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might,’ Cotton said, faintly shamefaced but also slightly indignant that Docherty should regard Greeks as something less than human.
    As they drank, the village priest went past, in his black robes and flat-topped hat, pushing back the sleeve of his robe, then an old man appeared from the cafe, holding a glass of raki, and stopped in front of them. He wore a beard, a fringed turban, elaborately embroidered waistcoat, cummerbund, tall black leather boots and a pair of voluminous knickerbockers with a baggy seat.
    ‘Known as crap-catchers,’ Patullo said to Shaw at the next table.
    The old man grinned and waved his hand. ‘Welcome,’ he said in English. ‘Rooly Britannia. Goss-savey King.’ He gestured at the radio and lapsed into Greek. ‘That is the true liturgy,’ he said, and Cotton translated for the others. ‘We have the words of the Fathers. The true confession. We have the ikons and the blessed Eucharist to cleanse and unite us.’ He stopped and looked hard at Cotton. ‘You are Greek, my son?’ he asked. ‘You look Greek.’
    ‘No,’ Cotton said quickly. ‘I’m English.’
    ‘You have the Greek language. You speak it well.’
    ‘I learned it,’ Cotton said. ‘I learned it at school.’
    ‘You speak it like a Greek too. You have a good accent.’ The old man paused as Cotton grew more uncomfortable. ‘Where are the Germans now?’ he asked.
    ‘I don’t know. North somewhere.’
    ‘They will come soon. We shall be prisoners. God grant that they will be haunted by the spirits of their victims. They no longer rest quiet in their graves.’ The old man sniffed. ‘The Italians - po-po -- ‘ he gestured contemptuously with his fingers ‘ - they are mere jackals. The Germans are vampires from hell. But a Greek is a man with a long memory.’ He looked hard at Cotton. ‘That boat of yours,’ he went on. ‘Panyioti, the millionaire, had one like that.’
    ‘It used to be Panyioti’s boat,’ Cotton explained.
    The old man spat. ‘Aie! That was no Greek. He only visited Aeos once a year, and he spent all the time throwing ten-drachma pieces to the poor from his shiny car. True Greeks believe in things. Every day the newspapers report how somebody has been chopped to the navel with a meat cleaver because somebody else didn’t agree with him.’
    They went inside to have a meal because they suspected they’d be living on bully beef and biscuit before long. Patullo paid and it consisted largely of lamb, which Gully suspected and Cotton knew was goat. But with it there was fresh bread and young wine, light, sparkling and cool. Gully inevitably preferred the beer.
    The food was brought by a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl with moist lips, big sticky eyes and a large bust. Gully eyed her gleefully, nudging Coward energetically. Docherty watched her with a hot, longing look in his eyes, as if he’d have liked to wrench the clothes from her back and fling her down across one of the tables.
    ‘Bit of all right,’ Gully said. ‘Look smashing with a feather in ‘er ‘at and no drawers.’
    Cotton said nothing. He’d lost his virginity soon after joining the Marines but he’d never gone for lush dark-eyed women. Because of his rejection of his background, he’d always chosen blonde, blue-eyed English-looking girls, but they’d always seemed to lack the steam and passion to match his own. ‘Steady on, ducks,’ one of them had once told him during a bout of intense love-making on the settee with her mother asleep upstairs. ‘You don’t have to go at it as if you’re starving.’
    They had cheese that was strong enough to remove the roofs of their mouths and washed it down with cherry brandy at a penny a glass, so that they returned on board feeling mellow and ready for anything. Later in the afternoon, they lay the boat alongside the mole and took on water. Then they slept in the heat, with only Cotton on deck, watching the sky. He didn’t feel like sleeping and had offered to do aircraft