Death of an Aegean Queen

by Maria Hudgins

  To Marco, Lettie, and me, the girls strongly recommended we walk to a section of town called Little Venice. “Many nice bars and coffee houses, they have,” Sophie told us.

  “And a great place to take pictures,” Brittany added, her eyes twinkling at Marco.

  Lettie and I both spotted the man in the yellow-and-red flowered shirt at the same time, because as I was trying to remember why his shirt looked familiar, Lettie said, “There’s that wrong-way man again. The one who was going down the ramp yesterday when everyone else was going up.”

  “Oh, right.” As I said it, the man looked back, spun around to a display case on his immediate left, and began studying it intently. That particular case, I had noticed earlier, held another beautiful antiquity. A black-and-gold bull’s head mounted on a wooden block. Raising five children has taught me a thing or two about acting nonchalant and attempting to blend into the scenery. Young boys will jam their hands in their pockets and whistle a nonsense tune, little girls will twirl their hair and look at the ceiling, and grown men will pretend to be interested in whatever is handy. This man, I thought, had seen something—or someone—he’d rather avoid.

  When he handed his card to the security man, I slipped around Brittany and Sophie, trying to see his name as his vital statistics flashed up on the screen. It said “Nigel” and something starting with an E. I couldn’t make out the last name.

  At the foot of the gangway, the ship’s photographer, a cheery olive-skinned man, was energetically recruiting folks to pose for a disembarking shot against a canvas backdrop of Mykonos, which seemed kind of silly to me because, by simply turning his camera the other way, he could have used the real Mykonos as his background. I pointed this out to Lettie.

  Three buses waited in a line, each driver herding people aboard then taking off up the hill as soon as his bus filled. A fourth bus appeared from over the hill, punching through a cloud of the departing bus’s dust, and took its place at the back of the line.

  “They really should have put the town closer to the dock,” Lettie said.

  Ollie and Marco glanced at each other and grinned.

  “Wait up,” Ollie called to two men I didn’t know. The men turned and came toward us. “I want you to meet Mr. Leclercq and Mr. Stone,” he said to us. “These are the guys we played poker with last night. They were kind enough to let us use their suite.” This was the most formal introduction I’d ever heard from Ollie Osgood, and a chill went through me when I realized these three men had been George Gaskill’s sole companions in the two or three hours before his death.

  The older man extended his hand to me first, then to the others. “Malcolm Stone,” he said, and Willem Leclercq followed suit. Leclercq slipped off his sunglasses and looked at me with his very blue eyes. He wore a tropical flowered shirt that looked expensive and olive-drab cargo pants. Bon vivant, I thought.

  As Leclercq shook hands with Marco, he said in a French-sounding accent, “I understand you’ve been helping security to find George Gaskill. Is there any further word? Have they found him yet?”

  “No, and at this point, I think they are not going to find him at all. I think Mr. Gaskill is gone . . .” Marco stopped abruptly and squinted into the morning sun.

  “Rum business, that,” Malcolm Stone said, shaking his head. No one seemed to have anything else to add.

  The four of us started up the hill toward the buses, and right away I realized I’d worn the wrong shoes. My sandals collected gravel, requiring me to stop and shake one foot or the other every few feet. I hoped the whole island wasn’t gravel.

  “What did he mean, ‘rum business’?” Lettie scrambled to catch up with Marco and me. “Is he suggesting George was drunk?”

  “No, Lettie, it’s a British expression. It means something like ‘bad business,’ I think.”

  On the other side of the hill, a beautiful little Greek town, white-washed to a dazzling brightness, hugged a crescent-shaped bay. Colorful boats bobbed at anchor in the sea and dotted the sandy beach. A red-domed church on the opposite hill seemed to be where our bus driver was pointing when he told Marco, “Little Venice, over there.”

  * * * * *

  Marco and I stopped by the local Hard Rock Café and bought T-shirts for my grandchildren while Ollie and Lettie forged ahead up a narrow, winding street toward Little Venice.

