I closed my eyes and straight away an image came to me: of a gun, then of several guns-a whole parade of them, laid out like in Dr Jauhari’s diagrams, with their sleek finishes, curved handles and thick hammers. The image widened: I was with my staff, all in formation just like in my dream, an aeroplane-shaped phalanx. We were on a demarcated surface, an interior concourse divided into areas, cut up by screens which we were penetrating, getting to the other side of. We were standing in a phalanx and demanding money, standing on the other side of something, holding guns-and the whole scene was intense, beautiful and real.
On the asphalt pitch a football hitting a caged goal slammed me back into the present. I turned to the short councillor and said:
“What I’d like to re-enact next is a bank heist.”
14
ONE WEEK LATER Naz and I found ourselves stepping back into the Blueprint Café. We were there to meet a man named Edward Samuels. In his heyday Samuels had been one of the UK’s most prolific and audacious armed robbers. Besides holding up countless banks, he’d also stolen artworks, clothes, tobacco, televisions: whole shipments of all these. He’d always stolen in bulk. He’d hijacked lorries and raided warehouses. He’d been so adept at making large things disappear that he’d earned himself the name, among the underworld, of Elephant Thief-a moniker which, apparently, those who knew him well were permitted to abbreviate to Elephant.
Samuels’s criminal career hadn’t gone completely without hitch. He’d been imprisoned twice-the second time for an eleven-year stretch, of which he’d served seven. While in prison he’d started studying. He’d done some O levels, and then some A levels, then a degree in Criminal Psychology. He’d written an autobiography, Elephant, which he’d managed to get published shortly after leaving prison. That’s how Naz had hooked up with him and set up our meeting: he’d read his book, then contacted his agent.
Naz told me all this stuff about Samuels while we took a taxi to the restaurant. As he did I pictured him. I pictured him as tall and quite athletic. I was more or less right. I picked Samuels out as soon as we walked in. He was burly and fiftyish, with straight white hair. He had high cheekbones and was sort of handsome. He’d brought a copy of his book with him-or so it seemed: a book which I assumed was his was lying on the table just in front of him, but when I sat down and glanced at it, it turned out to be called The Psychopathology of Crime.
“Still studying?” I asked him.
“Halfway through my MA,” Samuels said. His voice was husky and working class, but had a middle-class kind of assurance to it. “I got the bug. In prison you go mad if you don’t put your mind to something. The weights are okay for your murderers and psychos, but if you’ve got half a brain you want to use your time to educate yourself.”
“Why criminal psychology?” I asked.
“There were psychologists in prison, studying us,” Samuels said, picking at a breadstick. “So I asked one of them to lend me some books. At first he lent me ones geared to the patient: how to manage anger, how to cope with this and that. Within a week I’d asked him to show me the ones he read. Books for psychologists.”
“Like textbooks?” I asked.
“Exactly,” he said. “Reading these was like suddenly being given the key to my own past. Understanding it. If you don’t want to repeat things, you have to understand them.”
I thought hard about what Samuels had just said, then told him:
“But I do want to repeat things.”
“So Nazrul’s informed me,” Samuels answered. “He says…”
“And I don’t want to understand them. That’s the…”
My voice trailed off. The waiter turned up. Naz and I ordered fish soup, kedgeree and sparkling water; Samuels ordered venison sausages and red wine.
“Did you serve us here before?” I asked the waiter.
He stepped back and looked at me.
“Possibly, sir,” he said. “I’ll remember you next time.”
When he’d gone I told Naz:
“Get his details when we leave. I might use him for something in the future.”
“Absolutely,” Naz said. He knew exactly what I meant.
I turned to Samuels again.
“So,” I said. “Naz has filled you in on what we want?”
“He has indeed,” said Samuels. “You want to pay me an enormous amount of money for advice on how to re-stage a bank heist.”
“Re-enact,” I said, “yes. You think you can help out?”
“I’m certain I can,” he answered. “I acted as a consultant on a crime film recently. But it’s not a film you’re making, is it?”
“No,” I said. “Most definitely not. There’ll be no cameras: just the re-enactors, doing it.”
“The principle’s the same, though, isn’t it?” said Samuels. “You want to re-stage…”
“Re-enact,” I corrected him.
“Re-enact,” he continued, “a bank heist.”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s correct. But down to the last details, ones you wouldn’t bother putting in a film. In films you just have stuff to show the cameras: just fronts, enough to make it look right on the outside. I want it to be right. Intimately right, inside.”
“For the audience?” he asked.
“No,” I told him. “For me.”
Samuels sat back in his chair and furrowed his brow. He was silent for a few seconds; then he asked:
“Where?”
“In a warehouse near Heathrow,” I said. “We’ll recreate the bank there, physically. Duplicate it.”
The waiter arrived with our drinks. I watched him set them down. I decided that I’d definitely have something re-enacted around him one day, when I got round to it. He walked away again. I sat back in my chair, drew my arms out wide and said to Samuels:
“Well!”
“Well…” he repeated, waiting for more.
“Welclass="underline" tell me about bank robberies.”
“Oh!” he said. “Yes, well-where to start?” He picked another breadstick up, then laid it out in front of him and said: “I suppose that, for your purposes, I should tell you about their choreography.”
“Choreography?” I said. “Like ballet?”
“More or less, yes,” Samuels answered. “Who stands where, who does what, when, how they move: it’s all very orchestrated.”
“Choreography,” I said. “That’s good, very good.”
“Yes, it is,” said Naz. “It’s very good.”
“And,” Samuels went on, gesturing first to the breadstick’s right then to its left, “this is not just from the robbers’ side. It’s from the bank’s side too.”
“How come?” I asked. “They don’t know that the robbery’s going to happen.”
“Aha!” said Samuels. “Wrong. They don’t know when it’s going to happen. But it’s pretty much a certainty that if you have banks you’ll have robberies. All bank staff are highly drilled in preparation for these. Their actions are strictly programmed. The seven rules are even posted in every branch where all the staff can see them.”
“Seven?” I asked him.
“One: stay calm and don’t provoke the robbers. Two: activate the alarm as soon as there’s no risk in doing so. Three: only give the amount demanded, always including the bait money. Four: don’t answer…”
“What’s bait money?” I asked.
“It’s surplus money that they always keep aside to hand over to robbers,” Samuels said. “It’s usually marked, and sometimes has a canister of ink in it that’s set to explode in an hour or so. Anyway: four: don’t answer phones-unless they tell you to, of course. Five: don’t handle the demand note if they’ve used one, or touch anything they’ve touched. Six: observe the robbers-voices, height, faces if they’re not wearing masks. Seven: remember which way they ran off.”
He took a sip of his wine before continuing:
“Now, the important ones from the robbers’ point of view are the first three. The staff are programmed to behave a certain way, the robbers know this and the staff know they know, and the robbers know they know they know. So a robbery, ideally, follows a strict action-reaction pattern: A does X, B does Y in response, A then does Z and the whole interaction’s run its course.”