The Oracle (17 page)

He crossed the provincial road, ringing his bell loudly, and continued along the lane, on a slight upgrade now, headed towards the other side of town. A few houses, lit by a couple of lamp-posts, and the church of Haghios Dimitrios on the hill, then he was there. Yannis Kottàs worked as a nightwatchman in the area’s only factory, which made blocks of ice for the isolated houses which didn’t have electrical power. He leaned his bike against the wall of the building and rang the bell twice so his friend would know it was him. He peered through the office window; the light was on but Yannis wasn’t there. He must be doing his rounds. The door was open and he walked in.

‘Yannis? Yannis, it’s me, Petros. Have you put our bottle on ice? It’s my turn to win tonight!’

There was no answer. He went into the warehouse and called again loudly so his voice could be heard over the hum of the compressors. He looked all around, but there was no one to be seen.

‘Yannis, you in the john?’

The lights went out suddenly, but the compressors continued to hum: ‘Yannis, what kind of a joke is this? You trying to scare me? Come on, turn the lights back on, stop fooling around.’

Then the compressors went out as well, and the building was plunged into silence. The only sound to be heard was the odd car driving down the provincial road. One thing was sure – it wasn’t Yannis playing this trick on him; Yannis would never turn off the compressors. Roussos backed up towards the wall so no one could surprise him from behind and took the ice hook hanging from a rack. ‘Come and get me, smart guy,’ he said to himself, ‘I’ll teach you to play tricks.’

‘Petros! Petros Roussos!’ The voice boomed under the metal ceiling beams, sounding like thunder from the sky.

‘Okay,’ thought Roussos, ‘now we’ll see who’s talking.’ And in his mind he ran through all those episodes in which as a policeman he had created mortal enemies. Arrests, beatings, you name it. It must be one of them, someone with a grudge who had waited patiently until now. Who else?

‘Who are you?’ he shouted. ‘What do you want?’

‘Where did you put the girl, Roussos? Heleni Kaloudis, where did you put her?’

That’s what it was. So the joke was on him. Something that had happened ten years ago! Just now that he’d come home to enjoy his retirement.

He flattened himself against the wall and gripped the ice hook in his hand. He realized that he might have only a few minutes to live. The voice resounded again, hard and cold, fractured into countless echoes by the cement walls. ‘Aren’t you the boatman of death? Roussos!’

‘Who are you?’ he asked again. ‘Her father? Her brother? I’m a father, too . . . I can explain . . .’ His voice was cracking: his throat was dry and he was soaked with sweat.

‘I’m the one who’s come to settle up, Roussos!’

The voice was coming from another direction, but no noise had been heard.

‘Then come and get me; I’m waiting. I’ll send you to hell!’ He advanced cautiously towards the voice, brandishing the ice hook, but a loud crash very close by paralysed him completely. All the lights switched back on abruptly, blinding him. A block of ice had fallen from above, exploding into a thousand splinters that glittered on the floor like diamonds. He heard a sharp metallic click and then a roar of thunder: an avalanche of ice fell towards him, sweeping away everything it encountered. He turned, trying desperately to hide behind a pillar, but a block of ice hit him full force, hurling him against the wall and breaking his legs. In a last glimmer of consciousness he heard the rhythmic puff of the compressors as they were started up again, saw a shadow looming before him in the glare of the lights, and realized that his day of judgement had come.

Y
ANNIS
K
OTTÀS HAD
gone into town to buy a couple of bottles at the tavern; he didn’t want his friend Petros to find him high and dry! He was walking back up towards the factory at a good pace. He was sure that there had been at least half a dozen bottles left, but he’d found the crate empty. Must have been the workers sampling his stuff, those sons of bitches. From now on, he’d put his stash under lock and key.

He saw his friend’s bicycle leaning against the wall and called him: ‘Hey, Petros, you there? Have you been here long? I just ran over to the tavern, I was out of wine . . .’

