A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (31 page)

Alix woke with something that wasn’t quite a hangover but was definitely on the wrong side of happy, healthy, and fit. Instinctively, she groped for the bedside phone to call for coffee, but changed her mind and asked for orange juice instead.

She’d barely gotten into her robe when there was a
tap tap
at the door. In came Artemis, as crisp and fresh and smiling as ever, pushing a rolling table with a glass pitcher that held enough orange juice for four, a pot of coffee, and a basket of warm pastries topped with two of the buttery croissants that Alix had so quickly come to look forward to. Not this morning, though. Looking at them made her gag a little. She reached for the orange juice, but Artemis beat her to it and poured a glass for her. As Alix had come to expect, it was as fresh as could be, foamy and thick with flecks of pulp.

“May I serve you anything else?”

“No, thank you, this is more than enough.”

“Are you planning to go into Saranda today, Miss London?”

“Into where?”

“Saranda. Albania. You can get there by ferry.”

“I didn’t know that. Don’t I need a visa or something?”

“Technically, yes. Actually, no. Your passport is all. Saranda is, shall we say, quite informal when it comes to such things.”

“Okay, thanks for mentioning it. I might do that.”

“The reason I ask is that there are only two sailings a day, and most of our guests who were going there were on the nine o’clock—”

“What? It’s after nine?” Alix hadn’t slept that late in years. She was an early morning lover. On those few occasions when she missed the dawn, her day was never as good as it might have been.

“It’s nine forty-five, I’m afraid. But there is also a hydrofoil, smaller but much quicker, that leaves at ten thirty.”

“Oh, I don’t see how I could make that. Wouldn’t I have to take the launch into port, then—”

“Not at all, we’re already in port. Here in Corfu it’s possible for yachts of our size to berth in the marina.” She pointed to the window, out of which Alix had yet to look this morning. “And there is your ferry, not fifty meters from here.”

“Thank you, Artemis, I might do it at that,” Alix said without conviction, but after the chief stewardess had left and she’d had some more wonderfully restorative juice (but not so wonderful that she wanted to tackle the coffee or the croissants), she decided it might be a good idea. Remaining on the
Artemis
all day didn’t hold much appeal, and as for Corfu Town, she’d seen its moderately interesting sights when she’d been here on Uncle Julian’s yacht. But Albania, that would be someplace new. The last time she’d been here it was still the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, reclusive and paranoid, and visitors were not encouraged. Certainly there had been no public ferry from Corfu.

What the hell, she thought, why not? A quick shower, a sundress and sandals, and she’d be off.

The Hotel Porto Eda is generally thought to be one of the better hotels in Saranda, which isn’t saying much, but its solidly middling three-star rating, its location only steps from the marina, and its price (forty euros, breakfast included)—good value, but not cheap enough to bring in the
backpackers—combine to draw most overnight foreign visitors, of whom there aren’t all that many. A pink building of four balconied stories, with potted palms on the roof and a giant, peeling Tuborg Beer billboard looming over them, it boasts a tidy little lounge area, clean and modern, with faux-leather sofas and armchairs and glass-topped coffee tables, where guests meet other guests or wait for transportation or drink the excellent coffee or tea that is served there.

At 11:15 a.m. on this particular Friday it held the usual six or eight people having their midmorning coffees. Among them was Gabriela Papadakis, sick to her stomach with tension; opening nights had been child’s play compared to this. She was so stressed she kept forgetting to breathe. And when a friendly male tried to engage her in conversation, his first good look at her manic eyes scared him off before he’d gotten out the first sentence.

Had they found Panos yet? Could he still be alive? He’d looked as if he were dying, but why hadn’t she made absolutely sure? Emil, damn him, had panicked and his panic had infected her, and they had run.

The cleanup crew knew better than to enter their stateroom before one p.m., but still.… She had no clear memory of pulling the door closed when she and Emil had left, but surely she must have. Mustn’t she? Anyway, didn’t they close automatically? She couldn’t even remember that. Everything was so muddled. She wished now she’d never gone looking for that safe. Whatever the value of that damned Manet, it wasn’t worth
this
. Her eyes had been fixed on the hotel’s glass-door entrance for half an hour; she expected to see the police barge in to arrest her at any second.
What was taking Emil so long?
She couldn’t sit there very much longer without screaming.

They had arrived in Saranda at 10:45. Emil had openly carried the two paintings, the Monet and the newly found Manet, into the country in a tubular leather map case. There was no interest in them at customs, as he’d promised her there wouldn’t be. (Still, she’d made sure to be well behind him in the exit line.) They’d asked him to open the tube and pull
out the rolled-up contents so they could take a desultory look for drugs or weapons, but pictures? Why would the bored Albanian customs officers care about pictures coming into the country? Or going out, for that matter? The inspector had stifled a yawn and motioned him through with a waggle of his fingers.

Gaby still didn’t understand what he planned to do with Panos’s
Déjeuner au Bord Du Lac
, and she thought he wasn’t too clear about it himself. She didn’t blame him for this; she had dumped it in his lap only two hours ago. But when he’d said that he planned to try to sell it in addition to the Monet that had already been agreed upon, she’d exploded.

“Are you crazy? You think these gangsters have brought along an extra few million dollars just in case you happen to bring another painting with you? They’ll kill you for it and keep the money and keep
both
paintings.”