  Exiting the Hard Rock, I looked up the hill and spotted Brittany Benson, the dancer, emerging from a shop along a row of white cubes with brightly painted doors. Close behind her, Leclercq and Stone dashed out the same door, obviously calling to her as they went because she turned and stopped. They gestured toward the package Brittany was carrying, a bag roughly the size of a toaster. Brittany shook her head and seemed to clutch the bundle more tightly. I tugged at Marco’s shirt sleeve and pointed.

  Leclercq pulled out a wallet and extracted what looked like paper currency, extending it to Brittany. She shook her head. Stone reached toward her package but Brittany backed away, stumbling and righting herself quickly. She walked away, then turned and said something to them. Leclercq, his wallet still in his hand, withdrew another item that looked to me as if it was probably a business card. Brittany shifted her load to one arm and shoved whatever Leclercq had handed her into her shorts pocket.

  Bag of T-shirts in hand, we followed Ollie and Lettie’s route up the narrow street but I had to stop near the top because my sandals were full of rocks again. Ahead of us I spotted the photo opportunity of a lifetime. Ollie and Lettie, standing in a gap between two rough whitewashed walls with a swath of blue sky and a strip of bluer water behind them, had just turned to face each other when Ollie put his hands around Lettie’s waist and looked down at her.

  I grabbed my camera out of my purse, fumbled for the “on” button, and located them in the little view window in time to catch the look of love on both faces just before their lips touched.

  “Christmas gift!” I said to Marco. “If this turns out well, I think a framed eight-by-ten would be about right.” I flipped the camera mode to “playback” and saw the moment again, frozen in time. “Perfect.”

  We explored alleys and shops for an hour before my stomach told me it needed lunch. Marco confessed he hadn’t eaten all day and steered me into a small coffeehouse overlooking a bay. The windows on one side of the room stood directly over a wave-lapped cliff that rose straight from the water about a hundred feet below the base of the building. I had a moment of vertigo looking down from one of the windows and suggested we sit at a table a little farther back. If one accidentally fell into the glass and it broke, one’s next stop would be the Aegean Sea. Or the rocks, which would probably hurt even more.

  Our waiter spoke no English at all so I left the ordering to Marco, who, as a native to the Mediterranean area, was accustomed to dealing with language problems. Strange instrumental music played softly in the background and, through the windows, a row of five windmills with bare blades and grass roofs lined the crest of a promontory across the bay. What a wonderful place.

  About then I noticed Marco and I were the only mixed-gender couple in the room. Mostly in pairs and mostly men except for two women sitting with their backs to a window, they lounged with their coffee and cigarettes, arms slung casually across seat backs.

  “This is a gay bar, Marco.”

  “On Mykonos, gay bars are the rule and not the exception, Dotsy, and do not stare. It is bad manners.” He conferred with the waiter about our order while I studied the artwork on the walls, recovering from that rebuke.

  Our food arrived. Marco had ordered me a sort of fish-kebab with vegetables and rice. One of the skewers held nothing but a longitudinally impaled octopus tentacle, its suction cups lined up in a double row down one side. Sliced up, it tasted okay. While I ate, I considered how to respond to his “bad manners” crack. I wanted him to know I am not a homophobe and I have not recently fallen off the turnip truck. I considered it, but decided to say nothing. Much better to let my wound fester until it erupted in a
torrent of green bile.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you told me yesterday,” I said, taking a totally different tack, “about antiquities in warehouses and such. What do you know about the illegal market? The smuggling and all?”

  Marco lowered his forkful of rice back to his plate. “Quite a lot, actually. The Carabinieri are working with Interpol and with Scotland Yard in England. We have been for several years. The smugglers bring their goods from Turkey, from Crete, from all around the Mediterranean, through Italy on their way to Germany, England, and to America. Through Greece, too, of course, but there are a couple of families in Italy who have a well-organized smuggling syndicate. The looting of Etruscan artifacts in Italy has been big business for a long time, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. Marco knew of my interest in Etruscan civilization.

  “UNESCO has passed some laws that are making it more difficult for them to get away with it. For a long time, Switzerland allowed no-questions-asked importing and exporting so Geneva was a haven for the international black market. They are cracking down now, but the smugglers are also getting smarter.”

