The Oracle

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

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

  She’s naked. She’s cold.

  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.

  POLICE 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?

  BUT ANDREAS 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.’

  The policeman had no choice but to put the car in reverse and begin backing down the winding road, his head out the window to make sure that no one was going to ram him from behind.

  KARAGHEORGHIS REALIZED THAT something must have happened and decided to go in on his own. He couldn’t leave that guy down in the caves; tomorrow there would be a whole load of touri
sts and Lord only knew what he might try. And the police were always stuck with the blame. To hell with it. He went back to the car and switched on the radio: ‘Will you move your ass? That nutcase has gone into the Katafigi caves; we’ve got to get him out of there right now.’

  ‘Listen, there’s a truck here taking up the whole road. I can’t get by him and I’m backing up to the first turning place.’

  ‘A truck? Who is it?’

  ‘Listen, I don’t know, but I think he’s from Hierolimin.’

  ‘Write him up a hefty fine, at least; he can’t use this road with any kind of load. Then get the devil down here. I’m going in, in the meantime.’

  ‘All right. I’ll get there as soon as I can.’

  Karagheorghis entered the cave and realized that the lighting system had been activated. So the guy had the keys, or at least he knew where to find them. He cocked the trigger on his gun and walked quickly along the first stretch. The tunnel soon widened and the passage was transformed into a vast clearing studded by a forest of diaphanous white stalagmites. He strained to hear, but all he could make out was the soft concert of drops falling from the ceiling of the cavern. All at once he heard a slight gurgling: the lake! The man had entered from the underground river; perhaps he’d stolen one of the boats used to ferry tourists.

  He dashed over to the shore of the lake buried so deep beneath the surface of the earth. He had never seen a body of water look this way before: the absence of every living thing, the silence, the vast aperture of the cave, the eerie play of lights in the dark pool, the astonishing colours of the rocks. It gave him a sense of nearly religious wonder. Why had that man come all the way down here, at this time of day; what was he looking for? And where was he now?

  He walked down the little path that circled the lake for a couple of hundred metres. The surface of the water was shiny and as black as a sheet of polished steel, without the tiniest ripple. Any dark thought could have taken shape and strength under that inky sheen. He picked up a stone and tossed it into the water, as if to break a spell or banish a nightmare. It was swallowed up without a sound. Yorgo Karagheorghis could hear nothing but his own breath, nothing but the beating of his own heart, which had suddenly quickened.

  He thought that it would be best to turn back and wait for his buddy to show up. They could stake out the entrance, wait for the guy there; he’d have to get out somehow. He started to turn back, but a voice rumbled across the lake, ran down the walls of the cavern and splintered against the forest of stalagmites that rose from the ground and from the water.

  ‘Yorgo Karagheorghis!’

  His blood rushed, icy cold with fear, to his heart. He gripped his gun, which had become slippery in his numb, sweaty hand. All he could see was that pale forest of white pillars, streaked with green tears, without soul or life.

  ‘How do you know my name?’ he shouted. And his voice dashed up against the ceiling, thick with stalactites, and rained back down on his head, shivery and shattered.

  ‘You threw the girl in the lake, Yorgo Karagheorghis. Did you not throw her naked into the lake?’

  The voice seemed to be coming from behind him now . . . how was it possible? . . .

  ‘Now I’m coming to get you. Don’t you know that this is the mouth of hell?’

  Karagheorghis flattened himself against a wall, still and silent. He drew a long breath. ‘So it’s me or you, then,’ he thought, and he began to slip towards the darkest and most hidden corner of the cave. He raised his head and saw what looked like the wide open jaws of a monstrous dog – two pointy stalactites streaked with red like bloody fangs. Bad sign.

  The silence was suddenly broken by a slight splash, and he dropped his eyes, astonished, towards the surface of the lake. On the opposite shore, a boat was emerging out of the gloom. A cloaked, hooded figure was standing at the stern, pushing himself along with an oar.

  Karagheorghis smirked: ‘Takes more than a trick like this to make me shit in my pants, my friend.’ He swiftly calculated the distance that separated him from his target. When the boat was in range, he jumped out of his hiding place and pointed the pistol at the figure with both hands.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ shouted the voice, sounding vulnerable this time, touched with pain.

  ‘I had no choice,’ Karagheorghis shouted back. ‘I had no choice, dammit!’ But as he pulled the trigger, the lights abruptly went out. The shot exploded, tearing through the still atmosphere of the cavern. The roar reverberated into the cave’s most secret recesses and flooded back out, multiplied a thousandfold, fractured and distorted, transformed into a chorus of screams, into a pounding howl.

