They are in an alleyway barely wider than the corridor they have just been in. One end is blocked with rubble. They go the other way, and come out into a street that is familiar from his wanderings the night before last. They walk past heaps of broken glass and snaking telephone wires, the gendarme leading, Zoë last. As they take one turn, then another, Tom slows down so that he can walk next to the singer.

‘I know you don’t trust Sólon,’ she says quietly, and indeed, he has been trying to find a polite way to say something along those lines, but his mind keeps presenting difficulties.

‘He’s the police,’ Tom whispers back.

‘So it’s perfect if, God forbid, we are stopped. He will say he has arrested you.’

‘Right. Supposing he hasn’t, in fact, actually arrested me.’

‘He won’t. Sólon is half policeman, half mangas. He’d like to be all mangas, but he thinks about his duty too much. That is a good thing. We need decent gendarmes, not the Metaxas bastards …’

‘You said something about a brother.’ The world seems very heavy, somehow, as if the earth and all its weight is bearing down on him. Zoë’s voice makes everything seem lighter.

‘Sólon has a younger brother. Ioannis.’ Zoë looks as if she might spit. ‘He is a gendarme as well, but completely different.’

‘How so?’

‘When the Metaxas fascists came to power they made a youth movement called EON. With a black uniform, boots, white belts …’ She shudders. ‘Sólon wouldn’t join. But Ioannis? Och. You see, their father was a gendarme. Not from Mikra Asia – from Athens. He married an Armenian refugee. Now he was a good man, fair, everyone liked him. When General Metaxas made his coup, there were a lot of strikes all over the country. Metaxas wanted all the gendarmes to fight against the workers, and Sólon’s father said no. He wasn’t a communist, he just didn’t think it was fair. So he lost his job. He was disgraced, had to get a job on the docks. Ioannis was so ashamed of his father that he became the exact opposite. Everything Greek, nothing from Asia Minor, communists are devils …’ She shakes her head.

‘Poor Sólon. So is he a communist? Are you a communist?’

She laughs softly. ‘Me? No. I’m nothing. Ioannis would call me communist because I hate the king. I hated Metaxas, I want a republic for Greece, democracy, equality. Most of us from Smyrna are like that. I don’t know why. My mother used to say it was because we were more developed.’ She laughs again. ‘Everyone is always trying to get you to join something. Do you know? The EON, the KKE, the church. I just want to be Zoë Valavani.’

‘Which is hard enough,’ says Tom.

‘Exactly.’ She looks at him. ‘How are you feeling, really?’

‘Fine.’