Everyone's Dead But Us (11 page)

I have to give an accounting to my contact on Santorini in the next few days. I don’t know how much longer I can report failure. In the years I have been here, I have only suspicions about three paintings and one sculpture that may be copies or the real thing stolen over a century and a half ago. Are these the genuine thing being traded among rich collectors? My employers think the center of a huge illegal operation is here. Whether it is that or small time nefarious trading, you couldn’t prove either one by me.

None of these people are to be trusted. None of them. Not the help. Not the guests. It is hell working here and keeping this kind of secret. It’s a stark and terrifying place to work and stay. It frightens me.

The servants are no better than the guests or the owners. The help who come in on the boat every day are cutthroats who I think are mostly straight but who are quite willing to fleece, bamboozle, suck up to, or suck off the wealthy gay men for everything they can get. They’d bend over for a dime or a million dollars. I speak fluent Greek. No one knows I do. I hear the staff belittle everyone on the island from Henry Tudor on down. They are genuinely afraid of Movado when he comes here. They think Movado has spies among the help. They don’t dare retaliate. Rumor is one of them tried to. His family was nearly wiped out in a disaster on Santorini. I have not been able to confirm whether it was a natural or man-made disaster. I hate Movado so I’m not a good judge.

There was a great deal of charting of coming and goings of various staff members. None of which seemed to indicate criminal activity.

Scott looked up from his stack of papers. He said, “I don’t know most of these people. We’re looking at just the ones who are currently on the island, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve got Blake Klimpton here. Our heroic quarterback has a thing for dildos although I’m not sure what that has to do with murder.”

I said, “Done in with a dildo?”

Scott suggested, “Dildoed to death? The deadly dildo?”

“Dildon’t,” I said. I got a hint of a smile from him for that. I asked, “Why would Thasos keep that kind of information?”

Scott said, “I think he’s got odd bits about a lot of guys. Maybe every bit on anybody he got bits on. And don’t say bitten to death.”

“I’m still stuck on dildos.”

“That is not at all an entertaining picture, and it is, frankly, a painful one.”

I asked, “Did the island supply dildos?”

“I didn’t see them in the gift shop,” Scott replied.

“Not your run of the mill tacky souvenir.”

“It doesn’t say if Klimpton was the user or the usee, nor does it say how big they were.”

“Nor do I care,” I said.

“I can see the sports headlines,” Scott said. “ ‘Star quarterback dildo king,’ pictures at eleven.”

“I’m not sure that’s a headline I’m looking forward to or dreading. Anything in the report on him that has some connection with murder?”

Scott was silent. I looked up at him. He was frowning.

“What?” I asked.

“According to what this says none of Klimpton’s boy toys ever get back to their homes.”

He moved the page so I could read it. It listed the names of ten different young men. “Does he have proof?” I asked.

“Look what it says.”

There were lists of addresses with all the names with anecdotal records on four of them. These mostly consisted of phone conversations with families back in Eastern Europe, two in Slovakia and two in the Czech Republic. The families had seemed mostly clueless. There were also copies of e-mails he had sent to some of them. I know there are Internet sites and software programs where you can type in text and have it translated into a particular foreign language. He wouldn’t have to be fluent in that many languages. Thasos seemed to have had enough discretion not to blurt out the fact that their sons were selling their bodies to some very high bidders.

Scott asked, “Does he say Klimpton killed them?”

“He doesn’t make accusations. It’s more like he’s recording facts like a good investigator.”

Scott said, “There’re lots of reasons they could be missing. Or maybe they aren’t even missing. Maybe Thasos simply couldn’t find them. How’d he know that they were dead? He was sure they were dead?”

“That list of ten gives the names of the ones who are supposedly dead. I’d love to talk to the guy when he’s better.”

“If he gets better,” Scott said.

“If a murderer knew this kind of thing was out, he’d have a good reason to kill.”

“Yeah,” Scott said, “but why not come get these lists? If you’re killing the guy because he’s got the information, why not get the information? Better yet, why not destroy the information? And whoever it is didn’t do a very good job of killing the one who was a threat.”

I said, “Craveté knew who the investigator was. He says Pietro is his source. Maybe the killer doesn’t know Pietro knows. Which brings up another problem. How did Pietro know?”

