‘It’s hard to tell,’ said Tony. ‘There were still quite a few of them gathered around outside when I put the shutters down. Twenty or thirty, maybe. They know the stockroom’s still untouched, so I guess they’ll be back.’

Mike laid a hand on Tony’s shoulder. ‘If you want to leave now, slip out while the going’s good, I won’t hold it against you. I’d like to send Gina and Wendy home.’

Tony shook his head. ‘What do I want to go home for? To watch all this on the TV?’

‘Okay, but we should get the girls out.’

Gina was standing at the open office door. ‘We’d rather stay,’ she said. ‘At least until it’s quiet.’

Mike said, ‘You know the crowds may come back; and they may be a damn sight more vicious than they were just now.’

Gina nodded. ‘All the same, we’ll stay, if that’s okay by you.’

Mike looked around the wreckage of his store – the collapsed shelves, the smashed freezer cabinets, the food that was strewn all over the floor and trodden into a surrealistic salad of Cheerios, baked beans, loganberry jelly, bootlaces, cat food, and plastic doilies.

He said to Tony, ‘Go to the liquor cupboard, will you, and bring me a bottle of bourbon. Make sure you charge it down to me. I think I could use a drink.’

Three

All over the United States that night, fires were burning. From the top of the Hancock Building in Chicago, a CBS News reporter described the dark and fiery scene beneath him as ‘a preview of hell… like something by Hieronymus Bosch.’ Not many of his listeners knew who Hieronymus Bosch was, but the vision on their screens was unmistakable. Block after block of garish fires, hideous shadows, and running people.

Thousands of stores, restaurants, hotels, warehouses, and hamburger stands were broken into, all over the country. Anywhere there was food, there was violence. At a branch of McDonald’s in Darien, Connecticut, seven looters were shot dead by police as they tried to break into the restaurant’s cold store. One of the dead men was found to have tucked dozens of free McDonald’s airplanes into his windbreaker, presumably to take home for his children.

At the Iron Kettle restaurant, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the seventy-two-year-old proprietor was crushed against a brick wall as she attempted to stop looters escaping from her restaurant in a pick-up truck.