Death of an Aegean Queen

by Maria Hudgins

  “I need to take him to the jail in Iráklion but I also need to take you two back to the ship. I do not think you will want to ride in the same car with this man because he smells like goats.”

  “It’s okay. I just want to get back to the ship.”

  “Me too,” Sophie said.

  Sophie and I climbed into the back seat of the silver Mercedes and Marco tucked us in carefully, adjusting the position of Sophie’s arm before he closed our door. He threw his prisoner into the front seat, and slipped behind the wheel himself. Turning to me, he said, “Put this on the floor and try not to kick it.” He handed me the gun, still warm from having been fired.

  On the way back to town, I filled Marco in on what we’d been doing in the little village while we were not attending the funeral of Nikos Papadakos. I explained all I knew about the events in Rhodes yesterday, but didn’t say anything about George Gaskill’s watch, the accusations and the counter-accusations that had kept us busy on board the ship since he’d left. There’d be time for that later. Our would-be assassin, his hands tied behind his back, stared glumly out the side window.

  “I rented this nice car to impress you, Dotsy. Are you impressed? I went to the ship this morning and Dr. Girard told me where the two of you had gone. He said you had gone to the funeral and he told me how to find the village. So I thought I would pick you up in this nice car, like a knight on a white horse, you know?”

  “I’m impressed.” I tried to give him a playful punch across the back of the seat, but was stopped by another stabbing pain in my collar bone. “Anytime you save my life, Marco, I’ll be impressed. You could have ridden up on a donkey and I’d have been impressed.”

  “Thank you for saving my life, sir,” said Sophie.

  * * * * *

  Marco helped us into the lobby of the hospital in Iráklion, keeping one eye on the prisoner in the car as he did so. “I am sorry to leave you here, but . . “

  “We’ll be fine, Marco. Take Goatman to the police station before he figures out how to escape.”

  Sophie took care of the red tape at the admissions desk, spending far more time dealing with my American insurance than with her own. If I’d been alone, I couldn’t have done it. As it was, I’d have to pay them for my treatment today and settle up with my insurance company when I got home. I nearly cried when they took Sophie away to x-ray her arm. This was all my fault. If I hadn’t practically forced her to go with me, she’d have spent a happy day in the ship’s library, sorting things for Dr. Girard, and none of this would have happened.

  Eventually a nurse led me to another room, helped me take off my clothes and don a hospital gown. After they’d x-rayed me front, back, and sideways, they parked me in an alcohol-scented hallway between an old man and a whimpering child on his mother’s lap, neither of whom seemed to care about my lack of clothing. A half-hour later a nurse who spoke broken English came around and led me into a little examination room. Under her arm, she held a large envelope. She asked me questions about how this all happened.

  “I fell down a hill about ten miles south of town.” That’s all she needed to know.

  She poked around, made me lift my arms and turn my head as far as I could. Left, right, up, down. Noting my scrapes and cuts were still bloody and dirty, she went to work with a towel and antiseptic until most of my left arm and leg were painted mustard yellow. She pulled my x-rays out of the envelope and stuck them up on a light box. She touched the ghostlike shadow of what was obviously my collar bone. “See the little black line here? And the point here? It is what we are calling a . . .”

  “A break?” I tried to help her out.

  “No. Not a break . . . a . . . crack. Is this a good word?”

  “It’s a better word than break.”

  “Ah, yes. So we will not operate on you. There is nothing that will fix it but time. It hurts, yes? We will make over to you a . . . support.” She crossed her arms over her chest, mummy style. “You can wear it until your crack is better.”

  I think it’s good to find humor even in adversity.

  The nurse gave me a sort of strap-like device and a sling for my left arm. The padded strap thing looked as if it should be attached to a space suit. She showed me how to put on both items and told me I didn’t have to wear them all the time. “But at least when you sleep, you should wear the brace to hold your shoulder when you turn over,” she said.

