‘Not a chance.’ A Beaufighter screamed low overhead and wiggled its wings, and the soldiers around them cheered. ‘The navy is shelling Piraeus, Tom. ELAS captured a whole platoon of our chaps there last week. Plenty of things to paint closer to home, I should’ve thought.’

‘Are you manoeuvring for another portrait, sir?’ Tom asked, laughing to mask his disappointment.

‘No, just trying to save your skin. I don’t want a pack of bereaved art critics out for my blood. They can be vicious, I understand.’

‘I don’t think I’d be missed,’ Tom said.

‘We’re surrounded.’ The colonel swept his arm around the horizon. ‘We have Omonia Square and Syntagma, Mount Lycabettus and Kolonaki. We did have Kifisia but obviously we don’t any more. Everything else is ELAS. We’re on an island here, Tom.’

‘Outnumbered as well is what they tell me.’

‘In Athens, yes, but not by much. We’re being reinforced: by the end of the week we’ll have superiority. We outgun them already in the city. But if the divisions out there’ – he waved at the mountains, not so far away – ‘if they had committed those men even a couple of days ago, we’d have been done for.’

‘I wonder why they haven’t.’

‘So do we all. For what it’s worth, my feeling is that, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, ELAS don’t want to fight us.’

‘Why not?’

‘They think they’re fighting for justice, and they seem to think that we, even after all this, are their best hope. They don’t trust the new government and they certainly don’t trust the king.’

‘Are they right?’

The colonel shrugged. ‘That’s none of my business, old son.’

But it is, Tom wanted to say. The colonel was striding back to the museum, and Tom followed him inside. A generator chugged somewhere nearby, and a trickle of electricity cast a dim light, yellow and waxy as the fat on hanging beef, over the marble walls and the huge statues that reclined, armless, headless, more beautiful than the corpses on the roads around Caen and Falaise but still, in this light, just as dead. One giant, legs amputated at the thighs and with half a face, wore a paratrooper’s red cap at a jaunty angle. A rifle dangled by its strap from a Nereid’s arm. A section of pediment was draped in laundry: grey soldiers’ underwear festooned like a century’s worth of cobwebs. Their footsteps echoed in the cave-cool space, the colonel stopping to bend over a desk on which a radio sat, its dials glowing amber and red. A plane roared just above the roof and almost immediately the building shook with two, three, four concussions. Dust trickled from the ceiling in fine silver lines.