A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) Read online

  ALSO BY CHARLOTTE AND AARON ELKINS

  THE ALIX LONDON SERIES

  A DANGEROUS TALENT

  THE LEE OFSTED SERIES

  A WICKED SLICE

  ROTTEN LIES

  NASTY BREAKS

  WHERE HAVE ALL THE BIRDIES GONE?

  ON THE FRINGE

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 Charlotte and Aaron Elkins

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477805077

  ISBN-10: 1477805079

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Acknowledgments

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  1

  Welcome to the Home Page of The Culture Guru

  “Seen on the Art Scene”

  by

  I. Witt Ness

  Word is that a multimillion-dollar painting proudly owned by the Greek tycoon-“art collector” Panos Papadakis is not quite all it’s supposed to be, and if you don’t believe me, you can ask Lyons’ esteemed Laboratoire Forensique Pour l’Art, which has just finished subjecting two dozen of Papadakis’s paintings to its fearsome array of tests. Twenty-three of them passed. The twenty-fourth? A dud. In other words, a sham. In other words, a FAKE.

  Even your intrepid reporter’s skills have not yet ferreted out just which one it is (stay tuned, but I have it on good authority that it is one of the gems of Papadakis’s “collection” and set our boy Panos back something like $2,000,000 when he bought it in the mid 1990s—and that was before the explosion in art prices).

  What makes all this especially titillating is that these particular twenty-four paintings were in the process of being readied for what has to be the glitziest and most exclusive art auction of all time. Strictly invitational, it is described in the auction catalogue as “Masterpieces of Impressionist and Modern Art from the Collection of Panos Papadakis,” and it will be the highlight of a lavish Mediterranean cruise on megamillionaire Papadakis’s mega-mega-yacht, the sleek, two-hundred-thirty-nine foot Artemis.

  Some people in the know have begun to wonder if news of the fake will produce an epidemic of cold feet when it comes time to bid on the other paintings in the “collection.” My guess? No problemo, señor. They’ll be more eager than ever to be part of the occasion. Nothing like a touch of notoriety to add that delicious little hint of frisson to a society occasion. Especially when one can easily afford to lose a couple mill (as who cannot?).

  Interested in securing an invitation to this fabulous junket on the bounding main? Not a problem… as long as you happen to be one of Papadakis’s well-heeled financial clients with at least €1,000,000 invested with him. Oh, and to certify that you’re willing and able to shell out at least the minimum acceptable bid on the least expensive painting. Anyone interested in a snazzy little Mihaly von Zichy (who?) with a reserve price of $980,000?

  Know what your dauntless correspondent finds the most intriguing question about the whole affair? WHY is Papadakis putting a sizable chunk of his beloved “collection” up for sale? One can’t help wondering if the mono-multi-mega-mogul’s finances are in as much trouble as his native country’s, so that—

  Panos Papadakis slammed the iPad onto the slat-topped dining table hard enough to rattle the Armani-designed luncheon cutlery. “What the hell he means with all these, what you call them, quote marks?” He stared accusingly at Edward Reed, who sat beside him and had called the blog to his attention. “What, he’s saying I’m not really a ‘collector’? My collection isn’t really a ‘collection’?” He emphasized his points with sarcastic little air-quotation marks alongside his ears. “What, it’s not good enough for him, the piker? What does he know? He don’t even got the nerve to use his own name, the bum.”

  Suppressing both a sigh and a smile, but not quite managing to restrain one elegantly lifted eyebrow, Reed watched Papadakis stalk to the railing of the mountainside terrace of his enormous home above the posh seaside village of Gustavia on the Caribbean island of St. Barts. There he stood, the two-thousand-nine-hundred-and-fifty-eighth richest man in the world, muttering and staring down at the marina, squat, neckless, and incontestably toad-like. Thick-wristed, furry forearms stuck out of his short-sleeved sport shirt, from the open neck of which more wiry, dense hair sprouted like some black jungle growth struggling to get out into the sun. Although Reed knew for a fact that the man had shaved that morning, Papadakis’s cheeks were blue-black almost up to his eyes and down to his collarbone. About the only place he seemed to have trouble growing hair was on his scalp, which got barer every time Reed saw him—so much so that, judging from today’s coiffure, he had given up trying to make a comb-across work.

  His anger had come as no surprise to Reed. An explosion was to have been expected, but not because of the quotation marks. To be honest, he hadn’t thought that Papadakis would even notice them, let alone grasp their nuances. Once again, and not for the first time by a long shot, he reminded himself not to confuse the financier’s natural coarseness with lack of intelligence.

  On the other hand, it also wasn’t the first time that Papadakis had been goaded by snarky observations about his collection, and the more of them there were, the more they seemed to get under his skin. The gist of them, generally speaking, was that his understanding of art was pathetic and his collection wasn’t a collection at all, but a conglomeration, a meaningless potpourri, with no unifying principle underlying it. They were wrong, though; there was a powerful unifying principle, and it was called profit. The man had no emotional or scholarly interest in any particular artist, or period, or medium, or style. He bought paintings based purely on his estimate of their likely increase in value—a perfectly logical reason as far as Reed was concerned, and one for which he by no means shared the Culture Guru’s contempt.

