Dinner aboard the yacht was every bit as glamorous as she’d heard; every one of the men in black tie (God, Ted was truly gorgeous!), the two women in floor-length dinner gowns: Gaby’s a tasteful, rose-pink, schoolgirlish confection with an Empire waist and a gauzy, pleated skirt; Izzy’s a voluminous, eye-popping, leopard-patterned, jewel-belted caftan worn over silken harem pants and silvery slingbacks with four-inch stiletto heels. They both looked beautiful.
So did Alix. She’d taken her friend Chris’s advice, gone back to Le Frock Vintage Clothing and emerged with a black, spaghetti-strap, knee-length cocktail dress for forty-five dollars, ultrasimple but classic. Blanche had even thrown in a pair of smoky glass pendant earrings to go with it. The outfit looked great on her and she knew it, but she took little pleasure in the evening. The conversation at the table seemed silly and shallow. The food was predictably wonderful—oysters, lobster bisque, Caprese salad—seven courses in all, each one perfectly prepared and elegantly served, and each with its own wine—but she had no heart for it. That “amateur time” crack had stuck with her. Until the moment he’d said, “You’re off the case,” she’d had a purpose, and she was doing something useful and engaging. Now it all seemed simply sordid, and she was a fifth wheel on the wagon, more of a hindrance than a help to Ted, just one more thing for him to worry about. Pointless. She should never have come in the first place.
She slogged through the meal, eating little, drinking more wine than she meant to, and hardly speaking to her table companions, and she left when the espressos were poured, which was as early as she could without calling attention to herself. Forty minutes later she was in bed with the TV turned to an old Magnum, P.I.
Three days to go. It seemed like a lifetime.
Tomorrow morning, Corfu.
23
What a long, strange road it had been. Or maybe not so strange. Maybe it was the family genes reasserting themselves. She’d killed two people now, one by proxy, you might say (thank you, Uncle Frankie), the other by her own hand. People said it got easier after the first time, and maybe they were right. Donny had been the second, and even though he was the one she’d done herself, it was true; it had been easier for her. Of course, when it came to eminently killable people, Donny was in a class by himself, so maybe that was the reason.
But that was behind her now, as were the miseries and humiliations of the last decade. Out the stateroom’s window she could see the freighter-like ferry already loading cars for its nine a.m. trip to Albania. Less than an hour from now, she would be aboard, on her way, and she would never look back. A new life. A new, rich life.
There was one more person she wouldn’t mind killing—who badly needed killing—before she left, but it was too late for that now. She had only a little time left and she needed to concentrate on the task at hand. She had already unscrewed the credenza from the wall and pulled it far enough away to give herself some elbow room. Now she was using a screwdriver to pry off the waist-level wainscoting on the maple paneling behind it, but it was harder than she’d expected. She was nervous, and she was making a mess of it, poking holes in the wall and chipping and scarring the paneling, not that it mattered. But she couldn’t get the blade of the screwdriver deeply enough between wainscoting and wall to give her the leverage she needed to get it off. And the heel of her hand hurt from trying to use it to drive the thing in. Why hadn’t she thought to get a hammer? A pry bar? She turned back to the credenza, looking for anything that might be serviceable, grabbed a heavy, silver-backed man’s hairbrush and whacked away, putting dents in the hundred-year-old silver, but beginning to make progress with the wainscoting.
At one point she thought she heard someone approaching the door, and it was as if a lump of freezing mud filled her throat. Her breath stopped; her heart jumped. But whoever it was, if there really was anybody, kept moving down the corridor. She breathed again, a little dizzy now and trembling, angry with herself for being so panicky. Surprised too; she wouldn’t have expected that in herself. One more slow, calming breath and back to the job, working more quietly and deliberately, although her fingers, so steady a minute ago, were shaking now. She had to get the screwdriver inserted in two places a couple of feet apart to successfully break the section of wainscoting free, but she finally managed it, and there it was: the opening, the “safe” she’d known was there but had never actually seen before. The all-knowing Donny had told her about it, a secret oblong recess, three feet wide and a couple of feet deep, built into the wall behind the wainscoting but not shown on any plan.
It was narrower and deeper than she’d expected, not so much a box as a slot, and she had to get down on her knees to see inside.
There was something there all right, rolled up in butcher paper deep inside. She reached eagerly for it. From the first day of the cruise, she’d known he had something cooking—she could read the son of a bitch like a book—something that he didn’t want her or anybody else to know about. And with Panos, that had to mean money, in one form or another. At first she’d assumed it was just the paperwork for one of his fishy deals, but then, from a stranger-than-usual shiftiness in his manner, she’d begun to think it was something more tangible than that, and where would he have it if not in his (supposedly) secret safe? It had been sweet, innocent Alix London who had unknowingly told her what it was before they’d even left Mykonos, but it had taken until last night for what she’d said to hit home, and this was her first—and last—chance to see if she was right.
