Death of an Aegean Queen (7 page)

Disembarking was a computerized affair. We had to show them the plastic boarding card they had given to each of us yesterday in Piraeus. The card would then flash our photo, name, stateroom, age, weight, and bra size up on a screen for all to see. To get back on the ship, we had to show the card again. It had made me nervous that they required us to surrender our passports to the purser before we sailed, but Marco explained it was safer than letting us hold onto them. “On a cruise like this,” he told me, “you can be certain at least ten people will lose their passports. Some will drop them overboard accidentally, some will leave theirs on an island and not realize it until the ship has left port, and someone will threaten to sue the cruise line if the ship does not wait for them to go back to shore and search the whole island. It would be chaos.”

When he put it like that, I could see it was purely for our own safety. After all, what would a cruise line do with my passport? Sell my picture? Sell my passport number? I’d already surrendered those on several other documents. With our passports all safely tucked away in the ship’s vault, our boarding cards became our passport to everything.

The line to disembark snaked around from the exit door across the foyer and down one hall. Marco, Ollie, Lettie, and I stood behind two girls I recognized as dancers in last night’s show. They were also, I thought, the same two girls I’d run into on the promenade deck at 3 a.m. The shorter of the two, a perky girl with dark, curly hair, chattered away in Greek-accented English. The other girl answered her in a pure middle-America drawl. Ohio or Pennsylvania, I’d have guessed.

This second girl was beautiful in the sexy, full-lipped way that men seem to love. Long auburn curls, high cheekbones, and dimples. She turned toward us, looking back over our heads to the line of people behind us. “God, this is taking forever,” she said. “By the time all these people get off, it’ll be time to get back on.”

“Forgive me,” I said, “but I’ll bet you and I are from the same part of the world. I’m going by your accent, of course. I’m Dotsy Lamb from Staunton, Virginia.”

“Oh, hi. Brittany Benson,” she answered, her smile broadening as her gaze turned to Marco. “And you’re right. I’m from Pennsylvania originally, but I haven’t been home for years. I work on the ship.”

“I know. We saw your performance last evening. Lovely.”

“Oh no,” the smaller girl said, throwing both hands across her face. “You saw me fall onto the stage, didn’t you? I was trying to forget about that.”

And screwed up the whole circle dance by going the wrong way
, I thought, but what I said was, “You fell beautifully.”

“I’m Sophie Antonakos,” she said, extending her hand. We completed the introductions all around and chatted while the line inched toward the security post. Ollie asked the girls where he might go to see fishermen bringing in their catch, and both agreed he could do that almost anywhere along the shoreline but a little bay south of Mykonos Town, a bay within walking distance, was a good bet.

To Marco, Lettie, and me, the girls strongly recommended we walk to a section of town called Little Venice. “Many nice bars and coffee houses, they have,” Sophie told us.

“And a great place to take pictures,” Brittany added, her eyes twinkling at Marco.

Lettie and I both spotted the man in the yellow-and-red flowered shirt at the same time, because as I was trying to remember why his shirt looked familiar, Lettie said, “There’s that wrong-way man again. The one who was going down the ramp yesterday when everyone else was going up.”

“Oh, right.” As I said it, the man looked back, spun around to a display case on his immediate left, and began studying it intently. That particular case, I had noticed earlier, held another beautiful antiquity. A black-and-gold bull’s head mounted on a wooden block. Raising five children has taught me a thing or two about acting nonchalant and attempting to blend into the scenery. Young boys will jam their hands in their pockets and whistle a nonsense tune, little girls will twirl their hair and look at the ceiling, and grown men will pretend to be interested in whatever is handy. This man, I thought, had seen something—or someone—he’d rather avoid.

When he handed his card to the security man, I slipped around Brittany and Sophie, trying to see his name as his vital statistics flashed up on the screen. It said “Nigel” and something starting with an E. I couldn’t make out the last name.

At the foot of the gangway, the ship’s photographer, a cheery olive-skinned man, was energetically recruiting folks to pose for a disembarking shot against a canvas backdrop of Mykonos, which seemed kind of silly to me because, by simply turning his camera the other way, he could have used the real Mykonos as his background. I pointed this out to Lettie.

Three buses waited in a line, each driver herding people aboard then taking off up the hill as soon as his bus filled. A fourth bus appeared from over the hill, punching through a cloud of the departing bus’s dust, and took its place at the back of the line.

“They really should have put the town closer to the dock,” Lettie said.

Ollie and Marco glanced at each other and grinned.

“Wait up,” Ollie called to two men I didn’t know. The men turned and came toward us. “I want you to meet Mr. Leclercq and Mr. Stone,” he said to us. “These are the guys we played poker with last night. They were kind enough to let us use their suite.” This was the most formal introduction I’d ever heard from Ollie Osgood, and a chill went through me when I realized these three men had been George Gaskill’s sole companions in the two or three hours before his death.

The older man extended his hand to me first, then to the others. “Malcolm Stone,” he said, and Willem Leclercq followed suit. Leclercq slipped off his sunglasses and looked at me with his very blue eyes. He wore a tropical flowered shirt that looked expensive and olive-drab cargo pants.
Bon vivant
, I thought.

As Leclercq shook hands with Marco, he said in a French-sounding accent, “I understand you’ve been helping security to find George Gaskill. Is there any further word? Have they found him yet?”

“No, and at this point, I think they are not going to find him at all. I think Mr. Gaskill is gone . . .” Marco stopped abruptly and squinted into the morning sun.

“Rum business, that,” Malcolm Stone said, shaking his head. No one seemed to have anything else to add.

