“Call me Bennacio.”
“I’m Alfred Kropp.”
“I know who you are.”
“We’ve met before,” I said. “At Samson Towers. I didn’t recognize you at first without your robe. But I recognize your hands. And your voice.”
He nodded. “The man you know as Bernard Samson was killed two nights ago in Játiva, on the slopes of Monte Bernisa in Spain.” He sipped his coffee. He had taken off the lid and I could see he drank it black. “I was given instructions to find you in the event of his fall.”
I thought about that. It didn’t make much sense to me, but, since Mom died and I went to live with Uncle Farrell, almost everything had stopped making sense. “Why?”
“To tell you of his fate.”
“That’s important—telling me?”
He shrugged, like he really couldn’t make a judgment on the importance of keeping Alfred Kropp in the loop.
“What happened in Spain?”
Bennacio kept looking out the window. “He fell. Four of our Order fell with him. I alone have escaped to bring this news to you, Kropp. It was his dying wish that you should know.”
He sipped his coffee. He had a sharp nose and dark, deep-set eyes beneath thick salt-and-pepper brows. His white hair was swept back from his high forehead.
“Two of the Order fell in Toronto,” Bennacio said. “They were the first, dispatched by Samson to stop the enemy before he could flee North America. Another in London. Two in Pau, before the rest of us arrived.”
I did the math. Mr. Samson had told me there were twelve knights left. “That leaves just two of you.”
Bennacio shook his head. “Windimar fell near Bayonne, the night before we discovered the enemy in Játiva. I am the last of my Order.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. We finished our coffee. Finally, I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Bennacio.”
“Just Bennacio,” he said. I don’t think it really mattered to him if I was sorry.
I went on. “But there’s a lot of other people in on this, right? Mr. Samson brought in this secret agency, some kind of spies, I guess, or mercenaries; I don’t know what you’d call them . . .”
“You are speaking of oy-pep.”
“I am?”
He nodded. “O-I-P-E-P. Oy-pep.” He made a face like saying the word left a bad taste in his mouth.
“What’s OIPEP?”
“Did you not just say Samson told you?”
“Well, like a lot of things he told me, he kind of did but he kind of didn’t. But I’m not exactly what you might call quick on the uptake. What exactly is OIPEP?”
He glanced around the coffee shop. “We should not talk about OIPEP here, Kropp.”
He stood up. I don’t know why, but I stood up too. I followed him to the door and into the night. The late-spring air was soft and warm. He took out his white handkerchief again and blew his nose.
“It is a fool’s hope,” he said with a little laugh.
“What is?” I asked.
He didn’t give me a direct answer, sort of like Mr. Samson never gave direct answers. Maybe that was part of being a knight. “For Mogart cannot be stopped, not while he wields the Sword. Yet while I live, I must try to stop him.” He turned and looked right at me for the first time. His dark eyes were sad.
“Now is the hour,” he said softly. “Our doom is upon us.”
He walked away without saying anything else and I watched him cross the street. Then I saw two big men step out of the doorway of an antique store and follow him. Both wore long gray cloaks that were too heavy for the warm weather.
Bennacio didn’t seem to notice them; he walked with his head bowed, like he was deep in thought. A little voice inside my head said, “Go home, Alfred.” But I didn’t have a home anymore. Now Mr. Samson was dead and all the other knights except this Bennacio guy, and it was all my fault. I could have—should have—told Uncle Farrell no, I wasn’t going to help him get the Sword. I knew it was wrong at the time, and if I had stood my ground everybody would still be alive and I would have a home. I had hated that little apartment with the worn-out furniture and its old fishy smell. I had wished every day that my mom hadn’t died and my uncle was somebody more like Donald Trump than Farrell Kropp, but now that sounded like heaven to me. I would have given anything to have it back.
Bennacio was walking north on Central, the men keeping pace a few feet behind him.
And for some reason I have never understood, I followed them.
