She was seeing a less appealing side of Edward now, condescending and superior. The innate dismissiveness that seemed to go along with his kind was now apparent, and she warned herself to watch her tongue before she said something else she’d regret. But she didn’t have the meekest temper in the world, and he was definitely getting under her skin, not only with his manner but also with what he was saying with so much assurance. Surely he knew that only in dreams did such things exist as a lab that made no mistakes, or an incontestable letter of authenticity, or an impeccable catalogue raisonné (a supposedly complete and faultless catalog of an artist’s works and their history). All were based in the end on human judgment—even the laboratory results—and letters of authenticity were written by very human experts, the majority of whom were honest but understandably preferred to provide results that would please whoever was paying them for their services.
“More than that,” Edward went on, “Déjeuner has an absolutely unassailable provenance that traces it back more than a century and a half, back to the year of its creation. How much more do you want?”
An unassailable provenance—that took the cake, but, fortunately for her, Panos started yelling again before she could say anything.
“What is this? Everybody shut up! Who cares about all this stuff—catalogs, letters…” He shook his head. “To think such a thing… I invite them here, they enjoy my boat, they eat my food, they drink my liquor, they smile and bow… and then this.” He had wound down again and now looked simply poleaxed, standing there slumped, staring mournfully at his ruined treasure.
Christos took advantage of the hiatus. “Panos, this can surely be discussed more beneficially tomorrow. I would like to get this young lady in bed now.”
Under ordinary circumstances that would have brought smiles, but only Christos himself showed any reaction to what he’d said. Under the great mustache his mouth twitched, and when he caught Alix’s eye he winked, but not in a way to make her uneasy. Alix, exhausted as she was, smiled back.
With no protest from anybody, he escorted her to her stateroom, offered to get her something to help her sleep, which she declined, and departed. She could barely move, but she did manage to undress and get into her pajamas, thought about brushing her teeth, decided that she had earned the right to give it a skip, and slipped into bed. In seconds she was spiraling down into sleep.
12
It was the trembling of her eyelashes that woke her, reacting to the morning light that was pouring through the big windows and wheedling its way through the slits between her eyelids. She shifted a few inches to get her face out of the sun, briefly cranked open one eye to look at the watch she hadn’t gotten around to taking off when she’d fallen into bed, and saw that it was 7:10. Had she really slept for fourteen hours? She lay with her eyes closed, assessing her condition. Her head ached, no surprise there, but the throbbing was gone and the pain wasn’t enough to require anything more than a couple of ibuprofen, if that. And they could wait. Not bad, all things considered. For the moment just lying there, deeply rested, relaxed and unmoving, feeling the sun on her, was lovely, too perfect a state of repose to disturb. But there was nothing she could do about her mind, which swarmed with questions… conjectures.…
The Manet—why would anyone do that? Jealousy, resentment of the brazen showiness of all this wealth, this opulence that was on display? Maybe. She had no trouble understanding someone’s harboring those feelings. Or perhaps it was more personal—antipathy toward Panos over some wrongdoing, real or perceived? Le Déjeuner was the painting for which he’d reportedly paid the most and the one that was likely to bring the highest price, so, yes, that had something going for it as an explanation.
Or had Edward Reed been the target? After all, relatively speaking, he had more to lose than Panos did. At least Panos would recoup something from his insurance company, but for Edward it meant the entire loss of his commission. Assuming the painting went for eight or ten million—a conservative guess from what she understood, as it was considered the gem of the collection—and even if he was getting an extreme low-end commission of 2 or 3 percent, that slash had cost him many thousands of dollars.
Except that she knew it wasn’t the gem of the collection. It wasn’t even a real Manet. Could the slasher have known that too, or was it mere coincidence that it was the one painting about which she’d expressed her doubts? No, forget the mere-coincidence hypothesis. Miss Bigmouth here takes one look at the painting and blurts out, in front of Artemis and Edward, that there was “something wrong” with it. Twenty minutes later, maybe less, she’s lying under the piano hearing the birdies tweeting, and the painting has been hacked. That’d be some coincidence. But what would be the point of slashing something you knew to be a fake?
