deep, painful coughing. He held up his palm to signal them not to worry, and when it subsided, he drew in some oxygen from the clear tube under his nose. “Sit, please.”
There was only one chair, and Rook pulled it up bedside for Nikki, carefully avoiding the batch of cables snaking from under Tyler’s sheets to the array of monitors. She briefly introduced Rook as he found a path around to the foot of the bed and the windowsill where he perched. “The magazine writer,” he said. “Right. Pardon me for not getting up.” He briefly lifted both arms, which were connected to multiple IV drips. “Bad combination, three gunshots and a bad heart.”
“You’ll tell us when you need us to go, promise?” she asked.
Tyler Wynn just smiled and said, “Look at all these machines. The French sure like to make a grand spectacle of everything, don’t they? Cooking, cinema, sex scandals, les hopitaux. This country perfected modern medicine, but before that, I’m told, they used to operate without anesthetic. Didn’t even wash their hands. So I guess, all in all, I’m lucky.” He rolled his head her way on the pillow and stared. “Everybody tell you how much you look like your mom?”
“All the time. It’s a compliment.”
“You know it.” He took her in some more and then said, “I heard you tell my personal gendarme you were investigating a homicide.”
“Yes, I’m with the NYPD.”
“I read that article.” He cocked an eyebrow at Rook. “Looks like you got more than a byline, young man.”
“No complaints,” he said.
There was so much Nikki wanted to talk over with him; so many questions she wanted to get answers to in order to fill those gaps in her connection to her own mother. And there were some questions she was afraid to ask. But one look at the old man told her this wouldn’t be a long visit. She made a decision to prioritize and start with the case essentials. Crude as that might be, first and foremost, she had an investigation to conduct. Heat knew all about putting her personal needs to the side. They would have to wait for later or the next visit.
“Mr. Wynn,” she began, but he interrupted.
“Tyler. Or Uncle Tyler. Your mom called me that.”
“OK, Tyler. I’m assuming from the guard you’ve been assigned that they didn’t catch whoever did this to you. Do you have any idea who it was?”
“It’s a crazy world. Even Europe is getting gun happy.”
“Were you robbed?”
“Nope. Still got my gold Rolex. At least if the night orderly didn’t steal it.”
“Did you see who did it?”
He shook no. Then he told her, “That look on your face is the same one the police inspector had when he interviewed me. Sorry.”
From his perch, Rook asked, “When did this happen?”
The old man’s eyes found the ceiling. “Give me a minute. I was under a few days, so time is a little fuzzy, know what I mean?” Rook understood. “Tuesday night last week, late. How come?”
Heat and Rook registered the significance of that with a glance. Time zones notwithstanding, that would have been the night before Nicole Bernardin had been killed. “Gathering my facts,” she said, leaving it there for now. “How did it happen?”
“Not much to describe. I’d just come back to my apartment from the late show of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at the Gaumont Pathe. I got out of my car in the underground garage, and next thing, I hear three shots behind me and someone running away while I’m down on the pavement. I woke up here.”
Nikki had slipped out her reporter’s-cut spiral as unobtrusively as she could manage and made some notes. She asked him the questions she had asked so often in these circumstances over the years. About recent threats. No. Bad business deals. No. Romantic jealousies. “Oh, what I would give,” he said. Having exhausted the usual possibilities, she sat, tapping the cap of her pen to her lip.
“I did have a few drinks after the cinema. It’s possible that I drove poorly and this was some sort of road rage.” It sounded flimsy. Not only was neither of them buying, it had an odor of misdirection, as if he threw it out there to try to close the subject.
“What about a hit?” asked Rook. At first, Heat objected to the baldness of his question, but she gave her reservations a second thought when she saw the animation rise in Tyler Wynn.
“I beg your pardon?”
“A contract killing. That’s what it sounds like to me. Why would somebody have a reason to buy a termination? With extreme prejudice?” He used the jargon of clandestine operatives for effect. Nikki had to hand it to Rook, he walked the line beautifully, holding his ground without badgering the man. Letting innuendo do the heavy lifting. Saying, I know and you know, without speaking the words.
“That would be extraordinary, Mr. Rook,” Tyler said, not denying it.
“For an international investment banker, it would be,” he countered. Wynn had joined him, also playing the middle ground, so that’s where Rook stayed, for the moment, and said, “It would be quite extraordinary to target a mere investment banker.” The two men held a long look, the equivalent of a handshake crunch game to see who gave first. It was Tyler Wynn who blinked.
“Corporal Bergeron,” he said. When the officer appeared around the yellow drape, he said, “I would like to speak privately with my friends. Would you please find some water for these flowers and close the door when you step out?” The policeman hesitated and then did as instructed.
Tyler Wynn closed his eyes to ponder for so long in the quiet, with no sound other than the soft, rhythmic beeping of his heart monitor, that they both wondered if he had fallen asleep. But then he cleared some more chest congestion and began his story. “I am going to share this with you because it doesn’t just concern me, it concerns your mother.” When he said those words, Nikki felt her heart jump. She dared not interrupt, only nod, encouraging him onward. “And not only can I tell from these few minutes with you, Nikki, that you would be discreet, but at this hour of my life, alone and clearly with no… infrastructure… to protect me, I have no reason to be naive about misplaced loyalty.”
Prompted by his comment about discretion, Heat capped her pen and folded her hands across her notebook. Rook remained still, arms crossed. Waiting out the beeps.
“For many years, back when I was younger and more useful…” He paused. Then he made the leap. “I was engaged in helping my country through covert means. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was a spy. For CIA.” Rook sniffed and shifted, crossing his feet at the ankles where he leaned. Wynn tilted his head to him and said, “You had that figured out, of course. Another reason not to maintain the fiction. That’s what spying is all about, you know, fiction. It’s more cloak than dagger. We made up stories and lived them. And you’re right, sending me to Europe as an investment banker for my legend provided me excellent camouflage. More than that, it gave me access to places I needed to gather intel. There’s nothing like making people rich to open a few doors and not have anybody ask too many questions about you.”
He turned back to Nikki. “I ran what headquarters in Langley nicknamed my Nanny Network. They called it that because I began with an ingenious idea. With so many influential contacts I had developed through my cover business, I began to recruit and place nannies in the homes of diplomats and other select subjects of interest, to spy on them and report back to me. The simplicity of the notion was exceeded only by the results. These nannies had incredible access to the home lives of my subjects. Once they penetrated, they not only listened, they planted bugs and, occasionally, took photographs, either for intelligence gathering or, yes, leverage. Blackmail.” He smiled at Nikki. “I can see you are ahead of me. You’re there, already, aren’t you?”
She could feel light beads of perspiration on her chest and where the small of her back met the molded plastic chair. “I think so.” Her voice sounded like someone else’s.
“The director himself was so pleased by the secrets I was mining, my orders were to generate more. Remember, we’re talking the seventies. The Cold War was still on. You had Vietnam. The IRA. The Berlin Wall. Carlos the Jackal was kidnapping OPEC ministers in Vienna. SALT treaty talks were on in Moscow. The Greek monarchy got overthrown. Red Chinese sleeper cells started assimilating into the U.S. And most of the players, sooner or later, came through Paris.
“The genius of the Nanny Network was that I could expand it by plugging in more than just nannies and au pairs. I added a butler, then some cooks, and then English tutors, and, yes, Nikki Heat-music tutors. One of your
