Death of an Aegean Queen

by Maria Hudgins

  Brittany Benson, her innocence perhaps compromised at this point, dropped out of college three weeks into her first semester, and went to work as a flight attendant for Delta Airlines. Quit two years later and moved to Miami where she worked as a dancer at the Sandy Jug (I checked their website, Mom, and I don’t think it was ballet).

  I couldn’t find out anything about her high school record because those files are confidential, but her next move after the job in Miami is strange. She ups and moves to Lima, Peru. The next address I found for her was in an exclusive part of the city, where most of the residents are American expats and international jet-setters. The house at this address is currently on the market, for an asking price of $3 million, U.S.!

  That’s the latest thing I found on Brittany, but you say she’s working on your cruise ship now? Okay, I’ll believe you. Do they have a pole for her to use? Or do they fill the pool with Jello?

  Love,

  Charlie

  I smiled at the screen. This was about as flippant as Charlie ever got, and I was happy to see this levity. Maybe it meant the atmosphere at his school wasn’t as tense as it had been the last time I talked to him. Charlie had always taken things too seriously and since his dear wife was diagnosed as manic-depressive, his life had been nothing but stress at work, alternating with gray clouds at home. Maybe he was learning to laugh at the human comedy.

  While the photo Charlie had attached was printing, I studied it on the screen. Kathryn Gaskill sat with her left shoulder toward the camera, her hands folded in her lap. George stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders. I’d only seen George once, that first night at dinner. Strange to think how my trip to Greece had been hijacked by a man with whom I’d shared only a few sentences of innocuous, pointless small-talk.

  The photo brought him back to me. The slicked-back dark hair, the trim little goatee, the prominent front teeth. I recalled how he whistled his S’s. Was this the face of a child-molester? I tried to wipe my mind free of what I now knew and look at him with objective eyes. What I saw was a beaten man. Shoulders drooping, eyes without luster, a man upon whom life had dumped more than he could bear.

  I wondered how Kathryn had reacted to his conviction. Had she recoiled, avoiding his touch? Hated him secretly while sympathizing with him openly? Did she blame him for their plummeting social position? From professional, upper-middle class, probably with a home in a nice part of town, to used-car salesman and wife living in a town where nobody knew them?

  My photo lay on the floor in front of the attendant’s desk, having been spit out with great vigor by a printer that had apparently had a good night’s rest. I walked over, picked it up, and signed the billing sheet with my cabin number and number of pages I’d printed. On regular cheap copy paper, the picture wasn’t as clear as it had been on the computer screen.

  “Mrs. Lamb?” Luc Girard walked through the door. “Good. I’ve been looking for you since yesterday. May I speak to you for a minute?”

  I wanted to chase Marco down, but “speak to you for a minute” sounded like such a reasonable request, I said okay.

  He took my elbow and led me out into the hall. “Have you seen this?” he asked, stopping in front of a display case that held a lovely gold bracelet. “No known provenance. As far as I can tell, this has never been photographed, catalogued, or described anywhere, by anyone.”

  “Thessaly?” I bent down and read the brass plaque inside the case with the bracelet.

  Girard stepped back from the display case and looked at me over the top of his black-rimmed glasses. “Thessaly’s a big place. Where in Thessaly? When was it found? By whom?”

  “Why haven’t I noticed this before?” I wondered aloud. “It’s right outside the dining room.”

  “But it’s between the door to the dining room and the men’s room. You probably don’t go to the men’s room often.” Girard turned toward the open double doors to the dining room. “Could we have a cup of coffee and talk for a few minutes?”

  “Well,” I said, hesitating. Most of all I wanted to catch up with Marco, but if that couldn’t be done, I hated to pass up this chance to pick Luc Girard’s brain. “Could you wait here a second? I have to check on something. Won’t be a minute.”

  “I’ll be in the dining room. I’ll order coffee for you.”

