Death of an Aegean Queen

by Maria Hudgins

  “A few times, yes. Do you mean the big amphora from the Athens games?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t know where the people who furnished the ship got the things they have on display, but I have wondered where they came from. They all appear to be real. Not—how do you say—reproductions.”

  “Who would know where they got them?”

  “I don’t know.” Sophie studied her feet for a few seconds. “Maybe the purser? He might have a record of the purchases.”

  “Good idea. What about the captain?”

  “Captain Tzedakis? He might. He probably knows the owners of the cruise line.” Sophie agreed to ask around about who was in charge of purchasing what.

  “Another thing, Sophie. About your roommate, Brittany.”

  Sophie’s eyes widened as if she was surprised I remembered her roommate’s name.

  “A man I met yesterday saw Brittany with what he said was a ‘to-die-for’ antique krater. She had picked it up at a shop in Mykonos Town but when he tried to buy it from her, she wouldn’t even talk about making a deal. Not that she should, of course, but I wonder. She said it was for a friend of hers. Do you know anything about it? She turned down an offer of nine hundred Euros.”

  “I think it was probably for her boyfriend, Rob. She talks about him all the time. He’s rich, I think.”

  “Where does this Rob live?”

  “In Switzerland. Geneva.”

  “Did you see the krater yourself? She must have brought it back with her yesterday unless she had it shipped.”

  “It would make no sense to pick it up and then ship it,” Sophie said. “If he wanted it shipped, why not have the shop do it?”

  Sophie, I decided, was a sharp cookie.

  She stared at her feet for another moment, then said, “Brittany and I each have our own closet and we both stow things under our beds. She could have brought it back to our room.”

  “Could you look?”

  “Go through her belongings? No!” Her back went rigid. “I’d be very angry if she went through my things!”

  I sat quietly, letting the importance of what we might be talking about—the theft of priceless antiquities—sink in. “Well then, could I come to your room sometime and visit you?”

  “Certainly. Any time.” Sophie, I thought, understood.

  A perspiring and disheveled Luc Girard burst through the library door. “Merde! I don’t believe it!”

  “Whom should we tell? The captain?”

  Girard ran a hand through his hair. His eyes darted left, right, left, and he covered his mouth with both hands. “Didn’t you tell me you know of a Carabinieri captain on the ship? I think I should talk to him before we tell anyone else.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Marco and I climbed aboard the launch and found a spot on the bow so we could see Patmos as we approached it. I turned and shot a photo of our ship after we had put a bit of distance between it and ourselves. The launch, zipping across the water, blew a warm, sensuous breeze through my hair.

  Marco slipped an arm around my waist. He lightly kissed my temple and I turned to receive the kiss on the lips I knew waited for my lips. I felt a knot form in my stomach as he kissed me again.

  “At last,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for that kiss for two years.”

  The demons within me banged against my ribcage and I turned my face toward Patmos. Marco was threatening to make me deal with how screwed up I was. My divorce from the swamp rat some five years ago had left me with a bucket-load of problems and it didn’t take a psychiatrist to tell me what they were. Teaching ancient and medieval history at a local community college had helped mend parts of my shattered self-image, but to trust again? To let myself be vulnerable? I couldn’t do it yet.

  I felt Marco’s arm stiffen and drop away.

  “Did Luc Girard find you?” I asked.

  “Luc? You are on a first-name basis with him already, eh? Yes, he found me. We went up to the top deck together. It is the stolen amphora, all right. We think they may have been aware of the photograph being circulated. The one in the LAMBDA book. So they deliberately put the display case close to the wall and turned the amphora so the side shown in the photographs would be hidden.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Me? Nothing, for now. We are going to talk about it later.”

  I turned and looked at him.

  “Girard needs to proceed carefully,” Marco said, staring across the water toward the approaching island. “The cruise line is his employer, after all.”

  “You mean he wants you to do nothing so he won’t risk losing his job?”

  “I mean we must proceed carefully.”

  “I think we should check up on every item in the display cases all over the ship. They may all be stolen!” I may have said this a little too loudly, because I sensed heads had turned toward us. I looked to my left and saw Brittany Benson and Willem Leclercq standing together and no more than ten feet from Marco and me.

  Ollie and Lettie were the first people off the boat when we docked. Ollie was drunk. Marco and I watched as Lettie guided her voluminous husband around vendors’ stalls and darting children to an olive tree. She propped him up against the tree and glanced around, an anguished expression on her face.

  “Should we go and help her?” Marco asked.

  “She can handle it. Let’s not embarrass her.”

  Marco and I went first to the Holy Cave of the Apocalypse where St. John saw the vision that inspired the Book of Revelation, then back down a cobblestone path to the harbor town where Marco spotted Ollie careening dangerously along a seawall. He left me to go and help poor Lettie out.

  I found a bench under a tree and sat. I kicked off my shoes and then noticed the man on the other end of the bench was Malcolm Stone, the antiques expert from England. He had a brown paper package about the size of a hardcover book.

  “Did you find a bargain?” I asked.

  “No, I paid dearly.” Malcolm paused, then added, “Dotsy, isn’t it?”

  “Right. Friend of Ollie Osgood. We had dinner together last night.”

  “Of course. Have you seen Osgood? He’s drunk as a skunk.”

  “It’s because the FBI and ship security are leaning hard on him about the murder of George Gaskill. He’s about had it.”

  “Is there anything I can do? They’ve given me and Willem the third degree, as well.”

  I couldn’t think of anything he or I could do, other than figure out who had killed George.

  He turned his package over and began loosening the tape. “This is something I ordered a year ago. It was made for me by a monk in the monastery up there.” He jerked his head toward the eleventh-century Monastery of St. John at the top of the hill behind us. Unwrapped, it proved to be an icon of St. George running his lance through the legendary dragon. It looked old, but I knew they had ways of antiquing newly painted icons.

  “It’s lovely.”

  Stone looked at it in silence for a minute, and then said, “My wife’s father’s name was George and she always kept an icon similar to this one in the office at the back of our shop. It’s an antique shop I still own and operate in Brighton. Her father’s family was Greek. He, my father-in-law, had given it to her when she was young.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “I took an axe to it. I chopped it into a hundred pieces.” Stone began rewrapping the icon, found the end of the tape, and pressed it down again. “When she died two years ago. Stupid, wasn’t it? To blame a piece of wood for not protecting your wife?”

  “Grief makes us do things,” I said. “Will you put this one back in the same place? In your shop?”

  “Yes. It’s time for me to get on with my life. I’ve wallowed in self-pity long enough.”

  “It takes time.” I looked down the hill and spotted Willem Leclercq. It looked as if he was discussing a large, black table that sat in front of a restaurant, under a grape arbor. I suspected from
his gestures that he might be dickering to buy it. I asked Malcolm.

  “Right. It’s not old, but he decided he had to have it for the garden of the house he’s furnishing. It’ll cost him more to ship it to Belgium than he’s paying for it.”

  “Did you advise him against it?”

  “It’s not my concern. I’m only here to advise him about antiques.”

  I stood up to leave. “I’m sorry to hear about your wife.”

  “Thank you.” Without looking at me, he added, “If I could ask a pretty woman such as yourself to dance with me some evening, it might be a good next step. Would you?”

  “Of course.” I think I blushed. Well, what else could I say?

  Chapter Fourteen

  As Marco helped Ollie off the launch and back into our ship, I saw FBI Special Agent Bondurant standing immediately inside the security checkpoint. Ollie jerked around when he saw Bondurant and, for a moment, I was afraid he’d bolt. But Bondurant took Marco aside while Lettie and I steered Ollie to his room.

  After we deposited the big lug on his bed and removed his shoes for him, I left and went in search of Luc Girard and/or his new assistant, Sophie. I found her but not Girard in the library, where she was surrounded by books and by what appeared to be a number of pages downloaded from the Internet. Girard’s sandbox of pottery shards still sat on a side table, illuminated by a gooseneck lamp.

