Remainder (21 page)

“So,” he said. “This is the man who is re-staging the deaths of local gangsters who have met with violent ends.”

I could place him now: he’d been at the re-enactment of the first shooting—the man I’d seen standing behind the waiting BMW when I’d first arrived. He looked semi-official: smartish but a little ragged round the edges. Off-smart. He had a graphite-coloured jacket on and grey streaks in his hair. He must have been forty-odd.

“Are you a policeman?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. He glanced at his notebook again, then continued: “This is also the man who has had set up a building in which certain mundane and, on the surface, meaningless moments are repeated and prolonged until they assume an almost sacred aspect.”

His voice had a slightly Scottish edge. It was quite dry. He spoke in the kind of tone a lawyer might use to address a jury, or a serious professor of history his students. I lay there, listening to him.

“He has, moreover, had the most trivial of incidents—a spillage that occurred during a visit to a tyre repair shop—played and replayed like a stuck record for the last three weeks, residual.”

“I’d forgotten about that,” I said.

“Forgotten about that, he says?” His tone rose slightly as he uttered this rhetorical question, then dipped again as he ploughed on. “No less than one hundred and twenty actors have been used. Five hundred and eleven props—tyres, signs, tins, tools, all in working condition—have been assembled and deployed. And that’s just for the tyre shop scene. The number of people who have been employed in some capacity or other over the course of all five re-enactments must be closer to one thousand.” He paused again and let the figure sink in, then continued: “All these actions, into which so much energy has been invested, so many man-hours, so much money—all, taken as a whole, confront us with the question: for what purpose?”

He paused and looked at me intently.

“Does he, perhaps,” he started again suddenly, “consider himself to be some kind of artist?”

He was still looking intently at me, as though calling on me to give an answer.

“Who, me?” I said.

His eyes mockingly scoured the empty room, then came to rest on me again.

“No,” I told him. “I was never any good at art. In school.”

“In school, he wasn’t any good at art,” he repeated, then struck off on another tack: “In that case, could it rather be that he sees these acts as a kind of voodoo? Magic? As shamanic performances?”

“What’s shamanic?” I asked.

Naz walked in just then. He seemed to know this man: he nodded at him, then started tapping at his mobile.

“Who is this?” I asked him.

“A borough councillor,” Naz said. “He kept us posted on the shooting and found us our police mole. Don’t worry: he’s sound.”

I wasn’t worried. I felt quite at ease just lying there, passive, being talked about. The piano music spilled up from downstairs.

“He’s listening to Shostakovich,” the short councillor said.

“It’s Rachmaninov,” Naz told him.

“Ah, Rachmaninov. And there’s a smell, a kind of…is it cordite?”

“Yes!” I tried to shout to him, but my voice came out weak. “Yes: finally! It
is
cordite! I knew it!”

Naz’s phone beeped. He read from its screen:

“Of or pertaining to a priest-doctor of the Ural-Altaic peoples of Siberia. From the Tungusian
saman.
”

“Cordite! Didn’t I say, right from the beginning…” I began, but then slipped off into a trance again.

I saw this councillor again, the next afternoon, or perhaps the one after that. I was feeling a lot stronger and had ventured out of my building to take some air beside the sports track. I was leaning by the knitted green wire fence watching a football team train. They were practising shooting: their coach placed ball after ball on the green asphalt surface among all the intersecting lines and circles and they ran up, one after the other, and kicked the balls into the goal, or tried to. Some of the balls missed, ricocheted back off the fence and got in the next shooter’s way. The coach was shouting at his players to encourage them:

“Project!” he told them. “Will it in the goal. Take your time. Slow each second down.”