When I turned the corner, they had Bennacio against the wall and were taking turns slugging him, one guy holding him up while the other one slammed his big fists into his gut. They were too busy pounding the crap out of him to notice me.
One of them turned to his buddy and said with a foreign accent, “Finish him.” The second man pulled something long and black from the folds of his gray cloak.
“Hey!” I shouted.
They looked over at me. None of us moved for a second; then the guy holding the dagger jammed it into Bennacio’s side, the other one let him go and, as Bennacio slid slowly down the brick wall, they took off east along the railroad tracks.
I ran over to Bennacio. His eyes were open and he was breathing. He was clutching that white handkerchief in both hands. I put my hand on his side and it came away covered in his blood.
“Leave me,” he said.
I hauled him up, pulling his arm over my shoulder, and kind of dragged him back to Central.
“You’re hurt,” I said. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“No hospital. No hospital,” he gasped.
I spotted a Yellow Cab parked on the corner. I shoved Bennacio into the backseat.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“Where to?” I asked Bennacio.
“The Marriott . . .” Bennacio gasped.
“Take us to the Marriott,” I told the driver.
Bennacio leaned against me, and I tugged the handkerchief from his hands and pressed it against the badly bleeding wound in his side.
“Oh, boy,” I whispered. “Oh, jeez, you’re bleeding pretty bad, Bennacio.”
“Hey,” the cabbie said, staring at us in his rearview mirror. “Your friend okay, kid?”
“No hospital, no hospital,” Bennacio kept whispering. His face was very pale and his eyes were rolling in his head as he leaned against me. I guessed he was dying.
14
I managed to get Bennacio out of the cab and into the lobby of the hotel, with him leaning against me. The clerk behind the desk gave me a look.
“My uncle,” I told the clerk. “Little too much wine.”
Bennacio told me his room number and somehow I got him into the elevator, up to the sixth floor, and into his room. I laid him on the bed.
His eyes were closed and he was breathing in short, hard gasps. I opened his jacket and unbuttoned his white shirt to expose the wound, a gash just below his ribs on the left side. I got some towels from the bathroom and pressed one into his side, watching the blood soak into it. I threw that towel on the floor and replaced it with another. He wouldn’t stop bleeding.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I told him. “You’re gonna bleed to death if we don’t get you to a doctor.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. “The blade was poisoned,” he said. “The bleeding will not stop.” Then he raised his head a little and looked at my hand holding the towel against his side.
He must have seen the scar on my thumb, because he whispered, “You have been wounded by the Sword.”
“Yeah.”
“In the bathroom,” he gasped. “My straight razor. Bring it to me.”
I found it in a little black leather bag on the vanity. The razor had a long retractable blade that slipped into the handle. I didn’t think anybody used a straight razor anymore. How did I know this Bennacio wasn’t lying—that he wasn’t really a goon for Mogart, come to kill me? But even if he was lying, even if he was a bad guy, who was I to le
t him slowly bleed to death?
I brought the razor back to him. He sat forward a little, groaning with the effort, grabbed my wrist, and held it tight.
“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing?”
He grabbed the razor, placing the edge along my scar, and made a shallow cut just shallow enough to draw blood.
“Oh, my God!” I yelped, trying to pull my hand away.
He tossed the towel aside with his other hand, then brought my bleeding thumb to his side and pressed it into the wound.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“The Sword has the power to heal as well as to rend,” he said. After a few minutes he let go of my wrist. I picked up the towel and put it back on the wound, but already the bleeding had slowed.
Bennacio closed his eyes. His breathing became easier, and for a second I thought he had fallen asleep.
“Who were those men, Bennacio?” I asked, clutching my throbbing thumb.
“Servants of the enemy . . . following me since my return to America.”
Which meant he got stabbed because of me. Why had Mr. Samson sent him to me? Like telling Alfred Kropp about it was going to help them get the Sword back.
