A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery)

by Elkins, Aaron

  But hazards there were. Undercover work, whatever the kind, put a huge strain on the memory, the psyche, and sometimes even one’s moral core. On an assignment that might run months, one had to be on guard every minute. A single slip as to who you were supposed to be, or to your past, or what you were doing there, or anything at all you’d been telling people, and the mission was ruined, all hope of a bust gone. And there were hazards that filtered into your personal life too. You had to be dishonest with your friends and those you loved; not just the necessary sin-by-omission kind of dishonesty but outright lies or deceitful equivocations about what you were doing, and why you couldn’t come over for dinner Friday night, and why you hadn’t called or returned a phone call, and where the heck you’d been for the last two weeks.

  And you had to remember all that. That took a toll on you. It made you closemouthed and evasive, and when it came to your feelings you learned that your safest bet was to keep them to yourself, to remain, using Ted’s boss’s word for it, “disconnected.” And that, of course, was murder on your personal life. By anybody’s measure, Ted qualified as an extremely eligible bachelor: thirty-three years old, educated, good-looking, funny, and an all-around likable guy. He liked women and they liked him, but since he’d taken on his undercover role, none of his relationships had had a ghost of a chance of panning out.

  He’d met Alix London a few months earlier, when he’d been working a forgery case in Santa Fe. It was hate at first sight. She disliked him, or rather disliked his undercover persona, Roland (Rollie) de Beauvais, a foppish, faddish, not-too-principled Boston art dealer. He distrusted her because she was the daughter of Geoffrey London, a New York socialite and a respected conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art… until it turned out that he had a sideline: He was a serial forger and thief, for which crimes he’d deservedly served an eight-year prison term. Ted knew even at the time that it wasn’t sensible to saddle the daughter with the father’s reputation, but it was hard not to do so. Like him, after all, she was in the art world, and there she’d been in Santa Fe, “consulting,” right in the thick of the illicit doings Ted was investigating. And who, it turned out, had arranged that consulting gig for her? Why, none other than the newly released Geoffrey London himself. So what else was Ted to think other than that she was in cahoots with the old crook in some reprehensible new scheme?

  But she wasn’t a crook—she was anything but—and he wasn’t Rollie de Beauvais, and although it took them a few days to sort things out, they finally got them straight. Alix, he’d found, was not only straight as an arrow, she was a superbly trained art restorer and evaluator, and the possessor of a wonderfully keen eye, far keener and quicker than his, when it came to assessing the authenticity of a suspect work of art. So much so, in fact, that against all odds he’d gotten her interested in possibly doing some occasional consulting work for the squad. She’d filled out an application and come to Washington for interviews with his boss and the personnel people. Then she’d filled out more, lengthier forms, had been thoroughly investigated, and had been placed on the approved list.

  The truth was, the problem he’d had to wrestle with the most when originally thinking about recruiting her, was that there was an unmistakable something in the air between them—he felt it, and he knew she felt it—and complications of that sort in his personal life were the last thing he wanted right now. In the end, however, he’d decided that her unique abilities were just too valuable to pass up and he’d advocated her hiring. But he’d been more relieved than disappointed when a job in Cincinnati had made it impossible for him to keep the dinner date they’d set for when she came to D.C.

  The call he’d gotten from Edward Reed a little while ago signaled the start of what he hoped would be her first job, assuming that she wanted to do it. It was a case he’d been working on as lead investigator for months, so he would be her long-distance supervisor, although he didn’t expect that there’d be any direct supervision involved. By telephone, Jamie had asked her to keep the third week in May open until she heard from them again, and she’d agreed.

  Well, time for her to hear from them again. He pulled his chair up to the computer and opened his Contacts file.

  The eleven-year-old Volvo that Alix’s new budget had recently stretched for was pre-“hands-free telephone capability,” so when the phone in the glove box warbled she had to find a spot to pull over, which wasn’t that difficult on this dingy, depressing section of Alaskan Way South. Hard for a street not to be dingy and depressing, she supposed, when it lay under the Alaskan Way Viaduct—Highway 99—rumbling and shrieking overhead with the evening rush-hour traffic. Seattle’s typical March weather didn’t help either: temperature hovering in the low forties, a cold, penetrating rain coming down, and as black at five fifteen as it would be at midnight.

  She was irritated as she reached for the phone; her father had a new habit of calling her a few minutes before she was due to pick him up, to tell her, “Alas, my dear, I’m so sorry. Something frightfully important has come up. You won’t be very disturbed, will you, about waiting in the outer office with the boys for a few minutes?”

  Damn wrong she wouldn’t be disturbed. She flipped open the phone and snapped: “Okay, all right, tell me, what is it this time?”

  Silence. Then, “Uh… Alix?”

  It took a couple of seconds for the voice to register. Ted. The last time they’d spoken had been two months ago, just before she’d flown to Washington for her interviews, when he’d called to tell her she’d have to take a rain check on the dinner he’d promised. A couple of weeks later he’d telephoned to congratulate her on making it successfully through the hoops, but she’d been out so he’d left a message on her answering machine. He hadn’t suggested—hadn’t even implied—that he wanted her to call him back. She’d toyed with the idea of doing it anyway, but decided against it.

