Alix regretted that she hadn’t gotten up even earlier for a solitary sunrise dip. If there was another chance for one she’d take it. The best she could do at the moment was to sit on the edge and dangle her rubber-sandaled feet for a quick dip in the cool, velvety sea. Delicious, but she’d barely gotten her toes wet when the Hermes came sliding around the starboard side, its gentle putt-putt-putt-putt sounding more like a neighbor’s idling lawn mower than a fearsomely powerful cigarette boat. And, in fact, it didn’t look like her idea of a cigarette boat: Where was the spear-point bow, the gleaming, bullet-shaped hull? This little stub-nosed craft seemed more like the kind of weekender you saw by the dozens at any marina, and at first she was disappointed.
But the more of it that came into view, the more impressed she was. She realized now that she’d never seen anything like it. It was both lower slung and more massive than she’d thought at first, and its bulk gave it an aura of power that the skinnier cigarette boats didn’t have; at the same time, there was something about it that made her think of some sinewy beast—a leopard, a cheetah—relaxed for the moment but full of impending menace and latent speed. It was like some improbable prop for a sci-fi movie. Indeed, it was the kind of machine in which you might expect to find James Bond at the wheel.
Instead, of course, it was Yiorgos, looking more than ever like Özbek, the Turkish Giant, in a bursting white T-shirt that outlined every swelling muscle like a diagram in an anatomy book. He was an amiable, welcoming giant, though, reaching out one bulging-biceped arm to help her hop aboard. He gestured her into the front passenger seat and slowly started up. There were other yachts, small and large, anchored nearby, so the lazy putt-putt-ing continued as he wove through them. The windshield had been folded down, so the movement created a pleasant breeze on her face. She ran her hand along the smooth ebony of the instrument console and over the convex faces of the dials.
“This looks so familiar.…”
“You have been in such a boat before?” Yiorgos asked.
“No, or at least I don’t think so. I must have seen a picture of it.”
“Ever drive a Lancia?”
“The car, you mean? Yes, a Lancia Delta S4. Why?”
Yiorgos threw back his head and laughed, the deep, rolling har, har, har that would have been expected from him. “You don’t mean the S4, I think. I think maybe you mean the nice little Delta hatchback. The Delta S4 is a famous racing car, har, har, har.”
“That’s the one I mean,” Alix said, and then, just for the fun of rubbing it in, “the 1800-cubic-centimeter, 560-horsepower, turbocharged model that won at San Remo, Monte Carlo, Lombard—”
Yiorgos’s mouth was open. His eyebrows had lifted halfway to his hairline, and it took him a moment to find words. “You are kidding me. You are… you are a race car driver?”
“No,” she said, laughing, “but I did drive an S4. More than once. On the Amalfi Coast.”
It had been when she was in Italy studying with Fabrizio Santullo, she explained. Santullo, a stern critic and a demanding, no-excuses teacher in the workshop, had been a kindly man once he got out of it, and after a while he had fallen into the habit of inviting her to his summer house in Ravello for the weekend. His son Gian-Carlo had raced as an amateur for a few years and had been pleased when she’d expressed interest in the amazing collection of six racing cars that he maintained. He had given her a few lessons in several of them, including the Lancia S4 and the even more spectacular Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560. She had spent many wonderful hours cruising down the glorious Amalfi coastline just after sunup, before the traffic began to build.
Yiorgos gave her a lustrous smile. “Ah, so romantic: the Amalfi Coast at dawn, the Lamborghinis, the Lancias, the handsome Gian-Carlo.”
Alix smiled thinking of the balding, rotund, five-foot-five, forty-nine-year-old, contentedly married father of five they were talking about. “Oh, yes, very romantic,” she said. “But why are we talking about this? Why did you ask?”
“Because this is a Lancia,” he said, patting the console. “That is why the controls, the…” He couldn’t come up with the word for dials, so he made a spinning motion with his finger. “… Why they look to you familiar.”
