Sonia came down the giant stairway. She was brilliant and tiny, with olive skin and a lovely smile framed in perfectly applied red lipstick, as if it were not one o’clock in the morning. “Nice to meet you, Clyde. Ken has said good things about you.” She said this as if it were all that she demanded in the way of a character reference. Then she turned the full powers of her charm and energy on Maggie, who was anxious for a few moments, then fell silent, fascinated by the sounds and fragrances emanating from Sonia, and consented to be taken away somewhere and rocked back to sleep.
Clyde followed Knightly through the living room, the library, and finally to the back porch, where his host yanked a flashlight off a wall bracket and aimed its powerful halogen beam at his feet. “Watch your step,” Knightly instructed, “we haven’t fixed the stairs yet.” Indeed, they were rotten, buttressed by concrete blocks. He picked his way over the treacherous, ankle-breaking tire ruts frozen into the mud of the sideyard and entered the garage, a three-car model with a high roof. Clyde knew better than to ask, andsimply followed.
The garage was completely filled with dusty junk, except for a narrow winding passageway between sofas, filing cabinets, shipping crates, and old foreign motorcycles, which led to a crude ladder made of two-by-fours and nailed to a wall. It led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Knightly climbed up a few rungs and knocked on it with the butt of his big black cop flashlight—three longs and two shorts.
The trapdoor opened. Knightly shone the light up, piercing the square of blackness, and illuminated a ghastly face that would have sent Clyde running all the way to the Illinois border if he hadn’t recognized it.
“Fazoul!” Clyde said. “I’ll be darn.”
They clambered up the ladder and into the attic. Clyde was surprised to find a warm, well-furnished, windowless space. There was a desk, a wet bar, and the smell of Knightly’s Camels, a small but good home entertainment center, a urinal plumbed into one wall, a pool table, but no telephone.
“We’ve all got to have a hidey-hole,” Knightly said. “Someplace where nobody can find us and we can do what we want to do.”
“How many people know about this?” Clyde said.
“Sonia, Fazoul, and now you.”
Fazoul threw his good arm around Clyde’s shoulders and said, “We have to talk.”
Clyde said, “I figured you were halfway over the polar ice cap to wherever.”
“Ah that, that was easy. I have a brother who works at O’Hare. He has access to the international-departures area.”
Knightly turned to Clyde and drawled, “Ain’t that convenient? You would be surprised, Clyde, if you knew how often convenient things happened to Fazoul and his thousands and thousands of brothers.”
“Well,” Fazoul admitted, “I am using the word ‘brother’ in an extended sense. He is a compatriot. When I went into the men’s room, he happened to be there, working on a defective air-drying machine. He is now over the ice cap somewhere with my wife and little Khalid.”
“How did you get back here?” Clyde asked.
“In his car. After I had fixed the drying machine.”
“I suppose I ought to check your driver’s license,” Clyde said, “but I have the feeling you got one that looks pretty good.”
“Anyone who can fix a drying machine,” Fazoul said, “can forge a driver’s license.”
“So,” Knightly said, “I’m going to get the coffee machine fired up, because if I break into the bourbon collection now, I’ll fall asleep, and Fazoul wouldn’t approve anyway. And you can help yourself to those.” He nodded at a Dunkin’ Donuts box on the top of the bar.
“Some coffee would be not bad at all,” Clyde said.
“I called this meeting because I’m getting tired of waiting for something to happen,” Knightly said. “I keep waiting for the C-130’s to descend on Forks full of SWAT teams in protective moon suits, and it never seems to happen, and I’m getting the idea that it never will.”
Clyde looked questioningly at Fazoul. Fazoul said, “Dr. Knightly knows quite a few things. We consider him one of us.”
“Sonia is half Kurd and a quarter Azerbaijani and a quarter Russian,” Knightly said, “and when she became the center of my life, well, my life got even more complicated than it was to begin with, which is really saying something. It’s a very, very long story, but suffice it to say that I’m on Fazoul’s side—whether or not I want to be. But I do want to be.”