And why had the creep, whoever it was, found it necessary to knock her senseless in the process? What was the rush? Couldn’t he have just turned around and tiptoed away when he saw her and come back later? Well, there, at least, there were possible explanations that made sense. The obvious one would be that it was someone who was aboard just for the reception, for whom there wouldn’t be any “later.” The other, less obvious but no less likely, was that it was someone who wanted it to look as if it had been someone who was aboard just for the reception. Explanations, yes, but what did they explain?
Where the Manet itself was concerned, though, her uncertainties had diminished. She was more positive than ever that there was something wrong with it; she just couldn’t say what. Her brain had apparently been plugging away at the problem while she’d slept because she could practically feel the answer nudging away at the undersurface of her consciousness, trying to break through. And when it did, she’d keep it to herself this time instead of instantly announcing it to everybody in range. My God, where had her mind been last night? She’d blabbed it to all of them outright: Papadakis, Mrs. Papadakis, Edward Reed, the security guy. Even Donny had been there. The only person she should conceivably have informed was Ted, back in Washington. He would have had some ideas about where to go with it from there. Talk about a lousy start to undercover work. She didn’t know whether to blame it on jet lag, or getting knocked on the head, or inexperience, or opening her mouth without thinking first (she’d heard that one before), or just plain naïveté—
No, beating up on herself wasn’t going to get her anywhere. Okay, you, that’s it, knock it off right now, she commanded her brain, and when that didn’t work she pulled herself up against the padded leather headboard and opened both eyes to give herself something else to focus on.
“Whoa,” she said softly.
It was the first time she’d really taken in her stateroom beyond goggling at its size when Artemis had first brought her here. That time, she’d been all in a lather about the Manet, which she’d just looked at with Edward, and was in a hurry to get back to it. When Yiorgos had delivered her back to it, she’d been in no shape to notice anything. But now she noticed; she couldn’t help but notice.
To start with, its size was the least of it. One curving wall was all glass, three huge, floor-to-ceiling windows—through which she could now see that the yacht was underway, with no land in sight. On two of the other walls hung fragmentary marble reliefs—two muscled warriors’ torsos on one, and on the other, three splendid battle horses in profile, their necks arched, their nostrils dilated; they looked to Alix as if they must have come from the same Greek temple. The fourth wall held an extraordinary two-foot section of Roman floor mosaic that showed a lion pouncing on a deer. She placed it somewhere in the first century, about the time that Pompeii was flourishing. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it was from Pompeii. How it had come into Panos’s hands was probably something she didn’t want to know.
The walls themselves were paneled with something like cherrywood, but with a subtle pattern that looked like veins of gold. Placed around the room, seemingly at random but not really, were leather armchairs, several low tables, two sofas, a desk with a laptop s
et up on it, and a flat, wall-mounted TV screen that must have been six feet across. In a niche a few feet from the bed, wedged between two interior walls, was a vanity table made from a single five-foot-wide block of honey-colored, rough-worked stone, probably the remnant of yet another ancient Greek ruin. On its top, beside the hollowed-out sink, was a square-cut crystal vase with what must have been two dozen perfect white roses in it.
The flowers truly were perfect: not a spot of brown, not a wilted petal, not even a misshapen leaf. Everything she’d seen so far was perfect and, frankly, it was starting to irritate her. No corners had been cut anywhere, in cost, in craftsmanship, or in maintenance. She’d grown up in a rich environment (not like this, but plenty rich enough), so mere wealth didn’t faze her. But the New England blue bloods her family had lived among had conscientiously practiced a kind of conspicuous non-consumption—threadbare (if once costly) rugs, pitted old wooden floors, worn furniture, ultra-nontrendy cars—and she had come to respect its restraint. What she was seeing here was not only conspicuous consumption but conspicuous, if not obscene, opulence. The gleaming wooden banisters on the spiral staircase had shown not a fingerprint or a smudge; the carpets all looked as if no one before her had ever trodden on them; her bed, when she’d first seen it the day before, might have been some contemporary art piece cast in porcelain, so very perfectly had it been made up. Even the launch, now that she thought about it, looked as if it had been bought new that morning, in anticipation of her arrival.
