The people in the Council were the total foreigners; and the anonymous Greeks around me in the streets the familiar compatriots.

I had, when I checked in at the Grande Bretagne, asked whether there had been two English twins, fair-haired, early twenties… recently staying at the hotel. But the reception clerk was sure there had not; I hadn’t expected there to be, and I didn’t insist.

When I left the British Council, I went to the Ministry of the Interior. On the pretext that I was writing a travel book, I got to the department where the war crimes records were filed; and within fifteen minutes I had in my hands a copy of the report the real Anton had written. I sat down and read it; it was all, in every detail, as Conchis had said.

I asked the official who had helped me if Conchis was still alive. He flicked through the file from which he had taken the report. There was nothing there except the address on Phraxos. He did not know. He had never heard of Conchis, he was new in this department.

I went back in the sweltering midday heat to the hotel. The reception clerk turned to give me my key; and with it came a letter. It had my name only, and was marked Urgent. I tore open the envelope. Inside was a sheet of paper with a number and a name. 184 Syngrou.

“Who brought this?”

“A boy. A messenger.”

“Where from?”

He opened his hands. He did not know.

I knew where Syngrou was: a wide boulevard that ran from Athens down to the Piraeus. I went straight out and jumped into a taxi. We swung past the three columns of the temple of Olympic Zeus and down towards the Piraeus, and in a minute the taxi drew up outside a house standing back in a fair-sized garden. A chipped enamel number announced that it was No. 184.

The garden was thoroughly disreputable, the windows boarded up. A lottery-ticket seller sitting on a chair under a pepper tree nearby asked what I wanted, but I took no notice of him. I walked to the front door, then round the back. The house was a shell. There had been a fire, evidently some years before, and the flat roof had fallen in. I looked into a garden at the rear. It was as dry and unkempt and deserted as the front. The back door gaped open. There were signs, among the fallen rafters and charred walls, that tramps or Vlach gypsies had lived there; the trace of a more recent fire on an old hearth. I waited for a minute, but I somehow sensed that there was nothing to find. It was a false trail.

I returned to the waiting yellow taxi. The dust from the dry earth rose in little swirls in the day breeze and powdered the already drab leaves of the thin oleanders. Traffic ran up and down Syngrou, the leaves of a palm tree by the gate rustled. The ticket seller was talking to my taxi driver. He turned as I came out.

“Zitas kanenan?” Looking for someone?

“Whose house is that?”

He was an unshaven man in a worn gray suit, a dirty white shirt without a tie; his rosary of amber patience beads in his hand. He raised them, disclaiming knowledge.

“Now. I do not know. Nobody’s.”

I looked at him from behind my dark glasses. Then said one word.

“Conchis?”

Immediately his face cleared, as if he understood all. “Ah. I understand. You are looking for o kyrios Conchis?”

“Yeah.”

He flung open his hands. “He is dead.”

“When?”

“Four, five years.” He held up four fingers; then cut his throat and said “Kaput.” I looked past him to where his long stick of tickets, propped up against the chair, flapped in the wind.

I smiled acidly at him, speaking in English. “Where do you come from? The National Theatre?” But he shook his head, as if he didn’t understand.

“A very rich man.” He looked down at the driver, as if he would understand, even if I didn’t. “He is buried in St. George’s. A fine cemetery.” And there was something so perfect in his typical Greek idler’s smile, in the way he extended such unnecessary information, that I began almost to believe that he was what he seemed.

“Is that all?” I asked.

“Ne, ne. Go and see his grave. A beautiful grave.”

I got into the taxi. He rushed for his stick of tickets, and brandished them through the window.

“You will be lucky. The English are always lucky.” He picked one off, held it to me. “Eh. Just one little ticket.”

I spoke sharply to the driver. He did a U-turn, but after fifty yards I stopped him outside a café. I beckoned to a waiter.

The house back there, did he know who it belonged to?

Yes. To a widow called Ralli, who lived in Corfu.

I looked through the rear window. The ticket seller was walking quickly, much too quickly, in the opposite direction; and as I watched, he turned down a side alley out of sight.

At four o'clock that afternoon, when it was cooler, I caught a bus out to the cemetery. It lay some miles outside Athens, on a wooded slope of Mount Aigaleos. When I asked the old man at the gate I half expected a blank look. But he went painfully inside his lodge, fingered through a large register, and told me I must go up the main alley; then fifth right. I walked past lines of toy Ionic temples and columned busts and fancy steles, a forest of Hellenic bad taste; but pleasantly green and shady.

Fifth left. And there, between two cypresses, shaded by a mournful aspidistra-like plant, lay a simple Pentelic marble slab with, underneath a cross, the words:

MORIS KOLCHIS

1896—1949

Four years dead.

At the foot of the slab was a small green pot in which sat, rising from a cushion of inconspicuous white flowers, a white arum lily and a red rose. I knelt and took them out. The stems were recently cut, probably from only that morning; the water was clear and fresh. I understood; it was his way of telling me what I had already guessed, that detective work would lead me nowhere—to a false grave, to yet another joke, a smile fading into thin air.

I replaced the flowers. One of the humbler background sprigs fell and I picked it up and smelt it; a sweet, honey fragrance. Since there was a rose and a lily, perhaps it had some significance. I put it in my buttonhole, and forgot about it.

At the gate I asked the old man if he knew of any relatives of the deceased Maurice Conchis. He looked in his book again for me, but there was nothing. Did he know who had brought the flowers? No, many people brought flowers. The breeze raised the wispy hairs over his wrinkled forehead. He was an old, tired man.

The sky was very blue. A plane droned down to the airport on the other side of the Attic plain. Other visitors came, and the old man limped away.

The dinner that evening was dreadful, the epitome of English vacuity. Before I went, I had some idea that I might tell them a little about Bourani; I saw a spellbound dinner table. But the idea did not survive the first five minutes of conversation. There were eight of us, five from the Council, an Embassy secretary, and a little middle-aged queer, a critic, who had come to do some lectures. There was a good deal of literary chitchat. The queer waited like a small vulture for names to be produced.

“Has anyone read Murdoch’s latest?” asked the Embassy man.

“Couldn’t stand it.”

“Oh I rather enjoyed it.”

The queer touched his bowtie. “Of course you know what Iris said when she…”

I looked round the other faces, after he had done this for the tenth time, hoping to see a flicker of fellow feeling, someone else who wanted to shout at him that writing was about books, not the trivia of private lives. But they were all the same, each mind set in the same weird armor, like an archosaur’s ruff, like a fringe of icicles. All I heard the whole evening was the tinkle of broken ice needles as people tried timidly and vainly to reach through the stale fence of words, tinkle, tinkle, and then withdrew.