  “Dotsy, it’s terrible! We’ve found four items in the display cases are stolen, and we haven’t checked them all yet. They haven’t all been stolen from the same place, though, and they aren’t all in the LAMBDA book. We have limited references with us on the ship but we’re finding some help on the Internet. Dr. Girard is taking photos of the ones we can’t identify and emailing them to people he thinks might help us.”

  “What about the identity numbers? Aren’t the museum pieces supposed to have black numbers on them?”

  “We’ll have to get the cases unlocked in order to see. But the amphora on the Zeus deck, a krater in the case outside the show lounge, in fact, all the pottery items are probably bolted through their bottoms to the case itself.”

  “You mean they drilled a hole through them to bolt them down?”

  “Yes. Otherwise, when the ship rolls, the pottery would break.”

  “And the drill hole would likely remove some or all of the ID numbers.” I cringed at the thought of using a drill on any of these relics.

  “Dr. Girard is trying to get someone with a key to open the cases for him.”

  “Sophie, can you leave for a few minutes? I’d like you to show me your room.”

  “Now? Why?” Sophie frowned, and then her face softened. I think she realized I was really asking to see Brittany Benson’s room, which also happened to be her own room. “I suppose I can leave. Let me put away some things first.” She moved the sandbox into a cabinet, closed its doors, and looked around the library. “Let’s go.”

  The crew slept in the bowels of the ship. Luxury, I found, ended with the Athena deck. Below it was the Demeter deck with crew quarters, metal grid stairs leading down to the engine room, and noise. The engine noise on this level was overwhelming.

  Sophie slipped her key card into one of about fifty doors on the left side of one hall and ushered me into her tiny room. She and Brittany had somehow managed to cram two narrow beds into an L shape along two walls in a manner that must have made it nearly impossible to change sheets on the one in back.

  “Most of the rooms have the beds stacked up, but Brittany and I decided to do this because neither of us wanted to sleep on the top. It puts you so close to the ceiling, if you sit up in the middle of the night, you crack your head.”

  “I understand.” They each had a small desk and a closet no more than two feet wide. “Where is your bathroom?”

  “Down the hall.”

  “Would you mind going into the bathroom and getting me a paper towel?”

  Sophie looked at me questioningly, and then said, “Of course.”

  Sophie was a bright girl.

  “How long do you want me to take, getting this paper towel?”

  “Ten minutes ought to do it. But keep an eye on the hall, too.” It wasn’t hard to figure out which bed, closet, and desk were whose. Sophie’s had Greek language magazines under it, and Brittany’s were all in English. Near the foot of Brittany’s bed was a clipboard with an unfinished letter tucked under an envelope addressed to her, care of this ship. I pulled the envelope out and looked at the letter beneath. It professed true love for the recipient. In English. I pulled a notepad from my purse and jotted down the name and return address on the envelope.

  Under Brittany’s bed, I found two flat garment boxes. One was full of costumes, the other, street clothes. Her desk yielded little but nail polish, a curling iron, and makeup. Brittany wasn’t much of a reader. Or much of a writer, either, I decided.

  The closet with the longer clothes and the size nine shoes had to be Brittany’s. On its floor I found two cardboard cartons, wedged in so they couldn’t shift with the roll of the ship. I pulled both out and opened them. The first contained a geometric-style krater, probably the one Stone and Leclercq had tried to buy from her yesterday. With repeating black patterns on a red background, it had no identifying numbers anywhere on it and it was in excellent condition. If it was a genuine fifth century b.c. krater, it had weathered the millennia well.

  In the second carton I found a footed stone box with a carved scroll design that looked similar to pictures I’d seen of finds from the Cyclades. The carton also contained a lid, wrapped separately and tucked in on top of the stone box. Returning both cartons to the floor of the closet, I turned my attention to Brittany’s desk drawers but I knew my time was running out. I hoped to find some paperwork: a receipt, a certificate of authenticity, anything that would shed light on these two items and how they came to be in Brittany Benson’s closet.

