A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (32 page)

The Porto Eda was right in front of her as she left the ship, practically on the dock, and she made straight for it. As she pulled open the glass doors, a puff of air from inside carried the welcome scent of coffee to her. Unfortunately, it also blew a speck of something into her eye. Blinking, pressing a hand over the eye, she asked one of the two receptionists at the desk for the ladies’ room and was pointed toward the back of the building, near the elevators. To reach it she had to walk through the café, sensuously inhaling the thick, unmistakable aroma of Turkish coffee, although she was betting they probably called it “Albanian coffee” here, the same way—

“Alix, is that you?”

She turned her one functioning eye toward the voice and through the tears saw Gaby sitting there on a white leather sofa.

“Oh, hi, Gaby, I—”

Gaby had risen halfway up. “What are you doing here? What’s happened?”

Alix was confused by the strain in her voice and on her face. “Why, nothing’s happened. I just came in for some coffee. Is something the matter?”

“No, no, I was just.… It’s just that… no.” She sat back down, looking as though she were restraining herself from saying anything more.

“Gaby, may I join you? In a minute, though. Give me a chance to rinse something out of my eye first.”

“Oh, but I’m only going to be here another minute. Emil will be… that is… Sure, I suppose so. If you want.” She seemed to realize the way she sounded and appended a sunny, friendly smile. “Sure,” she said again. “Can I order you something in the meantime?”

“You bet, please, a cup of Turkish coffee. A double, if they have them.”

Flushing the speck out of her eye proved difficult, taking a good five minutes, and when she was done the eye was red and stinging, but at least she could keep it open. Lusting for the coffee that she hoped was waiting for her, she used the towel roll to dry off and went to the door. Before it was fully open she knew that something was wrong, but it took her a second to figure out what it was: There was no sound, no clinking of cups, no scraping of utensils, no murmured conversations. She stepped out into the café.

Gaby was gone; everybody was gone. The coffee Gaby had ordered for her was on the table, fresh and steaming, and half-finished coffees and pastries littered the other tables. The three stools at the bar were empty. The barista had disappeared, as had the clerks behind the reception desk. She was alone in the noiseless lobby, a
Twilight Zone
moment. A slow chill rolled up between her shoulders and spread out on the back of her neck. She jumped at a rustle behind her and to her right, and when she spun around she saw two armed, blue-uniformed men in black body armor—Albanian policemen; there had been another one on the pier—at the back of the building, near the rear exit. They were facing away from her, closely watching the fire door to the stairwell, their bodies tense.

Weapons, body armor, and jumpy Albanian cops. Whatever was about to happen, she preferred not to be there when it did. The quickest route to the front entrance was around the corner of the café and through a small atrium that held the elevator. She had barely stepped into the atrium when the massive form of Yiorgos materialized from around the far corner. She had never seen him anything but self-possessed and unruffled, but now he was agitatedly waving his arms and yelling at her. In Greek.

Startled, she stood rooted to the spot. “Wh—”

“Dammit, Alix”—This time, surprising her even more, it was Ted doing the materializing, and he looked every bit as upset as Yiorgos.—“didn’t you—”

He never got to finish the question because that was when the elevator door on Alix’s right whooshed open and all hell commenced breaking loose. Out came two men, one svelte and neatly bearded, wearing a business suit over a tieless white shirt buttoned up to the collar, and the other, bull-necked and swarthy, dressed in hey-look-at-me-I’m-a-gangster mode: tan, mirrored aviator sunglasses and a supple, blatantly expensive, chestnut leather bomber jacket straight from Fendi or Armani. At the same moment, four Albanian cops converged on them, two from around the same corner from which Ted and Yiorgos had come, and two, plus a man in street clothes, from where, she didn’t know. Everybody—Ted, Yiorgos, the good guys, the bad guys—was shouting and gesticulating, and most of the police had their handguns out—old-fashioned snub-nosed revolvers of the kind that American police forces had stopped using decades ago, but still plenty intimidating when they were waving around a foot from your head.

