Remainder - By Tom McCarthy Page 0,72

area?”

“I wasn’t there that day,” he said.

I stared at him intently for a few more seconds, then walked on with Naz.

“Slept well?” Naz asked.

I hadn’t slept at all. My tiredness made the dappled pattern of wet and dry patches on the pavement stand out more intensely. The air was bright but not bright-blue: the sun was beaming from behind a thin layer of white cloud. Its light cast shadows and reflections: from the bollards and the phone box and on the surfaces of puddles.

“Whatever,” I said. “How long do we have?”

“We’ve got until six o’clock this evening,” he said.

“Get it extended,” I told him.

“They won’t let us have more time,” he said.

“Pay them,” I said. “Offer them double what we’ve paid already, and if they say no, then double that again. Is all the area between the lines of tape ours?”

“Yes,” said Naz.

The cordoned-off stretch ran between the bridge and the traffic lights I’d been stopped by on the first day—but of this area only about a third was primary re-enactment space. The other two thirds were given over to back-up: cars and boxes, tables, a big van from whose back doors two women were handing out coffee. The vehicles were all parked unusually: not flat against the kerb but willy-nilly, right across the road, irregular.

“When you see that, it’s usually because there’s been an accident,” I told Naz.

“Sorry?” he said.

“Or the fair,” I said. “If it’s on grass.”

He looked at me intently for a while. Then his eyes lit up and he said:

“Oh yes, I see. I always liked the fair.”

“Me too,” I said.

We smiled at one another, then I looked across our area. One of Frank’s people who I recognized from the building was lifting replica sub-machine guns from a box and carrying them with another man towards the van the two women were serving coffee from. Another man was stepping from a dull red BMW he’d parked in the middle of the road beside the traffic lights. Another, shortish man I hadn’t seen before was standing two feet behind him, watching the goings-on. I looked back at the ground. Besides being layered and cracked, it was also plumbed: dotted with holes and outlets that had been placed there strategically when the street had first been laid. There was a small cover set into the tarmac that had ‘water’ written on it and another almost identical one that said ‘London Transport’. A larger, rounder one set into a hydrant carried two strings of figures, EM124 and B125; another simply bore the letter C. All these openings to tubes and pipelines, outlets and supply points, connections feeding back to who knew where. I saw we had a lot of work to do.

“Where are the re-enactors?” I asked.

“Over there,” said Naz.

He pointed to the van. Three black men were standing around behind it, drinking coffee. Two of them were the same ones I’d pointed out to Naz the day we’d hired the Soho Theatre; the third I’d not seen before. He was riding around in small circles on a red sports bicycle, trying to keep going without putting his feet down.

“Is that the victim?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied Naz.

“Stand him down,” I said. “I’ll take his place. Send the other two over to me. And Naz?”

“Yes?”

“I want to pay the people who’ve done all the organizing bits more.”

“Which ones do you mean?” he asked.

“The people who’ve worked with you to get all the elements of this coordinated. Not the ones who actually do stuff, but the ones who make the other people’s stuff all fit together. You understand?”

“I do,” said Naz. “But you’re already paying them generously.”

“Pay them more generously, then,” I said.

I pressed my thumb to my finger just where I’d stuck the knife in a few hours earlier as I said this. Money was like blood, I figured. I’d barely pricked myself; I had plenty more to give.

Naz walked across to the three black men by the van. I saw him take the man who’d been riding the bicycle in circles to one side and talk to him. The man got off the bike, talked to Naz some more, then strode back to the van, reached in, took out a bag and walked off towards the police tape. The other two, meanwhile, came sauntering over to me. I briefed them.

“What I want you to do,” I said, “is drive that BMW from over there beside the lights to just up there beside the Green Man.”

“Your man talked us through