A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (13 page)

S
omebody had her by the shoulders. “Miss London—”

She swung at him and contacted a face, a cheekbone. The result was a grunt, more of annoyance than of pain. She swung again but her wrist was grabbed and held.

“Please stop hitting me, you are all right, you are safe.”

“What? I thought—” She swam back up toward awareness and opened her eyes. She was flat on her back on the carpet, lying at the base of the piano. Her head felt like a soccer ball, a dangerously overinflated one. A man was kneeling behind her head and bending over her—she could see only the top half of his face, and that upside down. He had both her wrists now.

“I am the chief of security for this boat, madame, Yiorgos Christos by name.” He let go of her wrists and held up one of his hands a few inches from her eyes. “How many fingers do you see?”

“Two. What happened to me?”

“This, I think.” He very gently touched a spot above her ear, and the soccer ball exploded.

“Ouch!”

“I’m sorry. Follow with your eyes my hand.”

She did, trying to keep her throbbing head steady. “What happened? How did—” Then it came back. “He threw something over me, he threw me down, I must—”

“ ‘He’? You saw who it was?”

“No, I was looking at a painting. I didn’t see him coming.”

“But you believe it was a ‘he,’ a man?”

“No, I can’t say that either. He—” She stopped to wriggle herself into a more comfortable position on the floor. The security chief helped her to get her back against one of the piano legs, so she was more or less sitting, then stood up himself. Now she could see him right side up, all of him, and he was colossal, the shoulders of his blue blazer straining across his back, the sleeves bulging with muscle. The face went along with the frame too, big, beefy, and ornamented with a prodigious black mustache, an honest-to-God handlebar mustache, waxed so that it curled up at the ends. A long-forgotten image popped into her not-yet-altogether focused mind, a vintage Barnum & Bailey Circus poster that an old roommate had had up on the wall: Ö
ZBEK, THE
T
URKISH
G
IANT, THE
W
ORLD
’
S
S
TRONGEST
M
AN
. Put an over-one-shoulder leopard skin on this Christos guy, and he might have posed for it.

“No, it could have been a woman, I suppose,” she finished. Her voice seemed unconnected to her, hollow and far away. She wasn’t altogether back from cloud-cuckoo land yet. “He seemed pretty strong, but I didn’t see him. He threw something over my head.”

Christos nodded. “It was this object, I think, yes?” He held up a corner of the red shawl, now caught on the jutting edge of the music support stand above the keyboard, torn almost in two.

“It probably was,” Alix said. Her head was calming down and she began to rise.

Christos leaned over and placed a soothing hand on her shoulder. “No no no no no. A moment longer, sit, stay a minute, what’s the hurry?”

She settled back against the leg of the piano. “I was unconscious, wasn’t I? For how long?”

“Not so long,” said Christos, “a few seconds, no more. Maybe less. Maybe not at all, really.” He smiled reassuringly, a kindly giant.

“But why would someone do that to me? What was it all about; do you know?”

“Oh, yes, we know.” He pointed to the wall. “That.”

To see what he was pointing at she had to twist her neck, which shot a wrenching stab of pain through her head—skull, teeth, eyes, everything—as if it had been thrust into a giant electrical socket.

“Ai!” The worst of the pain was quickly over, but it made her eyes tear, so it took a few seconds before she could focus on what it was that Christos was talking about.

“The Manet,” she breathed, her still-pulsating head forgotten. “Oh, no.”

A ragged, two-foot-long gash ran obscenely down the middle of the canvas, separating the man and the woman and bisecting the long-haired little girl who sat between them eating a roll. Both canvas and lining had been ripped clear through; the edges had curled back, so the wall behind was visible through the laceration.

“Oh, how awful,” Alix said. “Shouldn’t someone tell Mr. Papadakis?” Something began niggling at her fogged mind, something important about the painting, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

“I have sent Dionysodaurus for him. He will—ah, he is here.”