He took out his keys but saw the door standing ajar. He smelled a rat; he was sure he’d locked the door before leaving. Who could have opened it? Maybe they’d forced the lock. But where was Petros? He called him again, but got no answer.

He went to his guard station and took a gun out of the table drawer. He made sure it was loaded and walked towards the compressor area. He opened the door and was nearly blinded: all the lights were on and illuminating a catastrophe. Blocks of ice everywhere, shelves overturned, drums of ammonia scattered here and there on the floor. A bloodstain in the corner had left a trail leading towards one of the deep-freeze chests. The wall of the container was stained with blood as well. He lifted the lid to look in and his knees buckled as he began to shiver uncontrollably. The gun fell from his hand as the lid banged back into place. He staggered backwards, eyes as wild as if he’d seen the devil in flesh and blood. ‘Oh, Mother of God,’ he muttered, ‘Oh, Holy Mother . . .’

T
HE POLICE INSPECTOR
didn’t arrive from the nearest station until around midnight, riding a scooter. Nearly all the men in town had already gathered around the ice factory. He found Petros Roussos’s corpse completely naked, encased in a block of ice. His heel was still caught in the ice hook used to drag him there, like a butchered animal.

Inside the lid of the ice chest, someone had written some words with a piece of chalk. It sounded like some sick joke:

He didn’t touch a thing. Once the coroner and medical examiner had arrived and thoroughly investigated the scene of the crime, he was curious to know what the coroner thought of that message with the feminine pronoun.

The coroner shrugged and shook his head: no way could he figure it out. Roussos had no enemies in town; he was respected and well liked for his open, outgoing personality. The inspector didn’t even consider calling the city police station to organize a roadblock; the killer was certainly far away by that time. He would have had all the time he needed to take off on the provincial road, by car or motorcycle. Or perhaps he’d taken one of the many mountain paths that went through the forest.

When he learned that Petros Roussos was a retired policeman, he thought of investigating a possible vendetta; some ex-con who was getting his revenge for being arrested and put away. At two in the morning, after having inspected the crime scene and taken the necessary photographs, he had to conclude that there was no direct evidence besides that strange, meaningless message. He asked the onlookers whether they could remember seeing anyone suspicious around town lately. When no one could come up with anything, he got back on his scooter and went home to bed.

The crowd broke up into little groups, discussing the events animatedly and coming up with the most outlandish hypotheses. Little by little, they ran out of steam and started to head back home, still chattering.

The next day, the coroner met with the medical examiner, who had his report ready: Petros Roussos had drowned after both his legs had been broken by a blunt instrument, almost certainly one of the many blocks of ice that had been released from the hopper at the far end of the warehouse. The murderer had then dragged the body towards one of the deep-freeze chests and thrown him in. When Yannis Kottàs had arrived, Roussos had probably only just died; in the two hours before the investigator arrived, the compressors had frozen the water around his body.

The coroner closed himself in his office to contemplate an apparently absurd case: such a ferocious crime in a quiet little town in the quietest region of Greece. He looked at the files and discovered that there had been only four murders in all of Arcadia in the previous twenty-five years. The solution had to come from outside. He called the local police station and had them give him Roussos’s service record: prior to his retirement, the officer had been working with the Patras harbour police for two years. Before that, he had been with the political police in Athens for fifteen. It was there, he was convinced, that they should start looking.

P
OLICE SERGEANT
Yorgo Karagheorghis was in his last year of regular duty in a sleepy town of the southern Peloponnesus called Areopolis, in the Kalamata district. It was a pleasant place which attracted plenty of tourists in the summer, who sunned at the beach and visited the nearby Dirou caves at the tip of the peninsula near Cape Tenaros. His son usually came down to spend the summer holidays there as well, with his wife and little son. Every evening after his shift, Karagheorghis changed into civilian clothes and went for a long bicycle ride with his grandson along the seashore. Sometimes they took a fishing rod and sat out on the rocks. He cast his line, lit up a cigar and watched the little boy running up and down the beach gathering shells or teasing the crabs hiding in the sand with a stick. If he was lucky he caught a couple of mullets, which they grilled for dinner under the trellis of the little house they’d rented outside the town.

