The Apothecary Page 0,76

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.

CHAPTER 32

Genii

Dawn broke clear and cold over the North Sea, and the red Anniken plowed steadily north-northeast through the waves. Seagulls flew overhead, calling, and two fought over a fish in midair, wheeling and turning on each other. The light shimmering on the water was so bright, it made me blink.

A man took sun sightings with a sextant at noon to determine our position, and studied charts, trying to keep us from