A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery)

by Elkins, Aaron

  “And you, dear lady,” Panos said to Alix, “how you are feeling this morning? Better, I hope? I’m so sorry for what happens to you last night. What a terrible, terrible thing.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Papadakis, I’m just fine.”

  “Panos! You must call me Panos,” he said with an expansive gesture. “Please!” He placed his hand over his heart.

  “Thank you. I wish I could have done something to protect your painting, though.”

  “Poof, as long as you are not hurt, that is the important thing.”

  The jovial, expansive, geniality-oozing Panos who now smiled so broadly down on her was like a completely new person, someone she hadn’t met before. All things considered, she thought she might prefer the other persona: abrasive, inconsiderate, and overbearing. If nothing else, it was more natural on him.

  It occurred to her that the befriend-and-betray quandary that she’d been fretting about might be moot in Panos’s case. His oily, unconvincing bonhomie this morning served to accentuate the nastiness that had poured out of him last night: the brutal way he’d treated Gaby, the vulgar emphasis he’d put on the Manet’s market value (despite his cringingly insincere “principle of the thing”), and his crude arrogance and undisguised disrespect for everyone around him. Add to all that the fact that he himself was befriending and betraying his investors, and the idea of betraying him, if that’s what it was, was no longer so troubling. Befriending him—that would have been the hard part.

  “Gaby, my darling wife,” he said, redirecting his smile to her and lowering his voice, “you spoke with Alix about that matter I asked… to keep to herself what she… yes?”

  “Yes, and she will.”

  “Keep what to yourself?” Izzy asked Alix with interest.

  “Oh, it’s just something that Mr. Papadakis… Panos… felt—”

  “What, that the Manet is a fake?”

  Panos’s good humor swirled away like water down a drain. Down came his eyebrows. Down turned his mouth. “Where did you hear this? Who was it who told you this?” He turned his scowl on Gaby and then on Alix, trying to decide which of them was the guilty party.

  “For heaven’s sake, Panos,” Izzy said, “don’t get so excited. It’s all over the place. Everybody’s talking about it.”

  “I didn’t say it was a fake,” Alix said, trying both to smooth the waters and to set the record straight. “I said there was something about it that didn’t seem right to me. But it was just an impression at the time, it doesn’t mean—”

  “Dionysodaurus,” Panos uttered in a low growl. “Bastard. I should know… I should…” He kept the rest of the thought to himself, but it was obvious that this wasn’t going to be a good day for the purser of the Artemis.

  “I must leave you now,” Panos said abruptly and stalked grimly off.

  “Was it Donny?” Gaby asked Izzy.

  “No, actually, it was one of the stews. She was talking about it in the lounge last night. But I asked her where she heard it, and she said she got it straight from somebody who was there—”

  “Donny,” Gaby said with a nod.

  “Right. This is a guy who doesn’t know the meaning of keeping something to himself. Believe me, I learned the hard way.” Izzy grinned. “I heard some pretty good stories about you too, Gab.”

  Gaby took this seriously. “About me? Like what?”

  Alix could see that Izzy was sorry she’d said anything. “Oh, hell, nothing, just stupid stories, nothing embarrassing, nothing you have to worry about. Still, if Panos didn’t want people to know about last night, it’s Donny he should have told to keep his mouth shut, not you, Alix. You’d think he’d know that.”

  “He did,” Gaby said. “He asked everybody to keep quiet about it. Well, except Alix. I got that job.”

  “Gaby,” Izzy said, “does it seem to you that Donny’s getting worse? I don’t know, more devious, more of a gossipmonger, a scandalmonger, maybe a little too big for his boots?”

  “All of the above. Alix, he brought you over on the launch, didn’t he? He behaved himself, didn’t he?”

  “Oh, he didn’t do anything I can complain about, but… well, I can’t say that he inspired a lot of trust in his judgment.”

  “You really ought to talk to Panos about doing something about him, Gaby,” Izzy said.

  “You know, I just might do that. After all, I have so much influence on him.” She gave an almost imperceptible nod in no particular direction and a male steward materialized at her side, awaiting instructions.

