“You’re a knight,” I said, slowly shaking my head. “You’re telling me you guys are knights like King Arthur–type knights?”
“Not those men, no,” Mr. Samson said, gesturing toward the two gray suits still at attention by the door. “Their organization did not even know of the Sword’s existence before tonight. Circumstances now demand the use of every tool at our disposal. You see, Monsieur Mogart has many powerful friends, Alfred, friends who would pay any price for a weapon against which there is no defense. And Mogart’s friends are no friends of humanity. They are despots and dictators who would pay anything to possess the Sword. Do you begin to understand? There is no weapon devised by man, no army or combination of armies, no nation or alliance of nations on earth that can resist the power of the Sword.”
“Mr. Myers paid my uncle to steal the Sword so he could sell it to somebody?”
“To the highest bidder, and you can guess how high those bids will go.”
He touched my arm again, and I was surprised to see tears shining in his hazel eyes.
“And what kinds of men will bid on it. Alfred,” he said, “an army with the Sword at its head would be invincible.”
11
“It is a prize beyond any price, Alfred,” Mr. Samson said. “But Mogart can expect billions for it. Tens of billions. And if we do not find him before the Sword passes into the hands of evil men, the world will plunge into an age of unimaginable cruelty and terror. Envision the horrors of Nazi Germany or the Russia of the Stalinists, multiply them tenfold, and then you will begin to understand the magnitude of this loss.”
The rising sun was shining now through the window on his sharp features.
“We must retrieve the Sword before this can happen. He may yet decide to keep it for his own use, but that result would not be much better.”
“You know where he is?” I asked.
“I know where he is going. He has been preparing a long time for this day. Right now he is crossing the Atlantic, making for his keep in Játiva.” He saw my confused expression and gave a little laugh. “In Spain, Alfred.” He smiled at me again. “You have a thousand more questions, but I’ve stayed too long; I must go.”
“Don’t go yet,” I begged. “Don’t leave me alone.”
He patted my hand and his smile faded. “That seems to be my doom—and yours, Alfred.”
He turned and went to the door. I jumped up and followed him.
“There’s gotta be something I can do,” I said. “Take me with you; I could help. I’m the one who lost it; I should help get it back.”
I expected him to say something like “I think you’ve done quite enough already.” Instead, he leaned toward me and whispered, “Pray.”
He started down the hall and I called out after him, “Just one more question, Mr. Samson! Why didn’t he kill me too?”
He paused, then turned back to me, smiling that same sad smile. “Two reasons, I think. First, it is crueler to kill your uncle and let you live. Second, there is such a thing as honor among thieves.”
He disappeared into the stairwell, followed by the two agents. Nothing he could have said would have made me feel worse than calling me a thief. I don’t think he meant to hurt my feelings, though. My feelings were the least of his worries.
12
With Uncle Farrell gone, I was now a ward of the state. A couple named Horace and Betty Tuttle volunteered to take me in, pending the unlikely event of somebody adopting me.
The Tuttles lived in a tiny house on the near north side of Knoxville. Five other foster kids lived crammed into that little house. I never saw Horace Tuttle go to work, and I knew they received all sorts of checks from the state and the federal government for each kid, so I think we were how he made a living.
Horace Tuttle was a short, round little guy, always making remarks about my size, particularly my head. I think I scared him or he resented how big I was, I mean, because he was awfully small. Betty, his wife, was short and round like him, with the same conical-shaped head. They reminded me of turtles, kind of like their name, Tuttle. Maybe some people come to resemble their names, the way some people come to resemble their dogs.
I shared a bedroom with two of the other foster kids. The very first night the older one threatened to kill me in my sleep. I was feeling so low and lousy, I told him that would be fine with me.
I usually had trouble concentrating in school, but try concentrating when your uncle has just been murdered right before your eyes and you know the world is about to end. Try studying when you know World War III is about to start and it’s all your fault.
I still met with Amy Pouchard twice a week. She asked why I had missed the past couple of weeks and I told her.
“My uncle was murdered.”
“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed. “Who killed him?”
I thought about my answer. “An agent of darkness.”
“So they caught him?”
“They’re trying.”
“Hey, isn’t your mom dead too?”
“She died of cancer.”
“You must be the unluckiest person on earth,” she said, and scooted away from me a little, probably without realizing she was doing it. “I mean, your mom and now your uncle and what you did to Barry and everything.”
“I’ve been trying to tell myself all those things had nothing to do with me, that I’m okay and everything,” I said. “But it’s getting harder and harder.”
I was Uncle Farrell’s sole heir, so I got all his things, but I only kept his TV and VCR, which I set up in my bedroom. The main thing I didn’t get was the $500,000. I didn’t remember Mogart leaving with the brown leather satchel, but it wasn’t under Uncle Farrell’s bed where he stashed it, and the police never found it, probably because I didn’t tell them about it. That cash would be hard to explain and would probably get me in more trouble than I already was in, but I started wishing I still had that money. If I did, I would have taken it and run. I didn’t know where I’d run, but anywhere seemed better than the Tuttles and the delinquents who lived with them.
