Death of an Aegean Queen (8 page)

“Hey, you’re preaching to the choir here.” I sat back, ducking his sweeping hand gesture.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

When will I learn to speak in plain English when I’m talking to Marco?

* * * * *

The door to the street opened and Lettie walked in, accompanied by the two strangest pelicans I had ever seen. Waddling nonchalantly, as if they were coming to tea, they elicited barely a ripple of laughter from the other patrons. I supposed this was the done thing on Mykonos. These pelicans, the official mascots of Mykonos, were snow-white except for their heads and pouched bills. The area around their eyes was pink, the top of their bills, a long streak of blue, and the pouch part underneath was lemon yellow. They must have weighed thirty pounds apiece because their heads were higher than Lettie’s waist.

Lettie carried a huge mesh bag full of sponges.

She calmly took an empty chair at our table and squished the bag of sponges between the chair’s legs. A waiter tried to shoo the pelicans out, but they were in no hurry to leave until he tossed something, probably fish, out the door and into the street. The birds waddled out the door.

“I thought you might like to walk down to the harbor with me,” Lettie said. “Ollie’s there now, gabbing with the fishermen, although I don’t know how either they or he knows what they’re saying. He’s speaking English and they’re speaking Greek.”

“Did he buy the sponges, or did you?” Marco asked.

“Oh, aren’t they ridiculous?” She pulled the huge bag out from under her chair and plopped it on her lap. “These are real natural sponges. Sponge divers bring them up. Ollie says he’s going to give them as Christmas presents to his crew.” She turned to Marco and explained, “Ollie is a building contractor. He usually has fifty to a hundred men working for him.”

“I bet a sponge is just what they’ve always wanted,” I said.

“Well, maybe not. But Ollie said, ‘How many of these guys are ever going to go to Greece themselves? Most of them have never seen a real sponge.’”

“You can buy them at home, you know.”

“Don’t tell Ollie. Just tell me how I’m going to pack these things up.”

Lettie and I headed for the door while Marco paid the bill. I glanced over my shoulder in time to catch the grins on the faces of the other patrons and resisted the temptation to say, where Marco could hear me, “Don’t stare. It’s bad manners.” We wound our way through several narrow streets and alleys in a roughly downhill manner. The aromas and sounds coming from the open shop doors we passed were a sensual smorgasbord. I tried to make mental notes to write in my trip journal later.

“The harbor is at the end of this next street, I think.”

“Wait a minute. I have to dump the rocks out of my sandals,” I said, vowing to wear closed-toed shoes at our next island. As I held onto Marco’s arm and lifted my left foot to shake it, I heard noises. A scream. Shuffling. A loudly barked order. Someone yelled, in English, “Get back! Get back!”

Marco left me leaning on thin air and ran to the nearest alley, one that ran downhill and to the right. He stopped.

“
Oh Dio
!”

Lettie and I hurried along to join him. The alley opened out to bright sky at the other end, but I could go no farther than the entrance because Marco stopped me with his outstretched arm. He didn’t stop Lettie, who, being a bit shy of five foot one, ducked under his arm.

Afternoon sun poured into the far end of the alley, highlighting red-streaked walls, red puddles on the cobblestones. It must have been a horrible battle. From a dark mound at the base of one wall, a bare arm stretched out and up at an awkward angle. Beyond the mound, one face, then two, then another, peeped around the corner and vanished when a voice warned, “Get back!” or something like it in Greek.

Lettie, standing between us and the dark mound, hunched over suddenly, her shoulders tight. I thought she was going to throw up. Instead, she turned and called back, “Marco! Come here!”

“No! This does not concern us. You come here!”

Lettie didn’t budge.

“This is an island problem. A Mykonos problem. We will stay out of it!”

She turned back to the dark mound, inching closer, bending forward. I wanted to run to her, to stop her before she touched the body. You can never tell what Lettie is going to do. But she raised one hand to her mouth, studied the lump for a second, then said, “Yes, it does concern us, Marco. It’s our photographer!”

“I have to go and get her, Dotsy,” Marco said, folding both my hands in his and pushing me firmly back and out of the alley. He slipped up behind Lettie, put an arm around her shoulders, and led her back to me. Her face was pale. She walked unsteadily, leaning on Marco, staring blankly toward her own feet.

Marco handed her off to me. “Take her away and get her some fresh air. I will stay here and try to help. And will you make certain someone has told the police?”

That last order was unnecessary because, as he said it, three policemen in summer shirts with emblems on their sleeves appeared at the far end of the alley. I walked Lettie down the street listening to her halting description of the photographer’s bloody remains. I looked for familiar faces. Anyone I recognized from the ship. It seemed to me, if I found myself in a police interview later, they might want to know who else was in the vicinity.

Luc Girard, the archaeologist, was at the bottom of the steep slope, walking toward us, and Sophie Antonakos was a few yards ahead of us, going down. She slipped on a cobble and a brush flipped out of her open purse as she twisted to right herself. Girard picked it up for her, but Sophie, stooping at the same time, cracked heads with him. He smiled sheepishly, handed her the brush, and rubbed his forehead as he passed us.

Where our street opened out onto a plaza fronting the harbor, Brittany Benson sat on a block of stone, surrounded by several packages. Sophie ran up to her, twittering, “Oh, no! I ran into Dr. Girard. I really ran into him! I was so embarrassed.”

