Apostoli’s voice is hoarse and slippery all at once. ‘A raven with honeycomb in his beak,’ is what Semsis calls him, approvingly. Now the hash has grated his throat just a little bit more. Zoë throws back her head and joins the others in the chorus. Vangeli plucks and slashes at the baglamas. For such a tiny thing, its sound almost drowns out the engine.

‘He’s smoking the hookah, with Turkish hashish …’

Apostoli coughs and begins to laugh. Vangeli curses him, laughing as well, and chops out chords as they shriek the next chorus:

‘That’s how they pass their lives, the pashas of this world …’

So they don’t hear the plane swoop down at the road behind them. They hear nothing but their own voices even when the car lurches and seems to leap up from the road. Zoë thinks she is still singing as the world beyond the windscreen twists and she sees blue sky, black smoke and then a flash of even paler blue, yellow and a single black cross, like a reptile’s eye. It’s seen me, she thinks, and then the world smashes her against the roof of the car and pinches her out like a candle flame.

Someone has dragged her clear of the Citroën, which is lying on its roof in prickly scrub by the side of the road. The engine is burning lazily, and a patch of flowering broom is smouldering, yellow flowers shrivelling in the dirty flames.

‘Zoë!’ She blinks and a face snaps into focus, haloed by the sun. ‘Are you all right, koukla mou?’

She sits up. Her back is sore but she knows at once that she is more or less unhurt. Looking down, she sees that she is only wearing one shoe, and that her stockings, her one good pair, are shredded. Beyond her bare foot, a pair of black and white shoes jut from the front door of the Citröen, ankles in black socks, trousers ridden up to reveal pale legs flecked with sparse hairs. Zoë looks up. Apostoli is squatting beside her. His shirt is soaked with blood and he is breathing hard.

‘What’s happened to us?’ Zoë asks, knowing that she has the answer, but it has been mislaid.

‘Those sons of bitches shot us up,’ Apostoli says. Zoë puts out her hand and runs it down the slick cotton clinging to his chest. There doesn’t seem to be a wound. ‘It’s not my blood,’ Apostoli tells her.

‘Oh, Christ … whose?’

‘Vangeli’s in there. They’ve killed him.’ Apostoli glances towards the car and crosses himself. ‘Pavlo bled all over me but it’s just a cut on his face. I think his arm’s broken, though. Vangeli … Don’t look at him, Zoë. Promise me, little bird.’ He puts a hand over his face and his shoulders begin to heave.