The Oracle (43 page)

Michel opened his mouth to shout his name, but the younger man disappeared into the car and took off, tyres squealing. Michel took off at a run with every ounce of energy he had left, shouting: ‘Claudio! Stop! Stop! Oh God, Claudio, stop!’ He tripped and fell to his knees as the Toyota disappeared into the night. He stayed on his knees, pummelling his fists on his legs, drained of energy and will. A big semi-trailer coming from the opposite direction sounded its horn and flooded him with blinding light. He got up, moved to the side of the road and walked back, disheartened, towards the square. The customs building was still lit up and there seemed to be a bar inside. Michel went in.

As he was eating a sandwich with a glass of milk, he noticed that the car rental shop was still open. It might have been right there that Claudio had rented the Toyota he was driving.

He slipped a ten-dollar bill under the service window and said to the clerk: ‘Excuse me, I need your help. A friend of mine just left here with a Toyota Land Cruiser that he rented from you. I absolutely have to reach him to give him a message from his family, but I lost sight of him and he must have driven off. Can you tell me where he’s arranged to turn the car in?’

The clerk took up the bill with a slight movement of his hand and it vanished into a little purse he held in his lap. He began to flip through the rental contracts he had on the table. ‘What did you say your friend’s name was?’

Michel was taken by surprise. He didn’t know how to answer and tried to gain time: ‘Well, my friend’s Italian, he’s . . .’

‘Oh sure, the Italian we rented the Toyota to. Here he is: Dino Ferretti, resident of Tarquinia, Italy. That him?’

‘Oh yes, of course, it’s him. Thanks. Can you tell me where he’ll be dropping off the car?’

‘Here it is . . . Eski Kahta. Know where it is? No? It’s near Adyaman. Pretty far, if you’ve got to reach him there.’

‘I’ll make it, even if it’s all the way to hell,’ said Michel. ‘
Teshekur ederim.
Thanks a lot.’

He got into the blue Rover and set off for Smyrna. He thought he’d pull over when he found a rest stop so he could sleep for a few hours. Claudio had left alone, and, all told, he was flesh and blood too, wasn’t he?

He drove twenty or thirty kilometres without finding any place to stop, until he noticed a turn-off on to a small road that led to the excavation site at Ilium. He drove down the road a little way until he reached the little car park in front of the entrance, where the Turks had set up a towering and quite horrible horse for the delight of tourists. It looked like a good place to stop; there was a custodian and a sentry box with a policeman on duty. Before he lay down on the back seat, he took a look around to see if anyone else had had the same idea. A black Mercedes was parked about one hundred metres further down. The driver was standing outside, leaning against the hood. His gaze seemed to scan the underlying plains, buried in fog and darkness, ears keened to the intermittent cries of the night birds of prey. The ember of his cigarette slightly illuminated his face now and then with its reflected light.

C
APTAIN
K
ARAMANLIS FOUND
an unmarked car waiting for him at the airport in Piges, along with the latest report on the Peugeot Norman and Mireille were driving: it had been spotted an hour earlier at Kavala. He’d most likely manage to intercept them before long on the state road leading to the border.

He was practically sure that Norman and Mireille were following Michel, and that this was his best lead.

He asked his colleagues to provide civilian documents for Vlassos and himself at the border in case they had to cross into Turkey, and they patiently lay in wait on the state road until they saw the Hertz Peugeot pass. It was nearly noon and Norman was at the wheel. The passenger seat was lowered completely; the girl must be sleeping.

At the border police station, Karamanlis pulled out an ID card made out for Sotiris Arnopoulos, businessman from Salonika, while Vlassos passed as Mr Konstantinos Tsulis, clerk.

They stayed on the car’s tail without being noticed, and when it had passed Kesan and turned right down the road for Eceabat-Canakkale, Karamanlis decided to overtake the Peugeot while it stopped to get petrol. Vlassos drove straight to the port, where they took the first ferry for the Asian side. They’d wait there.