  The main desk around which the offices, including security and purser’s offices, were arrayed was on the same deck so all I had to do was run down a hall past the casino and into the vast open space, roughly circular and three stories tall, designed to afford guests every opportunity to spend yet more money on land excursions, jewelry, sweaters, and photos of themselves. Photos now being taken by Nikos Papadakos’s replacement. Marco was nowhere in sight. I asked about him at the main desk, but the attendant on duty didn’t know who Marco was. I talked the man into ringing the security office for me. He shook his head after a minute. “No answer,” he said.

  I walked around to the security office door and knocked. No answer.

  Girard had taken a table near the entrance to the dining room. Two cups of coffee had already been served. As I took my seat, he pushed his chair back from the table, crossed his legs outside the linen cloth and threw one arm across the back of his chair. “Sophie and I have checked every display on the ship and we’ve found four items stolen from museums, ten with no known provenance, and five that were legally purchased through a dealer or an auction house.”

  “So they weren’t all obtained the same way,” I said. “Interesting.”

  This was the first time I had noticed how truly sexy Luc Girard was. Way too young for me, more’s the pity, but a serious threat to a younger woman’s heart. His mouth was almost feminine but strengthened somewhat by a roughly shaven jaw line and a sparse goatee that divided itself into three isolated parts: mustache, small tuft under the lower lip, and a few chin whiskers. Behind his black-rimmed glasses, his dark eyes smoldered with what was—to be totally honest with myself—no expression at all. Any message a woman got from those eyes was one she read into them herself. I checked his left hand. On his ring finger was a hefty gold job with an inlaid onyx. It could have been a college ring.

  “This cruise line is owned by a Geneva-based company called Helvetia Shipping, but the directors of the consortium are actually Italian, for the most part, with some Americans, Greeks, and others thrown in for good measure. You dig?”

  “So who acquired the things we see in the display cases?”

  “That’s not going to be easy to find out. But Sophie and I are working on it from several angles.” Girard uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, his hands around his coffee cup. He looked straight at me, then quickly down at his cup. “Sophie, by the way, is a very . . . astute woman. She is incredibly bright, you dig? I thank you for introducing her to me.”

  Oh, please. He couldn’t fool me with that “astute” business. The man was falling in love. I shook my brain back to the subject we were allegedly talking about. “Wouldn’t it be a matter of finding out who’s in charge of purchasing?”

  “The ship was overhauled and renovated three years ago. I’ve talked to the purser about who did the buying at that time and where they bought from. I’ve talked to Chief Letsos. Have you met him? He’s no help at all.”

  “He’s not the most amiable man I’ve ever met.”

  “Letsos keeps reminding me, subtly, that he and I are both employed by the company I’m suggesting we investigate. If we value our jobs, you dig, we shouldn’t rock the boat … no pun intended.”

  French accent notwithstanding, Luc Girard had firm command of English idiom.

  “I don’t care about that myself,” he said without a hint of bravado in his tone, “but I wouldn’t want to ask Sophie to risk getting fired. She needs her job more than I need mine.”

  “How can I help?”

  Girard turned his face toward the windows and, without looking at me, said, “Did you visit Sophie and Brittany’s room yesterday?”

  T
his caught me off-guard. I took a long sip of coffee to give myself time to think. “Yes. I assume Sophie told you. There’s no other way you could know.”

  “It doesn’t matter. What did you find?”

  When I didn’t answer immediately, he reached across the table and clasped my hand. “We are speaking in total confidence here. I promise you I won’t even tell Sophie anything you tell me, but if I’m to make any progress, I need to know.”

  “Of course.” I had the uneasy feeling this whole thing might get out of hand, but Girard was right. I had opened this up, myself. Gone to him with what I’d discovered, and I couldn’t hold out on him now. I squared my shoulders and told him about the krater and the carved stone box. On a scrap of paper, I drew the pattern I had seen on the box, as nearly as I could remember it. “I looked for paperwork. Anything that would tell me where she’d got these things and whether she’d paid for them. I found nothing.”

  “Was there anything else inside the boxes? Anything written on the outside of the boxes?”

