“Huh. I might have an idea about that, though. The fact—if it’s a fact—that it’s a copy of an existing, known painting, rather than some kind of ‘in-the-style-of’ pastiche, might make it possible to…” He stopped and sipped thoughtfully for a couple of beats. “You know, I’m not familiar with the painting myself. You did say it’s pretty well known?”
“No, I wouldn’t say ‘well known.’ It’s never been on permanent exhibition in a museum, as far as I know, but it’s in Venturi’s catalogue raisonné, and it’s got a provenance going all the way back to the 1861 Paris salon show. Why, what difference does it make?”
Instead of answering he opened his phone and pressed a key. “Jamie? Hi. Listen—yes, the flights were a piece of cake and everything’s fine here. Listen, I need you to see what you can get in the way of digital photos—the highest resolution you can find—of a Manet painting. Le Déjeuner au Bord du Lac.” He repeated the name more slowly. “Painted in…” He looked at Alix.
“Eighteen-sixty-one, same year as the salon.”
“Eighteen-sixty-one,” he said into the phone, and then again to Alix: “Do you have any idea how long Panos has owned it?”
“No. Yes. I heard him say he bought it fifteen years ago.”
Ted returned to Jamie. “Make sure you get something from before 1997, which shouldn’t be any problem, but then, if you can possibly find any that’ve been taken since then—he may have lent it to a gallery or a museum for a showing or something—I want those too. Got it? Hey, what kind of question is that? When I always need it by, of course. Right away. E-mail it to me when you have something, okay? Thanks. Yes, I’ll tell her. Bye now.”
“She says hi,” he said.
“Thanks.” Alix had had all the salmon she wanted and was now using her fork to dig into a sinfully sweet and gooey square of baklava, studded with slivered almonds and glistening with honey. “What was that call about? What’s getting a photo supposed to do?”
“Nothing, probably, but give me a chance to see if anything comes of it, and I’ll let you know. Jamie’s good; I should know something tomorrow.”
It had gotten dark as they’d talked, and they gathered up their plates and cutlery to take back to the buffet area (the satchels had been provided with removable inner linings so they weren’t stained by the leftovers). Ted stood up and extended a hand to pull her up too. “I guess I’d better get back and do some mingling. Oh, and may I make a suggestion? I realize all this forgery stuff is highly absorbing and exciting, but if you find yourself with some free time, and you’re getting bored, maybe you might also keep alert for anything that might come up about what you’ve been sent here for—those fractional investments?”
“Those what?”
“Those—” he began, but broke out laughing when he realized she was kidding.
“I will, Ted,” she said. “I promise. But…” She paused. “You’re here now. You’re a professional. I hardly know what I’m doing. You can talk to Panos about his investment system right out in the open, which I obviously can’t. So is there still really anything useful for me to do on that count?”
“Well, that is a point.” He paused. “You’re right. What the hell, why don’t you just kick back and enjoy the ride?”
“No, I’m not comfortable with that. Look, I think there are still things I can bring to the table. Unless you don’t want me to, I’d like to keep working on this Manet thing and see what develops. For all we know, it’ll lead us somewhere on the investments.”
“Could be,” Ted conceded. “Wouldn’t exactly bowl me over if it’s all connected.” He nodded to himself. “Okay, do that. But discreetly, right? It would seriously tick me off if you really got your head broken.”
19
When they got back to the buffet area Panos and Edward were still talking and Ted got himself some coffee and went to sit with them. Alix, not yet fully herself and starting to feel it, was the first to leave. She had the limo to herself on the way back to the harbor, where Donny was smoking a cigarette, waiting with the launch.
He perked up when he saw her. The cigarette was flipped into the water. “You want to go back?”
“Yes, please.”
“Nobody else here yet. We could go get cup of coffee, glass of wine, nice little café right there.”
Tempting as the idea was of having a one-on-one chat with the Artemis’s one-man information machine over a glass or two of milky, tongue-loosening ouzo, she wasn’t about to go off to a dark little hole-in-the-wall bar at night in a seedy port area she didn’t know with a scuzzball like him.
“No, thank you,” she said demurely, “I’d just like to get back to the boat.”
