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she bought a packet of spaghetti and a tub of margarine, the second time a packet of beans."
    "That's some memory," I told him, mainly to flatter him so that he'd come out with more.
    "Not memory, slack business. People here buy so little that you remember it like the national anthem."
    "Presumably, if they lived here all the time, they'd shop more often"
    "Pardon me for saying so, but you know nothing. They can get by for ten days on a packet of beans."
    "Did you happen to see anyone strange going in and out of the house?"
    "Strange?"
    "Anyone not from around here."
    He'd begun to grow impatient, I could see it in his look. "Listen, Inspector," he said, "far be it from me to tell you your job, but why all this fuss about two Albanians? You've got the one who murdered them, what more do you want? After all, with two fewer Albanians and another one in prison, Greece is a better place."
    "If I'm asking, it means that I have my reasons. Do you think I'm doing it for fun?" I turned and was heading for the door when behind me I heard him say, "One evening, must be a month ago now, I saw a truck parked outside their door."

    I stopped dead. "What kind of truck?"
    "One of those hard-top ones. You know, what are they called? Vans ... but it was dark, and I can't tell you what make it was"
    He said all this as he was arranging things in the fridge. Arranging not a lot, given that it was as empty as a bachelor pad. A whole salami, a cut of ham, half a slab of Gruyere, and some round boxes of Ayeladitsa cream cheese. And on the wall, where a bachelor would have stacked his books, he'd stacked dozens of jars of mixed pickles.
    "Not that it's of any importance, it might just be a coincidence," he went on, "but I told you anyway because I don't like people leaving my shop with empty hands."
    "Do you eat so many pickles around here?"
    "No, I got them at cost price. But no one buys them."
    "So why bother with them if no one wants them?"
    "If I didn't make that kind of mistake, I wouldn't be a grocer in Rendi, I'd have my own supermarket," he said, leaving me with nothing to say.
    The last house on the right side of the street, the one at an angle to the Albanians' house, had a green door and a square window, a small one, only just big enough for a head to poke through and gaze up and down the street. But on the inside, it was covered with white linen curtains, embroidered with tiny bonbons. They were parted in the middle to form two curves and tied back at the bottom.
    "Can I offer you some of my orange preserves?" said the old woman. She was about eighty, short and bony. She dragged her feet as she walked, as if her skin were stuck to her bones and her feet to the floor. She was wearing a dressing gown with clovers embroidered on it, and her face was wizened, like crumpled paper that you open out again, because you've noted something on it.
    "No, thank you. I won't be staying long," I said, to keep it short.
    "Do try a spoonful. It's homemade," the old women insisted. I humored her, though I hate preserves, and I swilled it down with water so it wouldn't stick in my throat and also to wash the taste from my mouth.
    "My daughter sends it to me from Kalamata. Bless her. And she sends me oil and olives, too, every year. Last New Year's, she bought me a television."

    And she pointed to a seventeen-inch television on a small table. There was a cloth covering on the table, also white, but embroidered with little flowers. Whenever I see embroidery like that, I think of my mother, who never left any surface in the house uncovered and was always warning my father and me not to dirty them. He with his cigarette ash, me with my dirty hands.
    "But she doesn't want me living with her," the old woman said, a note of grievance in her voice. "Not her, that is, but her husband. He won't hear of it; doesn't want his mother-in-law getting under his feet. When you're a young woman, it's your mother-in-law who doesn't want you; when you're old, it's your