I sat beside him and felt like crying, but I didn’t want to cry in front of Bennacio. Everybody around me lately was dying. All because I took something I shouldn’t have. I was like some lumbering, awkward, big-headed Angel of Death.
“You want anything, Bennacio?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “I don’t know what to do. I mean, I’m really scared right now. Why did Mr. Samson send you here? What’s going to happen now that all the knights are dead? I’m not going to live, am I? None of us are. You said our doom was upon us. I’m thirsty. You want a drink of water?”
He didn’t answer. This time he had really fallen asleep.
15
I watched him sleep for a long time, until I started feeling sleepy myself. There was sofa in the outer room, and I lay on that for a while, but it made me nervous because I couldn’t keep an eye on him.
So I went back into his room and sat on the bed. I must have finally passed out, because I woke up at dawn curled at the foot of the bed, like a big, faithful dog.
When I woke up he was still asleep, so I ordered room service, a plain bagel (since I didn’t know how he liked them), a bagel with everything, a pot of coffee, and an orange juice.
I answered the door to get the food. When I came back, he was awake. I helped him sit up so he could eat. He took the bagel with everything, the one I wanted, but he was the guy with the stab wound, so I didn’t say anything.
“What happened in Játiva?” I asked.
“Samson believed our only hope lay in attacking the enemy in force. I argued against it, but he was the head of our Order, and in the end I acquiesced. We had tracked Mogart to his keep in Játiva, an ancient castle overlooking the city, rebuilt and refortified in preparation for this day. Samson planted a story in one of the British dailies that he was actually in London, attending a conference of foreign business leaders. He had hoped this would lull Mogart into relaxing his vigilance.”
“I guess it didn’t.”
“They waited until we had reached the inner courtyard of Mogart’s castle—and then ambushed us. Fifty men at least. Bellot fell, then Cambon, yet even so we might have succeeded. We bested the front guard and had taken the grounds, when fate turned against us and Mogart appeared with the Sword.”
He took a deep breath. “And, as we fell, one by one, the angels themselves wailed and beat upon their breasts. The Sword was not meant for such work, was never forged to spill the blood of its protectors. We fell back, our hearts filled with dread, but another contingent of the enemy had formed behind us, cutting off our escape.”
“He killed—he killed everyone?”
“It was a slaughter, Kropp. I fell by the gate, wounded, though not mortally, and thus became the sole surviving witness to Mogart’s ultimate treachery, the killing of our captain, the man you call Bernard Samson. What Mogart did to him I will not say here—but it was terrible, Kropp. Terrible! Yet still Samson found strength before he died to tell me to take the message to you, that he had fallen and the Sword is still not safe. In short, that the Knights of the Order of the Sacred Sword are no more.”
I set down my half-eaten bagel. All of a sudden, I wasn’t hungry anymore. I remembered my dream, of the brave men outnumbered in a gray castle, and the man with the golden hair falling.
“For hours I lay half dead in the blood-soaked mud of Mogart’s keep,” Bennacio went on. “Finally darkness fell and I deemed it safe to slip away. I was spotted, of course, and pursued here to America, though I thought I had lost my pursuers. Apparently, I have not.”
He set down his cup and put his plate with the uneaten bagel on the bedside table.
“Nor will they stop until I am dead. For I am the last knight, the sole hope for the Sword’s retrieval. These others, the outsiders Samson enlisted to our cause, this . . . OIPEP cannot prevail against Mogart. Only a Knight of the Order has any prayer of retrieving the Sword. And Mogart knows this.”
He rolled to the edge of the bed, holding his side, wincing from the pain.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Leaving.”
“You can’t leave, Bennacio. You lost a lot of blood. You gotta rest for a couple—”
“Listen!” he said sharply. “They will not stop hunting me, Kropp. Even as we speak, they may be in this building. Now that my final oath to Samson is fulfilled, I must return to Europe and pick up Mogart’s trail before the calamity strikes, before he or anyone else can use the Sword to an evil end.”
