The Oracle (22 page)

F
ROM HIS VANTAGE
point, Claudio Setti could see the curving road that led to Gythion. From the cab he heard an indistinct buzz of voices alternated with long silences and the sound of a radio. The pickup slowed down a couple of times at the roadblocks, but Claudio was not alarmed. He watched emotionless from the back of the truck as the police and their cars vanished in the dark.

They passed Gythion and took the road that led north. The roll of the truck made him drowsy. The low music on the radio reminded him of the tune which had comforted him during the most intense moments of his life, a popular ballad that his mother used to sing to him when he was a child. He had lost her when he was very young, and that song was the only thing he remembered about her.

Ten kilometres later the truck slowed down and stopped at a railway crossing, and Claudio shook himself awake. As it started to move forward again, Claudio jumped out. He lingered for a few minutes behind the line inspector’s booth, then headed off on foot. Those strangers had helped him to slip through an impressive display of police force without even sensing they had a passenger.

He began to feel a little better, stronger and more confident, although he hadn’t eaten for hours and hours. He walked at a brisk pace through the warm night, accompanied by the crowing of roosters and barking of dogs. As dawn was breaking, a tractor gave him a lift to the tavern at the gates of Aighia. The owner brought him fried eggs
ommatia
and stewed beans with fresh bread.

It all tasted good and only cost him two hundred drachmas.

Areopolis, 26 August, 8 a.m.

C
APTAIN
K
ARAMANLIS WAS
woken up by the ringing of a telephone. It was one of his men from headquarters in Athens.

‘Captain, I found an Interpol dispatch we had on file that I’m sure you’ll be interested in: two months ago, an official of the British embassy in Belgrade was found murdered in Yugoslavia, a certain James Henry Shields. He was hunting in Macedonia along the Strimon valley. An arrow through the heart. And the corpse was found with his mouth and eyes closed up.’

Karamanlis was quiet for a minute, considering the news. ‘Doesn’t sound so strange, after all. He was a man with a dangerous job.’

‘There’s more: a slip of paper with a message in ancient Greek was found in his jacket pocket. That’s why I thought you’d be interested; it made me think of the Roussos and Karagheorghis murders.’

‘Do you know what the message said?’

‘It apparently didn’t make sense . . .’

‘Read it to me, for Chrissake!’

‘Yessir, captain. The Yugoslavian police report says: “You in your day have witnessed hundreds slaughtered, killed in single combat or killed in pitched battle, true, but if you’d laid eyes on this it would have wrenched your heart.” ’

Karamanlis fell back on the bed: the third crime that completed the picture. How couldn’t they be connected to that night ten years ago? But what did the murderer want to say? What message was there in his words? The officer on the phone shook him from his thoughts: ‘Captain, Captain, are you still there?’

‘Yes, I’m listening.’

‘Is there something more you want to know? Shall we ask for further clarification?’

‘Vassilios Vlassos, Sergeant Vlassos: where is he right now?’

‘I’ll check for you right away, sir. Vlassos . . . here it is, Vlassos is on leave, on holiday.’

‘Where?’

‘At Portolagos.’

‘What kind of a shithole of a place is Portolagos? I’ve never heard of it.’

‘It’s a town in Thrace. Vlassos knows a woman there.’

‘Contact him immediately and tell him to watch his ass. There’s a good chance that there’s someone who wants to knock him off in an imaginative way like Roussos, Karagheorghis and that other poor devil. Understand?’

‘Yes, sir, of course. I’ll do as you say immediately.’

‘And let my colleague in Salonika know that I’ll be getting in touch with him as soon as I arrive.’

‘Will do, sir.’

Karamanlis hung up, took a notepad out of his pocket and jotted down the message found on Shields’s body before he forgot the exact words. He washed and dressed quickly, stuffing his things into a little suitcase. Before leaving, he called police headquarters at Kalamata and instructed them to keep an eye on the blue Rover parked at the Plaja hotel and keep its occupants under surveillance without being noticed. He was in his car just a few minutes later.