  The doorknob turned and I caught my breath. I still had one drawer open and both hands in it. Thankfully, it was Sophie. I could breathe again.

  “I need to get back to the library,” she said. She didn’t ask what I’d been doing or what I’d found, and I didn’t offer to tell her. She handed me a paper towel.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chief Letsos, FBI Special Agent Bondurant, Marco, and Villas, the policeman from Mykonos, were in Letsos’s office once again, each sitting in the same place as last night but this time Marco had been awarded a chair. Young Demopoulos, who was scheduled for night duty, wasn’t there.

  “Update on the George Gaskill affair.” Bondurant started without referring to the notes on his lap. “We have a report from Pennsylvania on him. He’s a registered sex offender and the young lady he was convicted of abusing just happens to be a member of the crew on this very ship. The odds that this is a coincidence are vanishingly small.

  “He was employed at a used-car dealership in Elkhart, Indiana. Wife works at a department store. No children. Gaskill was definitely not Employee of the Month. According to the manager, he hadn’t sold a car in ages.

  “Health problems.” Bondurant went on in his staccato fashion. “Heart bypass surgery scheduled for July. He’d already been granted leave from work for the operation.”

  At this point, Bondurant referred to a page of his notes. “Brittany Benson. Sixteen at the time Gaskill was convicted of abusing her. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After high school she worked as a flight attendant for Delta Airlines for two years, then quit. Moved to Miami and worked in a bar. Shared an apartment with a Peter Davis. Moved to Lima, Peru. We have an address for her in Lima, but our men are still checking on whether she was living alone or if she had a roommate. Started work for this cruise line two years ago. Gives her current address as 1253 rue de Lausanne, Geneva, Switzerland.”

  “Busy young lady,” Letsos said, then turned to Villas. “What have you got for us today?”

  Villas, his elbows on his knees, read from his notepad. “We have a list of everyone who w
ent ashore in Mykonos yesterday. Both passengers and crew. We’ve created a database of their identity cards. This includes their photo, country of origin, passport number, and cabin number.

  “We have identified and talked to the owner of the shop where the knife that was used to kill Papadakos was sold. He is certain it is the same knife that was purchased by a man shortly after this ship docked. He remembers the man spoke English, was neither tall nor short. He wore sunglasses and a tourist-type shirt. Flowers or leaves or something all over it.”

  “Does he recall the color of the shirt?”

  “Unfortunately, he is color-blind, he told us.”

  “Anything else?” Marco asked. “Did the man who bought the knife speak English with an American accent, or what?”

  “I don’t know, but if the shop owner is like me, all accents sound the same in English. I faxed the photos of all the men in our database to the Mykonos police station, and the shop owner is coming in to study them and, hopefully, recognize one.”

  Marco cleared his throat. “May I make a suggestion?”

  Chief Letsos tapped a pencil against the edge of his desk and paused a second before saying, “Go ahead.”

  “There is a woman on the ship—Lettie Osgood—who was on the scene yesterday and who walked up and down the streets on both ends of that alley yesterday, moments after the murder. In fact it was she who first recognized that it was Papadakos. This woman has an unusually good, what they call photographic, memory. If you will talk to her, she will probably be able to tell you everyone who was in the area.”

  “Osgood?” Letsos frowned and leaned so far forward his wheeled chair zipped backward. He caught himself by grabbing the lip of the desk as his chair hurtled out from under him. He pulled the chair forward by its arms and reseated himself. “Is this the wife of our prime suspect in the murder of George Gaskill?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Can we expect her to tell us the truth?”

  “You will have to ask her.”

  Letsos tossed the pencil he’d been playing with across his desk. It bounced off the phone. “Yes. Well, our best bet is still the shop owner who sold that knife. Hopefully he’ll recognize either the man or his shirt.”