A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (20 page)

Dear Alix London,

Welcome aboard the
Artemis.
This booklet is your personal copy and contains practical information about the vessel and your cruise. Mr. and Mrs. Papadakis and the staff of the
Artemis
are at your service and wish you a happy and unforgettable voyage.

The eight pages of the leather-bound guest booklet offered deck plans, a telephone directory, meal times and cocktail hours, swimming pool rules, safety rules
(Please do not wear stiletto heels on the wooden decks or when the yacht is underway. Please do not sit on the railings at any time.),
travelogue-type guides to their destinations, and finally, the page she was hunting for, the schedule. She already knew that they would be in Crete that evening, but now she learned that the launch would be motoring to Heraklion harbor for an onshore excursion at about five thirty, after the
Artemis
, which was too big for the marina, had anchored a few miles out.

That was excellent, just what she was hoping: only a little over an hour to go until she could call someone she now needed to talk to even more urgently than to Ted. The guidelines she’d been given by the FBI said that any potentially sensitive telephone calls were to be made from dry land, and this would give her the chance. What she needed was the counsel of a first-rate, hands-on, expert forger. Alone among respectable art consultants Alix was fortunate (?) enough to have one right in the family, and she intended to telephone him the first chance she got.

She sat back in her chair, kicked off her sandals, put her feet up on a footstool, placed the laptop on her lap, and settled down to think through
her conclusions about the Manet one more time and to use the Internet to do a little cyberchecking. The more she thought and the more she checked, the more her certainty increased.
Le Déjeuner au Bord du Lac
was a forgery, and nothing Carrá might or might not have said about the epistemological foundations of
pittura metafisica
was going to change her mind about it.

At 5:15, as the yacht was letting out its anchor, there was a meeting in the
petit salon
, the smallest of the four shipboard salons, at which Artemis went over the evening’s plans for those going ashore. They would be met at the dock by limousines that would take them on the four-mile drive to Knossos, the fabulous—and fabulously reconstructed—Minoan palace of King Minos himself, of Minotaur fame. As a courtesy to Mr. Papadakis, the Greek government had arranged for the site to be closed to the public three hours early so that the
Artemis
party might have the use of it for their private function.

Alix was astonished. Knossos, she knew, was the second-most-visited site in Greece, outranked only by the Acropolis in Athens. To think that it would be shut down for the personal use of Panos Papadakis was amazing. Even assuming that he had paid for the privilege, surely it couldn’t have been enough to make up for the thousands of admissions that would otherwise have been paid. And what about the people who would have paid them? What about their plans? People—families—who had planned for years and had come to Crete from hundreds or thousands of miles away for that purpose alone?

She glanced at the other guests—Gaby, Mirko, Emil, Lorenzo, and Izzy—and not one of them showed the least surprise or concern. Ted was there too, looking equally blasé, but that was to be expected. It struck her with more force than it had before that these people—not Ted, but the others—lived in a world of entitlement that made her own rich and influential ex-in-laws seem like skid row bums.

Once they arrived at the site, Artemis continued, they would be greeted by one of the ship’s stewardesses and escorted to the bar that had been set up for them on the ancient flagstone walk at the foot of the Propylaeum—the palace’s monumental north entrance—below the raised, pillared stone platform with the famous charging-bull fresco, one of Knossos’s signature sights. They would have approximately two hours to wander at their pleasure. When it grew dark, security lights would be turned on. The complimentary services of a professional guide would be available to those who wished them. Boxed picnic dinners had been prepared that could be eaten at a table near the bar or taken anywhere on the site that they liked. Most of the barriers erected to limit public access to various areas had been taken down for their convenience, although a few of the most endangered objects and frescos were now protected with permanent iron bars that could not be removed—for which Artemis apologized on behalf of Panos and of the government.

Alix just shook her head.

Emil was shaking his head too, but for a different reason. “ ‘Archaeologically important,’ ” he said sarcastically. “The whole thing’s a fantasy, one big Knossosland. It’s all straight out of the mind of, what’s his name, the archaeologist who worked on it back in the 1890s—”

“I believe it was the early 1900s, mostly,” Mirko corrected mildly. “Sir Arthur Evans.” Alix noticed that he wasn’t much for eye contact, seeming to look everywhere but at the person he was addressing.

“Yes, Evans, he made it all up, it’s an illusion, it bears little relation to reality.”

Such conversation was like catnip to Lorenzo, who bounced energetically in. “But as Einstein himself informs us, reality itself is an illusion. How are we to tell one from the other, since all that we think we ‘know’ of the ‘real’ world comes to us from our brains, which are after all encased in utter blackness, and get all of their so-called information from a few openings in our skulls that convert sensory impulses from—”

“Oh, come on, Lorenzo,” Emil said, “I know what’s real when I see it, and you do too.”

Ted, obviously working to make himself agreeable, joined in. “I’m no philosopher, but I go along with the Marxian point of view—Groucho’s, that is: ‘I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.’ ”

That brought a round of laughter, and Izzy added, “Well, I know what reality is. ‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn’t go away.’ Woody Allen.”

“It was the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, actually,” Mirko said, and when the others laughed, he seemed startled but eventually he smiled a little as well, not at any one person, of course. Alix was impressed. Loner, recluse, whatever he was, he seemed to have quite a fund of knowledge.

Emil was the only one who hadn’t laughed. “Yes, it’s all very funny, but I am simply saying—”

“We know what you’re saying,” Edward Reed said crisply. “Everyone here has been to Knossos before, I believe, and we are all perfectly aware that Sir Arthur’s reconstruction, while based on the available research of the time, is somewhat speculative.”

Emil huffed a bit and shrank into his collar. “My only point—”

Edward looked at Artemis. “Perhaps we could move on?”