She tore at the paper wrapping, increasingly sure of what she would find. When it lay in shreds on the carpet, she peeled back a corner of the rolled painting that had been inside. She saw a grassy hummock on which a picnic had been spread on a white cloth. There was a wicker basket with a bottle of red wine sticking out of it, half a loaf of bread, some unidentifiable meats, the lower part of a seated woman, her full, robin’s-egg-blue skirt spread over her legs and feet, and beside her, on the grass, a matching, folded parasol…
It was the bottom right-hand corner of Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner au Bord du Lac. She unrolled the rest of it, her heart thumping away. She knew it! There was no ugly slash. The canvas was whole and unmarred. She came near to whooping her triumph. This was the real one, the original! The bastard had known all along that the other was a fake. Had he been going to unload this one somewhere along the way? Do the same thing that she was planning to do with the Monet? No, no, even as coincidences went, that one seemed too far-fetched. Still, what else… She jerked her head. Who cared; what difference did it make? She was the one who held it now in her shaking hands, and she hugged it gingerly to herself. What was it that it was supposed to be worth? Ten million euros? Dear God! That was even more than—
“Gaby!”
She froze. She hadn’t heard the door open. “Panos…” she managed to get out before the gob of freezing mud stopped her throat again. Her mind raced, hunting for explanations, prevarications, and not finding any, not with the wall torn up behind her, the carpet littered with wrapping paper, and the painting right there in her hands.
“What the hell are you doing?” he screamed.
“Panos… not so loud, people will—”
“What do I care about people, you thief?” He stomped furiously toward her. “Thief!” he yelled even louder, straight into her face. “My wife, the thief!”
“Panos…”
“THIEF! THIEF! TH—”
Later she would say honestly that she had no memory of picking up the heavy, silver-backed hairbrush again. But she couldn’t deny what happened next. She aimed for his face but hit him squarely on the ear. He was astounded. She had never struck him before. He looked blankly shocked for a moment, his mouth hanging open, and then his face swelled up, suffused with blood. Some people whitened when they were enraged. Panos turned red. He raised both fists, clenched and quivering, above his head.
She swung the hairbrush again, this time catching him over his left eye. It wasn’t a terribly solid blow because he
flinched back a step, but when he did his foot slipped on a clump of wrapping paper, and he fell heavily backward, catching his head on a corner of the credenza on the way down. When he hit the floor he lay without moving.
“Ahh… uhh…” he said. His eyes were open but unfocused. A rivulet of blood dribbled down his cheek from somewhere.
Gaby, thoroughly panicked, hurriedly rolled up the painting and ran for the door. When she flung it open, she screeched and reeled back. “Emil! What are you doing here?”
He was standing there looking startled and stupid, with his hand still in the air preparing to knock. “Gaby? What…”
A faint “uhh… nngg” reached them, and Emil’s gaze swung past her into the room. “Gaby… oh, my God, what… what have you…”
A second ago she had been close to fainting, but Emil’s stuttering feebleness brought out her formidable reserves of strength. She grabbed him by the collar (the closest she could come to the scruff of his neck) and jerked him, flabby and unresisting, into the corridor. Behind them, Panos’s heels thrummed on the carpet.
“Gaby, wh—”
“Shut up. Let’s go. We’ve got a ferry to catch.”
There had been a time when Emil had seemed to her a godsend. Over a year ago it was, when he’d been staying with them for a few days at the house on St. Barts, as Panos’s clients sometimes did, and she’d caught that randy gleam in his eye. He’d seemed more attractive back then (as so many men do before you know them), and they’d begun an affair that was still sporadically in effect. Eventually, when she’d seen how little he respected Panos, she’d told Emil about the satisfying deception she’d practiced on her husband by having forgeries made of two of his paintings and then selling the real ones off while the fakes went back into his collection. And Panos never once batted an eye. She’d done it with works by Odilon Redon and Émile Bernard. She’d been afraid at the time to mess with any of the biggies.
What made it especially delicious was that the idea had come from Panos himself, via (of all people) Donny. She’d been having an on-and-off fling with Donny too—he was, after all, a beautiful specimen, and when he stopped preening and prattling about himself and got down to business, he was a surprisingly good lover, probably a matter of pride with him. Lounging around after one such episode Donny had told her about the weirdly costumed man he’d seen more than once on the yacht when it was in port and not in use by Panos or anyone else. He’d spend four or five long days in front of an easel, painting and painting and painting away, copying one of Panos’s pictures. The copies were so good that Donny, no genius but sharp when it came to spotting angles, had arrived at a vague notion of what might be going on and had tried a little friendly blackmail on the artist, Christoph Weisskopf, who readily proved he was working for Panos, not cheating him.
For Donny, that had been the end of it, but Gaby saw opportunity there. She’d made Donny her intermediary in getting in touch with Weisskopf, who saw no problem in knocking off a picture or two for her without informing Panos. The two copies had been made, setting her back a total of $14,000. Donny himself had been glad to sell the originals for her to some scummy fence he knew for $20,000 apiece. His reward had been $1,000 and a few extra favors from Gaby. Gaby’s profit had thus been $25,000, which she’d thought was pretty good, but when she’d told Emil about it, he’d scoffed. He had connections that could have brought her twenty times that. Next time, he’d said, come to him and he’d prove it.
