A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (12 page)

Edward sighed. “I
love
Manet.”

Alix nodded. Manet was one of her favorites too. One of the two men most often credited with being the father of Impressionism (the other being Claude Monet), he was a lifelong individualist, a man who
rejected labels, refusing to refer to himself as an Impressionist or as anything else. Besides which, in her opinion, some of his paintings were among the most beautiful and appealing artworks that had ever been created.

Le Déjeuner au Bord du Lac
was a handsome early work, a quiet pastoral scene showing a decorous middle-class family of three—a man, a woman, a girl of eight or ten—picnicking beside a lake with their beached rowboat a few yards behind them. Alix had been taken with its photograph in the catalog and had looked forward to standing before the real thing, as she was doing now.

But as she took it in, she felt the beginnings of a fluttery, uneasy feeling in her stomach, and she knew what that implied. She stared harder at the painting, almost scowling at it.

“Is something the matter?” Edward asked.

“I don’t… I’m not… there’s something… Edward, does this look all right to you?”

“All right?” He paled, literally paled. “My God, did they do something to it?” She could see his eyes dart wildly over the surface.

“No, no,” she assured him, “I don’t mean it’s been damaged. No, the condition looks perfect.”

He wasn’t much soothed. “Then
what
?” His voice shot up to an unbecoming near-screech.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said lamely. “It’s just that something doesn’t seem right about it. I can’t put my finger on it—yet.”

“Alix, you’re making me very nervous here. What do you mean, not right?”

“I’m sorry, Edward. Look, I was probably just imagining it. Something must have hit me wrong. It was an overnight flight, you know… jet lag… I don’t know. Please, forget I said anything. Just ignore it.” She finished with an apologetic shrug.

Edward remained decidedly unsoothed. “I’m trying to see what it is about it that disturbs you, and frankly… ”He shook his head.

Alix caught a glimpse of Artemis stealing a discreet glance at her watch. “Oh, Artemis, I’m sorry. Why don’t you show me my stateroom now? Edward, I’ll see you up at the reception?”

“Yes, yes, I’m going there now,” he said absently, continuing to stare moodily at the painting.
I’ve offended him
, she thought.
That didn’t take long. A mere five minutes aboard the ship, and I’ve already antagonized my first person.

But that didn’t change the feeling in her stomach.
Something wasn’t right.

S
he followed Artemis down the forward corridor, over more of the same ultra-soft beige carpet that had been in the salon, to a door on the port side, which Artemis opened for her.

“Whoa,” Alix murmured. She’d known to expect something spacious and well appointed, but this place was the size of her entire apartment in Seattle and outfitted like a layout in a designer showroom.

“I hope you’ll be comfortable here,” Artemis said with a perfectly straight face.

“It seems quite nice,” replied Alix with what she hoped was an appropriate nonchalance.

Artemis presented her with the key card, offered to help her unpack, told her that she could be called upon at any time for anything Alix needed or desired, wished her a memorable journey and left, softly closing the door behind her.

Memorable
, Alix thought with a wry laugh. It was already memorable, and it hadn’t even started. That sense of something being “off” about that Manet was still with her, but maybe she was better off leaving it till morning when she’d be rested. After all, she probably
was
jet-lagged and was certainly sleep deprived, and maybe the only thing that was “off” was her nervous system.

What she should do right now, she knew, was to forget about it for the time being and go on up to the reception as requested. She moved decisively toward her luggage, which had been set on a long, low table at the foot of the bed. A quick wash was in order, a change of clothes, and then she’d go up and meet her hosts.

Except that she knew she wouldn’t, not quite yet. What she
would
do was go back to the music room and spend a little more time with Monsieur Manet and see if she could resolve what it was that was nagging at her about his painting. And she figured the Papadakises could bear to wait another twenty or thirty minutes for the pleasure of meeting her.

She did pause to perform the quick wash, and then she was out the door in a flash, practically trotting down the passageway, the lush carpet completely muffling the sound of her feet, and pausing only for a smile and a wave at the spot where the sixth step of the spiral staircase joined the central post. As she’d hoped, Edward Reed had gone; she had the music room to herself. She went at once to the Manet, which was at the front, behind a low stage that held a grouping of musical instruments—a full-sized Steinway concert grand piano with a bright red shawl laid across its closed lid, a harp, and a cello on a stand. The Manet was hung in pride of place, centered over the piano. She leaned back against the piano to study it from five or six feet away and opened her mind to it.

Nothing popped out at her, or at least nothing pertinent. What a long way this
Déjeuner
was, she thought absently, from Manet’s more celebrated
Déjeuner
, now in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay. That painting,
Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe—
the Luncheon in the Grass—had made him both famous and notorious, scandalizing the Parisian public with its depiction of three people, two men and a woman, lazily enjoying what looks like a lovely nineteenth-century French picnic in a Paris park. The painting is prettily done and the scene was commonplace enough in the art of the time—except that the two men, a pair of dandies, are fully clothed and the woman is stark naked, every inch of her. Her discarded clothing lies in a heap on the grass beside her. The nude woman, oddly enough, is being treated as if she weren’t there, the men apparently absorbed in lazy conversation with one another. The painting, now much admired, ignited an uproar at the time, French standards of propriety being stricter than they subsequently became.

