by Paul Cleave
The bank is pretty much slap bang in the middle of town, a tall building with the ground floor for the public and on the other floors-nobody really knows. It has air-conditioning and about fifty potted plants and a security guard who keeps glancing at his watch. We end up arriving early and are led to a group of comfortable chairs to kill time in. Nobody offers us anything to drink. There are racks full of banking brochures on the wall next to us, plenty of posters advertising interest rates; young families with new homes and new kids and big smiles is the image of choice-which is fine with us. But once you’ve seen one poster there isn’t much more to look at: just more floating and fixed interest rate packages and more smiles from people thrilled to be a slave to their mortgage. There are percentage symbols plastered everywhere.
Then, at thirteen minutes past one-two minutes until our appointment with the mortgage consultant-six men carrying shotguns walk calmly through the door.
chapter two
Crime is escalating. Domestic abuse, adolescent street racers running down innocent pedestrians, people stealing and killing-this is the norm in Christchurch, everyday acts happening in an everyday city. Crime escalates like every other statistic, like inflation, cost of living, it ebbs and flows along with gas prices and the real estate market. Same with the murder rate-it can’t be plotted and predicted on a graph, but it stays in line with other crime, a statistic, a percentage.
But this. .
He’s not even sure what this is.
Detective Inspector Schroder brings the car to a stop. There are two unmarked patrol cars blocking off the entrance to the alleyway but he can still see the body beyond it. Detective Landry is leaning against one of the cars, jotting down notes and pausing occasionally to cough into his hand as the medical examiner conveys the details with as many hand gestures as he does words. Schroder gets out of the car and walks over.
“Hell of a show, Carl,” Landry says.
“And you figured I’d want to come take a look.”
“Well, sure I did. I thought you could use the fresh air.”
“Some air. It must be forty degrees out here.”
“These nor’west winds-don’t know what it is, but they make the crazy even crazier,” Sheldon, the medical examiner, sighs, before taking off his glasses and wiping them with the tail of his shirt. “Don’t discount it,” he adds, “I’ve been doing this long enough to know.”
“So what have we got?” Schroder asks, stepping into the alleyway. The body doesn’t look any better than it did from behind his steering wheel. Landry and the ME follow him.
Blood has puddled around the dead man, creating a perimeter of about a meter that Schroder can’t cross without contaminating the scene; the footprints already in it are from Sheldon. The victim’s limbs are all twisted up, especially the legs-the left one has bent forward and snapped somewhere in the knee joint so the ankle is tucked up against the front of the groin.
The guy has three suction cups attached to him-one strapped on each hand, the third secured around his right knee. The fourth is resting on the ground about half a meter from the body, the strap broken in the fall.
The alleyway is cooler than the street, and in complete shade, but the top nine storeys of the ten-storey building are in direct sunlight. Even in this heat the alleyway smells damp. There are recycling bins lining one of the walls, broken wooden pallets and cardboard boxes lining the other. Christchurch alleyways are always full of something-just normally not bodies. He looks up, shielding his eyes against the bright reflection from the windows, then back down at the dead man’s face. A guy with big Vegas-style Elvis sideburns and busted-up features and head wounds that have leaked all over the cracked tarmac.
“See, told you it was a show,” Landry says. “Ain’t much for us to do except wrap Batman up in a bag and take him to the morgue.”
“I think he was trying to be more like Spiderman,” Schroder says.
“Either way, the fact he’s naked except for a trench coat tells us he’s a piece of crap.”
“Maybe.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? For all we know he was on his way to rape somebody,” Landry says. “Dressed like this-he certainly wasn’t trying to watch cable TV for free. I’m thinking he got what he deserved.”
Schroder nods. Still, if he was planning on peeking into somebody’s apartment-surely there was an easier way.
They all turn as one as the media vans begin their assault on the scene, all pulling up at the same time. The cameramen and reporters climb out and move around the barriers to get closer. Police constables push them back. Cameras are hoisted up onto shoulders and the sun glints off the lenses.
“And the show gets an audience,” Landry says.
“We should cover him up,” Schroder says, glancing up at the other tall buildings surrounding them. Landry is right-this is a hell of a show. People are standing in the windows, all staring down and pointing, their faces full of excitement. The reporters scan the buildings for better vantage points to invade the dead man’s privacy from. A constable comes over and goes about covering the victim, a white sheet of canvas hiding the view away from the public. Not all the blood has dried and some of it seeps into the material.
“Anything in his pockets?” Schroder asks.
“Nothing.”
“I’m all done with him,” Sheldon says. “Pretty obvious what happened, but I’ll know more once we get him back to the morgue. Messed up the way he is, he must have gotten pretty high.”
“I’m not so sure,” Schroder says. “All of this-something here doesn’t add up.”
