Crushton nodded. “I recognize the black rain slicker with rainbow striping. He had it custom-made.”
Movado and the others had clustered around us. “What did Thasos tell you?” Movado asked.
“You’ve got another dead body and you’re worried about secrets? Is there a priority you do have straight?”
“Maybe he gave you a clue we all need to know,” Movado said.
“Nothing,” I said. “He told us nothing. He was unconscious.”
Movado didn’t bother to accuse me of lying.
I pointed out to the yacht. “We’ve got another dead body on our hands.”
“I don’t,” Movado said.
I turned to Movado’s minions. “None of you feels a need to help in an investigation?”
Silence.
The rain continued. The wind whipped at us unmercifully. I realized there was no thunder or lightning. We could still see the waves crashing against the breakwater. We hustled down the cobblestone steps to the beach and then trotted through the pelting rain. Gavin, Martikovic, Crushton, Scott, and I cut Derek Harris’s body down. The rope around his neck was in a hangman’s noose. The three of them agreed to take the body out of the rain and put it with the others in the cooler in the basement of Apritzi House.
Just before they hefted the body to leave, Crushton asked, “Where are you guys going?”
I said, “To the cavern.” Trust no one, Thasos had said.
“Did Thasos say there was a clue there?”
I said, “We’ve been trying to put together hints we’ve gotten. We’re going to try there.” They struggled away.
Scott and I hurried back to the castle. Our ponchos didn’t keep the rain out of our faces and our legs below the knees were soaked. The waves crashed higher on the beach as we rounded the headland. The Atrium harbor had a breakwater, but the castle bay had no protection from the elements. I didn’t think the waves would reach the castle, but I didn’t know whether it was high tide or not. We hurried forward.
At the castle we stood under the portico. Despite the pouring rain we could still smell the remnants of the fire.
I said, “Tudor’s valet was supposed to stay here.”
“Would you stay in this dank old hole in a pouring rain by yourself?” Scott asked.
“Not even if my job depended on it.”
Scott said, “You lied to the others about where we were going.”
“Yes, I know. You wanted me to tell them the truth?”
“Not particularly.”
We tried Thasos’s keys. One of them worked on the door to the Great Hall. We stepped inside.
I shook the rain from the poncho, took it off, then draped it over a chair. Scott did the same. I wore a heavy sweatshirt, flannel-lined jeans, and work boots. Scott was similarly attired.
He said, “We going to be able to find a secret room?” We began walking through the Great Hall.
“It could be anywhere. Maybe under the rubble of the tower, getting soaked by the tons of water that are pouring onto it as we speak. What did Thasos say before he passed out?” I thought a moment.
Scott said, “The writing is on the wall and something about God’s word. Somebody wrote the clue to entering a secret room out in plain sight on a wall? That’s not very secret.”
I, of course, remembered the great detective dictum: the best place to hide something is right out in the open. I reminded Scott of this. He said, “Yes, I know the saying. I just don’t know what’s right out in the open.” We peered into the kitchen. He said, “Looks like most of the paintings from the walls are in here.”
Once the castle wasn’t going to burn, toting these items through the storm would be undesirable. The kitchen would be the least likely place for the priceless paintings to be harmed by the elements.
“Did he mean the stuff on the wall or the wall itself?” I asked.
Scott shrugged.
We returned to the Great Hall for a closer inspection. We lit candles and used the flashlight to do a thorough examination. We started at one end of the Great Hall and shone the light square by square. There was no writing on any of the walls. We looked behind the few remaining pictures and all the statues. We spent two chilly hours there. Nothing.
We then tried the refectory and the kitchen. We closed the door to try and keep out some of the chill. The refectory had several vast murals on the walls. One was of the earliest Olympic games in ancient Greece with javelin throwers, wrestlers, and runners. All were naked, as they were supposed to have been in the first Olympics. The other was of the agora in Athens with a philosopher speaking to the youths of the city, except all the youths were nearly naked young men in lascivious poses. We even looked behind the mirror on the back of the door and under the pots and pans.
The heavy overcast couldn’t hide the fact that the sun was setting.
In the kitchen I leaned up against the massive old cast-iron stove. “We must have missed something,” I said.
Scott said, “We should look through these paintings.”
I shrugged. I started carefully flipping through a stack. It felt weird holding in my hands works that great masters had created. Near the end I came across a painting of St. Jerome writing the Bible.
“That’s writing,” Scott said.
“It’s not on the wall.”
“It’s more on the wall than any other writing we’ve seen so far.”
We examined the painting. I shone the flashlight on the writing. “I can’t read it.”
Scott looked at it, then glanced across at the opposite wall. He said, “It’s backwards.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a code. I told you you should have read Sex and It’s written backwards.”
“Huh?”
He walked across to the mirror on the back of the door to the kitchen. I followed. “See,” he said. The writing now appeared in simple English. It said, “Mother’s womb will bring you peace.”
I said, “Okay, you read the damn Da Vinci thing, but what does that mean?”
