The Apprentices (21 page)

The man who had found him barked a command in a language Benjamin didn’t recognize, and the smaller boy spit a glob into the bowl and dashed out of the clearing.

“Where are we?” Benjamin asked.

The man grinned at him. “Nice try,” he said.

Two more men emerged from the trees a moment later, dressed in loincloths, but without Coca-Cola T-shirts. One had long, grizzled hair, and the other had dark hair cut very close to his scalp. They spoke with the prophet, and their eyes grew wide. The younger man put his hand on Benjamin’s shoulder, bowed his head, and said, “John Frum.”

“No,” Benjamin said, and he started to explain, but the young man took his hand away from Benjamin’s neck. There was blood on his fingertips. The three men seized Benjamin gently, with all the urgency and deference due to an injured god.

He was hustled into a dimly lit hut, and his bloody shirt was peeled off. He wished he had brought some of his father’s blue paste, which would have healed the wounds instantly. He had no great hopes for the medical technology on this island. He hoped the water was clean, at least. The grizzled older man washed his wounds, and the younger brought Benjamin a bowl of white soupy goo.

“That’s all right,” Benjamin said, pushing the bowl away.
He had been curious about the visions people had after drinking kava, and the superhuman strength it seemed to give them. But he could only think about the fact that it was made with spit.

“Yes!” the prophet insisted.

The two other men held Benjamin’s arms, and the bowl was pressed against his chin, the slimy contents tilting toward his mouth. Benjamin tried to protest, but when he opened his mouth to say “No!” it was filled with starchy, lukewarm kava. One of the men clapped a hand over his mouth so he couldn’t spit it out, and pinched his nose so that he had to swallow to breathe. Benjamin gagged and shivered.

“That’s disgusting,” he said when they uncovered his mouth. “Let me up!”

But they were still holding his arms.

“Stay,” the prophet said. “Good medicine.” The bowl was pressed to Benjamin’s mouth again, his nose held to force it down. He drank to avoid drowning, and then he sputtered and gasped for air.

“My father will look for me!” he said. He wasn’t sure why he’d said it. It wouldn’t mean anything to these men, but he was starting to feel desperate.

The prophet laughed. “John Frum has no father! He
is
father!”

“I’m
not
a father,” Benjamin said. His head was starting to swim and his tongue felt thick. “I’m just a boy!”

“Boy John Frum.”

“No,” Benjamin said weakly. “No cargo.” He could feel his hold on the room slipping. Shadows moved in the corners of his vision. Were they actually there? Had he asked that aloud? “No cargo,” he said again, trying to be firm.

“Nice try, John Frum,” the prophet said.

P
ip had a plan. He wasn’t sure it was a good plan, but he had come all this distance to America, and he had to do
something.
And anyway, the plan was already under way. His first thought had been to go to Opal’s mother for help, but Opal had said no.

“She’s afraid of my father,” she said. “She won’t help. If anything, she’ll just warn him.”

So that left Opal’s grandfather, the sultan. Sultans had money, he understood, and the ability to fly people places. Pip and Opal sent him a telegram as soon as the Western Union office opened, and then climbed aboard the bus to Boston.

“I’ve never taken a bus before,” Opal said.

“It’s not so bad.”

Opal raised her eyebrows at the worn seats.

“Not what you expected?” Pip asked.

“I never thought about what a bus was like,” she said, gazing out the dirty window through her clunky, pointless glasses.

It was a two-hour ride to Boston, and the bus swayed along. At the Copley Square Hotel, Opal went to the desk alone
and booked a room on her father’s account. Her family lived in Marblehead, outside the city, but she and her mother sometimes stayed in Boston when they went shopping. And her father stayed at the hotel when he was working late—Pip had some theories about
that.
While Opal checked in, Pip read a newspaper in the lobby. Then he trailed her up to the room. They made sure there were no maids in the hall before Opal unlocked the door. Now they just had to wait for word from her grandfather. They would be ready to go at a moment’s notice.

The room had heavy curtains, blue-and-gold upholstery, and two identical beds under blue-and-gold bedspreads. “Did you ask for two beds?” Pip asked.

“Of course I did.”

“That’ll seem suspicious. You’re just one person.”

“I said I was going shopping, and wanted a spare bed to lay out dresses.”

“And they believed you?”

“Of course. You’ll have to sleep on top of yours, not in it. Otherwise the maids will know.”

“How about you sleep on top of
yours
?”

She smiled at him and pushed her glasses up onto her nose. “Very funny.”

Pip sat down on one smooth bedspread. “So,” he said.

Opal sat on the other. “So what?”

“We wait for your grandfather’s response.”

“It’s not like sending a telegram to a normal person’s house,” she said. “It has to go through attendants and translators. He doesn’t even speak English.”

“It’s from the sultan’s granddaughter. They’ll get it to him.”

“Maybe,” Opal said. “If he’s like my dad, he won’t care.”

“He’ll care,” Pip said. “And he’ll send us a plane.”