Landry and Sheldon glance at the body, at the building, at the body again, then back at Schroder. “You want to elaborate on that, Carl? What exactly are we missing here? A mostly naked dead man with suction cups strapped to him at the base of an apartment building with a couple of hundred windows-what doesn’t add up?”
“I don’t get it,” Schroder says. “I mean, it seems a hell of an effort to go to just to peep through some windows. Problem is, all the effort in the world wouldn’t have helped him out. This whole suction cup thing, it’s a myth. You can’t scale buildings like that. Can’t be done.”
Schroder takes a step back to reduce the glare and gazes up the side of the building. None of the floors have balconies.
“All that means is he started climbing from higher up. Maybe he has an apartment here,” Landry says. “He probably climbed out on the sixth or seventh floor, and fell from the sixth or the seventh floor. Come on, Carl, we didn’t call you down here to try and make us look like idiots-there’s no crime here.”
“If there’s no crime, why did you call me down?”
Landry rolls his shoulders back, and when he talks, a vein pops out in his forehead and starts throbbing. “For once the victim is someone who deserved it. For once the victim isn’t some girl who smiled at the wrong guy and got sliced up for it. Come on, Carl, how many times have we seen that, huh? And this time-well, this time it’s score one for the good guys.”
“How come nobody found him earlier?” Schroder asks.
“There was a car parked at the front of the alley, blocking the view. Belonged to one of the tenants. He normally leaves it parked here overnight. He only came to move it half an hour ago.”
“Time of death is about twelve hours,” Sheldon says.
“Tell me, when he climbed out last night, before he fell, do you think he closed the window?”
“What?” Landry asks.
“None of the windows are open.”
They all study the side of the building. There’s no way the victim climbed out and made the effort to close the window behind him. There’s no way he could have gone more than a meter before the suction cups gave way.
“Shit,” Landry says. He pulls a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and dances one across his fingers.
“Maybe he managed to climb all the way up from the ground,” Sheldon suggests.
“It can’t happen,” Schrod
er says. “Look it up. Try it out. Do whatever you need to, but it doesn’t work.”
“How do you know for sure?” Landry asks.
“I saw it on the Discovery Channel.”
“Maybe he took the elevator to the roof and climbed down,” Landry says.
“Take another look,” Schroder says. Between the roof and the top apartments is about a two-meter strip of concrete. “This isn’t what it seems. This guy was a victim of something.”
“I still don’t get it,” Landry says, putting the cigarette back. “What you’re saying makes sense, I see that, but there are other alternatives.”
“Like what?” Schroder asks, reaching into his pocket for his ringing cell phone.
“Like maybe the suction cups worked.”
“Or maybe somebody dressed him up,” Schroder points out, “and threw him off the roof.” He takes the call. The woman on the other end of the phone talks quickly, and thirty seconds later he’s back in his car, racing toward the bank, fighting for position with the reporters making their way in the same direction.
chapter three
It’s a moment in a movie. Something so incredibly implausible and so far away from what I’m thinking about that I can’t even comprehend it. I actually look away for a second, just this normal slice of life in this everyday normal bank where abnormal things don’t happen, back to the family-oriented posters and floating interest rates, back to Jodie sitting opposite me-and then, somehow, somehow, it all becomes real.
The doors are two large side-by-side glass doors that open automatically as indiscriminately for these men as they did for me and my wife. The six men enter in three groups of two. The first group goes left, the second, right, and the third, straight ahead. It’s all happening behind Jodie and she has no idea what’s going on. She keeps talking. Most of the people are still talking. Some glance up at the men for a second before returning to what they were doing, then the realization of what they saw kicks in, the disbelief on their faces perhaps comical under other circumstances. Others seem to be noticing immediately, perhaps people who have seen this kind of thing on TV enough times to figure out what happens next. They’re dropping out of sight behind desks. All this and the men haven’t even made a sound.
Jodie watches my face. She hears the collective gasp from everybody else. She twists her head to see what’s happening. A woman screams.
The six men are all wearing balaclavas. They’re all wearing black jerseys and black jeans and could all have just come from a heavy metal concert. They move calmly but forcefully forward, surrounded by an air of confidence the six shotguns provide. They look like they own the bank. They look like never in their lives have they been said no to. The police station is a five-minute walk from here, which means the clock is ticking. Jodie reaches out and I take her hand.
“Next person to move gets their head taken off,” one of them yells, and most people come to a dead stop, a few more keep running, others are hiding behind anything that remotely covers their bodies. The security guard’s face turns about as white as his shirt. He’s absolutely motionless. He’s armed with a radio and the knowledge he’s not earning anything more than minimum wage to be here, and he’s trying to figure out what good either of those things are going to do against six men with shotguns. He doesn’t get far in his figuring, unless he was figuring on inaction, which he does down to perfection. He raises his hands in the air but doesn’t manage to do anything else, including duck, before one of the two men that went in his direction turns the stock of the shotgun and smashes it hard into his jaw. The guard’s head snaps back with a sick crack. He hits the floor, his body slumping in a heap, limbs twisted everywhere. All this and only fifteen seconds have passed. A silent alarm may have been tripped, or maybe the bank cut back on a few of those features so they could offer the competitive interest rates the posters are going on about. The bank staff have open mouths and wide eyes and any training they’ve been given is all shot to hell, a snapshot in a moment of time, like somebody pressed the pause button on life.
