The Oracle (14 page)

‘Admiral Bogdanos . . . you?’

‘You weren’t expecting me? Maybe I should have called first.’

The young man lowered his gaze and stepped aside. ‘Come in, please.’

The man entered the room, walking across it with a slow stride and stopping next to the window. ‘Quite a beautiful place,’ he said. ‘An enchanting view. And so this is where Dino Ferretti lives.’

‘Yes, it is. And it is here that he will die, very soon. I’ve decided to recover my original identity.’

Bogdanos turned towards him and Claudio Setti thought he saw, for the first time since he’d met him, an expression of dismay, nearly panic – if it hadn’t been for the unchanging strength in his eyes. He felt ashamed at what he had said.

‘I owe you so much, Commander. My life, the tranquillity of this place, my shelter in a storm. But I feel it’s useless to keep up this facade. I’ll never be able to lead a normal life this way.’

Bogdanos flared up: ‘Normal? You want a normal life? I understand. You want your name back, a woman, most likely, and children and a house with a garden and summer vacations. Is that what you want? Tell me, is this what you want? Tell me, dammit, so I’ll know that all I’ve done has been in vain and that the person who I met and saved no longer exists.’

Claudio dropped to a chair, covering his face with his hands: ‘Time changes many things, Commander. Even the most horrible wound scars over. You can die right away, of anger and of pain, but if you survive, it means that an unknown force is pushing you towards life. You can’t blame me for this, Commander.’

‘I understand. Now that the political situation in Greece has changed so radically and you feel you are no longer threatened, you think it’s time to take up your true identity again. The newspapers will love it: a dead man lives . . .’

‘You think I’m an ingrate and a coward. You’re wrong. I’ve lived for years in the dimension that you assigned to me, waiting for the moment at which I could take revenge. I’ve followed all your instructions to the letter, but now I feel that it’s all been useless. Human wickedness will remain, no matter what I do.’

Bogdanos nodded and fell silent for a few moments, then took his hat and walked towards the door.

Claudio seemed suddenly to shake off his mood. ‘Commander.’ Bogdanos turned towards him, the door handle already in his hand. ‘Why did you come here today?’

‘It no longer has any importance.’

‘No. I want to know.’

‘I’m sorry to have found you in this state of mind. I came to open your wound up again, to make it bleed . . . against your will, I’m afraid. Son, I have the proof which will nail those responsible for Heleni’s death as well as their accomplices. I have devised a plan to destroy them. Every last one.’

Claudio paled. ‘Why don’t you turn this proof over to the law?’

Bogdanos looked appalled, as though Claudio were a complete stranger, speaking nonsense, but his voice betrayed no emotion.

‘All the crimes committed during that time have fallen under the statute of limitations or have been covered by amnesty. They are, in any case, outside the jurisdiction of the law. They would never be punished. I know where they disposed of Heleni’s body: they threw it into the dam at Tournaras, after having taken off her clothes. They were afraid that some strip of clothing might have floated to the surface and given them away. A cold tomb . . .’

Claudio felt tears rise to his eyes and stream down his cheeks, but he couldn’t say a word. Bogdanos looked at him in silence and then started down the stairs. Claudio ran to the railing on the landing: ‘Commander!’ he yelled, his voice breaking. Bogdanos stopped and slowly turned his head upwards. ‘Why? Why are you still seeking . . .’

The door to the street opened and a woman came in with a shopping bag. Bogdanos waited until she disappeared behind the door of an apartment on the ground floor. ‘I’ve always punished unwarranted violence. Mercilessly.’ He continued down the stairs, in the dark.

Claudio shouted again, through his tears: ‘Why did you choose me? Why didn’t you let me die?’

Bogdanos was already at the bottom of the last ramp of stairs and was about to open the outside door. He turned again, and his voice echoed darkly, like a wolf snarling from the depths of his lair. ‘I didn’t choose you, fate chose you. You can’t escape the consequences of what has happened. Why don’t I take care of it? I can’t expose myself. Not here, not now. I’ve been fighting a hostile destiny, for ever, it seems . . . And I have to go back to my hotel. I’m tired. I’ve been investigating for years, understand? I’m tired . . .’