This was good advice. You could see the ones who got the balls in breaking their movements into segments, really concentrating on each one. It wasn’t that they took more time than the ones who missed—rather that they made the same amount of time expand. That’s what all good sportsmen do: fill time up with space. That’s what sprinters are doing when they run a hundred metres in less than ten seconds: they’re expanding every second, every half-second, as though the moment were a cylinder around them and they were pushing its edges outwards so it takes in more track, more for them to run down before they reach the second’s edge. A boxer who can duck, feint, twist and lunge before his opponent even sees him move, or a batsman who can calmly read, decode and play the swing and bounce of the hurtling ball: they’re filling time up with space too. So are men who can catch bullets: it’s easy enough if you just give yourself enough room to manoeuvre in. Watching these football players shoot now, I felt a huge wave of sadness for the three men who’d been killed, and an even greater one at not having managed, in my re-enactments, to fill the instant of their death with so much space that it retrieved them, kinked them back to life. Impossible, I know, but I still felt responsible, and sad.

The coach had introduced a new rule: if a player missed, he had to run around the track that hemmed the football pitch in. Three or four of them were jogging round it sluggishly, beneath the broken loudspeakers.

“In his coma,” a voice beside me said, “he had to give a commentary.”

It was the short councillor again. He was standing by the fence beside me with his fingers poking through the diamond-shaped green holes. He must have been standing there for some time without me noticing him.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s true.” I didn’t remember telling him that bit, about the sports dreams in my coma as I lay unconscious in the weeks after the accident. “There was a format,” I said, “and I had to fill it, or I’d die.”

“And ever since that time he’s felt unreal. Inauthentic.”

“Yes,” I replied. I didn’t remember telling him that bit either, but I must have done and then forgotten that I’d told him as I slipped into my trance.

“So when, recently, has he felt most real?” the short councillor asked. “When has he felt least inauthentic?”

It was a very good question. I’d been so busy, so driven over the last few months, moving from project to project, from the building re-enactments to the tyre shop ones and then on to the shootings, that I hadn’t paused to take stock of them all, to compare and contrast them, to ponder the question:
Which one has worked best?
They’d all had the same goal, their only goal: to allow me to be fluent, natural, to merge with actions and with objects until there was nothing separating us—and nothing separating me from the experience that I was having: no understanding, no learning first and emulating second-hand, no self-reflection, nothing: no detour. I’d gone to these extraordinary lengths in order to be real. And yet I’d never stopped and asked myself if it had worked. Naz had kind of asked me after the first building re-enactment—and the question had struck me as odd. The realness I was after wasn’t something you could just “do” once and then have “got”: it was a state, a mode—one that I needed to return to again and again and again. Opioids, Trevellian had said: endogenous opioids. A drug addict doesn’t stop to ask himself:
Did it work?
He just wants more—bigger doses, more often: more.

And yet it was a good question, coming as it did: here, in front of this caged-in sports pitch, from the short councillor. Venturing outside after days of trances I felt lucid, fresh, refreshed. The clang of footballs hitting the caged goal was sharp; his question sharpened my whole mind, turned me into a sportsman, made me slow time down, expand it, push its edges out and move around inside it. I thought back over the last months, and beyond: right back to Paris, to the feeling that I’d had with Catherine of getting away with something. I thought back over the serenity, the floating sensation that I’d felt when walking past my liver lady as she put the bin bag out; over my elation when the blue goop had seemed to have dematerialized and become sky; the intense and overwhelming tingling that had fulgurated when I’d opened myself up and become passive lying on the tarmac by the phone box and had stayed with me for days; I let my thoughts run right up to that same morning. And yet to the simple question
When had I felt least unreal?
the answer was not any of these times.

