“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 clusters 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?”
“They won’t!” I said. “But it doesn’t matter: they’ve been trained to do exactly what the re-enactors have been trained to do. Both should re-enact the same movements identically. Naz? Are you there?”
There was a long, long pause. When Naz eventually spoke, his voice was very deep and very slow.
“That’s brilliant,” he said. “Just brilliant.”
15
NAZ WENT ALONG WITH it. Of course he did. It seems strange, thinking of it now, with the advantage-as they say-of hindsight, that he didn’t try to talk me out of it or bring our professional liaison to an end-just walk out, quit, have done. Going along with my decision put everything he had in jeopardy: his job, his future, even his freedom. In law, we’d be robbing a bank. There were no two ways about it. In the eyes of the staff, the customers and bystanders and police it wouldn’t be a performance, a simulation, a re-staging: it would be a heist-pure and simple, straight up. A bank robbery.
Yes, looking at it from the outside, now, it does seem strange-but thinking back to when we were inside that time, intimately inside it, it doesn’t seem strange at all. Even before he acquiesced with that decision, Naz’s talent for logistics had become inflamed, blown up into an obsession that was edging into a delirium. If I woke up in the small hours of the morning and looked over from my building towards his, I’d see a dim light on and know that he was working there, alone, poring over his data like some Gnostic monk toiling away by oil lamp copying scripture. He looked unhealthy, sick through lack of sleep. His cheeks were pale and jaundiced. Like me, he’d become an addict-although to a different drug. This latest scheme, with its intricate complexities, its massively raised stakes, offered him a hit more perfect, more refined than before. No: I hadn’t stopped to calculate the chances of his accepting or rejecting my order before I issued it; it hadn’t even occurred to me-but if it had, if I’d been capable of stopping and calculating, I’d have thought it through and realized that there was no question but that he would go along with it.
And me? Why had I decided to transfer the robbery re-enactment to the bank itself? For the same reason I’d done everything I’d done since David Simpson’s party: to be real-to become fluent, natural, to cut out the detour that sweeps us around what’s fundamental to events, preventing us from touching their core: the detour that makes us all second-hand and second-rate. I felt that, by this stage, I’d got so close to doing this. Watching the re-enactors’ movements as they practised that day, their guns’ arcs, the turning of their shoulders, the postures of the prone customers and clerks-watching all these, feeling the tingling moving up my spine again, I’d had the feeling that I was closing in on this core. After stalking it for months, just like I’d stalked my building-stalking it with my small arsenal of craft and money, violence and passivity and patience, through a host of downwind trails and patterns, re-enactments that had honed and sharpened my skills-after all this, I could smell blood. Now I needed to move in for the kill.