Death of an Aegean Queen

by Maria Hudgins

  When the line started to move, Sophie dashed toward a taxi that was maneuvering to back up and leave, having picked up no passengers. She halted the driver and waved at me to hurry up. As our car pulled out, I spied Brittany Benson on the promenade deck high above the dock. She was on her cell phone again, and waving her free hand in apparent frustration.

  * * * * *

  We rolled out of Iráklion and into rocky hills peppered with olive trees. A winding road narrowed to a single paved lane, and then the pavement gave out altogether as we climbed higher. Our taxi had to plow through the dust kicked up by all the cars ahead of us. Sophie and I alternated between rolling our windows up to keep out the dust and rolling them down to keep the back seat from overheating. At ten a.m. the sun was already beating mercilessly on the roof of our unair-conditioned cab. I fanned myself and Sophie held a scarf over her nose and mouth. In Greek, she asked our driver if he knew a man named Spyros Kontos and was met with a negative shake of the head.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked him.

  “Ochi,” he answered, meaning no, so I felt free to tell Sophie about my morning’s grilling in the security office, confident the driver wouldn’t understand what I was talking about.

  “They know I snooped through Brittany’s stuff,” I said. “But I told the FBI man and Chief Letsos I stole your room key out of your purse, so they don’t know you had anything to do with it.”

  “Thanks, but Brittany already knows how you got in. Did they accuse you of putting the watch in her closet?”

  I stopped fanning myself and looked at her. “So you know about that, do you? Yes, they did.”

  “How did the watch get there?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Brittany thinks you put it there. I had to tell her everything, including the fact that it was I who let you in, and I had to tell her why.”

  “Gulp! So Bondurant and Letsos knew I was lying about stealing the key from your purse.”

  “Don’t worry about it. They can figure out for themselves that you were doing it to protect me.”

  We both stared out our windows for a long time, in silence. The rocky slopes, I noticed, were pockmarked with holes, some of which were surrounded by rude scaffolding. Like the entrance to a cave or something.

  “There was no watch in her closet when I was there,” I said.

  “I certainly didn’t put it there.”

  “So it must have been Brittany herself.”

  “I don’t think so.” She looked at me hard, and then added, “I truly don’t think Brittany knew anything about it.”

  I turned back to my window. By now, there was a thick layer of dust on everything including my denim jumper and my navy T-shirt. I studied the holes in the terrain, to get my mind off the chill that had suddenly come over us. I had an idea. “Sophie, do you think these holes are places where people have been digging for loot?”

  “I’ll bet you’re right! I was wondering what they were.” Sophie rolled her window down a bit lower and coughed as more dust poured in. “I see a little village ahead of us.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Nikos Papadakos’s home town was straight out of Zorba the Greek. Narrow streets, whitewashed shanties with red tile roofs, sheep assuming the right of way wherever they happened to wander. The funeral procession stopped when, I assumed, the lead car reached the church. Since there was nothing resembling a place to park, the rest of the cars simply stopped and disgorged their passengers.

  Sophie talked to our cabbie and told me he and the other drivers were going to take their vehicles out of town where they would wait for us until the service was over, then drop back around to pick us up. He showed her how the cardboard sign in his windshield would help us find him again, without which, of course, he couldn’t collect his fare.

  I stepped to one side of the street and slapped a cloud of dust off my clothes. Some fifty yards ahead of us stood a small stucco church. From the car behind the hearse, a young woman in the black of deep mourning and a boy of about seven climbed out and were led off toward the church. The little boy looked back toward me before they led him away. Big dark eyes and a mouth that looked as if it had already been tightened by manhood thrust upon him too soon. He was, I assumed, Papadakos’s son, and he was now the man of the family.

  Sophie took my arm and we headed up the street, following the crowd. “Nikos had two children. That’s his wife and son you were looking at. His baby daughter, I would imagine, is at home and being tended by another member of the family.”

  “Did you know Nikos well?”