Dark as it was, she could see that he was pouting away as he started up the engine, but she was fairly sure she knew her man, and it wouldn’t be long before he came back with another offer, perhaps a better one. Something in the daylight, for instance.
He continued to mope on the short trip back to the boat, however, and she’d begun to wonder if she’d blown her chance at him, but as they neared the bay door to let her off, he said offhandedly, without turning from the wheel, “You know, tomorrow morning, I got to go pick up some fresh fish and stuff at this market up the coast—ten, fifteen kilometers. I figure I take the Hermes. You know, you got to take them fast boats for a spin every now and then.” His shoulders went up and down in a couldn’t-care-less shrug. “I guess if you want to come I could take you too.”
“That might be fun, Donny,” she said, shooting for something friendly, but without coming on too strong, which even Donny would perceive as counterfeit. “When would that be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Got to be early, because we get going again at two o’clock and I got a lot to do. Maybe… seven o’clock?”
“I think I could make that. I’m usually up early. If I do, where should I be?”
“I think best you be by swim platform, you know it?”
“You mean here, by the bay door?”
“No, not here. The swim platform. Deck three, the main deck, aft. You know, back of the swimming pool. You be there, okay? Hey—if we got time, maybe we have that picnic? I could bring what to eat.”
“Could be,” she said, putting a becomingly hesitant but promising smile in her voice. “We’ll see.”
“Just talk about stuff, that’s all. You know?”
You got that right, she thought.
At 6:40 a.m. the next day, Alix went looking for the swim platform. In back of the swimming pool, Donny had said, although she couldn’t imagine how you could possibly have a swim platform on the yacht’s main deck, fifteen feet above the water line (a diving platform, maybe, but a swim platform?). The ship was still anchored, the morning gorgeous, the smooth, gently heaving Aegean still pink-tinged from the dawn and the Cretan mountains shadowed in tints of rose and gold. Assuming she was the only one of the guests who’d be up at this hour, she was startled to hear a voice coming from a canvas sling chair beside the pool.
“Alix, good morning!”
“Gaby? You’re up early.”
“Since three.” She patted the arm of the chair next to her. “Come join me if you have a little time. I could stand some company.” If she was embarrassed about having been seen smooching with Emil the night before, she gave no sign. If anybody was embarrassed, it was Alix, but if Gaby was willing to forget about it, Alix was glad to go along.
“Fifteen minutes or so—sure, I’d like that.” She saw now that there was a little table beside Gaby with a pitcher and a cup and saucer on it. “Especially if you can order me some coffee too. It smells like heaven.”
“Only the very best,” Gaby said. “Of course. Nothing but one hundred percent Kona.”
Alix eased herself into the sling chair—fell into it was more like it; how to do it gracefully was something she’d never gotten the hang of—while Gaby got on the phone. “Another pot, please. And a cup.”
“Up since three?” Alix said. “Are you not a g
ood sleeper, then?”
“You know, when you’re in opera, there’s always a party—always—or a reception, or a huge dinner, at least for the featured performers, and since you’re starving and your adrenaline is still pumping away, you always eat way, way more than you should, and you have about five drinks too many, and midnight or one o’clock is just the wrong time for stuffing your face, especially when you’re in Vienna, but your biological clock is still on Sydney time or wherever the hell your last stop was. It throws off your sleep rhythms, and, as I’m learning, you never get them back. It’s like—I don’t know, I feel like I’ve forgotten how to sleep sometimes. My brain just refuses to shut down when it’s supposed to.”
“Isn’t there something you can take for it?”
A stewardess came with Alix’s coffee and a couple of the luscious croissants, poured Alix a cup, and, at Gaby’s nod, poured a little more for her as well and left with a little bow, without having spoken.
“Oh, sure. God bless ketamine.”
“Pardon?”
“My fairy dust. Nothing else works for me. It’s mainly an animal anesthetic, if you can believe it, but there’s nothing like it for turning off your mind and giving you a good night’s sleep. I’d take it seven nights a week, if I could, but I don’t want to get addicted—I did to a couple of other sleeping pills, and breaking the habit practically killed me—so I limit myself to three nights a week. Unfortunately, last night wasn’t one of them, and I really could have used a little after what… well, Panos was… was…” She shook her head and lifted her coffee to her lips with both hands.