W
HEN
M
IREILLE AND
Norman got off the ship at four o’clock that afternoon, the sun was already low in the sky. They drove around town trying to spot Michel’s Rover, unsuccessfully. The traffic policeman they contacted couldn’t offer much help either.

‘If you could at least tell me where your friend was headed, I could send word through my patrol cars; they’d stop him sooner or later and he’d get your message. But if you can’t even give me the slightest indication . . . he may have gone south, or east, he may have decided to get back on the ferry. I’d have to search for him in all of Turkey, my friends, and Turkey is a very big country. You could try to have a message broadcast over the radio, but it may not work: most European tourists don’t like oriental music, so they tune in to a foreign station or listen to their own tapes.’

He did take note of their request and promised that if the Rover was still in his area, he’d try to get their message through.

Karamanlis, who had been following their wanderings for a while, realized that they didn’t have a clue as to where their friend was, and cursed himself as an idiot for having wasted time so stupidly.

‘Yeah, they know less than we do, Captain,’ said Vlassos. ‘I say we go home; if these damned Turks find out we’re a couple of plain-clothes Greek police, it won’t be easy to save our asses.’

‘Just drop everything after months of investigation? After we’ve been jerked around left and right?’ Karamanlis would have done anything to get to the end of this loathsome business. ‘Let’s just give them a little more time,’ he said, ‘let’s see what they’re up to. You never know. It’s clear that they’re looking for him, and they may have more information than we do. The last word is not said . . .’ He looked into Vlassos’s little piggy eyes and put a hand on his shoulder. And then we’ve got you, my friend, he thought. Might just be that with a lure like you we’ll get the fish to bite.

Norman and Mireille stopped at a restaurant and ordered something to eat. Norman was completely disheartened.

‘I actually do have directions for a precise location,’ Mireille burst out. ‘I haven’t said anything about it until now because you would have thought I was totally crazy. But we have no choice if we want to find Michel.’

‘What do you mean by directions for a precise location?’ asked Norman.

‘Just what I said. The directions are precise. But I don’t know how to decipher them. Listen carefully, because everything I’m about to tell you is absolutely true, even though the conclusions – I’ll be the first to admit – sound like pure folly.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ said Norman. ‘Now tell me everything you know, without leaving out a single word.’

V
LASSOS HAD BEEN
ordered by Karamanlis not to lose sight of Norman and Mireille for any reason whatsoever as he left him alone and went to contact a friend of his in Istanbul. Vlassos had parked his car right across from the restaurant to keep an eye on the couple, while constantly checking his rear- and side-view mirrors as well. The night at Portolagos still burned in his memory, and waiting there like a sitting duck, practically unarmed, made his skin prickle.

In the window to the right of the entrance was a huge rotating meat kebab, dripping grease, and to the left was a sign with the restaurant’s name. But right in between he could see the animated features of that beautiful girl. Some story she was telling, to judge from her gestures and facial expressions. The young man sitting across from her was completely absorbed in her tale, nothing moving but his eyes, in synch with the rapid movements of her hands. Every so often he’d write something on a piece of paper: numbers? signs? What the hell were they doing? He’d chop off his little finger to know what they were talking about. The young man seemed nervous, upset about something. He got up suddenly, rushed out to the car and got a map. Now what?

He ran back in and laid out the map on the table while the girl continued to talk, distressed. It looked like she had tears in her eyes.

Finally Karamanlis arrived, and he was even in a good mood. ‘Got us some weapons. Finally. Felt like I was in my underwear.’

‘Tell me about it, Captain. The idea that that bastard could use me for target practice without me being able to shoot back was giving me the creeps.’

‘What’s been happening here?’

Vlassos tried as best he could to explain what he’d seen through the window, including the steaming kebab, Norman’s comings and goings, the map and all the rest.

It was dark enough for them to approach without being seen from inside, and Karamanlis inched up along the wall to the window: Mireille and Norman were using a small calculator and had the map spread out on the table. Karamanlis was considerably cheered: it looked like they were examining a route that might get them somewhere. The idea of wandering through Turkey flaunting Vlassos’s ugly face in the vague hope that Claudio Setti would be watching hadn’t exactly thrilled him.