  “I hardly knew him at all, but I live in the crew’s quarters, so I’ve heard the talk. There’s been talk of little else since he was killed.”

  “Have you heard anything that would indicate a motive?”

  “Nothing. Everyone who knew him liked him.”

  It was the umpteenth time I’d heard that. How exceptional, I thought, for a man to work and live with these people for two years, and for everyone to still like him. Either Nikos Papadakos was a most amiable fellow, or somebody’s fibbing.

  Sophie had covered her head with the scarf she’d been using to cover her nose earlier. I looked around and realized I was the only woman with a bare head. “Is there a shop or something nearby? I need to buy a scarf.”

  We found a sort of tobacconist shop that also carried odds and ends. While I looked for something scarf-like, Sophie talked to the girl behind the counter. She learned today’s service for Nikos was not to be his only funeral. This one was for the foreigners, people from the ship, but another funeral, tomorrow, would be for the village. This close-knit community, hardly changed for hundreds of years, would suffer the indignities invariably inflicted on their church and their customs by the outsiders for an hour or two, saving their own mourning for later. Sophie also learned the location of Spyros Kontos’s store. It was about three blocks away.

  My head now properly covered by a purple something with a Greek key border, I noted we were more than a block behind the end of the line heading to the church. “Sophie, let’s not go to the funeral. I’d rather look around and find that hardware store.”

  “Okay. I’m only here because you promised to buy my lunch,” Sophie reminded me with a little grin.

  We found the store, but we didn’t find Kontos. The store was being tended by a man who told Sophie that Kontos was at the funeral. I looked around the store, craning my neck to see around the counter and into their back room. Might it hold some of Kontos’s recent diggings? I tried to think of an excuse to go back there. I watched the attendant for a minute and saw that he was so completely absorbed in flirting with Sophie, he wouldn’t notice me if I stripped naked and danced on the counter. I simply walked into the back room and looked around. I saw nothing that looked the least bit incriminating. No artifacts. Nothing. When I returned to the front room of the store, I found Sophie edging her way toward the door and the attendant trying his best to keep her from leaving. I rescued her by calling out, “Let’s go, Sophie.”

  Sophie exhaled loudly and rolled her eyes as she joined me outside the store. “Dotsy, why are we here? If you didn’t want to go to the funeral, why did you want to come here at all?”

  “We’re here because I’m looking for a connection between the murders of George Gaskill and Nikos Papadakos. My best friend’s husband and your roommate are suspects in the former, and, other than a possible smuggling operation, no one has come up with a reasonable motive for the latter. But I believe they were connected.”

  “The woman at the first store told me where Papadakos lived. Would you like to go there?”

  “Sure, but only to walk by. I wouldn’t dare impose on them.”

  Sophie led me off the main street and up a winding dirt lane that terminated in a cluster of tiny stone-and-stucco dwellings. “This is it,” she said, stopping in front of the one with green shutters.

  From inside the hut came a baby’s cry. An old woman dressed in black wobbled by t
he open door, one hand on a quivering cane. She glanced out toward us, shielded her eyes with her free hand, and stopped.

  “Kalimeŕa!” Sophie said, brightly.

  The old woman said nothing, but she waved us in. The next thing I knew, we were inside Nikos Papadakos’s home talking to his mother, and Sophie was holding the crying baby, which the old woman had unceremoniously handed her, then tottered to a cane chair beside a spinning wheel. She seated herself with the utmost care, and swept one hand around toward a table loaded with nuts, bread, small glasses, and a bottle of Metaxa.

  Sophie bounced the baby into silence. It made me a little nervous, knowing her tendency to drop things, but she shushed into the baby’s ear and the baby seemed happy enough. “She says, ‘Help yourself.’ The food on the table is the traditional funeral offering.”