She’d replied by informing him that, as a matter of fact, she’d recently had Weisskopf make a third copy from Panos’s collection, this one a big step up from Redon and Bernard: a Rouen Cathedral of Claude Monet’s. So here was Emil’s chance to put up or shut up. Donny had told her his contact was offering a hefty $60,000 this time and Donny thought he could get him up to $75,000. Could Emil do better than that?
A few days later he telephoned with his answer. Sit down, he told her, and then said that, assuming that it passed inspection, the buyers were ready to pay €2,500,000. In cash, full payment on delivery, said delivery to be made in Saranda, Albania, on the morning of May 25, when the Artemis would be docked a ferry ride away in nearby Corfu. How did that sound to her?
As he’d expected, she was floored, but not so floored that half an hour later she didn’t suggest to him that if two and a half million was their opening offer, didn’t he think he might charm them up to a nice round three?
Emil had laughed. “These people you don’t charm.”
Mafia, he meant, but she hadn’t said anything. Emil had a way of forgetting—or choosing not to remember—that half of her male relatives were or had once been mafiosi—not with some wannabe Albanian mafia either, but with the real thing, Mafia with a capital M.
It wasn’t long before the two of them realized that the Monet meant more than a giant payday; it was their ticket out of lives they both despised. They could escape—Gaby from Panos, Emil from his wife, both from their stunted existences. What if they didn’t return to the ship from Saranda? What if they rented a car instead and headed to Croatia, to Zagreb, where Emil had been born and claimed he still had useful connections, where Gabriela had sung several times and was still much esteemed, and where two and a half million euros would go a long, long way?
That had been the plan. When Panos had discovered the Monet forgery just before the cruise there been a brief period of terror on Gaby’s part. If Weisskopf were to tell him that it was she who’d had it commissioned, he would throw her out, cut her off, and probably bring charges. Her life would be over. For the first time she took advantage of her doting Uncle Frankie’s repeated, unambiguous offers of his “services” if she ever needed them. All she had to do was ask. She asked, he delivered, and Christoph Weisskopf was no longer a problem. That was another loop out of which Emil had been kept. He’d never known about Weisskopf at all. She kept waiting for him to ask where the forgeries had come from, but he never did. At root Emil was an insecure man, easily shaken, and he didn’t go looking for trouble. As a result, there was a lot he didn’t know and she meant to keep it that way.
The plan remained in effect.
“I cannot believe it,” Emil said through stiffened, barely parted lips. They were alone on the windy aft deck of the ferry, and he was staring fixedly down at the slowly spreading wake of the ship rather than looking at Gaby. “I can not believe it.” He had recovered his manly self-assurance and sense of command as soon as the ferry had cleared the breakwater and was safely into the strait that separated the Greek island of Corfu from Albania. “How could you do such a stupid thing? There were a hundred other things you could have done. What were you thinking?”
What Gaby was thinking was that this guy was really starting to get on her nerves. She was sick of the constant negativity, of his bossiness, of the endless carping and nagging and after-the-fact “advice.” And was his overemphasis of a word in just about every sentence something new or a habit that she had, for some inexplicable reason, never noticed? Whichever, it was making her grind her teeth now.
“Emil,” she said without expression, “just stop talking for a while, all right? Can you do that?”
“Christ,” he muttered. “I had everything so worked out. But no, you had to—” But when she turned to look at him, he read something in her face that made him think twice. “Oh, hell, I’m going to take a walk around the deck. I need to think.”
Good, she needed to think too. It was only in this last hour or so that she’d concluded once and for all that when Emil’s part in this was over, he had to be gotten rid of. Not killed, there was no need for that (as far as she could see at the moment), but dumped. She needed him to finalize today’s all-important transaction and get the money, and she needed him to get her safely to Zagreb, and, once in Zagreb she needed his protection and help in getting her set up with the documents and connections she would require to get back to civilization. Brazil, maybe, or Ireland.
Then he could be dumped. A year, no more. She could l
ast that long, even in Croatia.
Alix woke with something that wasn’t quite a hangover but was definitely on the wrong side of happy, healthy, and fit. Instinctively, she groped for the bedside phone to call for coffee, but changed her mind and asked for orange juice instead.
She’d barely gotten into her robe when there was a tap tap at the door. In came Artemis, as crisp and fresh and smiling as ever, pushing a rolling table with a glass pitcher that held enough orange juice for four, a pot of coffee, and a basket of warm pastries topped with two of the buttery croissants that Alix had so quickly come to look forward to. Not this morning, though. Looking at them made her gag a little. She reached for the orange juice, but Artemis beat her to it and poured a glass for her. As Alix had come to expect, it was as fresh as could be, foamy and thick with flecks of pulp.
“May I serve you anything else?”
“No, thank you, this is more than enough.”
“Are you planning to go into Saranda today, Miss London?”
“Into where?”
“Saranda. Albania. You can get there by ferry.”
“I didn’t know that. Don’t I need a visa or something?”
“Technically, yes. Actually, no. Your passport is all. Saranda is, shall we say, quite informal when it comes to such things.”
“Okay, thanks for mentioning it. I might do that.”
A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) Page 21