She couldn’t really say that there was anything wrong with all this. It was Panos’s money and Panos’s world, and he had the right to make of it what he wanted. There was nothing wrong with a little more beauty in the world either, and the Artemis and all that was in it were certainly beautiful. And of course keeping it the way it was gave employment to craftsmen and artisans and cleaners. All the same, there was something so flagrant about it, so self-congratulatory…
Was she envious? Was that at the bottom of it? Did she think she, and not people like Panos Papadakis, deserved to have Seurats and Renoirs and Pissarros on her walls? Had her current state of relative impoverishment turned her into a knee-jerk malcontent in need of vilifying the superrich for the sole reason that they were superrich?
She suddenly laughed. Her frown disappeared. No, that was not what she needed. What she needed was a giant cup of coffee; that was all. Surely in a place like this there was a way to get it. This looked like a job for Artemis & Co. On the bedside table was a telephone and she was in the act of reaching for it when it softly chimed. My God, she thought, do they even know when I need coffee before I know it myself?
But it was Mrs. Papadakis on the line. “Alix, good morning, this is Gaby Papadakis. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“No, I’m up.”
“You’re feeling better?”
“Much, thank you.”
“Oh, good. I’m not sure if you’ve had a chance to look at the guest booklet yet, but we don’t offer a set lunch or breakfast in any of the dining rooms on the Artemis, we leave it up to our guests to order their own whenever and wherever they feel like it. I was hoping you might like to join me this morning—on the main deck, by the pool? It’s a gorgeous day.”
“I’d love to, thanks. Which one’s the main deck?”
Alix was pleased at the invitation. Her opera-loving mother had been a fan of Gabriela Candelas’s, and Alix remembered a performance of Aida, seen at the Met in her mother’s company, in which Gaby’s sensuous, passionate voice had turned even the poisonous Amneris into a tragic figure. Alix’s mother had wept, and Alix herself had been impressed.
More recently, in researching the Papadakises for this cruise, she’d learned that she and Gaby shared similar family histories. Gaby’s father had been in jail too; was still in jail as far as Alix knew. In the 1970s Peter Candelas had been a mob accountant in New York, first for the Gambino family and then for the Gottis. The suspicions were that his assignments had extended beyond keeping the books, but all the FBI, the New York Police Department, the U.S. Attorney and the New York County District Attorney were able to make stick were various customs, fraud, and tax manipulation charges. One of her father’s brothers and several cousins were in prison on more serious mob-related charges, including homicide. Another of Gaby’s uncles had been charged with two murders but remained unconvicted. There was another uncle who had been assassinated by mob rivals. Only two or three years ago, the D.A. had described the whole Candelas clan as “a murderous cancer, not part of the human race.” So Gaby had had to cope with a bloodline that made Alix’s look like a royal lineage, and she’d done it with great success. All in all, an interesting and unusual woman. Alix looked forward to getting to know her.
“It’s the one where the reception was last night… oops, I forgot. You didn’t make that, did you?”
“I was unavoidably detained.”
“I’m glad you can laugh about it,” Gaby said. “It’s the third deck, the one above you. Nine o’clock, shall we say?”
“Fine. Gabriela… uh, Gaby? Did anything interesting happen after I left last night?”
“No,” was the answer, accompanied by a deep-throated chuckle. “Everything interesting happened before you left.”
“I mean, did they find out who slashed it?”
“No, they haven’t found out, but Yiorgos—you remember Yiorgos?”
She thought for a moment. “With the mustache. And the muscles.”