Scott shrugged.

I continued, “Either our killer is having a lot of luck, or it’s a vast conspiracy. I’d love to believe our killer was incompetent, but there are dead bodies floating all around this island.”

“So to speak,” Scott said. Ever the practical one, he added, “None of the boy toys’ bodies are on this island. Not that we know of. It’d be easy enough to shove them off the castle tower. Klimpton could have branched out and be killing others besides just his paid-for pals. Maybe he and Movado were in the snuff film business together. Maybe Klimpton supplied the boys and Movado supplied the toys.”

“Dead extras to the idle rich. I’m not ready to believe that yet. Even if they did do that, why kill some of the hired help and Henry Tudor and blow up part of the castle?”

Scott said, “Our killer is the only one who could have answers for all that. Somebody has reasons for doing all this shit. If Klimpton had a history of killing, he’d be a likely suspect. Who else do we have in these papers?”

We both resumed looking. Certainly the richest of the elite were represented.

A few more moments of perusal and Scott said, “I’ve got the scoop on O’Quinn.”

I said, “How much of this information do we believe? We’ve got no corroboration of any of it. Thasos could be the world’s most fabulous investigator, or he could have been a gossiping fool.”

Scott said, “Do we have more information than we did before?”

“Well, yeah.”

“If we need to look the gift horse in the mouth, we can do that later. Right now, I’m enjoying the gift.”

“What does it say?” I asked.

“Thasos has it written here that O’Quinn’s real reason for spending the last fifteen years in Europe was that he was in love with an artist on the Left Bank in Paris.”

“It’s that prosaic? What about the whole embarrassing drag queen versus the parents phenomenon?”

Scott said, “I don’t remember him being anything other than a bit effeminate.” Scott resumed reading. “He’s been coming here for more than twenty years. Since he was eighteen. He has been a business partner of Tudor’s for ten years. O’Quinn was going to inherit because he helped bail out the island. Then there’s a note in the margin which is hard to make out.”

I studied it. I’d been reading student handwriting for years, and I’m fairly good at deciphering the worst scrawls. I said, “I think it says the island keeps losing money.” I looked at Scott. “With the prices they charge, this place should be swimming in money.”

“Evidently not.”

I said, “We’ll never get hold of those kinds of financial records.”

“Where’s all the money going?” Scott asked.

I shrugged.

Scott perused another page, then said, “This says that O’Quinn is going to inherit. Look at what it says.” I gazed over. He said, “It’s Tudor’s will, or a copy at any rate. It’s dated January first, tomorrow. O’Quinn is named as inheritor of the island and a great deal of money.”

I was still reading the O’Quinn file. “This says he’s the owner of art galleries in Paris, Berlin, London, and Palm Beach. An excellent conduit for illegal artwork if they needed such a thing for getting stolen artwork on or off the Continent. O’Quinn also seems to own a lot of property on several continents. It says here that for a long while he showed his lover’s artwork, mostly sculptures. They broke up in the last six months. The lover was supposed to have come or be coming to the island here for some kind of meeting with O’Quinn. Thasos doesn’t seem to know if it was a reconciliation meeting or a purely business discussion. The meeting never happened. The lover never showed up. It doesn’t say why not.”

Scott asked, “Does Thasos mean the lover is dead? Maybe came here and was killed?”

I scanned another document. “According to this, O’Quinn has reported several thefts from his gallery in Paris over the past six years. All of them thefts of works by fairly minor artists.”

Scott held up an old, weathered document. A five-by-seven Post-it note was attached to the left-hand corner. Scott removed the Post-it note gently and then carefully placed the older document between us. The older document said,

Yes, we have done evil, but to protect ourselves and our own. They have tortured us, burned us, destroyed us over the years. Maybe we should have done things differently. Were there alternatives? Nobody ever pointed them out to me. Oscar is dead in Paris, and we need to be very afraid. As far as I can tell some of these objects are real. Many have legitimate provenances. There are early documents, some claiming that Alexander was not the only gay conqueror.

Then in Thasos’s handwriting on the Post-it note,
Sex and
Sex and

Scott pointed to the Conqueror claim. “Wishful thinking or legitimate scholarship?”