“And snarky is going to help how?” he asked.
That deep thrum in his voice can send shivers up my spine at the right moment. This was not a right moment. This was pissed off and scared and in a rush, but desperate to get things right. He, however, was not who was making things wrong. I drew several deep breaths. “Sorry,” I said. “Snarky is as snarky does.”
He let my stunningly lame attempt at humor go. That’s what lovers do, I think. A critique isn’t always necessary. Sometimes silence works pretty well.
Scott said, “I’m not an expert. It’s a clue. I’m just trying to figure stuff out. The book kept talking about feminine symbology.”
I looked at him. He said, “I don’t remember all of it. Doors to cathedrals were all supposedly constructed in the shape of a woman’s vagina.”
We poked our heads back into the Great Hall. I showed my light on each of the solid oak doors encased in concrete on the other three sides of the Great Hall. I said, “They’re all cold, gray, and solid as rock. Is that a statement by the Catholic Church, or a theological speculation, or useless religious claptrap?”
He said, “Made a decent plot point in the book.”
The doorways to the tower were blackened. They were mostly oval with a slight arch leading to a point at the top.
I said, “My vagina information is limited, but none of these look sexual to me.”
Back in the kitchen we leafed through the paintings again. I said, “I don’t see any naked women.”
Scott pointed. “There’s a metal Madonna and child on top of the huge china cabinet.”
I followed his gaze. The china cabinet was immense. It covered half a wall. It was filled with dishes, cups, saucers, figurines, and bric-a-brac.
The Madonna and child looked like a thousand other cheap Madonna and child statues you could pick up in any souvenir stand from Land’s End to the Bosporus.
“It’s the only Madonna?” I asked.
&nbs
p; “The only female figure I’ve noticed around here. It’s a gay resort. You’re going to get a surfeit of pictures of males and not a lot of religious icons.”
I tapped the solid oak side of the cabinet. “We should examine it more closely,” I said. We both stood on chairs. The metal figurine of the Madonna and child at the apex was heavier than it looked. We almost dropped it on several paintings. It could have put a nasty hole in any number of old masters. We put it in the center of the refectory table. The Madonna and child didn’t move. I like that in a cast iron statue. Gazing at the damn thing didn’t give me a clue. I looked at Scott. He shrugged.
I leaned against the side of the china cabinet. I looked back up at the top. “Does this thing move?”
We put our shoulders against one side and pushed. The result was the dishes, cups, saucers, figurines, and bric-a-brac all shuddered. There wasn’t anything else for it. We emptied the damn thing. It took our combined strengths fully exerted, but the china cabinet finally moved. It swung outward from my end. Once we had it a foot open we could see it hinged on the inside at Scott’s end. We moved it farther. When the opening was about four feet, it stopped and would not go any more. We stood together and looked down onto a set of stairs descending into darkness.
I said, “Half a bet this is the only entrance or exit.”
“More than half a bet,” Scott said. “If the evil killer moves this back on top of it, we’d be stuck down there.”
“Evil killers are like that.”
“We’re not going down there,” Scott said.
“Let’s bust this thing up so it can’t be moved back over the hole.”
“There’s other stuff in the room.”
I looked over the other things. “That stove isn’t moving any time this century. The center table wouldn’t fit over the hole.”
“Somebody could carry something big in here.”
“Big enough to cover this?” I asked.
“One of us could stay up here.”
“We are not splitting up.”
“So we break apart this china cabinet?”
“And anything else we think is too large.”
“Gonna take a while,” Scott said.
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m exhausted, but I don’t think we have a choice.”
“I’m a little woozy. My head feels like a hangover is running around inside banging on a drum.”
“You need medical attention.”
“Yeah, well, that ain’t gonna happen for a while.”
“You want to rest?”
“No, let’s get this over with.” He touched the china cabinet. He’s a carpenter and appreciates fine wood. “This is probably a valuable antique.”
“And it would have gone up in flames if there wasn’t a two-feet-thick medieval wall between it and that explosion. Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“What are we going to bust it up with?” Scott asked.
“It’s a medieval castle for pity’s sake. There’s gotta be axes somewhere around here.”
But there weren’t. We found one suit of armor with a pike that had been welded to the rest of the suit of armor.
“Axless in the Aegean,” Scott said as we gazed again at the china cabinet.
“This can’t be that hard,” I said. I picked up one of the dining room chairs and bashed it into the cabinet. The glass shattered. Several splinters flew. Not as many as I’d have liked. The cabinet was made of solid wood. We both started hacking away. It took half an hour of bashing oak on oak, but we had a satisfyingly large pile of kindling when we were done. A foot-long remnant of the china cabinet hung half off its last hinge.
With flashlight in hand we descended the steep set of stairs.
