‘Aim to one side of the light,’ Gerry suggested. ‘That way, you’ll be certain to hit the rotors.’

Chris glanced at them both. ‘Wish me luck, then,’ he said. He unlatched the station wagon door.

He didn’t even have time to aim. He had already waited too long, and as the minutes had passed by, the police marksman on board the helicopter had been growing edgy. As soon as the car door opened, and Chris showed his face, a small blizzard of machine-gun bullets banged into the metal roof. None of them hit Chris directly, but one of them drove a shard of metal as long and thin as a ballpoint pen straight into his right eye. Chris felt his eye burst, and he dropped to the sidewalk in sheer horror at what had happened to him.

The helicopter raged around the station wagon in a circle. Then the marksman opened fire again, and raked the vehicle’s roof and hood with over a hundred racketing shots. One of the last bullets hit the gas tank, and as Gerry and Madeleine were cowering in their seats, a hungry wave of superheated air, mixed with blazing gasoline, rolled through the length of the car. Gerry’s last vision of anything was Madeleine, with her hair frizzed by fire, the skin of her face already blackened, staring at him in agony and fright. Then his own world was consumed in excruciating pain, and he breathed in fire.

The helicopter hovered around the blazing station wagon for a few minutes, and then angled away over the rooftops. This was the ninth party of looters the police had stopped tonight, and now they were searching for more.

In his smashed-open store under the elevated highway, Nicolas Prokopiou lay half-conscious and bleeding. He heard the helicopter as it passed overhead, but it was just one more blurry noise in a night of chaos. Fire sirens whooped in the distance, and there was a crackle of shooting from the direction of Marquette University.

He closed his eyes and thought of Serifos. The dense blue skies, the dark blue seas. The fishing boats with their sun-faded paint, tied up with salt-faded ropes. The days when he had stood by the harbour, his hair ruffled by the wind, and dreamed all kinds of dreams.

A few minutes before dawn, he died. He suffered very little pain, and his death was like falling asleep. It wouldn’t have comforted him to know that Dolores was already dead, with half of her head blown away in crimson spatters and her body lying exposed on the sidewalk in her pink baby-doll nightie. Nor would it have comforted him to know that Chris, the looter, had survived; and was shivering under heavy sedation in hospital, blinded and burned, while his wife and children waited apprehensively at home for the food that he was going to bring.

Two