A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (16 page)

“Well, that’s good. Too bad we can’t say the same for the Manet.”

“Yes.”

There was an awkward pause during which Alix waited, expecting her to introduce herself, but it didn’t happen. “And you are…?” she asked.

The woman blinked. “Are you serious?”

“Well… yes. I’m sorry, have we met?”

“You
are
serious. Damn. I’m Izzy Clinke.”

“Izzy…” Alix echoed. After a second, it came to her. This gangly, quietly sardonic woman who loved Rothko because his paintings provided security of principal was the famous pop singer Donny had been raving about? The words
I gotta have mo’
suddenly took on new meaning. “Pocahontas?” she asked hesitantly.

“I should say so,” said the man, his first words to Alix. He was a blinking, spreading, soft-looking young guy in serious horn-rimmed glasses, the sort of person, she thought, who should have been wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and tie, with a pen holder stuffed with ballpoints in the pocket. When she took a second look, she saw that, with the exception of the tie, he was.

“This is Durward,” Izzy said.

“Durward G. Sternberg,” said Durward, shaking hands with Alix. The handshake was firm, but the hand itself was as squashy as Alix expected it to be.

“Durward is my factotum,” Izzy said with a perfectly straight face.

He nodded his agreement.

Alix laughed, thinking that a joke was being made. Who seriously calls somebody else a “factotum”? And does it right to his face? And has it promptly acknowledged? But neither of them returned the smile.

“You certainly laugh easily,” Izzy said. “You must have a very happy life.” The rueful implication seemed to be that she herself had anything but. It was hard to tell, though. Izzy had a curious way of speaking, halfway between supercilious and self-mocking, that gave much of what she said a wry tinge of irony, as if she were an observer taking in everything she saw, including herself, with tolerant, faintly cynical amusement.

“I’m not complaining,” Alix said. “Well, it’s a pleasure to know you, Izzy. I’d better go. I’m supposed to be meeting somebody by the swimming pool.”

“Which one?”

“There’s more than one swimming pool?”

“Well, of course. I mean, you really can’t expect people not to go swimming just because it’s raining, can you? Or snowing, for that matter. But I suspect you mean the one on the main deck, aft. Would it be Gaby that you’re meeting, by any chance?”

“It is, yes.”

“Well, so am I. I guess we’re a threesome. I’ll walk with you, then. Durward, have you dealt with my e-mail? Taken care of the Sony cover letter? Asked the Bellagio what the hell they want from me? Straightened out the mess with Ralph Lauren?”

Each of these questions was answered with a self-satisfied little simper.

“Good. Go forget about me for a while, then. Be bold. Take what comes to you. Enjoy life.”

After she and Alix had gone a few steps, she called back to him: “You’ve got your pager, right?” He tapped his belt to show that he did.

Alix smiled as they started again. “That makes it a little hard for him to forget about you, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, it does him good. He lives to please. You know, Durward may not look like much, but the man is a jewel. Not only is he totally devoted to me, he is the world’s most efficient person, whereas I am the world’s most disorganized human being. I’d be totally lost without him. I don’t go
anywhere
without him.”

They walked a little farther and Izzy said, “Alix, I’m sorry I was so stiff at first. I thought you were one of the crew and you were going to ask me to autograph your forehead, or babble about how much you love my stupid songs, or something, and that’s what I’m here to get away from. I just want to be Izzy Clinke for a week. Well, that and to come away with that gorgeous Rothko if I can.”

“Well, I can’t do much to help you with the Rothko, but I can certainly promise not to bring up Pocahontas again.” That would take no effort at
all, since she’d pretty much exhausted her knowledge of the singer, all of which had come from Donny, and of popdom in general.

As they walked through what seemed to be the ship’s library, lined by shelves filled with flawlessly lined-up books that looked as if they’d never been opened, and a few window alcoves that held two or three armchairs, Alix heard her name called.

She turned, thinking someone was trying to get her attention, but she saw that it had come from a couple of breakfasting men in one of the alcoves with their chairs angled toward the sea. One of them was Edward Reed. The other was someone she hadn’t seen before.

“Alix London?” the one she didn’t know repeated even more incredulously than he’d said it the first time. “
That’s
the lecturer you’ve chosen; that’s our expert?”

“Yes, Alix London,” was Edward’s measured reply. “I gather you’ve heard of her, then?”

“If it’s who I’m thinking of, I have. But surely you don’t mean the daughter of that—”

“Well, yes, that’s right, but she’s not her father, and, you know—”

“And wasn’t she in the middle of some sordid affair in Santa Fe, where—”

“Well, yes, she was, but really, Emil, she has firmly established her credentials as a legitimate and bona fide authority on—”

“Credentials!” The Danish pastry he’d had in his hand was tossed contemptuously onto his plate. “Edward, I know all about this person. I still have my contacts at Harvard—my second doctorate is from Harvard, you know, the first being from Oxford—and I happen to know—as you certainly should have known—that she dropped out of school there… in her
junior
year. The woman never earned a degree. She
has
no credentials! What she has, as I understand it, is a ‘connoisseur’s eye.’ ” His tone left no doubt about his opinion of connoisseurs’ eyes.

“I fully understand your point, Emil,” Edward said, “but, er, Panos settled on her, and… well, you know what Panos can be like.”

“Unfortunately, I do.”

Alix, her curiosity naturally aroused, had slowed her step to get a look at the new man as she and Izzy climbed the aft stairs to the main deck. Like Edward, he was in his mid-fifties and had probably been good looking as a young man, but he was one of those people (unlike Edward) to whom age had not been kind. His hairline was receding now and he was running to fat, with a defeated, hangdog look to his sloping shoulders. His criticism of Alix had been not so much blustery as put-upon, as if her presence aboard was a calculated personal affront to him. He spoke with one of those very slight, hard-to-pin-down Continental accents.