He pushed himself from the bed, swayed a second on his feet, and fell back. I caught him and eased him back down as he gulped in air.
“I am the last knight,” he gasped. “I am bound by my sacred oath to recover what should never have been lost.”
I don’t know if those words were aimed at me, what should never have been lost, but I took it like they were.
“What can I do?” I asked.
He cocked one of those thick eyebrows in my direction and I felt about the size of pencil lead again.
“Please, Bennacio, let me do something. Let me help. I didn’t realize I was doing it until now, but I’ve run away. I’m not going back to the Tuttles’ ever again. So if I’m not going back, then I’ve got nowhere to go and I can’t go nowhere, I’ve got to go somewhere. All this—it’s my fault. Well, it’s also my uncle’s fault, but if I had said no then none of this would have happened. He couldn’t have done it without me. But he’s dead now, so I’m the only one who can do anything about it, about letting Mogart get his hands on the Sword. I don’t know what I can do, but you’re in pretty rough shape; maybe you could use me. Please. Please, use me, Bennacio.”
He almost smiled. Almost. He held on to his side, wincing. “Can you drive a car, Kropp?”
16
I told him, you bet, I could drive a car, but I had just started and didn’t have much experience. That didn’t seem to bother him. I helped him get dressed and he leaned on me as we walked to the parking lot. He directed me to a brand-new silver Mercedes parked near the exit.
“This is your car?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Cool car.”
I helped him into the passenger seat. After I slid behind the wheel, he handed me the keys.
“This is a really nice car, Bennacio,” I said. “You sure it’s okay if I drive it?”
“Did you not say in the room you could drive?”
“Sure, but I only got my learner’s permit six months ago and I don’t have that much experience behind the wheel.”
He gave a little wave of his hand, a gesture that struck me as very European. “We must use the instruments given us, Kropp.”
“Oh,” I said. “You bet.”
The engine purred to life and I felt my scalp tingle. If things weren’t so serious, I would have been thrilled.
Bennacio directed me to the interstate. I asked him where we were going, thinking I was just giving him a quick lift to the airport, but all he said was “North,” which was the opposite direction of Knoxville’s airport. I didn’t know where we were going, only that somehow I was along for the ride. I kept checking the rearview mirror, but didn’t see anything suspicious, just cars and big semis. What would a suspicious car look like anyway? Since I didn’t know, all the cars around us started to look suspicious. It’s hard enough being a novice driver tooling down the interstate in heavy traffic; try adding covert pursuit by quasi-medieval bad guys to the list.
I was about an hour out of the city when Bennacio asked, “Why did you take the Sword?”
“That was my uncle’s idea,” I said. “Well, I guess it was his idea by way of Mr. Myers’s—I mean Mogart’s idea.”
“And why did your uncle take it?”
“Mogart gave him five hundred thousand dollars.”
“So you took it for money.” He said the word “money” like it was dirty.
“No. Not the money, really. I’m not greedy, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Then why?”
“Look, Bennacio, I didn’t know who Mr. Samson really was or what the Sword really was. How could I? I was just helping out Uncle Farrell. Plus he threatened to send me back to foster care if I said no. I told him we shouldn’t. I told him I had a bad feeling about it and it was wrong, but he’s my uncle. I’m a kid. And I ended up in foster care anyway.”
But I was just making excuses. Once you’re about ten, maybe eleven tops, “I’m just a kid” doesn’t cut it when it comes to your core ideas like the difference between right and wrong.
We didn’t say anything for a while. He was staring at the road, not looking at me.
“Where am I taking you, Bennacio?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. I glanced over at him. He was still staring at the road.
“How are you going to find Mogart and the Sword once you get to Europe?”
He didn’t answer. I took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. Then I tried again.
“Mr. Samson told me you guys were all descended from the original Knights of the Round Table,” I said. “Which one did you come from?”