The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp (Alfred Kropp #1)(25)

I pulled off the interstate around noon to get some gas and something to eat. All I’d had that day was half a bagel, and Bennacio hadn’t even touched his breakfast.

I paid for my gas and bought two corn dogs, a bag of chips, and a couple of fountain drinks. Back in the car, I handed one of the corn dogs to Bennacio.

“What is this?” he asked.

“A corn dog.”

“A corn dog?”

“It’s a wiener wrapped in corn bread.”

“Why is it skewered?”

“It’s a kind of handle.”

He looked at the corn dog suspiciously. I pulled to the far side of the building and parked near the air hose.

“What are you doing, Kropp?”

“I need to check your side. Pull up your shirt, Bennacio.”

“My side is fine. We need to keep driving.”

I just looked at him. He sighed, laid the corn dog still in its yellow wrapping on his lap, and lifted up his shirt. I pulled the dressing aside and saw the wound had already closed. I’m no doctor, but it looked almost healed.

“Let’s go, Kropp,” Bennacio said crisply, pulling down his shirt.

I got back on the interstate. Bennacio didn’t eat his corn dog; it lay on his lap for another twenty miles as he stared out his window.

“Your corn dog’s getting cold,” I told him. He ignored me. I reached over, took it off his lap, pulled off the wrapping, and ate it. It occurred to me I hadn’t seen Bennacio eat since the restaurant the night before.

“Maybe I should have asked before I bought you the corn dog,” I said. “But I figured, who doesn’t like corn dogs?”

“I am not hungry.”

“You gotta eat, Bennacio. Tell me what you want and I’ll stop again.”

“No, no. Keep driving.”

“Where am I going, exactly?”

“Canada.”

I looked over at him. “Canada?”

He sighed. “To Halifax, in Nova Scotia. I have friends there.”

“Jeez, Bennacio, I had no idea I was driving you all the way to Canada! Wouldn’t it have been easier just to fly to Spain?”

“The airports will be watched.”

“Won’t they be in Halifax too? I mean, wouldn’t they think of that?”

I wondered where exactly Halifax was in Nova Scotia. I wondered where Nova Scotia was. I didn’t ask him, though. He had a way of talking to me that sounded like he didn’t want to talk to me, like he was just being polite.

“Who are these friends in Halifax? The what-do-ya-call-’ems, OIPEP guys?”

“OIPEP is not my friend,” he said.

“Then what is it? What does OIPEP stand for, anyway?” He didn’t say anything, so my mind tried to fill in the blanks: Organization of Interested Parties in Evolutionary Psychiatry. But that didn’t make any sense.

“The knights were not the only ones who knew of the Sword’s existence,” Bennacio said. “We were its protectors, Kropp, but the Sword itself has many friends.”

“Oh. Well, that’s good. It’s good to have friends. I left my best friend behind in Salina, where I grew up. His name is Nick. So what happens once we get to Halifax? Are you crossing the Atlantic by boat?”

He didn’t say anything.

“What?” I asked. “Too slow? You guys probably have supersonic jets or something at your disposal.”

After driving in silence a while—that seemed to be the method Bennacio preferred—we hit some rain. Bennacio sipped his fountain drink, holding the tip of the straw against his lower lip with his upper, the straw pressing against his chin, not sucking but delicately drawing up the soda into his mouth. There was the gentle hissing of the rain and Bennacio slurping his drink, and those were the only two sounds for miles. It started to get to me.

“I was wondering,” I said, “who Mr. Samson was descended from.”

Bennacio sighed. “Lancelot,” he said wearily.

I decided not to worry if I was bugging him. I was getting tired of his Old World superior act and the way he talked to me like I was a little kid or somebody with a mental condition. And I was getting sleepy. And though it was a truly awesome car, I wasn’t used to driving long distances. I wasn’t used to driving, period.

“That’s the guy who stole Guinevere from King Arthur,” I said, like Bennacio might not know that little detail. “I guess none of this would have happened if he had controlled himself. Are you married, Bennacio?”

“No. Many of us marry in secret or not at all, thus our numbers have dwindled over the years.”

“How come?”

“Remember, Kropp, we are sworn to protect the Sword. To love another, to be bound by blood to another, that is to invite blackmail—or worse, betrayal. You mention Lancelot. Samson himself never wed because he could not bear the thought of endangering another human being.”

“There was something else I was wondering,” I said. “How did Mogart know about the Sword in the first place?”

“All Knights of the Sacred Order know.”

I looked over at him. He was staring at the rain smacking against the glass and his face was expressionless.

“Mogart was a knight?”

“Once.”