“No, they won’t,” he said. “I’m their source for this kind of thing. They’ve done business with me before and they’ll want to do it again. They know they can trust me, and that’s worth more to them than any two paintings. And I trust them. They—”

“You trust them? You
are
crazy.”

“Please, Gaby, I’ll work something out with them. It’ll be all right. Would it kill you to just trust my judgment for once?”

Just about, but what choice did she have? So now she sat in the lounge, an untouched cup of espresso on the coffee table in front of her and a leather tube worth approximately five million dollars, even at black market rates, clutched in one hand and clamped between her knees for extra assurance. Emil was up in room 204, talking to the buyers. This sort of thing was done in two steps, he’d told her. Making sure they had the money while she remained here, in a separate place, with the paintings, was the first. In the second step, having seen the money, he would come back down to get the paintings and bring them up to exchange for the money. And that was it; there was no third step. With the money in hand they would hop in the car they’d rented, and it was off through Montenegro and Bosnia and
Herzegovina, to Zagreb. Nobody in the world would know where they were, and what a thrilling, freeing thought that was.
But what was taking him so long?

“It’s on,” he said, so suddenly and so close that it started her on a hiccupping fit. He’d come up behind her while her attention had been focused on the doors. “Give me the tube, Gaby. We’ll be out of here in twenty minutes.”

She was so consumed by the hiccups that he had to pry it out of her hands, and even then her fingers wouldn’t let go. “Wait…”

“Damn it, Gaby—”

She got her hiccups enough under control to gasp, “They’re… giving us the… two and a half million… for the Monet?”

“Yes, I just counted it. Now all they need to do is see it.” He tugged harder.

She held on. “What about the Manet?”

“They’ll give us five hundred thousand now if they like it and another amount later, to be determined—”

“So they
had
an extra half-million euros with them. I
told
you they would have paid you that for the Monet alone. You idiot—”

He dug his fingernails—they were well manicured, but on the long side for a man, in her opinion—into her wrist. “You’re making a scene!” he whispered harshly. “There are people here. What’s wrong with you? Everything’s going fine.”

“I…” Out of the blue, a complete surprise, she was crying. “I don’t know, it’s all so… oh, Emil, what’s wrong with me? I’m sorry, I just want us to get out of here, I just want it to be over.”

“Well, it never will be if you don’t let go of the damn thing.”

Her fingers released their grip, and he pulled the tube safely out of her range and sat on the sofa beside her. “You have to stay strong for me now, Gaby. We’re almost there. Wait’ll you see it; it’s beautiful, the money.” He was speaking softly, almost singing the words, and stroking the back of her hand the way one would to calm an hysterical five-year-old. “Sixty
beautiful little stacks of five-hundred-euro bills; can you imagine? And it all fits in a duffel bag; can you believe it? And guess what it weighs. Fifty pounds? A hundred? No, just fourteen pounds. Didn’t you think it would be much more? I thought—”

Abruptly she snatched back her hand. “Stop babying me; I’m all right. It was a momentary… I don’t know what it was, but it’s over now and you don’t need to worry. It won’t happen again.”

He gave her hand one more pat as he rose. “There, that’s more like it. That’s my—”

“I said stop it! Now get the hell back up there and let’s get this over with.”

He grinned, only a little nervously, leaned over to plant an abstracted kiss on her forehead, and headed for the elevator.

W
atching Albania’s shoreline glide by from a window seat in the fifteen-row, airliner-like interior of the hydrofoil, Alix couldn’t imagine it looking any more unwelcoming in its People’s Republic heyday than it did right now. She’d read the
Artemis
’s two-page pamphlet guide while waiting for the ship to get going, and it had told her about the “thousands of gun-emplacement pillboxes” she would see on her way to Saranda. So she’d been ready for them. They were, according to the pamphlet, the legacy of Enver Hoxha, the xenophobic Communist leader of the republic for the forty years following World War II.

Still, she hadn’t been prepared for their astounding density. She’d taken it for granted that “thousands” was hyperbole. It wasn’t. Concrete, beehive-shaped gun emplacements, each with its ominous black opening facing the sea, were lined up along the shore for miles. Sometimes arranged in rows, sometimes in irregular clumps, they might be separated by as much as a hundred feet or as little as ten. Surely, she thought, there were more than enough to hold the entire Albanian army. For twenty solid minutes, she continued to pass them.

They were deserted and gunless now, but all the same it didn’t give her a good feeling about the country, and Saranda itself didn’t help. Seen from the pier, it seemed to be mostly composed of boxy, 1960s-style apartment buildings in various stages of decline. Nowhere in view was there anything resembling a commercial or historic downtown of interest to a visitor. By the time she’d gotten through customs (a ten-second process), she was wondering what she was going to do all day; there were no return ferries until
evening. There were some modern, nice-looking beach resorts visible at the south end of town, but she wasn’t in the mood for beach resorts.

What she
was
in the mood for was another chance at the coffee at which she’d so blithely turned up her nose earlier and maybe a little something to go along with it. According to the pamphlet, Albanian coffee was strong and tasty, and the nearest place to the dock where it could be gotten was the
kafe
in the lobby of the Hotel Porto Eda, where English was spoken, after a fashion, and euros were accepted. That settled it. She didn’t have any Albanian currency, and the only word of Albanian she knew was
kafe
.