A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (19 page)

“And this,” Panos said, moving on to Izzy, “is—”

“And this,” Ted interrupted, “unless I’m mistaken, is the famous Pocahontas. It’s a
real
pleasure to meet you, Miss Clinke.” And he held out his hand.

“Izzy, please,” she said.

Alix, a little ticked off about that “
real
pleasure” business—what was he saying, that meeting Alix again wasn’t a real pleasure?—was further annoyed by Izzy, who was practically simpering. If it was Ted who was asking her to sign her name on his forehead (or on any other part of his anatomy), Alix grumbled to herself, Izzy would leap at the chance.

Ted was then whisked away by Panos, and Alix whisked herself away to her stateroom, where she hid out for the next few hours, until she was due in the music room and salon for her first “informal chat session.” Izzy and Gaby, and maybe one or two of the others, had heard Ted say that he and Alix were “old friends,” and she didn’t want to try to field questions from them about how it was that she and Ted knew each other and just what kind of relationship they had and so on and so forth. She needed to talk to him first so that she didn’t blow whatever story he’d cooked up. She was more annoyed than ever at him for not giving her any warning. For that matter, why wasn’t he getting in touch with her right now to tell her what was going on? He had really put her in an uncomfortable spot. The man
did have some attractive qualities, true, but he was a long way from perfect, and he could be
damn
irritating.

Grumbling about Ted did her good, but she spent most of the time reviewing her art resource materials so that she wouldn’t make a complete ass of herself when it came time for the session. Midway through, she took a break, called in an order for a ham-and-cheese sandwich, and put “Pocahontas” into YouTube. Up came fifteen pages of videos, split about half and half between the Pocahontases of Walt Disney and Izzy Clinke. Watching one of Izzy’s, she would have had a hard time believing that the sensuous, exotic, extravagant creature on the screen and the lanky, low-key, tongue-in-cheek Izzy were one and the same, if not for that unmistakable helmet of orange corkscrew curls. Gaby had done a good job of describing her, the hypnotically smooth, almost boneless movements, the emotionless, unchanging expression, and the strange, grating, chant-like singing. Hair excepted, she made Alix think of one of those Indian statues of a multiarmed goddess come to life. Her costume was some kind of Indian-Egyptian-Tahitian mishmash that left only the bare minimum (of Izzy) to the imagination. As Gaby had said, it was hard to stop watching her. One would think that if Izzy hated being hounded by the fans and the paparazzi as much as she’d implied, all she had to do was to go out in public in ordinary clothes, sunglasses, and a cover for her hair. No one would know her.

At three o’clock Alix headed for the music room. Only Mirko Koslecki, the Man With Six Countries, was there, standing in front of the collection’s Renoir, one of his lush, fleshy nudes-in-the-bath. Alix walked boldly up to him and started right in doing some heavy-duty informal chatting.

“Hello, again, Mirko,” she said brightly. “Beautiful, isn’t it? Did you know that the woman is one of Renoir’s favorite models, Suzanne Valadon? She modeled for Toulouse-Lautrec too, and Puvis de Chavannes. A fascinating person, born very poor—the daughter of a laundress—she became a circus acrobat as a child, until she fell off a trapeze and had to
take to modeling. Believe it or not, she actually became a pretty decent painter herself. She was supposed to have had an affair with Renoir, but nobody really knows. Never married, but she did have a baby at eighteen, and she taught him to paint too. A lot of people believe Renoir was the father.”

She paused in the interest of narrative tension, but also because she needed to take a breath. “And would you like to guess the name of that baby boy who may well have been the natural son of Pierre August Renoir?” she asked triumphantly. “None other than—”

“Maurice Utrillo,” Mirko mumbled without ever once having looked at her, then pulled down his head and scuttled off on his tiny feet to the furthest corner of the room to look at a picture by Seurat.

Well, that went well.
Obviously, Alix had pumped herself up and come on a wee bit too strong there. And just as obviously she’d been overly cavalier in taking it for granted that these people didn’t know very much.
Okay, lesson learned, let’s move on.
Toward the salon she strode. Mirko, fearing she was coming in pursuit of him, quickly crossed the room again, to a Sisley beach scene. Alix sighed. Had she done
anything
right since putting foot on the
Artemis
?

There were two people in the salon: Emil Varga—the one whom she’d overheard talking to Edward earlier, scoffing at her “credentials”—and a man she hadn’t seen before. They weren’t looking at the paintings but standing in the middle of the room having a spirited discussion.

Varga spotted her as she came in. “You’re Alix London, aren’t you? Come and join us, there’s something we’d like your opinion on. We were just talking about you.”

“Oh?” Alix said with a smile.
I can just imagine
. He was a bigger man than she’d realized, with wider hips and shoulders, and standing up he had a bearlike, lumbering quality to him.

“My name is Dr. Emil Varga, Alix.”

That’s two more strikes against you, chum. What kind of self-aggrandizing jerk introduces himself in a social situation as “doctor”? Besides which, technically speaking,
“doctor” isn’t your name, it’s a title. You’d think a guy with doctorates from Harvard and Oxford would know that. Well, at least he didn’t refer to himself as “Doctor Doctor.”

Second, and more egregious in her opinion, if he was going to refer to himself as “doctor,” the least he could do would be to address her as “miss.”
This is going to be a hard guy to like.

“A pleasure to meet you,” she said, “Emil.”

A single small tic below his left eye and a brief compression of the lips indicated that she’d hit her mark. She wasn’t sure how happy she was about that. Antagonizing the guests was a totally dumb thing to do and yet she couldn’t stop doing it. She was there, at least until further notice, to gather information, and that wasn’t the way to encourage it. On the other hand, it did feel good to skewer the pretentious SOB.

