A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery)

by Elkins, Aaron

  “The reason I ask is that there are only two sailings a day, and most of our guests who were going there were on the nine o’clock—”

  “What? It’s after nine?” Alix hadn’t slept that late in years. She was an early morning lover. On those few occasions when she missed the dawn, her day was never as good as it might have been.

  “It’s nine forty-five, I’m afraid. But there is also a hydrofoil, smaller but much quicker, that leaves at ten thirty.”

  “Oh, I don’t see how I could make that. Wouldn’t I have to take the launch into port, then—”

  “Not at all, we’re already in port. Here in Corfu it’s possible for yachts of our size to berth in the marina.” She pointed to the window, out of which Alix had yet to look this morning. “And there is your ferry, not fifty meters from here.”

  “Thank you, Artemis, I might do it at that,” Alix said without conviction, but after the chief stewardess had left and she’d had some more wonderfully restorative juice (but not so wonderful that she wanted to tackle the coffee or the croissants), she decided it might be a good idea. Remaining on the Artemis all day didn’t hold much appeal, and as for Corfu Town, she’d seen its moderately interesting sights when she’d been here on Uncle Julian’s yacht. But Albania, that would be someplace new. The last time she’d been here it was still the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, reclusive and paranoid, and visitors were not encouraged. Certainly there had been no public ferry from Corfu.

  What the hell, she thought, why not? A quick shower, a sundress and sandals, and she’d be off.

  The Hotel Porto Eda is generally thought to be one of the better hotels in Saranda, which isn’t saying much, but its solidly middling three-star rating, its location only steps from the marina, and its price (forty euros, breakfast included)—good value, but not cheap enough to bring in the backpackers—combine to draw most overnight foreign visitors, of whom there aren’t all that many. A pink building of four balconied stories, with potted palms on the roof and a giant, peeling Tuborg Beer billboard looming over them, it boasts a tidy little lounge area, clean and modern, with faux-leather sofas and armchairs and glass-topped coffee tables, where guests meet other guests or wait for transportation or drink the excellent coffee or tea that is served there.

  At 11:15 a.m. on this particular Friday it held the usual six or eight people having their midmorning coffees. Among them was Gabriela Papadakis, sick to her stomach with tension; opening nights had been child’s play compared to this. She was so stressed she kept forgetting to breathe. And when a friendly male tried to engage her in conversation, his first good look at her manic eyes scared him off before he’d gotten out the first sentence.

  Had they found Panos yet? Could he still be alive? He’d looked as if he were dying, but why hadn’t she made absolutely sure? Emil, damn him, had panicked and his panic had infected her, and they had run.

  The cleanup crew knew better than to enter their stateroom before one p.m., but still.… She had no clear memory of pulling the door closed when she and Emil had left, but surely she must have. Mustn’t she? Anyway, didn’t they close automatically? She couldn’t even remember that. Everything was so muddled. She wished now she’d never gone looking for that safe. Whatever the value of that damned Manet, it wasn’t worth this. Her eyes had been fixed on the hotel’s glass-door entrance for half an hour; she expected to see the police barge in to arrest her at any second. What was taking Emil so long? She couldn’t sit there very much longer without screaming.

  They had arrived in Saranda at 10:45. Emil had openly carried the two paintings, the Monet and the newly found Manet, into the country in a tubular leather map case. There was no interest in them at customs, as he’d promised her there wouldn’t be. (Still, she’d made sure to be well behind him in the exit line.) They’d asked him to open the tube and pull out the rolled-up contents so they could take a desultory look for drugs or weapons, but pictures? Why would the bored Albanian customs officers care about pictures coming into the country? Or going out, for that matter? The inspector had stifled a yawn and motioned him through with a waggle of his fingers.

  Gaby still didn’t understand what he planned to do with Panos’s Déjeuner au Bord Du Lac, and she thought he wasn’t too clear about it himself. She didn’t blame him for this; she had dumped it in his lap only two hours ago. But when he’d said that he planned to try to sell it in addition to the Monet that had already been agreed upon, she’d exploded.

  “Are you crazy? You think these gangsters have brought along an extra few million dollars just in case you happen to bring another painting with you? They’ll kill you for it and keep the money and keep both paintings.”

