Death of an Aegean Queen (32 page)

Bondurant said, “The first tender is already loading. Let’s go down to the security checkpoint. We need to stop that boat. Someone may be off-loading those pots right now.”

“Stairs or elevator?” I asked, trying to be economical with words.

Sophie paused. “It’s two floors down from here. The stairs would be quicker.”

This turned out to be right because, as the four of us flew past the bank of elevators, I saw a crowd of at least thirty people waiting for a door to open. The next floor down was the Ares, or promenade, level and there we ran into a problem. The line to disembark stretched across this foyer and down the stairs to the Athena deck. Through the open doors here, I caught a glimpse of Marco on the deck outside. I started to call to him, but Bondurant grabbed my hand and pulled me around between the people and the stairway wall. Luc and Sophie followed.

“This is no time to remember our manners,” Bondurant said, dragging me along. “Excuse us,” he called out to a man who had taken it upon himself to uphold the rules of fair play by stretching out his arms. “FBI, United States. Let us through.”

“
Bande de chameaux
!” the self-appointed traffic cop shot back.

We squeezed past the crowd and fought our way to the security checkpoint. Beyond the walk-through metal detector and the open door, the fully-loaded tender pulled out leaving nothing but open sky and sea in its wake.

“Too late.” Bondurant said.

“Don’t worry, sir. There will be another boat soon,” one of the security men told him.

Meanwhile, Luc and Sophie had slipped down the hall to the case where the polished stone bull’s head was supposed to be. Sophie looked back at me and shook her head, mouthing, “Empty.”

I fought against the traffic to the case on the landing that held the little Cycladic fertility statue I loved so much. She was still there, thank heaven. I turned to Luc and Sophie, who by now had caught up with me, and gave them a thumbs-up. “I saw Marco on the promenade deck. I’m going up.” People were much nicer about letting me go up than they had been about letting us go down. “Marco!” I called out as I ran to him. “Were you watching the tender while it was loading? Could you see who got on?”

Marco gave me a hug before he said anything. He was so far behind in terms of news, it seemed as if it would take me all day to fill him in. But before I started, I insisted on knowing if he’d recognized anyone leaving in that first boatload.

“I could not see the entrance to the boat because they use a covered walk for people to cross over. But the top deck of the tender was about even with where I am standing here. I saw Lettie and Ollie. They waved to me.”

“Did you see Nigel Endicott?”

Marco frowned. “I do not know what Nigel Endicott looks like.”

“Oh, I forgot. Anyone else?”

“Villas. I saw him.”

“If Villas is on the boat, then Endicott is, too,” said a voice behind me. It was Bondurant, and Luc and Sophie were right behind him. “Villas is tailing Endicott today. Letsos is staying here on the ship.”

“What about Brittany?” Sophie asked.

“Oh yes, Brittany Benson. I think I saw her. She was carrying a very large potted plant.”

Sophie and I looked at each other and, more or less in unison, shouted, “The krater!”

“She must have stuck the snake plant in the krater,” I added. “Sneaky! How do you smuggle a stolen krater off a ship? Stick a four-foot-tall plant in it and no one will notice anything but the plant.”

“Miss Benson isn’t supposed to leave the ship without an escort. We have to catch the next boat,” Bondurant said, waving us toward the door. “Hurry.”

Bondurant took off down the stairs, leaving the four of us to make our own way. By the time we got to the security checkpoint, he had already flashed his badge at the guards and explained this was an emergency. The next tender pulled alongside our ship and we were the first aboard.

But we seriously needed to have a meeting. I was the only one who knew the whole situation, and I had no idea how to proceed from here.

* * * * *

The five of us gathered in a corner of the tender’s lower deck, in the covered cabin section beneath the upper deck. Both fore and aft of the cabin were open decks. Marco pulled a plastic chair into the V formed by the benches along two walls, so we could sit in a rough circle.

I began. “We have big problems. Marco, you don’t know what’s going on, and you other three know we’re chasing stolen antiquities, but you don’t know what I’m about to tell you. George Gaskill is not dead.”

Four shocked faces stared back at me.

“George Gaskill is, in fact, Nigel Endicott. I know this because I’ve been studying the pictures in the photo shop and, unless you can believe that both men, one with a goatee, cut themselves shaving at the same time, in the same exact spot, and that both tried to stop the bleeding by sticking identical bits of tissue on their faces, you must agree. I told all of you last night I’d seen Kathryn and Nigel together, in Nigel’s room. In each other’s arms. You see? Kathryn was actually in the arms of her own husband.”

“Impossible. They look nothing alike,” said Bondurant.

“Have you ever seen George Gaskill?”

“Well, no.”

“Have any of you seen both George Gaskill and Nigel Endicott?”

Silence. None of them had.

“I have, and I’m telling you the only difference between the two men is the goatee and the glasses and the hairline. And the hairstyle.” I visualized each man as I went on. “Nigel always wears an earring in his left ear, but George’s ear may have been pierced, who knows? George’s front teeth were more prominent than Nigel’s, but that could have been a plate. He lisped, probably because he wasn’t used to it.”

“Endicott has a tattoo on his arm,” Bondurant said.

“Gaskill wore long sleeves,” I pointed out. “And we know he wore a hairpiece. You have it in an evidence bag. I tell you, Nigel Endicott is George Gaskill without the hairpiece, the teeth, or the goatee.”

