The Apothecary

Chapter 20

The Bunker



We ran, invisible, through the streets of London, dodging people in warm hats, scarves, and woollen greatcoats, who couldn’t see us and would have walked right into us. Benjamin was right about the running warming us up: By the time we got to the bunker, I was out of breath, but I wasn’t cold anymore.

Pip’s ear went straight to the lock on the bunker’s door, and his paper clip looked like a tiny worm wiggling in the air as he worked. Benjamin and I kept an eye out for passersby. “Oh, come on, now,” Pip said to the lock. “Right—there it is.” The door swung open, and his ear went inside.

I bumped into Benjamin’s bare shoulder as we tried to go through at the same time.

“Sorry!” we both said.

“Shh!” Pip said.

Inside the door there was a small room with an elevator, but instead of a button to call it, there was a place to insert a key.

“Can you pick that?” Benjamin asked.

“I dunno,” Pip said. “It’s a switch for the lift.”

As he said it, we heard the elevator cables running, and we stepped back. I held my visible pinky behind my back, not sure if that would do any good. Then I pressed it against the wall, so at least it wasn’t floating. The doors opened, and Mr Danby came out with a young man who looked puzzled.

“Stand outside and watch for birds?” the young man asked.

“Three small ones, all together,” Danby said. “One is a red-chested American robin. Captain Harrison thinks he saw a cat attacking them. I don’t understand why he didn’t report it right away.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but—I don’t think I would have reported a thing like that either.”

“That’s why you’re only a lieutenant,” Danby snapped.

I felt Pip’s hand grab mine, and he pulled me around the two men, towards the open elevator door. The three of us tiptoed silently in.

“So, if I see three birds, I call you?” the young man said.

“Try to capture them first,” Danby said.

The lieutenant, who wasn’t in uniform—I guessed because of the bunker’s “secrecy”—went unhappily outside. It was clear that he thought Danby had lost his mind.

Danby turned a key in the switch and got back into the elevator with us, glancing at the upper corners. He was looking for birds, I supposed. The doors closed and we started to sink down under the ground.

Below ground, the elevator opened onto a small room, in which a row of orange hard hats hung over brown canvas overalls on hooks. Heavy boots were tucked neatly under a bench along the wall. Danby went out of the room into a hallway and turned right. We followed him, padding barefoot past framed pictures of Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, and Winston Churchill.

Then, abruptly, Danby stopped and turned around, as if he’d sensed someone behind him. I tucked my visible pinky behind a picture frame and held my breath. He scanned the hallway.

Another man leaned out of a doorway and called, “Danby! If you please.”

“Yes, General,” Danby said, giving the hallway one last searching look.

We followed him into the general’s office, where he sat down. The general had grey hair and an air of authority, but like the others, he wore no military uniform. There was a map of the world on the wall, with thumbtacks stuck in it. There were a few blue tacks in what seemed to be New Mexico, and a few red ones in Russia. There was a blue one stuck in an island in the Pacific, and a white one off the coast of Australia.

“Any luck with the prisoner?” the general asked.

“Not yet, sir,” Danby said. “The muteness should wear off soon.”

“Did you try getting written answers?”

“With no success, sir.”

“I heard you questioning Captain Harrison about birds.”

Danby flushed crimson. “Yes, sir.”

“Something to do with your investigation of the apothecary and his doings?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m sure you have your reasons, Danby, but the men are starting to talk.”

“But they—” Danby began, and then he seemed to think better of it. “Of course, sir.”

“Just so you know. You’re one of our best men, and I don’t want you compromised.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And your East German contact? What does he report?”

“That the apothecary isn’t working for the Soviets, sir. Also that Leonid Shiskin, an accountant at the Soviet embassy, has been serving as a messenger, but seems to be working on his own, out of personal conviction. He isn’t running the network.”

“I see.”

“We know that the Soviets are looking for the apothecary. They expect the conspirators to gather soon, and they believe Leonid Shiskin might lead them to the group. But as it stands, I don’t think the group can proceed without the apothecary.”

“No?”

“No, sir. He’s their—their Oppenheimer, if you will.”

