The Apothecary by Maile Meloy

Author:Maile Meloy [Meloy, Maile]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780399256271
Amazon: 039925627X
Publisher: Text Publishing Company
Published: 2011-10-04T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

The Oil of Mnemosyne

The elevator took us up to daylight, and Jin Lo left the vial of orange smoke by the front door of the bunker so that it poured out into the street. She looked boyish in the khaki overalls, with her long braid up under a hard hat, and she walked purposefully away, carrying her bundle of clothes, as if she were a workman going for help in controlling this strange chemical fire.

A few people came out of houses, staring at the orange smoke rising into the air, but no one stopped Jin Lo, and we were around the corner before we heard shouts coming from the building, and a man’s loud voice asking if anyone had seen a Chinese girl in black. No one had, and Pip and Benjamin and I were still invisible.

A bus came by and stopped, and we climbed aboard. Jin Lo nodded to the driver and walked past him with her armful of clothes.

“You’ve got to pay!” the driver said, but Jin Lo ignored him. The rest of us filed invisibly after her.

There were seven or eight other people on the bus, including a white-haired woman with a curly white dog in her lap. The dog started to bark hysterically as we passed, and she murmured and hugged him close.

“It’s just a Chinaman, my angel, selling clothes,” I heard her say.

The dog kept barking—smelling, I was sure, all four of us.

We found a place near the back of the bus where no one was going to bump into us, and the driver gave up and drove on, flummoxed by the inscrutable Chinaman and late for his route. The old lady got the curly dog to be quiet, but it gazed back over her shoulder, panting.

Jin Lo dumped the pile of clothes beside her and sat down.

“So who are you, exactly?” Benjamin whispered, under the rumbling noise of the bus’s engine. “How do you know my father?”

“Only letters,” Jin Lo said. “I come from China to meet him.”

“Are there lots of girl chemists in China?” I asked. This was 1952, after all.

Jin Lo frowned as if the question had never occurred to her. “I am apprentice, very young, to chemist in Shanghai. I have no other school. When he die, I finish his work, write to colleagues.”

“What was his work?” I asked. “He wasn’t a normal chemist, right? Was he an alchemist?”

Jin Lo shrugged, as if the idea of normality was unimportant. “Everyone work different. Where you last see apothecary?”

“In his shop,” Benjamin said. “He was given a message saying you had been taken, and he would be next, so he hid us in the cellar. Some Germans burst in, and when we came upstairs, my father was gone.”

“Germans—they say what?”

“We don’t know,” Benjamin said. “It was in German.”

Jin Lo frowned. “Why you not speak German?”

“I don’t know,” Benjamin whispered. “I guess because of the war. No one wants to. Do you speak Japanese?”

Something I couldn’t identify passed over her face, and I remembered that parts of China had been occupied by Japan.

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