The Apprentices (13 page)

Then a deep darkness descended on his closed eyes, and his vision brightened again, and he saw an office. It was a modern office, with a smooth, wide, pale desk and huge windows. A blond woman in a tight skirt and a green blouse stood in the middle of the room. Close up, a big, freckled hand held a fat cigar. It was the hand of a man. Benjamin nearly opened his eyes in confusion, but the woman was speaking.

“Will your wife approve?” she asked.

“She won’t say so if she doesn’t,” the man said. “She’s not like you, full of opinions and contrariness.”

Benjamin looked for clues about where he was. On a cigar
box on the desk was a slim dagger with a wavy blade and a carved wooden hilt. It was a keris, a ceremonial knife from the Malay peninsula. Count Vili had showed him one in a market stall once and told him they were heirlooms, presented on important occasions, and that the Malays used to put arsenic on the blade so that their victims would die a slow death, poisoned from within. This one was small and delicately carved.

“
That’s
why you need me,” the woman said. “Remember, it’s her island.”

“But it’s my mine,” the man’s voice said. “I like the way that sounds.
My mine.
All mine. Come sit on my lap.”

The blonde was starting to fade. Benjamin was losing the connection. But why so soon? He’d just gotten here.

“Tell me your plan first,” the woman said.

“Oh, don’t be difficult. I want it to be a surprise.”

But then the woman was gone, and Benjamin saw a dark theater. He wasn’t with the big cigar-smoking man anymore, but it also didn’t seem like the connection had ended. There was no vertigo, no nausea. He was looking at an empty stage.

He heard the squeak of the folding seat, and there was a blur, and then Benjamin was looking up into the adoring eyes of that kid with the curly hair. Janie was talking to him, but rage and panic flooded Benjamin, distracting him from what she was saying. He tried to figure out how to get her out of the situation. If he spoke, she wouldn’t hear him, and he couldn’t control her legs. He’d barely been able to move her finger half an inch the night before, with great effort. He watched helplessly as the boy moved closer, and then disappeared.

The boy was kissing Janie.

“No!” Benjamin said, but they couldn’t hear him.

Then the boy pulled back, looking—concerned? Or maybe just looking for encouragement. Janie didn’t run away. The boy leaned in, kissing her again, and
she was letting him.

Benjamin poured everything in his being—all his stubborn, formidable will—into Janie’s left hand. He urged it to rise, bringing his own hand up. Then he shoved it into the boy’s chest. It wasn’t as hard a blow as he wanted, but it was a pretty definite push. The boy stepped backward in surprise.

“I’m sorry!” Janie said.

“Don’t apologize!”
Benjamin shouted helplessly, unheard.

Janie seemed confused. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I can’t—I don’t…I have to go.”

Everything blurred as Janie ran past the boy and out into a bright hallway full of students. She forded the flow of distorted, hazy bodies and then she was in a bathroom over a sink, splashing her flushed face. She looked up at the mirror. “Janie, what are you
doing
?” she asked.

It was Benjamin’s question exactly. The vision faded, and he was back in the jungle. The light was gone from the sky. Benjamin waited for the vertigo to pass, then went to find his father, who was working by the light of a small lantern.

“Let’s keep moving,” Benjamin said. “I have to get to Hanoi
now.
”

His father glanced up, confused. “Why?”

“I need to send a telegram.”

I
n a newly built council house in the East End of London, the doorbell rang. The walls were thin, like those of all the houses that had gone up in a hurry to replace the city’s bombed-out buildings. But there was new furniture, paid for by Pip’s television salary. He was the lord of his household at sixteen, and had become insufferable.

“The
door
!” he called, although he was sitting in a chair right next to it, practicing a card trick that involved keeping one card pinned between his fingers on the back of his hand.

The bell rang again, and Pip’s little sister, Tildie, scampered out of her room. She revered Pip, and was the only member of his family who wasn’t mightily sick of his airs. She flung open the door to a boy about Pip’s age on the stoop. He presented an envelope to her with an official flourish.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a telegram,” the boy said, as if that was obvious. Then he whispered,
“From Indochina,”
as if it was a secret.

“A telegram!” Tildie said.

“Yup.”

“Pip, it’s for you! From Indoor China!”

The delivery boy leaned forward to catch a glimpse of the television star. The boy was small for his age, and wide-eyed like Pip. The only difference between them was that one boy had lucked into a job on the telly, and the other was delivering messages.

Pip stood, swiping the telegram from Tildie. “What are you staring at?” he demanded of the boy.

“Just makin’ sure it’s delivered.”

“Well, it is.”

“I’ave a sister, too,” the boy said. “We don’t’ave a telly, but we watch you at the—”

Pip didn’t learn where the boy and his sister watched
Robin Hood,
because he had slammed the door in the boy’s face. It was not a satisfying slam, the door being so light and flimsy. Their old place might have been a dark and filthy tenement building, but at least it had solid wooden Victorian doors that banged after a good swing. The sound took the edge off your anger. A slam here barely overcame its own wind resistance, and left Pip feeling as hollow as the door. He could hear, with perfect clarity, the boy’s vivid curse from the other side.

Pip threw himself back in the deep chair, swung his legs up onto the arm of it, and tore open the envelope.

“Wot’s in it?” Tildie asked.

“
What
is in it,” Pip said. He had been studying the way the other actors talked, and had started lecturing his little sister on her pronunciation. Just sitting round the house, he spoke like he was reading the news on the wireless.

Tildie stamped her foot. “That’s wot I
said
!”