A close-bunched crowd of people, four of them, was clacking down the marble steps. Donny was in the lead with Edward Reed, looking stricken, on his heels. The other two she recognized from photographs. Behind Edward was Gabriela Papadakis, a jowly woman of forty, prematurely aging and growing plain, but still recognizable as the beautiful American opera star who had been a darling of the paparazzi a dozen years ago, regularly photographed on the arms of movie stars or princes. She had ruined her voice with poor role choices before ever making it to the topmost rung, however, and then—obviously—she’d put on weight, and now other faces looked out at you from the magazines when you were on the grocery checkout line.

Bringing up the rear, red-faced and puffing, two decades older than his wife (his third), was the Man himself, Panos Papadakis.

Donny moved respectfully out of the way and the other three stared disbelievingly at the scene. Like Edward, Papadakis was in a tux, but it was too tight for him. He looked like an uncomfortable sausage about to
burst its bun. Mrs. Papadakis wore an emerald-green cocktail dress that was as classy as they came, but didn’t do her any favors by drawing the eye to her freckled, plump shoulders.

Edward was the first to find his voice. “Oh, dear, how very terrible.”

Panos was sucking air noisily in through his nose and huffing it out almost as loudly. His face seemed to be swelling up before Alix’s eyes. It wouldn’t have surprised her to see steam hissing out of his ears.

Of the three, only Mrs. Papadakis wasn’t caught up in the painting. “Oh, no,” she said softly, fingering the torn shawl. “Look what they did to my—”

Panos jerked it out of her hands and flung it to the floor. “I just lose fifteen million dollars and you’re worrying about a lousy shawl? What the hell is wrong with you, for Christ’s sake?”

Mrs. Papadakis said nothing, just stared stonily at the floor. Alix saw tears welling in her eyes.

Panos lost interest in her and turned to Christos. “How you could let this happen? How anybody could even get in here? Who the hell was it?”

“Hey, Panos, it just happened. Give me little time.”

“Time! What about all those expensive television sets that are supposed to be so great according to you, what about that damn kid who was supposed to be watching them? This is your job, your responsibility!” He was standing almost on tiptoe, trying to jut his chin into Christos’s face but got only as high as his collarbone.

Christos, a foot taller and a hundred pounds of muscle heavier, was uncowed. “It wasn’t the kid’s fault. Whoever it was, he sprayed the cameras, so the kid, he couldn’t see anything. He called me right away.”

“I don’t care; I want him fired. He never works for me again, understand? And what’s it supposed to mean, he sprayed the cameras? What, with paint? Where the hell he could get a can of paint?”

Christos used his thumb and forefinger to smooth his mustache, but it was clear that he was doing it to hide a smile. “Not paint, Panos. Whipped cream.” And then, after a pause, “Myself, I tasted it.”

Whipped cream?
Still dopey, Alix had to stifle her own giggle.

Not Panos. “He uses
whipped cream
to ruin a fifteen-million-dollar painting, and you think it’s funny? What am I paying you for? I find him,” muttered Panos to himself, fists clenched, “I kill the son of a bitch, I rip his ears off, I send him to jail for the rest of his miserable life. Somebody I invite on my own yacht, somebody I trust, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a snake in the grass, a… a…”

Alix was getting a little annoyed with the way things were going. Certainly a slashed Manet was no small matter, but what about her? None of them had asked what she was doing on the floor or asked if she was all right. Did they think she was sitting there because she found it comfortable?

It was Mrs. Papadakis who finally took notice. With tears over the ruin of her shawl still glimmering on her eyelids, she bent over Alix. “Why, you’re Alix London, aren’t you? What’s wrong? What happened to you? Yiorgos, is she all right?”

“Yes, I believe so,” he told her. “She suffered a bump on her head and fell.” And then to Alix: “Would you like to try getting up now? Give me your arm.”

Alix nodded and started to rise but had to stop when a wave of wooziness billowed over her. Mrs. Papadakis was quickly at her other side. “Here, let me give you a hand.”