  “I’ll just have fresh fruit and yogurt this morning, Takis,” she said, “and pastries and coffee for all.” And to Alix: “As Izzy already knows, just ask away, whatever your heart desires. Our chef’s a genius; he can do anything. If you want something simple, you couldn’t do better than one of his Greek omelets.”

  “A Greek omelet sounds wonderful,” Alix said, and Takis, nodding, murmured, “Greek omelet.” He was as spick-and-span as every other crew member whom Alix had seen so far (including the three wrestling with the landing pad, who were apparently not permitted to sweat).

  “And for you, madame,” he said to Izzy, “a plain egg-white omelet made with two eggs, accompanied by sliced cucumbers and one Rye-Krisp cracker, dry. And a glass of cranberry juice.”

  “Whoa, there, Takis,” Izzy said, “that’s some memory you have.”

  “You are hard to forget, madame.”

  Izzy smiled her response but as he left she screwed up her eyes. “Was that a compliment, or wasn’t it?”

  “Of course it was a compliment,” Gaby said. “They’re programmed to provide nothing but what guests want to hear. You should know that by now.” She closed her eyes and turned her face up to the sun. “You know I ordinarily go for a bigger breakfast than fruit and yogurt,” she said lazily. “Well, not bigger, but more protein rich. You know—food. But this morning…” She shook her head. “I’m not feeling all that spunky. I drank a lot more than was good for me last night. If either of you see me doing that again on this cruise, kindly shove me over the railing. But you won’t. See me doing that.”

  Alix believed her. Gaby was looking a lot more put together and a lot less pathetic than she had the night before. Seen like this, in brilliant daylight, sober, and with no makeup other than lipstick, there was something stable and reassuring about her, something resolute. There was a subtle overlay of sadness too, or regret, but who wouldn’t regret being married to Panos? She wasn’t really as overweight as she’d appeared last night either; it had been the puffiness of too much alcohol too quickly consumed that had made her seem that way—that and her softening jawline. She was still quite attractive, really, but in a more mature, almost motherly way.

  “So, ladies, what shall we—” Izzy began, but Gaby interrupted.

  “Wait, before anything else, I want to apologize to you, Alix.”

  Alix was getting a little uneasy. Why was everybody apologizing to her?

  “That scene I made last night?” Gaby said. “You must have wondered why I got so upset about that old rag that had been on the piano.”

  I sure did, Alix thought. “Not at all, Gaby.”

  “You see, that was my Carmen shawl. I wore that at La Scala, at Covent Garden.…” She smiled. “I wore it at the Met, with Domingo as my Don José…” For a moment she appeared poised to float off into the past, but she caught herself. “It’s one of the very few mementos that I kept from those days, and it held a lot of good memories for me.”

  “But surely you can have it repaired,” Alix said.

  “I suppose so, but now somehow it’s been, I don’t know, defiled… tarnished… now it’s a reminder of something I don’t want to remember.”

  “You know what you need?” Izzy said, slapping the table. “You need to come shopping with me. Remember that wonderful little street in Corfu? Let’s go buy some stuff when we get there. There are very few upsets in life that a few pairs of shoes and a couple dozen scarves and four or f
ive new bags won’t cure.”

  “Maybe,” Gaby said without conviction, “but you know, possessions—things—don’t mean too much to me anymore. I already have tons of stuff, more than anybody has a right to have, but—” She hunched her shoulders. “—in the end, it’s nothing. It’s meaningless. It’s worthless. The shawl was different. It meant something. It meant something good that I don’t have anymore.” She smiled at Alix. “Anyway, that’s why I was being such a crybaby about it.”

  “I understand completely, and there’s absolutely nothing to apologize for.” Alix couldn’t help noticing that there was a beautiful burgundy-red leather satchel tossed carelessly at Gaby’s feet, the way you see them in those full-page Louis Vuitton ads. Three thousand dollars, minimum, Alix thought. Meaningless, maybe, but not exactly worthless.

  She sensed someone zip by, and when she looked up she caught sight of a man speeding away from them, elbows churning, not technically running in that both feet were never off the deck at the same time but moving at a hell of a clip all the same.

  “No, that was not an errant ballistic missile,” Izzy told her. “That was the famous man of mystery, Mirko Koslecki. Have you met him yet?”

