The Apprentices

by Mailie Meloy

  “What kind of mill?” Benjamin asked.

  “You haven’t worked that out yet?”

  “He’s not as bright as the girl,” Danby said.

  “You’ve seen Janie?” Benjamin asked him. “Is she okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Danby said, glancing at Magnusson. “I haven’t had the privilege.”

  Benjamin didn’t have time to wonder what that meant, because they had entered another clean, concrete-floored room that was nearly filled with neat rows of black steel barrels. A man in a white coat opened one to reveal a grainy yellow powder. There was a smell of sulfuric acid in the air.

  Uranium. That was what Magnusson was mining.

  “It’s been milled,” Magnusson said. “Now the object is for you to make it effective, so it can’t be stopped by you or your friends.”

  Benjamin’s father pushed his spectacles up onto his nose. “You know the story of Rumpelstiltskin?” he asked.

  “The imp in the fairy story?” Danby asked.

  “It begins with a miller. Who claimed that his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king locked the girl in a tower with a pile of straw, but of course she couldn’t do it.”

  Danby smiled. “So you’re the miller’s daughter?”

  “I was able to control the effect of an atomic explosion,” Benjamin’s father said. “It doesn’t follow that I can make your uranium immune to such control. You see the logical error in the assumption? This is not my area of expertise. I can’t do what you want any more than I could spin straw into gold. Or gold into straw.”

  “You’re a man of great ability,” Magnusson said. “If you put your mind to it, you’ll find a solution.”

  “If I remember the story,” Danby said, “the girl promises the imp her firstborn if he’ll help her. Is that right? But this story’s a little different. You sacrifice your firstborn if you don’t do the spinning.” He put his hand on Benjamin’s shoulder, and Benjamin shook it off.

  “You can’t take my son as punishment for something I can’t do,” his father said.

  “Shall we feed him to the sharks?” Danby asked. “Or lock him up and let him starve? Or drop him out of an aeroplane?”

  “You must understand,” Benjamin’s father said. “I don’t know how to do what you want. I’ve never considered it.”

  “Then I suggest you start,” Danby said. “Think of it as an intellectual challenge. And no pretending to spin gold, Burrows—our engineer will test the uranium before we let you have the boy. We’ll leave you to think.” He pushed Benjamin toward the door.

  “I need my son to help me!” his father said. “He’s my apprentice, and he has outstripped me. He has a more inventive mind.”

  Danby and Magnusson looked at each other. Danby shrugged. “No harm in it, I suppose.”

  “You must unbind his hands,” his father said. “And I’ll need supplies. I don’t know yet what they are. Paper and pen, to start. And I need to send a message, by radio or telegram. You may read it if you like. But I must consult with my colleague in Manila if I am to succeed.”

  Danby took a small leather-bound notebook and pen from his shirt pocket, and Benjamin’s father scrawled a message and an address on a page. “We also need privacy, to concentrate,” he said. “And please tell me when the message has been sent.”

  “Try anything funny and we kill the girl,” Danby said. And they left.

  Benjamin rubbed his freed wrists, bringing the blood back to his hands. His fingers throbbed, and his skin itched. “Janie should have escaped by now,” he said.

  “I can’t do this,” his father said. “Not ethically, not practically. I don’t think it can be done. I don’t think it should be done, even if it could.”

  “Good,” Benjamin said.

  “But I have to try,” his father said. “What choice do I have?”

  “Did you send for help in your note?”

  “I asked Vinoray to take your packet of powder and consult the Pharmacopoeia. I swallowed half of what remained before we left Manila, so I might see the book through him if I needed to, in a case like this.”

  The idea was both brilliant and insane. “But you sent Vinoray some kind of coded SOS, too?” Benjamin asked.

  “Your Mr. Danby would see through such a thing.”

  “Why is he my Mr. Danby?”

  “A cry for help would only alarm Vinoray. He would have no way of reaching us in time. I need him to be calm and purposeful, with no agitation of mind.”

  “You might’ve tried to tell him something.”

  “If you’ll be quiet a moment, I need to think.”

  A guard returned and said the message had been sent. Benjamin’s father gave him a list of supplies, and then plunged into the kind of deep contemplation that Benjamin remembered from his childhood. Occasionally he wrote something in Danby’s little notebook.

  Benjamin scratched his wrists and wondered how they were going to get any useful information from the Pharmacopoeia. They couldn’t even tell Vinoray to stop on a particular page. And which page of the ancient book explained how to make an atomic bomb impervious to the antidote that his father and Jin Lo and Count Vili had invented? No page. The whole thing was hopeless.