‘Which hotel?’

‘The Rasenna.’

‘In what name? If I . . . if I were to look for you, what name are you registered under?’

‘Kouras, Stàvros Kouras. Goodnight, my son.’

He disappeared down the street and the door closed behind him with a bang. Claudio rested his head on the railing and remained in that position, mentally counting Admiral Bogdanos’s steps as he walked away, and imagined Heleni’s white body in the black water as she vanished, swallowed up in its depths. ‘Goodnight, Commander,’ he murmured.

France, University of Grenoble, 10 June, 9 a.m.

‘G
OOD MORNING
, P
ROFESSOR
.’

‘Good morning, Jacques. What’s new?’

‘Just the usual, Professor. Oh, I wanted to remind you that there’s a faculty board meeting this afternoon.’

‘Right. Trouble in the air?’

‘Looks like it. Madame Fournier is furious because your department has made off with two of her graduate scholarships, and the students are planning to present a motion for exam reform beginning the next academic year.’

‘Got it. We’ll try to weather the storm and survive. Don’t pass me any calls for the next ten minutes; I have to open my mail and look over my notes for the lesson.’

Michel Charrier hung his jacket on a coat hook and sat down at his desk. The telephone rang not a minute later.

Jacques, I thought I said ten minutes.’

‘I couldn’t say no: it’s Senator Laroche, from Paris.’

‘Oh right, thank you, Jacques. Hello? Hello? Is that you, Georges? To what do I owe this pleasure?’

‘Yes, it’s me, Michel. And I have good news. The executive committee at the party secretary’s office have decided to support your candidacy for the coming parliamentary elections. Not bad, eh? Well? Cat got your tongue?’

‘Good God, Georges . . . what can I say? I . . . good heavens, I don’t know what to say. I never expected anything like this . . . well . . . I’m happy, very happy. Please, could you thank them all on my behalf . . . I’m literally . . . speechless!’

‘Someone like you, speechless! Don’t make me laugh. You’ll have to find the words, you know. Meetings, assemblies, conferences . . . You’ll have to find a wealth of words!’

‘But, Georges, what about the University?’

‘Yes, that’s important. See, we’re preparing everything so far in advance because we want to be ready when the moment comes. And so we were thinking it would be good if you could be tenured before the next electoral campaign begins. An element of prestige like that would be just the thing. We’re planning on pushing this image hard: the excellent intellectual level of our candidates. The time when we were putting labourers up for parliament is long gone. The competition is setting such sharks into the arena that we can’t make too many concessions to ideology.’

‘Tenure! As if that were nothing at all! It’s no joke, you know. I don’t think the department intends to even ask for a chair for this subject.’

‘Oh, that’s nothing that can’t be fixed. We may be the minority, but we’re pretty strong in this neck of the woods, and we’ve got the right friends.’

‘Georges, I’m afraid that’s not enough. What I need is more . . . direct support.’

‘We’ll try to find that as well, but you have to get moving: produce something important, something that will get people talking even outside the academic world, maybe even abroad . . .’

‘I understand. I’ll . . . see what I can do. You have to give me time. Just off the top of my head . . . well, there is some research I’ve been working on, but I’m afraid it’s not very sensational. I’ll have to think about it.’

‘That’s fine, nothing to worry about, Michel. We’ll see each other and think of something together, with the help of other friends, if need be. What’s important is that you feel up to the challenge.’

‘Well, of course I do.’

‘Great, that’s what I like to hear. We’ll worry about the rest. Have to run now; I’ll call you back next week. Is next week okay?’

‘Oh, certainly. And thank you, thanks again.’

Michel hung up, leaned back in his chair and took a long breath. My God: Michel Charrier, tenured professor and member of parliament in one fell swoop! Not bad, not bad at all. One of the youngest and most brilliant intellectuals of France, one of the youngest deputies . . . that’s what the papers would be saying. If everything went as planned.