  When the fracas had died down, Karagheorghis, surrounded by total darkness, had lost all sense of time and space. He could only hear the furious beating of his heart.

  Then he heard the splashing again: the boat was still advancing towards him, inexorably. He lost control and began to shoot out wildly. As soon as he had discharged the final shot, a flame tore through the darkness at his left. He didn’t understand, couldn’t think: an explosion and then a high-pitched whistle. Then two, three atrocious stabs of pain lacerated his body and his mind.

  A small beam of light shone on him, and footsteps resounded on the gravel path. The cold hands of that ghost fell to work on his tormented body, leaving him naked and trembling. Then the little beam of light moved away, the sound of footsteps faded into the distance and he was left to die, alone, in the damp warmth of his own blood soaking the earth.

  OFFICER ANDREAS PENDELENI reached the entrance of the Katafigi caverns and saw Karagheorghis’s patrol car, parked, with the radio still on. He climbed over the fence and went in. The lights were on and the visitors’ trail was well lit. The policeman advanced cautiously, holding on tight to the Beretta calibre 9, his finger on the trigger. He called out: ‘Yorgo! Yorgo, are you in there? If you’re in there, answer me.’

  He heard what sounded like a death rattle, and he ran in the direction it was coming from. He reached the shore of the lake and saw the naked, bloody body of Sergeant Karagheorghis gleaming, half-immersed in the water.

  He had been run through by three stalactites, sharp and deadly as spears. One between the neck and collarbone, another in his stomach and the third in his groin.

  He put a hand under his head: ‘Who was it, Yorgo? What happened?’

  Karagheorghis raised his eyes towards the ceiling of the cave and Andreas could see the broken stumps of the cluster of stalactites which had pierced him through. Certainly no natural phenomenon.

  ‘Who was it?’ asked Andreas. ‘Did you see who it was?’

  Karagheorghis opened his mouth, trying to utter a sound, and his companion put his ear to his lips, hoping he’d say the murderer’s name, but all he heard was his last gasp as his body collapsed lifelessly. Andreas closed his friend’s eyes, then took off his own jacket and tried to cover him up as best he could. As he was going back towards the entrance, he happened to glance at a rock along the edge of the trail. Someone had used the dead man’s blood to write the words:

  She’s naked. She’s cold.

  He hurried back to his car. He switched on the radio and called headquarters at Kalamata.

  ‘This is Officer Pendeleni. Something terrible has happened. No, a crime. Sergeant Karagheorghis has been murdered, at the Dirou caves. Send a team to investigate and inform the coroner right away. I’ll wait here.’

  The sun had dipped below the horizon and a pale golden reflection lapped at the grey towers of Hierolimin in the distance.

  10

  Areopolis, the Peloponnesus, 22 August, 7 p.m.

  THE POLICE COMMISSIONER of the Kalamata district immediately ordered roadblocks on all the streets of the peninsula: they would trap the murderer at the end of the promontory. He had got there by car; when he tried to turn back he’d be caught in their net. The coastguard was put on alert to stop any suspicious boats trying to set sail from Hierolimin or Cape Tenaros. A helicopter patrolled all the cave exits f
rom above.

  When general headquarters in Athens was informed, the case was immediately connected to the murder of retired officer Petros Roussos at Parthenion in Arcadia. The message left by the killer was the same – apparently absurd and meaningless. Athens promised to send someone to work with the commissioner at Kalamata. In the meantime, it was essential that the criminal who had killed Karagheorghis be captured; it was surely the same person who had murdered Roussos. Same deranged mind, same sadistic imagination.

  Officer Pendeleni, who had discovered his partner dying in the cave at Katafigi, participated actively in the investigation along with his colleagues. They searched the caves thoroughly with the aid of local guides; speleologists from the University of Patras who had been conducting research on the site were also called in, all to no avail. The police worked all night, in shifts, exploring every nook of every gallery. Divers sounded the waters of the underground lakes but never found a thing.

  Pendeleni managed to locate the truck driver who had blocked off the road as he was trying to get to the caves, and arranged to meet with him that evening at a tavern in Hierolimin. The man was absolutely above and beyond suspicion; he had been working in the area for over thirty years. It was his load that seemed questionable; the boat that picked up the lumber he unloaded at the pier at his destination in Gythion seemed to be the same one that had delivered it earlier.

  ‘And that didn’t seem strange to you?’ asked the officer.

  ‘Oh, it seemed strange all right.’

  ‘And it didn’t occur to you to ask the guys on the boat why they were giving you the runaround?’