“We may never know. I feel sorry for these guys. I don’t know how I’d respond to direct persecution. I was pretty angry and pretty depressed after the last election, but my job wasn’t gone. I didn’t get thrown in jail.”

Scott said, “There’re more notes.” He shuffled through several sets of papers then said, “Looted Nazi art.”

“What?” I leaned over.

“These are notes on Nazi art that made it into private hands.”

I said, “These people kept stolen art from the Nazis? They collaborated with the Nazis?” Gay people had been persecuted by the Nazis, but were the rich on this island part of that somehow? I felt sick. “Gay people couldn’t have been involved in that.”

Scott picked out another piece of paper. “Wait. Here. I think this means they were part of retrieving art stolen by the Nazis and getting it back to the rightful owners.”

I looked carefully. I felt myself begin to breathe.

“See,” he said, “there’s a list of artworks, lists of where they were recovered from, the dates, most before World War II, some during, and then a short history of the work; I guess that’s the provenance, when they got them, and then how they found the rightful owners.” He pointed. “This last column is for ‘dates returned to rightful owners.’”

“Is this a document Thasos wrote or one he found made by someone else?”

“There’s no way to tell.”

“They didn’t steal anything?”

“Thasos thinks there was lots of stuff. There’re things from other museums that he represents. See this list here.” He held one out. It had dates and lists of artwork going back to 1905, up to 2003.

“So,” I said, “they’re high-caliber art thieves with a conscience. How come none of the people who got their art back ever made a fuss or gave them big thank-yous or made a deal about it in the papers? Some kind of headline like noble gay people saved our family heirlooms.”

“It doesn’t say he can prove any of this,” Scott said.

“So what have we learned,” I said.

“There’s a possible secret stash of stunningly valuable art somewhere on the island.”

“That’s not much more than people have suspected for centuries.”

“But it’s enough to kill for,” Scott said.

We heard a door moving downstairs.

“Oh shit,” Scott said.

We’d been too absorbed. I glanced out the windows. No one. There was no exit other than the staircase down. Trapped.

I clicked off the flashlight. Thunder boomed. I heard footsteps. We stuffed the papers under the silk covering. We hurried to the spiral staircase. I saw Pietro at the bottom. He was looking up into the gloom.

“Mr. Mason, Mr. Carpenter,” he whispered. I didn’t see a gun. He’d been the concierge for Scott’s and my room since the first time we’d visited the island. He was in his early sixties. He whispered, “I came to help.” It was the first time he’d spoken without an accent.

We’d been told not to trust anyone. Thasos hadn’t specifically mentioned Pietro. Here he was offering help. He didn’t have a gun, or at least not one that I could see.

I heard Scott lock the door behind us. We trod down the stairs and met him at the bottom. “How’d you know we were here?” I asked.

“The rich are stupid. They might get here sometime this year. They’re wrangling about being inconvenienced and doing nothing. You guys are dismissed as little more than minor nuisances.”

“Why the fake accent?” Scott asked Pietro.

“I grew up in Brooklyn. I flunked out of high school, joined the Merchant Marine when I was a kid, traveled the world. I learned to cook. I learned what elegant people liked. I trained for years as a butler in Glasgow, Scotland. People have expectations. If I sounded like a New York cab driver in the nineteen fifties, people wouldn’t make an association with elegance. If you have a mixture of some indeterminate foreign accent, you tend to get treated with a little deference, distance, and a little more respect.”

“Is Pietro your real name?” Scott asked.

“It’s Barney Crushton. I’ve been keeping secrets on this island since the seventies.”

I said, “Do we call you Barney or Pietro?”

“Barney’s good.”

“Why come to us now?” Scott asked.

“I think terrible things are happening on the island. I’m scared. The rich and their lackeys are in Movado’s villa making plans to cover up this whole thing. I don’t see how that can be done, but I see why they think they need to do it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they can do it. I just don’t think I want to be part of it. I’ve seen the rich do a lot of things on this island. Mr. Tudor was very good to me. To claim that you made up his death is ludicrous. And if he wasn’t dead, he’d certainly have shown himself by this point. I want to help you. Now O’Quinn is dead. Some of the staff have died. This is real murder and real life. Real people are dead. Some of my friends were in the Atrium when it collapsed in the explosion. Artie Sherebury was my lover.”

