“Whatever,” I said. “How long do we have?”
“We’ve got until six o’clock this evening,” he said.
“Get it extended,” I told him.
“They won’t let us have more time,” he said.
“Pay them,” I said. “Offer them double what we’ve paid already, and if they say no, then double that again. Is all the area between the lines of tape ours?”
“Yes,” said Naz.
The cordoned-off stretch ran between the bridge and the traffic lights I’d been stopped by on the first day-but of this area only about a third was primary re-enactment space. The other two thirds were given over to back-up: cars and boxes, tables, a big van from whose back doors two women were handing out coffee. The vehicles were all parked unusually: not flat against the kerb but willy-nilly, right across the road, irregular.
“When you see that, it’s usually because there’s been an accident,” I told Naz.
“Sorry?” he said.
“Or the fair,” I said. “If it’s on grass.”
He looked at me intently for a while. Then his eyes lit up and he said:
“Oh yes, I see. I always liked the fair.”
“Me too,” I said.
We smiled at one another, then I looked across our area. One of Frank’s people who I recognized from the building was lifting replica sub-machine guns from a box and carrying them with another man towards the van the two women were serving coffee from. Another man was stepping from a dull red BMW he’d parked in the middle of the road beside the traffic lights. Another, shortish man I hadn’t seen before was standing two feet behind him, watching the goings-on. I looked back at the ground. Besides being layered and cracked, it was also plumbed: dotted with holes and outlets that had been placed there strategically when the street had first been laid. There was a small cover set into the tarmac that had ‘water’ written on it and another almost identical one that said ‘London Transport’. A larger, rounder one set into a hydrant carried two strings of figures, EM124 and B125; another simply bore the letter C. All these openings to tubes and pipelines, outlets and supply points, connections feeding back to who knew where. I saw we had a lot of work to do.
“Where are the re-enactors?” I asked.
“Over there,” said Naz.
He pointed to the van. Three black men were standing around behind it, drinking coffee. Two of them were the same ones I’d pointed out to Naz the day we’d hired the Soho Theatre; the third I’d not seen before. He was riding around in small circles on a red sports bicycle, trying to keep going without putting his feet down.
“Is that the victim?” I asked.
“Yes,” replied Naz.
“Stand him down,” I said. “I’ll take his place. Send the other two over to me. And Naz?”
“Yes?”
“I want to pay the people who’ve done all the organizing bits more.”
“Which ones do you mean?” he asked.
“The people who’ve worked with you to get all the elements of this coordinated. Not the ones who actually do stuff, but the ones who make the other people’s stuff all fit together. You understand?”
“I do,” said Naz. “But you’re already paying them generously.”
“Pay them more generously, then,” I said.
I pressed my thumb to my finger just where I’d stuck the knife in a few hours earlier as I said this. Money was like blood, I figured. I’d barely pricked myself; I had plenty more to give.
Naz walked across to the three black men by the van. I saw him take the man who’d been riding the bicycle in circles to one side and talk to him. The man got off the bike, talked to Naz some more, then strode back to the van, reached in, took out a bag and walked off towards the police tape. The other two, meanwhile, came sauntering over to me. I briefed them.
“What I want you to do,” I said, “is drive that BMW from over there beside the lights to just up there beside the Green Man.”
“Your man talked us through the sequence,” one of them said. He had a London accent and an affable, smiley face.
“Yes,” I told him, “but you must park it just there, see? Exactly there. Its bonnet, front, its nose, should be exactly there, no further forward than the end of the Green Man’s second window. You park it there, then get out-you take your guns with you-and walk across the street firing at me.”
“At you?” the same man asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be re-enacting the victim’s role. You must walk across the street quite slowly, almost casually, firing at me. But don’t fire until-here, come with me.”
I walked them over to the phone box.
“I’ll start here,” I continued. “I’ll have just left this phone box when you pull up. Or I’ll just be leaving it. I’ll get on my bike and start pedalling, riding in this direction, over here. That’s when you should start shooting: as I come up to just here, where Movement Cars starts.”
“Where should we stand?” the man asked again.
“There,” I said. I walked them back across the street to a spot just in the middle where the cracks branched out into a cell-like pattern of repeating hexagons. “Walk from the car up to here. No further than here, though. You can keep firing, but just stop advancing once you reach this spot. I’ll try to turn into this road here, Belinda Road, and my bike’s handlebars will twist under me, and I’ll fall off, then get up again, and you shoot again and I’ll go down again. You guys should stand here while I do that. Stand here for a while, then go back to the car. Yes, do it like that. Do it just like that.”
The other man spoke now. Unlike his friend he had a strong West Indian accent:
“You’re the boss,” he said.
I signalled over to Naz, who had been talking on his mobile. He came over to us.
“Ready to go?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “What news on the time front?”
“Working on it,” he said.
He called Frank and Annie over. They had Frank’s man in tow, plus the man I’d seen handling the sub-machine guns with him a few minutes earlier. They carried one gun each.
“Sid,” Frank told me by way of introduction. “He’s an effects man I’ve worked with on several films. He’ll show our friends here how the guns work. You can take up your position if you like.”
“Okay,” I said-but I stayed to watch this Sid explain the working of the guns.
“Basically,” said Sid, “they’re like real ten-millimetre Uzis with the chamber taken out. They’ll make a nice bang. You’ve got two magazines,” he went on, pointing to two metallic blocks Frank’s man was holding, “which clip in under here. Look, try it.”
He handed the guns to the two black men. Frank’s man handed them the magazines. They held both awkwardly. Neither could get their magazine to clip in properly. Sid showed them how to wedge the Uzis’ butts against their stomachs just below the ribs and guide the magazines in upwards with their left hand from below, feeling for the slot and catch. They tried it a few times, nodding in satisfaction when they got it right. I envied them. I thought of asking to try too, but didn’t want to get all self-indulgent. Besides, things were moving on. The coffee van was being shifted and the re-enactment area cleared of all personnel. The two black men were being led towards the BMW and handed its keys. The bicycle was being brought to me. I took it, wheeled it over to the phone box, balanced it against the railings just beside this, then opened the phone box’s door and stepped inside.
The street’s sounds drained away and I was back in a cocoon-the same cocoon I’d been placed in when my phone connection had been ripped out of the wall the day the Settlement came through. The cabin had a little shelf in it. Perhaps this black man whose last moments I was re-enacting had rested his address book on this shelf as he made his final phone call. Had the book been shabby, fat and bulging? Yellow? I pictured it as yellow, tattered but not fat. Then it went blue and thin, like those vocabulary books you get in school.