He stretched out his hand to reach for a frame with the photo of a beautiful blonde girl with the sun in her hair.

Mireille, a brilliant career at the same university, associate professor of art history. One of the most illustrious families in the city, the Saint-Cyrs; also one of the most disagreeable and haughty. If all this went well, they’d no longer have a reason for keeping him away from their daughter. They’d have to recognize him for what he was and stop hindering their relationship. Maybe they’d even get married.

He realized that he should be ashamed of such plotting. The classic story: he loves her, she loves him, but ‘they’ are against it. And then the enterprising young man of modest working-class origins climbs up the ivory tower of the oldest aristocracy of the city, without losing his progressive ideals, naturally . . .
merde
! A
feuilleton
, that’s what he was. A shameless social climber. He felt totally ridiculous.

What the hell. You only live once, he thought, and sometimes life was made of clichés; so what? He really did love her, and they were very happy together. It was authentic love. Everyone else could go get screwed.

He tried to control his exhilaration, the heady delirium that grabbed him whenever the wheel of fortune spun his way and spurred him to jump right into the fray. He realized that he had to consider the whole thing carefully, unhurriedly. The party was willing to set their sights on him as a brilliant, successful intellectual, faithful to his political and ideological principles: this was the image they wanted to create for him, how they wanted the electors to see him. The senator had been polite and encouraging, but it was evident that he himself, Michel Charrier, had to pull out the winning hand.

He put Mireille’s photograph back down on the table and picked up the notebook in which he’d written the outline of his latest study: ‘The propagandistic value of Roman-age agora constructions in Ephesus.’ Less than awe-inspiring. Rigorous, original, deftly argued, but . . . a little dry. Okay to add to the bunch in a tenure evaluation, but not impressive enough to win him the chair. Nor to get people talking inside the University and out. What he was being asked to do was to exploit his research and to pretend, on top of it, that this wasn’t a contradiction in terms in itself; that politics and science could join in a chaste union – without politics fucking science, put simply.

Dial up the senator and tell him to go to hell, or try to reconcile the two with the least amount of damage? He could attempt to come up with something. If nothing interesting occurred to him, he’d withdraw, declaring nobly that intellectual honesty allowed no compromise. The fox and the grapes. Shit.

Michel took the pack of unopened mail that was sitting on his desk and began to look through it. He just couldn’t concentrate; he’d been invaded by a craving to take the bull by the horns, to get started on this new challenge, a challenge which was arousing all his energies. Energies which were flying every which way, like flies trapped in a bottle.

‘Steady, now,’ he chastised himself. ‘The moment has not arrived; no means nor methods yet, just intent. And not even certain intention. Better to open the mail and think about the lesson.’

Catalogues, subscriptions, an invitation to a convention, a bill from a bookstore. Abstracts: ‘Obscene language in military life in the Imperial age’; ‘The importance of the asyndeton in Sallustian prose’; ‘The composition of cement mortar in Sillan age constructions’; ‘Hypothesis on the necromantic rite in the
Odyssey
, Book XI’; ‘Internal road networks and Hadrian’s Wall’; ‘Phallic metaphors in slingshot projectile inscriptions’. It didn’t look like his colleagues scattered throughout the world were coming up with many sparkling ideas either.

The caretaker knocked on the door: ‘Professor, it’s time for your lesson. Your students are waiting.’

He picked up his bag, his books and his notes and went along to the classroom, but his concentration was close to zero. He dragged laboriously through the lesson; there was an idea taking shape in the back of his head, but he needed a connection that just wasn’t forthcoming. It fluttered around aimlessly without its meaning becoming clear. But it was a good idea, he could feel it, an important idea. Something that could solve the problem. What the devil . . . He suddenly realized that he hadn’t finished his sentence and the students were looking at him in surprised silence. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he apologized. ‘I’m afraid I’m a bit distracted this morning. What was it I was saying?’