I never suspected.

Crushton explained, “Yeah, we were about twenty years apart in age. When you’re stuck on this island, you get close to people. Not many of us lived here full time. It can get pretty dull here in mid-February Most of the help who come over every day are straight.”

I said, “I’ve always wanted to ask about that.”

“What?” Crushton asked.

“The guy who told us about this place mentioned one of the amenities he loved the most was the ready supply of companions.”

Crushton said, “No, we didn’t require the men who worked here to be prostitutes. It was explained to them that they could supplement their incomes enormously depending on what they were willing to do. An amazing number of them were willing to do a great deal. Henry Tudor did not run a pimping service, but if a guest was interested in a young man then options could be provided. Mr. Tudor was in the business of keeping his guests happy. If he knew someone who wanted a winner of the Tour de France as a partner, Henry would go out of his way to make that happen.”

“Wouldn’t that take a stunning amount of money?” I asked.

“These people have a stunning amount of money. They are often willing to pay a great deal for services that cost a great deal. Actually, far fewer of the guests wanted nightly companions than you might imagine. Most brought their own pleasure with them. The local studs were needed on a sometime basis. You probably couldn’t make a living at it although tips could be astronomical. I never heard of anybody getting killed over it.”

Scott said, “Does this prurient speculation of random indulgences get us closer to any kind of solution?” I gave him a look. Sarcasm flowing like someone just swallowed a thesaurus was my forte. Him using it meant he was annoyed.

I asked, “Where are the ones who aren’t with Movado?”

“They’ve gone to their villas. They think they’ll be safe.”

Scott said, “For their sakes, I hope they’re right.”

I said, “I think our most basic need is background on all these guests, on the dead and the living and on who might have motivation to kill all these people.”

“I can give you background information,” Crushton said.

Scott asked, “How come nobody would answer Tom’s question about Tudor having any enemies?”

Crushton said, “That’s simple. Our employers were there. The staff would never speak out of turn.”

“Even if it was a murder?” Scott asked.

“Our jobs and our livelihoods depend on the goodwill of the people we serve. Nobody would take that kind of risk.”

“And you are?” Scott asked.

“Yes. The future isn’t in murder.”

Should we trust him? We could add his knowledge to what we’d found in Thasos’s documents. Trust was a different issue.

“What was the deal with Derek Harris?” I asked. “He’s missing.”

Crushton said, “Mr. Tudor began bringing Mr. Harris before his wins in the Olympics. It’s been a while. Mr. Harris would leave for tours, tournaments, and exhibitions, but he always returned. Mr. Tudor was always very understanding.”

“Any idea how they met?” Scott asked.

“Mr. Tudor did not confide in me,” Crushton said.

“Who did he confide in?” I asked.

“His fellow rich people,” Crushton said.

“Did he have enemies?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Crushton said.

“What’s the story on O’Quinn?” I asked.

Crushton said, “One of the quieter guests. He is a regular, and we knew him well enough. He’s been here at least once a year every year for fifteen years. I think he and Mr. Tudor might have been lovers at one time. If they were, they haven’t had that kind of relationship in a long time, but they were very close. They shared secrets.”

“Their old relationship couldn’t have left residual anger on either of their parts?”

“He and Henry always had at least one private dinner while Mr. O’Quinn was here.”

“Did you know he inherited the island?”

“No. And now that O’Quinn is dead, I have no idea who does.”

“Did O’Quinn have a lover? We heard he’d just broken up with one recently.”

“He had a current favorite among the help. A Greek guy of about twenty. Mr. O’Quinn offered to hire the guy, and he was willing to be a temporary companion. He was scheduled to be on the boat coming in tonight. Obviously, he never showed up.”

“How much does a thing like that cost?” Scott asked.

“For this guy? Five thousand dollars for a night. He was young, compact, muscular, had a beautiful smile. Of course, this was on a sliding scale. Many of them worked that way. They weren’t stupid. For up to three thousand dollars, this Greek guy was straight and very unavailable. Then after four thousand dollars, he was a passive do-nothing. Just lay there. A lot of them are like that. Once you hit five thousand, this one was a total slut. He was one of the most expensive. The guy was beautiful.”