  “No, I haven’t. Why is he famous? And what makes him so mysterious?”

  “Mirko’s the Man Without a Country,” Gaby explained, “the Homeless Billionaire.”

  “Come again?”

  “You haven’t heard about the Homeless Billionaire? Come on, everybody’s heard of the Homeless Billionaire.”

  “Everybody’s heard of me too,” Izzy said, laughing. “Not Alix, though.”

  “I heard of Gaby,” Alix said in her own defense. She thought it best not to mention that she’d first heard of her from her mother, who had been such a big fan.

  “He’s coming around again. He always does a few turns. I’ll introduce you,” Gaby said, “assuming I can get him to slow down,” and a few seconds later: “Hey, Mirko!”

  The man braked and guardedly approached. “Good morning, Gaby. Izzy.” He spoke with another one of those hard-to-place Continental accents: a compact man, long-necked, small-headed, alert, and darty. It seemed to Alix that there was something nervous and furtive in his manner, something… well, weasely. He eyed the three women the way you might look at a trio of hungry lions from whom you were separated by a set of bars that didn’t look up to the task. He was very short, no more than five-five, with tiny, delicate, graceful hands.

  “Mirko,” said Gaby, “I’d like you to meet Alix London. Alix, Mirko Koslecki.”

  Mirko offered a precise half bow, so crisp that his lank, straight, black hair flipped down over his forehead and then back up again when he straightened. If he’d been wearing shoes instead of sneakers, Alix thought, she would have heard his heels click. “A pleasure, good morning.” And off he went, having barely come to a complete stop.

  “Not exactly what you’d call Mr. Conviviality, is he?” Alix said.

  “He’s not the world’s biggest talker, no,” Gaby agreed, “and he tends not to spend much time standing in one place. No moss grows on Mirko.”

  “Which, essentially, is why they call him the Man Without a Country,” Izzy put in. “A fascinating guy, really. I’m not sure he’s really up in Billionaireland, but he must be close. As for not having a country, though, that’s way off base. The man has more of them than he knows what to do with. He was born in the United States and his mother was from Hungary and his father was from, I forget, Macedonia, or Herzegovina—”

  “Montenegro,” Gaby contributed.

  “Right, and so that gave him three passports right there, the day he was born. And then, later, he put a lot of money into some resort in Aruba, or maybe it was the Bahamas, or one of those places down there—”

  “St. Kitts,” Gaby said.

  “Okay, whatever, and they gave him a citizenship in return, and then I know he’s got at least one more from New Zealand, I think it is—” She paused, awaiting Gaby’s interjection.

  “Australia,” Gaby said on cue. “I know because I’ve seen it, but don’t ask me how he got it. Anyway he’s got six in all.”

  “But seriously, he has no home?” Alix asked.

  “Hence the name,” Gaby said. “What he does have is a chain of fivestar hotels all around the world, and he keeps a permanent suite in each one, and those are basically where he lives, but only a couple of weeks at a time and then he moves on. He doesn’t own a car, either, or a television set, or even a wristwatch.”

  “You really know a lot about him,” Izzy said.

  “Well, we were pretty good friends at one time,” Gaby said, dropping her eyes. Alix saw splotches of pink jump out on the sides of her throat.

  Oho, there’s a history there, Alix thought, pretending not to notice. “But if he doesn’t own anything, what’s he doing at an art auction? What would he do with a painting? Or is he just here for the cruise experience?”

  “He’s not here for the cruise experience, I can tell you that much. He once rented the Christina O, Onassis’s old yacht, for a week when he felt like a cruise—at seventy-five thousand dollars a day, plus running expenses, and, believe me, the Christina O makes the Artemis look like a tugboat. No, he’s here for the auction. He’s got a fabulous art collection, but he doesn’t own it in the usual sense. Couldn’t be bothered with maintaining it, so the whole thing—every painting, every sculpture—is on loan to one museum or another whose board he’s on, or to one or another of his hotels, where they keep it on display except when he comes to visit, when they put it up in his suite.”

  Alix just shook her head. It was hard to associate the jumpy little man she’d just been talking to with the romantic, larger-than-life—if terribly isolated—person she was hearing about.