Over the next couple of days, I would grab Horace’s newspaper and take it to school and, instead of studying, I read the newspaper from front page to last, looking for anything that might give me a clue as to what was happening with Mr. Samson’s quest. I wondered what good a billion dollars was in a world of unimaginable cruelty and terror, but men like Mogart have imaginations different than mine. For example, if I had been Mogart, it would have never occurred to me to hire somebody like my uncle Farrell to steal the most powerful weapon that ever existed.
I missed Uncle Farrell. I missed the little apartment and the frozen dinners. I missed the way he wet his big lips and even all his lectures about getting ahead in the world. He was just trying to help me, to show me I didn’t have to end up like him. It hit me that he loved me, and I was the only family he had left.
To take my mind off things, I checked out a book from the library called The Once and Future King, about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I couldn’t get through it, so I rented this old movie called Excalibur with a bunch of English actors I had never heard of.
Arthur was this kind of goofy kid, actually, a squire to his brother Fey, toting around his sword and taking care of Fey’s horse and his armor, kind of his lackey, not even a knight. Nobody believed this kid could actually pull the Sword from the Stone, until Arthur did it and told them, “If you would be knights and follow a king, then follow me!”
Then he became king, built Camelot, and gathered his knights around the Round Table. Everything was great until his best knight, Lancelot, got together with his queen, Guinevere, and Arthur’s bastard son, Mordred, came to take everything over.
There’s a big, bloody battle at the end. Arthur kills Mordred, who sort of kills Arthur too, but it’s confusing because they show Arthur being taken over the sea by three angel-looking women in white robes. One of the knights picks up Excalibur and throws it into this big lake, where
the Lady of the Lake kind of floats up to grab it.
That last part confused me. I wondered how Mr. Samson and his knights ended up with the sword if the Lady took it after Arthur left. If I ever saw Mr. Samson again, I was going to ask him about that.
I don’t know if it was that movie, which I saw about forty-nine times, that made me have the dreams. I always fell asleep while the credits rolled, and I would dream of a gleaming white castle on a mountainside, and from its rampart flew triangular flags of black and gold, and inside its outer wall a thousand knights were mustered in full armor. They carried long black swords and their faces were painted black and their expressions were terrible as they fought some guys who had breached the outer wall, men with flowing hair in brown robes, and their faces were covered with mud and grimly set. The men in robes followed a man with golden hair and somehow I knew this man was Mr. Samson, though in my dream he looked different than I remembered him. They were about ten against a thousand, they had no hope, but they fought until the last man fell, and this last man was the knight with the golden hair.
I woke after that dream with the word “Játiva” on my lips. I went to the school library and found Játiva in the atlas. It was a town in Spain, like Mr. Samson said, right at this mountain called Monte Bernisa.
I had another dream too, a terrible dream, the kind that makes you wish you could wake up. I was far above a great plain or field and saw a vast army, row upon row of blank-faced soldiers marching, stretching as far as I could see, a million or more men, and the tramp of their feet was like thunder. Warplanes screamed overhead, lines of tanks rumbled over the field, and the night sky was lit up from the concussions of long-range missiles. Before this army, on a dark horse, rode a big man holding Excalibur, his face hidden in shadow, and as the jets screamed overhead, he raised the Sword in defiance, and from the army behind him came a cry that drowned out the sound of the bombs.
The man leaped from the horse, brought the Sword high over his head, and slammed it into the ground. Brilliant white light exploded from that spot and planes fell burning from the sky, tanks erupted into flame, and whole divisions of his foes were consumed in fire or fled screaming from the flood of light.
The light slowly died away, and then I was walking in a wasteland of broken concrete, uprooted, leafless trees, crushed and twisted cars with their hazard lights blinking. Ash floated everywhere, clinging to my hair and making me cough. I was looking for someone, calling a name, but I couldn’t hear who I was calling for. I was desperate to find whoever it was; if I could just find them, everything would be all right. But I always woke up without finding them.
13
After Mogart took the Sword, my life followed the same pattern. I would stay up late watching the news or Excalibur, stumble off to school after two or three hours of sleep filled with bad dreams, read the newspaper in class, then come home and go straight to my room to wait for the beginning of the end of the world.
At supper, the Tuttles would start in on me.
“Look at you!” Horace shouted one night. “You don’t sleep, you don’t eat, you mope around all day with your nose glued to the television screen or the newspaper—what’s the matter with you, you big-headed palooka?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it has something to do with my uncle dying.”
“Dear,” Betty said to Horace. “Maybe you shouldn’t bring up little Alfred’s uncle.”
“First of all, this kid is anything but little, and second of all, I didn’t bring up his uncle, he did!”
And he yelled, his pinched face puckered with rage: “Your problem is self-pity! You think you’re the only person on earth who’s ever lost somebody? The world is full of pain, Alfred, pain and big losers, and you’ve got to make up your mind to be a winner!”
“Like you?” I asked.
“Oh,” Betty gasped. “Oh, oh, oh!”
“That’s your other problem!” Horace screamed. “No gratitude! At least you’ve got a roof over your head and food for your big self! A lot of people in this world don’t even have that!”