Opal made a skeptical face, then lay back on the bed with her hands behind her head and looked at the ceiling. Her hair spread out in a shining pool. Her legs in laddered blue tights hung off the end of the bed, warm skin showing through the runs. She kicked her legs. One scuffed shoe fell to the carpet.

“I’m bored already,” she said.

J
anie’s first thought, stepping off the plane onto the small airstrip on Magnusson’s island, was that she had walked into a wall of wet heat. The air was so dense and humid that her clothes stuck to her skin. She was weak from the long trip—they had stopped in
Siberia,
of all places, to refuel, and to take on a new pilot—and she was exhausted from the mental effort of trying to find Benjamin. She hadn’t been able to make contact, and she tried to push away the idea that he’d been torn apart by sharp talons while he was trying to come to her rescue. Because he
was
trying to come to her rescue—wasn’t he? He must have seen the office when Magnusson had shown her the island on the map. She should have closed her eyes so Benjamin wouldn’t have known where to go. Then he would have stayed where he was. But she hadn’t known he was there. And it’s very hard to close your eyes when there’s something interesting to see. She scanned for Benjamin overhead, but saw nothing but the oppressive glare of blue sky.

Magnusson, beaming with the pride of ownership, followed her gaze up into the air.

Janie tried not to look down quickly, which would look suspicious. “Hot day,” she said. “Bright.”

Magnusson studied her face. “It is,” he said. “It gets that way.”

The pilots were doing something with the airplane engine. The beautiful Sylvia looked tired and rumpled. Janie was rumpled, too. But what did it matter? A jeep came down a path through the trees and pulled up beside them. It was driven by a man in a green uniform who looked like military, although
what
military Janie didn’t know.

They all climbed in, Janie feeling resigned. What else was she going to do? Run? Where? The jeep took them down a road of crushed seashells and past a pretty, sandy beach.

“Can I go for a swim?” Janie asked.

“You can swim in the pool,” Magnusson said.

“I mean in the ocean?”

“Sure,” Magnusson said. “If you want to be swallowed whole by a shark.”

In Janie’s demoralized mood, that idea didn’t seem too alarming. “Whole is better than in two pieces,” she said. “I might be able to fight my way out.”

“Let me be very clear,” Magnusson said. “You can’t go in the ocean.”

Next the jeep passed a pretty lagoon. It looked like a place for water nymphs to play. “What about there?”

“No,” Magnusson said. “Very dangerous. Strange tides.”

Then they were on the curving drive of a private villa: a
large white house with a blue swimming pool and a series of smaller cottages on a sloping lawn below.

“This doesn’t look like a mine,” Janie said.

“The mine is at the other end of the island,” Magnusson said.

“So where’s the desalinization plant?”

“It’s not set up yet.”

“You said you had a
plant.
”

“And I will, with your help.”

There was something in his voice that bothered her. He sounded bored. He didn’t care about desalinization. As they approached the villa, a high wire fence stopped them. A gate in the fence opened, and they continued down the drive. The big house had white columns, a terrace, and an oversized red door.

“What is this place?” Janie asked Magnusson. Something was still bothering her, buzzing in her mind.

“A very good place to wait,” he said.

The gate closed behind them, the perimeter around the villa secure. “Wait for what?” Janie asked.

“For your friends.”

Then the realization burst on Janie like the giant white blossoms opening on the hibernating tree in the Physic Garden, when the apothecary forced it to bloom. She had been too focused on her fears about Benjamin to see the truth: Magnusson had shown her the map
on purpose.
She felt sick. She forced herself to ask, “What do you want my friends for?”

Magnusson shrugged. “I collect talent.”

“Talent?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s how a good business works. You recruit the best minds. I have a hunch your friends can do remarkable things, as you can.”

“So I’m the bait,” Janie said, horrified. “In a trap.”

“To put it crudely.”

“They aren’t coming,” Janie said. She meant it as a bluff, but then realized it was true. If Benjamin was dead, then no one knew where she was. No one would come to her rescue.

“Where is your confidence, Janie?” Magnusson asked. “Your friends are more resourceful than you think.” He put an arm around Sylvia. “Now, let’s get this wilting flower a cold drink.”

J
in Lo and Marcus Burrows were up all night in Vinoray’s laboratory, grinding roots and measuring binding agents, trying to re-create Benjamin’s telepathic powder. The Pharmacopoeia was open to the pages about clairvoyance, but there were no instructions for what Benjamin had done. They read, they thought, they argued, they broke their own rules of safety and methodical experimentation. They mixed concoctions, drank them down, and struggled to access each other’s minds, but nothing worked.

Jin Lo finally lay down on Benjamin’s unmade cot, exhausted from her journey to Manila and dizzy from drinking failed concoctions. As her head touched the pillow, she heard the tiniest crinkling sound. She reached carefully beneath the pillow, remembering the story about the princess and the pea, and came away with a small, square, glassine envelope with a little powder in it. She was too tired and too curious to get up and find a glass of water, so she put her finger into the envelope and put a few grains on her tongue.