I thought of Bennacio kneeling before Mogart, and I understood then why he had spread his arms in that way, as if saying, Here I am. Here I am.
“Oh, jeez,” I said. “Like I didn’t feel bad enough, Natalia. What am I supposed to do, huh? What do you want me to do? I was just, you know, helping out my uncle. I didn’t know my father and I sure didn’t know I had stolen the Sword of Kings for a black knight or an agent of darkness or whatever he was. I mean, what rational person believes in all this stuff, Merlin and King Arthur and magic swords and angels and prophecies—who believes in that kind of stuff these days? I don’t know what you want from me, Natalia. Can you tell me what I’m supposed to do? Somebody better tell me and they better do it quick, because I’m just about at the end of my rope here.”
She came to the bed, and her hair fell over my face. She whispered, “He is at peace, Alfred. His dream is fulfilled, and he is at peace. Now you be at peace.”
Then she kissed me on the forehead, and her hair was like the walls of a cathedral around me, a sanctuary, and she murmured into my ear, “Be at peace, Master Alfred.”
53
One afternoon, about a week before I was to be discharged, the door opened and a dark-suited man came into the room. Tall and stoop-shouldered, with a hound-dog face and very long earlobes, he reminded me of a sad-eyed Basset. He closed the door behind him as I pushed myself up in the bed, thinking, What now?
He didn’t say a word; he barely looked at me. He crossed the room and peeked through the curtains, then strode to the bathroom and looked in there. Then he opened the door and spoke softly to someone in the hallway. He stepped back and a woman came in next, dressed in a tailored pinstriped business suit with shiny black heels that made a clicking sound on the linoleum as she walked. Her bright blond hair was pulled into a tight bun on her head. She carried a bundle wrapped in white satin.
“Abigail?” I said.
“Alfred.” She smiled, and I was impressed by the excellent condition of her teeth. “How good of you to remember.”
She handed the bundle over to the hound-dog man and sat down beside my bed.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Pretty lousy,” I said. “Physically I’m doing okay; it’s the other departments that are bothering me.”
“You have been through a great deal,” she said.
There was an uncomfortable silence. I blurted out, “I don’t have it.”
“Don’t have what, dear?”
“You know what. I don’t have it. And I don’t know where it is, though I have a guess.”
“And where would that be?”
I bit my lip. Her smile didn’t leave her face and her blue eyes were glittering brightly.
“You don’t trust me,” she said calmly. “I don’t blame you, Alfred. We’ve done little to earn your trust. At any rate, you don’t need to tell me. I believe I already know. The gift has been returned to its giver.” I didn’t say anything and she lowered her voice. “The master claims the Sword and, in claiming it, understands that it can never be claimed.”
She was just beaming by this point. “We tore that cave apart, Alfred, and dragged the inlet. The Sword is gone, which is both a great loss and a great boon. Its time on earth has passed, and now there is one less piece of wonder in our world. Perhaps it is the price we must pay for our . . . growing up.”
I stared at her. “Who are you, anyway?”
“I thought you knew, dear.”
“All I know is you guys double-crossed Mr. Samson and his knights, and you double-crossed Bennacio and you double-crossed his daughter and nearly got her killed, and did get me killed and—”
“OIPEP didn’t double-cross them, Alfred, Mike Arnold did.” She made a little sour face, as if just saying the name bothered her. “You of all people can understand the effect the Sword can have on the minds of . . . weaker men. Mike was seduced by it from the beginning. Without our knowledge he contacted the Dragon and gave away Samson’s plans to storm his castle in Spain, and he did agree to sacrifice Bennacio in order to gain the Sword. He also told Mogart where he might find Natalia—all without our knowledge. He was what you might call a ‘rogue agent,’ and he has been terminated.”
“You killed Mike Arnold?”
She smiled. “He is no longer with The Company.”
“The Company,” I said. “What is The Company? What is OIPEP and why does it care so much about the Sword?”
“It cares because its purpose is to care.”
I stared at her for a second, and then I said, because I had learned some things along the way, “That was my fault. I asked two questions, which allowed you to choose which one to answer.”
She laughed one of those gentle trills you associate with very cultivated people or people from England.
“Our organization dedicates itself to the research and preservation of the world’s great mysteries,” she said.
“Really? And all this time I thought you were some kind of supersecret spy outfit dedicated to killing people you don’t like.”
“We are not spies, Alfred. Not in the sense you mean. We are clandestine in that few know of our existence; and we do have certain . . . technologies that have yet to be officially acknowledged, but we are more likely to wear pocket protectors and carry laptops than body armor and guns. OIPEP has more scientists, historians, and theoreticians than field operatives like Mike Arnold. The head of my department is a doctor of thaumatology. And I hold a doctorate in eschatology.”
“What’s that?” I asked. She was being very Bennacian: The more she explained, the more confused I got.
“Eschatology is the study of final things. Death. The afterlife. The end of the world.”
“Oh. Gotcha.”
