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me?”
    He looked around. None of LeClerc’s men made eye contact with him. This time, he was the one to shrug.
    On his way into the lower level of the shabby two-storey crammed together with others identical to it, Touton reached down and gathered a handful of pebbles from the yard. He threw one of the stones ahead of him as he entered. No response. He walked in. He went up a short flight of sagging stairs that creaked underfoot. The first door was open. He chucked a stone inside, then listened to it rattle around and come to rest. Nothing. He went in.
    He tossed a stone into the living room on his left and, when he heard no sound, stepped into the room, then moved towards the rear of the house into the adjoining dining room.
    Tossing another stone earned him no reply.
    At the doorway to every room, he lobbed a stone. At the last, he spotted the shadow of an arm come up. Then a pistol rose into view. Commando style, fast, fiercely, Touton struck first, his massive fist smashing into the youth’s face. A left uppercut to the chin snapped the lad’s head back. Blood spurted as the gunman bit through his tongue. Touton reeled at the unexpected horror that confronted him there, and he levelled the crazed gunman with another savage right hand.
    Motionless, the young man’s body seethed with pustules. Foul secretions leaked across his back, and from his forehead down into his eyes. An effect, Touton would later have confirmed, of syphilis. The disease had already chewed up his mind. Touton called in LeClerc to clean up the mess and haul the diseased man away before he awoke in bad temper.
    And yet this time, as the riot gained intensity and the crowd grew more brazen and violent, Touton was the one suggesting that the cops pull back, that the conflagration be permitted to run its course.
    “Some guy wants to play with matches, douse him with a firehose. A thug wants to put the boots to a citizen, shoot off his left big toe. Later, you can claim it was an accidental discharge. A drunk wants to fire a pistol in the air, aim a warning shot past his right ear. If you miss and hit him between the eyes, too bad for that guy.”
    LeClerc said no. Newspapers and radio journalists had heralded Touton for his courage against the syphilitic gunman while reviling LeClerc and the rest of the department as cowards. Now he was being presented with an opportunity to show the other man up. “These bums need to be taught a lesson. They can’t take over the streets on my watch.”
    Pondering his options, Touton nodded. “Your choice. If you think you can teach a mob a lesson, be my guest. I’ll monitor the radio. Crooks will be going about their business tonight. My guys need to be ready for that.” He’d rather allocate his resources to protect critical targets, starting with the banks in the path of the mob’s eastward flow.
    Officers in overcoats—collars up, hats low over their eyes to suggest to rioters that they were not cops at all, a shotgun tucked under each arm and multiple pistols visible in gun-belts slung over their shoulders—ought to be enough to keep looters from the banks’ doors. He also had people on phones, siphoning bank presidents out of their evening baths, demanding that they hire private security to pick up the slack deeper into the night. Touton dispatched detectives to hot spots as they flared up, for all ears—including those of criminals—were tuned to the radio. By now, the whole city knew about the riot. Furious men in every quarter were racing to join the melee, by car or on foot. Those who came by bus would smash out the windows of the coach and beat up the drivers as they disembarked. Sometimes burn the buses. As he had expected, petty crooks were taking advantage of the massive police deployment to knock over small businesses elsewhere in the city. He might not be able to chase down those guys tonight, but his men would nab a few in the act, and afterwards he’d be in a better position to sort