  “No, they won’t,” he said. “I’m their source for this kind of thing. They’ve done business with me before and they’ll want to do it again. They know they can trust me, and that’s worth more to them than any two paintings. And I trust them. They—”

  “You trust them? You are crazy.”

  “Please, Gaby, I’ll work something out with them. It’ll be all right. Would it kill you to just trust my judgment for once?”

  Just about, but what choice did she have? So now she sat in the lounge, an untouched cup of espresso on the coffee table in front of her and a leather tube worth approximately five million dollars, even at black market rates, clutched in one hand and clamped between her knees for extra assurance. Emil was up in room 204, talking to the buyers. This sort of thing was done in two steps, he’d told her. Making sure they had the money while she remained here, in a separate place, with the paintings, was the first. In the second step, having seen the money, he would come back down to get the paintings and bring them up to exchange for the money. And that was it; there was no third step. With the money in hand they would hop in the car they’d rented, and it was off through Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Zagreb. Nobody in the world would know where they were, and what a thrilling, freeing thought that was. But what was taking him so long?

  “It’s on,” he said, so suddenly and so close that it started her on a hiccupping fit. He’d come up behind her while her attention had been focused on the doors. “Give me the tube, Gaby. We’ll be out of here in twenty minutes.”

  She was so consumed by the hiccups that he had to pry it out of her hands, and even then her fingers wouldn’t let go. “Wait…”

  “Damn it, Gaby—”

  She got her hiccups enough under control to gasp, “They’re… giving us the… two and a half million… for the Monet?”

  “Yes, I just counted it. Now all they need to do is see it.” He tugged harder.

  She held on. “What about the Manet?”

  “They’ll give us five hundred thousand now if they like it and another amount later, to be determined—”

  “So they had an extra half-million euros with them. I told you they would have paid you that for the Monet alone. You idiot—”

  He dug his fingernails—they were well manicured, but on the long side for a man, in her opinion—into her wrist. “You’re making a scene!” he whispered harshly. “There are people here. What’s wrong with you? Everything’s going fine.”

  “I…” Out of the blue, a complete surprise, she was crying. “I don’t know, it’s all so… oh, Emil, what’s wrong with me? I’m sorry, I just want us to get out of here, I just want it to be over.”

  “Well, it never will be if you don’t let go of the damn thing.”

  Her fingers released their grip, and he pulled the tube safely out of her range and sat on the sofa beside her. “You have to stay strong for me now, Gaby. We’re almost there. Wait’ll you see it; it’s beautiful, the money.” He was speaking softly, almost singing the words, and stroking the back of her hand the way one would to calm an hysterical five-year-old. “Sixty beautiful little stacks of five-hundred-euro bills; can you imagine? And it all fits in a duffel bag; can you believe it? And guess what it weighs. Fifty pounds? A hundred? No, just fourteen pounds. Didn’t you think
it would be much more? I thought—”

  Abruptly she snatched back her hand. “Stop babying me; I’m all right. It was a momentary… I don’t know what it was, but it’s over now and you don’t need to worry. It won’t happen again.”

  He gave her hand one more pat as he rose. “There, that’s more like it. That’s my—”

  “I said stop it! Now get the hell back up there and let’s get this over with.”

  He grinned, only a little nervously, leaned over to plant an abstracted kiss on her forehead, and headed for the elevator.

  24

  Watching Albania’s shoreline glide by from a window seat in the fifteen-row, airliner-like interior of the hydrofoil, Alix couldn’t imagine it looking any more unwelcoming in its People’s Republic heyday than it did right now. She’d read the Artemis’s two-page pamphlet guide while waiting for the ship to get going, and it had told her about the “thousands of gun-emplacement pillboxes” she would see on her way to Saranda. So she’d been ready for them. They were, according to the pamphlet, the legacy of Enver Hoxha, the xenophobic Communist leader of the republic for the forty years following World War II.

  Still, she hadn’t been prepared for their astounding density. She’d taken it for granted that “thousands” was hyperbole. It wasn’t. Concrete, beehive-shaped gun emplacements, each with its ominous black opening facing the sea, were lined up along the shore for miles. Sometimes arranged in rows, sometimes in irregular clumps, they might be separated by as much as a hundred feet or as little as ten. Surely, she thought, there were more than enough to hold the entire Albanian army. For twenty solid minutes, she continued to pass them.

