“I thought it was because…”
“That too,” he said. “It’s all in my book. I’ll give you a copy.”
He did, but I didn’t read it. I was too busy watching everything come together. Three weeks after our first meeting with Samuels in the Blueprint Café we were ready to start practising the re-enactment. This one needed a lot of practice. There was so much choreography involved, as Samuels had warned us. There were re-enactors for the robbers, re-enactors for the staff, for the security-van men and members of the public both inside and outside the bank: thirty-four primary re-enactors in all. This one was by far the most ambitious I’d attempted. The most complex, too, in terms of information management: the walls of Naz’s office became caked with charts: planning charts, flow charts and Venn diagrams, lists and indexes and keys to charts and indexes to lists. If I visited him there in the evenings after the practices I’d find him busy drawing up another one, or annotating one already there, or simply sitting at his desk between them all, silent, his eyes glazed-over while the whole room silently echoed with his manic whirring.
The procedure we came up with went like this: the security van would pull into the tiny stump-road beside the bank in order to deliver new cash-which was no good for stealing because it’s easily traceable-and to pick up bags of old notes, which were what we wanted. This van carried four re-enactors. Two of these men would carry the new money into the bank; a third would accompany them to the door but remain just outside, while the fourth stayed in the van. Security men do this to create linked lines of sight, from inside the bank back to the truck via the man at the door-like the way buzzards hover in long lines, each one a mile apart, so that if one sees food and goes down the ones on either side of him in the chain go down to join him and the whole chain will soon know about it.
Once inside the bank, Security Guard Re-enactors One and Two would be checked in at the far end of the counter, through a set of double doors known to employees as the “airlock” because one couldn’t be opened till the other one was closed, to an area protected by armour-plated glass. Once safely inside this area, they would hand over the new sacks to a cashier re-enactor, who’d then prepare a receipt for them while they waited for the bags of old notes, stored in vaults downstairs, to be brought to ground level in a small electric lift.
This whole transaction would take place out of view of the bank’s public area. There was one spot, though, just in front of the enquiry desk, from which it could be seen. We had an accomplice re-enactor stand in the enquiry desk queue and walk out of the bank as soon as he saw the lift carrying the old money arrive. That was what Samuels called the “showout”: the sign for the robber re-enactors to spring into action.
We’d be waiting in two cars parked one on each side of the street. The first would drive over and pull up across the entrance to the stump-road, blocking the security van in. Simultaneously three of us would run out of this and three more from the other car towards the bank. Robber Re-enactor One would throw Security Guard Re-enactor Three to the floor and take his place, holding the door ajar and setting up our own buzzard-like sight chain. Robber Re-enactors Two, Three and Four would run into the bank’s lobby and form a phalanx, Two firing the “frightener” from his shotgun at the ceiling before bringing the gun down to point at the bank staff re-enactors and telling them to move back from their counters, while Three also pointed a gun at them. Robber Re-enactors Four and Five, meanwhile, would move forward and smash the airlock’s doors with sledgehammers. Once inside the armour-glass enclosure, they’d be joined by Three, who, while Two kept his gun trained on the staff and customer re-enactors, would help them carry the bags out of the bank-three large bags, one each, held with both hands in front of the stomach-with Four eventually joining One at the door to exit behind them and escape in the two cars. The whole robbery sequence had to take no more than ninety seconds.
We ran through it countless times. In the early run-throughs we had everyone wear labels on their back: R1, R2 and so on for the robbers, C1 and so on for the clerks, P numbers for members of the public. We all looked like marathon runners, or entrants in a ballroom dancing contest. We added things and took things away. The first time Robber Five carried his bag across the lobby, for example, he tripped on a wrinkle in the carpet and fell over. Everyone laughed, but I said: “Do that each time.”
“What, fall over?” he said.
“No, just trip, but don’t quite fall over.”
I calculated that if he slightly tripped on purpose, this would prevent his tripping by mistake-forestall that event, as it were. After we’d run through it a few more times the wrinkle had been flattened. I got Frank to stick a piece of wood beneath it, so that it would kink and Robber Five could semi-trip each time. Another thing I tweaked was the departure from the bank of the accomplice in the enquiry desk line-the show-out. During the first few days’ practices he’d just step out, turn around and walk away. It looked awkward. I felt there must be a better way for him to do this, but I didn’t quite know how. After a week it struck me:
“Do it like a tight end,” I said.
“A what?” the re-enactor asked me.
“A tight end in American football,” I said.
I’d watched lots of American football on TV after the accident, in hospital late at night when I couldn’t sleep. I’d found it hypnotic: how the endlessly repeated static line-ups sprung into moving set pieces which the coaches signalled in from the touchlines by semaphore. Sometimes there’d even be two people semaphoring, one of them sending fake signals to confuse the other team’s code-breakers.
“Is he the guy that throws the ball?” the accomplice re-enactor asked me.
“No,” I said. “That’s the quarterback. The tight end’s the guy that’s in the line but is also eligible to receive the ball. So often he’s set with the others, crouching down; then just before the play begins, before the snap, he peels out and runs behind the other crouchers, parallel to them. I want you to leave the line like that. Not running, obviously-but peeling the same way.”
“Okay,” he said.
We tried it. It looked beautiful.
After almost two more weeks, when we’d got most of the movements right, we had Robber Re-enactors Five and Six actually smash down the airlock’s doors. They took some breaking. Watching them smash down the first, then move into the space between the two, then smash the second one and move on, I thought of explorers moving over polar ice, or mountaineers-how they have to secure each new position, no matter how small an advance it represents, before they progress to the next. We also used real guns. Naz got some shotguns-the type used for shooting pheasants. We needed the guns to be real for when Robber Re-enactor Two fired off the frightener. He fired it at the ceiling, and small bits of plaster fell down. The first time I saw him do this I thought of Matthew Younger, how plaster flakes had fallen onto him when he’d visited me in my building when it was all being set up. Strangely enough, when I got home that evening I found a message from him on my answering machine.
“Please contact me,” he said. “Your stocks are rocketing, but the level of exposure has become almost unbearable, and I have qualms about the sectors’ overall stability. You can call me at the office, or out of office hours on either of the following numbers…”
As I listened to his voice, I thought of what my short councillor had said: that I was wreaking magic, like a shaman. Maybe Matthew Younger had called me and left his message at the same instant that the plaster was falling. I’d never know. I did see the short councillor, though: he turned up the next day at the replica bank.