“And thaumatology is the study of miracles. So you see, it was only natural that Samson should involve us once the Sword was lost.”
She motioned to the large man with the dog face and the big flappy hands, and he brought her the long object wrapped in satin. She laid it on my lap.
“What’s this?” I asked. But I figured it out before she could answer. I pulled on a corner of the cloth and the black blade tumbled out.
“Bennacio’s sword,” she said. “We recovered it at Stonehenge and thought you might like to have it.”
I stared at the sword. “Thank you,” I whispered.
Abigail said, “There is one other thing before I go, Alfred. I must say The Company is quite impressed.”
“Impressed by what?” I asked.
“With you,” she said. “It is nothing less than extraordinary.”
“What is?”
“That you not only survived your ordeal, but accomplished what we, with all the resources at our disposal, could not.”
“Well,” I said. “The whole thing was basically my fault, so I kind of thought it was the right thing to do.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re very young. You have no idea how rare that is.”
“Youth?”
“Doing the right thing. Not only doing the right thing, but understanding what the right thing is.”
“Oh,” I said. “You bet.” Though I wasn’t completely sure what she was getting at or why we were having a philosophical conversation.
“We will be keeping an eye on you, Alfred Kropp,” she said.
“You will?” That didn’t sound good.
“We are very interested in your . . . development.”
A shiver went down my spine. “Look, Abby . . . Abigail . . . ma’am . . . I don’t have any intention of getting involved in anything like the Sword again, so if you’re worried—”
She raised her hand to shut me up. “We’re not worried at all. In fact, I wanted to give you this, in the event you decide you want to know more about The Company. We are always looking for fresh talent—for the extraordinary, if you will.”
She dropped a business card in my lap, shot up from the chair, nodded to hound-dog man by the door, and left me al
one. I picked up the card and read it:
OFFICE OF INTERDIMENSIONAL PARADOXES
&
EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENA
(OIPEP)
Abigail Smith, MD, PhD, JD, MBA
Special Agent-in-Charge
Field Operations Division
Washington • London • Paris • Tokyo
Brussels • Rome • Moscow • Sydney
54
My foster parents, the Tuttles, arrived in London the next day to take me back to America. I had no idea they were coming. They just showed up in the doorway and Horace Tuttle shouted, “Alfred Kropp, you big-headed pain in the rump! What in heaven’s name are you doing in London, England?”
“If you ever run away like that again, we’ll have to let you go, Alfred,” Betty Tuttle told me tearfully.
“Might do that anyway,” Horace puffed. “You have a lot of explaining to do, young man!”
“Actually,” I told them, “I saved the world from total annihilation.”
“Of course you did!” Horace shouted. “And I’m Tarzan, Lord of the Apes!”
“Now, Horace,” Betty said. “You know what the social worker told us: Alfred is a troubled youth.”
“We all have troubles,” Horace grumbled.
“I’m sure Alfred has every intention of getting back into school and living up to his potential as a solid citizen and contributing member of his community,” Betty said. She patted my arm. “Don’t you, dear?”
“That’s right,” I said. “You bet.”
“Well, I didn’t fly all the way across the Atlantic to this God-forsaken foreign English country to chitchat,” Horace said. “Where’re your things, Alfred? We’re leaving.”
“I don’t have anything,” I said. “Except this.”
I showed them Bennacio’s black sword. Horace tried to grab the sword and I told him not to touch it; the blade was very sharp. I also didn’t want him touching it because the thought of Horace Tuttle touching the blade of the Last Knight of the Order of the Sacred Sword made my stomach heave.
“We’ll never get this through Customs,” he said.
“Then I’m not going,” I told them. “I won’t leave without it.”
And I didn’t either. I stuck the sword in Horace’s bag and, when the screeners went nuts over it, I showed the supervisor Abigail Smith’s card. A call was made and in five minutes we were cleared through Customs.
55
So that’s how I ended up back in Knoxville, Tennessee, after saving the world and everybody in it, including the Tuttles.
After a week, I was back in school, but my picture had been flashed around the globe after the Stonehenge incident and now I was something of a celebrity. I don’t know what calls were made or who said what to whom, but I was back in school like nothing had happened. There was a rumor that I was an international terrorist because that’s what they called me on television, but I guess some people just can’t grasp nuances.
Amy Pouchard pulled me aside after math class on my first day back. She was working a piece of gum really hard, which reminded me of Mike Arnold, and suddenly I didn’t like Amy Pouchard as much as I thought I did.
“You disappeared, blew up something, and now you’re back,” she said.
“I didn’t blow up anything,” I told her. “I did kill somebody, though.”
Her eyes got wide. “Get out!”
“But he kind of had it coming.”
“Was he a terrorist or something?”
“No, but you might call him an agent of darkness.”
“Whoa. That’s too cool!” She touched my forearm with her hand. Her hand was very cold, and I wondered if she had a circulation problem. “You shot him?”
“I beheaded him.”
