by Tom McCarthy
“Where does it all go?” I mumbled.
“Sorry?” Samuels asked.
“I…nothing,” I said. “Whatever.”
We ate in silence for a while; then Samuels asked:
“So: this bank robbery you want to re-enact. Is it a particular one? One I did?”
I set my knife and fork down and thought about this for a moment. The other two looked at me while I thought. Eventually I told them:
“No, not a particular one. A mix of several ones, real and imaginary. Ones that could happen, ones that have, and ones that might at some time in the future.”
Naz’s phone beeped just then. He scrolled through the display and read aloud:
“In military parlance, a narrow way along which troops can march only by files or with a narrow front, especially a mountain gorge or pass. The act of defiling, a march by files. 1835. Also a verb: to bruise, corrupt. From the French défiler and the Middle English defoul.”
“Very good,” I said. “Very good indeed.”
“Yes,” Naz said. “It’s an excellent term. Marching in files.”
“A defile in time,” I said. “A kink.”
“That too,” said Naz.
“What’s that?” asked Samuels.
I turned to him and said:
“You’re hired.”
Over the next few days we sent people round town looking for banks for us to model our re-enactment on. They were told to pay particular attention to access and escape routes. Corners were considered good spots. Main roads tend to be trafficky, which will slow police cars down. Side roads are small enough to be blocked to prevent your being pursued, and often lead off into mazy streets of residential areas, giving you lots of options. Proximity to police stations is, obviously, undesirable. I had double the number of people search for banks as had searched for my building some months back. Their reports were gathered back at Naz’s headquarters in the blue-and-white building near mine, their findings pinned up on maps and laid out in charts and tables which, needless to say, I entirely ignored.
I found the bank myself, of course. It was in Chiswick, not far from the river. I opened an account there. I put a quarter of a million pounds in it, and was immediately invited to a meeting with the manager. I found reasons to drop in—making deposits and withdrawals, picking up cards, returning forms and so on—almost daily for a week. I had Samuels, Annie and Frank open accounts and had them visit frequently as well, to allow them to familiarize themselves with the bank’s layout. Naz had someone look up the firm of architects that had converted the building and procure a copy of the plans so that we’d get the measurements and dimensions right when we reconstructed the interior. It had a partially carpeted stone floor: I told Frank to memorize not only the floor’s pattern, but also any stains or cracks this and the carpet had on them. Annie bought a hidden camera from a spying-equipment shop in Mayfair and photographed the walls—their notices and posters, where these had been stuck, the little tears or dog-ears they had in them—so that these, just like the space itself, could be replicated accurately.
Constructing the duplicate bank inside the Heathrow warehouse took two weeks. I’d had the tyre and cascading blue-goop loop closed down and the replicated shop and café stripped out soon after I’d decided to do the re-enactment of my giving instructions to my killers, which I’d then abandoned as soon as I’d decided on the bank heist one; but we kept two of the drivers who’d taken my role in the blue-goop tyre re-enactment—one to re-enact the driver of the vehicles in which we, the robber re-enactors, would approach and exit the scene and one to drive the security van that would arrive to collect the money we’d be stealing.
Annie had photographed the street immediately outside the bank: the kerb, its markings. There was a tiny dead-end road beside the building, just large enough for one van to park in. The security van would pull in here; we’d watched the real one do this several times. A yellow line ran all along this tiny road. When the line reached the stump where the road stopped, it curved round with the same gradient as the running track outside my building. The Council’s street painters had painted it originally at a right angle—you could still see the old, half-washed-away first layer of paint extending further towards the stump’s corners—but then they, or maybe the next ones a few years later, had changed their minds and made it curved. Someone must have decided: the painters themselves, or maybe the Chiswick Council Road Markings Committee, in closed session debate in the Town Hall. Anyway, Annie photographed this and we replicated it faithfully: the same curve, the same half-washed-away layer extending from beneath.
Samuels spent a lot of time watching the bank from outside, logging the times of the van’s visits. They vary these, he explained—but if you watch for long enough you work out the variation’s sequence and how often it repeats itself. It always did eventually, he told me. It was just a matter of patience, of waiting it out until the pattern became visible.
“I like patience,” I said. “But I noticed you haven’t been writing the times down.”
“I log it all up here,” he said, tapping his head. “That’s why they called me Elephant: because of my retentive memory.”
“I thought it was because…”
“That too,” he said. “It’s all in my book. I’ll give you a copy.”
He did, but I didn’t read it. I was too busy watching everything come together. Three weeks after our first meeting with Samuels in the Blueprint Café we were ready to start practising the re-enactment. This one needed a lot of practice. There was so much choreography involved, as Samuels had warned us. There were re-enactors for the robbers, re-enactors for the staff, for the security-van men and members of the public both inside and outside the bank: thirty-four primary re-enactors in all. This one was by far the most ambitious I’d attempted. The most complex, too, in terms of information management: the walls of Naz’s office became caked with charts: planning charts, flow charts and Venn diagrams, lists and indexes and keys to charts and indexes to lists. If I visited him there in the evenings after the practices I’d find him busy drawing up another one, or annotating one already there, or simply sitting at his desk between them all, silent, his eyes glazed-over while the whole room silently echoed with his manic whirring.
