Markos regarded me skeptically. “I’m sorry to disagree, but if, as your English saying goes, a picture is worth a million words—”
“A thousand.”
“Very well, a thousand—then nine hundred and ninety-nine of them say you are lying.”
“Prove it,” I said, setting my glass down with a clink.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You say my pictures show me with Mr. Devos; I say I’ll have to see it to believe it. So show me.”
Markos hesitated only a moment. “All right. Let’s go.” He pushed back his chair and stood up, then fumbled in his wallet for the money to cover my drink.
“Never mind,” I said. “I can have it charged to my stateroom.”
“No, I insist.” He’d found what he needed, and tossed a few coins onto the table, then took me by the elbow and practically frog-marched me to the photography shop on Europa Deck. Ignoring the “closed” sign, he opened the door, switched on the light, and pushed me inside, then closed the door behind us. I looked around, and found myself in a tiny stock room with a metal desk bolted to the floor in one rear corner. Shelves held cameras and supplies—film, flashbulbs, and batteries—while open bins were stuffed with fat envelopes of developed photos waiting to be picked up by passengers. A door emblazoned with signs reading “DO NOT OPEN” in several languages obviously led to the darkroom. Markos pulled open one of the desk drawers and removed an envelope of photos, one that had clearly been set apart from the others. He pulled the photographs from the envelope and began flipping through them. I recognized my photos at once: the massive cathedral of Florence, the Ponte Vecchio, Michelangelo’s David, Pisa’s Field of Miracles with its Leaning Tower—
The Leaning Tower. Markos slapped one of the photos down on the desk, but I knew even without looking what I would see. Still, I was taken aback by the scene captured in that glossy three-and-a-half-inch square. There I stood in front of the famous bell tower, turned slightly to my right with the toes of my left foot pointed toward the camera just as I’d been taught as a twelve-year-old at charm school, smiling at Maggie in eager anticipation of mailing the photo to Gene. And there beside me was Konstantin Devos, scowling slightly at the camera as if he resented my turning away from him even for the short time it took for my aunt to take the photo.
“I remember now,” I said slowly. “He walked past just as Maggie snapped the photo. She was rather annoyed about it, and insisted on taking another shot. See? There it is—the very next picture. In fact, if you’ll notice, Mr. Devos isn’t in any of the others, which ought to be proof enough that he and I weren’t—”
Suddenly I remembered something Markos had said earlier, something that hadn’t made sense at the time. “What did you mean, up there on the Promenade Deck?” I asked, my eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Something about trying to see me safe?”
“Nothing, really,” Markos said in an off-hand manner that didn’t fool me for a moment. “The shock of Miss Duprée’s death, you know—I was just, what do you say, running off at the mouth. Saying whatever came into my head.”
Somehow I doubted Markos had ever said a thoughtless word in his life. “You’re not really a ship’s photographer, are you?”
“Of course I am!” exclaimed Markos, the picture of maligned innocence. He waved one hand in a gesture that took in all the minutiae of photography that surrounded us. “What else would I be doing here?”
“Oh, I know you’ve been making a nuisance of yourself snapping photos of unsuspecting passengers every time we turn around. But that’s not really who you are, is it?”
“Isn’t it?” he challenged. “Who do you think I am, then?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed, regarding him speculatively. “Are you a policeman? A detective, I mean?”
“No!” he said so indignantly that I was forced to concede the point.
“Interpol, maybe?”
“Good God, no! Where do you get these ideas?”
“Whoever you are,” I continued doggedly, “you think something fishy is going on—something illegal, I mean,” I amended quickly, lest he claim ignorance of American colloquialisms in order to avoid questions he didn’t care to answer, “—and you think I’m involved in it.”
“On the contrary, Miss Fletcher,” he said, flipping idly through the photos, “I know you are involved in it, intentionally or not.”
“But how can I be, when I don’t even know—” I broke off as the significance of his words dawned. “You did believe there was someone in my cabin earlier today, after all!”