The four of us started up the hill toward the buses, and right away I realized I’d worn the wrong shoes. My sandals collected gravel, requiring me to stop and shake one foot or the other every few feet. I hoped the whole island wasn’t gravel.

“What did he mean, ‘rum business’?” Lettie scrambled to catch up with Marco and me. “Is he suggesting George was drunk?”

“No, Lettie, it’s a British expression. It means something like ‘bad business,’ I think.”

On the other side of the hill, a beautiful little Greek town, white-washed to a dazzling brightness, hugged a crescent-shaped bay. Colorful boats bobbed at anchor in the sea and dotted the sandy beach. A red-domed church on the opposite hill seemed to be where our bus driver was pointing when he told Marco, “Little Venice, over there.”

* * * * *

Marco and I stopped by the local Hard Rock Café and bought T-shirts for my grandchildren while Ollie and Lettie forged ahead up a narrow, winding street toward Little Venice.

Exiting the Hard Rock, I looked up the hill and spotted Brittany Benson, the dancer, emerging from a shop along a row of white cubes with brightly painted doors. Close behind her, Leclercq and Stone dashed out the same door, obviously calling to her as they went because she turned and stopped. They gestured toward the package Brittany was carrying, a bag roughly the size of a toaster. Brittany shook her head and seemed to clutch the bundle more tightly. I tugged at Marco’s shirt sleeve and pointed.

Leclercq pulled out a wallet and extracted what looked like paper currency, extending it to Brittany. She shook her head. Stone reached toward her package but Brittany backed away, stumbling and righting herself quickly. She walked away, then turned and said something to them. Leclercq, his wallet still in his hand, withdrew another item that looked to me as if it was probably a business card. Brittany shifted her load to one arm and shoved whatever Leclercq had handed her into her shorts pocket.

Bag of T-shirts in hand, we followed Ollie and Lettie’s route up the narrow street but I had to stop near the top because my sandals were full of rocks again. Ahead of us I spotted the photo opportunity of a lifetime. Ollie and Lettie, standing in a gap between two rough whitewashed walls with a swath of blue sky and a strip of bluer water behind them, had just turned to face each other when Ollie put his hands around Lettie’s waist and looked down at her.

I grabbed my camera out of my purse, fumbled for the “on” button, and located them in the little view window in time to catch the look of love on both faces just before their lips touched.

“Christmas gift!” I said to Marco. “If this turns out well, I think a framed eight-by-ten would be about right.” I flipped the camera mode to “playback” and saw the moment again, frozen in time. “Perfect.”

We explored alleys and shops for an hour before my stomach told me it needed lunch. Marco confessed he hadn’t eaten all day and steered me into a small coffeehouse overlooking a bay. The windows on one side of the room stood directly over a wave-lapped cliff that rose straight from the water about a hundred feet below the base of the building. I had a moment of vertigo looking down from one of the windows and suggested we sit at a table a little farther back. If one accidentally fell into the glass and it broke, one’s next stop would be the Aegean Sea. Or the rocks, which would probably hurt even more.

Our waiter spoke no English at all so I left the ordering to Marco, who, as a native to the Mediterranean area, was accustomed to dealing with language problems. Strange instrumental music played softly in the background and, through the windows, a row of five windmills with bare blades and grass roofs lined the crest of a promontory across the bay. What a wonderful place.

About then I noticed Marco and I were the only mixed-gender couple in the room. Mostly in pairs and mostly men except for two women sitting with their backs to a window, they lounged with their coffee and cigarettes, arms slung casually across seat backs.

“This is a gay bar, Marco.”

“On Mykonos, gay bars are the rule and not the exception, Dotsy, and do not stare. It is bad manners.” He conferred with the waiter about our order while I studied the artwork on the walls, recovering from that rebuke.

Our food arrived. Marco had ordered me a sort of fish-kebab with vegetables and rice. One of the skewers held nothing but a longitudinally impaled octopus tentacle, its suction cups lined up in a double row down one side. Sliced up, it tasted okay. While I ate, I considered how to respond to his “bad manners” crack. I wanted him to know I am not a homophobe and I have not recently fallen off the turnip truck. I considered it, but decided to say nothing. Much better to let my wound fester until it erupted in a torrent of green bile.

“I’ve been thinking about what you told me yesterday,” I said, taking a totally different tack, “about antiquities in warehouses and such. What do you know about the illegal market? The smuggling and all?”

Marco lowered his forkful of rice back to his plate. “Quite a lot, actually. The Carabinieri are working with Interpol and with Scotland Yard in England. We have been for several years. The smugglers bring their goods from Turkey, from Crete, from all around the Mediterranean, through Italy on their way to Germany, England, and to America. Through Greece, too, of course, but there are a couple of families in Italy who have a well-organized smuggling syndicate. The looting of Etruscan artifacts in Italy has been big business for a long time, you know.”

“I know,” I said. Marco knew of my interest in Etruscan civilization.

“UNESCO has passed some laws that are making it more difficult for them to get away with it. For a long time, Switzerland allowed no-questions-asked importing and exporting so Geneva was a haven for the international black market. They are cracking down now, but the smugglers are also getting smarter.”

“Are these things that have been actually stolen or are they items that local people have just happened to dig up?”

“Both.” Marco leaned over his plate and tapped his forefinger firmly on the table. “But whether they break into the museum, knock out the guard, and smash open the glass cases or whether they pay a poor farmer in Crete more money than he can make in a month for a vase he has found, it makes no difference. It is stealing our heritage. Our history. And not just from the Italians and the Greeks, no! It is stealing from the world!”