A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (4 page)

“Panos, listen to me. I swear to you on the life of my mother, if you’ve got a fake Monet in your collection, it’s not my work. I’ve only done two Monets in my life, and that was years ago, and one is in a museum in Antwerp, and the other—”

“Christoph,
you
listen to me, and listen good. I don’t give a damn about your other fakes, or your mother either. You can have this one back too, and I don’t care what you do with it. But I want
my
Monet, you understand me? And I want it back now. I don’t care what you have to do to get it. Otherwise—”

“Panos, will you
please
stop threatening me and listen to reason? Just think about it for a minute. How could I possibly—”

“You want reason? Okay, here’s reason. If I don’t have my own painting back inside of one week—
one week
—I’ll have you put in jail for the next twenty years.”

“But I’m telling you I had nothing to do with—”

“I’m not talking about the Monet now, I’m talking about a few other little things I happen to know about you.”

Weisskopf was beginning to get a little hot under the collar, or rather under the shiny blue lapels of his banyan. “I don’t like what you’re insinuating,” he said. “You’re barking up the wrong tree now. I have never—
never
—knowingly participated in anything that was against the law. I take every—”

He was interrupted by a bark of derisive laughter. “Oh, really? That Hogarth in Gutterman’s collection in Montreal? Tell me; you think he knows it’s not a Hogarth?”

“Well, I admit, that’s the way it turned out, but it was certainly no fault of my—”

“And that little so-called Pissarro of Mulas’s, down in Lima? That wasn’t your fault either?”

“I… I…”

“One week,” snarled Papadakis and hung up.

Weisskopf put the phone down and stared at it for half a minute, the varnish forgotten.

Then, slowly, he picked it up again and dialed a number. It was answered on the third ring. “Hello?”

Weisskopf took a deep breath. “We’ve got trouble,” he said.

T
ed (Theodore Mark) Ellesworth was not your average FBI agent, and his work cubicle showed it. Where others might have criminal codes on their bookshelves and crime scene photos or Most Wanted posters on their walls, Ted’s shelves were more likely to hold books on Titian, Rodin, or the Post-Impressionist painters, and the pushpins stuck into the partitions that served as walls held up museum posters of works by Rubens, Goya, Gustav Klimt, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

These fittings, which were a continuing source of ribbing from his friends in violent-crimes units, were there as much for work as for pleasure. Ted was a member of the FBI’s seventeen-person Art Crime Team—three attorneys, an operations specialist, and thirteen agents, of which Ted was one of only two who specialized in undercover work. During his nine years on the team—generally referred to simply as the art squad, even by its members—he had posed as “bent” dealers, secretive or greedy collectors, and gullible, newly rich bourgeoisie looking to spend a million bucks, maybe two, on some culture they can flaunt. As undercover work went, it had a lot going for it—stays in expensive hotels, dinners in fine restaurants, sometimes a Ferrari or a Porsche to tool around in. And it certainly held none of the extreme physical hazards or other unpleasantnesses faced by undercover agents working drugs or organized crime. And most important, it was
interesting
.

But hazards there were. Undercover work, whatever the kind, put a huge strain on the memory, the psyche, and sometimes even one’s moral core. On an assignment that might run months, one had to be on guard
every minute. A single slip as to who you were supposed to be, or to your past, or what you were doing there, or anything at all you’d been telling people, and the mission was ruined, all hope of a bust gone. And there were hazards that filtered into your personal life too. You had to be dishonest with your friends and those you loved; not just the necessary sin-by-omission kind of dishonesty but outright lies or deceitful equivocations about what you were doing, and why you couldn’t come over for dinner Friday night, and why you hadn’t called or returned a phone call, and where the heck you’d been for the last two weeks.

And you had to
remember
all that. That took a toll on you. It made you closemouthed and evasive, and when it came to your feelings you learned that your safest bet was to keep them to yourself, to remain, using Ted’s boss’s word for it, “disconnected.” And that, of course, was murder on your personal life. By anybody’s measure, Ted qualified as an extremely eligible bachelor: thirty-three years old, educated, good-looking, funny, and an all-around likable guy. He liked women and they liked him, but since he’d taken on his undercover role, none of his relationships had had a ghost of a chance of panning out.

He’d met Alix London a few months earlier, when he’d been working a forgery case in Santa Fe. It was hate at first sight. She disliked him, or rather disliked his undercover persona, Roland (Rollie) de Beauvais, a foppish, faddish, not-too-principled Boston art dealer. He distrusted her because she was the daughter of Geoffrey London, a New York socialite and a respected conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art… until it turned out that he had a sideline: He was a serial forger and thief, for which crimes he’d deservedly served an eight-year prison term. Ted knew even at the time that it wasn’t sensible to saddle the daughter with the father’s reputation, but it was hard not to do so. Like him, after all, she was in the art world, and there she’d been in Santa Fe, “consulting,” right in the thick of the illicit doings Ted was investigating. And who, it turned out, had arranged that consulting gig for her? Why, none other than the newly
released Geoffrey London himself. So what else was Ted to think other than that she was in cahoots with the old crook in some reprehensible new scheme?