  “Really,” Gaby continued, “in the sense that we usually mean ‘own,’ the one thing he has is this beautiful little Learjet—well, not so little—for getting around from hotel to hotel. He only has one personal employee—”

  His factotum, Alix thought with a smile.

  “—his pilot, who also buys him a few days’ worth of clothes when he needs them—which eventually get left in one of his hotel rooms. He claims he doesn’t even own a suitcase.”

  “I can confirm that,” Izzy said. “Donny picked us up together yesterday, and he had all his stuff in a couple of grocery bags, one of which was pretty small. Compared to my two big trunks. Mirko’s one unusual guy.”

  Alix laughed. “I’d say ‘unusual’ doesn’t even come close. I’d say he sounds, well… weird.”

  Gaby gave it some thought. “No, I wouldn’t say that. Unique for sure, but not weird. He’s just got this aversion to baggage, real or emotional, and he’s got the resources and the cojones to gratify it. Never raised a family, never been married, never linked to a woman, or to some other guy, for that matter, always a step ahead of whoever’s badgering him. Just completely his own man.”

  “You sound almost envious,” Alix said.

  “Alix, I almost am.”

  “I know I am,” Izzy said. “And there’s no ‘almost’ about it. I kid you not.”

  The two older women smiled wistfully at each other, and Gaby added, “Maybe someday.”

  The exchange made Alix uncomfortable and she looked for something else to talk about. “Okay,” she said, “I’ve met Mirko, and you, of course, Izzy, and I’ve seen the man from Maine, Emil Varga, and then there’s the Belgian lady, or rather her nephew, who hasn’t shown yet. That’s four. Aren’t there five altogether? Who am I missing?”

  To her surprise they both laughed. “His name’s Lorenzo Bolzano; he’s a collector from Florence.”

  “And what’s he like?”

  Izzy and Gaby looked at each other and laughed again.

  “Well…” Gaby said and let it hang.

  “Let me put it this way,” Izzy said. “Let’s just say he’s indescribable. You’ll have to see for yourself.”

  “Now I’m really intrigued.”
<
br />   “Oh, you’ll enjoy him,” Gaby said. “He’s good fun… as long as you don’t have to take too much of him at a time. Wait’ll you hear him talk. It’s amazing.”

  “Yeah, but have you ever understood anything he said?” Izzy asked.

  “Never; not a word.” And to Alix, who was looking puzzled, “Don’t worry, you’ll see.”

  Durward showed up with Izzy’s visor and sunglasses. “Here you go, Miss C.”

  Izzy stared incredulously at them, one in each hand. “You got me a mauve visor and green sunglasses?”

  Durward looked stunned. “But you said I should—”

  “Oh, hell, it doesn’t matter, forget it.”

  He reached for them. “I’ll go and—”

  Izzy pulled them back. “Forget it, Durward, I’ll deal with it.”

  Durward left, his shoulders drooping, and Izzy said, “I hate to do that to him, I really do, but it has to be done occasionally so he doesn’t think he’s perfect. I’ll make it up to him later. Anyway, you know those inflatable punching-bag clowns—you knock ’em over and they bounce right back up? That’s Durward.”

  The steward brought the coffee and pastries and poured cups for each of them.

  “Alix,” Gaby said, adding cream to hers, “have you really never heard of Izzy? That is, of Pocahontas? She’s on TV all the time.”

  “I thought I was impossible to escape,” Izzy agreed. “I don’t know how you managed to get away with it.”

  Gaby laughed. “Pay no attention to her. She’s incredible. You’ve never seen anything like it. You’d think she didn’t have any bones. And that weird expression, like she’s a million miles away on some other planet—”

  “That part’s easy,” Izzy said. “Comes naturally.”

  “No, really,” Gaby persisted. “You can’t take your eyes off her. It’s as if she’s in some kind of trance, and then after a minute you’re in one too. Somehow, watching her is relaxing and stimulating at the same time, it’s—well, you really have to see for yourself, Alix. Look at one of her videos and you’ll see what I mean.” She’d been leaning enthusiastically forward, and now she sat back and picked up her coffee.