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I was impressed.”
    Alex waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “You and I can only imagine what life was like under the Nazi occupation,” he said, “but my father lived through it. He once told me a story about when he was a boy, not much older than you and your friend were. The German officer in command of the island was called von Braun, and everyone thought he must have been an incompetent bastard to be sent somewhere like this. As you say, my friend, not exactly The Guns of Navarone, not exactly the most strategic position in the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, someone had to keep an eye on the populace, and von Braun was the man. It wasn’t a very exacting task, and I’m sure the soldiers posted here became very sloppy.
    â€œOne day, my father and three of his friends stole a German jeep. The roads are bad, as you can see even now, and they couldn’t drive, of course, and knew nothing beyond the rudiments, so they crashed into a boulder after they’d barely gone half a mile. Luckily, they were uninjured and ran away before the soldiers were alerted to what had happened, though apparently one soldier saw them and told von Braun there were four kids.” Alex paused and lit one of his Turkish cigarettes. Banks had once questioned him on the political correctness of a Greek smoking Turkish tobacco, but all he’d said was that it tasted better.
    â€œAnyway,” Alex went on, expelling a plume of smoke, “whatever the reason, von Braun took it upon himself to seek retribution, make an example, in the same way theNazis did in many occupied villages. He probably wanted to prove that he wasn’t just some soft, incompetent idiot sent to the middle of nowhere to keep him out of harm’s way. He rounded up four teenage boys—the same number the soldier had counted—and had them shot just over there.” Alex pointed to where the main street met the quayside. “Two of them had actually been involved; the other two were innocent. None of them was my father.”
    The German tourists laughed at something one of the women had said and called Andrea to order more beer. They were already pretty drunk in Banks’s opinion, and there’s not much worse than a drunken German, unless it’s a drunken English football fan.
    Alex ignored them and went on. “My father was guilt-stricken for not speaking up, as was his friend, but what could they have done? The Nazis would probably have shot them in addition to the four others they had chosen. It was what the Americans call a no-win situation. He carried that shame and that guilt with him all his life.”
    â€œIs he still alive?”
    â€œHe’s been dead for years now. But the point is, von Braun was one of the minor war criminals tried after the war, and do you know what? My father went to the trial. He’d never left the island before in his life, except for one visit to Athens to have his appendix removed, but he had to go. To bear witness.”
    Banks felt oppressed by Alex’s story and the weight of history, felt as if there was nothing he could say that would not be inappropriately light. Finally, he found his voice. “Are you trying to tell me you think I ought to go back?”
    Alex looked at him and smiled sadly. “I’m not the one who thinks you ought to go back.”
    â€œAh, shit.” Banks lit a cigarette and tilted the ouzo bottle again. It was nearly empty.
    â€œAm I right?” Alex persisted.
    Banks looked out at the sea, dark now, twisting the lights reflected on its shimmering surface, and nodded. There wasnothing he could do tonight, of course, but Alex was right; he would have to go. He had been carrying his guilty secret around for so long now that it had become a part of him, and he could no more put the discovery of Graham Marshall’s bones out of his mind than he could all the other things he had thought he’d left behind: Sandra and her