Alix had the impression that Gaby was trying to decide whether she wanted to say something more or if she’d already revealed more than she should have. Alix drank some of her own coffee and waited. She’d already had waffles and fresh strawberries for breakfast in her stateroom, but the aroma of the warm croissants was too much to resist, and she tore off a melt-in-your-mouth morsel and chomped it down, by which time Gaby had made her decision.
“Panos was on the warpath last night,” she more or less blurted out, speaking low but fast, as if she just couldn’t hold it in any more, “which is not a pretty sight.”
“I know. If you remember, I just happened to be there when he saw the Manet.”
“This was just as bad.”
“What happened? What was it about?”
“He saw my charges from the shopping I did in Mykonos on Tuesday, and he hit the ceiling. Usually, our accountant sort of buries that kind of thing, but this time there wasn’t—”
“Gaby, do you mean you have to hide your purchases from your husband?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“But he’s enormously wealthy, isn’t he? I mean, this yacht and everything…”
“Oh, he’s as rich as Croesus, but he’s also as cheap as… I don’t know, Silas Marner?”
“Yes, but how much could you charge in Mykonos in one day? It’s not as if you could spend ten thousand dollars…” The look on Gaby’s face made her hesitate. “… Could you?”
“Twenty-one thousand, actually. Euros, not dollars.” An impish smile flitted across her face. “All right, I was naughty, I admit it.”
“Twenty-one thousand euros in Mykonos? Good heavens, what did you buy, a house?”
“No, don’t be silly, nothing big. A few accessories, that’s all. Some bags, shoes, a nice summer coat-and-hat set… no, it was a couple of summer coats, I don’t really remember. I sent Artemis in afterward to pick up the packages. I think she said there were eighteen altogether. She had to hire a car.”
Alix couldn’t think of anything to say. She was remembering Gaby’s earlier remark about possessions—things—being meaningless to her. She took a quick look at the deck beside Gaby’s chair, and sure enough, there was another unmistakably expensive designer bag casually flopped on its side: not the burgundy one she’d seen the day before, but a black leather one with lots of buckles. At three or four or five thousand euros a pop, she realized, they wouldn’t take long to add up to twenty-one thousand euros.
Gaby followed her gaze. She reached over and awkwardly put a hand on Alix’s forearm, then quickly removed it. “I know; I do have a lot of things. I do shop a lot. And what I said yesterday was the truth: They don’t mean anything to me, not really. But please try and understand—shopping is all I have. I gave up my career, my beautiful career, when I married Panos. What else do I have? I don’t really know how to do anything but sing, and I can’t do that anymore, and I can’t even do any teaching or coaching, which is what most of us old prima donnas wind up doing. The thing is, we’re always on the move, from one house to another, or off on another damn cruise. And I always have to go with him, so he can show me off.” Her fingers wandered to the loose flesh below what had not so long ago been a firm and lovely chin. “Although who knows how much longer that’s going to last.” She jerked her head. “God, listen to me whine. Pathetic. It’s just lack of sleep, Alix. Makes me goofy, pay no attention.” She stretched out in the chair with a sigh and put a hand over her eyes.
Alix’s attitude toward Gaby softened. Sure, Gaby had willingly signed on for the life she now had. Yes, it was nobody’s doing but her own. Yes, 99.9 percent of the women in the world would trade places with her in a heartbeat. And still…
It was an old story. Gaby had wanted money and security, Panos had wanted arm candy and a whiff of culture, and they’d each gotten their wish. That had been ten years ago. Now Gaby was getting old for a trophy wife, and surely she had to know that he could easily discard her for a new young and beautiful wife who was interested in the same deal that Gaby—who was herself wife number three—had gotten. If Alix’s guess was right, Panos had had an ironclad prenuptial agreement drawn up that would let him do just that and do it cheaply. Her heart went out to the aging opera star. If Emil (and Mirko?) offered some comfort and happiness, she thought, then go for it, girl.