  In Reed’s opinion, in fact, regardless of all the high-sounding talk out there, there were only two basic motivations that drove today’s art market—especially the Contemporary and Post-Modernist markets. One was to show off for one’s peers: You see, by paying millions of dollars for this stuffed shark or this collection of torn pieces of cardboard covered with unreadable graffiti written in chalk, I am demonstrating how very hip and avant-garde I am. And it usually met its objective. Why else did auction audiences applaud so respectfully when someone paid an obscene amount of money for a preposterous pile of junk, or rags, or medicine bottles “artistically” lined up on shelving?

  Reed found this motivation not only ridiculous but troubling. It did not bode well for the future of the market that he loved. The other motive, however—profit—had his wholehearted approval. After all, it was based on the same theory that successfully drove the stock ma
rket, the greater fool theory (otherwise known as the “dumber than thou” hypothesis): that is, you buy an object, regardless of its inherent value or lack thereof, in the expectation that someone dumber than you will eventually pay you even more for it.

  And at that sort of predicting, Panos’s record proved that he was very, very shrewd. He had sold pieces from his private collection for five and even ten times what he’d paid for them. And the art purchases for his investment business? Well, there Reed wasn’t privy to the details, but it was no secret that they’d made him a millionaire many times over; some said a billionaire.

  As Panos himself had once put it: “If I don’t know nothing about the paintings I’m buying, how come I make so much money off them?”

  But the man wasn’t happy. He was no different from anybody else: The money was one thing, yes, but it was respect he ached for. He got it from the financial establishment, but to the snooty art world he was and always would be nothing but a vulgar, ignorant parvenu. In Reed’s opinion, both points of view were correct.

  Panos was still staring down at the bay and muttering. “Can you believe that guy!” Papadakis banged the metal railing. “A bum is what he is, the bum. I’ll sue him. And how the hell this information got out? Myself, I just got the report this morning. I didn’t even read it yet myself. I’ll sue that goddamn lab too; who do they think they are?”

  “Really, Panos, you shouldn’t get so excited,” said Reed with the leisurely British drawl—the sort of BBC accent you didn’t hear very much anymore, even in England—that he’d brought with him when he’d come to New York twenty years before to open his Manhattan art dealership, and which he had worked hard to maintain. Sounding like Laurence Olivier to the American ear was no mean advantage in his world.

  “Forget about suing them; what we really should do is give them a commission. That dreadful Culture Guru person as well. You know,” he said, lifting his juice glass and scrutinizing it against the clear, bright sky the way a wine expert would study a premier grand cru from Château Haut-Brion, “this is really extraordinary. What in the world is in this concoction besides the blood orange juice? Bitters, of course, but… ah, is that juniper berry?”

  “What, I’m supposed to know?” Papadakis grumped without turning around. “Ask her, the maid; Thea, or something. Tell me, why should I give them a commission?”

  “Well, first of all I very much doubt that it’s the laboratory that leaked the information, but whoever it was, we can thank them for stimulating gossip and speculation.” Reed had a little more juice, decided he wasn’t that crazy about it after all, and went to stand beside Papadakis at the railing, but quickly stepped back a little; the drop was steeper than he’d realized, and heights didn’t agree with him. “I’m in the art-selling business, Panos. Trust me, in the end this will mean higher prices.”

  It was the selling of art that was Reed’s connection to Papadakis, who had engaged him to curate his seagoing auction and handle all of the associated tasks, for which he was to collect three percent of the hammer price on each painting sold—only a quarter of his usual commission, but then how often did he hold an auction with total estimated selling prices of thirty to fifty million dollars? How often did he hold an auction that required no sharing of his earnings with his staff? And how often did he hold an auction that had no expenses to speak of associated with it, no insurance costs, and just about no work?

  Never, never, and never.

  “Okay, okay, you’re right, Edward.” Panos grunted his disgust. “Ah, who got time to sue anybody anyway? Screw ’em.”

  Reed thought at first that it had been his smoothly worded reassurances that had calmed the other man, but now he saw that it was the prospect on which Papadakis gazed. Not the long row of luxury yachts lined up cheek by jowl in the marina below—seen from here, not so very different from a string of motor homes in an overnight trailer court—but further out to sea, beyond the harbor entrance, where boats too vast to moor in the marina were anchored. And there lay his pride and joy, the gleaming, blue-and-white Artemis, brilliant in the noonday sun and complete with a shiny new helicopter on a pad on the aft deck. But Panos’s pleasure had been marred. A quarter of a mile beyond it lay an even bigger vessel, Roman Abramovich’s monstrous Eclipse, the largest private yacht in the world at almost six hundred feet, bigger than a destroyer. When Abramovich had arrived in St. Barts that morning and anchored there, Papadakis, whose Artemis had been only a few hundred yards away, had moved his own vessel so that it wouldn’t seem dwarfed by the giant. And he’d been grumbling about it ever since. To work well with Papadakis, one had to be aware of these little conceits. And Reed was.

