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.
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.”