A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (2 page)

And at that sort of predicting, Panos’s record proved that he was very, very shrewd. He had sold pieces from his private collection for five and even ten times what he’d paid for them. And the art purchases for his investment business? Well, there Reed wasn’t privy to the details, but it was no secret that they’d made him a millionaire many times over; some said a billionaire.

As Panos himself had once put it: “If I don’t know nothing about the paintings I’m buying, how come I make so much money off them?”

But the man wasn’t happy. He was no different from anybody else: The money was one thing, yes, but it was
respect
he ached for. He got it from the financial establishment, but to the snooty art world he was and always would be nothing but a vulgar, ignorant parvenu. In Reed’s opinion, both points of view were correct.

Panos was still staring down at the bay and muttering. “Can you believe that guy!” Papadakis banged the metal railing. “A bum is what he
is, the bum. I’ll sue him. And how the hell this information got out? Myself, I just got the report this morning. I didn’t even read it yet myself. I’ll sue that goddamn lab too; who do they think they are?”

“Really, Panos, you shouldn’t get so excited,” said Reed with the leisurely British drawl—the sort of BBC accent you didn’t hear very much anymore, even in England—that he’d brought with him when he’d come to New York twenty years before to open his Manhattan art dealership, and which he had worked hard to maintain. Sounding like Laurence Olivier to the American ear was no mean advantage in his world.

“Forget about suing them; what we really should do is give them a commission. That dreadful Culture Guru person as well. You know,” he said, lifting his juice glass and scrutinizing it against the clear, bright sky the way a wine expert would study a
premier grand cru
from Château Haut-Brion, “this is really extraordinary. What in the world is in this concoction besides the blood orange juice? Bitters, of course, but… ah, is that juniper berry?”

“What, I’m supposed to know?” Papadakis grumped without turning around. “Ask her, the maid; Thea, or something. Tell me, why should I give them a commission?”

“Well, first of all I very much doubt that it’s the laboratory that leaked the information, but whoever it was, we can thank them for stimulating gossip and speculation.” Reed had a little more juice, decided he wasn’t that crazy about it after all, and went to stand beside Papadakis at the railing, but quickly stepped back a little; the drop was steeper than he’d realized, and heights didn’t agree with him. “I’m in the art-selling business, Panos. Trust me, in the end this will mean higher prices.”

It was the selling of art that was Reed’s connection to Papadakis, who had engaged him to curate his seagoing auction and handle all of the associated tasks, for which he was to collect three percent of the hammer price on each painting sold—only a quarter of his usual commission, but then how often did he hold an auction with total estimated selling prices of
thirty to fifty million dollars? How often did he hold an auction that required no sharing of his earnings with his staff? And how often did he hold an auction that had no expenses to speak of associated with it, no insurance costs, and just about no work?

Never, never, and never.

“Okay, okay, you’re right, Edward.” Panos grunted his disgust. “Ah, who got time to sue anybody anyway? Screw ’em.”

Reed thought at first that it had been his smoothly worded reassurances that had calmed the other man, but now he saw that it was the prospect on which Papadakis gazed. Not the long row of luxury yachts lined up cheek by jowl in the marina below—seen from here, not so very different from a string of motor homes in an overnight trailer court—but further out to sea, beyond the harbor entrance, where boats too vast to moor in the marina were anchored. And there lay his pride and joy, the gleaming, blue-and-white
Artemis
, brilliant in the noonday sun and complete with a shiny new helicopter on a pad on the aft deck. But Panos’s pleasure had been marred. A quarter of a mile beyond it lay an even bigger vessel, Roman Abramovich’s monstrous
Eclipse
, the largest private yacht in the world at almost six hundred feet, bigger than a destroyer. When Abramovich had arrived in St. Barts that morning and anchored there, Papadakis, whose
Artemis
had been only a few hundred yards away, had moved his own vessel so that it wouldn’t seem dwarfed by the giant. And he’d been grumbling about it ever since. To work well with Papadakis, one had to be aware of these little conceits. And Reed was.

Continuing to glower at the
Eclipse
, the financier-collector went back to processing his resentment of the Culture Guru’s insinuations. “That business at the end—wondering if I still had any money, that part I really don’t like. Who the hell is he to wonder? That’s slander, right? For that, I could sic my lawyers on the lousy crumb, couldn’t I? Am I wrong?”

“For heaven’s sake, Panos, this is some sleazy two-bit blogger, not the
New York Times.
Besides, with all that’s been happening in the world, who isn’t wondering about everybody else’s finances?”

Reed laughed as he spoke, but if there is such a thing as a mental wince, he was experiencing one. He was thinking about the sorry state of his own affairs since the weak moment when he’d let his wife talk him into bidding at that accursed Fairfield County estate auction.

And he’d actually, inexplicably, wound up winning the damn thing. So now he was the dazed owner—that is, mortgage holder—of a fifteen-year-old wedding-cake of a mansion that could have doubled for the east wing of Buckingham Palace (except that it was more elaborate), and the acre that surrounded it. It wasn’t the price tag itself—$2,800,000, a “steal” (ha!) considering that it had taken $12,000,000 to build—that was the killer, it was what came with it. The property taxes ran $68,000, the once-extravagant landscaping (“a one-third-scale reproduction of Marie Antoinette’s garden at Versailles”) now looked like a random acre along the Upper Amazon, and his wife was already complaining about the dated bathrooms, of which there were a total of
seven
.

What had he been thinking? The thing was ruining him. He’d been trying to unload it almost since the day he’d bought it, and he was more than ready to take a loss, but it seemed that there weren’t any other suckers out there; only him. However, if this auction of Panos’s netted him as much as he was hoping for—three percent of thirty million was almost a million dollars, and that was the low estimate!—it would keep him afloat long enough to make something happen.

