Marco glanced from Lettie to me and blushed.
“I must say, you certainly know how to make an entrance,” Lettie continued. “Like Dudley Doright.”
“Who?”
“Oh I forgot. You probably didn’t have the same cartoons in Italy.”
I butted in because I knew Lettie could go on for hours about Rocky and Bullwinkle and Boris and Natasha. “You didn’t leave the gun in the back of the Mercedes, did you?”
“It is at the Iráklion police station. Bagged and tagged, as they say.” Marco came over to the bed where I lay and touched my forehead, as if he was checking for a fever. “I am going to the purser’s office and return my passport to the safe.”
“Oh. May I go with you?” I had an idea. While I had been analyzing things last night, through an ouzo-induced haze, it had occurred to me George and/or Kathryn Gaskill’s passports might shed some light on whether or not they had truly come on this trip for a simple vacation. I’d also wondered about Nigel Endicott. Where was he from? Was he even American? “I’d like to see where they keep the passports.”
“I doubt they will let either of us go into the safe. The purser will probably take my passport and lock it up for me.”
“Marco, I want to go into the safe. Please. Make up some reason why you and I have to go in there ourselves. Can you please do this for me?”
“Probably not. If they do not want to let me go in, I cannot go in. It is that simple.”
“Can I at least go with you to the purser’s office?”
He turned around, looking for Lettie, but she wasn’t there. She’d slipped out while Marco and I had been talking. “If you will give me a kiss, I will let you go with me.”
He kissed me. It was the longest and best kiss I’d had since Rome.
* * * * *
The purser, the officer in charge of monetary transactions, wasn’t in, and a young assistant was on duty. We were in luck. He sat behind a tall counter, swiveling back and forth on a tall stool as he talked to Marco. Behind him was a small office-like room with file cabinets, a desk, and a computer. By stepping to the right, I could see a polished steel door with a combination lock on the front. It had to be the safe and it looked as if the door might be ajar. Could I be so lucky? From the size of the door, I figured it had to be a walk-in type safe.
“Sorry, sir,” the young man said. “I don’t know anything about the passports. Could you come back when the purser is in?”
Here was Marco’s chance. But would he take it?
“I do not want to walk around with it, because you never know. I might drop it overboard and then where would I be?” Marco glanced quickly at me and winked. “I know how they keep the passports. They put them in a drawer inside the safe. I have been in there. I know.”
“Well, sir, I’m not sure . . .”
“Look. Call your purser on the phone. Tell him it is Captain Marco Quattrocchi. I am a police officer from Florence.” Marco leaned conspiratorially over the counter and lowered his voice to a whisper. “He knows me, and he knows I am helping Chief Letsos with his investigations. The murder investigations.” He flipped his passport open, showing that he was, indeed, Marco Quattrocchi, and slipped his hand inside his jacket as if searching for his police ID.
The young man didn’t wait for Marco to actually pull out any additional identification and didn’t make the suggested call, either. “All right, sir. If you’re sure you know where to put it, go on back. The door’s open.”
Marco rounded the counter and I slipped through with him, attached to his side like a leech. I didn’t look at the attendant or give him a chance to stop me. He could, after all, watch us so we wouldn’t have been able to steal anything. The safe wasn’t really big enough to walk into. Inside were three walls of shiny metal drawers, most with keyholes, some without. The whole floor area was no more than three feet wide and two feet deep. From the counter outside, the attendant could watch us as we worked. On the wall in front of us and about halfway down, I saw two drawers, conveniently labeled Passports A–M and Passports N–Z. Marco pulled the second one open and I did likewise to the first.
I turned to the assistant, who was swiveling rather nervously on his tall stool, and said, “My name is Lamb. I’m just checking something on my own passport.” I fingered through the Gs until I found the two Gaskills, pulled them out, and looked. They were both United States passports, recently issued. The photo of George looked like the man I recalled having dinner with that first night. Both documents bore only one stamp each, indicating they had immigrated into Athens, Greece, on June fifteenth.