Markos nodded. “I thought it quite possible.”
Any gratification I might have felt was short-lived. “You might have told me so, instead of treating me like a hysterical ninny who was scared of her own shadow!”
“If I did that, Miss Fletcher, I am extremely sorry. I did not want to give you more of a fright than you had already had,” he said, gazing at me with such a mournful expression in his dark eyes that I felt I ought to be begging his pardon, instead of the other way around.
I ruthlessly squashed the feeling. “If I’m in some kind of danger, don’t you think I have a right to know?”
Markos hesitated, obviously choosing his next words with care. “I don’t know that you are in any sort of personal danger, Miss Fletcher.”
“Of course not,” I said sweetly. “And Sylvia Duprée just decided to practice her high-dive off the end of the ship.”
“We don’t know that Miss Duprée’s death has anything to do with—with this other thing.”
“We don’t know that it doesn’t, either. Anyway, ‘knowledge is power,’ isn’t it?”
He sighed. “In this case, Miss Fletcher, knowledge might well be fatal. In other words, the less you know about this business, the better.” I was still struggling to grasp this observation when he shocked me with another, less frightening, perhaps, but no less disturbing, albeit on a personal level. “Tomorrow morning we will dock at Mykonos. I would be very honored if you will allow me to show you something of my homeland.”
I looked up at him, and studied his face. There was no hint of suspicion or mockery, just the admiring gaze of a man interested in a woman, which looks the same all over the world. I realized I was holding my breath, and forced myself to exhale slowly and evenly.
“All right,” I said. “I would like that very much.”
It was with a somewhat lighter heart that I returned to my stateroom. Sylvia Duprée was still dead, it was true, but her death might well have been an accident that had nothing to do with Devos at all; certainly it had nothing to do with me, although I did feel sorry for her, and for Mr. Grimes, left all alone in his luxurious suite. Surely if there were anything suspicious about it, Markos (who, I was firmly convinced, was more than a ship’s photographer, however much he might try to deny it) wouldn’t choose such a time to go haring off to a romantic Greek island with a girl. And if some instinct suggested that that was exactly why he’d wanted to keep a close eye on me, well, he was the one who would have egg on his face when he realized I proved to be nothing but an innocent bystander, just as I’d insisted all along.
After exchanging my pink dress for my nightgown, I crawled into bed, sat up against the pillows, and looked through the photos I’d taken in Florence. Markos had surrendered them to me as proof that I was no longer under suspicion, and had even insisted on paying for their development himself by way of apology. I smiled as I came to a photo Paul had taken of Maggie and me standing in front of the Leaning Tower. In the background over my aunt’s shoulder, a young man, probably a college student on spring break, stretched out his hands while a companion took his picture; the end result, I deduced, would make it appear that he was trying to push the tower back to an upright position. Meanwhile, over my own shoulder—
I stretched out a hand to switch on the nightstand lamp for a closer look. Yes, in the left middle ground behind me was Konstantin Devos. He was turned slightly away from the camera, but I recogn
ized him by the same shirt he’d been wearing in the other photo, the one he’d walked into. In this shot, he appeared to be shaking hands with another man. No, on closer inspection he wasn’t shaking the man’s hand, but giving him—or perhaps receiving from him—a rectangular box slightly larger than the shoe boxes Sylvia and I had brought back from Rome.
Markos might claim that I was better off remaining in ignorance, but I suspected he would not believe the same rule applied to himself. Resolving to show him the photo in the morning during our outing on Mykonos, I tucked it into my bag and turned off the lights.
The events of what was supposed to have been a relaxing day at sea had taken their toll, and I collapsed onto the pillow, exhausted and ready to allow sleep to claim me. But as darkness enveloped the cabin, all the horror of Sylvia Duprée’s death came rushing back to my mind, and it was a long time before I finally fell into a restless sleep, to dream of tanned masculine hands shoving me over the ship’s railing into Homer’s wine-dark sea.
