The woman’s voice, high-pitched, Catalan. In the background, sirens. “They had crowbars, I saw one man with a golf club. They were smashing every store along the boulevard—the pizzeria, the motorcycle showroom. When they reached my shop, I went out into the street, I begged them to stop. I said to them, What did I ever do to hurt you?”

“Did they listen?” the reporter asks.

“No, they didn’t. One of them, he says to me, Madame, if you don’t want to get hurt, you’d better go home. And they went right ahead”—she’s crying now—“and smashed the windows of my bakery. Who’s going to pay for it?”

Thick burry voice of a Gypsy pastor, saying Gypsies are peace-loving people. Voice of a young Arab man saying Gypsies break the law right, left, and center, and nobody does a thing. Voice of a sociology professor talking about the collapse of the Republican model of integration.

Bla-bla-bla. It’s all a scam, a three-card monte game. They ask you to integrate, but they won’t let you.

The radio announcer comes back on the air, saying that the Minister of the Interior has ordered fifteen hundred riot police to be bused into Perpignan from Montpellier and Bordeaux till order is restored.

Jean-Luc laughs. “That’ll be the day. You know, I grew up on the rue des Remparts de St. Jacques, a block away from the place Cassanyes. When I was a kid, neighbors left their doors wide open. Didn’t matter whether you were French, Gypsy, Spanish, Arab. Everybody looked out for everybody. There was an old Gypsy grandmother—if you didn’t see her one day on her chair on the sidewalk, my mother’d be, like, Luc, go knock on Mamie Paulette’s window, make sure she’s all right. Nowadays, everybody in the neighborhood’s got a dead bolt on their front door and a pistol in the bedside table. The little Arab who works for us, I was helping him load up his car, I see a golf club in the back, I say, I didn’t know you were a golfer, Farid. He says, I have to protect my family, don’t I?”

“Putain,” yawns Rat, stretching. “What a mess.”

“Fasten your seat belt; you got it all twisted up.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me, if we get pulled over.” Jean-Luc switches off the radio. “More and more, I think Marx had a point. Why are these kids smashing shop windows? Because consumer capitalism has sapped them of any political sense. Kids think what’s wrong with their lives is they don’t have enough money to buy the latest Adidas tracksuit, not that they have no access to power.”

Rat yawns again, switches back on the radio, and tunes it to the hip-hop station. Fatal Bazooka boasting about how he’s the big man in town.