But that wasn’t to happen until 1863, two years after the
Déjeuner
before Alix was completed. This painting,
Déjeuner au Bord du Lac,
was painted when he was still an unknown artist (not a starving one, however; his father had been a judge, his mother the goddaughter of the Swedish crown prince), and his work hadn’t yet developed its mature style. The style… she frowned; was it something about the
style
that was bothering her? She moved in for a closer look.

Two decks below her, in the closet-like security command center next to the engine room, twenty-year-old Yiannis Alexopolous sat before a console of six color monitors on two levels, each screen divided into four quadrants showing four separate locations on the yacht. He set down the empty plate that had held the best
keftedes
he’d ever tasted—the meatballs ground as fine as custard, the tomato sauce as thick and sweet as honey—licked his lips, and took hold of the tray filled with little squares of baklava, lemon cake, walnut cake, and half a dozen other desserts he didn’t recognize. He didn’t need to recognize them; he knew they’d be delicious. Yiannis ate like this only two or three times a year, when his third cousin twice removed, Panos Papadakis, hired him to put in an evening’s security duty for a party. The incredible food alone would have been enough to make him jump at the chance—all he wanted to eat, plus whatever he could get away with stuffing in his clothes—but the money, as much for three hours of sitting there doing not much of anything as he got for two full days’ work in the butcher shop, made it the best job he ever had or ever would have.

The only problem, if you could call it that, was that it was boring to stare and stare and stare at six television screens showing twenty-four different passageways or stairways or public rooms in none of which anything ever happened or even moved. Not that he was complaining. He moved the tray to his lap, leaned back and popped a square of baklava
into his mouth, closing his eyes to savor the taste: super-sweet and sticky. Perfect. When he opened his eyes he thought he actually saw something move on one of the screens. He quickly swallowed what was left of the baklava and rose halfway out of his chair, the better to see what it was. No, not movement, but a change. The lower right quadrant of the screen had gone a strange, fuzzy gray. He checked the location key posted below the monitors: aft stairway, deck three.

He hesitated. His instructions were to call Mr. Christos, the security chief, at once if anybody who hadn’t been cleared was spotted below decks, but this was different, probably just a glitch in the system and he was reluctant to—

But now it was the lower
left
window of the monitor—the music room—that was affected as well. Horizontal streaks of gray spread rapidly across it and in one second it was as blank as the other one. No, something weird was happening. He was all the way out of his chair now and excitedly punching the telephone button for security. “Mr. Christos—”

Even from six inches away, Alix couldn’t figure out what it was. Now, to take it in again from further off, she backed away until her hips bumped up against the grand piano, folded her arms, and let her intuition go to work.

Alix’s reputation for assessing and authenticating works of art was well deserved, but she wasn’t the conventional kind of expert, the sort who examines a questioned painting and says,
Aha, the draperies of that purported Velasquez do not fit his technique with fabrics,
or
I’m sorry, but I don’t see how this can possibly be a Gauguin. The pigment in this lemon is surely lead-tin yellow, and since lead-tin yellow was not available between 1750 and 1941 and Gauguin’s paintings were all made between 1873 and 1903, certainly you can see…

Oh, she knew such things, and better than most experts did, but her particular gift, and a rare and controversial gift it was, was what is called a “connoisseur’s eye,” the ability to tell almost instantly, without thinking
about it—to
feel
rather than to
know
—that a particular painting was or wasn’t what it was purported to be. The absence of lead-tin yellow or the presence of a few incongruous drapery folds might well be what she was picking up, but she was picking it up subliminally. That sort of conscious analysis would come later—sometimes a long while later—and serve as a source of confirmation rather than the starting point.

In this case, whether viewing the painting from a distance of six inches or ten feet, her intuition was the same:
Something was definitely not right.
She realized suddenly that her stomach wasn’t the only part of her that was trying to tell her something. The back of her neck prickled. There was someone else in the room.… She turned—

And ran into a wall, a soft, giving wall that first blinded and suffocated her and then tightened around her head. She thought for a second it was a blanket, but the texture, the dusty smell of it, told her it was the shawl that had been lying across the piano. Panicked, thinking she was being smothered, she flailed blindly against whomever was there. Her fist found what she thought was a shoulder and she tried to claw at where she imagined the eyes would be, but she was spun roughly around and then shoved so that she stumbled. Her elbow cracked into something. Her ankle caught in something else and she lost her footing entirely. She lifted her arms to try to protect her head. She—