Smack in the center of all this stood Alix, dumbfounded and frozen, not knowing whether to run or duck or just say her prayers. A policeman reached for her to pull her out of the way, but the leather-jacketed man got there first, catching her neck in the crook of his arm and jerking her up against him so that her body shielded his. Alix struggled, batting at his arm and face, but her back was to him and she couldn’t get enough weight behind her fists to do any harm. And he was strong, as a quick, hard squeeze of her neck between his forearm and his biceps showed, shutting off her air. With his other hand he was brandishing a thick pipe or bar just a few inches from her face. That served to get her attention too, and she stopped struggling. He eased the pressure enough for her to pull in a couple of shallow, strangled breaths.

Everyone except Ted was still yelling. She caught a glimpse of him off to the side, looking stricken and speaking urgently to Yiorgos, who was
busy bawling at the bad guys. Leather-jacket started dragging her backward, toward the hotel entrance. He was screaming louder than anyone. She couldn’t understand a word but from the faces of the police, she had no trouble grasping the point he was making:
Keep away or I’ll kill her
.

She knew he could do it too, and easily. It had taken him—what, two seconds?—to completely cut off her air and turn her into a rag doll. She could see that the police knew it too. They had stopped shouting and were now dithering, looking to the plainclothesman for guidance. Ted, standing a little away from the others, began sidling around to one side, but Leather-jacket saw him and squeezed again, harder. Alix had been struggling to breathe as it was—his eye-watering cologne didn’t make it any easier—and little starbursts now exploded behind her eyes. Ted stopped at once, lifting his hands to show he’d gotten the message. The pressure was eased once more. Her knees, which had given way without her realizing it, braced themselves again.

The other man who had been on the elevator, the man in the suit, had been left behind, and with no nearby body to grab for protection, he was in trouble. Wild-eyed, he reached under his jacket and behind him with one hand, but was stopped cold by the almost simultaneous cocking of four revolver hammers—
snick snick snick snick—
none of them more than six feet away from him. Meekly he held both hands out well away from his body and one of the cops spun him around and pulled out the gleaming black semiautomatic pistol he’d been after. Then he angrily held it up to show to his fellow cops. He was mad, Alix thought, because the guy had a newer and better weapon than they had. It made her giggle and she realized she was getting muzzy and stupid. Lack of oxygen?

One of the Albanian cops roughly handcuffed the second man, pinned him by the back of the neck and frog-marched him off. The others slowly began advancing toward Alix and her captor. Leather-jacket, still dragging her backward, speeded up. One of her heels caught in the carpet, momentarily slowing them, and he punished her by tightening his hold again. More stars. Twisting her head to the side allowed her to suck in a little air
but made her dizzier, brought her to the brink of blacking out. Something about pressure on the carotid arteries? Her mind seemed to be floating away from her, out of her reach. She wanted to turn her head forward again, preferring gasping to fainting, but it was impossible. She had both hands on his arms now, trying without success to give herself a little more room before she did faint. When he readjusted his grip to keep it tight, his wrist pressed against her cheek. With a huge effort she managed to twist her head the two inches she needed to sink her teeth into his wrist. She felt tendons grind under her teeth and tasted blood. He howled, but rather than loosen his arm he tightened it again, savagely this time, and took a backhanded swat at her with his other hand. When he did he almost lost his hold on what she now realized wasn’t a bar or pipe at all, but a long mailing tube—no, it was made of leather; a map case then?

The case wobbled on the tips of his fingers for a moment, and it took a frantic swipe for him to pluck it back out of the air. When he did, the arm that held her slipped enough to let her take in something close to a full breath, the first she’d had since he’d had her; but in another second he’d adjusted and she was clamped more firmly than ever in the vise of that thick, leather-sheathed arm. But that one lungful of air had instantly sharpened her mind, and what she was thinking was how desperately he had lunged for that case, and would surely lunge for it again if she… if she…

Behind her eyes, the starbursts started silently popping again, tiny fireworks, and her thoughts began to lose shape, to fragment and to fall away. If she didn’t do something now, right now, she’d black out in seconds and be dead not long after. She let her knees go soft again and sagged, making herself a dead weight, as if she had already lost consciousness, and when he was forced to readjust for this, loosening his hold on her throat a little, she was able to gulp another quick breath and use the brief spurt of energy to snatch at the map case with both hands, get her fingers around it, and yank it out of his hand.