My four friends sat and stared, as if they were putting all this together in their heads. Marco reached over and took my hand but said nothing. Luc looked at Sophie, who didn’t lift her gaze from the floor. Bondurant cleared his throat, and turned toward the starboard windows, as if he wished he were somewhere other than here.

I waited for what seemed like fifteen minutes, then broke the silence myself. “Somebody say something.”

“It defies all reason.”

“Maybe there was a speck of something on the camera lens.”

“If both men were really the same man, it would mean Kathryn Gaskill knew all about it and said nothing.”

“What about the watch they found in Brittany’s closet?” Sophie asked. “Are you saying Nigel Endicott left it there?” The look on her face made it plain she didn’t believe me and I saw no support for my idea on the faces of either Girard or Bondurant. I looked at Marco. He looked as if he was embarrassed for me. I felt his hand go slack.

“Kathryn could have done it,” I suggested.

“It’s too fantastic, Dotsy.” Luc Girard wouldn’t look me straight in the eye. “As one involved in research, you must know the Principle of Occam’s Razor. It says the simplest solution is almost always the right one. What you’ve proposed is too incredibly twisted to possibly be right.”

I fought back. “If you’re going to cite Occam’s Razor, cite the whole thing! It says, when faced with several possible solutions, the simplest one, no matter how improbable it is, is the right one. My solution is improbable, I’ll grant you, but it’s a hell of a lot simpler than anything you guys have come up with to explain why a man’s blood is all over a deck, why his watch turns up in the closet of the girl he was once accused of raping, and why a tourist in a ‘hey-look-at-me’ shirt pops into a knife shop on a remote island in the Aegean Sea, buys a knife, and then uses it to carve up a photographer!”

Embarrassed silence all around. I thought about what I’d just said and only regretted the little hula dance I’d done to illustrate the shirt. This hurt. Not that they didn’t believe me but that they felt sorry for me. I could feel it.

Bondurant said, “Nigel Endicott has a passport. George Gaskill had a passport. You can’t enter Greece or any other country and hand the immigration officer two passports. It’s one per customer. Nigel Endicott’s passport indicates he flew from the U.S. to Turkey the same day George Gaskill flew from the U.S. to Athens and each of those flights takes at least nine hours. It’s impossible for all that to have been done by one man.” He paused long enough for that to sink in, then went on in a soft, condescending voice. “The FBI has run a check on both Endicott and Gaskill. Both men have jobs, Social Security numbers, credit cards, phone numbers, addresses, even wives . . . except that Endicott is a widower. His wife died some five years ago.”

“Excuse me.” I stood up and made a dash for the other side of the cabin where I’d seen a door with the universal “Women’s” sign. I couldn’t let them see me cry. The door was locked, so I found a space nearby where I could stand and keep my back to my four turncoat companions. I waited. I heard rustling noises that told me the toilet was occupied, but someone was taking a long time.

The tender was fully loaded now and had pulled away from the
Aegean Queen
. Through the short breezeway flanked by the bathroom doors, I glimpsed the horizon, and as the boat swung around to enter the caldera along whose rim the town of Fira nestled, I saw great strips of red rock, black rock, and tan rock, running more or less horizontally along the crater wall, like layers in one of those sand pictures with shifting sands between two layers of glass. The various colors were from different eruptions, I guessed. I played with that idea for a while to get my mind off the fool I’d made of myself. I still thought I was right, although I had to admit I didn’t have enough evidence to make a convincing case.

Whoever was in the bathroom was taking an impossibly long time. I found a shred of tissue in my pocket, wiped my eyes, blew my nose, and returned to my seat.

All eyes were on Marco and no one seemed to notice I was back. Marco, his eyes glittering, slapped himself on the forehead and shouted, “That is right! Now that I think about it, there was something very familiar about the man. Of course, I was looking down on him from the promenade. He was standing on the lower deck of the tender, so I was looking down on the top of his head. But I have seen pictures of Robert Segal in the files of the Carabinieri. In fact, I was looking at his photograph only two days ago, when I was in Milano.”

Robert Segal? Brittany’s boyfriend? Was he here?

“What about the box? What did it look like?” Bondurant addressed this question to Marco, then turned to me to explain. “Captain Quattrocchi remembers seeing a man with a large box standing on the lower deck of the tender that took the first load of passengers. We think it may have been Miss Benson’s boyfriend.”

“I wish I had looked at the box more, but I did not know it would be important. It was dark, I remember. Possibly wood or metal painted black. It was more than a meter long, and at least a half-meter wide and deep.” Marco showed us with his hands. “He carried it by a handle, like a guitar case, you know?”

“More than a meter long? Then it would have been large enough to hold the amphora,” Luc said.

“Did he appear to be with Miss Benson?”

“No, he was on the lower deck. Miss Benson was sitting on the top deck with the potted plant beside her. You are right, Dotsy. I did not even look at the pot. I only noticed the very tall plant.”

“He probably used some ruse or other to get onto the ship and pick up the box,” Luc said. “Probably told them he was picking up a cello or something for repairs. Oh, he is a clever one!”

With a big clunk, the tender shifted into neutral and a young man in coveralls dashed past us to the stern rail and grabbed a dock line. Almost time to disembark. There was confusion all around the cabin as passengers grabbed their belongings and their children. Bondurant suggested we move to the rail on the outside deck and remove ourselves from the hubbub so we could talk.