I was pretty sure Oppenheimer was the physicist who’d made the atomic bomb. I tried to look at Benjamin to see what he made of the comparison, and realised that the strangest thing about being invisible wasn’t being naked in a military bunker. It was that we couldn’t make eye contact. There was no way of sharing all the information I had grown used to sharing with him in a glance. I didn’t know where Benjamin’s eyes were, and he couldn’t see mine.

The general raised an eyebrow. “I see.” He looked at his watch. “D’you suppose the silent treatment might be ending yet?”

“I’ll go check, sir,” Danby said, rising. He seemed anxious to be out of the office.

“Danby,” the general said.

“Yes, sir?”

“You’re sure your Kraut is entirely on our side?”

“Yes, sir,” Danby said. “And he’s quite ruthless.”

The general smiled to himself. “Good,” he said. “Wish we could bring him in here to do some interrogating. We could use some of that ruthlessness.”

Danby smiled uncomfortably.

“And do we know who killed the poor old gardener?” the general asked.

“Not yet, sir,” Danby said. “But we’ll find out.” I knew that he knew the Scar had done it, and thought what a very good liar he was. He sounded completely convincing.

“Strange business, that,” the general said. “Well, carry on.”

“Yes, sir.”

We followed Danby out and tiptoed behind him down the hallway. When I think now about how much eavesdropping we did, I realise that being fourteen had prepared us for it. To be a kid is to be invisible and to listen, and to interpret things that aren’t necessarily meant for you to hear—because how else do you find out about the world?

We passed an enormous telephone switchboard, with empty chairs waiting for operators to sit and make connections, and I wondered if the switchboard was meant to run all the calls of London in the case of an atomic bomb—and if there would be anyone left to make calls.

Further down the hall, Danby knocked at a door. A young woman in a neat green dress came out and closed the door behind her. She had wavy light-brown hair cut short around her ears.

“So?” Danby asked her.

“I’m so bored!” the girl complained. “I thought that stuff was meant to wear off. But we’re just sitting there staring at each other.”

“I’d think you’d like that,” Danby said. “You could talk all day, with no one to interrupt you.”

The girl pouted. “It’s no joke,” she said. “I need a coffee.”

“Go on then,” Danby said.

The girl flashed him a grateful smile and darted off down the hall.

Mr Danby went into the room, and we silently followed him in, ready to rescue Benjamin’s father—somehow. I was so busy finding a place to stand where I wouldn’t bump into Danby or anyone else that when I finally looked up at the prisoner, I was shocked.

It wasn’t the apothecary.

The prisoner was a woman, and she looked Chinese. She was young, maybe in her twenties, with her hair in a shiny black braid, and she wore a black shirt and black trousers. I could have sworn that she looked at my visible finger, but only for an instant, and then she fixed her eyes on Mr Danby. She was beautiful, in an austere way, and angry. She sat straight-backed in a chair at a metal table that was bolted to the floor.

Danby took a seat on the table, with one foot on the floor, affecting a casual stance. “Would you like a coffee?” he asked her. “Or tea?”

The prisoner shook her head.

He asked her something in a language I guessed was Chinese, and the woman gave him a look of contempt.

“My Mandarin’s rotten, I know,” Danby said. “But I’m curious—the muteness didn’t last this long on Shiskin. Perhaps it’s because you’re so much smaller?”

The woman shrugged.

“The things you wrote for me, in such elegant Chinese calligraphy, I had them translated,” he said, tapping his knuckles on the table. “Some of the curses were rather primitive—the ones about dogs and pigs, for example—but some were rather good. I liked the one insulting my ancestors to the eighteenth generation.”

The woman glared at him.

He reached forward and put a hand on her pale throat, as if he were a doctor, examining it. “It’s been suggested that I hurt you, to make you talk,” he said. “It isn’t my way, but I’m under a great deal of pressure.” He pressed his finger and thumb into the soft recesses of her neck in a way that seemed both very expert and very painful.

The woman’s eyes watered and she blinked, but she said nothing. I couldn’t believe I had ever found Danby dreamy. Now his handsomeness only made him more horrible.

He dropped his hand. “Amazing how long the pill has lasted,” he said. “But it’s only a matter of time before it wears off. I’ll be back.”

He left the room, and we heard the door lock behind him. The prisoner’s manner immediately changed, and she coughed and put a hand on her throat, then turned to where I was standing.