  “Are these things that have been actually stolen or are they items that local people have just happened to dig up?”

  “Both.” Marco leaned over his plate and tapped his forefinger firmly on the table. “But whether they break into the museum, knock out the guard, and smash open the glass cases or whether they pay a poor farmer in Crete more money than he can make in a month for a vase he has found, it makes no difference. It is stealing our heritage. Our history. And not just from the Italians and the Greeks, no! It is stealing from the world!”

  “Hey, you’re preaching to the choir here.” I sat back, ducking his sweeping hand gesture.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  When will I learn to speak in plain English when I’m talking to Marco?

  * * * * *

  The door to the street opened and Lettie walked in, accompanied by the two strangest pelicans I had ever seen. Waddling nonchalantly, as if they were coming to tea, they elicited barely a ripple of laughter from the other patrons. I supposed this was the done thing on Mykonos. These pelicans, the official mascots of Mykonos, were snow-white except for their heads and pouched bills. The area around their eyes was pink, the top of their bills, a long streak of blue, and the pouch part underneath was lemon yellow. They must have weighed thirty pounds apiece because their heads were higher than Lettie’s waist.

  Lettie carried a huge mesh bag full of sponges.

  She calmly took an empty chair at our table and squished the bag of sponges between the chair’s legs. A waiter tried to shoo the pelicans out, but they were in no hurry to leave until he tossed something, probably fish, out the door and into the street. The birds waddled out the door.

  “I thought you might like to walk down to the harbor with me,” Lettie said. “Ollie’s there now, gabbing with the fishermen, although I don’t know how either they or he knows what they’re saying. He’s speaking English and they’re speaking Greek.”

  “Did he buy the sponges, or did you?” Marco asked.

  “Oh, aren’t they ridiculous?” She pulled the huge bag out from under her chair and plopped it on her lap. “These are real natural sponges. Sponge divers bring them up. Ollie says he’s going to give them as Christmas presents to his crew.” She turned to Marco and explained, “Ollie is a building contractor. He usually has fifty to a hundred men working for him.”

  “I bet a sponge is just what they’ve always wanted,” I said.

  “Well, maybe not. But Ollie said, ‘How many of these guys are ever going to go to Greece themselves? Most of them have never seen a real sponge.’”

  “You can buy them at home, you know.”

  “Don’t tell Ollie. Just tell me how I’m going to pack these things up.”

  Lettie and I headed for the door while Marco paid the bill. I glanced over my shoulder in time to catch the grins on the faces of the other patrons and resisted the temptation to say, where Marco could hear me, “Don’t stare. It’s bad manners.” We wound our way through several narrow streets and alleys in a roughly downhill manner. The aromas and sounds coming from the open shop doors we passed were a sensual smorgasbord. I tried to make mental notes to write in my trip journal later.

  “The harbor is at the end of this next street, I think.”

  “Wait a minute. I have to dump the rocks out of my sandals,” I said, vowing to wear closed-toed shoes at our next island. As I held onto Marco’s arm and lifted my left foot to shake it, I heard noises. A scream. Shuffling. A loudly barked order. Someone yelled, in English, “Get back! Get back!”

  Marco left me leaning on thin air and ran to the nearest alley, one that ran downhill and to the right. He stopped.

  “Oh Dio!”

  Lettie and I hurried along to join him. The alley opened out to bright sky at the other end, but I could go no farther than the entrance because Marco stopped me with his outstretched arm. He didn’t stop Lettie, who, being a bit shy of five foot one, ducked under his arm.

  Afternoon sun poured into the far end of the alley, highlighting red-streaked walls, red puddles on the cobblestones. It must have been a horrible battle. From a dark mound at the base of one wall, a bare arm stretched out and up at an awkward angle. Beyond the mound, one face, then two, then another, peeped around the corner and vanished when a voice warned, “Get back!” or something like it in Greek.

  Lettie, standing between us and the dark mound, hunched over suddenly, her shoulders tight. I thought she was going to throw up. Instead, she turned and called back, “Marco! Come here!”