“Oh, I believe I’ve finished,” said the unruffled chief stewardess. “We can start on our way now.”

When they got to the launch, in which Donny was waiting at the wheel, Alix thought it wisest to keep her distance from Ted and settled on the bench across from him. The way the seating then worked out, Mirko was talking to Lorenzo as the launch got underway, Emil to Gaby, and Ted to Izzy, who was wearing oversized Lolita sunglasses and did indeed have her hair tightly wrapped in a bandana. As a result Alix wound up with no one to talk to, and turned, her elbow on the gunwale, to take in the view.

Although Crete had been on the itinerary of the trip she’d taken as a teenager on her Uncle Julian’s yacht and she had clear memories of Knossos,
she had none at all of their approaching this same harbor, although they must have done so. Her interest had probably been focused on the bronzed, rippling muscles of Sergio’s back and shoulders as he went about the deck doing the things deck hands do to prepare for docking. Looking out toward the city now, she found that the guide in the guest booklet, which she’d thought over-romanticized, had done a good job of capturing what it was like to arrive from the sea.

As it had said, from a few miles out, a tall, broad mountain loomed up as a photogenic backdrop to the city: Mount Juktas, according to the guide, and, according to legend, the burial place of Zeus. A more recent legend—Alix thought it just might have something to do with efforts to boost tourism—suggested that the mountain itself
was
the petrified god, and his upturned face could be seen in profile at the top. (If true, she thought now, it would mean that the supreme god of the Greeks looked pretty much like Bob Hope, ski-jump nose and all.) Whatever; it was green and craggy and picturesque.

Coming nearer, the thick, serpentine Venetian walls that still surrounded the oldest part of Heraklion loomed large, as the guide said they would, and gleamed like hammered copper in the slanting, late-afternoon sunlight. And after the sea wall was rounded and the old harbor entered, there was the great monolithic fortress of Rocca al Mare, right on schedule, also erected by the Venetians to defend the city when it was theirs to defend. Unfortunately for Heraklion, that more or less completed the list of must-see sights. Beyond that, the sprawling, bustling city had little besides its Archaeological Museum to offer tourists. Thus, the group from the
Artemis
would be following a path common to the island’s visitors in heading directly out to Knossos, from which most of the objects in the museum had come.

Once Donny had turned off the engine, done some showy, cowboy-style twirls of the mooring line and lassoed one of the posts, Alix saw the anticipated pair of limousines a few yards off at curbside, one behind the other, their engines slowly idling. Glossy, black, and roomy, they looked
as if they should have been flaunting a diplomatic flag on each fender. She thought they were probably refurbished London taxis of the older, more elegant variety—hackney carriages, as they were called.

But there was also something unanticipated, a gaggle of long-haired, grungy young guys converging on the launch from either side, five of them altogether. Alix might have taken them for touts for taxis or cheap hotels, except for the fearsome array of intricate-lensed cameras dangling from necks and shoulders.

“Paparazzi, God damn them to hell,” Izzy said bitterly. “I
hate
them. How’d they even know I’d be here? I’m gonna have to make a dash for it, guys. Let me go first, okay?”

“But will they recognize you, Izzy?” Alix asked. “I mean with the bandana and everything?”

“Paparazzi? Are you kidding? They’d recognize me if I was wearing a gorilla suit. They’d love it even more if I didn’t have any makeup on and I was wearing baggy shorts and I’d put on fifteen pounds and my hair was a mess. Lucky for me I decided to clean up a little.”

“Hey, Poke,” one of the photographers called amiably, “so how’s it going?”

A couple of them took her picture, but there was something oddly listless about it, Alix thought.

“Here I go,” Izzy said as the launch bobbed gently against the dock’s rubber-tire bumper. Teeth clenched and head down, up and over the gunwale she went, making a beeline for one of the limos, apparently intending to bull her way through the clustered bodies. But to Alix’s surprise—to everybody’s surprise—she didn’t have to. It was like watching the Red Sea parting, some of them going left, others to the right, giving her an unobstructed path to the car.

One of them did turn to follow her with his camera but spun quickly back when another one blurted, “There he is, that’s him—the little guy!”

Alix, who had been watching Izzy’s progress, now saw that Mirko was making his own hunched, frightened dash for sanctuary, but the five
photographers surrounded him, some of them running backwards, engulfing him like hungry lampreys homing in on a juicy tuna fish.

“Hey, Mirko, look over here, will ya?”

“Hey, Mirko, come on, man, give us a break, one lousy smile!”

“Mirko, you gonna buy that boat out there from Papadakis?”

“Hey, Mirko, is it true you’re buying Ecuador?”

One of them was yelling his questions in French, but they were clearly at about the same level of discourse as the ones in English.

“Once upon a time,” Gaby said softly, as Mirko ducked safely into the limo without ever having said anything, “they would have been all over me too.” She must have heard the maudlin overlay in her voice, because she immediately trilled a laugh. “Thank goodness I don’t have to go through that anymore.”

The remaining passengers, Alix, Ted, Gaby, Lorenzo, and Emil, climbed out more or less as a group and made their way to the limos, ignored by the photographers, a couple of whom were still fruitlessly beseeching Mirko through the smoked windows of the limousine, while others had hunkered down on the sidewalk, phoning or e-mailing their shots to their newspapers or magazines or agents.

When they got to the vehicles, Emil, Gaby, and Ted climbed into the one with Mirko, while Alix and Lorenzo joined Izzy, Lorenzo sitting beside Izzy in the back seat, and Alix facing them in one of the bucket seats behind the driver.

“Well, that sucked,” Izzy said as the driver closed the side door and got back behind the wheel. “Did you see that? All those years of being dogged by those jerks, and now I get upstaged by Mr. Reclusive himself. There’s only one explanation. My career’s really in the toilet.”