The assistant slipped off his perch and came toward me. Marco was pretending he couldn’t find the Qs in the second drawer. “I’m sorry madam, but I must ask you to wait on the other side of the counter.” I guess he figured I’d had enough time to check something on my own passport.
“Oh dear,” I said. “I’m keeping a journal, you see, and I’ve forgotten exactly when I entered and left each country on my tour. It’s so confusing. One day I’m in Germany, and the next day it’s Switzerland. Or is it Hungary? Or Greece?” I laughed. “If I don’t get it straight now, I’ll never be able to sort it out when I get home, because I write an entry in my journal every day and . . .”
He left and returned to his stool.
I found the Es and pulled out Nigel Endicott’s document. The photo showed the man I knew as Nigel. He was, after all, a U.S. citizen because he had a U.S. passport. His had also been issued recently, within the past year, but he had two immigration stamps and one visa stamp. On June fifteenth, Nigel had entered Istanbul, Turkey, an immigration that also required a visa, and on June seventeenth, Athens, Greece.
Marco nudged me with his elbow. “We must go.”
Thanking the young man, and holding up both my hands so he could see I hadn’t swiped anything, I made my exit and headed for the elevator. “Thank you, Marco. That worked perfectly.”
“Did you find out what you wanted to know?”
“I found out Nigel Endicott didn’t come here straight from America. He went to Istanbul first, then here.”
“Very interesting! Who is Nigel Endicott?”
The elevator doors opened and we stepped inside. “Oh, dear. You’re so far behind. We really need to talk.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Shortly after I returned to my room, Sophie dropped by, proudly displaying the cast on her left arm. I showed her my multicolored arms and legs, and she pulled up her pants legs to show me she had as many mustard-yellow patches as I had.
“I thought you were going to buy me lunch,” she said. “I go through all this and I still don’t get lunch!”
We both laughed. I said, “Was Luc Girard still at the hospital when you got out of surgery?”
“Yes. He and the ship’s nurse brought me back.”
I filled Sophie in on the parts of the day she had missed, up to the time when I fell asleep under the tree. “That reminds me. The police may need a formal statement from you. Marco and I both gave them our versions.”
“They’ll have to ask quickly because the ship is getting ready to pull out, and I’m going to the clinic. The nurse is making up a bed for me because she wants to watch me until tomorrow morning. The anesthesia, you know. The hospital let me go sooner than they normally would, because the nurse told them the ship was leaving.” Sophie stared out my window for a minute. “And besides, I don’t want to go to my room, anyway. I don’t know what to say to Brittany.”
“How were things this morning before you left?”
“Strained. Very awkward. Brittany is practically under house arrest. Letsos told her she’d have to have an escort if she left the ship today. And, although we didn’t talk about it, she knows I let you into our room that day.”
“And, if she didn’t leave Gaskill’s watch in her closet herself, she obviously believes I did. The watch, Sophie, is the key to everything. Do you suppose I was the only person who sneaked into your room? Might t
here have been someone else who wanted to throw suspicion on Brittany?”
“Maybe Willem Leclercq? He’s been hanging around with her lately. Perhaps he’s flirting with her as a way of getting into our room.”
“An interesting thought. We have to find out how that watch got into Brittany’s closet because whoever put it there either killed George Gaskill or knows who did. And that includes Brittany herself.”
I walked Sophie to the clinic, aware that she was still woozy from the anesthesia. The nurse I’d last seen in the hospital waiting room took over and said she’d have Sophie’s dinner sent up from the kitchen. Hearing the thunk of gears engaging somewhere deep in the ship, I hurried down to the promenade deck to watch us pull out of the harbor. From the rail, I scanned the horizon, knowing the Palace of Knossos, number two on my list of things I most wanted to see, would have to wait for another time. Maybe. Would I ever be back? Number one on my list, the ruins of Akrotiri on the island of Santorini, was yet to come. It was the 3,500-year-old Minoan town, excavated in the late twentieth century. Buried under volcanic ash in antiquity, it had emerged beautifully preserved, wall frescoes of boys fishing and children boxing still brightly colored. From my reading at home I knew excavators had covered the entire town with a sort of canopy, but I didn’t know if the site was open to the public now. If not, I would miss seeing both of my top two places.
