T. Bunn - Drummer in the Dark

Jackie watched as the bloom of pain she had seen back in Esther Hutchings’ living room returned to his features. Wynn surprised her then, by directing the question to her and not Nabil. “Do you know enough to know what to ask this man?”

The words were strong, but not the gaze. He was more than wounded. He was frightened. “I might.”

“Then ask the question for me, will you?” He turned back to the Egyptian. “Whether I go or not depends on how you answer her.”

Jackie was unsettled to suddenly become an ally of this man Esther called their enemy. Before she could speak, however, Nabil interrupted, “Your sister is a good and brave woman, Congressman. Go to Sant’Egidio in Rome. Ask for Father Libretto. She asks that you see and decide for yourself. If you are with us, all will be explained. If not, you can depart and be safe in your unknowing.”

“Does this have anything to do with the Jubilee thing?”

“Movement,” Jackie corrected. “Jubilee movement.”

“Whatever.” To Nabil. “How does this third-world debt issue tie into what Graham was talking about in his speech, the banking crisis and hedge funds and all that?”

But the Egyptian was stalking off. “Come to Rome or do not come, that is all I was sent to say.”

Wynn’s voice rose enough to attract the attention of others in the lobby. “Why is it I’ve got people crawling all over me about this thing?”

“Your sister has made her request. Respect it or not, that is your choice.” Nabil rammed through the revolving doors and was gone.

Wynn Bryant watched as the doors flapped ever slower, finally coming to a halt, empty and forlorn as his face. Jackie told him, “You should have added some names like Trastevere and Hayek to the mix. You might have really gotten him to dance.”

He remained defeated by whatever he saw painted there on the empty doorway. “He looked familiar.”

“His name is Nabil Saad.” When that did not illicit a response, she added, “He says he knew you when you were kids.”

The news deflated him even further. Wynn turned toward the back hall, carrying himself with the shuffling gait of one old and infirm. “Tell them I’ll go.”

“I’m supposed to tag along,” she said, trying to hold the thrill from her voice. But Wynn just continued down the hall and out of sight. Leaving her to venture alone into whatever strange journeys tomorrow held.

Rome.

Jackie waited to call Esther until she was safely back in her room at the Howard Johnson’s. She found the freeway traffic rumbling beyond her window a welcome reality-check after the glitz and polish of the Willard fantasyland. “How is your husband?”

Esther sounded happy, in the quiet way of the eternally spent. “When he woke up this afternoon, he held my hand. He tried to speak.” Forcefully she drew herself away from the room down the hall. “What did Wynn tell Nabil?”

“He’s going.”

“I suppose that’s to be expected. Do you have a passport?”

Excitement fizzed Jackie’s blood until she was up and carrying the hotel phone around in tight little circles, unable to hold down the thrill or the words. “Preston made me get one. You know about Preston?”

“Your brother.”

“We were always talking about going someplace far away. We took the occasional weekend trip, once even to the Bahamas. But I kept holding off on the bigger journeys until we had more time.”

“You still miss him.”

“Preston was the only real family I ever had.” Saying it without pain. Almost. “So what do I do now that Wynn is going?”

“I’ll have a staffer meet you at the airport tomorrow with your travel documents.”

A shiver ran the entire length of her frame. Rome. “I mean, when I get there.”

“Sybel said Wynn should contact her through the church of Sant’Egidio. It is in a place called-wait, I have the paper in my pocket. Piazza Trastevere. Do I need to spell that?”

“No.”

Esther caught the change. “You have more questions.”

“Thousands.” But the woman sounded so tired, and the night’s excitement was so great, all she wanted to ask at that moment was “How do I get for myself what you have with Graham?”

“That’s not the question for this moment. You want to ask what I didn’t fully answer earlier. About why you were hired.”

Jackie took the phone over to the bed and sat down.

“After you left I did some very hard thinking. You were right to ask what you did. The trust between us needs to be based upon genuine honesty. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Jackie slipped from the bed to the floor. Gathered her feet up beneath her. Leaned against the bed. “Yes.”

Esther waited as the hospital intercom rattled out some message, then said, “I hired a private detective and instructed him to locate an employee of Hayek’s with an ax to grind. Someone so embittered he or she would be more than happy to risk everything and search for what we could not find.”

“You found Shane.” The word was a dreg so bitter it caulked up her throat and left her spirit choking.

“We found you. And despite what Kay Trilling might think, I am convinced God’s hand was upon this act.”

The noose eased enough for Jackie to breathe and speak and turn the subject away. “I have to tell you, I don’t think Wynn is an enemy. He’s walking through this like a blind man.”

Esther was silent through another pair of announcements. “Wynn Bryant will sacrifice anybody and anything on the altar of his own ambitions. His wife was sick for more than a year and he was too blind to see it. I was the one who held her hand at the doctor’s, gave her a shoulder to cry on, then had to go and tell him. .” She was interrupted by another voice over the intercom, or perhaps she just used it as an excuse to stop talking. When all was quiet once more, Esther merely said, “Watch him.”

Monday

Pavel Hayek stood at his window and saw not his current domain but the suzerainties of his past and the one yet to come. His Orlando organization, though small compared to the sprawling Schwab campus farther north, had been featured in countless magazines, including the cover of Architectural Digest. The main building was a modern rendition of his family’s former castle, a secret known only to himself. The architect had merely been given a photograph of what was now a museum and told to find a way to meld Hayek’s Czech heritage with Wall Street. There were no turrets to this financial manor, nor lines of liveried servants to welcome his carriage at the start of each new day. But the sweeping grandeur had been well captured, and the sense of power.

In truth, he had never known the servants, but they lived for him still, branded in his mind by his mother’s embittered ramblings.

The rumors were indeed true. Pavel Hayek was that rarest of creatures in the contemporary world, a prince. A blue blood. His lineage was linked through his mother’s mother to the Romanovs, and through various other relatives to six reigning European monarchs. His fiefdom had stood east of Prague, an estate larger than Rhode Island. But his family had lost everything when the Nazis swallowed the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s tattered remains.

Pavel had been born in the waning days of World War II, in what had formerly been the groundskeeper’s cottage behind the palace stables. His family had managed to escape west in the frenetic period between the Nazis’ defeat and the Russians’ arrival. His earliest memory was of his mother standing in front of the gutted palace, shrieking invectives at the men who had bombed her world into antiquity. Then his father had hustled them into a stolen truck laden with their few remaining possessions and trainloads of shattered pride. Pavel had knelt on the seat beside his weeping mother, watching through the back portal as the moon filled in the gaping wounds and made the palace whole once more.