Both men returned to the umbrellaed table, where Papadakis absent-mindedly picked at his cooling lobster-and-avocado omelet. After a few moments of pushing pieces of it around on his plate, he finally got to the subject that Reed had expected him to erupt over.

“The truth is, Edward, what really bothers me, that a painting of mine, it’s supposed to be a fake? That’s impossible!”

“There’s no ‘supposed to be’ about it, Panos. The
Laboratoire’s
reputation is—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, but I still don’t buy it. And it makes me look like some kind of crook. Or a dope, which is worse.”

“On the contrary, it’s going to make you look like the most honest and forthright of men. Upon learning of the Monet’s, ah, doubtful provenance, you immediately announce the fact and remove it from the auction, not wishing to give even the appearance of doing anything dishonest. You will do that, I trust?”

“Yeah, sure, sure, but I still don’t buy it. I mean, how it can be a fake? You think I’d buy something without testing it every goddamn way there is? Listen, that Manet got certified not only by the lab in Geneva, but—”

“You mean the Monet.”

“—by that big shot, what’s his name, at the Museum of… what?”

“You said Manet. You meant Monet.”

Papadakis stared uncomprehendingly at him for a second, then exploded with an agitated “Manet, Monet, what’s the difference, goddammit! Don’t keep interrupting me! I’m trying to think!”

Reed had all he could do to keep from shaking his head in wonderment. Admittedly, most people tended to confuse Edouard Manet with Claude Monet. Putting aside the similarity in names, both lived at the same time; both painted Parisian street scenes by the carload; both were cited by some as the father of Impressionism; both were snubbed by the critics and rejected by the Salon; both painted similar famous pictures called
Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,
and did many others with
Argenteuil
and
Seine
in the titles, and so on. So it was understandable that a lot of people couldn’t keep them straight. Once, in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, Edward had heard a man respond with some impatience to a question from his wife: “It doesn’t matter. Either spelling is acceptable.”

But such ignorance—such lack of concern—in a man blessed with the immense good fortune to actually own paintings by both these great masters? To be unaware of the differences in style, and technique, and even subject matter—Monet’s joyful, animated, transitory “impressions” versus Manet’s deeper, darker, less spontaneous explorations into personality and society—seemed to Reed to be emblematic of the sad level to which the once-refined culture of art collectorship had fallen.

On the other hand, there was a good side too. With speculation and ignorance rampant, there was more money than ever to be made (honestly, if not necessarily ethically), for less work than ever, and how could that be a bad thing? Various commissions from Papadakis had already earned Reed quite a sum, and the upcoming auction was a much-needed blessing. He looked with something like affection at Papadakis, who had his hands pressed to his temples and was rocking back and forth and groaning, “Oh boy, oh, boy, oh, boy.”

Reed leaned forward over the table and peered at him. “Panos, are you well?”

Panos was not well. Panos felt like hell.

You don’t get to be the two-thousand-nine-hundred-and-eighty-fifth richest man in the world by being stupid, and Panos Papadakis was anything but. It also helps if you don’t mind bending the law a little, or even tweaking it, or even breaking it. He had, in fact, done a little of all three in relation to the auction.

For one thing, he had known full well from the beginning that there was a forgery among the twenty-four paintings. He knew because he’d put it there himself. Like several other fakes that he owned, he had commissioned it. As with the others, he had paid the forger $30,000 for it, an outrageous price, but he fully anticipated seeing it go for five hundred times that at the auction. And the original? That, he had other plans for.

The possibility of detection hadn’t worried him. The forger was probably the best in the world at his craft, and he had justified his extraordinary fees by coming up with a clever and original means of making it virtually impossible for even the most stringent scientific tests to spot his fakes. And he had proven it; not one of the earlier ones had raised the least shadow of suspicion. Thus, Panos had been deeply shaken to learn that the
Laboratoire Forensique
had somehow spotted this one.

But that shock, unnerving as it was, paled to nothing when it turned out that they had
not
identified it. His forged Manet? That had indeed passed muster. The picture that had
not
passed muster was the
Monet
, a painting that he’d owned for more than ten years, that he’d paid a lot of money for, and in the authenticity of which he’d had absolute confidence.

How could this be?
Was
it a fake? What was going on? And the most important questions of all: If his painting was a fake, then where was his Monet, the real Monet? And… his eyes narrowed, his brain focused…
who had it
?

“Am I all right?” he said to Edward. “Yes, sure I’m all right, you just gave me a little shock, that’s all. I’m fine.” And he was telling the truth. Among the attributes that had gotten him where he was, was the ability to recover quickly from setbacks and disasters, to regroup his resources and go back on offense. He’d come up with no answers to his questions, but at least he knew where to start.

“Well, you just seem a little—”

But Panos had had enough of Reed for the time being; of his too-perfect manners, his fake concern, his barely disguised condescension, his stupid little mustache that he probably groomed with tweezers. “Edward, look, I got a lot of stuff to do. I need to talk to the insurance people about this, I need to get hold of Sotheby’s, I need to… well, a lot of things. Do you got anything else we need to talk about right now that can’t wait?”

“Well, you remember you were looking for someone who might serve as a sort of lecturer on the cruise? Someone who could speak knowledgeably about not merely the pictures, but the artists as well; someone the guests could come to with questions they might—”

Papadakis motioned with his hand:
Get to the point.

“Well, I think I may have the perfect candidate for you. A young woman—”

Papadakis nodded. “ ‘Young woman’ is good.”

“Quite pretty—”