But she wasn’t a crook—she was anything but—and he wasn’t Rollie de Beauvais, and although it took them a few days to sort things out, they finally got them straight. Alix, he’d found, was not only straight as an arrow, she was a superbly trained art restorer and evaluator, and the possessor of a wonderfully keen eye, far keener and quicker than his, when it came to assessing the authenticity of a suspect work of art. So much so, in fact, that against all odds he’d gotten her interested in possibly doing some occasional consulting work for the squad. She’d filled out an application and come to Washington for interviews with his boss and the personnel people. Then she’d filled out more, lengthier forms, had been thoroughly investigated, and had been placed on the approved list.

The truth was, the problem he’d had to wrestle with the most when originally thinking about recruiting her, was that there was an unmistakable
something
in the air between them—he felt it, and he knew she felt it—and complications of that sort in his personal life were the last thing he wanted right now. In the end, however, he’d decided that her unique abilities were just too valuable to pass up and he’d advocated her hiring. But he’d been more relieved than disappointed when a job in Cincinnati had made it impossible for him to keep the dinner date they’d set for when she came to D.C.

The call he’d gotten from Edward Reed a little while ago signaled the start of what he hoped would be her first job, assuming that she wanted to do it. It was a case he’d been working on as lead investigator for months, so he would be her long-distance supervisor, although he didn’t expect that there’d be any direct supervision involved. By telephone, Jamie had asked her to keep the third week in May open until she heard from them again, and she’d agreed.

Well, time for her to hear from them again. He pulled his chair up to the computer and opened his Contacts file.

The eleven-year-old Volvo that Alix’s new budget had recently stretched for was pre-“hands-free telephone capability,” so when the phone in the glove box warbled she had to find a spot to pull over, which wasn’t that difficult on this dingy, depressing section of Alaskan Way South. Hard for a street not to be dingy and depressing, she supposed, when it lay under the Alaskan Way Viaduct—Highway 99—rumbling and shrieking overhead with the evening rush-hour traffic. Seattle’s typical March weather didn’t help either: temperature hovering in the low forties, a cold, penetrating rain coming down, and as black at five fifteen as it would be at midnight.

She was irritated as she reached for the phone; her father had a new habit of calling her a few minutes before she was due to pick him up, to tell her, “Alas, my dear, I’m so sorry. Something frightfully important has come up. You won’t be very disturbed, will you, about waiting in the outer office with the boys for a few minutes?”

Damn wrong she wouldn’t be disturbed. She flipped open the phone and snapped: “Okay, all right, tell me, what is it this time?”

Silence. Then, “Uh… Alix?”

It took a couple of seconds for the voice to register.
Ted
. The last time they’d spoken had been two months ago, just before she’d flown to Washington for her interviews, when he’d called to tell her she’d have to take a rain check on the dinner he’d promised. A couple of weeks later he’d telephoned to congratulate her on making it successfully through the hoops, but she’d been out so he’d left a message on her answering machine. He hadn’t suggested—hadn’t even implied—that he wanted her to call him back. She’d toyed with the idea of doing it anyway, but decided against it.

“I’m sorry, Ted; I thought you were someone else.”

“Well, whoever it is, I’m glad I’m not him. Alix, I have some news. The job came through. It’s been approved.”

“Oh, good.” She had yet to figure out if his blunt, impassive, get-to-the-point style was a locked-in part of his personality or just something
that went with his kind of work. As usual, she decided with a sigh to simply follow his lead. “I
think,
” she added. “Jamie didn’t really give me anything in the way of details beyond asking me to make sure my passport was up to date.”

“Oh, I think you’ll like what we have in mind,” he said expansively, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “How does a week-long, super-deluxe cruise through the Greek islands on one of the world’s most luxurious megayachts sound?”

Frankly, not as wonderfully appealing as he apparently thought it would. Alix’s mother had come from an old-money New England family, and Alix herself had been married (briefly) to the scion of another such family, so cruising and yachts were nothing new—she didn’t know if they qualified as “mega,” but they were big, fancy boats devoted to rich living—and the truth was that the experience hadn’t been all it was cracked up to be. Too many self-important people, too much posturing and affectation, too much servile truckling to “celebrity” guests, too many amorous, sloppy drunks… and nowhere near enough interesting conversation.

As for the Greek islands, she’d experienced them too, and on a yacht at that, one belonging to her mother’s black-sheep brother, Julian, who would earn his black-sheep status a few years afterward by divorcing his wife of twenty-two years to marry a Las Vegas dancer of twenty-two years, period. Alix had been sixteen at the time of the cruise, and one of the crew members had been a dashing Italian in his mid-twenties who had been the object of what she thought of as her first “grown-up” crush (in other words, one with fantasies that actually involved
S-E-X
). Fantasies they remained, however. Sergio was obviously willing enough, but her mother’s eagle-eyed surveillance had put a stop to things before they got started, so what Alix took away from the trip was more along the lines of rueful,
if-only
memories of the gorgeous, smiling, bare-chested Sergio, than of dazzling beaches, quaint, whitewashed villages, and romantic ruins.

On the other hand… she looked out through the fogging windows at the wet, black, freezing pavement, and thought about wine-dark seas and
Greek islands: the Dodecanese, the Cyclades, the Aegean… the very names warmed her. “Oh, I imagine I could handle it,” she said.

“Well, if you prefer, I could get you something a little more exciting, a little more ‘real,’ something in the seedy underbelly of art crimes, perhaps? We have an opening for an operative to crack a gang of mob-connected antiquities smugglers who operate on the Marseilles docks. Be glad to put you in for it.”