  I was free to go after I signed a bunch of papers that, for all I knew, gave them title to everything I owned. I let them make an imprint of my credit card and returned to the area from which they had hauled Sophie away, thinking I’d stay there and wait for her. I had no idea how long it would take but I realized it might be hours. A white-uniformed nurse approached me and touched my shoulder. She looked familiar. After a few seconds, I recognized her as the nurse from our ship, the one who’d been trying to help Kathryn Gaskill that morning when they showed her the ersatz suicide note. Kathryn had rebuffed her, saying, “I’m not sick. I don’t need a nurse,” and that’s when Marco had brought me in.

  “Mrs. Lamb?” she said. “Are you all right?” When I assured her I was, she said, “I’m waiting for Miss Antonakos. When she comes out of the operating room it will still be some time before they release her. I’ll take her back to the ship, so you can leave if you wish. I’m sure you could use a little rest.”

  “How did you know we were here?”

  “Mr. Quattrocchi telephoned from the police station and explained. I believe he’s waiting in the front lobby now.”

  The nurse pointed me in the right direction and assured me she didn’t mind waiting alone. In the lobby, I found Marco sitting in a plastic chair, but he wasn’t alone. In the plastic chair next to him sat Luc Girard, both men staring straight ahead as if they were waiting for word their babies had been delivered.

  Marco jumped up when he saw me, rushed over as if to hug me, then stopped. “I should not give you a hug, I think.”

  “I’d appreciate it. But I’m okay. Only a fractured collar bone. Nothing’s broken.” I smiled at him and he smiled back. The panic now over, I really looked at him for the first time today. He hadn’t shaved in a while and black stubble cast his lower face in shadow. The effect was not unattractive.

  Luc Girard came forward and joined us. “Where’s Sophie?”

  I explained, and assured him her injuries weren’t life-threatening. Marco said he’d drive me back to the ship and Girard said he’d stay there and wait for Sophie. I told him about the nurse waiting for her down the hall.

  Marco walked me to his rented prestige car, opened the door, and set my purse on the floor beside my feet. I discovered it was impossible to straighten my twisted denim jumper without using the neck muscles attached to my collar bone. How else to raise one’s hips and thighs off the seat? I was stuck with the twist.

  “What’s the story on the goat man?” I asked, after Marco had fastened my seat belt for me. Fortunately the seat belt crossed my right shoulder and the fracture was in my left collar bone, so it didn’t hurt.

  “The goat man is not talking. They got a name and address out of him and that is all. He is waiting for his lawyer but I did not have the time to wait. I will call them later this evening and find out what is going on.”

  “He’s connected to Brittany Benson. That’s all I know.”

  “You told me that she has a boyfriend.”

  “With all due respect to Goatman, I don’t think he’s Brittany’s boyfriend.”

  “I know.” Marco glanced toward me briefly before he swung the prestige car out into traffic. “Because I know who her boyfriend is. I know where he lives and I know the Carabinieri are looking for him.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “The address Brittany listed on her employee data form. I checked it out at our offices in Milano, and it is the address of Robert Segal, who is suspected of being the kingpole of antiquities smuggling in Western Europe.”

  “Kingpin,” I corrected him.
>
  “What?”

  “It’s kingpin, not kingpole. So what else did you learn? Tell me everything.”

  “That will take a long time,” he said, swinging into the dock and around to the ramp beside the Aegean Queen. “You go now and get some rest. I have to return this impressive car before it turns into a melon. Can you get to your room by yourself?”

  “Of course.” I slipped carefully out of the car, reaching back in to pick up my purse with my right hand. Huh? Turns into a melon? Oh. He meant pumpkin.

  * * * * *

  Enough hill country dirt poured off me in the shower to clog the ship’s drains. I would’ve liked to wash my hair but, being able to raise only one arm to my head, I figured it would be smarter to tackle that job after a good rest. Better yet, how about a visit to the ship’s salon? Across the hall from my bathroom hung a full-length mirror on the outside of a closet door. I stood and stared at my unclothed self and laughed. With mustard-yellow patches of antiseptic, scrapes now darkened with scabs, and purple bruises—especially a real beauty on my left shoulder—developing rapidly, I looked as if I were wearing a camouflage body suit. Dressing myself with great care, I struggled with the criss-cross brace the hospital had given me. Do you wear it under or on top of your clothes? With or without a bra? I started with a nightshirt and fastened the brace on top of it, then considered the likelihood I’d have visitors dropping in as folks returned to the ship and my nightshirt, bunched up by the brace, was awfully short. What if I got called out to go somewhere? Did I really want to go through the dressing ordeal again? I settled on a cotton shirt and a pair of shorts. Buttoning the shirt one-handed proved impossible, but I found I really could use both hands enough to do the buttons. It only hurt when I raised my left elbow sideways.