Sometimes the boy came to the police station and asked: ‘Grandpa, can I see your gun?’

Karagheorghis would smile: ‘Stay away from guns, Panos, don’t touch. You should never play with a gun. If it goes off by mistake that means big trouble. You know we have to keep our weapons loaded?’

‘Gramps, have you ever killed a bandit?’ insisted the boy.

‘Oh, a few here and there, but only in self-defence.’ And then he’d tell him about all the dangerous operations he’d taken part in, miming all the chases, the shoot-outs, ‘Boom-boom-boom!’

For a few days he’d been noticing someone he didn’t know, a young man of about thirty, with brown hair that was a little grey at the temples, who’d sit for hours near the sea, just a couple of hundred metres from where he stopped to fish. He sat with his chin on his knees, watching the waves come in until it got dark, then he’d get up and take off southward on foot, towards Cape Tenaros. There was nothing down that way: the rugged crags of the mountain sloped towards the sea, where white- and blue-tipped waves broke on the jagged rocks. A few times he’d been tempted to follow him, out of pure curiosity, but he’d always held back. It was none of his business, after all, there were lots of strange people in this world.

One evening, when he’d finished his shift, he decided to take a spin with the squad car to get a better look. There he was, at the usual place, sitting on a rock and gazing out to sea. But as soon as he heard the engine and saw the patrol car at a distance, he jumped up and ran off in the opposite direction, disappearing behind a bend in the road. Karagheorghis accelerated, and after the curve, the youth got into a car parked alongside the road and took off in a southerly direction at full speed. The policeman refrained from stepping on the gas; he didn’t want to lose the guy from sight, but it would be unwise to take risks on such a narrow, curving road. You could easily end up in the sea. The man couldn’t get very far anyway; the road ended at the southernmost point of the peninsula.

He switched on the radio and called his fellow officer at the town police station: ‘Andreas? It’s me, Yorgo. I’m following a suspect. He’s headed towards Dirou and he’s driving like a maniac; as soon as he saw my car he took off like a shot. Try to reach me with the other car if you can; this guy might be a wacko, and he may be armed.’

The other policeman left immediately, speeding off south. Karagheorghis pulled his pistol from its holster and lay it on the seat next to him, locked and loaded. It was just a little over a kilometre to the promontory. The setting sun inflamed the entire bay of Messenia to his right. In a few minutes he was at the entrance to the caves of Dirou, where he found the car he’d been chasing, parked with its left door open. He grabbed his gun and approached: the car was empty and the radio was on. The mountain all around was steep and rocky and practically inaccessible; the only way the guy could have gone was over the enclosure fence and into the caves.

He climbed over the fence himself and went in, stopping at the entrance.

‘Come out!’ he yelled, and his voice was swallowed up in the underground labyrinth, turning into a low bellow. He looked back to see if his back-up had arrived; he didn’t want to go into the belly of the cave alone. If this guy were dangerous he could take him out whenever he liked, just by hiding behind one of the craggy formations in the cave. He calculated how long it would take his buddy to get there: it was just a few kilometres, dammit, just a ten-minute drive. Why the hell was it taking him so long?

B
UT
A
NDREAS WOULD
certainly not be able to be there any time soon: he had met up with a huge truck proceeding in the opposite direction, loaded down with lumber and taking up the entire road.

‘Move over, dammit, I have to get by!’

The driver leaned out of the window: ‘Where do you want me to go? I can’t fly! Both of us can’t get by at once.’

‘Then back up. There has to be some place you can pull over.’

‘No, sir. You’re the one that has to back up. There are no turning places for miles back and there’s no way I can back up for a couple of miles with this baby; I’ll end up down in the gulley.’