Next day, at dinner, two customers. Two men sat in separate booths, waiting for their meal: two men who, by coincidence, both ordered the mixed grill, the Achillion’s most popular dish. Achilles set their meat on the stove, from left to right: bacon, sausage, mutton chop, ox tongue, tomato (grills came with half a fried tomato on the side). While they were waiting, the customers started arguing with each other—Achilles, watching through the peephole between the kitchen and cafe, didn’t understand what they were quarrelling about. Something about a person known to them both, someone who’d ‘had enough of that man’, which could refer to any number of people, which also vaguely described the present condition of the Asproyerakas family, and in a stinging moment of second-hand shame Achilles turned away from the peephole and his gaze fell inadvertently on the olive-wood club propped up in the corner of the room.

By the time he’d pushed through the door into the cafe, the two customers had left their booths and were brawling on the floor, rolling around in such entanglement that Achilles had difficulty telling one guy from the other.

He stood over the nearest man and struck him in the shoulder with the olive-wood club. The blow glanced across and cut open this fellow’s high forehead. The other man, receiving blows to the ribs, screamed, ‘Don’t!’, and out of a pity reflex Achilles turned back to the first man, who was dazed and trying to sit up, blood from the head wound skittering over his face. Out of an acutely buried impulse, and surprising even himself, Achilles uttered the word ‘Youvarlakia’ (meatballs in lemon sauce), as he brought the weapon down on the man’s knee, making the sound of a stick across a ball. It was the other man’s turn again. He took the club around his middle. ‘Youvarlakia!’ Achilles said again. A marvellous dish he couldn’t place on the menu because Australians wouldn’t order it. And he dragged the two brawlers out onto the footpath and closed the cafe, cleaned up the blood, extinguished the stove, and drank one glass of whiskey—no more (he felt like more). He expected the men to come back with guns or knives.

That night Achilles stood at the front window and looked out, waiting for a person, or a gang, to return seeking revenge. Why didn’t they come back?