Page 54 of Safe Enough

“What happened next?”

“I left. I skipped dessert. I came home.”

“I’m glad,” she said.

She snuggled closer.

She said, “But I’m sorry the world will never see that scene. He was right about that, at least. You would have knocked it out of the park. Some kind of noble sacrifice. One for the ages.”

“No,” he said. “Not noble. I think I would make it small. The big things have already been done. The friendship has been forged. I suppose the final scene has to be in a foxhole. The two of them. They’ve gotten that far by being strong. Now the buddy is about to exit the picture by being weak. That’s the dynamic. I think that’s the way battle movies have got to work. Personality is revealed by the big things first and the little things last.”

“Weak how?”

“This is the 1950s, don’t forget. Even the studio doesn’t want to drag it into the present day. So people smoked. Including the buddy. Now he’s in the foxhole and he’s out of cigarettes. He’s getting antsy. People smoking means it’s already an R-rated movie anyway, so twenty yards away we can have the mangled corpse of one of their squad mates, who the buddy knows is an occasional smoker, which almost certainly means he’s got a nearly full pack in his pocket.”

“Twenty yards beyond the rim of the foxhole?”

“And there’s an enemy sniper in the area.”

“Does he stay, or does he go?”

“He goes,” the screenwriter said. “Twenty yards there, twenty yards back. The sniper gets him. It’s both tiny and monumental. He wanted a cigarette. That was all. A small human weakness. But it was also a determination to live the way he wanted to, or not live at all. Which then explains and informs his earlier actions. We know him fully only at the moment of his death.”

His wife said, “That’s lovely.”

She snuggled even tighter and scooched her butt even closer.

She said, “So really it’s a fairly small decision. Isn’t it? It’s English accents in 1916, or American accents in 1952. Does it matter?”

He didn’t answer. He had noticed.

Two years and seven months later the movie came out. It was not about the British Army in World War One. It was compromised in every possible way. The screenwriter did not throw himself under a train. Instead he moved house, higher up the canyon. Then eight months later the buddy won the Oscar. Best Actor in a Supporting Role. The guy’s speech was all about how fabulous the writing was. Then an hour later the screenwriter won an Oscar of his own. Best Original Screenplay. His speech thanked his wife and his producer, the rocks in his life. Coming off the stage he pumped the statuette like a heavy dumbbell and figured some compromises were easy to live with. They got easier and easier through the after-parties and the interviews and the calls from his agent, which for the first time in his life gave him a choice of what to do and when and how much for. The years passed and he became a name, then a senior figure, then a guru. He and his wife stayed married. They lived a great life. He was honestly happy.

He never twigged exactly how his ancient compromises had been engineered. What had killed his artistic vision had been his cigarette breaks. They were ten-minute voids, ripe for exploitation. It was the producer’s idea. He had done it before with difficult writers. As soon as the guy stalked out, he would call the guy’s wife, to report the latest impasse, to get advice on what to say in the short term, to talk him down off the ledge, and then to build an agenda for the wife to discuss with the guy that night, strictly in his own best interests, of course, for his own good, because there was a lot of money and prestige on the line here, and in the producer’s experience a little grumpiness would be quickly forgotten when there was a gold statuette to polish. In this case the wife thought, He’s right, you know, and he was.

THE SNAKE EATER BY THE NUMBERS

Numbers. Percentages, rates, averages, means, medians. Crime rate, clearance rate, clearance percentage, increase, decrease, throughput, input, output, productivity. At the end of the twentieth century, police work was about nothing but numbers.

Detective Sergeant Ken Cameron loved numbers.

I know this, because Cameron was my training officer the year he died. He told me that numbers were our salvation. They made being a copper as easy as being a financier or a salesman or a factory manager. We don’t need to work the cases, he said. We need to work the numbers. If we make our numbers, we get good performance reviews. If we get good reviews, we get commendations. If we get commendations, we get promotions. And promotions mean pay and pensions. You could be comfortable your whole life, he said, because of numbers. Truly comfortable. Doubly comfortable, he said, because you’re not tearing your hair out over vague bullshit subjective notions like safe streets and quality of life. You’re dealing with numbers, and numbers never lie.

We worked in North London. Or at least he did, and I was assigned there for my probationary period. I would be moving on, but he had been there three years and would be staying. And North London was a great place for numbers. It was a big manor with a lot of crime and a population that was permanently hypersensitive to being treated less well than populations in other parts of London. The local councillors were always in an uproar. They compared their schools to other schools, their transport spurs to other transport spurs. Everything was about perceived disadvantage. If an escalator was out at the West Finchley tube station for three days, then they better not hear that an escalator had been fixed in two days down at Tooting Bec. That kind of thing was the birth of the numbers, Cameron told me. Because stupid, dull administrators learned to counter the paranoid arguments with numbers. No, they would say, the Northern Line is actually sixty-three percent on time up here, and only sixty-one percent on time down there.

So, they would say, shut up.

It wasn’t long before police work fell in with the trend. It was inevitable. Everything started being measured. It was an obvious defensive tactic on the part of our bosses. Average response time following a 999 call? Eleven minutes in Tottenham, Madam Councillor, versus twelve minutes in Kentish Town. Said proudly, with a blank-but-smug expression on our bosses’ meaty faces. Of course, they were lying. The Kentish Town bosses were lying too. It was a race toward absurdity. I once joked to Cameron that pretty soon we would start to see negative response times. Like, Yes, Madam Councillor, that 999 call was answered eleven minutes before it was made. But Cameron just stared at me. He thought I had lost it. He was far too serious on the subject to countenance such a blatant mistake, even in jest.

But certainly he admitted that numbers could be massaged.

He collected massage examples like a connoisseur. He observed some of them from afar. The 999 stuff, for instance. He knew how the books were cooked. Switchboard operators were required to be a little inexact with their timekeeping. When it was noon out there in the real world, it was four minutes past noon inside the emergency switchboard. When a sector car was dispatched to an address, it would radio its arrival when it was still three streets away. Thus, a slow twenty-minute response time went into the books as a decent twelve minutes. Everybody won.

His approach to his own numbers was more sophisticated.

His major intellectual preoccupation was parsing the inconvenient balance between his productivity and his clearance rate. For any copper, the obvious way to enhance his clearance rate was to accept no cases at all, except the solid gold slam dunks that had guaranteed collars at the end of them. He explained it like a Zen master: Suppose you have only one case a year. Suppose you solve it. What’s your clearance rate? One hundred percent! I knew that, of course, because I was comfortable with simple arithmetic. But just for fun I said, OK, but suppose you don’t solve it? Then your clearance rate is zero! But he didn’t get all wound up like I thought he would. Instead, he beamed at me, like I was making progress. Like I already knew the dance steps. Exactly, he said. You avoid the cases you know you can’t solve, and you jump all over the cases you know you can solve.

I should have spotted it right then. The cases you know you can solve. But I didn’t spot it. I was still inside the box. And he didn’t give me much time to think, because he rushed straight on to the main problem, which was productivity. Certainly major points could be scored for a seventy-five percent clearance rate. That was obvious. But if you achieved that mark by clearing three cases out of four, you lost major points for a lack of productivity. That was obvious, too. Four cases a year was absurdly low. Forty cases a year was low. In North London at that time, each detective was looking at hundreds of cases a year. That was Ken Cameron’s big problem. The balance between productivity and clearance rate. Good productivity meant a bad clearance rate. A good clearance rate meant bad productivity. He said to me, See? Like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. Although that was a misinterpretation on my part. He was really saying: So I’m not such a bad guy, doing what I’m doing. I should have seen it. But I didn’t.

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