It was one large room dug into the ground about ten feet and extending back under the Great Hall about twenty feet. It was maybe thirty feet wide. Light from the opening we’d come through seeped in. Mostly we used the flashlight. The back wall was natural gray rock. The two side walls had patterns of gray plaster in designs of stars, suns, moons, the zodiac, the solar system surrounded by vast swirls. Bricks, each with its own separate intricate design, made up the fourth wall, the one under the Great Hall. Exquisite porcelain figurines that shimmered in the fitful light were set in alcoves every five feet around the perimeter. The center of the room was what I imagined a reading room in an exclusive men’s club in England would look like: deep leather chairs, mahogany end tables, Tiffany lamps. All the way around the room sculptures and paintings alternated.
I gasped. A Sex and hung directly across from us. We approached it. “This has to be a copy,” I said.
“Looks real,” Scott said.
“Can’t be,” I said.
“The real one was stolen, a couple times. What if the authorities recovered reproductions and this is the original?”
I said, “You really think we’re going to find genuine hidden treasures in the middle of a remote island in the Aegean controlled by rich gay Europeans for over a hundred years?”
Scott added, “Which has been essentially undisturbed for all that time.”
I said, “Noble gay people who looted some of the most famous and valuable artwork in the world? Noble gay people who are blind-greedy? Noble gay people who aren’t afraid of being arrested or of having all this stolen stuff?”
“Maybe they didn’t steal it.”
“You mean they got it from eBay?”
“Well, no, but just because it’s here doesn’t mean these guys are crooks or bad. Maybe there’s an explanation of some…” He stopped. “I’m starting to not make sense to myself. How the hell did they get all this crap and how come nobody knows about it and how come nobody blabbed?”
“Excellent questions.”
“This shit would be worth killing for,” Scott said.
“That and a whole lot more,” I said.
I held the light up close to the Sex and There was no Plexiglas between me and it as there was in the Louvre. I had no way to tell if it was real. Carefully I passed the light over each object in the room. On a desk in a corner stood a foot-high golden bird encrusted with jewels.
“I’m dreaming,” I whispered. We walked over. “I am not standing in front of the Maltese Falcon. It was only a movie MacGuffin. It can’t be real. Somebody is playing a game.”
The jewels shimmered in the flashlight beam. I placed a finger on the bird’s head. “I just don’t believe it. Maybe a movie fan had a replica made.” I swung the flashlight beam around the room. “These could all be replicas.”
“Look at all this stuff,” Scott said. “It’s supposed to have been missing, some of it for centuries.”
“You know these things?”
“I took art history in college.”
“You did?”
“One semester. You had to take a fine arts class as part of our physical education program. It was known as an easy A. The instructor was a male grad student who was really hot. I sat in front and paid a lot of attention. Only seventeen guys currently playing baseball at the major-league level have a four-year-college degree. I’m one of them. I never had the nerve to approach the guy, but he was a stud. I learned a lot of useless art stuff.”
I pointed to a largish book on a lectern. It was open to the middle. The page was beautiful.
Scott said, “That might be a Gutenberg Bible.”
“Are these real? This can’t be real.”
“I couldn’t possibly say for sure. I just know that some of these have been missing for ages. A few of these look like things that were looted by the Nazis and never recovered.”
“No wonder nobody knew about this place.”
“No dead body,” Scott said.
“Well, that’s a step in the right direction.”
I walked up to the brick wall and examined some of the intricate detail work. Several of the bricks seemed to be contiguous and told a story. Some were frankly obscene. Scott stood near the center of the wall. He said, “I think
there’s a doorway here.”
I heard a sound behind us. We whirled around. Two legs appeared on the steps followed by a torso and head. If it had been the other way around, head then torso, I might have really freaked. As it was I was past startled. It was Movado.
“Ah, gentlemen,” he said. “You have chosen to trespass on our little refuge.”
I was wary even though I didn’t see a weapon.
“Who knew about this place?” I asked.
“Those of us in the know. The Great Hall of the castle was off limits to everyone. That kitchen is unused. It’s a medieval joke.”
“Is this stuff real?” Scott asked.
“The correct question is, are they reproductions or fakes or real?”
I said, “Why is there a need to indulge in guessing games? Just give a fucking straight answer.”
“Which I don’t owe to you.”
Scott said, “Could the killer be after these things?”
“Only the very elite of the gay rich know about these things. They would have no reason to kill for them.”
“What bullshit,” I said. “Somebody takes a dive in the stock market. Somebody’s rich family cuts him off. Somebody makes stupid investments. Just because you’re old money doesn’t protect you from greed.”
“I suppose it doesn’t, but my response to you remains the same. No one in the hundred years this has been here has removed a thing. Each person has to make a contribution to the room to be allowed in.”
“How do you know there’s a room to make a contribution to?” I asked.
“The rich have ways of discovering things about each other.” He held up his right hand. “Spare me your class warfare lecture. How do the rich know the most exclusive jeweler on the European continent works on a side street in Paris in a shop that no one would notice? How do we know who is dressing in exclusive fashions? How do we know which restaurants cater to the very rich? We do. We simply do. It’s a lifestyle. A lifetime of being different and being treated differently.” Movado extended his arm and pointed around the room. “Now that you’ve seen all this, what has it gained you?”
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