Death of an Aegean Queen (20 page)

This caught me off-guard. I took a long sip of coffee to give myself time to think. “Yes. I assume Sophie told you. There’s no other way you could know.”

“It doesn’t matter. What did you find?”

When I didn’t answer immediately, he reached across the table and clasped my hand. “We are speaking in total confidence here. I promise you I won’t even tell Sophie anything you tell me, but if I’m to make any progress, I need to know.”

“Of course.” I had the uneasy feeling this whole thing might get out of hand, but Girard was right. I had opened this up, myself. Gone to him with what I’d discovered, and I couldn’t hold out on him now. I squared my shoulders and told him about the krater and the carved stone box. On a scrap of paper, I drew the pattern I had seen on the box, as nearly as I could remember it. “I looked for paperwork. Anything that would tell me where she’d got these things and whether she’d paid for them. I found nothing.”

“Was there anything else inside the boxes? Anything written on the outside of the boxes?”

“No.” I slipped my napkin onto the table. “And if you’ll excuse me . . .”

“Thank you, Mrs. Lamb. And if you see Captain Quattrocchi before I do, ask him to come see me, will you?”

If I see Captain Quattrocchi before you do
, I thought,
I’ve got some other things to ask him first
.

* * * * *

I went to the disembarkation point fifteen minutes early, hoping to be the first off the ship so I could catch Marco before he got away. The ship docked beside a concrete bulkhead in the Rhodes harbor, close to the city wall. Entrance into old Rhodes town is restricted to eleven widely spaced gates in the medieval wall, and from the window in my room it looked as if there was only one gate close by. It stood to reason that if I went ashore quickly and stood by the gate, Marco would have to walk past me. But if he was heading for the airport, he’d probably catch a taxi and I could see several cars that might or might not be taxis parked along the outside of the wall.

At the bottom of the gangway, a new photographer was set up to snap everyone as they set foot on Rhodes, the island of roses.
How easily we can be replaced
, I thought as I walked past him, shaking my head. I was in no mood to have my picture taken.
If I died today
, I continued thinking in that maudlin vein,
how long would it take my college to replace me?
No time at all. They’d just open their bulging applications files and call a few numbers.

Passengers from the ship were directed down a rather narrow concrete strip between the city wall and the harbor in order to reach the aptly-named Marine Gate, the entrance to the old town. I stepped aside, out of the continuous stream of foot traffic, when I found a grassy spot some twenty yards from the gate. Turning, I scanned the heads and faces behind me for Marco. I wished he were in the habit of wearing distinctive headgear or something that would help me pick him out of the crowd, because his dark hair and medium build made him extremely average from a distance. Instead, I spotted Lettie, sans Ollie.

She joined me on the grassy strip. “Ollie had to run back to the room for his sunglasses,” she said. “This looks like a good place to wait for him.”

“I’m hoping to catch Marco before he leaves the island.”

“Oh, right. He told us at breakfast, didn’t he? He’s flying back to Italy? What’s going on with you two?”

“He says it’s about George Gaskill’s murder, but I’m afraid it’s really because he’s fed up with me. I didn’t mean to ignore him last night, but Malcolm Stone and Nigel Endicott kept asking me to dance, cutting in and all, and I’m afraid I . . .”

“What else did you do?” Lettie glanced up at me, frowning.

“He asked me what was wrong, and I told him not to psychoanalyze me.”

“You done screwed up again, Dotsy. I told Ollie yesterday, I said, ‘Marco’s too good for Dotsy, but she’ll find a way to screw it up. Never fear.’”

Brittany Benson approached us and, not far behind her, Malcolm Stone and Willem Leclercq. She waved in our direction, slipped on her sunglasses, and would, I’m sure, have walked past us without speaking if Lettie hadn’t pulled her aside.

“Are you all right, Brittany?” Lettie asked. “After you left our room last night, Ollie told me he knew exactly how you felt. It’s such torture to be accused of something you didn’t do.”

Brittany shot daggers at me through her sunglasses. I held my breath, my mind racing, deciding what I would say if she confronted me with my invasion of her room. Instead, she said, “Right. And I know how your husband feels, too. This cruise can’t be over soon enough for me.”

“Brittany!” The call came from Willem Leclercq, who nodded goodbye to his companion and headed toward us. “Join me for a drink, Brittany? I heard there’s a nice little taverna inside the gate.” Brittany looked as if she’d rather not, but she let him take her arm and lead her away.

“I saw them together last night at a table near Marco and me. I wonder if that was before or after she came to your room.”

“If you and Marco were still together, it must have been before.”

“Oh dear, there’s Malcolm Stone,” I said. “If Marco walks by now and sees me talking to him, that’ll really do it.” I turned and examined the scruffy bit of a tree behind me, reminding myself Marco insisted he wasn’t mad at me, but was flying home to confer with his forensic people.

“He’s walking on by, Dotsy. You can turn around now. Gee, he looks like a lonely soul, don’t you think so?” Lettie and I watched Malcolm stop and wait his turn to pass through the Marine Gate. With Leclercq hitting on Brittany over a cappuccino, Malcolm would probably have to see Rhodes alone.

“Lonely? Yes, probably. His wife died a few years ago, he told me. But there’s something else going on with him. I can’t put my finger on it.”

“Maybe it’s the George Gaskill thing. He’s been questioned, too.”

“He’s always looking around. As if he’s expecting someone. I noticed it yesterday, too, when we were in Patmos.”