“But he’s not here?”

“No. According to rumor, the Greek guy lived up to his heritage for Mr. O’Quinn. Although they aren’t the only ones who put into port around here. We’ve got the British Royal Navy pursuing at least one of their traditions on the island.”

Scott said, “Gay British sailors openly prostitute themselves here?”

“My dear, these are the rich. It’s never that crass really, is it? A few of them make themselves available. The rich dangle money. A sailor in one of those trim little outfits? Scrumptious. And, of course, supposedly an admiral back in the eighteen nineties was very close to the Earl of Trent, the first owner of the island. Word is—”

I wasn’t in the mood for this. I interrupted, “And it ended with a bevy of sailors and at least one admiral taking headers off the castle battlement.”

Crushton smiled. “One would hope.”

“Did O’Quinn have enemies?” I asked. “Fights with anyone? Disagreements?”

“Mr. O’Quinn was the outcast of his family. He wasn’t just the ‘gay’ problem. He was a wastrel with absolutely no sense of family. He refused to have anything to do with them. His grandfather, who didn’t much like most of the family, made a will which made made it possible for O’Quinn to ignore them with impunity after the age of eighteen. Mr. O’Quinn spent his time at swanky parties with the rich and beautiful. He came here to get away and to indulge in sex.”

“Do you know anything about the breakup with O’Quinn’s lover?”

“I know nothing about that.”

“Tell me about Henry Tudor.”

“Henry Tudor was in his eighties, but sharp as a whip. He’s owned the island since the late fifties. He was employed in the State Department in the forties. He got out before the red scare was at its worst. I was told he left because he became the lover of a man who was a United States senator at the time. When the senator died, Mr. Tudor was given half his estate in the will. Supposedly, the family didn’t contest it because Mr. Tudor threatened to expose the senator to the press.”

“You can’t libel a dead man,” Scott said.

“Is the truth libel?” Crushton asked.

“They didn’t have a way of squelching him?” I asked. “The rich usually have ways of fixing those things.”

“Whatever nefarious ways they had, Mr. Tudor also had a very smart lawyer, and I heard some kind of family connections of his own. Those were never made clear to me. Mr. Tudor had come to this island in the early fifties with the senator. After the senator died, Mr. Tudor started coming to the island on his own. He and the owner back in those days fell in love. That owner happened to need an infusion of cash. This was the late fifties or early sixties.”

Scott asked, “Was it real love, or was the other guy in love with Tudor’s money?”

“Perhaps it was real love, perhaps both. They became partners before I got here. When Mr. Gerald, the previous owner, died, the ownership of all the land transferred to Mr. Tudor.”

“Does any of the land belong to anyone else?” I asked. “Are there part owners?”

“As far as I know, it was all Mr. Tudor’s.”

“Did he have any enemies?” I asked.

“There weren’t any tensions on the island. He was a good boss. It was like living in the middle of a four star restaurant. He anticipated problems with guests. That’s what he paid us for.”

“Anticipated? Like what?” Scott asked.

“If someone was inordinately fussy about cleanliness, he’d make arrangements to have an extra team go through the villa before they arrived. Simple stuff, but he liked to make people happy.”

I remembered what Thasos had written. I said, “We understood he was a monster to some of the staff.”

“If you did your job right, you had no problems. If you screwed up, you could lose your job, but that’s like anywhere else.”

Evaluating who was right, Crushton or Thasos, would have to come later. The answer might or might not help lead to the identity of the killer.

Scott said, “I’ve seen a lot of these ancient artifacts while I’ve been here. If they’re real, isn’t some government concerned with keeping them here or officially preserving them?”

“I’ve always been told they’re real,” Crushton said. “Most of the real ones are in Mr. Tudor’s villa. No government has ever interfered here. I think it is an official British possession. It all started back with the British aristocracy in the eighteen eighties or nineties. Who has jurisdiction could be as simple as courtesy among governments, or it could be complex international treaties. The island doesn’t control any shipping lanes. Even the castle isn’t high enough to place lethal guns on top of. The island is barren and not very attractive. It has no natural resources. It’s a nothing and a no place, of use only to the very rich.”

“You haven’t heard anything about art fraud?”

“No,” Crushton said.