A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (6 page)

In other words, Venezia’s main business was to supply second-rate hotels with the pictures that were bolted to the walls of their rooms, the ornate lamps that were bolted to their tables, and the fancy ashtrays and other gewgaws that couldn’t be bolted down but were cheap enough to replace without undue cost when guests walked off with them. One small Southern hotel chain with a total of only a hundred-and-twenty rooms, for example, ordered Venezia’s “Aztec-style synthetic onyx soap dishes” four dozen at a time to make up for their popularity with departing clients.

The upper floor was where her widowed father lived, and although he’d been here in Seattle for almost a year now, she’d never been up there. Oh, he’d invited her enough times, but she’d always come up with excuses, some of them so ridiculous that he’d had to know they were pretexts. Being Geoff, though, there were no reprimands, no guilt trips laid on her. Just a soft, smiling, accepting “Perhaps next time, then.”

Not bloody likely, as Geoff might say. The fact was she simply couldn’t bear to see him in that environment—a man who valued and appreciated beauty more than anyone else she’d ever known. He lived for art, for elegance, and in the old days, thanks to his work at the Met and the near fortune her mother had inherited, he was surrounded by it, at work and at home. To think of him now, eating his canned and frozen meals alone—he was no cook—in a loft built seventy years ago to store metal piping, with the only “art” around him being the cheap knock-offs he dealt in… well, it hurt her just to think of it, and she would continue to put off seeing it for as long as she possibly could. It was just too, too depressing.

As for Alix’s own living quarters, they were a far cry from the Upper East Side, but they were certainly nothing to complain about: a pleasant, six-hundred-square-foot studio apartment on a quiet, leafy street in the Green Lake district. And if her financial situation kept improving, she
might soon move up to something a little roomier. It had come as a pleasant surprise that her budding career as an art consultant hadn’t been damaged by her inadvertent involvement in a sensational art forgery case that had culminated in the murder of a well-known Santa Fe art dealer. On the contrary, her phone was ringing away now, not only with requests for advice on developing an art collection but with assistance determining if a work was the real thing. And then there was her new association with the FBI, a development that still had her shaking her head in amazement.

“I’ve got myself a pretty interesting job, Geoff,” she told him brightly as she turned back onto Alaskan Way, then up the ramp to the viaduct, and headed north toward their destination, Sangiovese, an upscale wine bar in Belltown owned by Chris LeMay—a one-time client and now a good friend. It was largely on account of Chris—Chris and her wine bar—that Geoff was back in her life in such a big way. Her friend had taken to the old rogue, and his presence at the Thursday evening happy hours had wound up giving Sangiovese a new cachet and drawing an assortment of artists, art students, and anyone else who loved to talk about art. The sessions were certainly a wonderful tonic for Geoff, whose notoriety and genuine, wide-ranging art expertise—and of course that irresistible, twinkling charm of his—had quickly drawn a coterie of attentive, respectful admirers. They were good for Alix too, a chance to see him regularly and to chat on the drives, but not
too
much of a chance to be with him. It was a difficult situation. Their relationship, at least on her side, was complex.

Her father had reentered her life less than a year earlier, when he surprised her by moving to Seattle on his release from the federal minimum-security prison in Lompoc, California. At the time, she had been anything but pleased to have him in the same city. To say that she had “issues” with him was putting it mildly. Geoff’s trial and conviction had virtually ruined her life. Their considerable family money had gone for attorney’s fees and suits. Her own precious college fund, $60,000, had followed shortly (not that Geoff knew, or ever would know, that she had given it up for him), and she’d dropped out of Harvard in her junior year. Her relationship
to him—the very name London—had made her the object of jokes and innuendo, an anathema in the art world she’d dreamed of entering when she graduated. His reckless, selfish actions had put a stop to those dreams, and although she’d come a long way back since then—years of dedicated apprenticeship with the great art historian and restorer Fabrizio Santullo in Italy had made her an expert in her own right—she was still angry with him over it. Despite that, over this last year she had almost unwillingly come to love him as much as ever. And if those emotions weren’t confusing and contradictory enough, she was sad for him too, and filled with guilt for the resentment that yet remained, coiled in her chest, and sometimes boiled to the surface.

Complex
was putting it mildly.

“A job?” he said. “Excellent. Restoration? Consultation?”

“Lecturing.”

“Lecturing,” he repeated with interest. “Well, this is a new path for you. Tell me more.”

She began filling him in (everything but the FBI part), but only got a couple of sentences into it before he interrupted.

“Wait a moment—this yacht you’ll be on—are you talking about the
Artemis
? Will you be lecturing on Panos Papadakis’s auction cruise?”

She blinked. “You know about that?”

“Certainly I know about it. Don’t you think I keep up with the Culture Guru?”

“The what? The who?”

He emitted a theatrical sigh. “My dear child, you have no idea how out of touch you are. I’m really going to have to introduce you to the blogosphere before it’s completely hopeless.”

Turning down off the viaduct as they neared the bar, Alix laughed, not without irritation. Her seventy-year-old father, having spent eight of the last nine years in a jail cell, was sitting there telling her that
she
was out of touch. He was right, of course, when it came to social media, or networks, or whatever they were called, which was exactly what made it so irritating.

“Panos Papadakis,” he murmured. “My word, you’re going to be moving in very high-powered company.”

“You know him?”

“I know
of
him.”

“I understand he sells fractional shares of paintings.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that.”

“I don’t really know what it means, Geoff. Okay, I understand that if a painting sells for a profit, you get your percentage of the profit, but other than that, why would a collector want a ‘share’ of a painting? Is it like having a time-share condo? Does he get to hang it on his wall a certain share of the time, or what?”