  “No.” I slipped my napkin onto the table. “And if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Lamb. And if you see Captain Quattrocchi before I do, ask him to come see me, will you?”

  If I see Captain Quattrocchi before you do, I thought, I’ve got some other things to ask him first.

  * * * * *

  I went to the disembarkation point fifteen minutes early, hoping to be the first off the ship so I could catch Marco before he got away. The ship docked beside a concrete bulkhead in the Rhodes harbor, close to the city wall. Entrance into old Rhodes town is restricted to eleven widely spaced gates in the medieval wall, and from the window in my room it looked as if there was only one gate close by. It stood to reason that if I went ashore quickly and stood by the gate, Marco would have to walk past me. But if he was heading for the airport, he’d probably catch a taxi and I could see several cars that might or might not be taxis parked along the outside of the wall.

  At the bottom of the gangway, a new photographer was set up to snap everyone as they set foot on Rhodes, the island of roses. How easily we can be replaced, I thought as I walked past him, shaking my head. I was in no mood to have my picture taken. If I died today, I continued thinking in that maudlin vein, how long would it take my college to replace me? No time at all. They’d just open their bulging applications files and call a few numbers.

  Passengers from the ship were directed down a rather narrow concrete strip between the city wall and the harbor in order to reach the aptly-named Marine Gate, the entrance to the old town. I stepped aside, out of the continuous stream of foot traffic, when I found a grassy spot some twenty yards from the gate. Turning, I scanned the heads and faces behind me for Marco. I wished he were in the habit of wearing distinctive headgear or something that would help me pick him out of the crowd, because his dark hair and medium build made him extremely average from a distance. Instead, I spotted Lettie, sans Ollie.

  She joined me on the grassy strip. “Ollie had to run back to the room for his sunglasses,” she said. “This looks like a good place to wait for him.”

  “I’m hoping to catch Marco before he leaves the island.”

  “Oh, right. He told us at breakfast, didn’t he? He’s flying back to Italy? What’s going on with you two?”

  “He says it’s about George Gaskill’s murder, but I’m afraid it’s really because he’s fed up with me. I didn’t mean to ignore him last night, but Malcolm Stone and Nigel Endicott kept asking me to dance, cutting in and all, and I’m afraid I . . .”

  “What else did you do?” Lettie glanced up at me, frowning.

  “He asked me what was wrong, and I told him not to psychoanalyze me.”

  “You done screwed up again, Dotsy. I told Ollie yesterday, I said, ‘Marco’s too good for Dotsy, but she’ll find a way to screw it up. Never fear.’”

  Brittany Benson approached us and, not far behind her, Malcolm Stone and Willem Leclercq. She waved in our direction, slipped on her sunglasses, and would, I’m sure, have walked past us without speaking if Lettie hadn’t pulled her aside.

  “Are you all right, Brittany?” Lettie asked. “After you left our room last night, Ollie told me he knew exactly how you felt. It’s such torture to be accused of something you didn’t do.”

  Brittany shot daggers at me through her sunglasses. I held my breath, my mind racing, deciding what I would say if she confronted me with my invasion of her room. Instead, she said, “Right. And I know how your husband feels, too. This cruise can’t be over soon enough for me.”

  “Brittany!” The call came from Willem Leclercq, who nodded goodbye to his companion and headed toward us. “Join me for a drink, Brittany? I heard there’s a nice little taverna inside the gate.” Brittany looked as if she’d rather not, but she let him take her arm and lead her away.

  “I saw them together last night at a table near Marco and me. I wonder if that was before or after she came to your room.”

  “If you and Marco were still together, it must have been before.”

  “Oh dear, there’s Malcolm Stone,” I said. “If Marco walks by now and sees me talking to him, that’ll really do it.” I turned and examined the scruffy bit of a tree behind me, reminding myself Marco insisted he wasn’t mad at me, but was flying home to confer with his forensic people.