“That’s him, our security chief. He interviewed last night’s temporary staff before we left this morning, and now he’s talking with the regular crew to see what they might know. He’s also supplied the Hellenic Police with a list of last night’s guests and they’re looking into them all. Yiorgos was a lieutenant colonel with them, you know. It’s a high rank, so he still has plenty of clout.”
“You’re pretty sure it was one of the people here for the reception, then?”
“Of course.” She sounded surprised at the question. “Who else? The people here for the cruise are all collectors themselves; they’d never do such a thing. And the crew… they’re almost all relatives of Panos, and to these Greeks, loyalty to family comes before everything else.”
“Yes, you’re probably right.”
“Panos is furious that someone he invited, someone he trusted, would do this to him. And to you.” Oh, sure, Alix thought sourly. That was why he’d been so terribly concerned for my welfare last night. “And let me tell you, my husband, when mad, is something to reckon with. When they find whoever it is, he’ll see that they throw the book at him and then some.”
“I’d like to throw a book at the guy myself,” Alix muttered, fingering the lump above her ear.
“Oh, listen, I almost forgot, there’s something Panos wanted me to ask you,” Gaby said.
Alix sensed a hesitance, a false brightness, as if Gaby were pretending that whatever it was had just occurred to her.
“It’s just that, you know, getting the painting slashed was bad enough, but when you started saying it might not even be real, that kind of upset him. So he asks… he asked me to ask you to, well, unless you have something more to go on than just a feeling, to, well…”
“To shut up about it.”
“That’s about it. I’m sure you can understand.”
“Tell him not to worry, Gaby. I’m done talking about it, believe me.”
She didn’t think it would make much difference what she did or didn’t do anyway. With the motor-mouthed Donny having been there, she’d be surprised if the whole ship didn’t know about it by now. “So is Mr. Papadakis thinking about bringing in another painting for the auction, or just leaving it at twenty-two?”
“Honey, you’re asking me questions I don’t know the answers to. I’m not exactly privy to everything that goes on around here. I’ll see you at nine, yes? Oh, I might have somebody else there that I think you’d enjoy meeting, if that’s okay.”
“Sure, I’ll be there. What do I do to
get a cup of coffee before then?”
“You pick up the phone, you dial ‘three,’ and you say ‘coffee.’ ”
13
The coffee came in a small pewter serving thermos brought by a smiling young stewardess, and of course it was perfect. The two croissants that were delivered with it were also unfaultable: beautifully shaped, warm and buttery, flaky and tender. Not that Alix would have complained if they’d been otherwise. She’d had no dinner the night before, and she was ravenous. In three minutes everything was gone. Another telephone call brought a second pot of coffee, which she consumed in a more civilized fashion, appreciative and reflective. As she did, something new popped into her mind. Why was she assuming that the Manet was the only fake? For all she knew, they could all be fakes. She didn’t really think that, but then she hadn’t checked, had she? She hadn’t “checked” the Manet either; it had just jumped out at her. Well, there was something for her to do today: go through the collection and see if any more jumping-out occurred. Not that she was expecting anything to.
She showered and changed to a tank top and Bermudas, which she was pretty sure would pass for daywear on the Artemis. That took her to eight o’clock. With an hour to go, she had time to browse through the rest of the collection to see if there was anything else that didn’t seem right. And if anybody was around, it would be a chance to start fulfilling the twin responsibilities she’d signed on for: schmoozing with the other guests for Papadakis, and inconspicuously trolling for fractional investment tidbits for the FBI.
At this early hour she had the music room, where the Impressionists were displayed, to herself. She moved quickly from painting to painting, partly because after last night, she was a little edgy about standing in one place for too long, but mostly because she wasn’t “studying” them; she was just seeing what might catch that celebrated—or bogus, depending on whom you talked to—connoisseur’s eye of hers. Nothing did. Nice to know, but no real surprise there.
A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) Page 10