‘I don’t know if she’s still alive.’ Why is he whispering? Careless talk costs lives, but who is there to overhear? And then he remembers lying in bed next to Zoë, listening as she talked about chance, the goddess, Tyche. Is this tempting her?

‘Well, let’s find out,’ says McCall. ‘If you want to, that is.’

‘I do. God, yes, I do. She’s why I’m here. Here at all, maybe.’

McCall stands up. ‘Let’s go, then. But you’ll need to lose the camouflage. Got any civvies?’

‘Some trousers.’

The journalist looks him up and down. ‘The sweater looks OK. If you ask the concierge, he’ll let you scrounge something from the cloakroom – the Krauts left a whole lot of stuff behind. A coat would be good. Meet you back here in fifteen?’

‘OK. And thank you, Mac.’

‘You’re doing me a favour. It’ll be a scoop: first correspondent in Little Moscow.’

The sky is a flawless, seamless tissue of blue reflected in the sea towards which they are driving down Syngrou Avenue, straight and wide as a runway. Tom sits in McCall’s jeep, wrapped in a beautiful tweed overcoat, watching the sagging telephone wires and the shattered date palms pass by. McCall is driving slowly, because the road is full of obstacles: burnt-out cars, shell holes, fallen poles. Can’t you go any faster? Tom wants to shout. It is freezing cold. The label in his coat reads Scheer – Wien and it plainly cost someone a fortune. He chose it because it seemed to be the one least likely to have belonged to a Gestapo man. But it could have, or to someone just as bad. No one from Vienna has come here with good intentions lately. ‘You’ll do,’ McCall said. But Tom wasn’t so sure.

‘I feel like a Nazi spiv,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t want to show up after all this time, looking like this.’

‘You really think she’ll be there?’ McCall pulled a stained porkpie hat down over his brow and turned away without waiting for an answer.

The jeep has a big American flag tied across the bonnet, WAR CORRESPONDENT stencilled in large white letters across the top of the windscreen and a smaller flag tied to the aerial. Tom has a pre-war motorist’s map and he thinks he has worked out a route to Kokkinia which avoids the main trouble spots. McCall glanced at the map, at Tom’s finger pointing out Zoë Valavani’s house, said ‘OK’ and shrugged. The journalist has become a different person: cool and soldierly.