“Lancia makes boats? I thought they only made cars.”
“Only this one, and only for two years they made it. A wonderful boat, it can skim over the water like a jet plane, but it was too much money for people to buy.”
They had reached open water now, but rather than speed up, Yiorgos slowed to a full stop, so they remained there, bobbing and gently putt-putting. “Would you like to have the wheel?”
“Really?”
“If you can drive the S4, you can drive this. It is the same thing, almost.”
“I’d love to—thank you!”
They switched seats. Excitedly, Alix scanned the panel. “I don’t know what some of the dials mean.”
“I will watch the dials.”
She put her hand on the double-levered throttle. “And this is new to me. This is the same as a gear shift lever?”
“Sure. You want to go forward, you push forward this part, that’s all.”
“And what else do I do?”
He shrugged. “Nothing else. You turn the wheel like a car to go where you want to go.”
“And where do we want to go?”
“Straight ahead, up the coast. Don’t worry, I tell you when we get there.”
“Push the throttle forward…,” she murmured to herself, excited but also a little nervous.
Yiorgos made an encouraging go-ahead gesture. “That’s all. Push, push.”
She pushed.
VrroooOOOOAAAHHHMMM!
Off flew her visor. Back jerked her head. For a split second her hair was snapping at her eyes, and then it was streaming out behind her. She was sure she could feel her cheeks rippling, the way they do in those videos of astronauts hitting six Gs in the training centrifuge. The ride was smooth for a few seconds, but then began bumping wildly, bouncing her in her seat. The bow rose in front of her, higher than she thought possible without upending the boat. She had to peer around the side to see where she was going. All of this in a space of five seconds. She pulled back on the throttle. The boat slowed. The bow flopped back down into the water with a splat.
“Wow,” she said, and she knew she was bug-eyed. “Yikes. Oh my God, that is really something.”
Yiorgos was laughing. “Maybe not push so hard next time.”
“You know, I think you might be right,” she said, easing the lever forward. This time the buildup was lengthier, but in sixty seconds they were back up at the same earsplitting, kidney-jolting, utterly thrilling speed. Alix simply gave herself up to the sheer joy of it, taking the marvelous craft in grand, sweeping curves so great and exact that she could see their own wake running parallel alongside the boat but going the other way. Lost in sensation, she was unaware of Yiorgos’s trying to get her attention until he tapped her on the shoulder. She’d been laughing without realizing it, but the look on his face put an end to that. She eased back on the throttle.
“What is it?” she asked when the racketing had died down enough for her to be heard. “What’s the matter?”
He put a finger to his lips and she saw that he had his cell phone pressed to his ear. He said a few curt words in Greek, listened for a while, added another brief phrase or two, closed the phone and then opened it a moment later, hit another button, and placed it to his ear again.
“What is it, Yiorgos? Is something wrong?”
He made another shushing gesture and indicated that she should set the boat to idling again. While it putt-putt-ed away, he spoke into the phone at some length. His clipped, authoritative sentences didn’t sound to her as if they were part of a two-way conversation. He was issuing orders.
When he was done, he pocketed the phone. “I drive now.”
Once they had exchanged seats and he’d gotten the boat up to a moderate speed, he spoke. “They find Diony
sodaurus. Near Agia Pelagia. Other side of Heraklion, a few kilometers.”
She didn’t understand. “Donny isn’t on the yacht? I mean, I know Mr. Papadakis fired him, but I thought he would be getting off in Corfu.”
He glanced at her. “Who tells you this information?”
“Well, people are talking about it,” she said, afraid of causing difficulties for Gaby.
He nodded. “This is true, yes, but Dionysodaurus, he didn’t want to wait until Corfu.”
Donny had not appeared at the early staff breakfast that morning, he told her, and when looked for he couldn’t be found. On a hunch, Yiorgos had checked the “petty cash” box, 3000 euros kept for buying food and supplies at village shops and markets that didn’t take credit cards. All of the paper money, approximately 2,700 euros, was gone. A more thorough search had made it clear that Donny was also gone.
