Far From Ordinary

by M James Murray

  “How did this happen?” Shouted a voice from the crowd.

  “I regret that we had to inform you all in such a manner, but I could not in good conscience keep such an important fact hidden from the esteemed people in this room. Yes, our beloved Prussian prince has died. Our very own Adrian Vandervoort was there and tried to stop the heinous deed.”

  There were wails of anger and notes of sadness among the crowd now. Dick looked around again. It all seemed ingenuine. He’d personally spoken with at least three or four of the people in the room. They had already known of the Prussian Prince’s death.

  “Yes, he was there,” Abelard’s deep baritone silenced the crowd. “Many of you know that he traversed the Atlantic to save Alfred. Alas, despite his best efforts he was unable to stop the attempt on his life.”

  “Yes, Adrian was there. Held his hand as he died. A small comfort, but comfort nonetheless. He has told me that he wished he could do more. I say, instead, that he should be proud. Forces have conspired against us which were out of our control.

  “As a final mercy, however, Alfred Gunter Katzmann’s final words have been passed on to us.”

  “Do you know what he said to us, my friends? With his dying breath, Alfred Gunter Katzmann told us that Germany could be powerful again, it can be glorious.

  The audience listened with rapt attention. Abelard Lochte’s words were powerful and moving.

  “Let this be a small blessing in disguise, however, that I have brought you Lord Alfred Gunter Katzmann’s murderer. He is here now, at this very instant, in the same room as us! He attended the party, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, mocking us with his very presence. He thought us simple, my friends. He thought that we didn’t know his heinous crime.

  “Richard Mitey murdered our beloved Prince!” Abelard shouted, pointing at Dick. “We have risked life and limb, and precious Black Eagle resources to bring him here, to Germany, to face judgment!”

  A murderous murmur passed through the room. The people sitting in the chairs closest to Dick suddenly recoiled as though they had just discovered that he had the plague.

  In the hall, in a reserved seat close to the front of the room, Dick Mitey was feeling very, very small.

  “Um, what?” He said.

  Dick had never been a smart man. But even he could tell that he was in a world of trouble

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Excerpt from the New York Times

  American detained in Germany over Alleged Murder

  April 12, 2018

  By John Roque

  BERLIN, Germany – A Houston man was arrested yesterday in connection to the suspicious death of a high-ranking German official.

  Dick Mitey, a native of South Houston, was arrested by Interpol yesterday in Berlin, Germany, in conjunction with an ongoing investigation surrounding the death of Alfred Gunter Katzmann. Katzmann, a descendant of Kaiser Wilhelm, the last emperor of Germany, was last seen in Houston Texas attending a dinner party hosted by Jane Dempsey, a Texas socialite who died under mysterious circumstances. It is speculated that the two deaths are connected at this time.

  Katzmann’s body was found naked outside the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament building located in downtown Berlin. It is undetermined how or why the body was deposed in such a fashion. Thus far Interpol has declined comment however it is believed that the cause of death is poison.

  There is currently no known motive for the accused.

  The U.S. embassy has been in contact with the German government, however, in reaching out to them, The Times has learned that there are currently no plans to extradite the accused.

  #

  “You’re making a huge mistake!” he said as they shoved him into the gunmetal gray prison cell. His narrow frame skidded along the cold, smooth concrete floor and his eye throbbed in pain from where the guard had struck him.

  Immediately Richard Mitey stood back up, wiped the dust from his prison-issued jumpsuit as the heavy door of the cell closed with a screech. He walked up to the door and put his hands around the thick bars. “Stop! Come back!”

  He banged against the solid steel bars until his knuckles began to bruise deep purple, then he started to yell at the top of his voice, a shrill sound which was like a tornado siren.

  Finally, a guard came back to check on him.

  “Oh thank God you’re here!” Dick said. “There’s been a mix-up. You see your friend was a bit rude and hit me when I tried to explain before –“

  The guard silenced him with an abrupt motion of his hand.

  “Hör auf mit dem Radau!” Said the guard.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak German,” Dick said quietly. “Do you speaken zhe English?”

  Dick took the intense glare of the guard as a “no.”

  “You’ve got to help me out here, okay? Can you take a note or something? This’ll get sorted out soon enough, I’m sure. Hey, wait! Where are you going? Damn it!”

  Now, Dick didn’t usually swear, but being locked up in a prison cell by mistake seemed like an extenuating circumstance.

  He hoped that the ghost of his Mama would forgive him.

  After the guard left, Dick picked up the clamor again, beating his shoe against the bars and hollering at the top of his lungs.

  But nobody came.