He fumbled for it with his free hand, still struggling backward with her. She dug in her heels again to make it harder for him, managing to hold
the case at arm’s length in front of her, where he couldn’t reach it without letting up on her neck. They were only a dozen feet from the door now and moving toward it fast. His hold had retightened, but before the constriction could affect her she jerked the case up, as if at his head. It was a feint and it worked. He flinched, bending to the side and giving her the freedom of movement she was after. They had stumbled into, and almost tripped over, a steel-framed chair near the door, and it was down onto the metal back of this that she smashed the map case. The case was sturdy; it dented only a little. He was babbling frantically to her now, or rather
at
her, wild with desperation. She took heart from that and whacked the case against the metal frame once more. The dent was now a crack, and the case had given way and bent almost double at its center. And Leather-jacket was nearly hysterical.

But she was losing strength—the starbursts had given way to wavering black spots that grew and shrank and moved in and out of focus. The world began to tilt. Nausea roiled deep inside her. She was able to raise the case yet again but neither her muscles nor her mind would cooperate in bringing it down on the chair, and she could only hold it there, just out of his grasp, her fingers numbed, her vision darkening. Leather-jacket uttered a kind of low moan and grabbed for it with both hands. Alix let go—she couldn’t have hung on to it any longer anyway—and as he clutched at it, her eyes rolled up, the world went red and then black, and she collapsed to the floor.

The next instant the police were on him and it was over.

“W
ell, I can’t say it was easy, but I finally got my coffee,” Alix said, thirty minutes later, as she started on her second cup with a happy sigh. A fabulously, wickedly sweet, sticky Albanian pastry had already been consumed and two more waited in the basket, but not for long.

Ted smiled at her across the table, hands circling his own cup. It had taken him a while to loosen up, but now he seemed relaxed. Some of the police were enjoying similar snacks at other tables. The Porto Eda
kafe,
not yet reopened to the public, was providing free refreshments for them all. (“To thank because we don’t shoot up the place,” Yiorgos had said.)

Ted was just finishing up a brief explanation of what she’d stumbled into—the “international operation” he’d referred to earlier. It had gotten its start only a few hours after he’d arrived on the
Artemis
. He’d gotten word through the FBI grapevine that an Albanian mafia bust had been in the works for a while, in which the police there hoped to take down some top-level mafiosi on customs violations (in much the same way that Al Capone, having successfully eluded conviction on murder, prostitution, and Prohibition-related charges, was finally jailed for tax evasion). At the center of the planned bust was an illegal importation of paintings to take place a couple of days hence at the Hotel Porto Eda in Saranda. Since a couple of days hence was the very date that the
Artemis,
practically bulging with masterpieces, would be calling at Saranda, it didn’t require massive brainpower to figure out that there might be a connection between the two.

Knowing that Yiorgos was on leave from a colonelcy in the Hellenic Police, Ted had guessed correctly that he was the representative from the
Greek side. He’d told Yiorgos who he was and, with the Bureau’s go-ahead, had offered his help. Yiorgos had been quick to accept. What exactly was going to happen they didn’t know, but the Albanian police had set up a surveillance van near the hotel that morning and had been tuned to room 204 ever since. Yiorgos and Ted had been brought over in a police boat at eight a.m. They had assumed that Panos would be at the heart of it and were surprised when he didn’t show up on the nine o’clock ferry, but their puzzlement ended when Emil and Gaby walked off it carrying the map case and headed straight for the Hotel Porto Eda. They had then—