A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) by Aaron Elkins, Charlotte Elkins Page B

rested. After all, she probably
was
jet-lagged and was certainly sleep deprived, and maybe the only thing that was “off” was her nervous system.
    What she should do right now, she knew, was to forget about it for the time being and go on up to the reception as requested. She moved decisively toward her luggage, which had been set on a long, low table at the foot of the bed. A quick wash was in order, a change of clothes, and then she’d go up and meet her hosts.
    Except that she knew she wouldn’t, not quite yet. What she
would
do was go back to the music room and spend a little more time with Monsieur Manet and see if she could resolve what it was that was nagging at her about his painting. And she figured the Papadakises could bear to wait another twenty or thirty minutes for the pleasure of meeting her.
    She did pause to perform the quick wash, and then she was out the door in a flash, practically trotting down the passageway, the lush carpet completely muffling the sound of her feet, and pausing only for a smile and a wave at the spot where the sixth step of the spiral staircase joined the central post. As she’d hoped, Edward Reed had gone; she had the music room to herself. She went at once to the Manet, which was at the front, behind a low stage that held a grouping of musical instruments—a full-sized Steinway concert grand piano with a bright red shawl laid across its closed lid, a harp, and a cello on a stand. The Manet was hung in pride of place, centered over the piano. She leaned back against the piano to study it from five or six feet away and opened her mind to it.
    Nothing popped out at her, or at least nothing pertinent. What a long way this
Déjeuner
was, she thought absently, from Manet’s more celebrated
Déjeuner
, now in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay. That painting,
Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe—
the Luncheon in the Grass—had made him both famous and notorious, scandalizing the Parisian public with its depiction of three people, two men and a woman, lazily enjoying what looks like a lovely nineteenth-century French picnic in a Paris park. The painting is prettily done and the scene was commonplace enough in the art of the time—except that the two men, a pair of dandies, are fully clothed and the woman is stark naked, every inch of her. Her discarded clothing lies in a heap on the grass beside her. The nude woman, oddly enough, is being treated as if she weren’t there, the men apparently absorbed in lazy conversation with one another. The painting, now much admired, ignited an uproar at the time, French standards of propriety being stricter than they subsequently became.
    But that wasn’t to happen until 1863, two years after the
Déjeuner
before Alix was completed. This painting,
Déjeuner au Bord du Lac,
was painted when he was still an unknown artist (not a starving one, however; his father had been a judge, his mother the goddaughter of the Swedish crown prince), and his work hadn’t yet developed its mature style. The style… she frowned; was it something about the
style
that was bothering her? She moved in for a closer look.

    Two decks below her, in the closet-like security command center next to the engine room, twenty-year-old Yiannis Alexopolous sat before a console of six color monitors on two levels, each screen divided into four quadrants showing four separate locations on the yacht. He set down the empty plate that had held the best
keftedes
he’d ever tasted—the meatballs ground as fine as custard, the tomato sauce as thick and sweet as honey—licked his lips, and took hold of the tray filled with little squares of baklava, lemon cake, walnut cake, and half a dozen other desserts he didn’t recognize. He didn’t need to recognize them; he knew they’d be delicious. Yiannis ate like this only two or three times a year, when his third cousin twice removed, Panos Papadakis, hired him to put in an evening’s security duty for a party. The incredible food alone would have