Chapter 10
Kiss me, and be quiet.
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU,
A Summary of Lord Lyttelton’s Advice
I woke abruptly to find myself safe in my own stateroom, with brilliant sunlight spilling through the small gap between the curtains. The ship’s engines were silent, and I realized we were no longer moving. The nightmares of the previous night had all been banished by the brilliant light of day, and we had arrived at the Greek island of Mykonos. I threw back the covers, hurried to the porthole, and flung back the curtain. The water was as blue as ever, while on land, a cluster of whitewashed buildings hugged the shoreline, blinding in the sun. To their right, half a dozen stout thatch-roofed windmills stretched bare spokes against the sky—the famous windmills of Mykonos. Farther inland, a few widely spaced buildings straggled up the hill, their square shapes and whitewashed walls giving them the appearance of a handful of dice rolled by a giant hand.
“Zeus’s, I suppose,” I told Pedro as I turned back into the room and pulled a blue and white seersucker sundress from its hanger in the closet. “After all, this is his territory.”
Fraternization between crew and passengers, although not expressly forbidden, was not encouraged—at least not beyond the crewmen’s availability as extra dance partners—so Markos and I had agreed not to meet on the ship; instead, he had promised to wait for me ashore. He proved to be as good as his word, standing at the foot of the gangplank casually dressed in dun-colored trousers and a white cotton sport shirt that made the most of his bronzed skin and dark hair.
“Good morning,” he called cheerfully. “I hope you slept well.”
I shuddered at the wisps of nightmare that lingered in my mind. “About as well as can be expected.” I glanced back at the ship, which rivaled the white buildings in its brilliance. It was hard to believe that somewhere in a cool, dark hold deep within the ship, lay Sylvia’s body. Mykonos was too small to boast an airport, so the body would remain aboard until we reached Istanbul. Or so the rumors at breakfast had said. It was amazing how quickly word got around in the close confines of the ship.
“Don’t think about it,” Markos said, reading my thoughts with very little difficulty. “There’s nothing you can do, so at least for today, put it out of your mind and enjoy your visit to Mykonos.”
I gave him a feeble smile. “Words to live by,” I said, although privately I thought they were probably easier to say than to do.
“I suppose you want to see the windmills first,” he said. “Everyone does.”
I agreed to this plan, and allowed him to lead the way. We passed along the town’s waterfront, and then through a maze of narrow flagstone-paved streets flanked with whitewashed walls that blocked any hint of a breeze. I took off my wide-brimmed hat and fanned my face with it for a moment before plunking it back on my head.
“Someone could get lost here and never be seen again,” I said, puffing slightly from the climb as we moved inland.
“That was the idea, at least so I have been told,” Markos said. He took my hand to steer me through a bottleneck formed by a narrow staircase taking up one side of the street and a host of tourists heading downhill toward the sea from the other direction. Once the obstacle was cleared, he made no move to release my hand, and I didn’t push the issue.
“I suppose the residents want tourists to get lost here until they’ve spent all their money,” I remarked, pausing to glance through a wide storefront window at the offerings within. The shop signs were literally Greek to me; although I recognized certain letters from the fraternity houses at my alma mater, connecting them into recognizable words was beyond me.
“Very likely,” Markos agreed. “But these buildings are much older than the tourist trade. It is said they are built that way to discourage invaders. Not that it has always been successful,” he added.
At last the maze decanted us onto the western side of the island and the hillside where the windmills stood sentry. Now that we were no longer surrounded by the suffocating walls, the stiff sea breeze tugged at my hat, making it easy to see why this particular location had been chosen for harnessing the power of the wind.
“Lovely!” I fished my camera from my straw bag and trained its viewfinder on the scene. “What do they do, exactly?”
“These days, they pose for tourists’ photos,” Markos said, grinning broadly. “Before that, they ground wheat and barley. There were once many more of them on the island, but only about a dozen remain—half of them here on this one spot.”
