After dinner, George goes to look for another bottle, and Maro disappears into the kitchen with Katsimbalis. Tom hears him start to sing over the clink and plash of wet dishes. Tom and Dimitriou go outside and stand in the dark street, looking up at the star-framed Parthenon high overhead. There is an army guardhouse across the street, and through the open door they can see soldiers gathered around a brazier. Gunfire rattles hollowly but it isn’t nearby. As they watch, a flare arcs up from the Acropolis and floats down northwards.

‘I found a name,’ Dimitriou says. ‘Don’t worry, it isn’t your friend. But I thought I’d better tell you. Pavlo Valavani: that was her brother, wasn’t it?’

‘Pavlo.’ Tom leans hard against the doorjamb. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘Afraid so. Some chaps I know are going over the records from the city morgue, collating info with the new government. I thought I’d have a look.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘An overdose. Heroin. He died around the beginning of October. Sorry, old man.’ Dimitriou shakes his head. ‘He almost made it to Liberation. Wish I could have brought you some better news.’

‘Still, thank you,’ says Tom. He pictures Zoë’s brother as he first saw him, propped against a tree and covered in blood, and as he was in the Cordelio, long fingers fluttering up and down the neck of his bouzouki. The tall, thin young man, beautifully dressed, who sat with him in the little house, waiting for the soldiers who would help him escape. Zoë said something about her brother: what was it? Too sensitive for this world, too much like a musical instrument. How terrible for a man like that to be trapped in this torture chamber of a city. ‘I didn’t know him well at all, but I don’t think he would have liked being liberated like this.’ Tom’s bad arm is throbbing and his left hand feels as if it is being chewed by sharp-toothed creatures. ‘There are so many bodies out there, Chris,’ he says. ‘What the hell are we doing to this country?’

‘Reinstating their beloved Danish king, old boy,’ says Dimitriou bitterly. ‘Cheers. Did you know, incidentally, that the new regent, the archbishop, used to be a professional wrestler? I have decided that this whole thing is nothing but an exercise in surrealism, and I have surrendered to it. I strongly advise you to do the same.’

‘Trouble is, I never was that keen on the surrealists,’ mutters Tom. ‘A Romantic, that’s me. And a modernist. A modernist Romantic.’

‘Can you be both?’

Tom sighs. ‘I wish to God I was neither,’ he says.