The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011

by Dave Eggers

  McCormick and Levasseur listened to the calls in and out of Cairo as temperatures rose. They could hear Blanchard calling Tien back in Vancouver, trying desperately to reach Kashongwe. He called Kashongwe's sister in Brussels and his brother in Ottawa. He sounded frantic at times. But Blanchard had no luck; Kashongwe had vanished.

  Things took another turn for the worse when the Boss told Blanchard he couldn't leave Cairo until the missing cards were accounted for. Two more men arrived to "keep an eye on things." The Marriott suites had turned into a hostage scene.

  But Blanchard's natural charm worked on the Boss, too. He took full responsibility, promised to personally pay back Kashongwe's share, and calmly argued that James didn't have anything to do with the double cross. The Boss eventually told his men to let James go. Then he agreed to let Blanchard travel to London to smooth things out in person. "I'm pretty honest about that kind of thing," Blanchard says. "And the Boss could see that I was taking responsibility for my guy."

  The two decided to set aside the Kashongwe problem in the interest of business. The Boss' men would meet Blanchard back in Canada with a new batch of cards. "After all," Blanchard says, "why fight when there was more money to be made?"

  On December 3, 2006, Blanchard landed in Vancouver, where he immediately rented a car and drove straight to a branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia, sixty-five miles east in Chilliwack. He'd started prepping to burglarize the bank before his trip. The Kashongwe fiasco ended up nearly costing Blanchard money, and now he was after a sizable payday. Chilliwack was good for $800,000, he figured, and he would work through the holidays to get it done.

  McCormick and Levasseur had both been on duty during the holidays before, but never had a case so consumed them. They were spending I8-hour days in their makeshift headquarters or at the King's Head, poring over transcripts and evidence. They got no overtime pay. The strain grew, as did the pressure from higher-ups.

  Lucky for them, Blanchard's disarray was compounding his mistakes. As soon as he touched down, McCormick and Levasseur picked up Blanchard live, discussing Cairo, his next bank, and the potential whereabouts of Kashongwe. While Blanchard was en route to Chilliwack, they listened to him and the Boss discuss details about the arrival of a team in Montreal the next day.

  McCormick and Levasseur called officials at the Montreal airport with names and flight information. As the targets strode through the airport, the cops swarmed in. The team was detained, and police seized dozens of blank credit cards, a card writer, and computers overflowing with evidence that filled in the blanks on the Cairo operation. To top it off, the hard drives also contained some of Blanchard's comprehensive amateur crime video of that job. Now the police could not only hear him talking about crimes, they could see him committing them.

  The Boss phoned the very next day, panicked. But the call caught Blanchard at an inopportune moment. "I can't talk right now," Blanchard whispered. "I'm doing my thing inside the bank right now." It was 12:30 A.M., and Blanchard was crawling through the banks ductwork.

  "Listen, my guys got arrested in the airport, and I need to find out why," the Boss said. Blanchard was making his way painstakingly through the air vents, en route to the ATM room. His earpiece was taped in and the phone was on auto-answer, in case he got a call that the police were nearby. "what's going on with my guys in Montreal?" the Boss demanded. "They got pulled in!"

  "I have no idea," Blanchard said softly. "But it's too much of a coincidence that customs knew. The phones must be tapped."

  The Boss pressed on, asking for news about Kashongwe, but Blanchard interrupted. "I'm looking down. There's a security guard down there right now," he breathed. He was deep into the building, making it hard to shimmy his way out in case he needed an emergency escape. "I have too much invested in this job," he said. "I have to go."

  "We need to fix this, Danny," the Boss said.

  As Blanchard whispered back, McCormick and Levasseur were triangulating the call's location. Now they knew Blanchard was targeting Chilliwacks Bank of Nova Scotia. In late January, investigators from Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver as well as provincial police and the Mounties had joined McCormick and Levasseur's small operation. "Project Kite was ready to be reeled in," McCormick says.