“It’s going to be okay,” I say, and I squeeze Jodie’s hand tight. She gives me a look that suggests she doesn’t think things are going to be okay. She’s pale and scared and I’m the same way and I wish we’d ordered something for lunch that would have taken longer to prepare.
The same guy who yelled moves closer to the bank tellers. “Everybody on this side of the counter move over there,” he says, and he points to the far left of the line of counters. Nobody moves. “Now! And get down on the ground!”
We all move as one, footsteps shuffling on the floor, everybody hunched over and moving awkwardly, like old folks in a retirement home running from the Reaper. I don’t let go of Jodie’s hand. We sit on the ground, maybe twenty-five of us, all scared, all thinking the same thing-that we should have made more of Christmas last year.
The six men, in three teams of two, spread further out to the sides. One of them turns and points his gun at the door, ready for more customers to wander on in, even though the whole front of the bank is made up of glass and everybody outside is staring at us. The man barking the instructions reaches the counter.
“You,” he yells, and he points his shotgun at a woman behind the counter. All the makeup in the world couldn’t hide the tightening of her features. “Take these back to the vault and fill them.” He throws some bags at her. They hit her counter and she doesn’t move. “Now!” he says.
“What?”
“Fill them or die. The choice is yours.”
She gets it. She picks up the bags.
“Help her,” he says, pointing at another of the bank tellers. “You as well,” he says, glaring at a third. “And you too,” he adds, waving the gun at a fourth. “And if all four of you aren’t back here in two minutes we open fire on everybody else. Get that?”
As soon as the four disappear, an office door opens. We all turn toward it. A man with a pink tie and his shirtsleeves rolled up stands there with his hands raised in the air, and his head tilted and hunched down slightly, as if trying to avoid sniper fire.
“P. . p. . please, I’m the manager, please don’t hurt anybody and-”
He doesn’t get to say any more. The shotgun barks and people cry out. The manager isn’t thrown backward like in movies. He just stands where he was shot. His head hangs down so he seems to study the angry wound in his chest, seems to notice his shirt has blossomed red, and gravity pulls at the features on his face, making him appear sad. Then he folds at the waist, his ass going backwards, his feet staying in the same place, so when he hits the ground he’s folded in half, his legs out straight, his face against his knees, and he stays in that position with his arms by his side. The wall behind where he stood is streaked in blood, the window next to the door is shattered, other small pellets are buried into the wall. The manager looks like he’s stretching, warming up for yoga.
“Jesus,” I whisper, and I can see other people mouthing the same word but can’t hear it because my ears are still ringing. People are raising their hands to their faces. Others are crying. A man in his late sixties or early seventies has wet himself. A woman has passed out, her face pressing into the floor, looking far more relaxed than anybody else here.
Jodie’s grip is almost breaking my fingers.
“Stay calm,” I say, “just stay calm.”
“Everybody shut up!” one of the men yells, then he fires another shot, this one into the ceiling. Plaster dust rains down, it settles on his shoulders like dandruff.
The four people return from the vault. The bags are bulging with cash and obviously heavy. They manage to lift them up onto the counter.
“Too slow,” the man says, talking to the bank teller he first singled out. He pumps the shotgun and levels it at her chest. “You’re coming with us,” he says.
“No, no,” she says.
“Wait!”
Everybody turns to the voice. It takes a moment to realize that they’ve all turned toward me, and a longer mom
ent to figure out the reason for that-I’m the one who spoke. The man holding the shotgun on the bank teller turns his head toward me.
“What?” he says.
“Eddie,” Jodie says, “what are you doing?”
I have no idea. People are staring at me like I’m an anomaly, like they haven’t seen a twenty-nine-year-old white guy speaking in a bank before. I get onto my knees, then onto my feet, swaying slightly, with still no idea what I’m doing or why I called out. “I said wait,” I say, and my voice is firm.
“We all heard what you said,” he says, “and I think we’re all curious now as to what you’re planning on doing next.”
“You’ve got what you came for,” I say, and the girl with the gun pointed at her takes the distraction to duck down behind the counter. Everybody back there does.
The man turns back to where she just was. “Hey, get back up here.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Please. You don’t have to hurt anybody else,” I say.
“I didn’t realize you were giving the orders here,” he says, looking over the counter for the woman. He can’t get an angle on her.
“Eddie,” Jodie says.
“It’s okay, Jodie.”
“We have to go,” another of them says, his finger pressed against his ear, listening to something small. “The police are only two minutes away.”
