The Crime Studio

by Steve Aylett

  Leon theorised that a thief creates something out of nothing, like an artist or god. These lisped absurdities made Leon unpopular with other criminals, and Savage suffered a loss of esteem by association. They wanted to know why Savage stood for it, and he felt the pressure. He began to think Leon was being resentful for the time Savage had tried to teach him about real life by dragging him behind a Chevy. Leon had been eight years old at the time and had made no comment except to thank his uncle for demonstrating the behaviour of a typical bastard. In truth the incident was one of Leon’s fondest memories and in the autobiographical novel Burgling In Beerlight With Uncle Savage attributed the whole thing to Savage having taken buoyant leave of his senses. Savage was a laughing stock before the book’s publication but on hearing of its existence he lunged across the table at Leon’s throat. Pulling away with his uncle’s hands about his neck Leon dragged him through shattering breakfast plates and into a struggling, screaming heap, kicking over chairs and straining for weapons just out of reach. This scuffle formed the opening scene in the stage adaptation, which was notorious for the ending in which a cop appeared on stage and arrested the audience. The acclaim which greeted Uncle Savage came as a total surprise to Leon and a shock to his uncle, whose hair went black overnight. Disguised as an Arab and approaching Leon at a dinner party, he had barely begun to express his feelings when Leon tugged down his false beard, at which Savage retreated in alarm. They say a little embarrassment’s good for you - I wonder what they say about this much?

  Leon wallowed in the newfound popularity which was aided by his readers’ fascination with the perils of his work. The lady host of a literary soiree once found her absent guest-speaker burgling her bedroom and brought him downstairs in a din of delighted applause. Leon, flattered and bashful, removed his mask and accepted their toast, presenting the host with a crowbar and searing his admirers with a volcano of modesty.

  Leon’s idea of a perfect crime was one during which he enjoyed himself. How could he be so selfish? Crime was supposed to be a necessity - the cops didn’t want people to think crooks were enjoying it, and crooks didn’t want the cops to think so either. Leon was blowing the gaff like there was no tomorrow. He’d never been popular on the west coast, where bigtime hoods have the souls of accountants. But now even the Beerlight mob was brooding and Dino Korova the hoodboss hauled Savage in by the legs. Savage was not unconnected with the mob and so by association Leon was not unconnected any the more. Dino Korova did not like to hear Leon saying he was having the time of his life as a burglar in Beerlight. Night and day Leon was on chat shows stating the benefits of not having to pay, and it was placing mob rule in a bad glare. As the keeper of the Beerlight mob it pleased Dino to pretend it was fragile, and alluding to Leon’s cool calculated cheek he stated with a yell that he’d oblong the bastard with an ammo-guzzler.

  Savage found himself arguing on Leon’s behalf with an almost forensic intensity. What with the hazards of drugs, sex and spiritual quest, crime was one of the few activities a young man could undertake without fear of the consequences. Leon’s lack of unconnectedness with the mob was as slender as a bug’s fetlock. The boy could walk down Chain Street picking both nostrils simultaneously with a tuning fork and no one would give a thought to the mob or anything else. And as a burglar, nobody was more punctual.

  ‘Never was a truer word spoken,’ said Dino Korova. ‘At least not around here. I’ll have you know what I intend to do with this skulking paragon, Savage - you two will enter a premises on my behalf, and if Leon begins chanting, impersonating a crash dummy in slow motion or braying with laughter during the job, I assure you he’ll depart the world like a greyhound out of a trap. This joker of a nephew of yours grows more floridly conspicuous every time I look away. I cannot allow the national media to perceive the moral angularities of my enterprise.’

  Savage tracked Leon down at a squash club and tried to impress upon him this opportunity to redeem himself or face the boneshattering music. Leon distractedly agreed during a slamserve and turned up cheerily on the night with only the dimmest notion of what was riding on it. Gasping with hilarity, he shuffled into the dark alley and began to mime an encounter with an invisible wall. Bristling with common sense, Savage watched as the evening developed into a fiesta of song and balloon animal mayhem. Leon proceeded as though there were no such thing as a burglary. The premises was quickly filled with semi-inflated dogs and volleys of abuse. Savage stood slack-featured and regarded the fading afterimage of his integrity. And then, as Leon began playing a trumpet, years of sedentary, strolled burglaries exploded like a fumbled egg. Savage saw with a pellucid clarity the notion that would transform his previously dreary career. Leon was bringing him on. Leon wasn’t into misery because it lacked the element of surprise.