Crewmen on the dock below started to drag the ramp away from our ship and shouted to each other in preparation for dropping the dock lines wrapped around huge cleats on the dock. A man came flying across from the street that ran along the harbor, waving his arms, shouting “Wait! Wait!” Two dockhands called out something to the bridge high above me, and the engine shifted to a deeper rumbling sound.
Malcolm Stone, carrying a large package, dashed up the ramp, yelling, “Don’t close the door!” and leaped across a foot-wide gap from the top of the ramp to the ship. The ship, still moving away due to the inertia, would have been out of jumping range if he’d been a tenth of a second later. From all along the promenade deck, from the dock below and the deck above me came a chorus of “Crazy!” and “Proséxte!” and “Who is that nut?”
* * * * *
The conversation at dinner that evening was revealing, if hardly appetizing. We mostly talked about blood. Lettie, Ollie, Marco, and I joined Kathryn Gaskill and the Zieglers who were already seated. I figured Ernestine Ziegler had discovered Marco was back and had wangled a place for herself and Heather at our table, because their earlier assignment had been elsewhere and our table only seated six comfortably. Tonight we were seven.
Marco brought up the subject. “Kathryn, you said your husband’s blood type was AB positive, didn’t you?”
This, I believe, was Marco’s very first use of a contraction. I could have proposed a toast to this big linguistic step forward but I didn’t want to change the subject.
“Yes. His doctor at home told him that was good because it made him a universal recipient,” Kathryn said. “In other words, he could receive blood from most anyone, but he couldn’t donate it except to another person with AB blood.”
“It’s not quite as simple as that,” Ernestine Ziegler, who I recalled telling us she was a nurse, butted in. Her gaze shifted around the table. When it came back to Marco, her eyelashes fluttered. “Blood has a number of factors other than the A, B, O, and Rhesus factors. Not to mention the fact that it needs to be screened for hepatitis, HIV, and a lot of other things. But you’re right, generally speaking.”
Kathryn looked at Marco, quizzically. “Why do you ask that again?”
“Because,” Marco began, then paused and took a sip of water as if he wasn’t sure how to proceed. “Because I took a small sample of the blood from the deck. I collected it that morning after you and Dotsy called me out there. I took it to our laboratory in Milano yesterday and I asked them to do a DNA test on it. That test takes a while, but the A,B,O test is fast. It only takes a few seconds. They told me immediately the sample I gave them was type AB positive, and only three percent of the population has AB positive blood.”
“Now you know what I knew already.” Kathryn didn’t appear shocked that Marco had surreptitiously collected a blood sample. “I knew it was George’s blood. Didn’t I tell you?”
“Well now, wait a minute. Three percent is three percent. It is not a certainty. It would not hold up in court as proof the blood was George’s. For that you need the DNA.” Marco swept his hand around, taking in most of the dining room. “How many people are here right now? About three or four hundred? So there are probably ten or twelve people in this room with AB positive blood. Not good enough.”
“When the DNA tests come back, they’ll prove it was George’s blood.”
“Don’t you need some of George’s DNA to compare it to?” Ollie asked.
“I am afraid I must confess. I also took a few hairs from George’s brush. The FBI collected George’s toothbrush and hairbrush as well as blood samples from the deck but it will take them a long time to get the results. I have connections so I can get it done faster.
I hope the hairs you pulled from George’s brush were from his hair and not from his hairpiece. I forced myself to keep a straight face as I flashed on an image of a lab worker yelling out, “It’s not even human!” or “This hair is from a woman of Tahitian ancestry.”