The procedure we came up with went like this: the security van would pull into the tiny stump-road beside the bank in order to deliver new cash—which was no good for stealing because it’s easily traceable—and to pick up bags of old notes, which were what we wanted. This van carried four re-enactors. Two of these men would carry the new money into the bank; a third would accompany them to the door but remain just outside, while the fourth stayed in the van. Security men do this to create linked lines of sight, from inside the bank back to the truck via the man at the door—like the way buzzards hover in long lines, each one a mile apart, so that if one sees food and goes down the ones on either side of him in the chain go down to join him and the whole chain will soon know about it.
Once inside the bank, Security Guard Re-enactors One and Two would be checked in at the far end of the counter, through a set of double doors known to employees as the “airlock” because one couldn’t be opened till the other one was closed, to an area protected by armour-plated glass. Once safely inside this area, they would hand over the new sacks to a cashier re-enactor, who’d then prepare a receipt for them while they waited for the bags of old notes, stored in vaults downstairs, to be brought to ground level in a small electric lift.
This whole transaction would take place out of view of the bank’s public area. There was one spot, though, just in front of the enquiry desk, from which it could be seen. We had an accomplice re-enactor stand in the enquiry desk queue and walk out of the bank as soon as he saw the lift carrying the old money arrive. That was what Samuels called the “showout”: the sign for the robber re-enactors to spring into action.
We’d be waiting in two cars parked one on each side of the street. The first would drive over and pu
ll up across the entrance to the stump-road, blocking the security van in. Simultaneously three of us would run out of this and three more from the other car towards the bank. Robber Re-enactor One would throw Security Guard Re-enactor Three to the floor and take his place, holding the door ajar and setting up our own buzzard-like sight chain. Robber Re-enactors Two, Three and Four would run into the bank’s lobby and form a phalanx, Two firing the “frightener” from his shotgun at the ceiling before bringing the gun down to point at the bank staff re-enactors and telling them to move back from their counters, while Three also pointed a gun at them. Robber Re-enactors Four and Five, meanwhile, would move forward and smash the airlock’s doors with sledgehammers. Once inside the armour-glass enclosure, they’d be joined by Three, who, while Two kept his gun trained on the staff and customer re-enactors, would help them carry the bags out of the bank—three large bags, one each, held with both hands in front of the stomach—with Four eventually joining One at the door to exit behind them and escape in the two cars. The whole robbery sequence had to take no more than ninety seconds.
We ran through it countless times. In the early run-throughs we had everyone wear labels on their back: R1, R2 and so on for the robbers, C1 and so on for the clerks, P numbers for members of the public. We all looked like marathon runners, or entrants in a ballroom dancing contest. We added things and took things away. The first time Robber Five carried his bag across the lobby, for example, he tripped on a wrinkle in the carpet and fell over. Everyone laughed, but I said: “Do that each time.”
“What, fall over?” he said.
“No, just trip, but don’t quite fall over.”
I calculated that if he slightly tripped on purpose, this would prevent his tripping by mistake—forestall that event, as it were. After we’d run through it a few more times the wrinkle had been flattened. I got Frank to stick a piece of wood beneath it, so that it would kink and Robber Five could semi-trip each time. Another thing I tweaked was the departure from the bank of the accomplice in the enquiry desk line—the show-out. During the first few days’ practices he’d just step out, turn around and walk away. It looked awkward. I felt there must be a better way for him to do this, but I didn’t quite know how. After a week it struck me:
“Do it like a tight end,” I said.
“A what?” the re-enactor asked me.
“A tight end in American football,” I said.
I’d watched lots of American football on TV after the accident, in hospital late at night when I couldn’t sleep. I’d found it hypnotic: how the endlessly repeated static line-ups sprung into moving set pieces which the coaches signalled in from the touchlines by semaphore. Sometimes there’d even be two people semaphoring, one of them sending fake signals to confuse the other team’s code-breakers.
“Is he the guy that throws the ball?” the accomplice re-enactor asked me.
“No,” I said. “That’s the quarterback. The tight end’s the guy that’s in the line but is also eligible to receive the ball. So often he’s set with the others, crouching down; then just before the play begins, before the snap, he peels out and runs behind the other crouchers, parallel to them. I want you to leave the line like that. Not running, obviously—but peeling the same way.”
“Okay,” he said.
We tried it. It looked beautiful.
After almost two more weeks, when we’d got most of the movements right, we had Robber Re-enactors Five and Six actually smash down the airlock’s doors. They took some breaking. Watching them smash down the first, then move into the space between the two, then smash the second one and move on, I thought of explorers moving over polar ice, or mountaineers—how they have to secure each new position, no matter how small an advance it represents, before they progress to the next. We also used real guns. Naz got some shotguns—the type used for shooting pheasants. We needed the guns to be real for when Robber Re-enactor Two fired off the frightener. He fired it at the ceiling, and small bits of plaster fell down. The first time I saw him do this I thought of Matthew Younger, how plaster flakes had fallen onto him when he’d visited me in my building when it was all being set up. Strangely enough, when I got home that evening I found a message from him on my answering machine.