  Neighbours were banging on the walls and cop sirens began to wail. Leon and Savage were on the roof, releasing balloon creatures and bellowing quotations from Poe at operatic volume. The cops arrived gung-ho for justice and hauled them yanking and flapping to the state pen at such speed their yells underwent a Doppler shift. The arrest produced baffling headlines which had to be qualified and explained at length, and then the issue sank like a U-boat. Savage was so happy his teeth hurt. His smug mediocrity lay cooling on a slab. Leon was out of the public eye and wouldn’t have to be abstracted by Dino. The book continued to circulate, and would later enthral Billy Panacea, burglar extraordinaire. Leon and Savage were celebrities inside. And when the pen priest told them the walls of hell were four thousand miles thick, they began at once to formulate a plan for breaking in.

  AUTO EROTICA

  More murders are committed at 92 degrees Fahrenheit than at any other temperature. How crisply I recall the summer when the barometers hit the 92 mark and the denizens of Beerlight burst hollering onto the streets and began arbitrarily shooting the life out of each other. For the first time there was a real sense of community. Everyone woke up to the fact that they were living in a barnacle-encrusted city run by a donut-crazed cerebral-retentive and a strange, gill-bearing mayor. It was difficult to tell where one bastard ended and another began, and the town was immediately swept by lucrative rioting and lush panic. Shrapnel flew through the air as if by enchantment. All minorities were catered for by the hail of lead and aluminium. Freddy Bitmap was assaulted with a rivet gun. Lester Mirsky was smacked by a truck on Crane Street. Dino Korova the hoodboss shot three of his best men with a Colt Python then turned it around and blew off his own unredeeming features. Brute Parker entered the Delayed Reaction with a street-sweeper and knocked ten people onto the back wall - it was like an explosion in a melon shed. My good friend Billy Panacea dropped by for a visit and stabbed me six times in the chest with a bowie knife - I’d never seen him so happy. He leapt screaming onto the bandwagon and in the following days took every risk available to him, burgling premises for all he was worth. Those cops not instantly dead and buried were stringently demoralised, and one escaped through the skylight of the beleaguered cop den wearing a vertical take-off jet. The mayhem had all the diversified and collaborative qualities of good improvised theatre and it wasn’t surprising that the papers claimed not to understand it.

  All that summer everyone had been critical of my death-defying attachment to Bleach Pastiche and the supposed idea that it ripped the balls off polite society - I couldn’t even visit the Delayed Reaction Bar without Don Toto the owner yelling his view that she was poison. ‘It’d be cruel to test her on animals, you clown. She walks around with a Parabellum automatic in her jacket - she’s more scary than a cretin with a vote.’

  But these observations ricocheted off me so fast Toto caught the fragments in his leg. Me and Bleach were burning like Shelley’s cadaver and any ill-feeling I had ever harboured languished like a drying starfish. It takes alot to change what people laughingly refer to as my mind, though in the first weeks even I was baffled by the draw - she wasn’t a beautiful mess, she was just beautiful. Her mouth was so red I had to regard it throug
h a welding mask. She had a registered trademark symbol tattooed on her forehead and every accessory she wore was capable of exploding harmfully. She had dyed her hair luminous in honour of her twin sister who, starved of colour in the eighties, had finally blown her head off with a flare gun. Bleach taught me so much about the world - like how the atom bomb was the result of Einstein mistaking a roving flea for a decimal point in his calculus, that America produces better physical comedy because there’s more room and that for a two-dimensional being 10 and 90 miles per hour are the same on a 100 mph speedometer. She once rubbed a sleep crumb out of her eye and when I studied it under a microscope I found it was a perfect miniature replica of an Alpine village.

  Bleach existed in a colourful corner - her TV didn’t get snow, it got sunburn. She moved through the Beerlight streets in a cloud of army surplus and drove a surgical-pink convertible. The back of the car had caught light in a bomb accident and everyone had joined in with wrenches and hammers to make shapes before the metal cooled - the rear wings were now rippled and stretched like a discarded rubber.