  At four A.M. on January 23, 2007, more than a dozen SWAT team members swarmed Blanchard's Vancouver condo, where they found Blanchard and Tien. Several other search warrants were executed simultaneously across Canada, turning up half a dozen accomplices, including Angela James and Blanchard's cousin Dale Fedoruk.

  Blanchard was busted. At his various residences and storage facilities, police confiscated 10 pallets of material: 60,000 documents, cash in various currencies, smoke bombs, firearms, and 300 electronic devices, including commercial card printers, card readers, and all manner of surveillance equipment. In his condo, police discovered a hidden room stocked with burglary kits and well-organized, itemized documentation of all Blanchard's fake identities. He was initially charged with 41 crimes, ranging from fraud to possession of instruments for forging credit cards.

  The Boss called Blanchard in jail on the prison phone. "Why you, Danny?" he asked. "Why would little Winnipeg go to all that trouble? You must have upset the establishment. It's like we say in England: You fuck with the Queen, and they fuck with you."

  As McCormick and Levasseur listened in, Blanchard said it wasn't the establishment, or the Queen. "It was these Keystone Kops out here in Winnipeg."

  Blanchard says that he could have escaped from jail again, but there was no point. The police had all the evidence, including 120 video and audiotapes detailing everything. They'd just find him again, and he was tired of running anyhow.

  Blanchard refused to make statements about any of his associates, but he eventually decided to cooperate with authorities about his own case. "He's a flamboyant guy," McCormick says. "And an extrovert, recording everything. Some part of him just wanted to tell his story." He had another incentive, too: Revealing his methods, which would help the banking industry improve its security practices, could earn him a lighter prison sentence.

  The first day that Levasseur sat down with Blanchard in Vancouver, the investigator felt like he "was talking to a wall." But in later interviews, Blanchard became more courteous and helpful. Finally, after some negotiations through his lawyer, Blanchard offered to take them to the Sisi Star. "It's right here in my grandmother's basement in Winnipeg," he said. Blanchard had tried to steer clear of his family since his arrest; he didn't want to embarrass them further. But now he had to call. "I need to come to the house," he said. "And I'm bringing the police."

  Blanchard, in handcuffs and leg shackles, hugged his grandmother at the door and took McCormick and Levasseur directly into the basement. He disappeared into a crawl space with Levasseur. It was quiet except for the sound of them grappling with the insulation. Eventually, Levasseur removed a square of Styrofoam and pulled out the star.

  They brought it out into the light, where the detectives marveled at the beauty of the piece. They'd never seen anything like it. That kicked off nearly a month of debriefing. The cops had gotten some stuff right, but Blanchard set them straight on the rest. "Never in policing does the bad guy tell you, 'Here's how I did it, down to the last detail,'" McCormick says. "And That'swhat he did."

  After spending so much time chasing Blanchard—and then talking to him—McCormick and Levasseur developed a grudging regard for his abilities. And Blanchard grew to admire their relentless investigation. Like a cornered hacker who trades his black hat for white, Blanchard took on a new challenge: working the system from the inside. He provided such good information that McCormick and Levasseur were able to put together an eight-hour presentation for law enforcement and banking professionals. "When those guys hear what Blanchard told us," McCormick says, "you can hear their assholes pucker shut."

  Blanchard's full participation came under consideration when he pled guilty to sixteen charges on November 7, 2007. He agreed to sell his four cond
os and pay restitution to the Canadian government. And he was willing to take a longer sentence for himself in exchange for leniency toward his coaccused, whom he refused to testify against. None of his partners served jail time.

  Blanchard also surprised the court by having his lawyer issue an unusual statement: an expression of gratitude for being arrested. "My client wishes to recognize that this huge lie that he had been living could now finally fall apart." It added that Blanchard was looking forward to moving on. "He recognizes that the men and women of the Winnipeg Police Service made that all possible."

  Instead of the maximum of 164 years, Blanchard got eight. And then last summer, after serving less than two, he was released into carefully guarded probation. He now lives in a Vancouver halfway house, where he is prohibited from going anywhere near certain types of surveillance equipment and talking to any of his former associates. One of the people he can call is Randy Flanagan, his old mentor from high school.

