had come to tell him about it, and to tell him he was in danger— but we were too late.
“We used it!” I said. “And it worked. Could it help you now?”
The gardener shook his head again. “No.” He was having trouble breathing, and his white eyebrows knitted together in an exhausted frown. “Remember,” he said, “you must . . . allow for the possibilities.”
Then his grip on my hand relaxed, and his body grew eerily still.
“Wait!” I said, fumbling under his scratchy beard for a pulse. The skin of his throat was loose and still, and I felt no pulse, only my own heart pounding.
“Is he dead?” Benjamin asked.
“I think so.”
“We have to get out of here.”
“I don’t think I can move.”
“You have to. Whoever killed him might come back.”
He pulled me by the hand, past the waiting table where the gardener would never eat dinner again, and out the open door. We passed the ruined sundial and the Artemisia veritas planted in neat green rows.
“Wait!” I said, tugging Benjamin back. I knew the gardener hadn’t given up his last breath just to ask if the Smell of Truth worked. “He was trying to tell us something about the herbs.”
I knelt by the rows of leafy plants, but saw nothing, so I felt blindly between them and under them, and then my hand touched something smooth and hard. It was a small bottle, hidden under the leaves, with a piece of paper tied around it with string.
“He left us something,” I said.
“Take it,” Benjamin said. “Let’s go!”
I put the bottle in my pocket, and we climbed the fence to the outer garden. The trees seemed to loom and reach for us as we ran towards the outer gate, where we clambered over again.
On the other side, in the street, I got a stitch in my side from running. I slumped down against the stone wall and felt tears welling up. “They killed him because of us,” I said.
“For helping us.”
“Get up,” Benjamin said. “We don’t know that.”
“It’s true! Shiskin’s house was bugged, and I talked about the gardener there. It was so stupid!”
“We have to go.”
“We have to tell the police.”
“We can’t trust them.”
“We have to tell my parents, then.”
“Absolutely not,” Benjamin said. “There was a murder. They’ll have to call the police. And we can’t do that.”
“But maybe we should! A murder. Oh, Benjamin, it’s all my fault!”
“Here,” he said, fishing a handkerchief out of his coat pocket. “Take this.”
The handkerchief was white, perfectly pressed and folded into a square. His father must have ironed it: the kind, methodical apothecary. Benjamin was right that we needed to find him. He’d know what to do.
I wiped my nose and put the handkerchief in my pocket, where I felt the hard glass. “What about the bottle?” I asked.
“First let’s get somewhere safe,” Benjamin said.
CHAPTER 13
The Gardener’s Letter
I wouldn’t, under the circumstances, have described my parents’ flat as safe, but I had to get home. My parents were furious. “So you just waltz in here at ten o’clock at night?” my father demanded.
“Is it ten?” I asked. I would have guessed much later.
“Do you know how terrified we were?” my mother asked.
“I think so.”
“Where were you this late?”
Benjamin and I had agreed, after much debate as we made our way through the streets, not to tell them about the murder. Both the gardener and the apothecary had told us not to trust the police. But my parents could tell I was upset and had been crying, so we had to tell them something.
“It’s a really long story,” I said.
“So start at the beginning,” my father said. “And I want the truth!” He pointed at Benjamin. “Did your mother really die in the war?”
“Yes,” Benjamin said.
“Okay, that sounds true. Let’s go from there. Did your father go visit a sick aunt?”
“No.”
“I knew it! Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then we should call the police,” my mother said.
“No!” Benjamin said. “We can’t trust the police.”
“Have you done something wrong?”
“No,” he said.
“So why can’t you trust them?”
“I just can’t.”
“You don’t trust the federal marshals,” I reminded my father. “And you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“That’s different.”
“How do you know?” My father hated it when people jumped to conclusions about other people’s situations, and I wasn’t going to let him do the same.
He relented. “I don’t,” he said. “So tell me. Where were you?”
“At a friend’s house, working on a science project,” Benjamin said. “We made . . . a bit of a mess, and our friend’s father was angry with us.”
That was pretty much true.
“So you cleaned up the mess, and you didn’t think to call us, and then what?” my father asked.
“That’s it,” Benjamin said. “It took a long time.”
“What’s the name of the friend?”
Benjamin hesitated. “Stephen Smith.”
“You’re lying, Figment,” my father said. “I’ve worked in show business a long time, and I know what lying sounds like.”
“I can’t tell you his name,” Benjamin said, with stubborn dignity. We had pr
omised Mr Shiskin we would leave him and Sergei out of it, and Benjamin wouldn’t budge on that.
“Then I want you out of my house.”
“He doesn’t have anywhere to go!” I said. “Let him stay one more night.”
“If he tells me the truth, I’ll consider it.”
“He can’t! He promised!”
“Promised who?” my father said. “I’m waiting.”
Benjamin was silent, his head stubbornly bent forward.
“Out, Figment,” my father said. “Now. And Janie, you’re going to bed.”
I begged my parents to reconsider, but it did no good, and I got into bed feeling helpless and trapped. The gardener was dead and Benjamin was out in the streets, in mortal danger, and there was nothing I could do. I was writing furiously in my diary about how my parents didn’t—couldn’t—understand anything, when I heard a tap at the window. I slid the window open, and Benjamin climbed in off the ledge, with his satchel slung across his chest, taking off his shoes before his feet silently touched the floor.
“How’d you get up here?” I whispered. I was too amazed to worry about the fact that I was only in my nightgown. Anyway, it was the long flannel hand-me-down nightgown from Olivia Wolff ’s daughter, and it was about as revealing as a nun’s habit.
“I climbed that tree to the window ledge.”
“If my parents catch you—”
“They won’t. I’ll leave early in the morning.”
I tried to think about the options, and the consequences, but I had no argument. He really didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Benjamin set his satchel down carefully and spotted the diary open on my bed. “You keep a diary?”
I closed it and slid it beneath my pillow. “Sometimes.”
“It doesn’t say anything about the Pharmacopoeia or the gardener, does it?”
“No.” That was a partial truth. “Not so anyone else could understand it.”
“It would be bad if someone found it, and could understand.”
“They won’t,” I said. My eyes filled. “Benjamin—the gardener.”
“We have to be strong,” he said. “Don’t cry.”
I brushed away the tears. “Where will you sleep?” My bed was very narrow, and even if it hadn’t been, the question of sharing it was too embarrassing to think about.