  “I’m sorry, Ted; I thought you were someone else.”

  “Well, whoever it is, I’m glad I’m not him. Alix, I have some news. The job came through. It’s been approved.”

  “Oh, good.” She had yet to figure out if his blunt, impassive, get-to-the-point style was a locked-in part of his personality or just something that went with his kind of work. As usual, she decided with a sigh to simply follow his lead. “I think,” she added. “Jamie didn’t really give me anything in the way of details beyond asking me to make sure my passport was up to date.”

  “Oh, I think you’ll like what we have in mind,” he said expansively, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “How does a week-long, super-deluxe cruise through the Greek islands on one of the world’s most luxurious megayachts sound?”

  Frankly, not as wonderfully appealing as he apparently thought it would. Alix’s mother had come from an old-money New England family, and Alix herself had been married (briefly) to the scion of another such family, so cruising and yachts were nothing new—she didn’t know if they qualified as “mega,” but they were big, fancy boats devoted to rich living—and the truth was that the experience hadn’t been all it was cracked up to be. Too many self-important people, too much posturing and affectation, too much servile truckling to “celebrity” guests, too many amorous, sloppy drunks… and nowhere near enough interesting conversation.

  As for the Greek islands, she’d experienced them too, and on a yacht at that, one belonging to her mother’s black-sheep brother, Julian, who would earn his black-sheep status a few years afterward by divorcing his wife of twenty-two years to marry a Las Vegas dancer of twenty-two years, period. Alix had been sixteen at the time of the cruise, and one of the crew members had been a dashing Italian in his mid-twenties who had been the object of what she thought of as her first “grown-up” crush (in other words, one with fantasies that actually involved S-E-X). Fantasies they remained, however. Sergio was obviously willing enough, but her mother’s eagle-eyed surveillance had put a stop to things before they got started, so what Alix took away from the trip was more along the lines of ru
eful, if-only memories of the gorgeous, smiling, bare-chested Sergio, than of dazzling beaches, quaint, whitewashed villages, and romantic ruins.

  On the other hand… she looked out through the fogging windows at the wet, black, freezing pavement, and thought about wine-dark seas and Greek islands: the Dodecanese, the Cyclades, the Aegean… the very names warmed her. “Oh, I imagine I could handle it,” she said.

  “Well, if you prefer, I could get you something a little more exciting, a little more ‘real,’ something in the seedy underbelly of art crimes, perhaps? We have an opening for an operative to crack a gang of mob-connected antiquities smugglers who operate on the Marseilles docks. Be glad to put you in for it.”

  Alix laughed. He was so nice when he eased up. “No, thank you, the Greek islands will do. But what am I supposed to be doing? Who am I supposed to be?”

  “You’re you, Alix London. This isn’t undercover work. And all you have to do is keep your eyes open and give a few lectures about art.”

  “Lectures? I’ve never given a lecture in my life.”

  “Not lecture lectures, just, you know, schmooze with the guests, talk about art, talk about painters. That, I know you can do. Oh, and be charming, which certainly won’t be a problem for you either.”

  A compliment? And not about her abilities but about her? She waited with interest for him to continue.

  Nope, he was back to business on the next sentence. “Alix, have you ever heard of a man named Panos Papadakis?”

  “I think so. I know he’s rich, anyway. And Greek, obviously.”

  “And a crook, though not so obviously. We think he gets most of his income from a sort of Ponzi scheme he runs, where he invests his clients’ money and supposedly shares these huge profits with them.”

  “The operative word being supposedly?”

  “Exactly. We’ve been on his trail for months, but this opening on his cruise is the first chance we’ve gotten to insert someone right into his operation. And you’re the perfect candidate.”

  There was something about the sound of being “inserted” into an “operation” that she didn’t like. For the first time she had a few qualms about what she was getting herself into. “I see,” she said, “but what am I supposed to be doing?”

  “Well, I told you. Give an occasional presentation—”

  “No, I mean what am I supposed to be doing for the FBI? What does ‘keep my eyes open’ mean? Open for what?”

  “Anything, anything at all that relates to his business or that makes you wonder if something not quite kosher is going on.”

  “But about what?” She was getting more confused, not less. “What is his business?”

  “Mainly, he’s an international financier—”

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “Oh, a lot of things in his case—money manager, lender, venture capital bundler, investment adviser, and so on—but the main thing is he sells these fractional interests in paintings, and that’s where the art squad’s interest comes in.”

  “Mm…”

  “Then when the paintings sell later for more money, everybody who holds a share gets a proportionate share of the profit. That’s the idea, but we think our friend Panos is scamming the hell out of them. And that’s what we’d like you to be especially alert for—anything that might relate to the fractional investments.”

  “Oh.”

  Pause. “Alix, you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “Not really.” Fractional shares of paintings? What did that even mean? How could you own a quarter or a twelfth of a painting?

  “Well, look, don’t worry about it; Jamie will fill you in on the grisly details when you stop by DC on the way. In the meantime, I’m having her send you a list of the works that will be in the auction so you can bone up on them and look super-smart. You should get it tomorrow morning.”

