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.
“Just as he said beside the football pitch,” he said. “A hold-up. He will simulate the robbing of a bank.”
“Yes,” I said. “Re-enact.”
“And re-enact and re-enact again, one presumes,” he continued. “His ultimate goal, of course, being to—how shall we put it? To attain—no, to accede to—a kind of authenticity through this strange, pointless residual.”
Just then I had to take up my position—I was Robber Re-enactor Three—but after we’d rehearsed the procedure again, I went looking for him so that I could ask him what he meant by “residual”. He’d used the word twice now. I couldn’t find him, though.
I decided to sit out the next couple of run-throughs. I put a marker, one of the spare re-enactors, in for me, stood to one side and watched. It was all working very well. The way Robber One’s leg held the door open, slightly bent; the movement of Robber Two’s gun as it described an arc across the lobby from inside the main door while Robber Three did the same but faster and from the floor’s centre, like the second and third hands of a clock set slightly apart; the way the tight end-accomplice turned as he peeled out of the line, his shoulders inclining so the left was slightly lower than the right, then straightening again; the sight of the clerks, customers and security men lying horizontal on the floor, static and abject—all these movements and positions carried an intensity that emanated way beyond them. As I stood watching them I felt that tingling start up at my spine’s base again.
Samuels came over and stood beside me for a while, watching the re-enactors running through their interlocking sequences.
“We used to do this too,” he said after a while.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Dry runs. Simulations. Before any major robbery. We didn’t just go through it on paper: we rehearsed it too, like this.”
I turned and looked at him.
“You mean you’d re-enact the robberies in advance?” I asked, incredulous.
“Well, yes, that’s what I’m saying. Not re-enact: pre-enact, I suppose. But yes, of course.”
I thought about that, hard. It started to make me feel dizzy. I walked over to Naz and told him that I wanted to go home.
“What?” he said, staring intently into space.
“I need to go home,” I said again.
He stared straight ahead for a few more seconds; then, eventually, he turned to me and said: “Oh, right. I’ll have you driven back.”
An hour later I was lying in my bath looking at the crack on the wall again. Piano music was wafting up from downstairs. The steam rising off the bath water seemed to be swirling in the patterns of the bank raid: the arcs of the guns, the half-trip on the kink. I was still thinking about what Samuels had