  I clicked my TV on, grabbed a package of cheese crackers and a carton of orange juice, and stretched out on the bed. A message was crawling continuously across the bottom of the screen: Any passenger or crew member knowing the whereabouts of taxi #930, last seen near the village of Aghios Minos, please call the main desk immediately.

  I reached for the phone and hit the button for the main desk. I explained that I had been riding in taxi #930 until a couple of hours ago, but I had only the vaguest idea where we had left it. That took a bit more explaining.

  “The driver of the car is waiting on the dock. He can’t come aboard, so could you go out and talk to him?”

  I sighed and said, “Of course, but I’ll need someone who speaks both English and Greek to go with me. If it’s the same man who drove us to the funeral, he speaks no English.”

  “We’ll send someone down to accompany you, Mrs. Lamb.”

  I was glad I’d decided to get dressed before strapping myself into the brace. While I finished my snack and waited for someone from the desk to come to my door, I remembered the poor cab driver still hadn’t been paid his fifty Euros, the agreed-upon fare. I had no Euros. I’d given the whole wad to Sophie to buy that bowl, and she hadn’t given me any money back. As I was wondering if there was an ATM on the dock, someone knocked on my door. It was a man I’d seen at the main desk several times earlier.

  “Oh my!” he said when he saw my brace.

  It took a few minutes to explain the events leading up to the abandonment of a car from the funeral procession and my standing before him now in a figure-eight clavicle brace. He said, “Oh my” several more times.

  “I’m afraid I won’t be able to tell the man where his car is now, because I don’t know where I was when I last saw it.” I remembered its precarious position at the edge of a cliff. “But the car’s okay, as long as its hand brake holds. When Captain Quattrocchi comes back from the car rental place, he’ll be able to give better directions, since he was driving.”

  We met the driver on the dock near the foot of the gangway. His face was only vaguely familiar to me because I’d seen mostly the back of his head on the trip up to the village. The man from the desk, our translator, listened as the driver gesticulated and shouted in rapid-fire Greek. He turned to me. “He wants to know what you did with his car.”

  “Tell him what I’ve told you. Explain why I don’t know exactly where his car is, but if we could find a map, I think I could show him the general area.” There was a tourist information kiosk I thought would probably have maps, on the dock only a few yards away. “Also, tell him I’ll give him his fifty Euros as soon as I find an ATM.”

  After another conference with the driver, the translator turned to me. “He says he’s already been paid. While he and the other drivers were waiting for the funeral service to end, a man came up to him, gave him a hundred Euros, and told him to ride back with another driver. Told him he could pick his car up here, on the dock, when he got back.”

  “I see!”

  “The man told him he was taking you and your companion to a surprise party in Iráklion.”

  “It was a surprise, all right.”

  While the cabbie and I waited for our interpreter to buy a map at the kiosk, an Iráklion police car pulled onto the dock and Marco hopped out. He waved at me, then stuck his head back into the car and said something to the driver. After I introduced Marco and the cabbie to one another, they launched into a bilingual gesturing frenzy that included a good bit of forehead-slapping. At length, Marco called out to the policeman, still sitting in the squad car. He got out and approached us as the man from the front desk loped over from the kiosk with a map.

  It didn’t take the policeman and Marco long to locate on the map the approximate area where the action had taken place. Although I only understood bits and pieces of the discussion, I gathered we all had to go back to the site. The policeman needed more information from me about what led up to Sophie and me jumping out of the moving vehicle, and I could do that most effectively on the actual site. The cabbie, of course, needed to pick up his car, and Marco could fill in the parts of the story I’d missed when Sophie and I had been face-down in the dirt.

