‘But you have seriously misjudged my capabilities as a politician in keeping this crisis low-key. I have been trying to save this country’s neck. And now, with your one foolish broadcast, you have guaranteed its strangulation.’

Ed had stayed where he was.

‘I shouldn’t let it worry you. Senator,’ he had said, loudly. ‘You’ll be okay, won’t you? You have plenty of food, and plenty of wine, and enough money to last you through the next few months. Why should you be upset?’

‘Because the United States of America is my country,’ growled Shearson. ‘And because you have effectively undone with two hundred ill-advised words the work of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and hundreds of Americans a hundred times abler and more dedicated to this country than you are.

‘Graft is one thing, Hardesty. Suicide is another.’

Book Two

One

It was the sound of breaking glass that woke Nicolas up. Not downstairs, in his own delicatessen, but all over the city. Glass breaking, in street after street, with a terrible wintry jangle like sleighbells.

Nicolas sat up, and listened. He was Greek, round-shouldered, with fuzzy grey hair all over his chest and back, although his head was bald and blue. Next to him, his wife Dolores was still sleeping, her heavy eyebrows drawn together with all the intensity of mating caterpillars. Nicolas laid a cautious hand on her shoulder, as if silently advising her to remain asleep.

Outside, the noise grew louder. The cracking and smashing of huge plateglass storefronts. Then, suddenly, a series of malicious, slushy crashes, as glass display cases and cold-beer cabinets were attacked with hammers and bricks and bars. Sombody screamed – really screamed, as if their fingers were being torn off. There was a whole lot of garbled yelling, and then the distant scribbling sound of ambulance sirens.

‘Dolly,’ whispered Nicolas, but now she was awake. The danger in the night air was as strong as a smouldering mattress – too strong for anyone to stay asleep. She stared up at him, the back of her hand pressed to her forehead, and said ‘Nick? What is it? What’s the matter?’

‘Listen,’ he told her, as if he was going to tell her something interesting. But he meant: listen to the noise outside.

They sat in their dark wallpapered bedroom in that rundown section of Milwaukee where the elevated highways leave you blotted in shadow in the summer, and blessed with nothing but dirty second-hand slush in the winter; and the two of them, both fifty-five years old, heard the chiming of glass that heralded the end of their life’s labours, and their small ambitions, and the mutual love which they had nursed through two delicatessen stores, one bankruptcy, five children, two deaths, and more freezing Christmases on the shores of Lake Michigan than they could remember.