And I couldn’t take any more. I left him sitting there, his thin lips moving silently, and locked myself in the bedroom. This got my roomies going, a thirteen-year-old greasy-haired thug named Dexter and his ten-year-old brother, Lester, who was also a thug, only not registering as high as Dexter on the thug-o-meter. They pounded on the door and yelled that it was their room too. I just turned the volume up on the news and pretended I didn’t hear them. Then Dexter began to shout he was going to cut me; he was going to cut me bad; and that reminded me of the scar on my thumb, which was an inch long and white as dental floss. Sometimes it ached and sometimes it burned and sometimes it just throbbed and tingled. I developed this nervous habit of running my index finger along it, feeling the little indent in my flesh, especially when I was nervous or thought I was going crazy.
I started skipping school. I didn’t see much point in an education when the world was about to end. I left in the mornings as if I was going to the bus stop, then cut through a side street to Broadway and walked all the way to the Old City, the historic section of downtown Knoxville. I hung out in the coffeehouses and used-book shops or paced up and down Jackson Street, looking at the homeless people or the long-haired college kids lounging in the sidewalk cafés.
Then, late one afternoon, I decided I just couldn’t go back and face the Tuttles, so I ate an early dinner at a place called McCallister’s. It was about five o’clock and the dinner crowd hadn’t arrived yet, so I had the place mostly to myself.
Mostly, but not all. Across the room sat a tall man with long snow-white hair. He ate very slowly, carving his steak into razor-thin slices and chewing real slow. Every once in a while he lifted his eyes toward me. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen him before. His fingers wrapped around his wineglass were long and delicate. He had big hands, like a basketball player or a pianist.
He stood up and that’s when I saw how tall he was. He pulled a white handkerchief from his breast pocket as he sneezed loudly. Then he walked out of the room without looking in my direction, and I wondered why some old guy having dinner was making me so paranoid.
I was feeling guilty at about this point because now it was past six and the Tuttles were probably sitting down to dinner and Horace was probably shouting, “Where is that Kropp? Where is that big-headed palooka?” So I called their house from a pay phone.
Betty answered. “Oh, Alfred, where have you been? Where are you now? We’ve been worried sick! We were about to call the police or 911, though Horace has been telling me we shouldn’t call 911 except in the case of an emergency and he doesn’t feel this qualifies since you’re nearly sixteen and old enough to look after yourself, but I told him you’re just a boy despite your larger-than-normal size, but we have been worried sick.”
“Don’t be worried, Betty,” I said. “I’m okay.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m going to be a while longer. I just wanted to tell you I was okay.”
“Oh, Alfred,” she said. “Alfred, please come home.” She was crying.
“I don’t have a home anymore,” I said, and I hung up.
There was somebody else I wanted to call, but it took me a long time to work up the nerve to do it. I got her number from the operator and almost hung up when a guy who sounded like he might be her dad answered the phone. But I didn’t.
“Is Amy there?” I asked.
After what seemed like a couple of years, I heard her twangy voice.
“Who is this?” she asked.
“Me. Alfred. Alfred Kropp.”
“Who?”
“The guy you’re tutoring in math.”
“Oh! The dead-uncle guy,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “The dead-uncle guy. Look, I just wanted to say—”
“I knew it wasn’t somebody I know,” she said. “Because you called this number. People I know call me on my cell phone.”
/> “Right,” I said. “Look, the reason I called. I—I don’t think I’ll be at tutoring tomorrow. Or ever. I don’t think I’m coming back.”
There was silence. I said, to break it, “I said I don’t think I’m coming back.”
“I heard you. Look, I know you must be really messed up right now. I know what that’s like. When I was twelve my big brother ran over my dog. I couldn’t get out of bed for a week.”
Why did I think she cared? Why was I thinking anybody cared? My own father hadn’t even cared. I was an accident everybody had to suffer from, like Barry with his sprained wrist.
I said good-bye to Amy Pouchard and started to walk. It was getting dark now, and there were a lot of people about, couples mostly, walking arm in arm, and I watched them as I walked. Something made me turn around at one point and I saw him, the tall guy with the white hair, about half a block down. He was standing by a newspaper rack, pretending to read. I walked to the intersection of Western and Central, turned left, and walked half a block to Ye Olde Coffee House, right next to the old JFG coffee plant.
I went in and ordered a grande with extra cream and sugar, and sat at the long counter against the window, watching the couples pass outside.
Halfway through my grande I saw him sit down at the very end of the bar, next to the bathroom. I picked up my coffee and walked over to sit down next to him.
We drank our coffee in silence for a moment. The end of his nose was red and runny; he had a cold. He pulled out the white handkerchief. It had a design of a horse and rider on it. The rider was a knight carrying a red banner. That clinched it for me.
“How is Mr. Samson?” I asked him.
“Dead.”
I thought about my dream and asked, “When did that happen?”
“Two days ago.”
“Mr. Mogart—he killed him?”
“Do not say that name.” He folded the handkerchief into a perfect square and tucked it back into his breast pocket.
“Who’re you?” I asked.