  "He filled me in about the past ten years," Flanagan says. "I was surprised, but not that surprised, about what our little former son had been up to." Blanchard told Flanagan he wanted to turn his life around. Working with McCormick and Levasseur had convinced him that he could become a consultant to the banks. "Who knows?" Flanagan says. "Maybe he will get that security business he talked about off the ground after all."

  The judge had a similar thought during Blanchard's plea hearing. The banks "should hire him and pay him a million dollars a year," he said. And right before sentencing, the judge turned directly to Blanchard. "I think that you have a great future ahead of you if you wish to pursue an honest style of life," he said. "Although I'm not prepared to sign a letter of reference."

  Le Paris!

  Sloane Crosley

  FROM How Did You Get This Number

  IT'S INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT to get yourself banished from a city. A country is not so tough. There are words for that on both sides of the border. Emigrate. Defect. Deport. But when New Yorkers use those words to explain their residency here, what they really mean is that they packed their bags and got on a plane and it meant more to them than it did to anyone else. No one stopped them. No one checked their papers in Hoboken. No one kept them in quarantine in Queens. No one earns a living being stationed at the Lincoln Tunnel and scowling. At least not technically, they don't. Because as it is with most cities, this one is porous. We absorb the new and sweat out the old and put about as much conscious effort into it as we do into actually sweating. Once you're in, you really have to get creative to be pushed back out.

  It's not so tough to get yourself banished from a person's apartment. Smoke in the freshly painted bathroom. Feed the dog chocolate. Ask the hosts if they think It's weird that their two-year-old hasn't started talking yet. The door shuts, the bolt locks, the whispers commence, and your passport to game night gets revoked faster than you can say "baby fish mouth." But in order to get bounced from a city, that place in between, you have to break the public transit system. Or execute some very specific offense on par with killing your young lover's cousin in a vicious street fight in Verona. Or run for office.

  I didn't do any of those things to Paris. I loved Paris. Which is why it's especially painful knowing that, like a boarding school reject, I will not be "asked back" anytime soon. Though I was not formally banished, Paris has made it clear that it would prefer to continue on in its Frenchness sans moi. To sweat me out. Imagine what it is to be rejected by the most sophisticated and casually stunning place in the world. A place filled with the highest percentage of women on the planet able to pull off chinchilla wraps with jeans. To not be welcome in the City of Love is tantamount to being rejected by love itself. Why couldn't I have gotten thrown out of Akron, Ohio, City of Rubber?

  My friend Louise had sublet an apartment in Paris for a month, so I found the cheapest red-eye possible and booked my flight. Because this is what you do when your friend calls from Paris to tell you how wonderful the very worst of everything is over there. You go out and buy an international adapter plug kit, lay the plug heads on your bed, and stare at the beveled prongs. You feel the sudden urge to travel sixteen hours to Fiji just to plug something in. A toaster, maybe. But Fiji, she will have to wait. Paris is calling! The entire city is spinning with sophistication, like a child's top. The Eiffel Tower is the handle.

  Having just successfully deplaned, I was already trying on the Parisian version of myself. This version of my personhood was distinctly laid-back. Sometimes forcefully, if the situation required it. What? No, honestly, take this taxi. You were here first in spirit. Laid-back Me was sewn to my heels, a shadow with its own motivations and interests. A silhouette with a joint in one hand, a package of Ding Dongs in the other, and bunny slippers on its feet. Not that the shadow wasn't adaptable. That was part of the deal. If I had gone to Montana, I would have been laid-back and prone to liking horses. If I had gone to Tokyo, I would have been laid-back and unfazed by pornographic comic books and confounding soft-drink packaging. If I had gone to Rome, I would have done as they do. Now I had returned to Paris to be laid-back and—who knew what? The shadow knows. Consume unseemly quantities of macaroons, maybe.