“And another thing,” Marco added. “They told me the blood has a high level of a chemical called EDTA. I thought that was strange.”
“That’s a blood thinner. They use it to keep blood from clotting. Don’t you remember the big to-do in the O.J. Simpson case?” This came from Ernestine. “The defense tried to say it meant the blood on the back fence had been planted there from a lab sample.”
Kathryn put her fork down and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “George was taking a blood thinner. There was so much plaque in his coronary arteries, the doctors were worried about a blood clot. That’s why he was scheduled for heart surgery this summer.”
Ernestine Ziegler almost shouted, “If he was scheduled for surgery, why was he on blood thinners? Doctors always take a patient off that stuff, weeks before surgery.”
“No they don’t. Not always.” This came from Heather Ziegler in the form of a tiny croak.
Her mother rounded on her as if she were about to strike. I caught my breath. Ernestine seemed to consult her plate for instructions on how to respond. She patted the tablecloth and shifted a spoon. “When you’ve been a nurse as long as I have, young lady, you’ll know that when a doctor keeps a patient on a blood thinner regimen right up until . . .”
Lettie cut her short with, “Did you know Dotsy got kidnapped and shot at today?” That was brilliant. Nothing short of a bombshell like that would have been sufficient to divert the conversation onto a less contentious path. All heads turned toward me and I, looking pretty unscathed because I hadn’t worn my clavicle brace, launched into a lengthy and, if I do say so myself, entertaining account of my narrow escape from the goat man.
The waiter brought our desserts and coffee.
Should I bring up the watch? I tossed it around in my mind while the waiter corrected the placement of the desserts, giving the lemon tart to Lettie and the baklava to Heather. Kathryn and I hadn’t been told not to talk about it so I decided to go for it, but not actually reveal that it had been found in Brittany’s closet. “The investigators are asking questions about George’s watch. A beautiful gold watch Kathryn said was given to him by a high school class he sponsored when he was a principal.”
“Actually, it was when he was still a teacher. Before he became principal,” Kathryn said.
“Do any of you remember if George was wearing it that first evening after we left Athens?”
Ollie and Marco shook their heads. Ernestine reminded me she and Heather weren’t with us that evening. Lettie, the little human data bank, closed her eyes, licked a blob of lemon tart off her upper lip, and appeared to go into a trance. After several seconds she
said, “I don’t believe he was. At dinner he was wearing a long-sleeve shirt and jacket so a watch could have been hidden by his sleeves. But when he reached to the center of the table for the creamer, I remember, his jacket sleeve crept up and there was no watch on his wrist. Not on his left wrist, anyway.”
This phenomenal display of total recall got wide-eyed stares from everyone at the table, except me and Ollie. We were used to it.
“George was left-handed. He wore his watch on his right arm,” Kathryn said.
* * * * *
Heather Ziegler caught up with Marco and me in the hall outside the dining room. She tugged at his sleeve. “Captain? About what Mother was saying in there about the blood thinners and all.”
“Yes?” Marco said and we both stopped to listen.
“I didn’t say anything at the table because Mother is . . . well I didn’t want to contradict her, you know.” She pulled Marco out of the flow of traffic, people heading for the elevators, and I followed. “You said a large amount of EDTA was found in the blood sample you collected, didn’t you? Well, if it was from receiving EDTA as a blood thinner, it would have been a small amount. A large amount would likely mean it came from a drawn blood sample. EDTA is sometimes used to keep it from clotting in the test tube.”
* * * * *
Marco and I were invited to a summit meeting in the library. I was to be, at least temporarily, admitted to the inner circle of the investigation because I had now acquired combat equity by virtue of being fired upon by a man who was somehow connected to the smuggling business, even if we hadn’t yet figured out how. On our way out to the promenade, Marco told me he’d phoned the Iráklion police station and learned Goatman was now represented by an attorney with known connections to Robert Segal, big-time antiquities smuggler and, incidentally, Brittany’s boyfriend.
Death of an Aegean Queen Page 19
