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

master forger, was not completely nuts. He only thought he was Georges Desmarées (or whomever) on weekdays, and then only until six p.m. At that time the alarm clock he’d set in another room went off, and after a momentary disruption of thought, he turned into Christoph Weisskopf again.
    When it rang on this particular Monday in March, it took the usual few seconds to break through his daytime spell, but when it did he immediately stopped work, cleaned up, and put on everyday clothes. He had finished his Desmarées and was just starting on a Franz Marc hard-edged, semi-abstract painting of a tiger, so he was wearing an outfit based on a photograph of the artist: a green-collared, waist-length Bavarian jacket, a shirt and tie, and a gold-buttoned vest complete with watch fob and chain. The photo hadn’t shown Marc below the waist, so Weisskopf, in his desire to be true to the place and time (Bavaria, 1900 to 1910) had opted for knee breeches—it had been either that or lederhosen. Thus, switching to passable everyday clothes required no more than taking off the breeches and putting on a pair of chinos.
    In this case, however, he didn’t bother. It would have been hard to find a more diverse piece of New York than this teeming, polyglot little corner of Brooklyn, and among the many religious sects was a population of ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews for whom the men’s traditional costumes included knee breeches worn under a long coat, and high white socks. Thus, the sight of Weisskopf’s pale, skinny calves peeping out from under his own dark overcoat would be nothing out of the ordinary.
    He went to a window to check the night’s weather. The twin arcs of blue and white lights on the cables of the bridge twinkled and glittered prettily, which meant there was no mist in the air, no muck, no precipitation. No wind, either, from what he could tell, and judging from what people on the street were wearing, not too cold. All in all, a fine night for March, almost springlike. That was good. What he liked to do, and he did it every night after work if the weather was amenable, was to pick up some carry-out food and take it to Grand Ferry Park, a tiny patch of green, not quite two acres, that sat on the East River a seven-or-eight-block stroll from his loft. It was the most peaceful, un-citified place he knew in Williamsburg, despite its being right up against the hulk of a nineteenth-century Domino Sugar plant, which didn’t bother him very much, because you couldn’t really see it at night anyway.
    There were some dilapidated benches in the little park, but these he disdained. Among the big boulders at the water’s edge was a grouping of them that was just right for a remarkably comfortable one-person seating arrangement: backrest, footrest, and even a flat little table-top rock on which you could safely put your drink without spilling it. And the seat angled you so that you looked diagonally across the river at the ever-changing colored lights of the Empire State Building and the midtown skyscrapers. He hated being in Manhattan, but he loved this shimmering, soundless view of it across the water’s black expanse. And at least for the evening it helped cement him a little more firmly in the twenty-first century.
    What with the bigger, grander East River Park less than a mile to the north, few others made use of Grand Ferry after dark (few others knew it was there at all), which made it a perfect place to unwind with a cup of Jägermeister, the German liqueur to which he was greatly attached, followed by a tranquil, leisurely dinner and perhaps another cup or two of the spirits and a short after-dinner nap, from which he would awake refreshed and relaxed.
    His food-provider choices lasted about a week at a time, and this week it was Khao Sarn on Bedford Avenue, a few blocks from the park, and there he stopped for an order of vegetable spring rolls and a peanut noodle plate with fried red snapper. The white plastic bag that