“Gaby—”
“But what are you doing up at this time of day?” Gaby asked with a bright, brittle smile. “For most of the others, this is the middle of the night. Are you a lousy sleeper too? Want to try the ketamine? It’s a lifesaver.” She began to reach for her bag. “I always have some—”
“Oh, no thanks, I sleep fine, knock on wood. Donny’s going off for supplies in a few minutes, though, in the Hermes, and he offered me a ride, so I—”
Gaby surprised her with a harsh laugh. “I wouldn’t count on that, honey. I doubt if Donny will be doing anything like that this morning.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I did talk to Panos about him. It wasn’t just what Izzy said. There have been other… complaints from guests, especially from women. The boy has become truly insufferable. But I still didn’t expect Panos to react the way he did. I guess he was still steaming over those credit card bills and looking for someplace to get it off his chest because he charged off looking for Donny like a bull hunting for a china shop—hey, I think I just invented a metaphor.”
Telling the story had perked her up, and she looked down at the remaining croissant on Alix’s plate. “If you’re not planning on eating that…?”
Alix shoved the plate in her direction. “Please. I shouldn’t have had the first one. I already had breakfast.”
Gaby took a bite, chewed it slowly and appreciatively, and continued. Panos had returned ten minutes later, still angry but with a satisfied look on his face. He’d finally given Donny his walking papers, he told her, and the hell with whatever Donny’s ogre of a mother, who was Panos’s domineering, Medusa-like Aunt Polyphema, happened to think about it. When they arrived in Corfu tomorrow morning, Donny would be put off the ship and forbidden ever to come anywhere near it again. Out of the goodness of his heart (“I’m quoting,” Gaby said), Panos would give him two hundred euros to get back home to Karavostassis.
“Well, I guess it’s all for the best,” Alix said. “I’m sorry to miss that ride in the Hermes, though.”
“Why do you have to miss the ride? Somebody’s going to be going. You can go with whoever it is. If they’re taking the speedboat, it’ll be Yiorgos. He’s the only other one who drives it.”
Alix brightened. “The security guy? Do you think he’d take me?” The stalwart Yiorgos Christos, she was pretty sure, wasn’t going to be the fountainhead of information that Donny might have been, but that didn’t mean she had to pass up the ride. Besides, she’d been more or less relieved of information-gathering duty by Ted, hadn’t she?
Gaby laughed and got out her cell phone. “Yiorgos, you’re going out for supplies this morning? In the Hermes? Alix London would like to ride with you. That’s all right, isn’t it? Yes, I’ll do that.” She put the phone away. “He’s in the process of getting the boat now. Better go and wait for him on the swim platform. And Alix?” she said as Alix fought her way out of the sling chair, “don’t take everything I said too seriously. I just need to vent from time to time, and you happened to be here for one of my better venting sessions. I’ve got a pretty good life, and I know it. The truth is, I’m really a pretty happy person.”
Alix didn’t believe it for a minute. “Gaby,” she said on a sudden urge, “did you know my father spent eight years in prison?”
“Yes, I did,” she said with a smile. “We have a lot in common, don’t we? There’s nothing that can beat that look on someone’s face, is there, when they hear your name, and their eyes squish up, and you see the little wheels going around in their head, chunka chunka, and they’re thinking, ‘Don’t tell me she’s the daughter of that…’ ” She finished with that warm, liquid laugh of hers.
Alix smiled in response. Two of a kind, all right. “Well, at least they never think you’re boring,” she said lightly. “I’d better get going, Gaby. See you later.”
When she got to the stern, Alix saw how it was that the swim platform could possibly be on the main deck, which was so far above the water. The stern of the Artemis was another of its design features that had been revolutionary when it was built, but was now commonplace on luxury yachts. The rear of the third deck, the open main deck, didn’t end sharply at a more or less vertical transom, but descended at a long, shallow angle, with curving, symmetrical steps on either side, down to an eight-foot-wide shelf on the second deck—the water-level deck—that ran the width of the ship. There were a few padded wicker deck chairs and a couple of cocktail tables on it lined up facing rearward, toward the sea. From the shelf projected a foldaway diving board in the center and two removable pool ladders at the sides for climbing back out of the water.
A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) Page 17