A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (15 page)

She suddenly laughed. Her frown disappeared. No, that was
not
what she needed. What she needed was a giant cup of coffee; that was all. Surely in a place like this there was a way to get it. This looked like a job for Artemis & Co. On the bedside table was a telephone and she was in the act of reaching for it when it softly chimed.
My God,
she thought,
do they even know when I need coffee before I know it myself?

But it was Mrs. Papadakis on the line. “Alix, good morning, this is Gaby Papadakis. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No, I’m up.”

“You’re feeling better?”

“Much, thank you.”

“Oh, good. I’m not sure if you’ve had a chance to look at the guest booklet yet, but we don’t offer a set lunch or breakfast in any of the dining rooms on the
Artemis
, we leave it up to our guests to order their own whenever and wherever they feel like it. I was hoping you might like to join me this morning—on the main deck, by the pool? It’s a gorgeous day.”

“I’d love to, thanks. Which one’s the main deck?”

Alix was pleased at the invitation. Her opera-loving mother had been a fan of Gabriela Candelas’s, and Alix remembered a performance of
Aida,
seen at the Met in her mother’s company, in which Gaby’s sensuous, passionate voice had turned even the poisonous Amneris into a tragic figure. Alix’s mother had wept, and Alix herself had been impressed.

More recently, in researching the Papadakises for this cruise, she’d learned that she and Gaby shared similar family histories. Gaby’s father had been in jail too; was still in jail as far as Alix knew. In the 1970s Peter Candelas had been a mob accountant in New York, first for the Gambino family and then for the Gottis. The suspicions were that his assignments had extended beyond keeping the books, but all the FBI, the New York Police Department, the U.S. Attorney and the New York County District
Attorney were able to make stick were various customs, fraud, and tax manipulation charges. One of her father’s brothers and several cousins were in prison on more serious mob-related charges, including homicide. Another of Gaby’s uncles had been charged with two murders but remained unconvicted. There was another uncle who had been assassinated by mob rivals. Only two or three years ago, the D.A. had described the whole Candelas clan as “a murderous cancer, not part of the human race.” So Gaby had had to cope with a bloodline that made Alix’s look like a royal lineage, and she’d done it with great success. All in all, an interesting and unusual woman. Alix looked forward to getting to know her.

“It’s the one where the reception was last night… oops, I forgot. You didn’t make that, did you?”

“I was unavoidably detained.”

“I’m glad you can laugh about it,” Gaby said. “It’s the third deck, the one above you. Nine o’clock, shall we say?”

“Fine. Gabriela… uh, Gaby? Did anything interesting happen after I left last night?”

“No,” was the answer, accompanied by a deep-throated chuckle. “Everything interesting happened before you left.”

“I mean, did they find out who slashed it?”

“No, they haven’t found out, but Yiorgos—you remember Yiorgos?”

She thought for a moment. “With the mustache. And the muscles.”

“That’s him, our security chief. He interviewed last night’s temporary staff before we left this morning, and now he’s talking with the regular crew to see what they might know. He’s also supplied the Hellenic Police with a list of last night’s guests and they’re looking into them all. Yiorgos was a lieutenant colonel with them, you know. It’s a high rank, so he still has plenty of clout.”

“You’re pretty sure it was one of the people here for the reception, then?”

“Of course.” She sounded surprised at the question. “Who else? The people here for the cruise are all collectors themselves; they’d never do such
a thing. And the crew… they’re almost all relatives of Panos, and to these Greeks, loyalty to family comes before everything else.”

“Yes, you’re probably right.”

“Panos is furious that someone he invited, someone he trusted, would do this to him. And to
you.” Oh, sure,
Alix thought sourly.
That was why he’d been so terribly concerned for my welfare last night
. “And let me tell you, my husband, when mad, is something to reckon with. When they find whoever it is, he’ll see that they throw the book at him and then some.”

“I’d like to throw a book at the guy myself,” Alix muttered, fingering the lump above her ear.

“Oh, listen, I almost forgot, there’s something Panos wanted me to ask you,” Gaby said.

Alix sensed a hesitance, a false brightness, as if Gaby were pretending that whatever it was had just occurred to her.

“It’s just that, you know, getting the painting slashed was bad enough, but when you started saying it might not even be real, that kind of upset him. So he asks… he asked me to ask you to, well, unless you have something more to go on than just a feeling, to, well…”

“To shut up about it.”

“That’s about it. I’m sure you can understand.”

“Tell him not to worry, Gaby. I’m done talking about it, believe me.”

She didn’t think it would make much difference what she did or didn’t do anyway. With the motor-mouthed Donny having been there, she’d be surprised if the whole ship didn’t know about it by now. “So is Mr. Papadakis thinking about bringing in another painting for the auction, or just leaving it at twenty-two?”

“Honey, you’re asking me questions I don’t know the answers to. I’m not exactly privy to everything that goes on around here. I’ll see you at nine, yes? Oh, I might have somebody else there that I think you’d enjoy meeting, if that’s okay.”

“Sure, I’ll be there. What do I do to get a cup of coffee before then?”

“You pick up the phone, you dial ‘three,’ and you say ‘coffee.’ ”

T
he coffee came in a small pewter serving thermos brought by a smiling young stewardess, and of course it was perfect. The two croissants that were delivered with it were also unfaultable: beautifully shaped, warm and buttery, flaky and tender. Not that Alix would have complained if they’d been otherwise. She’d had no dinner the night before, and she was ravenous. In three minutes everything was gone. Another telephone call brought a second pot of coffee, which she consumed in a more civilized fashion, appreciative and reflective. As she did, something new popped into her mind. Why was she assuming that the Manet was the only fake? For all she knew, they could all be fakes. She didn’t really think that, but then she hadn’t checked, had she? She hadn’t “checked” the Manet either; it had just jumped out at her. Well, there was something for her to do today: go through the collection and see if any more jumping-out occurred. Not that she was expecting anything to.