“I’ve never thought of Greece having windmills,” I confessed. “I’d always thought they were a Dutch thing.”
“These happen to be Venetian.”
“Okay, now I’m really confused,” I said. “I thought Venice was all about canals.”
“Oh, they are, as you will see at the end of the cruise, but Mykonos was conquered by the Venetians in the Middle Ages. Venice was the gateway between Europe and Asia in those days, and Mykonos was a great trade center. The Venetians set up windmills in the sixteenth century to use the sea wind in order to keep their ships supplied with—” Here his excellent English failed him. “What do you call it, the dry bread sailors used to eat?”
What a naval boyfriend hadn’t taught me about sailing, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner had. “Hardtack,” I said.
“Yes, that is it. Hardtack,” he echoed, as if committing the term to memory. He might have saved himself the trouble, as it was unlikely to come up in conversation again.
As we turned away from the windmills, Markos pointed toward a small spit of land just north of where we stood. Here the ubiquitous whitewashed shops were built right up against the sea, with their gaily colored balconies hanging out over the water.
“This section is called Little Venice,” he said.
I cocked a speculative eyebrow at him. “The conquering Venetians again?”
He shook his head. “No, these are newer—built in the eighteenth century, when Mykonos was part of the Ottoman Empire. Most are restaurants or nightclubs now, but they were originally fisherman’s cottages—although the fact that they have cellar doors opening directly over the sea suggests that fish were not the only thing being caught.”
“Pirates, you mean?” I exclaimed delightedly.
“Oh, yes. The Greeks invented piracy thousands of years before Long John Silver ever stumped about the deck on his peg leg.”
“Where did you learn your English?” I demanded, not for the first time.
He merely laughed. “Come, there is something I wish to show you.”
He led the way to a paved square dominated by the bust of a woman at its center.
“Robin Fletcher, I should like you to meet Kyria Manto Mavrogenous.” He gave the statue an exaggerated bow, and I followed suit with my best charm school curtsey. “Kyria Mavrogenous is a great heroine in Greece. She was a wealthy heiress who spent her entire fortune to free her country—and mine—from the Turks, even selling her jewelry to outfit a fleet
of battleships. Sadly, she died in poverty, but she is much revered today, as you can see. The English poet, Lord Byron, is also highly esteemed as a hero of the Greek cause.”
Lord Byron was an old acquaintance from my college days. “He was highly esteemed by all the English ladies of his day, too,” I told him. “Especially Lady Caroline Lamb, who called him ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know.’ Of course, that didn’t stop her from having a passionate affair with him, or being obsessed with him for the rest of her life, so that criticism should be taken with a very large grain of salt.”
“Unless she found dangerous men attractive,” Markos pointed out, giving me a speculative look. “I understand some women do.”
My hackles rose. “If you still think there’s something going on between me and Devos—”
“No, no,” he assured me hastily. “I was quite wrong in that regard, I freely admit it. No, you seem to be the type who would prefer a safe man to a dangerous one.”
I nodded emphatically. “Exactly!”
“But this, too, may not be a good thing. Sometimes what appears to be safety is actually stagnation.”
My eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Have you been talking to my aunt?”
“No,” he said, laughing. “Should I?”
“No.” Impatient to change a subject that had become uncomfortably personal, I asked a bit too eagerly, “What should we see next?”
“Not what; who. There is someone I want you to meet.”
We plunged back into the labyrinthine white-walled streets—whether they were the same ones we’d passed through before, or entirely different ones, I couldn’t tell—and at last Markos stopped to open a tiny gate at the foot of a narrow whitewashed stone staircase climbing up the outside of the building.
“Up here,” he said, pressing himself against the wall in order to let me pass. “But watch your step; the stairs are a bit uneven. We’ve tried to persuade her to move to a ground-level flat, but she won’t be budged.”
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