“No, he does not. You’re quite right, Alix. A truly serious collector would not be interested in owning a fractional piece of art.”

“But people do—”

“Yes, but those people—” The corners of his lips turned down. “—
Those
people are not serious collectors. Genuine collectors are in increasingly short supply these days.” He turned earnestly in her direction. “These people are
investors
. Speculators. Philistines. They don’t know about art, they don’t understand it, and they couldn’t care less. They don’t
want
the paintings hanging on their walls. They are perfectly happy to have them housed in some climate-controlled vault, for years if need be, or even for decades, as long as, in the end, their values rise enough for a healthy profit.” He was talking himself into one of his rare fits of temper. He folded his arms and stared out at the oncoming headlights through the noisily scraping wipers. She’d hoped to make it through the winter without replacing them, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen. “
Collectors
,” he grumbled.

“I can understand why you’d be upset, Geoff. I am too. The idea of beautiful works of art sitting for years in the dark; unseen, unappreciated—that’s awful, but still… well, people can do what they want with them. They own them, after all. It’s not illegal.”

“Oh? Whatever they want? So if they own a Rembrandt, they can burn it?”

“Well, no, there’s a moral responsibility—”

“Oh, a
moral
responsibility,” he said sarcastically.

“Geoff, I only meant that—and I’m talking about the shares thing now—that as long as what they’re doing isn’t against the law, which as far as I know it isn’t, they have every right—”

“And if moral responsibility and the law are in conflict?” he snapped. “What then?”

Uh-oh, she’d stepped in it now. This was something she did not intend to discuss with him, and how like her father to bring it up when she was in the middle of driving on dark, rain-slippery streets, surrounded by impatient drivers honking their horns and cutting in, impatient to get home to their martinis and their white wine. Or had
she
brought it up? Hard to say, but why did she so often allow their conversations to get back to this raw, tender subject?

The thing was, it was the conflict between morality and legality that lay at the root of her father’s undoing and the trauma that he’d brought upon them both. His crime had been to take a painting that had been entrusted to him for restoration or cleaning—these were not from the Met’s collection, but from private clients—and use his meticulous skills to make an exacting copy of it. He would then keep the original and give the copy to the grateful collector (“What wonderful work, Mr. London! Look how bright it is! How crisp! Why, it’s almost like new!”). Then, sometimes years later, he had quietly sold the originals, usually many thousands of miles away. His income from these illegal dealings had eventually gone the way of the rest of the family’s money, to pay for lawyers and to settle suits. He’d been convicted on sixteen counts of fraud for this and had been locked up for eight years, a long, long time when you’re sixty-one.

He had committed these criminal acts out of moral outrage over the way these exquisite eighteenth-and nineteenth-century paintings were being used by their owners. In every one of the cases in which he’d done it—and he’d proven this at his trial—they’d been given to him to restore in preparation for their sale to generate funds to buy ugly, late
twentieth-century “monstrosities” that had inexplicably come to be worth more in money and prestige. The most egregious case, which he referred to in court and more than once in arguments with Alix, was that of the elderly couple who were selling a sublime and subtle Ingres charcoal drawing of a nude so that it could be replaced by a “political statement” made of wires and shellacked animal entrails. It was Geoff’s position that he was rescuing these irreplaceable works from uncultured barbarians who couldn’t tell the difference between art and garbage (and didn’t care), and putting them under the loving stewardship of sensitive people who valued their beauty. The fact that he’d taken money, and plenty of it, for paintings that he’d stolen from clients who had trusted him was scoffed at, with considerable impatience on his part, as beside the point.

It was a position he’d taken under questioning in court, and a position he’d maintained to this day. “I didn’t do anything
wrong
,” he’d said to Alix the last time they’d talked about it. “I did something
illegal
. Can’t you appreciate the difference?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong?” she’d shot back. “You went to jail for eight years, for God’s sake, and you’re lucky they didn’t give you twenty.”

“And I deserved it,” he said, “in terms of the law. But I did not do anything
wrong
.”

“Well, you sure screwed up my life. And yours.”

“Well, yes, perhaps I should have given more thought—”

“Of
course
you should have thought… !” she’d exploded in exasperation, and the conversation had gone downhill from there. She didn’t mean to let that happen now.

“Geoff,” she said with a placating smile as they pulled into Sangiovese’s parking lot, “may I respectfully suggest that we save these philosophical meditations for when we get inside and you’re surrounded by your groupies and your worshipful acolytes?”

He hated confrontation and argument even more than she did, and, as always, he was willing to suspend hostilities. “I was aware that I
had worshipful acolytes,” he said with his jolly laugh, “but I didn’t know I had groupies. I wouldn’t have thought that sixty-year-old women qualified.”

“That’s because you’ve been spending too much time reading blogs about the cultural scene and not enough time
in
it.” She shook her head. “Really, Dad, you need to get out more.”

Oh, sure,
she thought wryly,
you’re the one to talk. You’re not even
reading
about it
.

His indulgent, knowing, fatherly smile indicated that he was thinking the same thing.

“A
lix, you’re kidding me!” Chris exclaimed. “Papas Papapapapuss’s yacht—or whatever the hell his name is? The Greek islands? Mykonos, Crete, Corfu, Rhodes…
Whoa
!”

In any other public place, her full-throated whoop would have turned heads, but since they were in Sangiovese, Chris’s own place, the regulars at the other tables were used to the proprietor’s outbursts. Christine LeMay had many fine qualities, but ladylike restraint was not among them.