  Finally, he sat down on the thin cot in the corner of the room. He could feel the criss-cross pattern of leather straps which functioned as a box spring on his back as smoothly as if the mattress hadn’t been there at all.

  Of course there weren’t bed springs.

  “Cause people would use them to shank people,” Dick guessed. He sighed deeply and laid down on the uncomfortable bed.

  How had he ever gotten himself into such a situation? Half a world away from his home, in a foreign place where people spoke a foreign language.

  Dick glanced over at the toilet, positioned dangerously close to the cot. Years of less than adequate maintenance had left brown calcium deposit rings around the bowl of the porcelain.

  He looked around, but there were no cleaning supplies to be found.

  “At least it’s just me,” he said, trying hard to look at the positives. Having to share a cell with another person would be terrible with a toilet mere feet from his bed.

  That’s how it all started, though, Dick realized, thinking of the interconnecting network of pipes under the floor. If it hadn’t been for that one night, that blocked pipe then none of this would have happened.

  Would they execute me? Dick wondered with a gulp. He couldn’t remember off the top of his head whether or not Germany still used the death penalty.

  Not that it would matter much anyway. If they wanted him dead, he would die. Simple as that.

  It wasn’t a very reassuring thought.

  Dick passed a long, spindly finger over the text emblazoned on the front of his orange jumpsuit.

  “54373. I guess that’s me, now.”

  But why? He had done nothing wrong. As far as he knew, anyway. Dick sighed. Maybe it was his fault, after all.

  It was his fault for getting in over his head, for not just going home and continuing his dull life. He should have known better than to get involved with charming secret agents and beautiful women.

  That wasn’t him, after all. All he had ever wanted was a friend.

  “You’ve got the wrong person!” He shouted to a passing guard, who didn’t even slow down in his stride.

  “I don’t even think that they speak English,” Dick said to himself sadly.

  He could still remember those faces, all looking at him, looking more like beast than man in that great hall with the heavy wooden door.

  “Deep breaths,” Dick told himself. “You’ve got to stay positive.”

  But the stress of imprisonment in a foreign country where no-one understood him was too much to take.

  Dick put his hands on his face, turned towards the wall and sobbed silently.

  #

  Excerpt from the New Yor
k Times

  German Chancellor Defeated in No-Confidence Vote

  June 3, 2018

  By Esther Cruickshank

  BERLIN, Germany – In a shocking turn of events German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been narrowly defeated in a vote of no-confidence.

  Merkel was defeated 301-297 and has stepped down from her position as German Chancellor. Abelard Lochte of the New Socialist Party has assumed the leadership reigns of the German Bundestag for now, with an official vote coming shortly.

  Merkel, widely considered the unofficial leader of the European Union, has a wide range of accomplishments to her name. However, party faith in her declined sharply following an odd incident on March 12 where a prominent member of Germany’s old ruling line of Kaisers was found dead in front of the German parliament building.

  Europe has plunged into an uncertainty which hasn’t been felt since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990.

  Read more about the potential impact on the European Union here.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Dick Mitey sat in a jail cell with his hands on his face. The past few months had been tediously dull. He’d gotten used to the routine every day, to the isolation.

  As used to it as he could get, anyway.

  Dick often thought of Adrian. He’d never forget that expression Adrian had as he watched Abelard Lochte accusing Dick of a crime that he had not committed.

  It had reminded him of Dimitri, of all people, lying dead on the ground with smoke circling out of his skull.

  At first, it hadn’t made sense. Adrian was Dick’s friend, and you don’t accuse your friends of international espionage.

  But the quiet and unwanted solitude had given Dick a lot of time to think. He realized that Adrian was never his friend. He’d been used, played like a cheap fiddle and then discarded when it was no longer convenient to have him around.

  Dick wasn’t the type to get angry quickly. His Mama had told him that anger was never the answer, and he’d believed that through his twenty-seven years on this earth.

  Or was it twenty-eight now? Dick hadn’t seen a calendar in a while. He wanted desperately to ask the date, but the guards wouldn’t do anything other than shout at him in German.

  Dick often thought back to the plane trip overseas where he and Adrian had finished an entire bottle of expensive rum together.

  How could someone be so open, so vulnerable and yet so distant? The thought rubbed salt in Dick’ wounds.

  “You’ve spent your whole life thinking you were mediocre. Are you surprised that you are?” Adrian’s words, spoken so many months ago. Dick hadn’t forgotten them.

  Dick wasn’t surprised. He was mediocre. Everyone had told him that he was his entire life. Not smart enough, or handsome enough. Not enough of anything to make him anything more than mediocre.