T
HINGS WERE ACTUALLY
not so simple. Norman felt close to the solution but understood that there was still something very important missing.

‘Good God, Mireille, if you haven’t dreamed all this up, maybe we can figure out where he’s headed. As far as all the rest goes, it’s ridiculous. Do you hear me? Absolutely impossible. If any part of it is true, even the tiniest part, it’ll make a great story to tell one day. But let’s not even think about it now.’

‘Well then?’

‘Look. See? What Michel calls the “axis of Harvatis” is a loxodromic line which joins Dodona with the oasis of Siwa in Egypt. Look, it passes through the source of the Acheron river, then Ephira, here, and then it goes right through Cape Tenaros . . .’

‘The two doves who flew from Egyptian Thebes . . .’

‘Mireille. Doves?’

‘It’s a story that Herodotus tells, explaining how the most ancient oracles of the world – Dodona and Siwa – were born. Two black doves took off simultaneously from Thebes of Egypt; one alighted on an oak in Dodona and the other on a palm tree at the oasis of Siwa. They were transformed into two priestesses who revealed oracles.’

‘Oh. I see. Anyway, if you’d taken the original it would have all been much easier, but this formula seems clear enough: ET/TS = 0.37; it must refer to the ratio between the two distances: Ephira to Cape Tenaros, Tenaros to Siwa. Now, let’s say that the Dodona-Siwa segment is the base; to identify this place called Kelkea or Bouneima, we need some sort of convergence. Let’s say, for instance, a triangle with the axis of Harvatis at its base.’

‘A triangle? That’s possible, I hadn’t thought of that.’ Mireille bent over the map, and then over the sheet Norman was using to make his calculations.

‘But there’s still an unknown: alpha. How can we calculate the other angle?’

Norman lit a cigarette; his hands were trembling so badly he couldn’t even hold the match up to the tip. ‘One unknown. Dammit! Wait a minute – what if the triangle were isosceles?’ He hit his forehead. ‘That’s it! How stupid, it has to be an isosceles triangle, so the two angles at the base are identical. All we have to do is calculate alpha.’ He switched back on the little calculator. ‘Let’s multiply 180 times 0.37 . . . here it is: 66.6. If your Harvatis got it right, the point which Michel is headed towards is the vertex of an isosceles triangle with its base from Dodona to Siwa and a base angle of 66.6 degrees.’

‘Norman.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Six, six, six: isn’t that an evil number, a curse? Isn’t that the number of the apocalypse?’

‘My God, Mireille, what does the apocalypse have to do with it? You’re thinking of that American film
The Omen
with that little boy who’s the antichrist with three sixes tattooed on his forehead.’

‘Exactly, the antichrist. The apocalypse.’

‘Listen, Mireille, let’s not get carried away; let’s leave the apocalypse out of this, okay? As if we didn’t have enough to worry about. Now we need a goniometer to measure the angles. Where the hell are we going to find a goniometer at this time of night . . .’

‘It’s not even eight o’clock. You’ll find some place open; they’re not strict about closing time here in Turkey.’

‘I’ll be right back,’ said Norman, springing for the door. He flew out, but then stuck his head back in nearly immediately: ‘Do you know how to say goniometer in Turkish?’ Mireille shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter, I’ll use sign language. And you don’t move from here. Don’t you dare move.’

He jumped into the car.

‘Shall we follow him, Captain?’ asked Vlassos, putting his hand on the steering wheel.

‘No, he’s left the girl here, he’ll be back.’

It took Norman more than half an hour to find a stationery shop, explain to the owner that he needed a goniometer which the store didn’t stock, and go to the vegetable shop of the owner’s friend whose son was a surveyor and would surely lend him a goniometer.

‘Okay, let’s see the map,’ said Norman, sweaty and out of breath. He’d taken an aluminium section from the jack kit in his car and used it to draw in the base of the triangle. Then he placed the little clear plastic goniometer at the two angles of the base, measuring out 66.6 degrees. But when he tried to draw in the sides, he realized that the vertex of the triangle was far out of range of the mapped area.