“Why you here?” she demanded hoarsely.

Pip already had his unfolded paper clip out, and was working on the lock.

“You can talk!” Benjamin said.

“Of course I talk.”

“Do you know my father, Marcus Burrows?”

The woman paused, as if unsure whether to trust us, then nodded. “Where is he?”

“We don’t know,” Benjamin said. “We thought he was in here.”

“You’re the chemist!” I said, remembering Shiskin’s note, and the gardener. I wondered if they had known she was a woman. “You’re Jin Lo!”

“How long have you been able to talk?” Benjamin asked her.

“Whole time. They think I have pill. So I pretend.”

“Can you make yourself invisible?” I asked. It was a long shot, but she was a chemist. It seemed worth asking.

She shook her head, her braid snaking on her shoulder.

“The door’s unlocked,” Pip announced.

Jin Lo frowned. “This is not trap?”

“You think it’s the kind of trap the British military’s likely to lay on?” Benjamin said. “Three invisible kids?”

“We just need some way of hiding you,” I said.

Jin Lo seemed to consider the problem, then untucked her shirt and removed several tiny glass vials from the sewn-up fold of the shirt’s hem, pressing them out of the slot in the fabric one at a time. She chose two, and stuffed the others in her pocket. One of the vials contained something orange, and one was a clear liquid.

“Smoke flare,” she said. “To signal plane. Will fill all of bunker.”

She poured the clear liquid into the orange vial, sealed it with her thumb, and shook it up. When she took her thumb away, a thick orange smoke started to pour out of the vial. In a few seconds it had filled the room. I held my breath so I wouldn’t cough.

“Open door,” she said, and Pip did.

There was no guard in the hall when we looked out— just Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret and Winston Churchill gazing at us from the wall. Jin Lo held up the vial, and the orange smoke filled the hall, obscuring the pictures. I’d never seen so much smoke pour out of such a small container. It surrounded us as we started silently down the corridor.

We were almost to the telephone switchboard, with the smoke billowing out behind us, when Pip whispered, “Look!”

He held out his arm, and I saw him do it, because there was a dusting of orange on his invisible skin. I could see his head, too, as if cast in orange mist. The smoke was clinging to us, and we were becoming visible, as orange ghosts. I looked down at myself and saw my hands and forearms, nearly transparent but outlined in smoke dust. I crossed my orange arms over my naked chest. The dusting had started at the top, where the smoke was thickest. I could see Benjamin’s head and shoulders, too.

“We have to get clothes!” I whispered.

We were outside the general’s office, where we’d heard Danby talking, and I peeked in. No one was inside. A long black wool overcoat was hanging by the door, and I grabbed it and put it on. It was enormous, but I didn’t care.

There were voices back down the hall, beyond the smoke screen.

“Look at this smoke!” the girl who’d gone for a coffee said.

“Is it a fire?” a man’s voice asked.

We ran silently towards the elevators, the smoke billowing behind us. Benjamin grabbed a jacket off one of the switchboard chairs and pulled it on just as his legs became orangely visible.

An alarm rang out, making me jump. There was coughing and shouting in the obscured hall behind us.

We reached the elevator lobby and Pip pressed the call button. It didn’t require a key to go up. I grabbed two khaki overalls and two hard hats off the hooks on the wall. Jin Lo was still waving the vial into the hall, spreading smoke.

“Take this,” I said, handing her one of the overalls. “And put your braid up under the hard hat. Pip, you take the other.”

She started pulling the overalls on over her clothes.

“You look like the invisible man,” Benjamin said to me, looking at my long coat.

“Well, you look like the invisible girl,” I said. The jacket he had stolen was actually a woman’s light blue raincoat, cinched at the waist, with a full skirt.

Pip, still naked and half visible, was busy brushing the orange dust off his skin. “It comes off!” he said. His arm had vanished again. “Brush it off and take those stupid coats off! Quick!”

We scrubbed ourselves clean as quickly as we could— the orange dust came off easily—and handed our clothes to Jin Lo as the elevator opened. She still wielded the smoke-spewing vial in one hand.

I heard a shriek from the female guard down the hall. “The prisoner’s gone!” she cried.

But the elevator doors closed, and we were on our way out.