Tom McCarthy: Remainder

“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.”

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.

But to do this required a leap of genius: a leap to another level, one that contained and swallowed all the levels I’d been operating on up to now. Samuels’s offhand comment about dry-runs had opened the gateway to that other level for me; pushing the three bath-foam clusters together, and the revelation this had brought on, had propelled me up there. Yes: lifting the re-enactment out of its demarcated zone and slotting it back into the world, into an actual bank whose staff didn’t know it was a re-enactment: that would return my motions and my gestures to ground zero and hour zero, to the point at which the re-enactment merged with the event. It would let me penetrate and live inside the core, be seamless, perfect, real.

And so our goals aligned, mine and Naz’s. He needed me as much as I needed him. And need him I did, more than ever. In order for the re-enactment to pay off-to produce the defile Samuels had talked about, that sportsmanlike expansion in which we could move around and do our thing-we had to get everything coordinated absolutely perfectly. We’d have no chance to repeat it; there could be no slight mistimings, no slipping bin bags, leakage onto floors or falling cats-and certainly no skiving off and substituting tapes. And then not only was total control of movement and of matter necessary-every surface, every gesture, every last half-trip on a carpet’s kink-but so, too, was control of information. We had to treat information as matter: stop it spilling, seeping, trickling, dribbling, whatever: getting in the wrong place and becoming mess. That’s how bank robbers who get clean away from the scene of the robbery itself get tripped up, Samuels had told us earlier: someone speaks to someone who tells someone else who tells their girlfriend who tells three of her friends, and then soon it’s common knowledge and only a matter of time before the police get to hear about it.

“If our heist were a real one,” Naz explained to me as we sat alone in his office one evening, surrounded by his flow charts, “a normal one I mean, there’d be eight people involved: the five robbers, the two drivers and the show-out man.”

“The tight-end accomplice,” I said.

“Right,” said Naz. “But in our operation there are thirty-four primary re-enactors, plus six immediate back-up people, ones that need to be there all the time, although these ones will stop being necessary from the moment that the location transfers to the real bank-as, of course, will twenty-seven of the primary re-enactors-although to call them ‘unnecessary’ is misleading, as it’s necessary they continue to believe that they’ll be necessary right up until the last minute. So with thirty-four, plus six, plus eleven secondary back-up people and a further twenty-eight (at a conservative guess) tertiary ones-caterers, builders, taxi drivers, basically anyone who’s visited the warehouse more than once-you can appreciate that the probability of information leakage, were we to put even a handful of these people in the picture over the next few days, is pretty much one hundred per cent.”

“Well, then we just don’t tell them,” I said. “Any of them.”

“A: that doesn’t work,” Naz answered. “The drivers will need to have learnt escape routes-and secondary routes in case the first routes are blocked up, and tertiary ones and so on. B: that in itself is only half the problem-no, one third. Beside outward leakage both before and after the event, there’s the need to safeguard against inward leakage-re-enactors learning of your change of plan. And then there’s sideways leakage. Look: I’ve marked it here.”