  “Not good enough,” Dick said to himself.

  For the first time in his life that thought made him angry. If he ever saw Adrian again, he would punch him right in the face. Maybe bloody that aquiline nose. Seeing blood drip into that stupid mustache, that would make Dick happy. The thought made him smile.

  Dick had tried to work out, to take the edge off of the boredom of the grey cell with padded walls. His anger had motivated him, at first, but try as he might he could not do any more than a single push-up.

  But Dick kept to it every day. Some days now he could do two or three.

  He thought about the future at first. He’d thought, as all caged rats do, of escape. Somehow overpowering the guards, stealing a jeep and leaving.

  But the guards were tall, powerfully built men. And Dick was just Dick. He hadn’t thought it possible to get any skinnier, but the prison rations weren’t high on nutritional value. Dick looked at his hands and felt that they were gaunt. The tendons, the veins were all much more visible than before. His skin had taken on an ashy hew as well.

  He was only allowed outside once per week, in the yard with the massive barbed wire fences and even then not for long.

  No, escape was out of the question.

  Dick had thought about his release as well. He’d imagined someone opening the door every time he heard footsteps and telling him that he was free to go.

  He’d pictured the feeling of walking outside, breathing the fresh air and enjoying the sun on his face. He’d imagined it in dreams so vivid that he believed he was there, not in the grey cell with the padded walls and the one door with the tiny window that was his only connection to the world outside his cell.

  But no, Dick knew that no-one was coming to save him.

  Deep down in his mind, Dick knew he’d be in this hell for the rest of his life.

  The days passed into weeks which passed into months which passed into time immeasurable.

  Why was he being punished? That’s why people went to prison, right? To be punished. He knew that. Bad people went to jail, that’s just how the world worked. Dick didn’t recall being a bad person, but he must have been.

  Dick wanted to go home. Adrian had promised him that he would, after all. But now Dick was wondering if Adrian’s definition of home was different from his own.

  For Dick home was friendship and love and comfort. It was his job as a waste technician in the sewage treatment plant which admittedly was shitty. But it was his.

  Home was his small apartment where the air conditioning didn’t always work. Where Delilah would come by in her gossamer nightie to steal his coffee and Irish cream. He missed her smell of stale cigarettes and sweat which somehow was so intoxicating to him.

  But then again, maybe that wasn’t home. Delilah’s mocking laughter still burned his ears. She didn’t care about him, not really. He was just a curiosity to her. Until he wasn’t.

  That was the way of the world, after all.

  Dick was beginning to think that home was a feeling, not a place.

  He thought about Sarah Nieminen as well. If she was who she said she was, shouldn’t she have done something by now? Didn’t the CIA have all kinds of influence? She had seemed good, after all.

  But so had Adrian.

  He remembered how Sarah had smelled of lilac and something else which was more intoxicating than any glass of alcohol could ever be. How she’d smoothed her hair, and swore like a sailor.

  How she’d taken control of every situation. That part had reminded Dick of his dear departed mother. But Sarah had taken control naturally like it was second nature. Dick’ mother had been loud and opinionated. He had always been afraid to say no.

  Some people, Dick realized, were only friendly to other people – to mediocre people – when it suited them.

  Dick thought about Dimitri. About how he looked when Adrian had shot him in the back. That mixture of impotent fury and fear. Dick hadn’t known that there was so much blood in the human body before that.

  People like Dimitri were honest, at least. Dick had always known precisely what Dimitri was thinking. He’d found the Russian man with the goofy accent off-putting at first. But with the clarity given to him by so much time alone he established that maybe people who say exactly what they feel were the only honest people in the world

  Dimitri hadn’t bothered to conceal what he thought behind flowery words or misleading compliments. He hadn’t liked Dick, like everyone else, but he’d been up-front with it.

  With the clarity of someone reminiscing about past events, Dick realized that that was the most refreshing quality that someone could have.

  This was his life now. A padded six by eight cell. A nice cell for a mediocre person. Maybe, at the end of it all, this was for the best. The world didn’t want him – had never wanted him. He’d never fit in, never been loved, never been anything more than an awkward looking passing curiosity.

  What was the point of it all, Dick wondered.

  Why me? He thought, over and over again until the words lost all meaning to him.

  False friends were no friends at all.

  Dick closed his eyes and drifted away.

&n
bsp; Part Two

  Ten Months Later

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Adrian opened his brown eyes and looked around at the island paradise surrounding him and breathed in the warm, humid tropical air. He looked out the balcony towards the view which the ordinary person would swear was breathtaking.

  But he had seen views like that in all different places in the world, and they had begun to lose their appeal to him.