She showered and changed to a tank top and Bermudas, which she was pretty sure would pass for daywear on the
Artemis
. That took her to eight o’clock. With an hour to go, she had time to browse through the rest of the collection to see if there was anything else that didn’t seem right. And if anybody was around, it would be a chance to start fulfilling the twin responsibilities she’d signed on for: schmoozing with the other guests for Papadakis, and inconspicuously trolling for fractional investment tidbits for the FBI.

At this early hour she had the music room, where the Impressionists were displayed, to herself. She moved quickly from painting to painting, partly because after last night, she was a little edgy about standing in one
place for too long, but mostly because she wasn’t “studying” them; she was just seeing what might catch that celebrated—or bogus, depending on whom you talked to—connoisseur’s eye of hers. Nothing did. Nice to know, but no real surprise there.

Generally speaking, all seemed as well as could be expected in the room; no further slashings, anyway. The torn Manet had been removed and the remaining paintings on that wall had been redistributed overnight, so one couldn’t even tell where it had hung. The ash paneling looked as flawless as ever, not a spackled hole, not a sign of repair. It was if the Manet had never been there. Would she have an opportunity to look at it again and see if she could determine what it was that was wrong with it? She was pretty sure Panos wouldn’t give her the chance, and she was in no position to press. That wouldn’t stop her from chewing it over, though. She remembered it well enough, and if cogitation and research could do the job, she’d figure it out. It wasn’t Edward or Panos she’d tell about it, though; it was Ted, and he could take it from there.

Gaby’s shawl no longer draped the piano, and there was one painting that was supposed to be there that she didn’t find, by Claude Monet, one of his extraordinary, light-flooded studies of Rouen Cathedral. She made a mental note to ask Edward where it was hung.

On into the salon, where the Contemporary paintings were displayed. This room was about the same size as the music room, but with walls made of three-foot squares of glossy brown granite flecked with yellow and orange. The carpet was a pale tan with a mazelike pattern that she supposed might represent the Minotaur’s lair at Knossos, on the island of Crete, toward which they were at this moment headed. The pattern was repeated on the fabric of the half-dozen armchairs that were scattered about. On the walls, in addition to the paintings, were a few more tasteful Greek and Roman reliefs. It was altogether another quite splendid room, but Alix was starting to succumb to splendor burnout. Besides, she was more interested in the people in the room.

There were two of them, a tall, bony woman with an extraordinary mop of frizzy, orange hair that surrounded and stood out from her head like a thick cloud of dandelion seed, and a shorter, rounder man, both standing in front of what Alix recognized as the Rothko. Like most Rothko’s, it was big, about six feet by five. This was Rothko as he had painted in the 1950s, a vertical stack of fuzzy, irregular rectangles in warm, earthen colors. She wasn’t ready to admit him to her pantheon of the Greats, but she did find this period of his work pleasing in an interior-decorator sort of way. The stacked rectangles seemed to breathe, to go in and out of focus, in a way that soothed and relaxed.

As she got closer, she heard the woman say: “I
need
this painting, Durward. It’s terrific.” The woman’s gaze wandered lovingly over it. “It has everything I look for in a work of art. Everything.”

Alix stopped where she was to listen, partly because she was curious to hear what this woman liked so much about the picture, but mostly because she was already relishing Geoff’s reaction when she informed him that he’d been his usual high-handed and judgmental self in writing off these people as philistines who neither knew nor cared anything about art beyond its investment potential. At least some of them (at least one of them) were genuine lovers of art who knew what they were looking for and why.

“I know just what you mean, Miss C,” the young man said, his voice thrumming with excitement. “It’s just beautiful. The colors are amazing. They leap off the canvas at you in great swaths—”

“Control yourself, Durward,” Miss C said dryly. “You’re trying too hard again. That is
not
what I mean. What
I
see leaping off the canvas at me is liquidity, security of principal, proven record, and a practically guaranteed return on investment along with a huge growth potential in a market that’s only now beginning to find its feet.”

Alix managed not to break out laughing, but only with an effort.
Good old Geoff
, she was thinking.
There wasn’t too much he got wrong.

“Good morning,” she called before they found her eavesdropping on their own.

Miss C turned and stared coldly at her. “Yes?” The woman had a determinedly off-putting glare. “Is there something I can do for you?”

A little civility would be a good start
. “No. I was just having a look at the paintings,” she said, smiling. “I’m Alix London.”

The woman thought for a moment and then finally showed some interest. “Oh, you’re the lecture lady.”

“I guess that’s me, yes. Happy to meet you.”

“Yes, I was planning to stop by your session this afternoon and say hello.”

“My session?”

“ ‘Informal chat session,’ it was called. You’re supposed to be making yourself available to edify us on the paintings, didn’t you know? From three to five on the days we’re at sea, I think it is. It’s in the guest booklet.”

“No, I haven’t had a chance to look at that yet.” She was pleased.
Chat session
sounded a lot more up her alley than
lecture
. If that was all that was expected of her, she was going to do just fine.

“So, Alix, the word is that you had yourself a little excitement last night. Tell me, did he truly wrap you up in that shawl and fling you bodily down the steps?”

“Not down the steps, no, it wasn’t quite as exciting as that, thank goodness. Awful about the painting, though.”

“But he knocked you out, didn’t he, or is that just a rumor too? How are you feeling now?”

“Oh, I’m fine. Could have been a lot worse.”