  The cops wanted an audience with Bleach because she was responsible for seven important murders but in the four days that the atmosphere remained at 92 they were fully occupied supervising the violence. So what with Bleach’s munitions knowledge and the feeling of invulnerability common to kids newly on the shaft we felt safe and inclined to go for a leisurely cruise in the exaggerated sun. My borrowed AK-47 sub lay in the back and I drove with one arm about Bleach and her S&W 9mm ACP, her Armalite AR-180 semiauto, her SPAS-12 autofeed, her M-79 grenade launcher and her cut-down Remington skeet. She kissed me like a frog and passed a pill that numbed my body and stopped the pain in my chest. We laughed in the knowledge that in the trunk were stowed a Panzerfaust-3, an adjustable dagger set, a Japanese bolus and a three-sectioned staff. Life was strong and durable as the wind whistled through the pin of Bleach’s body-grenade. Parking turbulently on the waterfront, we felt like the perfect antidude couple as we strolled down the boardwalk with a golfbag containing the best of our home-defence artillery. We thought our passion would last forever, like styrofoam. Bleach elaborated on her theory about how Lee Oswald survived and changed his name to Bob Newhart, and we idled at a fish stall for a snack - but we had reckoned without the pathological climate. Instantly belligerent, the fish-seller formed his hand into a claw and expressed indignation at our breathtaking arrogance in requesting food from a guy like him. Rolling up his sleeves, he shrieked about how things were done when he was a boy.

  A disturbance developed during which everyone on the pier pulled out an automatic weapon. Even picturesque passersby walking small chirpy dogs became gun-toting, bellowing maniacs. A silver-haired gran rolled down the hood of a baby carriage revealing a SMAW launcher with a dual function HEDP projectile and nightsighter. Taffy Moodswing, who ran the boat-hire service, ran screaming up the steps with an H&K, rapid-firing before a target had so much as graced his eye. Any sign of mannered deportment went out the window. Even as he was firing a Winchester the fishman yelled that he couldn’t hear himself think. Taffy was slobbering like a primitive, strafing the pier buildings with a fierce and Freudian inaccuracy. Granny launched the SMAW and blew the north end of the boardwalk to matchwood - Bleach and I were behind a lifeboat and dwarfed by the wall of splintering debris.

  The shooting resumed before the smoke had cleared. And when I looked around Bleach had selected the Norinco submachine. She took aim with soulful eyes and wasn’t at all cruel. She’d been shot in the arm once and said it was like having her picture taken by god. Tightening on the squeeze like a Grafenberg manoeuvre - the cords in her arm and shoulder moved like a river and the recoil erased any question from her mind. Linda Hamilton with a touch of Spinoza, a ballistic angel, her beauty at that instant was intravenous.

  Bleach swapped the AK for the Armalite and, aiming, narrowed her eyes. Her nipples were hardened like acorns.

  ‘This’ll hurt.’

  Taffy prancing across the fireline - Bleach let it go. The scene was like a Scorsese movie but without the pretence at moral justification - and the gore looked fake. The fishman yelled from behind rubble. ‘You and the clown better throw down your weapons or any moment now you’ll be zinc-eyed and deceased.’ I couldn’t believe he was acting so superior when all he ever sold were manually-strangled lobsters whose bleak features told a tale of unrelieved despair. I began shooting at him tentatively.

  But I was no good and kept hitting gulls and surfacing anchovies. Bleach was appalled and we began arguing without restraint. We got onto communism as usual, and Bleach repeated her view that Russia was never a communist country seeing as communism is the abolition of class and all they ever did in Russia was abolish the middle one. Finally she said she was ashamed to be seen with me and stormed off down the boardwalk, her white tanktop an easy sight-target as she took casual pot-shots left and right with the 9mm. She scudded away in the car so I had to walk back.

  In town the firing had become more sparse and emphatic. Chief of the Cops Henry Blince declaimed from a balcony but the combined effort of his mouth, nose, arms and legs could not produce the level of authority required to quell the masses. Brute Parker fired at him boisterously with the same Corbray he’d used in the Delayed Reaction.