  “Wait a minute now, Ted, you’ve totally lost me. What auction?”

  “Oh, didn’t I mention that? See, this is something that’s not really related to the Ponzi thing. He wants to auction off some of his own private collection, and the way he’s doing it is to hold it on a glitzy cruise aboard this sensational yacht he owns. During the cruise, he’ll have the paintings on display for the passengers to get a feel for how it would be to live with them. This will be super-exclusive, an invitation-only group of his own highest-rolling clients, probably only half-a-dozen people. Then they’ll hold the auction on the final night.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would he want to limit it to six people? Wouldn’t he be likely to get more for them if it was a regular wide-open auction?”

  “Well, it will be. Catalogs will go out, the auction itself will be streamed online to a larger group, and people will be able to call in bids via iPhone, or iPad, or anything else that connects. But only the cruise passengers will have the privilege of being there on the scene.”

  “Oh, I see. And you think this auction is part of the scam? He’s auctioning off shares of—”

  “No, as far as we know, the auction itself is on the level. They’re his paintings, and he’s got the right to sell them. Of course, with our boy Panos, you never know, but it’s being run by a New York art dealer, someone that—as far as we know—we have no reason to distrust, Edward Reed. No, you’re there to just generally observe, to—”

  “Keep my eyes open. And ears too, presumably?”

  “That would be good.”

  “Ted, what do you suggest I tell people about this? Where I’m going to be that week? What I’m doing?”

  “Tell ’em the truth: You’re lecturing on a private Mediterranean cruise. Papadakis is paying your airfare back and forth, by the way, and you’ll have the same privileges as any other guest while you’re on the yacht. That’s the deal from his side. And the Bureau will pay the regular fee you’ve agreed on with them, and cover any expenses Papadakis doesn’t. That sound all right?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Fine.” There was a moment’s pause. “Alix, we need to get something straight here. If any useful information comes out of this, great. If it doesn’t, that’s okay too; don’t worry about it, all right? There’s no need to do anything beyond being your usual observant self. We’re not asking you to investigate. Since all the invitees are in this investment club of his, I expect there’ll be some talk about it, and all we’re asking you to do is to be alert to the possibility. No horning in on other people’s conversations, no subtle interrogations of fellow guests—or of Papadakis—no hiding behind potted palms to listen in on—”

  “I don’t think yachts have potted palms.”

  “This one does. I’m serious, so listen to me. Whatever comes your way that might relate to Papadakis’s dealings, yes, we want to know about it, but we don’t want you asking questions, probing, taking risks, understand? You’re not trained for it, and if anything happened to you, Alix…”

  Yes?

  “… well, just think of the paperwork.”

  Sigh. “I’m touched by your concern, Special Agent Ellesworth. I gather, then, that I’ll be reporting to you?”

  “Technically, yes. I’m the lead investigator on this, but I’m expecting to be on another assignment most of that week. So it’s Jamie you’ll be contacting, if there’s anything you need to contact us about during the cruise itself.”

  “And how do I do that?”

  “Do you have a smartphone?”

  “I do, yes, very high-tech.” Not the kind of thing she would have bought on her own, it had been a thank-you gift from a Samsung executive for helping her “weed” an extensive but mixed-bag art collection she’d inherited from her mother.

  “Good enough. You know how to lock it so no one else can get in?”

  “Well, of course I do. God, Ted, what do you take me for?” Note to self: how to lock phone.

  “Well, good. Keep it locked. You can just call her on that, but unless it’s an emergency, don’t call her from the ship, only when you’
re ashore. We don’t know what kind of bugs or surveillance system Papadakis might have, but from what we do know, he’s a little on the paranoid side—he once had some art pieces, Greek vases or something, stolen from the yacht, so there might be hidden mikes and cameras. Or you can e-mail her if you have any questions, or anything to report. Do you have any questions?”

  “I guess not, for now.”

  “Good. If any come up, give her a call. She really knows more about it all than I do. And Alix?”

  “Ted?”

  “Glad to have you aboard.” The phone clicked and went silent.

  Glad to have you aboard… that was it? Not even a renewal of the aborted dinner offer when she’d gone to Washington the last time. Alix made a face at the telephone. This was starting to get old. She’d given more time than she should have to considering this guy as a potential romantic possibility. It was obviously headed nowhere as far as he was concerned. Maybe it was time to just cross him off the list. Not that there were any other possibilities in sight at the moment. She’d dipped her toe into the singles scene since coming to Seattle; not the usual bar scene, which repelled her, but the receptions put on by the symphony, or the Friday evening cocktail hours at the art museum that targeted twenty-and thirty-somethings. These had resulted in a few “dates.” Her conclusion after a couple of months of trying: There sure were a lot of jerks in Seattle.

  She had fallen into a bad mood as she re-started the engine. The cold and wet had seeped into the car and gotten through her sweater. And now she was the one who wasn’t going to be on time to pick up her father. After all the times she’d chewed him out for being late, she knew she was going to get an earful about it.