“Pizza!” Ro repeated.

“Pizza? Now?” Roger snorted and looked at his watch.

The bank robber, who had been struck by another thought, in turn sighed in resignation: “No. To start with, I haven’t actually got enough money to order pizza. I can’t even manage to take hostages without them starving to death…”

Roger folded his arms and looked at the bank robber, for the first time not judgmentally, but more curiously.

“Can I ask what your plan is? How are you thinking of getting out of here?”

The bank robber blinked hard, then admitted without bothering to dress it up: “I don’t know. I didn’t think this far. I was just trying… I just needed money for the rent, because I’m getting divorced and the lawyer said they’d take my children away otherwise. My girls. Oh, it’s a long story, I don’t want to bore you with… sorry, it’s probably best if I give myself up. I get it!”

“If you give yourself up now and go out into the street, the police might kill you,” Ro said, not altogether encouragingly.

“What a thing to say!” Estelle said.

“That’s probably true, they see you as armed and dangerous, and people like that tend to get shot on sight,” Roger added informatively.

The ski mask suddenly looked rather moist around the eye holes.

“This isn’t even a real pistol.”

“It doesn’t look real,” Roger agreed, based on his almost breathtakingly total lack of experience in the subject.

The bank robber whispered: “I’m an idiot. I’m a failure and an idiot. I haven’t got a plan. If they want to shoot me, they might as well. I can’t get anything right anyway.”

The bank robber stood up and walked toward the door of the apartment with newfound determination.

It was Ro who went and stood in the way. Partly because the bank robber had talked about having kids, of course, but also because at this point in her life Ro could sympathize with the feeling of getting things wrong the whole time. So she exclaimed: “Hello? You’re just going to give up now, after all this? Can’t we at least order pizza? In hostage films the police always provide pizza! Free of charge!”

Estelle folded her hands over her stomach and added: “I’ve got nothing against pizza. Do you think they’d send some salad, too?”

Roger grunted without looking up: “Free? Are you serious?”

“Serious as kidney stones,” Ro swore. “Hostages always get pizza in films! If we can just think of a way of contacting the police, we can order some!”

Roger stared down at the floor for a long, long time. Then he glanced over at the closed door of the closet at the other end of the apartment, trying to sense his wife’s presence through it. The skin beneath his eyes kept twitching spasmodically. Then it was as if he’d made up his mind to act, because in Roger’s experience nothing good ever came of him thinking things through for too long, so he slapped his hands down firmly on his knees and stood up. He was seizing the initiative. And just doing that made him feel warm inside.

“Okay! I’ll organize pizza!”

He marched toward the balcony. Estelle scuttled quickly into the kitchen to find plates. Ro in turn set off toward the closet to ask what sort of pizza Julia wanted. The bank robber was left alone in the hall, clutching the pistol and muttering quietly: “Worst hostages ever. You’re the worst hostages ever.”

42

Jack and Jim turn the entire closet upside down without finding any trace of the bank robber. The chest at the back is empty, apart from a collection of mostly empty wine bottles—and what sort of drunk hides wine bottles in a closet? They pull out all the clothes, men’s suits and some dresses that seem to have been made before the invention of color television. But otherwise they find nothing. Jim gets so sweaty while he’s searching that he doesn’t notice the cold draft in there. It’s Jack who stops and sniffs keenly at the air like a bloodhound at a music festival.

“It smells of cigarette smoke in here,” he says, tentatively feeling the bump on his forehead.

“Maybe one of the prospective buyers had a sneaky smoke, that would be understandable in the circumstances,” Jim speculates.

“Okay, but then it ought to smell MORE of smoke. There’s no smell of it anywhere else in the apartment, so it’s almost as if someone has… I don’t know, aired the closet somehow?”

“How would that be possible?”

Jack doesn’t answer, just moves through the space hunting for the draft he initially thought he had imagined. Suddenly he picks up a stepladder that’s lying on the floor, shoves a pile of clothes out of the way, climbs up the steps, and starts hitting the ceiling with the flat of his hand until something gives way.

“There’s some sort of old air vent up here!”

Jim doesn’t have time to respond before Jack sticks his head through the hole. Jim takes the opportunity to shake the wine bottles he found in the chest, and takes a swig out of one that isn’t quite empty. Because wine doesn’t go bad, either.

Jack calls from up the ladder: “There’s a narrow passageway up here, above the false ceiling, I think the draft’s coming from the attic.”

“A passageway? Big enough to crawl through and get out somewhere else?” Jim wonders.

“God knows, it’s very narrow, but someone slim could probably… hold on…”

“Can you see anything?”

“I’m trying to shine the torch to see where it leads, but there’s something in the way… something… fluffy.”

“Fluffy?” Jim repeats anxiously, thinking about all the animals Jack probably wouldn’t want to discover dead in a ventilation duct. Jack doesn’t like most animals even when they’re alive.

* * *

Jack curses, pulls the thing out, and tosses it down to Jim. It’s a rabbit’s head.

43

Roger glanced over the balcony railing at the police, then took a deep breath and shouted: “We need supplies!”

“Medical? Are you hurt?” one of the police officers called back. His name was Jim, his hearing wasn’t great, and he hadn’t experienced many hostage situations before. Or any at all, if we’re being strictly correct.

“No! We’re hungry!” Roger shouted.

“Angry?” the policeman yelled.

There was another police officer, a younger one, standing next to him. He was trying to shut the older one up so he could hear what Roger was saying, but of course the older one wasn’t listening.

“NO! PIZZA!” Roger yelled, but because he had cotton stuffed in both nostrils unfortunately it sounded more like “pisser.”

“MELISSA? SOMEONE CALLED MELISSA IS INJURED?” the older police officer shouted.

“YOU’RE NOT LISTENING!”

“WHAT?”

“BE QUIET, DAD, SO I CAN HEAR WHAT HE’S SAYING!” the younger officer shouted at the older police officer down in the street, but by then Roger had already left the balcony in frustration. He hadn’t actually sworn that much since a group of damn activists had changed the name of his favorite chocolate bars because the old name was regarded as insulting to someone or other. He stomped back inside the apartment and waved his notepad and IKEA pencil in the air.