  Feeling like a terrible intruder, I grabbed a handful of peanuts, and smiled at the woman. She and Sophie lit into a long discussion of something, while I studied the simple room, its plain cement floor, smoke-stained hearth, and simple wood-framed windows. I didn’t know whether I should sit down or not so I stood quietly and ate my peanuts. My gaze fell on a stack of black pottery bowls on the floor. They looked exactly like something I’d seen in the back of the LAMBDA catalog of stolen antiquities. Stolen items painted shiny black to make them look like cheap tourist junk. They could be slipped through customs easily with officials never suspecting they were real artifacts. So Papadakos was a smuggler, after all! I must get one of those bowls. I faked a coughing fit as if I had peanuts stuck in my throat and walked out the door, still coughing.

  Sophie followed a minute later, sans baby. “Are you all right, Dotsy?”

  “I’m fine, but I want one of those black bowls on the floor in there. You have to help me get one.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “They’ve been painted black so they can be smuggled out of the country, Sophie. I saw a photo just like them in the LAMBDA book.”

  “Oh, Dotsy. They’re probably just cheap bowls.”

  “I don’t think so. Please. Go in and offer her money. Here.” I dug in my purse and pulled out a wad of Euros. “Give her whatever it takes.”

  Sophie spun around and threw her hands up. “This is silly. Okay, how much should I offer her?”

  “A hundred Euros.”

  “She’d laugh at me. They probably cost less than five.”

  “Do whatever you have to.”

  With a loud sigh, Sophie slipped back inside and said, “Na sas rotiso kati?” I saw her shuffle her feet self-consciously as she listened to the old woman’s answer. A few minutes later, she emerged with a black bowl and handed it to me. “That sweet old woman is now certain all tourists are crazy. I paid her ten Euros for a two-Euro bowl.”

  “You’re a good girl, Sophie.”

  We arrived outside the church when the service was ending and watched as the mourners left. No surprises, really. Nigel Endicott, Malcolm Stone, Willem Leclercq, Brittany Benson—none of them were there. Bondurant, Officer Villas, and Captain Tzedakis were the only people I recognized, and I already knew they were here. The hired cars were waiting for us, now heading the opposite direction. We located our cab and hopped in. We were at the back end of the line again but our driver, rather than wait his turn to move out, shoved the car into reverse and drove around behind the church and out of the village by a different route.

  I looked at the black bowl on my lap. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Sophie’s grin. “Laugh all you want. You and Dr. Girard will thank me when you see I’ve rescued a priceless antiquity.”

  “Are you still going to buy me lunch? I’m hungry.” Sophie grabbed the bowl and turned it over, examining the bottom.

  “Sure. Do you know a good place to eat in Iráklion?”

  The cab was sweltering and the sun beat in on my side of the back seat. I rolled my window down and watched the barren hills roll by. We weren’t returning by the route we’d come, but we were going downhill, so I figured it had to be all right. Sophie told me about the work she was doing for Dr. Girard and her tone of voice confirmed my belief that a fondness was growing between them.

  “I love the work,” she told me, “even though it means working full time as a dancer and working with Dr. Girard in my free time.”

  I looked out the back window. A silver car, a lot like one we’d passed back in the village, was behind us. Sophie turned as well, and looked back. “Are we going the right way?” I said.

  Our driver swerved left onto a smaller side road and a big puff of dust flew into my face. I rolled up my window and leaned forward to ask the man if he knew what he was doing. I smelled—GOATS.

  * * * * *

  “Excuse me,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder. “Aren’t we going the wrong way?”

  Sophie leaned sideways and looked across the seat back. She was in a better position than I was to see his profile. I could see only the back of a greasy head and, in the rearview mirror, his eyes. Sophie turned to me and mouthed something that looked like, “Oh, shit.”

  We careened around a hairpin turn and the car speeded up, hitting a boulder on the side of the road that nearly turned us over. The road descended more steeply on the other side of the turn. Like a sidewinder rattlesnake, our cab slid and slipped down the hill and from the window on my side I saw that the goat man, our driver, was heading for a grove of trees. Once inside the grove, both we and the car would be hidden from view in all directions. My door was on the downhill side. I had to risk it. The lock button on my door was up. Unlocked.

