The Oracle (39 page)

‘Kastritza. We were on opposite sides, then. “Commander”, huh? Wait, I remember hearing about you . . .’

‘Forget about it, Karamanlis. Water under the bridge. Now the good of our country demands that we cooperate. In any case, there’s not much more to say. Take Vlassos with you. He’s the perfect lure. Setti will lose control as soon as he sees him in circulation and he’s bound to commit some error.’

Karamanlis sat down in the driver’s seat of his car, leaving the door open. He stretched his hand into the glove compartment and took out an unopened pack of cigarettes that had been there for months. He took one out and lit it. ‘To hell with it. They can’t be any more dangerous than the trap I’m about to walk into.’ He relished a long drag.

‘One thing, Karamanlis. You’ll have realized that I could have torn you to pieces at any time. I’ve played with you like a cat with a rat, just so that you know who sets the rules here. And now be good and do as I say.’ He turned around and began walking towards Stadiou Street. Karamanlis leaned out of the car.

‘Just one moment . . . Commander.’ The man stopped. ‘Were you ever on Mount Peristeri? I mean, did we ever meet somewhere around there?’

He turned suddenly towards Karamanlis and his teeth gleamed, in the dark, in a wolf’s leer. ‘There were times,’ he said, ‘during the civil war, but I don’t remember if you were there with your battalion.’

‘No. I wasn’t,’ said Karamanlis. He closed the door and watched the man as he walked off with his long, even stride, his jacket collar turned up and his hat down over his eyes. He was painfully reminded of the words of the
kallikàntharo
s
on the wind-beaten peak of Mount Peristeri: ‘It is he who administers death’.

Fine, so the only thing left to do was keep this appointment. What the devil.
O Tàvros
had always knocked off all the toughest and craftiest of his enemies. Gored them at the last minute, when they distractedly thought they had the situation in hand. And after all . . . Setti had never got close enough to know what the old bull was capable of.

He switched on the radio and called headquarters: ‘Karamanlis here. Tell Sergeant Vlassos to get ready to leave with me. Tomorrow morning at six.’

‘With you, sir? Where to?’

‘It’s my own fucking business where to. You just tell him what I said.’ When he lifted his head the commander, or whoever the hell he was, had disappeared around the corner. He started up the car and headed home.

The ‘commander’. He had heard plenty of talk about him during the resistance. A strange figure, no one knew exactly whose side he was on; he had been known to destroy entire police battalions, but he’d also harshly punished any excess on the part of the partisans. The people considered him a hero, a legend, although no one knew who he really was. He certainly knew about the operations that he, Karamanlis, had carried out in the area of Kastritza and other regions of the north at the head of his police division. Back when he was known as
O Tàvros.
So now the game was drawing to a close, and in one way or another a number of things would come to light.

He parked in the usual place, walked slowly up the stairs and opened the door to his apartment. He took off his shoes and didn’t turn on the light, but his wife heard him anyway and scurried in slippers down the hall: ‘Is that you? Oh Holy Mother, do you know what time it is? And this smell? What is this smell?’

M
IREILLE REACHED OUT
to the hatch and pushed it up gently. It was counterweighted and opened easily, and there she was: in the printer’s shop on 17 Dionysìou Street. Everything was in perfect order, as if work had just come to a stop for the night: the floor was clean and packs of paper were neatly stacked on the shelves. The press was in the corner. So this was where Periklis Harvatis’s article had been printed.

She felt tired, exhausted by tension and lack of sleep. Her throat was dry and her heartbeat was irregular, making her feel as if she would suffocate.

She got to her feet. Where was Michel right now? She had the panicky sensation that there was a threat hovering over him, like a hail cloud over a field of wheat. She walked around the little room and scanned the shelves; there were all kinds of things: documents, certificates, papers, electronic components, books, records, an old bouzouki.

The room at the back of the shop was much bigger than the printing room itself and held the strangest assembly of objects that Mireille had ever seen. An old Lee-Enfield gun and an American revolver, an eighteenth-century manifesto of the Klephts against the Turks, the combat flag of a Byzantine dromond from the fourteenth century, a banner of the sacred battalion of Ypsilandis, old photographs, objets d’art of every type, antique weapons, paintings, prints, the oars and rudder of a boat, a fishing net, models of antique ships, a classical Attic red-figured cup, a late Mycenaean damascened blade, a game table . . .

In the corner, a stack of articles; hundreds of copies, rather, of the same article. It was what she was looking for, the work of Harvatis: ‘Hypothesis on the necromantic rite in the
Odyssey
, Book XI’.

Alongside was a folder with a typescript by the same author entitled: ‘Hypothesis on the position of the site called “Kelkea”, or, in other works, “Bounima” or “Bouneima”.’

Those were the same names she’d seen in Michel’s notes in his apartment! She urged herself to remember the context: something about the final sacrifice of Odysseus.

Mireille was completely worn out, but sensed that she had to sit down and squeeze all the meaning she could out of those pages, even from the most unimportant-looking expressions. She didn’t feel that she could take anything out of that room, which emanated a spirit of silent and intense sacredness; she wanted to leave no trace of her passage, and certainly didn’t want the inhabitant of that unique refuge – so jealous of his own solitude – to have any clue of where to come looking for her.

She plunged into the manuscript, nervous and jittery, after having switched off the light in the printing shop. She looked at her watch: perhaps the waiter at the bar across the street was cleaning up and had noticed the light switching on and off for the second time that night and was wondering who to call. Wondering why the girl who had given him the thousand drachmas wasn’t answering the phone in her hotel.

The article by Harvatis was obviously unfinished; actually, rather than a scholarly article, it was more of a collection of notes and observations:

Mireille’s head was spinning with all this puzzling information. She was convinced that it must mean something, something important, something connected to Michel. But what? She delved on. The pages which followed were covered with difficult-to-interpret sketches, isolated phrases, verses. And then again:

Notes from his excavation journal followed with sketches, sections, stratigraphies and drawings of the objects found. Dense notes written in a neat, minute hand. She thought of the vase, the golden vase that Karamanlis had described to her. It had come from Ephira; Harvatis had almost certainly unearthed it himself. Why was there no mention of it?

Mireille looked at her watch: it was three-thirty in the morning. She certainly didn’t want the owner of the place to surprise her there at this hour. She knew she couldn’t hold up under the intensity of that gaze. Mireille listened carefully, but there was not a sound to be heard: the place seemed completely isolated or soundproofed, and it was quite warm inside.

She got to the end of the article without finding anything else that particularly attracted her attention. But right between the last page and the back cover was an envelope addressed in Harvatis’s hand, although the writing was very different: wavering, weak, scribbled:

The envelope had been opened hurriedly and the paper was torn. Mireille took out the sheet of paper it contained and began to read: