“I know you know it. I’m just chalking it up on the blackboard, so to speak, as a thing to keep in mind.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
“Good. So we’re being real gentlemen about this so far. We are being politically correct academic leftists, fully aware of the extent of racism in our society. And that’s good. But we also have to be very clear about something that is not very politically correct.”
“And that is?”
“Wapsipinicon is crawling with foreign spooks. Always has been. Hell, during the heyday of the shah we had our own local office of SAVAK here—the shah’s gestapo—and they would do surveillance on Iranian students and actually carry out wet ops on a small scale—like riddling some student’s car with bullets in the middle of the night, just to intimidate him. Most of our foreign students come from developing countries, Clyde, where they don’t have things like democracy and human rights, never have, and probably never will. They come here with a mind-set that is far more alien to our college-town openness than we can possibly imagine.” Knightly shook his head and laughed darkly. “Those Howdy Brigade people just kill me.”
“I know what you mean,” Clyde said.
“In these countries sending a student overseas for several years is a big deal. It’s not just a luxury for spoiled kids who haven’t decided what they want to do for a living yet. It’s dead serious. It’s a large expenditure of money, made by a government—usually sort of a nasty government—that expects to get a healthy return on its investment. So when you look at the foreign students from countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, there are few of these who haven’t been thoroughly vetted by their country’s equivalent of SAVAK. Many of them have actually signed up with such organizations. Many have had to leave wives and children behind, as hostages.
“The message being that there are all kinds of scary governments that have flung out tendrils of power into places where you’d never expect it. If you could do a thorough sweep on all the places frequented by my students—run-down houses in campustown, those tacky apartment complexes on University Boulevard, the offices and labs where they work—you’d find countless listening devices. You’d find bugs on top of bugs.”
“Well, sir,” Clyde said, “I know you’re expecting that I’m not going to believe you. But I do believe you.”
“Okay,” Knightly said. “So what do we have on the chalkboard now?”
“Number one, there is racism and prejudice,” Clyde said. “Number two, that doesn’t mean that a lot of these foreign students aren’t up to”—he groped for a word—“shenanigans.”
Knightly laughed hollowly. “Shenanigans. I like that. That’s Ebenezer’s word, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’ve got used to the shenanigans. It’s part of my job. These guys know the rules, they always stay within certain boundaries, and we rarely have serious trouble. Fazoul is a fine example. He’s up to all kinds of shenanigans. But his behavior is flawless. If only they could all be like Fazoul.”
“You having trouble now?”
Knightly sighed in exasperation. He started to speak two or three times and then stopped himself before a full word had escaped his lips. “It’s not that there’s trouble per se,” he said. “Hell, maybe I’m just feeling a little jumpy because of the Gulf War.”
“I know I sure am.”
“Of course you are. But I can’t escape the impression that we have some very naughty students in town nowadays. Students who are looking at some big-time detention if they ever get caught.”
“Where are they from? What are they doing?” Clyde said.
“You realize that it’s totally unethical for me to say anything,” Knightly said, “because it looks like I’m feeding the racism and prejudice, which is a big no-no right now. And there’s another reason that, if this gets out, I’m in deep shit. I’ll get to that reason later.”
“Okay.”
“We seem to have some Jordanians in town right now who are not really Jordanians,” Knightly said. “Which makes me wonder, what are they? I happen to think they are Iraqis.”
“One of them is, at least,” Clyde said. “One of them is Abdul al-Turki of Mosul, Iraq. Thirty-two years of age.”
Knightly turned to look at Clyde to see whether he was joking. He was silent for a long time. “Now, how in the fuck did you know that?” he said.
“Noticed one of the Jordanians was a wrestler,” Clyde said. “Went over to the EIU wrestling department and looked through all their old wrestling magazines, found pictures of him from some international meets back in the early eighties. He was on the Iraqi national team. He was disqualified for the eighty-four Olympics because of steroid use.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Knightly said. “Hell, I’ll bet the CIA doesn’t even know what you know.”
“CIA?”
“I mean the FBI,” Knightly said, “they’re the ones who do counterintelligence.” He shook his head. “I’ll be damned. So they are Iraqis.”