Pip sighed and pulled out the telegram. It had come by means of electrical dots and dashes under the sea. That was really something, when you thought about it. The telegram said:

Pip dropped his feet to the floor and read the telegram again. What kind of danger was Janie in? It had to be important. Benjamin hadn’t written in all this time. And Pip owed Benjamin and Janie. Meeting them in a juvenile lockup had gotten him his television job, which had gotten him everything: the new house for his family, the new life as a celebrity, even the beautiful Sarah Pennington on his arm—for a while.

The thought of Sarah Pennington gave Pip a pang. She had dropped him on some flimsy excuse, saying he had
changed.
Well, of course he had changed! That was the whole point! Who wanted to be a cockney pickpocket forever? And how
could
he be a cockney pickpocket, when his true love was Sarah Pennington, whose father was going to be an earl, if a third cousin ever died? Pip didn’t know how healthy the third cousin might be. But the point was that Pip had changed for
Sarah,
and she had thrown him over. It was heart-stabbingly unfair.

But back to Benjamin’s telegram. Pip’s mind got off track easily these days, circling back to the pain Sarah had caused him, finding ingenious routes to get there. He had left St. Beden’s so that he wouldn’t come round the corner to find that dazzling crown of blond hair in front of him, those blue eyes assessing him coldly. But he couldn’t stop his brain from poking at the memory of her like a bruise. He tortured himself with thoughts of where she might be now. Was she with someone else?

Sometimes he had found himself wishing for more of the apothecary’s forgetting wine, to erase all trace of her. He wished he had kept the dregs of the bottle. He had been furious at the apothecary at the time, for stealing his memories, but it would be so sweet to drink the wine now and feel these painful thoughts melt away.

But the telegram. Janie needed him. Could he go to America?
Robin Hood
wouldn’t start again for another month. He wasn’t in school. But to get to America cost a packet, and his salary only went so far, with a whole family living on it.

He had a sudden sharp awareness, a sort of extra sense that he’d had in his pickpocketing days. The sense had grown fuzzy from disuse, but it told him now to go to the front door.

He pulled on the cheap doorknob and immediately ducked the thing that flew at his head. A mud clod burst open on the clean, new wall behind him with a spray of dirt and pebbles. The delivery boy was crouched and scowling by the gate, ready to fling another.

“Listen,” Pip said. “I’m sorry about before. I was in a bit of a mood, that’s all. If you take a message back, there’s an autographed picture for your sister in it.”

The wary boy considered the offer.

Pip held out his hand. “C’mon,” he said. “Friends?”

J
anie stood in the steam at the sink at Bruno’s restaurant, grateful for the absorbing task of the dishes. After spying on Magnusson, she had taken the powder at midnight to try to reach Benjamin, but it only made her throw up. The noise woke Giovanna, who made her lie down with a wet washcloth on her head. The next morning she had finally written to her parents, a complicated letter full of bland statements that were true, and omissions of everything else:
The weather is freezing. The Grayson basketball team seems good this year. The Winter Wonderland dance is coming up.
She had also spent two days making sure she was never alone with Raffaello, who looked increasingly hurt. But she hadn’t sorted anything out in her mind yet. She liked Raffaello, and she needed him. Both her liking and her need were very clear to her. He was her only friend in a place where people were against her, and he was the only reason she had a roof over her head.

She also liked and needed Benjamin. Her idea of herself for the past year had been of someone who was in love with a
boy named Benjamin Burrows. She missed him. She longed for him.

But if questioned under oath, by some hard-nosed prosecutor in her brain, she would have to admit that Benjamin Burrows was a boy she had known for three weeks, two years earlier, when she was fourteen. Three weeks! After that, she’d spent almost a year not knowing that he existed. And she hadn’t seen him since. The sensible sixteen-year-old she had become couldn’t call that “being in love.” And the hard-nosed prosecutor in her brain would point out that the last time she’d seen him, he had drugged and abandoned her, destroying the links between two train cars to leave her behind.

And now she had the very vivid memory of Raffaello kissing her in the darkened auditorium. She had known Raffaello liked her. She wasn’t stupid. But she’d thought he liked her as the household’s new pet. Amusing and diverting, but not someone to kiss.

So she had pushed him away. She had done it instinctively, without thought—which must indicate something about how she felt about him. Right? It seemed an exhausting way to discover what you felt, to have to wait and see what you
did
about it. But it also seemed like a true measurement. In the actual moment, she had pushed him away. That was undeniable. But if she was honest with herself, she also remembered liking the kiss. A lot.

She blushed as she scrubbed out a pot. The noise of the kitchen went on around her, and she hoped no one could see
her turning red. But maybe they would think it was just the steam and the hot water, the exertion of scrubbing.

Then, oddly, the noise subsided. The kitchen, which was never quiet, grew so silent that she heard a single clang of a pot on the stove, and then nothing. She turned, hands dripping, and saw Mr. Magnusson in the doorway. Everyone in the kitchen was staring at him. He was really an enormous man—Janie noticed it now that she saw him standing near the small Italian cooks in their trim white aprons. He was tall and broad-shouldered and ruddy-faced.

“So this is where it all happens!” he said in a booming, jolly voice, in the pin-drop silence. “My compliments to the chef! You’ve outdone yourselves.”

Janie turned back to the sink so Magnusson wouldn’t notice her, but the kitchen staff was frozen, and the movement caught his eye. She could feel his curiosity.

“Is that
Janie
?” he asked.

She didn’t want to look up.

“I’d recognize that head of hair anywhere! What are you doing here?”

“Working,” she said in a small voice, against her will.

“But what about your schoolwork?” He looked around, as if one of the staring cooks might have an answer. “Is money a problem? Why didn’t you come to me?”