“Please contact me,” he said. “Your stocks are rocketing, but the level of exposure has become almost unbearable, and I have qualms about the sectors’ overall stability. You can call me at the office, or out of office hours on either of the following numbers…”
As I listened to his voice, I thought of what my short councillor had said: that I was wreaking magic, like a shaman. Maybe Matthew Younger had called me and left his message at the same instant that the plaster was falling. I’d never know. I did see the short councillor, though: he turned up the next day at the replica bank.
“Just as he said beside the football pitch,” he said. “A hold-up. He will simulate the robbing of a bank.”
“Yes,” I said. “Re-enact.”
“And re-enact and re-enact again, one presumes,” he continued. “His ultimate goal, of course, being to—how shall we put it? To attain—no, to accede to—a kind of authenticity through this strange, pointless residual.”
Just then I had to take up my position—I was Robber Re-enactor Three—but after we’d rehearsed the procedure again, I went looking for him so that I could ask him what he meant by “residual”. He’d used the word twice now. I couldn’t find him, though.
I decided to sit out the next couple of run-throughs. I put a marker, one of the spare re-enactors, in for me, stood to one side and watched. It was all working very well. The way Robber One’s leg held the door open, slightly bent; the movement of Robber Two’s gun as it described an arc across the lobby from inside the main door while Robber Three did the same but faster and from the floor’s centre, like the second and third hands of a clock set slightly apart; the way the tight end-accomplice turned as he peeled out of the line, his shoulders inclining so the left was slightly lower than the right, then straightening again; the sight of the clerks, customers and security men lying horizontal on the floor, static and abject—all these movements and positions carried an intensity that emanated way beyond them. As I stood watching them I felt that tingling start up at my spine’s base again.
Samuels came over and stood beside me for a while, watching the re-enactors running through their interlocking sequences.
“We used to do this too,” he said after a while.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Dry runs. Simulations. Before any major robbery. We didn’t just go through it on paper: we rehearsed it too, like this.”
I turned and looked at him.
“You mean you’d re-enact the robberies in advance?” I asked, incredulous.
“Well, yes, that’s what I’m saying. Not re-enact: pre-enact, I suppose. But yes, of course.”
I thought about that, hard. It started to make me feel dizzy. I walked over to Naz and told him that I wanted to go home.
“What?” he said, staring intently into space.
“I need to go home,” I said again.
He stared straight ahead for a few more seconds; then, eventually, he turned to me and said: “Oh, right. I’ll have you driven back.”
An hour later I was lying in my bath looking at the crack on the wall again. Piano music was wafting up from downstairs. The steam rising off the bath water seemed to be swirling in the patterns of the bank raid: the arcs of the guns, the half-trip on the kink. I was still thinking about what Samuels had said. I tried to map it all out on the surface of the water: I let one cluster of foam-bubbles be the duplicated bank at Heathrow and our exercises there; I moved another to the left and let it be the bank in Chiswick, the real bank on which we’d modelled our replica; I sculpted a third cluster together, moved it to the right and let it be the places in which Samuels and his gang used to practise their turning and pointing and exiting before they raided banks—their preenactments. I lay and watched the three foam cluster
s for a long time, comparing them. After a while I cupped my hands around the clusters to the right and to the left of the first one and dragged these back towards the centre of the bath, compacting all three together.
As I did this I had a revelation. The revelation sent a jolt through me—almost a shock, as though the water had become electric. I jumped out of the bath, ran naked to the living room, snatched the phone from its cradle and dialled Naz’s number.
“I’m back at the office,” he said. “I’ve started notating where second-string objects and people are. The ones not directly involved in the re-enactment: things like the coffee table and the ladder. For if you decide to re-enact the preparations at a later date. We could…”
“Naz!” I told him. “Listen to me! Naz!”
“What?” he asked.
“I’ve had an idea,” I said. I gulped, and tasted soap. I was so excited that I could hardly speak. “I should like,” I continued, “to transfer the re-enactment of the bank heist to the actual bank.”
There was a pause, then Naz said:
“That’s good. Yes: very good. I’ll go about making arrangements with the bank.”
“Arrangements?” I said. “What arrangements?”
“To procure it,” he said. “We’ll have to do it on a Sunday, obviously. Or a bank holiday.”
“No!” I said. “Don’t get their permission.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought you just said you wanted to do it in the bank. The bank we modelled our bank on, in Chiswick, right?”
“Right!” I said. “But I don’t want them to know we’ll do it. We’ll just do it there, our re-enactment, right there in the bank!”
“But what about the staff? We’ll have to replace the real staff with re-enactors.”
“No we won’t!” I told him. “We’ll just stand our staff re-enactors down and use the real staff.”
“But how will they know that it’s a re-enactment and not an actual hold-up?”