The Apothecary

Chapter 11

The Samovar



Benjamin, from his amateur spying, knew exactly where the Shiskins lived, in a flat near the Soviet embassy. The afternoon had grown cold, and we walked in silence, nursing our regrets about the Smell of Truth, scarves wrapped around our faces and hands shoved in our pockets.

The Shiskins’ front door was in a row of narrow brick houses, all attached to each other. There were steps leading up to it. Benjamin said, “So now what?”

“Well,” I said. “We’ll say we’re here to see Sergei. Maybe I have a Latin question.”

“You don’t know enough Latin to have a question!”

“So it’s a social visit. We want to show him this wonderful tea we’ve discovered.”

“As if that doesn’t sound suspicious.”

“You have a better idea, Mr Super-spy?”

“No.”

“All right,” I said, and I strode up the steps and rang the bell, thinking he would rather be with Sarah Pennington anyway, so why was I doing this?

“Janie, wait!” he said.

“Are you coming or not?”

Benjamin looked up and down the empty street, as if someone with a better plan might be coming along, then ran up the steps after me. “This is daft,” he said.

Sergei opened the door. He had changed out of his school uniform, and wore a jumper and grey wool pants, with house slippers. His broad shoulders seemed slightly less rounded and protective of his soft middle than they did at school. He was surprised to see us, and tossed his hair out of his eyes. Loneliness came off him like steam rising, so I tried to summon some confidence that whatever crazy thing I proposed, he would want to join in.

“Hi, Sergei!” I said. “We wondered if you were busy.”

“For what?” he asked.

“We’re thinking of entering the science competition at school,” I said. “But we need a third person on our team.”

“Science competition?” Sergei said. “There is a science competition?”

“We want to do botany as our subject,” I said, willing myself not to blush. “Right now we’re exploring the properties of this one particular herb.”

“A remarkable herb,” Benjamin put in, pronouncing the h, as if to clarify. “May we please come in?”

Sergei stood back from the door, and we walked into a small anteroom hung with coats, with a staircase that led up to a second floor. I wondered if his father was up there, the Soviet agent.

“We have to brew it, like tea,” I said. “Can we use your kitchen?”

“You want the samovar?”

We must have looked at him blankly.

“It’s a Russian teapot.”

“Perfect!” Benjamin said.

I heard uneven footsteps upstairs as Sergei led us into the kitchen. I remembered Mr Shiskin’s wooden leg. So he was home, and we could try the herb on him. The kitchen clearly belonged to two men living alone: It was full of unwashed dishes and smelled of onions.

“My mother is in Russia with my sister,” Sergei said, in apology. “Here is the samovar.”

It was a large silver urn, elaborately decorated in relief with leaves and vines, with a teapot on top. It looked out of place in the shabby kitchen.

“It was my grandmother’s,” he said. “We just had tea, so it’s hot.”

“Terrific,” Benjamin said.

I heard a thump upstairs, and then another, and then the careful sound of Mr Shiskin’s wooden leg coming all the way down the stairs. I tried to act natural, bustling around in the kitchen, but my heart felt like it would leap out of my chest.

Then Mr Shiskin was standing in the kitchen doorway. “What are you doing with the samovar?” he asked. His accent was more Russian than Sergei’s, less British, and he was even bigger up close. His body filled the door frame and his hands looked the size of baseball mitts.

“Making tea, sir,” Benjamin said. “Sorry to intrude.”

“You are Sergei’s friends?”

“Yes,” I said.

He gazed past us to the dirty dishes in the sink. “My wife is in Russia,” he explained. “I am not a good housekeeper.”

“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.