The Oracle by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

Author:Valerio Massimo Manfredi
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers UK
Published: 2011-02-28T06:00:00+00:00

14

Skardamoula, 13 September, 9 a.m.

AFTER HAVING ABANDONED the fishing cooperative’s truck at the gas station as they had been told, Norman and Michel took a bus back to their hotel, where they found the blue Rover in perfect running order and their keys at the Plaja reception desk. They waited days in vain for further contact. Michel had thought long and hard about the meaning of the phrase found next to the corpses of Petros Roussos and Yorgo Karagheorghis, without getting anywhere. They decided finally to take matters into their own hands, and to cast their thoughts back to the moment when they’d stumbled upon the golden vase in the basement of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. They would return to the capital and try to contact Aristotelis Malidis. He had been with Periklis Harvatis during his last hours, and he had been the last caretaker of the vase of Tiresias. Perhaps he had some sort of connection with the mysterious person who had failed to take them to the vase.

Norman wanted to go first to Macedonia, to the place where his father had been found dead, to see if he could learn anything more than the bare facts Scotland Yard had provided. They decided to split up and to call each other every couple of days, meeting up in Athens ten days or so later to exchange information. It seemed like a good plan to both.

Norman drove up the Strimon valley one fine day in mid-September, finding the place so gorgeous that it nearly made him forget the reason for his mission. The river meandered in wide turns through woody groves and beautiful meadows. The slow-running waters were covered with pond lilies; big old plane and beech trees heavy with foliage bent to touch the water, where flocks of sheep came to drink during the hottest hours of the day. This was the ancestral homeland of Orpheus and Zalmoxis, the mythical land of centaurs and chimeras.

He spent the night in a clean, freshly whitewashed little room in a private home near a town called Sidirokastro. The stars had never seemed nearer: the galaxy curved over the ridge of Mount Pindus like the veil of a goddess fluttering in the dark, and the stars were so close to the ground that they seemed as bright and sweetly scented as mountain orchids.

That night at a tavern he asked around for a guide who was well acquainted with both sides of the border and who spoke Vlachì, the mountain dialect used on the Yugoslavian side of Macedonia as well as here on the Greek side. The generous fifty dollars a day Norman was offering attracted no shortage of takers. The next day, at dusk, a hunter of about forty named Haralambos Hackiris showed up: he had been born in the area and was familiar with every inch of the woods and river banks for a twenty-kilometre stretch, even on the Yugoslavian side, where he knew plenty of people. He was definitely a smuggler, and admitted as much to Norman, but on the whole seemed to be honest and trustworthy.

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