Remainder - By Tom McCarthy Page 0,93

said. I tried to map it all out on the surface of the water: I let one cluster of foam-bubbles be the duplicated bank at Heathrow and our exercises there; I moved another to the left and let it be the bank in Chiswick, the real bank on which we’d modelled our replica; I sculpted a third cluster together, moved it to the right and let it be the places in which Samuels and his gang used to practise their turning and pointing and exiting before they raided banks—their preenactments. I lay and watched the three foam clusters for a long time, comparing them. After a while I cupped my hands around the clusters to the right and to the left of the first one and dragged these back towards the centre of the bath, compacting all three together.

As I did this I had a revelation. The revelation sent a jolt through me—almost a shock, as though the water had become electric. I jumped out of the bath, ran naked to the living room, snatched the phone from its cradle and dialled Naz’s number.

“I’m back at the office,” he said. “I’ve started notating where second-string objects and people are. The ones not directly involved in the re-enactment: things like the coffee table and the ladder. For if you decide to re-enact the preparations at a later date. We could…”

“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.”

15

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