But really, she’d have to stop indulging in these small-minded jabs. She could save them for Ted when she got the chance.

“And this is my good friend,
il professore
Lorenzo Bolzano of Firenze, Italia,” Varga said.

“
Molto lieto, professore
,” said Alix.

“Lorenzo, please! And it is kind of you to speak in my language, but I enjoy speaking English very much. I am glad to see that you were not seriously hurt last night, Alix.”

She was trying to figure out what it was that was so “indescribable” about him. A bit odd looking, that was true, but pretty describable as far as she could see: bald, beaky, and hollow chested, with moist, dim-sighted black eyes peering amiably out from behind wire-rimmed glasses that sat slightly awry on his pinched nose. His monk-like ruffle of gray hair was ridiculously long, so that it hung limply down all the way to his collar like the fringe on a cowgirl skirt. The accent was thick but his English was fluent and correct.

“Actually, Alix,” Emil said, “we were talking about last night, about your, uh, interesting and—no offense, arguable—conclusion that the Manet is a forgery.”

So Izzy had been right, she thought. Panos could forget about keeping any secrets on the
Artemis
. “Actually,” she said, “I’d hardly call it a ‘conclusion,’ and I don’t think I used the word ‘forgery,’ or at least I hope I didn’t. That’s a term I’m very careful with. Forgery is a slippery, woolly kind of concept that—”

“Exactly, exactly!” cried Lorenzo abruptly, his arms jerking about. “My point exactly, Emil! You see? What Alix is saying is precisely what I was telling you: that the application of so-called ‘universal’ objectivist definitions—this painting is authentic, that painting is not authentic—is absurd on the face of it, and I am speaking not merely of the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in the dichotomies of Aristotelian logic. No, in our post-modern world, there
is
no rational distinction between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ art.”

“Well, no, that’s not exactly what I meant,” Alix said. “What I was trying to say was that, even if you couldn’t call it a genuine Manet, that didn’t necessarily mean it would have to be a forgery. It could have been worked on by more than one hand, or badly restored at some point, or be a study, or a student exercise, or simply a copy—”

Emil pounced. “In other words, a forgery.”

Well, yes, really, that was what she thought when you came down to it, but she didn’t want to churn the waters any more than she already had. “No, I wouldn’t say—”

Lorenzo was still too energized by his own off-the-wall reasoning to stay quiet any longer. “Alix, I wonder if you’ve read my paper, ‘Is Art Real?’ ”

“No-o, I don’t think so…”

“Ah. Perhaps ‘Reality as Metaphor’?”

“I’m afraid not.”

His enthusiasm flagged a little. “You don’t read the
Journal of Subjectivistic Art Commentary
?”

Not only didn’t Alix read it, she’d never heard of it. And if she had, it didn’t sound as if it would top her list of reading priorities.
Reality as
Metaphor
? “Oh, I’ve seen it, of course,” she lied, “and I’ve enjoyed some of the papers, but you know there are so many journals to subscribe to…”

“I’m a contributing editor. I’ll arrange a subscription for you today. It’s something you must have. Its overarching premise, you see, takes its theme from the epistemological foundations of
pittura metafisica
, especially as laid down by Carrá; that is, that the exterior, so-called ‘real’ world can only be imperfectly known through our senses, whereas the inner reality—the significations that we ourselves impose upon our disorderly, unknowable world—while perhaps equally mistaken, are necessarily more cogent, more coherent, more
real
than the ‘real world’ itself, ah-ha-ha. What would you say to that?”

Alix just looked at him.
What would anyone say to that?

But Lorenzo wasn’t really expecting an answer. “In other words, in reality—ah-ha-ha—‘forgery’ has no meaning, because ‘authentic’ likewise is meaningless.
All
of our old constants—time, space, reality itself—are now understood to be no more than cultural constructs that the human mind creates in its desperate need to invent order where no order exists—where
nothing
exists. As Heidegger so memorably puts it in
Was ist Metaphysik?,
‘What does the Nothing do? The Nothing
nothings
.’ Of course, Carnap, as an analytical antimetaphysician, criticizes this as a pseudo-statement, but I would posit that we can be sure…”

What Gaby and Izzy had meant by
indescribable
was getting clearer. They were also right about his being hard not to like despite his quirky, barely penetrable “logic.” In fact, it was largely his good-humored, effervescent goofiness that made him likable. And entertaining.

Not to Emil, though, but then no doubt Emil had had a lot more exposure to Lorenzo’s wacky locutions than Alix had. “Could we cease and desist with the metaphysics, please?

“Let me put my question as simply as I can. Miss London, can you tell us what it is about the Manet that makes you entertain the possibility that it might be a f—I beg your pardon, Lorenzo—that it might not
be
a Manet?”

Suddenly, Alex was tired. She did think it wasn’t a genuine Manet—and very likely a forgery in the generally understood meaning of the word (although she’d have to remember never to say that to Lorenzo)—but she still didn’t know why she thought so. That made it hard to argue her point. That was why, when she was in her full senses, she kept such intimations to herself until she had something more than a gut feeling to go on.

“Emil—” she began uncertainly.

But he saved her. “Aside from the all-around brilliance of the work, which I should have thought would speak for itself, there are innumerable Manet hallmarks that, in my opinion, cannot be successfully imitated. I’m surprised that you would imagine that those warm, brown shadows, the uniquely buttery green grass of the background, the curving, flowing strokes that outline the…”

She was no longer paying attention. Unknown to Emil, his words had finally freed up the logjam and she was too excited to listen.

She knew what was wrong with the painting.