Ollie rounded the corner of the next street over—logically the one that would intersect the alley we’d just left but who could tell in this rabbit warren—and headed toward the water. I called out to him. He turned, waved, and then ran toward us.

“What’s wrong with Lettie?” he asked, gathering her into his arms.

As I explained, Ollie held Lettie at arms’ length, studied her face, pulled her close, and kissed the top of her head. I noticed Ollie was toting another mesh bag of sponges, as large as the one Lettie had. Snuggled together with both bags, they looked more like a foursome. Ollie suggested we’d better head back to the ship right away.

We had to pass the other end of the alley as we climbed back over the hill and as we did so I paused, standing on tiptoes to see over the heads of what was now a crowd. A police officer stood, feet wide apart, barring rubber-neckers from the alley. I heard Marco’s voice, somewhat damped by the alley walls, shouting, “Stay back!”

Chapter Seven

Back on the ship, I knocked on Kathryn Gaskill’s door but got no response. Thinking she might not be dressed or might not feel like opening the door, I retraced my steps three doors down, slipped into my own room, and dialed her number. No answer. Maybe she’s talking with the investigators, I thought. I didn’t even consider the possibility that there was good news. That they’d found George. Somehow the hallway around their door had taken on a sort of pall, which, it seemed, would neutralize laughter and suck it into the walls.
Maybe she’s getting a bit of fresh air
, I thought. I walked back to my room and checked the floor inside my door for a note slipped under. It occurred to me that I didn’t know Kathryn well enough to know if she was the note-leaving sort or not.

I renewed my lipstick, brushed my hair, and scanned the deck plans in my brochure to locate the library. Luc Girard’s lecture was to be held there at five o’clock and it was already four-fifty. The library, according to the brochure, was on the starboard side of the Ares deck, one deck up, so I took the stairs. The library’s entrance was by way of an exterior door off the promenade. Through a round porthole window in the varnished teak door, I saw no lights inside, but there was a note taped to the brass porthole fittings:
La conférence de Dr Girard sera tenue à 18h00, pas 17h00
.

And below this: “Dr. Girard’s lecture will be at 6:00 p.m., not 5:00.”

I ran into Ollie and Lettie on my way back to the stairs and they suggested a drink in the lounge on the Poseidon Deck. Up two more levels. It was a large, well-upholstered room with U-shaped sofas and lots of throw pillows. Lettie and I sat facing the windows on one arm of a U and Ollie, opposite us, occupied a section of sofa normally sufficient for two people.

“You’ve changed clothes, Ollie,” I said.

“I’ve been handling fish all afternoon. Lettie made me take a shower.”

“I asked him if he needed a sponge for his bath. We have plenty.” Lettie stuck her foot around the coffee table and gave Ollie’s tent-pole leg a light kick.

Ollie cleared his throat and paused a moment. “Lettie tells me the man you found in the alley was our ship’s photographer.”

“It was,” Lettie said.

“I don’t think I’d have recognized him,” he said. “Who looks at a photographer when he’s taking your picture? He’s always got that light shining straight in your eyes.”

“But you can count on Lettie to recognize anyone she’s ever seen before.”

“Of course I recognized him. We’d just passed him on the dock. He had a cute sort of round face and he was wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt.” Lettie paused and studied her hands for a moment. “The shirt wasn’t blue and white when I saw him later. It was red.” Her voice faltered. “So much blood. You wouldn’t think a person could have so much blood in him.”

“Did you see a knife?” I asked. We hadn’t discussed this at all on our walk back to the ship. We hadn’t waited for a bus to tote us across the hill, and the three of us had made the whole trek in silence.

“No.”

“Did you see any cuts on his arms? I mean, if there were cuts, it would indicate he’d fought his attacker.”

“Oh yes. His arms were all cut up. His chest, his arms, his neck. All cut up.”

“It must have been a battle.”

“A lop-sided battle,” said Ollie. “Apparently only one of them had a weapon.”

“I sure hope they find the weapon. The knife or whatever it was.”

We talked about it at length, but all we knew was based on the one brief look Lettie had, and that wasn’t nearly enough. The waiter brought our drinks. The lounge was starting to fill up as people returned to the ship. We were already a half-hour past the time we were supposed to have left the dock. A man came over and asked us if he could take the empty chair at the open end of our seating nook, but before he could take it, a hand grabbed his shoulder.

Marco stood behind him. “Sorry, but I need this chair,” he said. The man bowed politely and left.

“What a day, eh?” Marco pushed the chair close to my end of the sofa and sat. He smelled of sweat. “
Li mortacci
. . .” He squinted, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

“Tell us,” I said, and the three of us stared at him.

“His name was Nikos Papadakos and he was from Crete. His family, his wife and children, still live in Crete. He had worked on this ship for two seasons. Everyone liked him.”

“Not everyone,” Lettie muttered.

Marco gave Lettie a sidelong glance. “Everyone they’ve talked to so far. A lot of people from the ship were down in the area near the waterfront when it happened. The police grabbed everyone they could find and talked to them. At first, their chief wanted to hold up the ship’s leaving until they could sort everything out, but the ship security and the FBI men came down and talked to him. They pointed out that the people on the ship are as good as in jail when it comes to escaping.”