  Continuing to glower at the Eclipse, the financier-collector went back to processing his resentment of the Culture Guru’s insinuations. “That business at the end—wondering if I still had any money, that part I really don’t like. Who the hell is he to wonder? That’s slander, right? For that, I could sic my lawyers on the lousy crumb, couldn’t I? Am I wrong?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Panos, this is some sleazy two-bit blogger, not the New York Times. Besides, with all that’s been happening in the world, who isn’t wondering about everybody else’s finances?”

  Reed laughed as he spoke, but if there is such a thing as a mental wince, he was experiencing one. He was thinking about the sorry state of his own affairs since the weak moment when he’d let his wife talk him into bidding at that accursed Fairfield County estate auction.

  And he’d actually, inexplicably, wound up winning the damn thing. So now he was the dazed owner—that is, mortgage holder—of a fifteen-year-old wedding-cake of a mansion that could have doubled for the east wing of Buckingham Palace (except that it was more elaborate), and the acre that surrounded it. It wasn’t the price tag itself—$2,800,000, a “steal” (ha!) considering that it had taken $12,000,000 to build—that was the killer, it was what came with it. The property taxes ran $68,000, the once-extravagant landscaping (“a one-third-scale reproduction of Marie Antoinette’s garden at Versailles”) now looked like a random acre along the Upper Amazon, and his wife was already complaining about the dated bathrooms, of which there were a total of seven.

  What had he been thinking? The thing was ruining him. He’d been trying to unload it almost since the day he’d bought it, and he was more than ready to take a loss, but it seemed that there weren’t any other suckers out there; only him. However, if this auction of Panos’s netted him as much as he was hoping for—three percent of thirty million was almost a million dollars, and that was the low estimate!—it would keep him afloat long enough to make something happen.

  Both men returned to the umbrellaed table, where Papadakis absent-mindedly picked at his cooling lobster-and-avocado omelet. After a few moments of pushing pieces of it around on his plate, he finally got to the subject that Reed had expected him to erupt over.

  “The truth is, Edward, what really bothers me, that a painting of mine, it’s supposed to be a fake? That’s impossible!”

  “There’s no ‘supposed to be’ about it, Panos. The Laboratoire’s reputation is—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, but I still don’t buy it. And it makes me look like some kind of crook. Or a dope, which is worse.”

  “On the contrary, it’s going to make you look like the most honest and forthright of men. Upon learning of the Monet’s, ah, doubtful provenance, you immediately announce the fact and remove it from the auction, not wishing to give even the appearance of doing anything dishonest. You will do that, I trust?”

  “Yeah, sure, sure, but I still don’t buy it. I mean, how it can be a fake? You think I’d buy something without testing it every goddamn way there is? Listen, that Manet got certified not only by the lab in Geneva, but—”

  “You mean the Monet.”

  “—by that big shot, what’s his name, at the Museum of… what?”

  “You said Manet. You meant Monet.”

  Papadakis stared uncomprehendingly at him for a second
, then exploded with an agitated “Manet, Monet, what’s the difference, goddammit! Don’t keep interrupting me! I’m trying to think!”

  Reed had all he could do to keep from shaking his head in wonderment. Admittedly, most people tended to confuse Edouard Manet with Claude Monet. Putting aside the similarity in names, both lived at the same time; both painted Parisian street scenes by the carload; both were cited by some as the father of Impressionism; both were snubbed by the critics and rejected by the Salon; both painted similar famous pictures called Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, and did many others with Argenteuil and Seine in the titles, and so on. So it was understandable that a lot of people couldn’t keep them straight. Once, in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, Edward had heard a man respond with some impatience to a question from his wife: “It doesn’t matter. Either spelling is acceptable.”

  But such ignorance—such lack of concern—in a man blessed with the immense good fortune to actually own paintings by both these great masters? To be unaware of the differences in style, and technique, and even subject matter—Monet’s joyful, animated, transitory “impressions” versus Manet’s deeper, darker, less spontaneous explorations into personality and society—seemed to Reed to be emblematic of the sad level to which the once-refined culture of art collectorship had fallen.

  On the other hand, there was a good side too. With speculation and ignorance rampant, there was more money than ever to be made (honestly, if not necessarily ethically), for less work than ever, and how could that be a bad thing? Various commissions from Papadakis had already earned Reed quite a sum, and the upcoming auction was a much-needed blessing. He looked with something like affection at Papadakis, who had his hands pressed to his temples and was rocking back and forth and groaning, “Oh boy, oh, boy, oh, boy.”

  Reed leaned forward over the table and peered at him. “Panos, are you well?”

  Panos was not well. Panos felt like hell.