The Apothecary

Chapter 31

The Execution



In the morning, after breakfast, I knocked softly on the door to Shiskin’s cabin. The men were taking turns guarding it with a revolver, and the skinny young crewman, whose name was Niels, was on guard duty. I nodded to him and went inside. Shiskin lay listlessly on his bunk, his hands and leg tied, his head on the pillow. I closed the door behind me.

“Ah, the little girl,” Shiskin said. “Who thinks she is saving the world and instead has ruined my life.”

I tried to ignore that, and tried not to feel hideously guilty. “I wanted to ask you to change your mind and help us,” I said.

“Ha,” Shiskin said bitterly.

“You used to believe in the apothecary,” I said.

“That was before my family was held hostage.”

“The crew is willing to help us.”

Shiskin rolled on the bunk to look at me. “I could lie and say I would,” he said. “But your friends would not believe me. Jin Lo especially knows that every person acts for himself, and his family.”

“The apothecary isn’t acting for himself.”

“Of course he is. For himself and for his dead wife. Every minute of every day is for his dead wife.”

“He’s trying to save humanity.”

Shiskin scoffed. “Humanity is not worth saving.”

There was a pause. Finally I said, softly, “They’re going to kill you. I tried to argue, but they won’t listen. They’re worried about our survival.”

Shiskin sat up as well as he could, bound as he was. “Janie,” he said, alarmed. “Untie my hands. You must let me signal.”

“I can’t!”

“The radio is in my suitcase. Janie, listen. If the Soviet kidnappers think I have helped the apothecary, there is no hope for my wife and daughter. But if they know I have been murdered in their cause, perhaps they will have some pity and free my family.”

I hesitated, so as not to seem too eager. “You swear on Sergei’s life you won’t do anything but signal?”

“I swear on Sergei’s life.”

It was all going perfectly. I untied his hands, and he rubbed his wrists, bringing blood back to them.

Then I turned to pull the little suitcase close to him, as Benjamin had told me to do, but Shiskin had loosened the rope tying his leg to the bunk, and he launched himself at me. I felt one powerful arm tighten around my neck and tried to scream, but Shiskin clamped his free hand over my mouth.

“Tell them to open the door,” he said.

“Mmph!”

“Any tricks and I will kill you, I swear.” He released my mouth.

I didn’t know what to do. “I’m ready to come out,” I called weakly.

Niels opened the door carefully, with the revolver raised, but Shiskin grabbed the barrel and wrested it free. I screamed, and Shiskin crooked his arm around my face, smothering my mouth. He leveled the gun at Niels. “Put your hands on your head,” he said. “And find my leg.”

Niels lifted his skinny arms. “But I don’t know where it is!”

“Find it,” Shiskin said. “Or I kill her.”

“Benjamin!” I shouted, my mouth full of the wool of Shiskin’s jacket. “Jin Lo!”

Shiskin knocked me in the side of the head with the butt of the gun, making my eyes fill with tears, and he tightened his elbow around my face. I had no doubt that he could break my neck if he wanted to. Niels had disappeared into a cabin, looking for the leg, and we were alone in the corridor.

Count Vili came into the saloon and said something calm and placating in Russian, which Shiskin ignored. Vili held up both hands, one empty and one dangling his walking stick, in a gesture of peace or surrender. He looked inconsequential—soft and whimsical, with his expensive clothes and his unnecessary walking stick, facing the hardness and desperation of a man with nothing to lose.

“Comrade,” the count said. “Friend. Please.”

In the meantime, Niels had returned with the prosthetic leg.

“Put it on,” Shiskin said, nodding down towards his left thigh. “And try nothing, or I will kill you.”

The boy’s hands were trembling as he fumbled with the unfamiliar straps, trying to attach the leg.

Benjamin appeared from the wheelhouse and said, “Janie!”

Shiskin still had the revolver pointed at my head, and my mind was strangely detached. I thought what a peculiar way this would be to die, and how it was the last thing I would have expected: to be killed at sea by a one-legged man, while a teenaged boy tried to get the other leg on him. Who would explain it to my parents?

Then something even stranger happened. The sound of the struggle with the straps stopped, and a deep calm came over the corridor. I couldn’t hear Shiskin’s breathing anymore, and everything was still. The ship had stopped rolling, and the birds had stopped crying. It wasn’t that I couldn’t move, exactly—but I wasn’t moving. And my heart wasn’t beating.

Nothing moved except Count Vili, who came at us so quickly he looked like a flash through the air. He had knocked Shiskin’s gun out of his hand with the walking stick before I knew what was happening, and had pulled me free. The gun hung in the air, motionless.

Just as I formed the thought that the count had frozen time, there was a rush of noise in my ears. Everything came unstuck, and Count Vili caught the flying gun, and the momentum of his pulling me away from Shiskin threw me against the wall of the corridor. I put my hands up to stop myself before my face hit.

Shiskin lost his balance without me to hold him up, and fell to the floor. Vili stood over him with the gun—no longer a racing, superhuman blur, but a round Hungarian count in a rumpled three-piece suit.

Benjamin, who had been frozen across the saloon, rushed forward. He threw himself at Shiskin on the ground, gripping his throat with both hands.

“Stop!” Shiskin’s strangled voice said.

“Benjamin!” Vili said.

“I’m all right!” I cried, thinking Benjamin might kill Shiskin with his bare hands. I knew he didn’t want to do that, and would regret it later. “Really, Benjamin, I’m fine!”

“Get—him—off—me!” Shiskin gasped, with what sounded like his last breath.

Vili pulled Benjamin away, and up to his feet, and the young crewman tied Shiskin’s hands with expert sailors’ knots. Benjamin didn’t look at me. I could see a muscle working in his jaw, in anger and maybe in embarrassment.

As they moved Shiskin back into his cabin, I slipped my hand into Benjamin’s. “Thank you,” I whispered.

Shiskin was allowed to signal the Soviets to tell them he had been discovered and was going to be executed. He seemed subdued and resigned to his fate, and I pitied him, even if he had held a gun to my head ten minutes earlier. Vili, who knew Russian Morse code, monitored the transmission.

When Shiskin signed off, Count Vili took off his earphones and switched off the radio. “That was very good,” he said. “Very moving and patriotic. Now you have died a hero, and your family is of no use to the Soviets. With luck, they will set your wife and daughter free. And with more luck, they won’t find us and discover that you’re alive.”

Shiskin blinked. “You’re not going to shoot me?”

“You think we are barbarians?” Vili said. “The children promised your son that they would try to help your family. We are trying to help them keep their word.”

Shiskin looked to Benjamin and me, amazed. Jin Lo took his radio out on deck and we heard a splash as she dumped it overboard.

“We do have to keep you locked up, you understand,” Vili said. “I apologise for that. We can’t have you taking hostages all the time.”

But Shiskin had his face in his hands and didn’t seem to hear the count, so overwhelming and torrential was his relief. He might not think humanity was worth saving, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t happy, himself, to be alive.