Far From Ordinary

by M James Murray

  Sarah brushed a strand of brown hair from her face and queried the database for all mentions of Alfred Katzmann. She clicked on the first link which looked promising, translated from its original German text.

  “Kaizer descendant cuts rope at Children’s Hospital, eh.” Sarah quickly skimmed through the article. “Living descendant of the last German Emperor,” she pursed her lips.

  Somebody had wanted him dead. Somebody succeeded. The biggest question that Sarah had was why.

  #

  Later on that evening, Sarah was pondering the same subject by herself at the CIA's unofficial watering hole, an Irish pub not too far from the field office. A few agents had offered to join her, but she had refused.

  Fuck that noise.

  She wasn’t really in the mood for company. Not that type of company, anyways.

  Half of the pot lights on the ceiling had burnt out over time, and the floor was covered in a thin layer of sawdust.

  The bar tonight was dead, almost empty. Sarah took a seat at the bar top and ordered a whiskey on the rocks.

  She sipped the drink and felt the cool fire travel from her throat down to her belly while absentmindedly rubbing her right shoulder which had begun to ache fiercely since the crash

  She’d come to the bar for physical intimacy. It had been a long couple of days, and Sarah could undoubtedly use the touch of another person.

  Men never lasted long in her life. She hadn’t had a boyfriend since her early twenties, and even those hadn’t been around for a long time. None of them had ever been worth keeping around longer than a night or two, anyway.

  Sarah had had the child debate with herself many years ago and had decided that she was alright not bringing any children into the world. Crying, shitting, emotionally exhausting children.

  No, Sarah was perfectly alright with the only man in her life being her dog, Charlie.

  But now and then Sarah felt the urge.

  Sarah took another sip of her drink. A bigger sip this time.

  Why was it that whenever she did take someone home, they ended up being more of a girl than she was? The last one wanted to cuddle for fuck's sake. To cuddle, like she was some prize toy that he won at the fair or some deluded shit like that.

  Some things just aren’t meant to last longer than one whiskey filled evening.

  The news report was playing on the television behind the bar, talking about the murder of Jane Dempsey, a socialite from Southern Houston. The story detailed her life, how her husband and her son who were both high up in a prominent oil company were devastated.

  That’s why it’s a story, Sarah thought. No-one would care if it were some kid from the projects who’d died. High society is mourning one of their own.

  The story, Sarah noticed, did not contain any mention of Alfred Katzmann’s probable death at all. He was missing; authorities were urging citizens to call in with any tips on his whereabouts. It brought a thin smile to Sarah’s lips.

  German Prince dies in sewage treatment plant. The media would shit themselves in excitement.

  Sarah could see in the reflection of the mirror behind the dimly lit bar that a table of two college-aged jocks was laughing and glancing in her direction. She sighed. She wanted physical intimacy, but she wanted it from someone who knew what they were doing.

  She knew what would happen next. They’d order another few drinks, maybe a round of shots or two and then when there was enough liquid courage in the system, one of them would come up to her, invade her personal space and try to put the moves on.

  She wasn’t even wearing anything that she’d consider sexy, either. Just a plain brown shirt and a comfortable pair of jeans.

  There was this pack mentality with college boys. They couldn’t resist a pretty woman sitting by herself. Sarah shook her head, tucked a piece of hair behind her ear and put her jacket on.

  Finally one of them worked up the nerve to come and talk to her. He had chinstrap facial hair and a Yankees ballcap on backward.

  Go fuck the cheerleader instead, buddy.

  “No,” Sarah said before he opened his mouth. The jock, about to give his absolute best pickup line, suddenly ran out of things to say and meekly retreated to his table where his friend was laughing and banging his hand on the table.

  “Shut down!” She heard him call.

  “Another one?” The bartender asked, pointing at Sarah’s empty cup with his index finger.

  “Why the hell not,” she replied, clinking the empty glass against the bartop.

  She was hoping for some spark, some intuition from the stiff drink in front of her.

  Those people who were pleasantly buzzed had all the world’s answers, after all.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “So, I get that there’s not a lot of room, but do I really need to sit next to him?” Dick said. The big cargo plane had landed in eastern France, where Adrian, Dick and their precious cargo boarded another much smaller four-seater plane to take them to Berlin, Germany.

  The small plane was noisy, without any of the sound muffling features of the larger jets, so each of them wore a pilot’s headset to communicate with each other.

  Dick had never seen mountains before. It didn’t matter how many people said that they were huge, you didn’t know until you saw one for yourself up close, saw it kiss the sky and part the clouds.

  “That’s amazing, look at that!” Dick said. He took in the scenery around him, pointing out the things which interested him to Adrian and the pilot.