  Finally, his father said, “The message should have been delivered to Vinoray’s shop by now. So I close my eyes and think about him, yes?”

  “Once you find him, you can move his left hand a little, if he’s right-handed,” Benjamin said. “The less dominant hand is more open to outside control. You might be able to turn pages.”

  “Thank you,” his father said. “I meant what I said about your having the more inventive mind. If you have any other ideas, they would be most welcome.”

  Benjamin watched his father sit down and close his eyes. He wondered what ideas he, Benjamin, could possibly have about their situation. Doing Danby and Magnusson’s bidding went against everything they believed in. Peace was his father’s calling, his vocation. Benjamin should have thrown himself down a mineshaft as they walked through the tunnel. That would have been the brave and noble thing to do. If Benjamin was removed from the situation, then there was no reason for his father to do this terrible thing.

  But then he wouldn’t be able to help his father escape. Or was that a rationalization? Did Benjamin only selfishly want to survive? His father looked vulnerable, sitting with his eyes closed, and Benjamin felt a rush of tenderness for him. He couldn’t leave him alone.

  Finally his father opened his eyes. “I can’t make contact,” he said. “I don’t see anything.”

  Impatience replaced the tenderness, and Benjamin wished he’d been the one to take the powder and try. He was better at it.

  There was another knock at the door, and two guards came in, carrying a card table piled with things the apothecary had asked for. There was a jug of water, a Bunsen burner, the knapsack full of supplies that Benjamin had hidden in the kitchen garden, a cylindrical container of salt, and two cooking pots, one large and one small.

  The two guards stood looking at the list like removal men with the last of the kitchen furniture. They were Americans, a little thuggish, a little simple, probably men with few other options in life. Benjamin looked at the back of the nearest guard’s thick neck and thought about throwing an arm around it, the struggle, the snap of vertebrae, the escape. He had craved a life of adventure when he was back in school, but after two years he knew something about adventure, and also something about what he was capable of. Killing a man with his bare hands wasn’t one of those things.

  The guards left—Benjamin’s chance missed—and his father began arranging the table as a proper workspace. Then he began to work.

  PART SEVEN

  Germination

  1. (of a seed or spore) growth and the putting out of shoots after a period of dormancy

  2. the coming into existence or development of an idea or feeling

  CHAPTER 57

  The Confrontation

  Janie sat up with a start
in the elevator cage, throwing the pillow off her head and struggling out of the confines of the little blanket. She hadn’t been asleep, but she had been startled by a sudden thought, an inspiration that was something like a dream.

  There had been a meaningful look in Osman’s eye when he brought her food, and she had ignored it. The sandwich! He’d kept telling her to eat. She grabbed the sandwich and tore off the waxed paper, looking for a key to the padlock.

  What she found instead was a note. She unfolded it.

  Janie, it said.

  DON’T DRINK from the bottle. Pour it on the lock. And don’t get any on you, it’s nasty stuff. There’s a second exit from the mine, near the sea, that isn’t guarded. It’s our best chance. If you can make your way out, I’ll meet you there.

  Bx

  Benjamin! He was on the island! She looked at the corked bottle. How much time had she wasted? Why hadn’t she even looked at what Osman had brought? She pulled the cork. The liquid smelled sharp and burned her sinuses, and she flinched and blinked. She had a sudden, intense memory of Benjamin pulling away from her on a train, two years earlier, the connection between their two cars corroded. He had left her end of the train behind so she couldn’t follow him. The drugged champagne had already started erasing her memories at that moment, but still the image was burned in her brain. It was the moment she’d lost him.

  But now Benjamin was here! How had he done it? Were the others here? Did Magnusson know?

  She tucked the note into the pocket of her pajamas and poured the liquid carefully over the padlock, her hands shaking. The steel sizzled and smoked so much that she thought someone might hear or smell it. She stopped and listened. There were no footsteps in the tunnel. She poured more of the liquid. When it stopped sizzling, she tapped the crusty metal with the side of the bottle. The lower part of the lock fell away. The curved bar now hung useless and free, and she tapped it out of the metal loop, freeing the hasp that held the door closed.

  She listened again for footsteps, and then pushed open the door of the cage. The rusty hinges creaked. She wished Benjamin had sent more instructions. Where was the other exit? Which direction was the sea? She headed up the tunnel toward the main corridor, and the mine seemed weirdly deserted.

  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 Texa
s,” 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.