The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp (34 page)

I smoothed her hair and stroked her forehead with my other hand. “Live,” I said. “Live.”

And after what seemed a very long time, her eyes opened, she took a deep breath, and I knew I had saved her.

52

I guess after all that, I would have bled to death beside her, but Mike came to and found us inside the cave. Soon we were loaded onto stretchers and men carried us up the path to the top of the cliff, where a helicopter was waiting. We were flown to a hospital in London.

After a couple of weeks I was able to sit up and eat some solid food, though hospital food in the best of circumstances isn't that good, and this was England, after all, so the food was really lousy.

They did two operations on me to remove part of my lower intestines and fix up my left lung, which Mogart had torn with his final thrust. After another couple of weeks I could walk around, and sometimes Natalia would walk with me in the hallway. We didn't talk much on these walks, though she did thank me for saving her life. Once I asked her if she believed in angels.

“As a little girl I thought I had a guardian angel.”

“That doesn't count,” I told her. “Little kids believe in Santa Claus too. Your father said the angels live whether we believe in them or not.”

She looked away then. I could have kicked myself for mentioning her father. For once she was actually talking to me as if I were a halfway normal person.

“I guess it would be tough for you to forgive me,” I said. “I can't seem to, no matter how hard I try.”

“You should have left me to die,” she said. “It would be better. Why didn't you leave me to die?” She began to cry.

I had apologized, but that only made it worse for her. I was beginning to think that was my special gift: taking something bad and making it worse. I tried to hold her hand while she cried, but she turned away from me. I could save her life but not her broken heart.

After Natalia left, I felt really bad, the worst I'd felt since this whole thing with the Sword started. You would think the prospect of saving six billion lives might make me feel better, but it didn't. I could save the world, but it wouldn't bring Uncle Farrell back. It wouldn't bring my father back.

Or Bennacio. I kept seeing him fall, the way he raised his arms and just let Mogart run him through. Why hadn't Bennacio fought? He could have lunged forward and tackled Mogart by the knees. Why had he just given up like that? How was that keeping his precious vow? I was pretty sore at him for that. If he hadn't quit, I wouldn't have ended up with the Sword, he would be alive, and Natalia's heart would not be broken.

A shadow fell into the room but I hardly noticed it. I just wanted it all to go away. The hospital, London, my memories, me.

The shadow came closer and I heard her ask softly, “Alfred, why are you crying?”

I said, “It works on everybody but me, Natalia. I can heal everybody but myself.”

She sat in the wooden chair beside the bed. She had changed into a long red cloak over a gray dress with one of those soft, high collars, and her earrings were fat diamonds about the size of green olives. Her reddish gold hair was loose and flowed over her shoulders. She looked like some medieval princess, beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Seeing her dressed like that, I realized Natalia was leaving.

“You are forgetting something,” she said.

“I can't forget anything,” I said. “That's the problem.”

“You are forgetting you saved the world.”

I didn't say anything. I wondered why she had come back, but at the same time I knew why, though I couldn't put it into words.

Then she did. “I'm leaving, Alfred.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“Don't.”

“I must.” She drew a deep breath. She was sitting very straight in the chair.

“But before I go,” she went on, “I wanted to pay homage to the master.”

She looked down at my snotty face.

“I'm not the master of anything,” I said.

“Alfred,” she answered softly. “Like my father, I have waited a very long time for your coming. My father would tell me stories of our ancestor Bedivere, how he betrayed the king by refusing his command to return the Sword to the waters from which it rose. I would spend hours imagining what the master would be like. Tall, handsome, brave, honest, chaste, modest, the knight of all knights—in short, everything that I believed my father to be.” She looked sideways at me, clearly not the guy she had pictured as the master of the Sword. “In fact, when I was still very young I told him that
he
might be the master, that perhaps it was his destiny to claim the Sword as his own, a fitting end to Bedivere's shame.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me of the prophecy Merlin made before he departed the world of men, that the master would not come until the last male heir to the house of Bedivere had perished. My father believed that prophecy, Alfred. He believed it because he believed in the justice of it. It was the price we would pay for Bedivere's failure, our atonement for his sin.”

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?”