  They were deserted and gunless now, but all the same it didn’t give her a good feeling about the country, and Saranda itself didn’t help. Seen from the pier, it seemed to be mostly composed of boxy, 1960s-style apartment buildings in various stages of decline. Nowhere in view was there anything resembling a commercial or historic downtown of interest to a visitor. By the time she’d gotten through customs (a ten-second process), she was wondering what she was going to do all day; there were no return ferries until evening. There were some modern, nice-looking beach resorts visible at the south end of town, but she wasn’t in the mood for beach resorts.

  What she was in the mood for was another chance at the coffee at which she’d so blithely turned up her nose earlier and maybe a little something to go along with it. According to the pamphlet, Albanian coffee was strong and tasty, and the nearest place to the dock where it could be gotten was the kafe in the lobby of the Hotel Porto Eda, where English was spoken, after a fashion, and euros were accepted. That settled it. She didn’t have any Albanian currency, and the only word of Albanian she knew was kafe.

  The Porto Eda was right in front of her as she left the ship, practically on the dock, and she made straight for it. As she pulled open the glass doors, a puff of air from inside carried the welcome scent of coffee to her. Unfortunately, it also blew a speck of something into her eye. Blinking, pressing a hand over the eye, she asked one of the two receptionists at the desk for the ladies’ room and was pointed toward the back of the building, near the elevators. To reach it she had to walk through the café, sensuously inhaling the thick, unmistakable aroma of Turkish coffee, although she was betting they probably called it “Albanian coffee” here, the same way—

  “Alix, is that you?”

  She turned her one functioning eye toward the voice and through the tears saw Gaby sitting there on a white leather sofa.

  “Oh, hi, Gaby, I—”

  Gaby had risen halfway up. “What are you doing here? What’s happened?”

  Alix was confused by the strain in her voice and on her face. “Why, nothing’s happened. I just came in for some coffee. Is something the matter?”

  “No, no, I was just.… It’s just that… no.” She sat back down, looking as though she were restraining herself from saying anything more.

  “Gaby, may I join you? In a minute, though. Give me a chance to rinse something out of my eye first.”

  “Oh, but I’m only going to be here another minute. Emil will be… that is… Sure, I suppose so. If you want.” She seemed to realize the way she sounded and appended a sunny, friendly smile. “Sure,” she said again. “Can I order you something in the meantime?”

  “You bet, please, a cup of Turkish coffee. A double, if they have them.”

  Flushing the speck out of her eye proved difficult, taking a good five minutes, and when she was done the eye was red and stinging, but at least she could keep it open. Lusting for the coffee that she hoped was waiting for her, she used the towel roll to dry off and went to the door. Before it was fully open she knew that something was wrong, but it took her a second to figure out what it was: There was no sound, no clinking of cups, no scraping of utensils, no murmured conversations. She stepped out into the café.

  Gaby was gone; everybody was gone. The coffee Gaby had ordered for her was on the table, fresh and steaming, and half-finished coffees and pastries littered the other tables. The three stools at the bar were empty. The barista had disappeared, as had the clerks behind the reception desk. She was alone in the noiseless lobby, a Twilight Zone moment. A slow chill rolled up between her shoulders and spread out on the back of her neck. She jumped at a rustle behind her and to her right, and when she spun around she saw two armed, blue-uniformed men in black body armor—Albanian policemen; there had been another one on the pier—at the back of the building, near the rear exit. They were facing away from her, closely watching the fire door to the stairwell, their bodies tense.

  Weapons, body armor, and jumpy Albanian cops. Whatever was about to happen, she preferred not to be there when it did. The quickest route to the front entrance was around the corner of the café and through a small atrium that held the elevator. She had barely stepped into the atrium when the massive form of Yiorgos materialized from around the far corner. She had never seen him anything but self-possessed and unruffled, but now he was agitatedly waving his arms and yelling at her. In Greek.

