Hideaway

beating on a window-pane—”
    He was interrupted by the arrival of Salvatore Gujilio in whose office they were waiting. Gujilio, a huge man, heavy and tall, swung the door wide and entered as he always did—taking big strides instead of ordinary steps, closing the door behind him in a grand sweeping gesture. With the unstoppable determination of a force of nature—rather like a disciplined tornado—he swept around the room, greeting them one by one. Hatch would not have been surprised to see furniture spun aloft and artwork flung off walls as the attorney passed, for he seemed to radiate enough energy to levitate anything within his immediate sphere of influence.
    Keeping up a continuous line of patter, Gujilio gave Jiminez a bear hug, shook hands vigorously with Duran, and bowed to each of the nuns with the sincerity of a passionate monarchist greeting members of the royal family. Gujilio bonded with people as quickly as one piece of pottery to another under the influence of super glue, and by their second meeting he'd greeted and said goodbye to Lindsey with a hug. She liked the man and didn't mind the hugging, but as she had told Hatch, she felt like a very small child embracing a sumo wrestler. “He lifts me off my feet, for God's sake,” she'd said. Now she stayed on the sofa instead of rising, and merely shook hands with the attorney.
    Hatch rose and extended his right hand, prepared to see it engulfed as if it were a speck of food in a culture dish filled with hungry amoebas, which is exactly what happened. Gujilio, as always, took Hatch's hand in both of his, and since each of his mitts was half-again the size of any ordinary man's, it wasn't so much a matter of shaking as being shaken.
    “What a wonderful day,” Gujilio said, “a special day. I hope for everyone's sake it goes as smooth as glass.”
    The attorney donated a certain number of hours a week to St. Thomas's Church and the orphanage. He appeared to take great satisfaction in connecting adoptive parents with disabled kids.
    “Regina's on her way from the ladies,” Gujilio told them. “She stopped to chat a moment with my receptionist, that's all. She's nervous, I think, trying to delay a little longer until she has her courage screwed up as far as it'll go. She'll be here in a moment.”
    Hatch looked at Lindsey. She smiled nervously and took his hand.
    “Now, you understand,” Salvatore Gujilio said, looming over them like one of those giant balloons in a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, “that the point of this meeting is for you to get to know Regina and for her to get to know you. Nobody makes a decision right here, today. You go away, think about it, and let us know tomorrow or the day after whether this is the one. The same goes for Regina. She has a day to think about it.”
    “It's a big step,” Father Jiminez said.
    “An enormous step,” Sister Immaculata concurred.
    Squeezing Hatch's hand, Lindsey said, “We understand.”
    The Nun with No Name went to the door, opened it, and peered down the hallway. Evidently Regina was not in sight.
    Rounding his desk, Gujilio said, “She's coming, I'm sure.”
    The attorney settled his considerable bulk into the executive office chair beside his desk, but because he was six-feet-five, he seemed almost as tall seated as standing. The office was furnished entirely with antiques, and the desk was actually a Napoleon III table so fine that Hatch wished he had something like it in the front window of his shop. Banded by ormolu, the exotic woods of the marquetry top depicted a central cartouche with a detailed musical trophy over a conforming frieze of stylized foliage. The whole was raised on circular legs with acanthus-leaf ormolu joined by a voluted X stretcher centered with an ormolu urn finial, on toupie feet. At every meeting, Gujilio's size and dangerous levels of kinetic energy initially made the desk—and all the antiques—seem fragile, in imminent jeopardy of being knocked over or smashed to smithereens. But after a few minutes, he and the room seemed in such perfect harmony, you had the eerie feeling that he had recreated a decor he had lived with in another—thinner—life.
    A soft, distant, but peculiar thud drew Hatch's attention away from the attorney and the desk.
    The Nun with No Name turned from the door and hurried back into the room, saying, “Here she comes,” as if she didn't want Regina to think she had been looking for her.
    The sound came again. Then again.