There was a map in his glove compartment. He spread it over the steering wheel and pointed his finger at the rest and relaxation site chosen by Sergeant Vassilios Vlassos. It was a little town in eastern Thrace, not far from the Turkish border, halfway between Xanthi and Komotini. It looked like it was right in the middle of a swamp or a lagoon. Hard to tell. Not much of a vacation spot. He folded up the map and started off at a steady speed. No need to kill himself; he’d easily get there by tomorrow evening.

He also thought there was no need to worry about Bogdanos, at least not for the moment. His intuition told him that he’d be seeing him somewhere in the vicinity of Portolagos, and maybe the puzzle would start to unravel. He radioed headquarters and advised them to close down the roadblocks: the murderer had almost certainly got away. And they’d surely need more than a roadblock to stop him.

If he had figured it right, Vlassos would be next, then him. Yes, the murderer wanted to leave him until last,
dulcis in fundo
. Right, he thought, go ahead and save the best for last, you bastard, you son of a bitch, but I’ll be there this time, waiting for you in that fucking swamp. I’ll be there and I’ll be ready for you.

When he passed Sparta it was late in the morning, and he stopped at Corinth to get something to eat for lunch. He also called his wife to tell her he’d be away for a few days.

‘But when will you decide to retire?’ asked the poor woman. ‘You have enough years added up. With your retirement pay we could find a new house and get new furniture . . .’

‘Irini, does this seem like the time to talk about this? Come on, don’t be angry. I’ll bring you some feta from Komotini.’

Retire . . . as if it were that easy. In his line of work, there was just one way to go out. When you’d settled all your accounts. Or when someone faster and smarter than you took you out of business once and for all. Poor Irini. She was a good woman, simple and so affectionate. He’d make her happy, he’d bring her some olives from Kalamata and some cheese from Komotini.

He drove past Athens, staying on the highway for Thermopylae and Lamia. Retire . . . why the hell not, after all. Irini was right – it was no good working until you were decrepit. You should retire when you could still enjoy life, take a trip or two, go to the sea, to the mountains. Their children had grown up – Dimitrios would soon be getting his degree in architecture in Florence, and Maria had begun to study medicine in Patras. She was so beautiful, it amazed him to think that he and his wife had managed to bring such a lovely child into the world, so sweet. All he had to do was lie in wait for the bastard and kill him like a dog: legitimate self-defence and that would be the end of that, party over. But who the hell could it be? Couldn’t be the Englishman. But what about his French friend?

No. Only a madman would come back after so many years and risk his own skin. What did the Frenchman know anyway? Very little, when it came down to it. No. It had to be some relative of the girl, or of the boy. But how could they have found out about it? How could any of their relatives possibly know about James Henry Shields?

No. None of those hypotheses held water. One was crazier than the next. He realized that it frightened him to admit that there was only one solution to the mystery: Claudio Setti. Only Claudio Setti could know enough to want Roussos, Karagheorghis and Shields dead. If Setti weren’t already dead . . . if he himself hadn’t seen a photograph of the boy’s corpse. Yeah . . . just a photograph, after all. Well, dammit, even if it were the devil himself he’d find him and kill him. He couldn’t wait to have his chance.

He arrived in the evening at Salonika and stopped in a hotel near the sea. Before stretching out to sleep, he stuck his loaded long-barrelled Beretta calibre 9 under his pillow. He felt close to the front line.

Two weeks went by without a thing happening. Vlassos would get up late and go to the local café for breakfast. He’d stay there gossiping with some other slugs until nearly lunch-time. From their gestures they were talking about women and soccer. Every day, every blessed day. In the afternoon he slept until late, then usually took a boat into the middle of the fucking swamp and sat there like an idiot with a fishing pole in his hand for hours. He’d smoke, pull in the line and then smoke some more. He caught a fish every now and then, ugly, warty things. Karamanlis had begun to hate him.

