By now Janson had become hyperattentive to his environs. A block later, he noticed the woman across the street peering into the jewelry shop; but, again, something was off about it. The sun slanted fiercely at the plate glass, making it a better mirror than a window. If she were, in fact, trying to make out the necklaces and bracelets displayed in the window, she would have had to stand at the opposite angle, with her back to the sun, creating a shadow through which the window would be restored to transparency. Moments before, another shopper had held out a wide-brimmed hat to block the sun’s slanting rays and see into the store. But what if your interest was only in what the glass was reflecting?

Janson’s field instincts began signaling wildly. He was being watched: as he thought back on it, he should have picked up on the couple at the florist’s counter opposite the hotel, ostentatiously looking at a large map that hid their faces. Incongruously large. Most tourists on foot contented themselves with the smaller pocketsized versions.

What the hell was going on?

He strode into the Omónia meat market, which sprawled within a cavernous nineteenth-century building with a fretted-iron front. On beds of chopped ice, there were mountains of glistening organs: hearts, livers, stomachs. The intact carcasses of cows, pigs, and improbably large fowl were stationed upright, head to tail, creating a grotesque topiary of flesh.

Janson’s eyes darted around him. To his left, several stalls over: a customer, poking at one of the pork bellies—the same man who had averted his gaze in the National Gardens. Giving no sign that he’d made the watcher, Janson strode swiftly to the other side of a veritable curtain of mutton, the meat hooks hanging from a long steel rod. From between two sheep carcasses, he saw the white-haired customer quickly lose interest in the pig. The man walked along the row of hanging sheep, straining for a view of the other side. Janson pulled back one of the larger specimens, grabbing its rear hooves, and then, as the white-haired man was walking past, swung the massive carcass toward him, sending him sprawling into a quivering bed of calves’ tripe.

Vociferous exclamations in Greek erupted, and Janson swiftly dodged the commotion, striking out toward the other end of the meat market and onto the street again. Now he made his way to a nearby department store, Lambropouli Bros., at the corner of Eólou and Lykoúrgos Streets.