  This laid-back version of me decided to surprise Louise by navigating public transport from the airport to her apartment. Having been to Paris once before, I had a vague sense of its layout. In New York, I couldn't find my way out of a paper bag. Or, more accurately, a used paper bag. I forgot the paths to the same locations no sooner than I had found them. But the Parisian streets were generous with me, rewarding my instinct to veer left or turn right with the correct street names drilled to the walls of each corner. When I located Louise's address, I realized she was right: the worst of the worst here looks a lot like the best of our best. Everything about the building was perfect, right down to the doors—sturdy but worn wooden twins that earned their distress. Like a great pair of jeans. I exchanged grins with a woman who entered the building ahead of me. This would be a double surprise. Any closer and Louise would wake up with me sitting creepily at the end of her bed, watching her sleep.

  "Bonjour, Louise," I'd say, all Hello, Clarice.

  Maybe just inside the door was far enough.

  The woman held the door. I was still mute with embarrassment, my tongue like the neck of a turtle retracted in the shell of my face. I speak "get by" French. Also known as " bicyclette rouge French" to anyone who's ever cracked open a blue, white, and red textbook. Estce que vous avez une bicyclette rouge? Oui, ici est ma bicyclette rouge. If McGraw-Hill is to be believed, red bicycles are government-issued in France. Also, everyone in France is trèsfatigué all the time, likely from their late nights buttering bread and sending telegrams.

  The woman allowed me to follow her, rolling my suitcase clumsily over the cobblestone of the courtyard. When she slid a key into a door on the first floor, she glanced back over her shoulder and smiled again, this time more furtively, which I translated to mean "You gonna be okay out here?" but which probably meant something along the lines of "Please don't kill my family with whatever^ in that bag." I sat on my suitcase and called Louise, somewhat horrified by the expensive trip the signal took, ricocheting between hemispheres.

  "Well, hello there," I said, anxious to surprise her with my presence not at the métro stop, as planned, but delivered right to her front door. Quel service!

  "Guess where I am."

  "At the metro stop?"

  "Non! In your courtyard."

  "What?"

  "In your courtyard?"

  I didn't understand why she couldn't get on board with my enthusiasm. I had saved her much clunking up metro steps with an obvious fellow tourist, and this allowed her another day of native make-believe. One's own touristicity is easily submerged—watch what you put on your feet, lose the raincoat, try not to look up so much—but two tourists are a different story. It's the same principle that allows one to dart like a pixilated frog across oncoming traffic when alone but forces one to wait for a blinking light when
with a group, watching old ladies with walkers and mothers with strollers dart past. It's why spies don't have friends and serial killers don't start book clubs. There is no safety in numbers.

  "That's impossible," said Louise, waking up.

  "Well"—I gave my haughtiest chuckle—"the laws of time and space would beg to differ."

  "I don't have a courtyard."

  In a moment of temporary dyslexia, Louise had e-mailed me the wrong address. Worse, she couldn't recall her own address. This is not a problem! said my laid-back-ness, as it waited for Louise to go downstairs and consult her front door. But when I went to leave I discovered that the giant doors to the street had locked behind me. The metal knobs refused to turn, despite my repeated attempts to convince them. I shook them, imagining how futile a couple of vibrating doors on a bustling Parisian avenue appeared from the other side. I went back into the courtyard, but there were no signs of life, just a few curtains blowing in the open windows above and some very annoying birds. It was nine A.M. I glanced at the door on the first floor. This is not a problem! said my laid-back self. Louise got back on the phone, at which point I explained that I was being held hostage by this strange building.

  "Okay," she said. "I'm coming to find you."

  I didn't know how French blocks worked. I knew only that I was somewhere on a street as long as Broadway and the address had been botched using four digits. I had some time. The first pangs of jet lag washed over me. Sometimes the worst of the worst is actually the worst. Tired of fiddling with the lock, I stepped back and roundhouse kicked it for my own amusement. I did this at the exact right angle to set off the security alarm. Like its cousin, the ambulance siren, this alarm blared in a French accent—singsongy and oddly un-urgent. But it echoed like a bitch.