  Eventually, Adrian had threatened to turn off Dick’s headset if he didn’t stop it, so he sat in silence. He looked over at the passenger sitting beside him. Under the normal turbulence of the small Cessna plane, Alfred Gunter Katzmann had shifted in flight. His lifeless eyes with the clouded irises were now staring directly at Dick’s soul, and his jowls jiggled like jello with every small jolt the plane experienced.

  Adrian had insisted on sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, leaving Dick in the back with Alfred Gunter Katzmann’s overweight body.

  “You should consider it an honor to sit beside his Lordship,” Adrian said. Dick looked over at the lifeless body.

  “You didn’t want to sit here,” Dick muttered under his breath.

  “What was that, my boy?” Adrian called. Dick was sure he had heard exactly what he had said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Folks, we’re still about three hours away from Berlin,” the pilot said. “Looks like we’re in for some major turbulence, so strap yourselves in.”

  Even in the recycled cabin air, Dick could smell the odor of decay coming from Alfred. He was disgusted to find that it also smelled just a little bit sweet. He tried to close his eyes, but he felt drawn towards this bloated dead man.

  He reached over and shut the dead man’s eyes, the skin cold and a little bit sticky under his fingers.

  “It’s rude to stare,” he told the corpse. In the front seat, Adrian and the pilot exchanged puzzled glances.

  “I think he’s talking to the body,” Adrian said.

  “Why?” The pilot asked. Adrian shrugged.

  Dick looked out the window and saw an unusual looking cloud. He almost told Adrian about it, but Adrian seemed to get a bit grouchy with things like that today.

  He spared a glance back at Alfred. The eyes were open again! It was probably Dick’s imagination, but his Lordship seemed almost a little angry.

  That’s impossible, he thought. He’s dead! It’s all just your imagination.

  He reached over again and closed Alfred’s eyes again, shuddering. Working with shit, he could do. Touching dead people, maybe not so much.

  “Stay closed this time, please.” As a courtesy, he picked a piece of lint off the dead man’s shoulder. “There! Looking fresh now. Ready to go entertain the lady ghosts or something.”

  “Richard, I hope that I'm not too forward, but it is a little bit disconcerting when you speak to the dead body like he’s going to answer you,” Adrian’s voice filtered in f
rom the headset.

  “Sorry!” He looked over at the body again. As he feared, the eyes were wide open. “He just keeps staring at me.”

  He racked his brain to think of what his Mama would have said in this situation. Nothing came to mind. As far as he knew his Mama had never sat beside the corpse of a German prince on an airplane.

  A substantial current of turbulence shook the aircraft.

  “Alright, folks, stay buckled in. This is going to be a bumpy ride for a bit,” said the pilot.

  The plane bounced around for about twenty minutes before the pilot found a calm patch of air. Dick couldn’t stop watching Alfred Gunter Katzmann the entire time. He bobbed, and he jiggled around, almost as though he were alive again.

  He would have looked comical bouncing around in his too tight Hawaiian shirt with his considerable gut spilling out, unshaven face and pencil-thin grey mustache, but Dick was shaking in his boots.

  He wouldn’t stop looking at Dick with his milky, dry eyes.

  At least the turbulence has stopped, Dick thought. But no sooner than when he finished the though the plane began to shake again, even more violently than before. Dick felt that he would be sick, the cloyingly sweet smell of Alfred Katzmann was ever present in his nostrils.

  An unusually violent jolt made the plane groan in stress and sent Lord Alfred Gunter Katzmann lurching to his side, and into Dick’s lap.

  Hearing Dick screams from the cockpit Adrian did the only sensible thing he could think of – he turned off Dick’s headset with the flip of a switch.

  “Do you think he’s okay?” Asked the pilot.

  “He’s fine, I’m sure. Quite simply, he can be dramatic at times. I don’t doubt that the rough ride has upset his delicate sensibilities. Unless you’d prefer that I…” He hovered his finger over the switch that would allow them to hear Dick from the back menacingly.

  “Negatory!”

  Meanwhile, in the back, Dick was not having a good time.

  “Why didn’t we strap him in?” He wailed. Now Dick was tall, incredibly thin, and very weak, so try as he might he could not move Alfred’s large body off his lap. He could see the dead eyes looking up at him once again, the irises clouded over and milky like those of a fish about to be gutted.

  He reached out with his spare arm and closed the eyes. They opened. Dick couldn’t hear anything over the din of the airplane cabin, but he pictured the cold and clammy eyelids opening every time with a wet slinking sic noise in his mind.

  He closed them. They opened. He shut them again. They opened.

  “Damn it!” He yelled. “Adrian, I could really use a hand back here! And you,” he said, speaking to the heavy body on his lap, “you should be nicer to me, given everything I’ve done for you.”

