Germany, France, Holland, and the rest of the EEC countries quickly followed the British example. They were all sorry. They all spoke of their regret. But even ‘special relationships’ could not overcome the impossibility of accepting refugees who might eventually arrive from the United States in their tens of millions.

Watching the television in his room, Shearson Jones said to Peter Kaiser, ‘Don’t you ever wonder why we fought for those sons-of-bitches at all? I mean, don’t you wonder?’

*

But as Monday drew to a close, there were more important questions than that, and they were still unanswered. The looting and the arson had been so devastating that most of the networks had forgotten why they started at all, and nobody was asking if the threat of a famine was real, and how serious it was, and what the President was going to do about it.

Of course, nobody in the administration had yet been told about the Abbott family, of Portales, New Mexico. And nobody had yet been officially told about the isotope that Square had found in the grain elevator in St Louis.

And that was one of the reasons why the Duncan family, of Willingboro, New Jersey, sat around their kitchen table that evening for a supper of canned salmon and salad without any feelings but feelings of family closeness and good appetite, and gratefulness to the Lord for providing their daily sustenance. There were four of them – Emmett Duncan, a telephone engineer, his wife Dora, and their two daughters, Jenny and Kate. If you had asked any of them what Clostridium botulinum was, they wouldn’t have been able to tell you. But the salmon they ate that night was swarming with it.

Six

It was two o’clock on Tuesday morning when Ed was awakened by someone shaking his shoulder. He thought he was still dreaming at first – a strange airless dream of waiting in a funeral parlour for the body of his father to arrive – and he struck out with his left arm and hit Della on the side of the head. She seized his wrist and said, ‘Quiet. I don’t want to wake up the Muldoons.’

Ed rolled over and sat up in bed. He’d been drinking for most of the afternoon, and his mouth tasted as if he’d been chewing alfalfa seeds. Della was wearing an emerald green silk wrap, and she smelled of Paco Rabanne. ‘What’s the matter?’ Ed asked her, frowzily. ‘Couldn’t you just have slipped into bed?’

She smiled in the darkness. ‘I don’t have time for that tonight. I’m afraid. I need your help.’

‘Help? What kind of help?’

‘Shearson and Peter Kaiser have been forced to clear out the Blight Crisis Appeal faster than they wanted to. That’s why you haven’t seen them around today. They’ve been diverting as much money as possible into false-bottomed trusts and phoney accounts.’