The jeep heads south and west, through the empty streets, past smouldering factories and abandoned barricades. McCall steers away from machine-gun fire, and once a mortar bomb explodes close enough to them that a piece of shrapnel tears a gash in the flag stretched over the bonnet. Finally they reach Syngrou Avenue, and pull in behind a small convoy of armoured cars, driving fast towards Athens. McCall has pulled the ELAS armband from behind the windscreen wiper and tucked it inside his coat.

‘She might be OK, you know.’

‘What?’ Tom has been somewhere else. Dreams and memory … has he been living here, or there, these last years? The line between has become so thin. Thin as a film of paint or a scrape of pencil lead. He remembers Caen, how quickly the dogs came to dig in the ruins, dragging out bones and charred meat.

‘Your singer. She might … I mean, she’ll be all right. The ELAS guys in the carpet factory were telling me that a lot of people are camping out in the hills. I guess a lot of houses are wrecked – I mean, they’ve been fighting up there since March. If she was smart, she’d have left a long time ago. She’ll be fine.’

‘There’s nothing left, Mac.’ Tom sucks in freezing air and petrol fumes, and pats down the Nazi coat for his cigarettes. ‘Before, I thought: what if she’s gone? What if I knock on the door, and no one opens it? Or a stranger … but there’s nothing.’

‘I thought you were looking for a girl, Tom.’ McCall takes an offered cigarette. ‘But it was more than that, wasn’t it? I could have told you: people like us, I don’t think we get to go home.’

Tom tastes sulphur from the match as he sucks the flame into the tobacco. He lets it scorch his tongue. ‘You’re right. I was going to stay.’ He shakes his head. ‘With her. In that ridiculous little house, which she hated. That’s all I wanted. Just to stay.’

‘What will you do now?’

Tom looks at the armoured car in front of them, the young men in the turret, very young, pale and English. The Acropolis rises in the distance, coming closer, a white cage. He thinks of the machine gunners pouring out arcs of fire onto streets where they’ve never walked. Of ash and cinders, and what so often lies beneath them, these days.

‘I suppose I’ll do my job,’ he says.

CHAPTER FORTY