  “Adrian? Adrian! I don’t think you did a good job of cleaning his hair!” It seemed that Alfred’s brown hair was still a darker shade of brown than it should have been. His hair, rubbing against Dick’s white shirt, was leaving brown stains everywhere.

  A few days after a persons death there is sometimes a build-up of gasses in certain cavities. This is entirely natural and, usually, nothing comes of it.

  Dick was in anything but a usual situation, however. The turbulence in the plane was pushing Dick’s arm into Alfred’s enormous belly, which forced the built-up gasses from his stomach up through his diaphragm, and his vocal cords.

  “Huuuuggghhh. Huugggghhhh” cried the body.

  “Jesus Christ!” Shouted Dick, struggling hard to get free.

  In the cockpit, the pilot turned to Adrian.

  “Do you think we should check on him? I can hear his screams even from here.”

  Adrian considered.

  “I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “Huuuuuggghhh,” said the body. And then, “Prrrbbt.”

  “Gah! Help, somebody, please! He’s alive, and he’s gassy!”

  Chapter Twenty

  “I swear, on my mother’s grave, he was talking!” Dick said.

  “Your imagination was going wild, surely,” Adrian responded. “It has been well over a week since His Lordship passed. What you suggest is, quite simply, not possible.”

  “He was screaming from the beyond! He sounded like he was in pain. Hrrrgh! That’s what he sounded like!” Alfred Katzmann’s dead body had stayed on Dick’s lap until after the small Cessna touched down at a private airfield.

  It had been three hours of panic for the young man.

  Adrian told him that, because of the turbulence, the pilot had switched off everyone’s microphones so that he could better concentrate.

  Dick had been more than a little annoyed with the blonde ex-soldier.

  “He could at least apologize to me,” Dick said under his breath.

  “I’ve seen enough of those in my time, my boy. Maybe next time we should learn the valuable lesson of ensuring that everyone is wearing the appropriate safety restraints.”

  There had been a vaguely military looking black van waiting for them at the landing strip. The outside had been nondescript. However, the inside was lined with Perrier water bottles with custom labels, and a snifter of alcohol in the corner.

  “What’s this?” Dick had asked Adrian, referring to the odd symbol on the bottle of water.

  “It’s the symbol of the Black Eagle,” Adrian had replied. “The organization which I work for.”

  “Ah,” Dick said. He wanted to ask more about that, but Adrian had seemed agitated.

  Finally, they arrived at an official looking building with white awnings and two massive stone lions standing guard by the entrance.

  The limestone steps and the polished brass door gave a surreal look of importance to the building, like it used to be the residence of kings and emperors.

  Adrian led him to an office richly decorated with various exotic items. It was large and was dominated by a solid oak desk in the corner.

  “These are from all the places which I’ve visited,” Adrian said. “Smashing, aren’t they?”

  There were shields from African tribes, rent and worn from use in combat as well as a didgeridoo from Australia.

  There was also a pair of beautifully crafted katanas from Japan. Adrian noticed his interest in them.

  “Beautiful weapons, no? Perhaps one day I shall let you hold one.”

  Dick smiled at that. He’d never held a sword before, but he had always pictured himself with one, like some of his favorite comic book heroes.

  “Now, try these on. They should be your size.” Adrian handed him a pair of smartly pressed khakis and a button up t-shirt. They fit him perfectly.

  Dick couldn’t remember the last time he wore clothes which had fit as intended.

  “Thank you!” he said, touched by the gesture. He wasn’t sure exactly how Adrian had gotten his measurements, but he wasn’t about to complain.

  “Think nothing of it, my boy. Let’s go.” They set off down the hall, stopping briefly at a reception desk where Adrian had offered up Dick’s old clothes with instructions to throw them out.

  The receptionist had wrinkled her nose at the smell but complied without complaint. Finally, they found themselves in an elegant waiting room decorated with marble flooring and exotic plants.

  Dick kept running his fingers through his hair. The artificially created humidity necessary to support the foreign, tropical plants was causing his hair to stick up in very odd places.

  “I swear, he was shouting,” Dick brought up the subject once again of the dead man pinning him down.

  “This is nonsense. Dead bodies do not shout. They do not emote. And they most certainly do not pass gas!” Dick went to answer, but Adrian silenced him by raising his finger. “You are about to meet Abelard Lochte. He is a great man, a visionary and a leader of men. We will not be inconveniencing him with such nonsense, my boy. Do you understand?”

  “I –“ Adrian silenced Dick again with a glance.

  “Do you understand?”

  Dick sighed. He was beginning to th
ink that he was just a footnote on this adventure.

  “Yes Adrian, I understand.”

  “He is the leader of the New Socialist party. Have you brushed up on your German parliamentary knowledge lately?”

  “Of course,” Dick responded. He had no idea what the New Socialist Party was, or what they stood for but he wasn’t about to admit that.