A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (14 page)

Panos’s eyes popped. He wasn’t used to being spoken to like this by a member of his staff. “I… you…”

Christos stared him into silence, but once having gotten his message home, shifted gears and shrugged sympathetically. “It is the best, Panos,” he said, smiling. “Remember, you are the one who said no touch detectors, no invisible walls—you don’t want bells going off every time somebody got too close. You said these people knew enough not to touch. Well, no bells went off.”

“All right, all right,” said Panos, now thoroughly deflated. “It’s all my fault. Isn’t it always my fault? God damn it,” he tacked on, as if to prove he was still in command.

He looked so downcast that Mrs. Papadakis came closer to him and took his hand. With a disgusted glance at her and a grumbled, “Aagh,” he jerked it free.
What an unpleasant man
, Alix thought.

Morose silence took over for a few seconds.

“Wait a minute!” Alix exclaimed so abruptly that every face turned toward her. She’d continued to stare at the painting, and the elusive recollection that had been knocked out of her head had suddenly come rushing back. “I don’t think that
is
a Manet.”

Panos’s brow beetled. He glowered at her. “
You
don’t think it’s a Manet! And who makes you such an expert, better than the scientists?”

Alix had wanted to take her words back the millisecond they were out of her mouth, and now she regretted them even more. Now she’d antagonized Panos too. She should have kept her mouth shut until she’d figured out exactly what it was that was bothering her—or until she’d decided that her connoisseur’s eye had played her false this time, which didn’t happen often, but did happen. It wasn’t magic.

“Mr. Papadakis, I’m sorry, I should have—”

Edward smoothly cut in. “Miss London flew all night to get here, Panos, and now she’s taken a pretty severe blow to the head. I say we allow her a little—”

“What’s wrong with it?” Panos demanded.

“Um…” She dithered, pretty sure that “my stomach tells me” wasn’t going to do the trick. “I’m not sure. I may have spoken too quickly.”

“I think you just might have, Alix,” Edward interceded, smiling. “Perhaps it would help you to know that we have the stamp and seal of the
Laboratoire Forensique—
which, as I’m sure you know, does
not
make mistakes—on the back of the painting; we have two authentication letters from two different experts, both of them incontestable, here on the yacht—you’re more than welcome to see them; we have an impeccable catalogue raisonné
—”

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.

I
t 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 set 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?