Bandits! part the second and last

Your eyes do not deceive you: I have finished a work of prose fiction! Now that the exam-wave has crested I have a lot of time on my hands, so I'll have to be careful not to make it a habit. To guard against this contingency I am making myself proper dinners and finding other inventive ways to waste my time. Witness the results!

This is my newest craze, Balkan spaghetti. You simply fry a couple of chopped garlic cloves in a big splodge of tomato-paste, spoon on, and mix with lots of yogurt.

And this is how I have spent a thoroughly productive day:

I've had these rather fine measuring-matryoshki since Christmas (cheers, folks!) but they now appear for the first time in glorious technicolour, in the national blazons of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. It goes without saying that the whole thing is unbelievably rich in symbolic significance, possibly.

Should a newly-minted adult citizen be this pleased with himself about anything accomplished using Crayola paint-pots? Do I care?

And now, Bandits!: the not-so-thrilling conclusion.

Nebless Tom was selected, by the rough and silent democracy of cattle-rustlers, to represent the suit. As the planner of the raid and distributor of the loot, he could rely on his comrades to keep their eyes trained on each-other even while he exposed his back for some seconds together. And of course if there turned out to be some hitch in his plan waiting beyond the locked door, it was only fair that he should be the first to know.

The door, designed for a civilised modern age in which it is possible to fortify your tower with so many interlocking bastions of glamour, distraction, and deceit that actual fortification can be all but done away with, yielded to one determined boot. In strode Tom – and behind him the other chieftains (Watt was one of the few people in history to master the striding limp), squeezing through the door together before Tom was left alone with the loot for too long. 

‘Intae the neuk thare, you!,’ cried Skellit Harry, brandishing his pistol with a motion so expansive as to permit no doubt that the unfortunate ‘you’ might be any of the men around the conference table. (I regret to say that this sample of executives and officials were all indeed men; but in fairness to them so were all of there 16^th century adversaries, so you can’t say fairer than that then.) But for some lengthy seconds there was no exodus into the corner, or any other movement at all. In hindsight, of course, we can call this dangerously stupid; but then the whole point of hindsight is that it makes everything clearer, no?

In any case they all jumped to it after Jack Pott shot the windows out – which was his normal method of expressing agreement, disagreement, approval, disapproval, anger, jubiliation, surprise, and sundry other emotions.

‘Richt!,’ said Tom, slapping his gauntleted hands in satisfaction. ‘We’re gey sorrae it haed tae be denner-time whan we cawed, but juist haun’ ower the clink an we’ll be aff.’ 

This request, succinct and gentlemanlike though it certainly was, didn’t have quite the desired effect. The Bolivian chap, and many others besides, appeared to take it as some sort of mortal threat. The mass of neat suits containing the conference-goers shivered as if it had been one being.

‘Thare’s naw muckle a body can say for hou thay eat here,’ said Watt, surveying the supper of papers and Blackberries on the conference-table. This was interpreted as further elaboration of a cruel and unusual death.

It dawned on Peter Laidlaw that he was almost alone in understanding what had just been said. He cleared this throat. Whether he was a coward or not, or whether it was at this moment that he ceased to be one, are questions that need not detain us here. Suffice it to say that he found a quavering voice.

‘…What do you want?...’ His words hung uncomfortably in the air, demanding in the next few moments a dramatic resolution, one way or the other. (Rather like what kept happening to Jack Pott.)

‘The clink, ye gawkie,’ said Tom generously. ‘The siller. The money.’

There was a rippling of suits as frightened and quizzical glances were exchanged. The rievers had enough career experience to tell the fear of being robbed from the fear of being shot: it was clear enough that there was no money to hand.

Nebless Tom and Peter Laidlaw looked intently through each-other in the hush that followed, both rather surprised that nobody had deigned to shoot them yet.

‘We haed an ettlin,’ said Tom cautiously, his tongue weighing each new word much as his hands weighed the pistol and sabre at his belt, ‘That a guid severals hunder-thousand pound waur passin haunds the evening.”

Strictly, the conference-goers had to admit to themselves (for even the Bolivian chappie was able to follow the outline of this remark, thanks to that powerful thing, the survival-instinct), that was true. That was the purpose of the deal. What kind of a world would it be if people made efficiency savings purely for efficiency’s sake? But you didn’t say it! Men in steel bonnets didn’t burst in on meetings, either, but that at least was something you could by virtue of its clear impossibility avoid thinking about, when it wasn’t happening. No, it was the shocks that hovered over you waiting for their moment that were the worst.

‘Sae thare’s naw ony clink,’ said Watt philosophically. ‘Let’s awa. We’re still naw ony iller aff, whilk’s better nor some raids hae endit, aye, Harry?’ He was actually better-off, by several surreptitiously lifted Blackberries.

Harry nodded disappointedly, as did a relieved Tom. The three of them moved with a measured gait towards the door – measured once again so that they would all pass through it together. It was when this proved less of a squeeze than you might have thought that they realised Jack Pott had stayed perfectly still.

‘This is nae denner,’ he said slowly, like a man caught up in calculations. 'Thare’s money in this, a maiter gin it’s here for takin or naw. Wha’s is that, then? Yours, or yours?’

He gestured violently at the suits with his hand. You would almost have preferred it to be his sword; at least you know precisely why you were frightened to death of swords.

‘D’ye mind whan ye stealt thae hunder kyne aff o ma faither, Harry?,’ he said suddenly, almost conversationally. Skellit Harry tried to suppress a look of profound self-satisfaction. ‘A mind, aye,’ he said with masterful self-control.

‘But A cud aye hae liftit thaim back again…’ In fact he had; but Harry might have thought better of mentioning this even had Jack not sounded as if he expected no answer.

‘Gin we’re gangin, we maun gang,’ said Tom, looking nervously out of the broken window at the silvery smudge of the rising moon. But Watt hirpled back across the threshold with a bemused look on his face. 

‘We sud tak some wee thingum, ye’re sayin, aye, Jack? Something mebbe that’s haird for tae buy back?’

Jack nodded.

‘…Forby thae wee black things we waur liftin juist than, Watt?,’ said Harry. ‘Och, daed ye think a daedna see? A waes myndin tae git ma skare efterhaund.’

‘A’v a queesitive naitur,’ said Watt smoothly, tossing him a Blackberry. After a pointed cough, Tom received one of his own, after which he went over to the window, to signal to the men holding the horses far below. But Jack, though offered his portion, was still far away.

‘Something thay canna buy back…’

The papers were all full of it the next day, of course: perhaps it wasn’t a very weighty story, and perhaps they had received some hints that it should certainly be handled lightly from important quarters; but journalists, too, are human. Each was once a smiling child, hard as it may be to imagine. And there is such a thing as good old-fashioned fun. Some of the papers made rather good puns.

The men were found naked and bound in various skips and wheelie-bins south of the Clyde; their clothes eventually washed up in County Antrim; their documentation and their Blackberries were nowhere to be found. The consequences of this development for Bolivia turned out to be quite momentous; but why should I trouble myself about Bolivia? Hardly anybody did. LifeSunTechGrow and the World Bank never had. The papers promptly forgot about it – in spite of the best efforts of one Peter Laidlaw, who left his job and went to live there as a legal advisor to the peasants and who wrote several pretty good books about his experiences, the first of which was called ‘21^st-century Bandits’ and was rather confessional in nature.

And what of the men receding, in a clatter of pistols and sabres and Blackberries, over the brow of the purple hills and into the famous Mists of History? I can’t honestly say that they even knew where Bolivia was. They just knew fair when they saw it and – what is much more important – when they didn’t.