  “He’s walking on by, Dotsy. You can turn around now. Gee, he looks like a lonely soul, don’t you think so?” Lettie and I watched Malcolm stop and wait his turn to pass through the Marine Gate. With Leclercq hitting on Brittany over a cappuccino, Malcolm would probably have to see Rhodes alone.

  “Lonely? Yes, probably. His wife died a few years ago, he told me. But there’s something else going on with him. I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Maybe it’s the George Gaskill thing. He’s been questioned, too.”

  “He’s always looking around. As if he’s expecting someone. I noticed it yesterday, too, when we were in Patmos.”

  Luc Girard rushed up, greeting me as he came. I introduced him to Lettie. “What good luck to find you here,” he said. “Are you, by any chance, planning to visit the Palace of the Grand Masters today?”

  Until an hour ago I had planned to tour the Palace with Marco but, since then, I hadn’t thought about anything except finding Marco before he left. I stood, stupidly forgetting to answer Girard’s question, until Lettie nudged me. “Yes, of course,” I said. “And the Street of the Knights. They’re close together, aren’t they?”

  “They’re adjacent to each other. When you go through the gate here, turn right and right again. That’ll be the Street of the Knights, and at the end, you’ll see the Palace. How about meeting me there? There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  We agreed to rendezvous in the central courtyard inside the Palace, and Girard left, joining the throng at the gate.

  “Why does that man always carry a backpack?” Lettie said. I saw she was looking at Nigel Endicott, hip Nigel, trekking up the walk. Today, his hair was gelled up like a bird’s nest, his T-shirt’s advertisement for some brand of surfboard peeked out between the padded straps of his backpack.

  “There’s another man with something on his mind. When I danced with him last night, I got the feeling of . . . oh, I don’t know . . . fear. The man is frightened of something, Lettie.”

  Nigel nodded to me as he approached us. I introduced him to Lettie, who, with her customary reticence, said, “Why do you always carry that backpack, Mr. Endicott?”

  He blinked and took a small step back. “I don’t always carry it, but, since you ask, I’m on my way to the hammam, and one has to bring one’s own towel and toiletries.”

  “Hammam. You mean a harem?” Lettie’s eyes widened. “Where they have girls?”

  I laughed and Nigel explained, “A hammam is a Turkish bath. There’s a famous one that’s been here since the seventeen-hundreds. So that’s why I’m carrying my backpack. Would you like to see?”

  “No, it�
��s okay. Have a nice . . . bath, Mr. Endicott.”

  After Nigel had walked on, I caught Lettie staring toward the pier. She touched my arm. “Agent Bondurant is following Nigel Endicott,” she said, her voice low. “He was right behind him until Nigel came over here and talked to us, then Bondurant stopped and pretended to be interested in a piling. When Nigel left, he followed.”

  That would explain why Nigel acted frightened, but why was Bondurant interested in him? Was he another suspect in the murder of George Gaskill or could it be something else entirely? The whole situation was beginning to make me dizzy.

  The ship had nearly emptied by this time, a few stragglers still ambling down the gangway. It looked as if Marco had given me the slip. Did he do it on purpose? Had he been picked up by a boat or something on the other side? Perhaps I’d missed him while I’d been talking.

  “There’s Ollie,” Lettie said, jumping and waving at the bald head sticking out above the crowd. She and Ollie left me to explore Rhodes on my own.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I wandered through shops along Socrates Street and noticed that nearby streets were named for other ancient Greek scholars like Pythagoras and Aristotle. Although inhabited since before Christ, the medieval period gave the city its character because Rhodes served as a base for the Knights of St. John during the Crusades. All over the town, jewelry, clothing, and souvenir shops, tucked into narrow, arched, cobblestone streets, competed with mosques and fourteenth-century towers for the visitor’s attention.

  It was while I was thumbing through a stack of scarves in an alley off Socrates Street that I caught a whiff of something unpleasant. I moved around the rickety table on which the scarves were displayed and the smell got stronger. Like old cheese. No, not exactly. More like stinky feet. No, that wasn’t quite it either.