Luc Girard rushed up, greeting me as he came. I introduced him to Lettie. “What good luck to find you here,” he said. “Are you, by any chance, planning to visit the Palace of the Grand Masters today?”

Until an hour ago I had planned to tour the Palace with Marco but, since then, I hadn’t thought about anything except finding Marco before he left. I stood, stupidly forgetting to answer Girard’s question, until Lettie nudged me. “Yes, of course,” I said. “And the Street of the Knights. They’re close together, aren’t they?”

“They’re adjacent to each other. When you go through the gate here, turn right and right again. That’ll be the Street of the Knights, and at the end, you’ll see the Palace. How about meeting me there? There’s someone I want you to meet.”

We agreed to rendezvous in the central courtyard inside the Palace, and Girard left, joining the throng at the gate.

“Why does that man always carry a backpack?” Lettie said. I saw she was looking at Nigel Endicott, hip Nigel, trekking up the walk. Today, his hair was gelled up like a bird’s nest, his T-shirt’s advertisement for some brand of surfboard peeked out between the padded straps of his backpack.

“There’s another man with something on his mind. When I danced with him last night, I got the feeling of . . . oh, I don’t know . . . fear. The man is frightened of something, Lettie.”

Nigel nodded to me as he approached us. I introduced him to Lettie, who, with her customary reticence, said, “Why do you always carry that backpack, Mr. Endicott?”

He blinked and took a small step back. “I don’t always carry it, but, since you ask, I’m on my way to the hammam, and one has to bring one’s own towel and toiletries.”

“Hammam. You mean a harem?” Lettie’s eyes widened. “Where they have girls?”

I laughed and Nigel explained, “A hammam is a Turkish bath. There’s a famous one that’s been here since the seventeen-hundreds. So that’s why I’m carrying my backpack. Would you like to see?”

“No, it’s okay. Have a nice . . . bath, Mr. Endicott.”

After Nigel had walked on, I caught Lettie staring toward the pier. She touched my arm. “Agent Bondurant is following Nigel Endicott,” she said, her voice low. “He was right behind him until Nigel came over here and talked to us, then Bondurant stopped and pretended to be interested in a piling. When Nigel left, he followed.”

That would explain why Nigel acted frightened, but why was Bondurant interested in him? Was he another suspect in the murder of George Gaskill or could it be something else entirely? The whole situation was beginning to make me dizzy.

The ship had nearly emptied by this time, a few stragglers still ambling down the gangway. It looked as if Marco had given me the slip. Did he do it on purpose? Had he been picked up by a boat or something on the other side? Perhaps I’d missed him while I’d been talking.

“There’s Ollie,” Lettie said, jumping and waving at the bald head sticking out above the crowd. She and Ollie left me to explore Rhodes on my own.

Chapter Eighteen

I wandered through shops along Socrates Street and noticed that nearby streets were named for other ancient Greek scholars like Pythagoras and Aristotle. Although inhabited since before Christ, the medieval period gave the city its character because Rhodes served as a base for the Knights of St. John during the Crusades. All over the town, jewelry, clothing, and souvenir shops, tucked into narrow, arched, cobblestone streets, competed with mosques and fourteenth-century towers for the visitor’s attention.

It was while I was thumbing through a stack of scarves in an alley off Socrates Street that I caught a whiff of something unpleasant. I moved around the rickety table on which the scarves were displayed and the smell got stronger. Like old cheese. No, not exactly. More like stinky feet. No, that wasn’t quite it either.

Glancing around and making a couple of moves to narrow down the source, I discovered it to be a man at the other end of the scarf table. He was studying the postcards on a four-sided rack. Dirty hair with traces of the last fingers raked through it, baggy woolen trousers, and an old tweed jacket that might have originally been more colors than brown. I couldn’t see his face and didn’t really want to. Goats! That’s what he smelled like. I hate goat cheese because, to me, it smells like the goats my grandfather used to have.
This man must have goats living in his closet
, I thought.

I left the shop without buying and turned down Socrates Street toward the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent. I had hoped to see the inside, but found it closed to the public, and a good thing, because it was crumbling so badly it probably wasn’t safe. More than content to study it from the outside, I stepped to the opposite side of the street and stood.

Malcolm Stone breezed by right in front of me. I called his name, loudly. He must have heard me, but he kept walking. In fact he quickened his pace, almost running, into the intersection in front of the mosque. His left hip grazed the fender of a little delivery truck as he ducked out of my sight. The truck driver tooted, swore, and eventually drove on, but by that time Malcolm was nowhere to be seen.

My watch said it was almost time to meet Dr. Girard, and the Palace was nearby, so I located the main entrance, bought a ticket, and climbed a couple of flights of stairs into a medieval exhibition room. I needed to find the Central Courtyard.

The Palace, a labyrinth of square rooms with mosaic tile floors and tiny doors leading off in various directions, gave me vertigo. After trying several doors that led nowhere, or back where I’d come from, I asked a guard whose explanation for how to find the courtyard was completely unintelligible, but did involve some pointing, which helped.

The courtyard was huge and empty and open to the sky. On the opposite side near an exterior staircase, Luc Girard stood, talking to a woman. I recognized Girard’s dark khaki bush jacket and shorts. They both watched me as I trekked across the marble tiles and joined them. Girard introduced me to the small, dark woman, curator of the museum under the stairs. She led us through a dozen rooms devoted to the ancient city of Rhodes, dating from the fifth century
b.c
. We saw a scale model of the city as it would have appeared back then, and the tiny hooks-and-eyes they used to fasten their clothing.