  “Do I really need to go with you?” the desk clerk said as he refolded the map and handed it to the policeman. “You speak English, don’t you? I’m supposed to be on desk duty now, and you already have four people going up in the same car.”

  “We’ll be all right. Mrs. Lamb can write out a statement for me, in English.” The policeman looked at my brace. “Can you write, Mrs. Lamb?”

  “I’m right-handed. I should be able to.”

  The cabbie took the front passenger seat, leaving the back of the squad car to Marco and me. Following several exchanges in Greek between the men in the front seat, the policeman turned around and asked if either of us had the keys to the taxi. We didn’t, so that meant we had to swing by the police station and see if Goatman had them.

  The keys, Goatman told them through the bars of his cell, should still be in the ignition.

  As we wound southward, back to the hill country and to the scene of the crime, I tried to write my statement on the yellow pad the policeman handed me, but I couldn’t. Not because of my fractured collar bone, but because we bumped and bounced along the rutted road, like so many balls in a Lotto machine. I gave up and held my left arm tight against my stomach with my right. Marco looked over at me, and winced in sympathy. He reached over and touched my hair, lifting a wisp off my face. He touched my cheek with the back of his hand.

  “You haven’t shaved in a while, have you?” I said.

  “Not since I left Rhodes.”

  “Why?”

  “You did not like me without a beard.”

  “It was just a shock when I first saw you. I’d never seen you without one.”

  Marco called out to the policeman, “Sorry, I didn’t see the road. Back up a little and turn down this road on the right.”

  The taxi was still there with the keys in the ignition. The cabbie kissed its hood and drove away immediately. Marco and I walked the policeman through the events surrounding the shooting, using tire tracks and skid marks as our guides. The shrub I’d landed on still waved a
few purple threads it had ripped from my scarf, and the rocks I’d dragged Sophie over in our desperate rush for cover still bore traces of her blood or mine. Did I break Sophie’s arm when I pulled her out of the car? Did it break when she hit the ground? It occurred to me I’d rather not know.

  I sat under an olive tree and wrote my statement while Marco and the policeman trekked back to locate the place where Goatman had veered off the main road. I filled only a page and a half, realizing as I wrote that parts of the scene were a blur in my mind. Rolling down the hill, for instance. How far had we rolled? It could have been a foot or a football field. All I recalled was a swirl of rocks and thorny bushes. Looking up at the slope now from my seat under the tree, I could see it had been about a twenty-foot slide. I signed and dated the statement, rested my head against the trunk of the tree behind me, and dozed off.

  * * * * *

  The policeman dropped us off at the ship. I went straight to my room, kicked off my shoes, and lay down. Less than a minute later, Lettie knocked at my door. She worked herself into an awful snit when she saw my brace, so I took it off to prove it wasn’t holding me together.

  I went back to my bed and explained the day’s happenings from a reclining position while Lettie sat at my dressing table, her hands clasped so tightly her knuckles were white. When I finished my harrowing tale, I asked her how she’d spent her day.

  She shook her head as if she was waking from a nightmare. “Nothing as exciting as that, I can assure you. Ollie and I went to the Palace of Knossos and so did Nigel Endicott and Malcolm Stone. I watched them carefully every chance I got, but they didn’t do anything suspicious. Agent Bondurant wasn’t following Nigel today, but the security man, Chief Letsos, followed us the whole time.”

  “They had all their bases covered. Bondurant and Villas were with the group at the funeral. Did you notice who, in particular, Chief Letsos seemed to be watching?”

  “Ollie and Malcolm. He didn’t seem to care about Nigel Endicott, but he watched every move Ollie or Malcolm made.”

  Lettie was on her way out when we heard a knock at the door. Lettie opened it and gave a little squeal when she saw Marco. She pinched his cheeks. “Welcome, back! Dotsy told me everything about being kidnapped by a goat man and bullets flying and you riding up in a silver car to rescue her in the nick of time.”