  “No! This does not concern us. You come here!”

  Lettie didn’t budge.

  “This is an island problem. A Mykonos problem. We will stay out of it!”

  She turned back to the dark mound, inching closer, bending forward. I wanted to run to her, to stop her before she touched the body. You can never tell what Lettie is going to do. But she raised one hand to her mouth, studied the lump for a second, then said, “Yes, it does concern us, Marco. It’s our photographer!”

  “I have to go and get her, Dotsy,” Marco said, folding both my hands in his and pushing me firmly back and out of the alley. He slipped up behind Lettie, put an arm around her shoulders, and led her back to me. Her face was pale. She walked unsteadily, leaning on Marco, staring blankly toward her own feet.

  Marco handed her off to me. “Take her away and get her some fresh air. I will stay here and try to help. And will you make certain someone has told the police?”

  That last order was unnecessary because, as he said it, three policemen in summer shirts with emblems on their sleeves appeared at the far end of the alley. I walked Lettie down the street listening to her halting description of the photographer’s bloody remains. I looked for familiar faces. Anyone I recognized from the ship. It seemed to me, if I found myself in a police interview later, they might want to know who else was in the vicinity.

  Luc Girard, the archaeologist, was at the bottom of the steep slope, walking toward us, and Sophie Antonakos was a few yards ahead of us, going down. She slipped on a cobble and a brush flipped out of her open purse as she twisted to right herself. Girard picked it up for her, but Sophie, stooping at the same time, cracked heads with him. He smiled sheepishly, handed her the brush, and rubbed his forehead as he passed us.

  Where our street opened out onto a plaza fronting the harbor, Brittany Benson sat on a block of stone, surrounded by several packages. Sophie ran up to her, twittering, “Oh, no! I ran into Dr. Girard. I really ran into him! I was so embarrassed.”

  Ollie rounded the corner of the next street over—logically the one that would intersect the alley we’d just left but who could tell in this rabbit warren—and headed toward the water. I called out to him. He turned, waved, and then ran toward us.

  “What’s wrong with Lettie?” he asked, gathering her into his arms.

  As I explained, Ollie
held Lettie at arms’ length, studied her face, pulled her close, and kissed the top of her head. I noticed Ollie was toting another mesh bag of sponges, as large as the one Lettie had. Snuggled together with both bags, they looked more like a foursome. Ollie suggested we’d better head back to the ship right away.

  We had to pass the other end of the alley as we climbed back over the hill and as we did so I paused, standing on tiptoes to see over the heads of what was now a crowd. A police officer stood, feet wide apart, barring rubber-neckers from the alley. I heard Marco’s voice, somewhat damped by the alley walls, shouting, “Stay back!”

  Chapter Seven

  Back on the ship, I knocked on Kathryn Gaskill’s door but got no response. Thinking she might not be dressed or might not feel like opening the door, I retraced my steps three doors down, slipped into my own room, and dialed her number. No answer. Maybe she’s talking with the investigators, I thought. I didn’t even consider the possibility that there was good news. That they’d found George. Somehow the hallway around their door had taken on a sort of pall, which, it seemed, would neutralize laughter and suck it into the walls. Maybe she’s getting a bit of fresh air, I thought. I walked back to my room and checked the floor inside my door for a note slipped under. It occurred to me that I didn’t know Kathryn well enough to know if she was the note-leaving sort or not.

  I renewed my lipstick, brushed my hair, and scanned the deck plans in my brochure to locate the library. Luc Girard’s lecture was to be held there at five o’clock and it was already four-fifty. The library, according to the brochure, was on the starboard side of the Ares deck, one deck up, so I took the stairs. The library’s entrance was by way of an exterior door off the promenade. Through a round porthole window in the varnished teak door, I saw no lights inside, but there was a note taped to the brass porthole fittings: La conférence de Dr Girard sera tenue à 18h00, pas 17h00.

  And below this: “Dr. Girard’s lecture will be at 6:00 p.m., not 5:00.”