  But within twenty-four hours the only work for the cops was in cutting down the hanged and wading through blood so thick it pulled their boots off. The temperature dropped dramatically - at 92 degrees there are murders galore but at minus 92 they’re unnecessary. Even the mosquitoes were frozen. Parker tried to make soup in a cauldron of water, boiling his Corbray and spent shells. Everyone was ashamed at having shot people without arranging an alibi. As Bleach and I argued in the Reaction we were shivering so much our features were a blur. I compromised by agreeing to use BBs, which take people’s eyes out no matter where you point them. But the whole mess had lowered my bridge in regard to Beerlight, its alleys and apartments full of brooding garbage, stoved-in TVs and shipwrecked cars, the air polluted by flying ammunition. Even the squalor was nuclear-powered. What was it doing to me? Pretty soon I’d be regarding the world through an infra-red grid.

  And for the first time I found myself dreaming of a land far away, where I would be awoken by the clang of opening flowers and walk through apple-green fields full of small, inexpensive cows.

  FAIT ACCOMPLI

  Ben Stalkeye had a fierce effect upon chance - he had only to walk into a room and the probability figures would go haywire. The unlikeliest things would happen, but on the sole condition that he didn’t want them to. This was detrimental to his work - every heist he performed failed through the most bizarre chance events. He could never make anyone understand or believe how there’d be another robbery in progress when he arrived, or the teller would be struck acutely blind at the moment he passed over the note, or the gun he held would simply and impossibly turn into a sweetcorn. It happened. By tradition those who make pacts with the devil have some success in life, so Stalkeye assumed he’d made a pact with god.

  A benign illustration of his effect on chance was his ability to throw a dice a couple of hundred times and always have it come up the same number, so long as he didn’t want it to. If he tried to demonstrate this to someone it wouldn’t happen, because he wanted it to. Stalkeye was fascinated and appalled by the immaculate simplicity of his private hell.

  But despite absolutely everything Stalkeye was not one to kick back and let the blistering inferno of circumstance reduce him to bleached bone. The logical thing was to find someone else who had the same problem, but who didn’t want to accomplish any form of crime. If brought along on the robbery this party would influence the probability ratings in favour of a successful heist and thus neutralise the effects of Stalkeye’s bad luck. Stalkeye would have at least a fighting chance of performing a hold-up with the standard odds.

  After eight farcical years he ran slambang into a woman who was running away from Deal Street in a flurry of smackers and so
bbing like a struck deacon. Stalkeye took her aside and she explained her plight in finely-crafted detail. She had been all fired up to make a small deposit at a Deal Street bank when she saw a gun sat in one of the bank’s litterbaskets. She took this to a teller and was instantly given vast quantities of cash. Then the teller began screaming and the woman bolted as though checking out of a hotel. She had inadvertently robbed two hundred and fifty thousand smackers from the stockpile. ‘This town is full of recidivists,’ she sobbed. ‘Recidivists and people of imagination. I just want to be good like a lamb or perhaps a turtle.’ Her name was Gerty Hundred Ram, regrettably. But Stalkeye perceived in her an innocence which, if channelled correctly, would make more money than war.

  He told her he’d by all means help her to make her deposit - what could be more simple? At the strategic hour he’d just pull the Ingram M11 out of his coat and rob the life out of the establishment. They went straight across town to a bank on Cardiac Avenue and stood in line. When they reached the front and it was time to start the robbery, Stalkeye found that he simply couldn’t be bothered. He was mildly startled by this new complacency. Gerty, in her turn, was no longer concerned about making a deposit, but couldn’t understand why. The two were crippled by a rictus of lethargy and finally had to excuse themselves and leave the bank, mystified.

  Back at Stalkeye’s fragile apartment he calculated the distortions of the day on a blackboard as Gerty sifted desultorily through her two hundred and fifty thousand smackers. It was crystal clear that in neutralising each other’s bad luck at the bank, they had temporarily neutralised each other’s desire to do anything there. Stalkeye recalled how he had been idly fascinated by the patterns on the floor. The sudden absence of annihilating fortune had left he and Gerty in a shock which resembled heaven. They lined up each other’s chakras like a snake swallowing a pole. And when they got used to each other, Stalkeye reasoned, they’d be able to rob a bank like any other couple.