“And now—” he was still at it “—she’s been on the
Artemis
not even one day, and already…”

But Alix and Izzy were out of earshot. Izzy grinned another of her taut smiles. “Looks as if I’m not the only celebrity aboard.”

“Oh, I’m used to it,” Alix said resignedly, but she was pleased to see a distinct change in Izzy’s manner, as if her notoriety made them comrades in arms. “I’d hoped maybe it wouldn’t come up, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“Well, I wouldn’t take anything Emil Varga says personally. It’s just his way. Faultfinding, nit-picking, they come naturally to him. You name it, he’ll pooh-pooh it. You’ll see.”

“Sounds like you know him pretty well?”

“I don’t know about ‘pretty well,’ but, sure, we all know each other. We may not all be friends, exactly, but all of us have been on Panos’s cruises before, and nobody’s killed anybody else. Yet. Give it a little time, you’ll understand the guy better.”

“Yes, but will I like him any better?”

Izzy grinned. “Hasn’t worked for me.”

“He has some kind of accent, doesn’t he? Russian or something like that.”

“Yeah, he was born in Lithuania, or Bulgaria, or one of those. I don’t know, Macedonia? Came over when he was a kid.”

The stairwell opened onto the main deck, and they were drawn to the handrail to get the full benefit of the wonderful blue expanse of cloud-flecked sky and calm sea, and the sweet, fresh morning air that went along with them.

“Beautiful,” Izzy sighed, looking out over the Aegean and sucking in a couple of deep breaths, but she was still thinking about Emil. “See, what his problem is, is that he thinks he’s some kind of intellectual giant. You heard all that crap—Oxford this, Harvard that—and yet he’s stuck in some rinky-dink art museum in Maine or someplace, and the only reason he’s the director there is that he inherited the job from his wife’s uncle, whose collection started the place fifty years ago. He can’t get his head around how that happened to him.

“And then there’s the wife, Maddy.” Izzy shook her head. “She’s all over him every minute, correcting his grammar, telling him his shirt’s buttoned wrong, criticizing his table manners, contradicting him every chance she gets. If he says, ‘I like quiche,’ she says, ‘No, you don’t, you hate quiche.’ And I’m not making that up, that’s an exact quote. I was there. If she’s that way in public, you can imagine the way she is at home.”

“I can hardly wait to meet her.”

“You won’t get the chance. She stayed home this time. I don’t have a clue how he managed that, but all I can say is, thank heaven for small blessings. Oh, listen, there’s something else you probably should know about Emil to understand him. He’s not poor—he couldn’t be and still be in the fractional investment consortium—but he’s not in the same league as the rest of us high rollers, and anyway, the money is hers, not his. I think that makes him a little defensive too, you know? Insecure.”

“Interesting.” Alix paused for a moment. A chance for a little trolling, she thought. “Fractional investment plan?” she repeated innocently. “What exactly is that?”

But Izzy was peering over Alix’s shoulder. “Hey, there’s Gaby, waiting for us by the pool. Shall we join her?”

O
nly there wasn’t any pool, not this morning. Alix had read in
Amazing Yachts
how the
Artemis’
s main-deck swimming pool, considered a marvel when the yacht was constructed, was a triple-duty affair. Most of the time it functioned as a roomy, six-foot-deep pool, but if there was to be dancing in the evening the water would be drained and the faux mosaic floor, with its larger-than-life image of the famed Minoan bull-leapers fresco, would be raised flush with the deck to provide a dance floor. And if a helicopter were expected, the raised swimming-pool floor could then be covered with a portable landing pad.

Apparently, a helicopter was expected today; a three-man crew was struggling to get the bulky, folding pad in place.

“We anticipating company?” Izzy asked as they reached Gaby, who was in a straight-backed deck chair over near the railing, sipping tomato juice.
Or was it a Bloody Mary
, Alix wondered.

“Yes, our final guest should be landing shortly.”

“Oh, right, our own touch of royalty, Saskia, hereditary Countess of Brabant, or so she claims. I wondered why Her Majesty didn’t make her usual regal appearance at dinner.”

“No, Saskia’s not coming. She stepped off a curb the wrong way in Antwerp a couple of days ago and tore up her knee, so she’s sending a nephew in her place, with full authority to act as her proxy in the bidding. I understand they left Athens with him an hour ago, so he should be here pretty soon. Hey, pull up a chair, you two. I see you’ve met without my help.”

They sat down with her around a small table, and Izzy immediately squinted and put up her hand to shade her eyes. The sun was very bright. Alix was wearing a visor and was getting out her sunglasses, and Gaby already had both on. Izzy had come out with neither. She opened her telephone and hit a button. “Visor,” she said into it. “And sunglasses. No, Durward, I do not care what color.”

While she was speaking, Gaby had nodded at someone over Alix’s shoulder, and Alix turned to see Panos Papadakis approaching, topped by a broad-brimmed straw hat and casually dressed in polo shirt and Bermudas, but looking even more bulgy and uncomfortably stuffed into his clothing than he had in a tuxedo.

“Have you ever noticed,” Izzy whispered sidewise to Alix, “how many fat people seem to think tight clothes make them look thinner? Doesn’t work, does it?”

“Not too well in this case,” Alix whispered back.

“Good morning, good morning, ladies!” Panos sang, whipping off his hat.

“Good morning, dear,” Gaby replied. “You’re very cheerful this morning.”

“And why I shouldn’t be cheerful when I step out on my deck and the first sight that greets my eyes is three such beautiful ladies? I must be in heaven, ha-ha-ha.”

Gaby smiled in return but was glancing around as if she were looking for someplace to hide.

“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.”