  I grabbed Sophie’s wrist, popped my door open, and rolled out, pulling Sophie along with me. We both hit the ground hard. My left side landed on a thorny bush, my left leg twisted up under me. Sophie, I think, must have fallen flat on her back because I heard a pained “Uunh.”

  Without a word, we both scrambled to our hands and knees. Stumbling and crawling, we struggled toward a large boulder some twenty yards away. I heard the crunch of tires on gravel behind and above us. Then shouts.

  Then the crack of gunfire.

  I heard the ping of a bullet that grazed the boulder Sophie and I were headed for. Sophie had fallen. I heard her say, “Go on, Dotsy. Save yourself.”

  I slid an arm around her and pulled. Pulled her toward the boulder, inch by inch. Sophie regained her footing, sort of, and we stumbled on.

  More shouts. Another shot. Thuds. I hit the dirt and flattened myself out against the ground, waiting for the next shot, which I fully expected to enter my left temple at any second. Two arms lifted and turned me over, pulled me up, and held me tightly. I smelled a clean, soap smell. Clean? Not goat?

  I drew back and looked up. It was Marco.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “I thought you were in Italy.”

  “I came back.” Marco stood up rather abruptly and I fell back, my elbows scraping against the ground. “Excuse me. I have to see about this man who was shooting at you and make sure he does not escape.”

  To Marco’s retreating back, I said, “Find out who he is.”

  I sat up and looked around. Sophie lay face down, a few feet downhill from me, her arms and shirt streaked with blood. My heart thudded in my chest. As I scooted over toward her, she raised her head and looked around. “Oh, thank God, Sophie, I thought you were a goner.”

  “A goner? No, I’m still here, I think.” She sat up, groaned, and plucked a triangular black shard out of her right arm. “I broke your priceless antiquity, though.” She examined the broken edge of the shard and said, “Plaster. What did I tell you?”

  Even I could see the white interior was nothing but plaster, painted black. We checked ourselves for injuries. Sophie had numerous cuts, and a right arm she thought might be broken. It was numb, she said, and it did have a funny angle to it.

  I had too many cuts and scrapes to count, especially on my left side, but everything seemed to move properly. Except my neck. It only wanted to turn right. I had left my newly purchased
scarf, which was probably meant to be a tablecloth, around my shoulders and I found it now, a couple of yards uphill and ensnared in a thorny bush. I retrieved it and made a sling for Sophie’s arm with it.

  “Who is that man?” Sophie asked, so casually it made me laugh. She had no idea what was going on. But then neither did I.

  “I don’t know who he is, but he’s the same man who was following me in Rhodes yesterday. I realized he wasn’t our driver when I leaned forward to talk to him and smelled goats.”

  “Goats?”

  “Yes. I smelled that same smell at a shop in Rhodes, thought nothing about it at the time, of course. But when I saw Brittany in the Palace of the Grand Masters a little while later and smelled goats again, I realized they were together and they were following me. I still have no idea why.”

  “That’s your friend from Italy, isn’t it? The man who saved us?”

  “Right. Marco Quattrocchi. He’s with the Italian Carabinieri.”

  “I know. He and Dr. Girard have been comparing notes. Why is he here?”

  I looked up the hill and saw Marco now had the goat man firmly in hand, up against the car, and was tying him up with a necktie or something. Behind the cab we’d been riding in, which was now angled precariously on the verge of a steep drop, sat a silver Mercedes, obviously the car I’d seen behind us a few minutes ago.

  Sophie and I struggled to our feet and picked our way gingerly up the hill, Sophie wincing as she cradled her right arm with her left. I got a sharp pain in my collar bone region when I tried to turn my neck again.

  Marco jerked his prisoner around to face us. “Do either of you ladies know this man?”

  “I know he was following me yesterday in Rhodes, but I don’t know why,” I said.