Free The Crime Studio by Steve Aylett Page B

bank’s litterbaskets. She took this to a teller and was instantly given vast quantities of cash. Then the teller began screaming and the woman bolted as though checking out of a hotel. She had inadvertently robbed two hundred and fifty thousand smackers from the stockpile. ‘This town is full of recidivists,’ she sobbed. ‘Recidivists and people of imagination. I just want to be good like a lamb or perhaps a turtle.’ Her name was Gerty Hundred Ram, regrettably. But Stalkeye perceived in her an innocence which, if channelled correctly, would make more money than war.
    He told her he’d by all means help her to make her deposit - what could be more simple? At the strategic hour he’d just pull the Ingram M11 out of his coat and rob the life out of the establishment. They went straight across town to a bank on Cardiac Avenue and stood in line. When they reached the front and it was time to start the robbery, Stalkeye found that he simply couldn’t be bothered. He was mildly startled by this new complacency. Gerty, in her turn, was no longer concerned about making a deposit, but couldn’t understand why. The two were crippled by a rictus of lethargy and finally had to excuse themselves and leave the bank, mystified.
    Back at Stalkeye’s fragile apartment he calculated the distortions of the day on a blackboard as Gerty sifted desultorily through her two hundred and fifty thousand smackers. It was crystal clear that in neutralising each other’s bad luck at the bank, they had temporarily neutralised each other’s desire to do anything there. Stalkeye recalled how he had been idly fascinated by the patterns on the floor. The sudden absence of annihilating fortune had left he and Gerty in a shock which resembled heaven. They lined up each other’s chakras like a snake swallowing a pole. And when they got used to each other, Stalkeye reasoned, they’d be able to rob a bank like any other couple.
    Meanwhile they were growing accustomed to doing what they wanted without all the forces of nature strategically mustering against them. They could move about the apartment without harmful incident. They could go see a movie together without getting mugged any more often than the national statistics suggested. They watched street-mimes without laughing. Everything was as it should be.
    When acting independently, however, it was back to the old days. Whenever Gerty went alone to make a deposit at the bank she’d return with at least a hundred smackers. And if Stalkeye tried to rob a bank, as he felt he should as the man of the house, he’d end up buying shares. Once he opened a gilt-edged account which would yield impressive dividends, and left the bank boiling with frustration. Gerty once laughed hysterically at the antics of a street performer and was too ashamed to tell Stalkeye about it when she went home.
    Only together did they add up to two normal people. And it was with this certainty that Stalkeye proposed his gas-attack on the bank on Belly Street. Gerty protested that they had enough money from her visits to the bank and attempts to give to charity. Stalkeye let her disagree, all too aware that if they both wanted the robbery it wouldn’t stand a chance. In most things they held opposing views, and their well-being depended on this balance.
    But as the robbery approached, a new anti-crime campaign started up in Beerlight. Henry Blince pledged to halve crime in ignorance of the old Zeno principle that if you keep halving something indefinitely you’ll never get rid of it. The alternative was to halve crime and allocate the more lucrative half to the government, but this had already been done with the result that public sector crime expanded to fill the gap. It was imperative to the average bank artist to steal as much money as possible to spend after s/he finished the prison term s/he’d be given for stealing it. The cod sentence held no fear for those providing for a family. So the new campaign consisted of