“But the Artemis must be two miles from shore,” Alix said. “How could he—oh, of course, he was a swimmer; he told me he’d been, what was it, the swimming champion of the Cyclades. He must have—”
“Of the Cyclades?” Yiorgos snorted. “He was second-place winner of his village, Karavostassis.” He sighed. “Not good enough, it looks like.”
It took a moment for her to grasp his meaning. “He’s dead? They found him dead?”
They had indeed. When the Philomena, an ancient shrimp trawler out of the fishing village of Agia Pelagia, returning at dawn from a nighttime drag, had winched in a heavy, promisingly bulging net and loosened its pursed mouth to let the contents flow into the sluicing box, what slithered down seemed at first to be no more than the beautiful, shining, gray-brown rain of shrimp they’d expected. But as they hosed the creatures down into the refrigerated hold, they found something that no man among them had ever encountered before.
Among the thousands of crawling, ten-legged Steiracrangon orientalis was a single, two-legged representative of the phylum Chordata, subphylum Vertebrata, class Mammalia, order Primates, family Hominidae, genus Homo.
In a word, Donny, much the worse for wear after spending a few hours among the hungry crustaceans.
There was little doubt as to his identity. He had personal identification in his wallet, he was wearing a shirt with the logo Artemis woven into it—and in a plastic bag inside a travel pouch attached to his belt was a thick wad of euros, as yet uncounted.
Final confirmation came as Yiorgos finished his explanation. His cell phone buzzed gently, and when he opened it he took a long look. “They took a photograph,” he said. “It is him for sure.”
Alix put out her hand. “May I see?”
Yiorgos shook his head. “Not good to look at. The shrimp, the crabs…” He ended with a grimace.
“Do they know what happened to him? I mean, he just drowned? There wasn’t any…?”
“That is what we must find out. The Agia Pelagia police—it was they who called—they find no signs of foul play, no injuries but the… the nibbling of his flesh. They believe he drowns while trying to swim to Heraklion in the night, and the current takes him in that direction. The current here, it flows from east to west, so it may be so. We will see.”
“You think it might not be?”
He shrugged. “Dionysodaurus, for him it was easy to make enemies. And these local policemen, they are not trained to look into such things. Already I have notified the Hellenic Police, the national police, to take charge. They will be here in an hour. Until then, I will take charge myself.”
“But I thought you weren’t with them anymore.”
“No, I am a lieutenant colonel. Only for a month I take leave to help because my wife, she asks to make a family favor. You see, she is the cousin of the husband of Panos’s Aunt Eleni’s nephew’s wife’s brother Kostas. Panos, you see, he fires his old security chief, his own cousin, for various… well, it makes no difference. I am here for one month, no more. If he picks a new chief before one month, I am through. The sooner the better,” he muttered as an afterthought. “There, that is Agia Pelagia.”
They were approaching a terraced village rising from a small, blue-green bay. There was a sandy beach onto which four midsize fishing vessels had been pulled up. Around one of them a crowd milled, a couple of uniformed policemen among them.
“The Philomena, I think,” Yiorgos said, turning the Hermes toward it.
“What do you want me to do?” Alix asked. “Can I help?”
“No,” he said bluntly. “A police car will drive you back to the marina in Heraklion. The launch from the yacht will come for you. It has been arranged.”
She very nearly objected, much preferring to be there for whatever was going to happen. On the other hand, whatever was going to happen was going to happen in Greek, so she wouldn’t have gotten much out of it anyway. “Thank you,” she said submissively.