Her mouth opened a little and I could see the knobby bright green of her gum between her tongue and her teeth.
“Kropp! You! Kropp!”
It was Barry Lancaster, pushing people out of the way in the crowded hall to get to me.
“Are you still his girlfriend?” I asked Amy Pouchard.
“Sort of. Not really. I mean, he’s never beheaded anybody or anything like that. Do you want my cell phone number?”
Barry had reached me by that point. He shoved me hard in the right shoulder and said, “What are you doing here, Kropp? Aren’t you supposed to be in jail or something?”
“Actually,” I said, “I’m supposed to be in social studies.”
“But instead you’re talking to my girlfriend. Pretty stupid, Kropp.”
“She’s not your girlfriend, Barry.”
“Like you would know.”
He shoved me again.
“Don’t shove me, Barry.”
“Yeah? Who’s gonna stop me, Kropp?”
He shoved me again.
“Barry,” Amy Pouchard said. “Cut it out.”
A crowd had gathered by that point. The bell rang but nobody paid attention.
“Maybe this is the point I should tell you that the last guy who shoved me around like this got his head chopped off,” I told Barry.
“You’re so full of it,” he snarled, and then he launched himself at me.
He really didn’t have a chance. I sidestepped to the right and landed a haymaker to the side of his blond head as he flew past. Barry went down and he stayed down, and I guess if I had been Barry, I might have kicked him in the ribs. But I wasn’t Barry Lancaster. I was Alfred Kropp, not exactly a knight bound by the code of chivalry, but I was the descendant of the greatest knight who had ever lived. Plus I guess dying gives you some perspective on what’s worth fighting about.
I held out my hand.
“This is nuts, Barry,” I said. “We’re both gonna get expelled.”
“That was just a lucky punch,” he gasped, and he slapped my hand away.
“The odds are against that,” I answered. “I’ve never had too much luck.”
I pulled him to his feet and he spat, “You’re a freak.”
But he didn’t shove me again or try to punch me, and after that nobody teased me about my size or the remark about my IQ. People left me alone. Even my teachers kept their distance and went out of their way to give me a break. Of course, it got all around school that I had admitted to killing someone, and the rumor about me being a terrorist persisted.
I spent most afternoons in the Old City, walking aimlessly or sitting in the Ye Olde Coffee Shop, where I had met Bennacio. I always took the last stool at the end of the counter and sipped lattes, staring at the people walking past the big window. Sometimes I took out the card Abigail Smith had given me in London and stared at it. Most of the time, though, I just stared out the window. And I always dreaded going home to the Tuttles.
Sitting in the coffee shop made me feel close to Bennacio, the nearest thing to a father I ever had, and sometimes I would hear his voice in my head: Do not concern yourself so much with guilt and grief, Alfred. No battle was ever won, no great deed ever accomplished by wallowing in guilt and grief.
I began to understand I had claimed more than the Sword of Kings in Merlin’s cave. I had claimed something even more powerful and scary.
I had claimed who I was.
One afternoon, after I finished my coffee, I looked at my watch and realized it was almost six o’clock. Dinner would be over by the time I got to the Tuttles’, and Betty would fuss at me and wonder where I wandered off to every afternoon instead of coming home and studying like a good boy. Horace would stomp and shout, and the thin walls of the little house would shake. I would eat the leftovers and retreat to the little room I shared with Lester and Dexter. The next morning I would go to school and that would be my life, the life of Alfred Kropp, Heir to Lancelot, Son of the Sacred Order, Master of the Sword of Kings, and Adventurer Extraordinaire.
I left the coffee house and turned on Central to Jackson, but instead of walking toward the bus stop I went straight to the pay phone half a block down and dialed the 800 number scrawled on the back of the card. r />
“This is Alfred Kropp, Abby . . . Abigail . . . Ms. Smith, Doctor Smith, ma’am,” I said. “I was wondering about what you said. About, um, needing fresh talent . . .”
Copyright © 2005 by Rick Yancey
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in
the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in the United States of America in October 2005
by Bloomsbury Publishing
E-book edition published in December 2010
www.bloomsburykids.com
Excerpt from “Ash Wednesday” from COLLECTED POEMS 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot,
copyright 1936 by Harcourt, Inc., copyright © 1930 and renewed 1958 by T. S. Eliot,
reprinted by permission of the publisher.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Bloomsbury BFYR, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Yancey, Richard.
The extraordinary adventures of Alfred Kropp / by Rick Yancey. —1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Through a series of dangerous and violent misadventures, teenage loser Alfred
Kropp rescues King Arthur’s legendary sword Excalibur from the forces of evil.
ISBN-10: 1-58234-693-3 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 978-1-58234-693-9 (hardcover)
[1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Arthur, King—Fiction. 3. Orphans—Fiction.]
I. Title.
PZ7.Y19197Ext 2005 [Fic]—dc22 2005013044
ISBN 978-1-59990-412-2 (e-book)
Rick Yancey, The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp
(Series: Alfred Kropp # 1)