Portolagos was the most horrible place you could imagine. The mosquitoes bit even during the day and there were millions of them. He wondered how anyone in his right mind could live in a place where the mosquitoes bit all day long. He’d spread on the insect repellent every day, but after a while it made him break out in a rash, which was even worse. He got to the point where if someone felt like shooting Vassilios Vlassos in the back, they’d be doing him a favour.

The most unbearable part of it all was the surveillance after dark. Every night, or nearly, Vlassos went to visit his woman. She lived in a wretched house at the other end of the lagoon, near the bridge for Komotini, an old military bridge covered with wooden beams. Alongside the house was an ancient acacia tree surrounded by bushes whose branches held an unbelievable quantity of mosquitoes. There was no other place Karamanlis could hide. From there he could keep an eye on the territory all around, but to stay on the safe side, every once in a while he’d creep up to the window to see what was going on inside. They made love with the lights on and what he saw was more embarrassing each time.

The woman was a sort of fleshy giantess with enormous breasts and round, massive buttocks. The black, luxuriant hairiness under her arms stood out against her white skin, as did her pubic hair, which trailed down the inside of her thighs nearly to her knees. Vlassos dived into that sea of flesh with the ardour of a copulating boar, and he always succeeded in making that immense female tremble and sigh like a young girl in the arms of her one true love. When he lay back panting, she would kiss him and lick him all over like a cow with a newborn calf. Karamanlis, who had a delicate stomach for some things, often felt a wave of nausea overcoming him. But hell, from a certain point of view, Vlassos was admirable – a man his age who could still stay in the saddle for hours, dammit, and with a creature on whom any normal man wouldn’t know where to start. Lord knew what he’d be capable of with a nice fresh young girl. Yeah, young and beautiful . . .

Karamanlis had nearly convinced himself that he’d been wrong about the whole thing. Vlassos was a sitting duck while he was out there fishing on the swamp. Anyone could have killed him, a thousand times, easily. Roussos, Shields and Karagheorghis had all been murdered in solitary, hidden places. The killer certainly wouldn’t want to wait until Vlassos was back on duty, armed and in similar company. Maybe he’d just dreamed the whole thing up? Well, just as well then, just as well. Although now he had no idea where to start looking.

On the last night of Vlassos’s holiday, Karamanlis noticed that the sergeant hadn’t gone out fishing as he usually did. He must have stayed at home to pack his bags. The captain decided to take some time off for dinner, and then go back to keep watch on the house until one or two in the morning. Then he’d return to the boarding house to sleep as he had every night, with his ears wide open, of course. Not that Vlassos needed him, really. He had been warned by the police, after all, and he surely kept a gun in the house. And probably wore a gun by day as well.

He reached a little town called Messemvria just east of Portolagos and sat down at the only tavern, in front of a panful of lamb chops and fried potatoes. The town
papàs
was sitting at the next table and lots of the people there spoke Turkish, the border being so close.

The tavern owner came to his table with a half litre of retsina. ‘His treat,’ he said with a backward jerk of his head, putting two clean glasses on the table. Karamanlis raised his head and his gaze – travelling past the hats and bald heads of the other taverngoers, above the blue fog of cigarette smoke – encountered the steady eyes of Admiral Bogdanos.

So the situation was finally starting to sort itself out. He gestured for the man to join him at his table, without showing particular surprise. Bogdanos got up, rising above the layer of smoke like a mountain peak over a stretch of clouds. He sat opposite Karamanlis as he poured some wine into the glasses.

‘You don’t seem surprised to see me after so many years,’ said Bogdanos.

‘I’m not. I saw you around Dirou a couple of weeks ago and in my heart I knew I’d see you again.’

‘Really? And what made you think that?’

‘Because this is where police sergeant Vassilios Vlassos from headquarters in Athens is spending his holidays. And something could happen to him, like those poor devils Karagheorghis and Roussos, or like Mr James Henry Shields.’

‘It seems that you’ve already drawn some pretty firm conclusions from this chain of crimes.’