  Startled, she stood rooted to the spot. “Wh—”

  “Dammit, Alix”—This time, surprising her even more, it was Ted doing the materializing, and he looked every bit as upset as Yiorgos.—“didn’t you—”

  He never got to finish the question because that was when the elevator door on Alix’s right whooshed open and all hell commenced breaking loose. Out came two men, one svelte and neatly bearded, wearing a business suit over a tieless white shirt buttoned up to the collar, and the other, bull-necked and swarthy, dressed in hey-look-at-me-I’m-a-gangster mode: tan, mirrored aviator sunglasses and a supple, blatantly expensive, chestnut leather bomber jacket straight from Fendi or Armani. At the same moment, four Albanian cops converged on them, two from around the same corner from which Ted and Yiorgos had come, and two, plus a man in street clothes, from where, she didn’t know. Everybody—Ted, Yiorgos, the good guys, the bad guys—was shouting and gesticulating, and most of the police had their handguns out—old-fashioned snub-nosed revolvers of the kind that American police forces had stopped using decades ago, but still plenty intimidating when they were waving around a foot from your head.

  Smack in the center of all this stood Alix, dumbfounded and frozen, not knowing whether to run or duck or just say her prayers. A policeman reached for her to pull her out of the way, but the leather-jacketed man got there first, catching her neck in the crook of his arm and jerking her up against him so that her body shielded his. Alix struggled, batting at his arm and face, but her back was to him and she couldn’t get enough weight behind her fists to do any harm. And he was strong, as a quick, hard squeeze of her neck between his forearm and his biceps showed, shutting off her air. With his other hand he was brandishing a thick pipe or bar just a few inches from her face. That served to get her attention too, and she stopped struggling. He eased the pressure enough for her to pull in a couple of shallow, strangled breaths.

  Everyone except Ted was st
ill yelling. She caught a glimpse of him off to the side, looking stricken and speaking urgently to Yiorgos, who was busy bawling at the bad guys. Leather-jacket started dragging her backward, toward the hotel entrance. He was screaming louder than anyone. She couldn’t understand a word but from the faces of the police, she had no trouble grasping the point he was making: Keep away or I’ll kill her.

  She knew he could do it too, and easily. It had taken him—what, two seconds?—to completely cut off her air and turn her into a rag doll. She could see that the police knew it too. They had stopped shouting and were now dithering, looking to the plainclothesman for guidance. Ted, standing a little away from the others, began sidling around to one side, but Leather-jacket saw him and squeezed again, harder. Alix had been struggling to breathe as it was—his eye-watering cologne didn’t make it any easier—and little starbursts now exploded behind her eyes. Ted stopped at once, lifting his hands to show he’d gotten the message. The pressure was eased once more. Her knees, which had given way without her realizing it, braced themselves again.

  The other man who had been on the elevator, the man in the suit, had been left behind, and with no nearby body to grab for protection, he was in trouble. Wild-eyed, he reached under his jacket and behind him with one hand, but was stopped cold by the almost simultaneous cocking of four revolver hammers—snick snick snick snick—none of them more than six feet away from him. Meekly he held both hands out well away from his body and one of the cops spun him around and pulled out the gleaming black semiautomatic pistol he’d been after. Then he angrily held it up to show to his fellow cops. He was mad, Alix thought, because the guy had a newer and better weapon than they had. It made her giggle and she realized she was getting muzzy and stupid. Lack of oxygen?

  One of the Albanian cops roughly handcuffed the second man, pinned him by the back of the neck and frog-marched him off. The others slowly began advancing toward Alix and her captor. Leather-jacket, still dragging her backward, speeded up. One of her heels caught in the carpet, momentarily slowing them, and he punished her by tightening his hold again. More stars. Twisting her head to the side allowed her to suck in a little air but made her dizzier, brought her to the brink of blacking out. Something about pressure on the carotid arteries? Her mind seemed to be floating away from her, out of her reach. She wanted to turn her head forward again, preferring gasping to fainting, but it was impossible. She had both hands on his arms now, trying without success to give herself a little more room before she did faint. When he readjusted his grip to keep it tight, his wrist pressed against her cheek. With a huge effort she managed to twist her head the two inches she needed to sink her teeth into his wrist. She felt tendons grind under her teeth and tasted blood. He howled, but rather than loosen his arm he tightened it again, savagely this time, and took a backhanded swat at her with his other hand. When he did he almost lost his hold on what she now realized wasn’t a bar or pipe at all, but a long mailing tube—no, it was made of leather; a map case then?