“Thank you,” Alix said as the dizziness faded. Mrs. Papadakis’s face was close to her own. Alix got a whiff of gin and saw that the woman was less steady than she’d first appeared to be. Her makeup had been applied with a heavy hand. It had caked and fissured in the creases alongside her nose and along her softening jawline, and her mascara had run when the tears had started. Even her lipstick had gotten smeared.
Her life is unhappy,
was Alix’s immediate thought. She might live among surroundings like these, but things had not turned out for her as she must have hoped, back when she was Gabriela Candelas, the beautiful and sought-after young mezzo-soprano.

Once Alix was solidly on both feet, the two people on either side of her relaxed their hold. Alix, not quite fully stable, leaned back against the piano. If Panos had yet taken any notice of her he gave no sign. He was glaring accusingly at the painting as if the whole thing was its own fault, and muttering to himself in Greek.

“But Panos,” Mrs. Papadakis was saying, “after all, it’s insured, isn’t it?”

He glanced disgustedly at her. “Yeah, sure, for what it cost me fifteen years ago, not what it’s worth now.” He had simmered down to grumbling rather than yelling. “Besides, the money is just money, but to destroy great art like this, it’s a crime against humanity. It belongs to the world. It’s the principle of the thing, you know what I’m saying?” He must have realized how dubious this sounded coming from him, because he looked angrily around, as if to challenge anyone who might doubt him.

“You’re probably right about the insurance, Panos,” Edward said, “but look at it this way: The picture is far from a total loss. Yes, it looks just awful now, but it’s certainly reparable, and I would have every expectation that your insurance would cover the cost of repair.”

“Every expectation,” Panos grunted sourly.

“Now look, Panos. As a conservator of some repute, Miss London here would know about such things.”

At the mention of her name, Alix jumped. What had he been saying? “Well…”

“Wouldn’t you say it’s reparable, Miss London? Couldn’t a good restorer make the damage hardly noticeable?”

For the first time Panos seemed to be aware of her. He stared at her with suspicion, as if to say,
Who the hell are you? What are you doing on my boat?

“Hardly noticeable? Yes. Unnoticeable, no I don’t think so, not without a great deal of overpainting that would greatly decrease its artistic standing.”
Hey,
she thought,
that was pretty coherent. I think my mind’s working again
. She had edged nearer to the picture as she spoke. Whatever was down there nagging her about it was bubbling closer to the surface.

“Hardly noticeable,” Panos said dismissively, “artistic standing. Yeah sure, but what about the value? All of a sudden that’s hardly noticeable too.”

“Well, the value, of course…,” Edward said with a shrug. “That’s another story.”

“Yeah, suddenly it’s three million, maybe four, not ten or fifteen.”

“So you’ll be withdrawing it from the auction?” Edward asked.

“Of course I’m withdrawing it,” Panos snapped. “What, are you nuts? Who’s gonna buy it like this? And I’m sure as hell not giving it away for peanuts.”

Edward flushed and then showed a discreet little flare of pique. “Panos, I was merely ascertaining… no matter. We’ll withdraw it.”

Christos had been eyeing Alix. “Ms. London, you don’t look so hot. We got a couple of doctors at the reception. I think maybe we should get one of them—”

“Thank you, I don’t need a doctor.”

“She don’t need a doctor,” Panos said, barely looking at her.

Alix was liking him less by the second. It was one thing for her to decline medical assistance, but where did Panos come off declining it for her?

He was talking to Christos. “Put it in the storage room, the secure one. I’ll go down with you to open it.”

“Okay, give me a minute to turn off the alarm system so we can take it off the wall.”

Panos had shown signs of calming down, but now he exploded again. “Alarm system! That’s another thing—what the hell good is an alarm system if this can happen? I thought this was the best one money could buy, no? You told me that yourself, no?”

Christos, who had yet to display trepidation in the face of Panos’s wrath, now showed some annoyance of his own, quiet but trenchant and pointed. “Don’t talk to me like this anymore, Panos. I don’t like it.”
No love lost there
, Alix thought.