It was, it slowly dawned on me, another time: a moment that had come about not through an orchestrated re-enactment, but by chance—without back-up people, two-way radios, architects, police moles and forensic reports, without piano loops and licences and demarcated zones. I’d been alone: alone and yet surrounded by people. They’d been streaming past me, on the concourse outside Victoria Station. Commuters. I’d been going to see Matthew Younger: I’d come out of the tube just as rush hour was beginning, and commuters—men and women dressed in suits—had hurried past me. I’d stood still, facing the other way, feeling them hurrying, streaming. I’d turned the palms of my hands outwards, felt the tingling begin—and been struck by the thought that my posture was like the posture of a beggar, holding his hands out, asking passers-by for change. The tingling had grown; after a while I’d decided that I
would
ask them for change. I’d started murmuring:

“Spare change…spare change…spare change…”

I’d stood like this, gazing vaguely in front of me and murmuring
spare change,
for several minutes. Nobody had given me any; I didn’t need or want their change: I’d just received eight and half million pounds. But being in that particular space, right then, in that particular relation to the others, to the world, had made me so serene, so intense that I’d felt almost real. I remembered, standing next to the short councillor now, having felt exactly that way: almost real. I turned to him and said:

“It was when I was outside Victoria Station, looking for my stockbroker’s office, asking passers-by for change.”

The short councillor smiled—the type of smile that implied he’d known what my answer would be before I’d even given it.

“Demanding money of which he most certainly had no need,” he said. “That’s what’s made him feel most real.”

“Demanding money, yes,” I told him, “but also the sense of…”

“Of what?” he asked.

“Of being on the other side of something. A veil, a screen, the law—I don’t know…”

My voice petered out. The short councillor looked at me for a while, then said:

“Demanding money, having passed onto the other side, he says. The question follows: What will he do next?”

What would I do next? Another good question. It should be something like the scene outside Victoria that day. Perhaps I could just re-enact exactly that: hire the concourse and get my staff to be streaming commuters while I stood with my hands out facing them, asking them for change. I pictured it, but it didn’t really catch my imagination. Re-enacting it wouldn’t be enough: there’d be something missing, something fundamental.

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.

“Well: 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.”

He’d snapped the breadstick in two and, as he explained this, made one half be
A
and one half
B,
reacting to one another by changing their positions on the tablecloth. Naz and I watched them, listening.

“I say ‘ideally’,” Samuels continued, “because this pattern is to both sides’ great advantage. The robbers get their money and the bank staff don’t get killed. What messes it all up is when a factor no one has anticipated and built into the pattern breaks in.” He placed the salt shaker between the breadstick’s two halves to illustrate this. “A have-a-go hero jumping one of the robbers, a hysterical woman who won’t obey commands, someone who tries to run out of the door…”

“Like with the carrot!” I said.

“Sorry?” Samuels asked, furrowing his brow again.

“It’s…whatever. Carry on.”

Samuels hesitated, then resumed:

“This preset pattern, when it works, which it does most of the time to both sides’ great relief, is heavily weighted in the bank’s favour—but only from the moment that they activate the alarm. Their aim isn’t to stop you robbing them: it’s to set in motion the chain that will lead to your being nabbed by the police after you’ve left. You can’t prevent this chain being set in motion—and the time from their hitting the alarm button to the police arriving is a matter of minutes: five, seven, maybe only two. Your goal is not to stop them doing this, but to carve out enough time for yourself to get in, out and away again before they do.”

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“With shock,” he answered. “Psychology again, see? You rush in, fire a frightener, point guns around—and the staff are too scared to push alarms, or to do anything!”

His tone had changed now. He’d dropped the breadstick props; his eyes were kind of sparkling, as though lit up by memories of rushing into banks and pointing guns. He sipped his wine again, wiped his lip and continued:

“They’re like bunnies in headlights: frozen. You step in and move them gently away from the counters, get them to lie down. You use their shock to create a…bridge, a…a suspension in which you can operate. A little enclave, a defile.”

I looked across at Naz and raised my eyebrow. He nodded, took his mobile out and tapped its keys. The waiter arrived with our food. He set the venison sausages Samuels had ordered in front of me by mistake. They were grey and wrinkled, like an elephant’s trunk. I imagined trying to steal an elephant and then fence it, get rid of it, just spirit it away.

“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.