20
Ted had spent the early part of the morning exploring the yacht and had come upon Lorenzo Bolzano, Emil Varga, and Mirko Koslecki, the Man Without a Country, relaxing in a grouping of armchairs in the Al Fresco lounge, an informal, open-air room on the forward part of the main deck, which was overhung by the half-length bridge deck and thus shielded from the sun. He wasn’t surprised to find them there. All three were pallid men who looked as if they hadn’t been caught out in the sun in years. The mysterious Mirko in particular gave off distinctly Dracula-like emanations.
They were being served coffee. Ted ordered some for himself and joined them without being invited, and a few minutes later along came Panos and Edward Reed, and they sat down too. Ted was pleased. The more of them he had to talk with, the better.
“Panos,” he said at a break in the meandering small talk, “Aunt Saskia asked me to tell you how pleased she was with the returns on that Turner you sold recently, and the Pollock before that.”
“Thank you, my friend Rollie.” Panos smiled, Buddha-like, his hands folded on his belly, and turned to the others. “We got a good price on the Pollock, didn’t we? Didn’t I said we would?”
“Very nice,” said Lorenzo. Mirko mumbled his agreement, but Emil shook his head ruefully. “I knew the Pollock would do well, but you, you old scoundrel, you wouldn’t sell me a single share, would you?”
“Don’t blame me, Emil. Too late, you waited for. Already, it was one hundred percent subscribed.” He spread his hands in mocking apology. “I can’t sell more than a hundred percent of something, can I?”
The hell you can’t, Ted thought. “Panos, my aunt was wondering if you expect to have any other pieces available for similar investment in the near future.”
The others showed interest as well, but for whatever reason, Panos wasn’t biting. He clucked his disapproval. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, such talk. Fractional investments,” he said contemptuously. “Why we are here? We are here for to relax among our own kind and to live with the great art that is on the walls for a few days. Let us hear no more about ‘investments.’ Pah.”
“Not until the auction, at any rate,” a smiling Edward amended.
That brought a great gust of laughter from Panos, who clapped Edward good-humoredly on the forearm. “Yes, for that we make an exception.” He hauled himself to his feet. “Gentlemen, things to do,” he said and went on his way toward the stern. “Enjoy yourselves. Anything you want, ask.”
Ted got up and followed. “Panos, there’s something else I want to talk to you about: the Manet.”
Panos stopped and turned with a scowl of sharpened interest. “You know something?”
“No, what would I know? I haven’t even seen it. But I’d like to.”
Panos sagged a little. “It’s wrecked. I put it away. I can’t stand anymore to look at the damn thing.” He began walking again.
Ted stayed where he was. “I was thinking I might make you an offer on it.”
Panos had gone only a few steps. He stopped in his tracks and came back. Ted expected to be asked why he would want to buy a ruinously damaged painting, and he had a studiously prepared rationale ready
and waiting, but he didn’t need it; Panos got right down to brass tacks.
“How much?”
“Well, I don’t know; I haven’t seen it.”
“The estimate was, it would go for ten million. At least ten million. A good chance for fifteen.”
Ted smiled. “Well, it sure as hell isn’t going to go for that now, is it? I was thinking maybe, oh, five million, if I like the looks of it. It’d save you a lot of worry and expense and time before you could even think of putting it up for sale. And you know what they say: a bird in the hand…”
Panos responded with a hoarse laugh. “Five million euros? Forget it.”
“Five million dollars.”
“You’re insulting me.”
“Maybe as much as seven or so. It depends. Let’s have a look.”
“You want it for Countess Saskia?”
“No, for myself. My aunt has nothing to do with this.”
Panos peered at him. “What for do you want it? You ain’t a collector.”
“No, but I am a dealer… of sorts.” He glanced around, as if to make sure nobody could overhear them, then leaned closer. “Panos, let me be frank. I have certain… clients… in Asia and the Middle East, who would love to own a Manet.”
“A Manet with a big rip down the middle?”
“No, of course not. I’d have it repaired before offering it. I have a first-rate restorer, the best in the world, in my opinion, with whom I work from time to time.”
A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) Page 18
