Chapter 2
The Places Do Not Touch
The next morning, Eleni drew a map on the back of a television schedule.
She marked Paiania, Pallini, Kantza, Glyka Nera, Koropi, and Sesi. The names sat close together, but they were not the same place. She circled Koutouki above Paiania and put the paper in her bag.
At the Athens courthouse, reporters waited beneath bare trees. Some sheltered notebooks inside their coats. Others smoked near the kiosk. Every few minutes, someone asked whether a lawyer had arrived.
Marina Kallergi stood at the curb with coffee and a newspaper.
— You’re Vardaki, she said. The local television researcher.
— Freelance researcher.
— For the cave piece.
— For now.
Marina glanced at the courthouse. “You picked a busy week to learn court reporting.”
— I need to know what belongs in the story.
— Then don’t begin with the cave.
They crossed to a café opposite the entrance. Marina chose a table facing the courthouse doors. Eleni opened her map and notebook.
— My producer says the appeal lets us tell the whole case.
— It does. The appeal is news. Start there.
— And then?
— Go back to the dates. The central crimes were from 1991 to 1993. The trial was in 1995. This appeal is in 1997. That is why the case is back in the papers.
Eleni wrote each year on a separate line.
Marina opened a notebook full of tight handwriting and folded slips.
— Two killings are central to the reporting, she said. Theodora Syropoulou—Dora—was fourteen. Reports place her death on 27 August 1992, in a remote area linked with Koropi and Sesi. Garifallia Giourga was twenty-eight. Reports place her death on 14 April 1993, in the Koropi area.
Eleni marked Koropi.
— Nothing there says Koutouki.
— Not in the published accounts I have read.
— Or Paiania?
Marina shook her head. “Don’t replace one mistake with another. Paiania is in the wider eastern-Attica area. So are Pallini and Kantza. Koropi is nearby, but it is different. Sesi is a local name linked with Koropi. People use one name when they mean another, especially when they repeat a frightening story.”
— What about the name everyone uses? The Satanists of Pallini?
— That was a press label, not a charge.
— It stuck.
— It fit a headline. Marina turned a page. The papers liked photographs too: black clothes, records, symbols. Legal procedure is harder to photograph.
— They made people suspicious of anyone dressed that way.
— Yes. That was unfair and lazy. The case concerned particular people and particular offences. It did not make a music fan, or someone in black, guilty.
A court officer came outside. Reporters moved closer. Marina relaxed when he went only to the kiosk.
— I have ten minutes, she said. What is your question?
Eleni showed her a photocopied article, one paragraph marked in blue.
— This says police searched a place in Paiania around 30 or 31 December 1993. It calls it a crypt, then a hideout. It mentions objects described as ritual-related.
Marina read it.
— Does it name the place?
— No.
— Does it say Koutouki?
— No.
— Does it even say cave?
— It says underground place. The writer may have meant a basement, a shelter, something else. We do not know.
Eleni saw how Paiania, underground, and a few missing details could become a story about the famous cave.
— Could we say police searched an underground site in Paiania and film Koutouki? she asked. If the narration says the site was not identified?
Marina gave her a flat look. “Would viewers separate the sentence from the picture?”
— I could make it clear.
— Could Stella?
Eleni lowered her pen.
— If you use the cave behind that report, people will decide the cave was the place, Marina said. They will remember the rock and tunnel, not a careful clause.
— Do you have an inventory from the search?
— No.
— A forensic report?
— No.
— A court document identifying the location?
— Not one I can verify.
The answer took away a finished story. Eleni copied the date, the article’s wording, and the newspapers that repeated it. Beside them she wrote: Location not named.
By midday, she was back in Paiania. She stopped at Yannis’s shop near the bus road to buy cigarettes for her mother, who had been trying to quit for six months.
Yannis saw the papers under her arm.
— You’re still on that cave business?
— I’m trying to find where it started.
— It started in people’s mouths. That is where most bad stories start.
— Did people connect Koutouki to the case then?
— Some did. After the headlines, they connected everything. A boy with long hair. A girl in boots. A record shop. My nephew wore black for three years and listened to metal music. Old ladies watched him like he had brought trouble home in his backpack.
— Did he know anyone involved?
— No.
— Then I can’t use him as part of the case.
— I know. I’m telling you what the headlines did around here.
— Who told you the cave was involved?
— One person heard Paiania. Another heard underground. By the time it reached this counter, it was Koutouki.
It was not proof, but it showed how the rumor could travel.
At the television station, the editing room smelled of warm tape and instant coffee. On the monitor, old footage showed Koutouki’s entrance: paved path, sign, low building against the hillside.
Stella stood behind the cameraman.
— Well?
— I found a report of a police search in Paiania in late December 1993.
Stella brightened. “Good. We have the police connection.”
— The report does not identify Koutouki.
— But it says Paiania.
— And Koutouki is in Paiania. That only tells us the cave is in the same town.
Stella lifted the draft script. “What can we put on screen?”
Eleni watched the frozen entrance. A few seconds beside the word crypt would undo any disclaimer.
— We can say the case involved several places in eastern Attica. We can say a later report mentioned an unnamed underground site in Paiania. But we should not show the cave with that.
Stella stared at her. “You don’t think?”
— I know what people will assume.
— What I need is a segment people can follow. Police searched somewhere underground. There is a cave above Paiania. The appeal is happening now. That is a story.
— The appeal is not about new crimes at the cave, Eleni said. The central crimes were in 1991 to 1993. The trial was in 1995. The appeal is why the case has returned to public attention.
— Fine. Put in the dates. But dates are not television.
— The convictions were for specific offences. They do not prove every report that followed.
Stella rubbed her forehead. “I am not asking you to invent a murder in the cave.”
— No. But using the cave as the picture for an unnamed place is close.
The tape machine clicked behind them.
— Bring me the investigation, Stella said. Who went to police? How did it move from rumor to a case?
— There are retrospective reports that Manos Dimitrokalis spoke to a priest around Christmas or New Year in 1993, then gave information to the authorities. The accounts differ on details.
— Find someone who can explain the process without making every sentence uncertain.
— By tonight, Stella said. Otherwise I give it to somebody else.
Outside, rain had begun again. Eleni sat in her car, map open on the passenger seat. Paiania and Koropi were close, but separate marks.
She wrote beneath the report’s date:
What does this source actually say?
Then:
What will the picture make people believe?
Marina had mentioned a retired police records clerk, Petros Leonidas. Eleni did not expect a secret file. She needed a clear account of how an inquiry became a court case, and where the public record stopped.