Remainder - By Tom McCarthy Page 0,88

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