Inside Man (part three)

Back inside the police van, Darius is smoking, and wearily wondering: ‘How dumb do these morons have to be to think they’re gonna get a plane?’ Keith has become a great champion of Dalton’s and points out that he is ‘no moron’ but Darius is thinking on a more macro level. ‘I don’t just mean him. Any hostage taker. Those ragheads at the Munich Olympics. Who the f*** ever got a plane?’ These un-PC ramblings seem to give Keith an idea and he picks up the phone. ‘He wants a plane. I’m gonna give him a plane.’ Mitch is bewildered but Keith’s reasoning is sound. ‘This whole time, we’re trying to stall him, right? Wrong. They’re the ones that are stalling. The b******t questions, the Albanian thing … He wants to give us more time. He makes demands. He gives us deadlines. We stall. Then he gives us more time. I don’t think he’s in a rush.’ Mitch remains flummoxed.

Dalton answers the phone and Keith tells me him the plane is ready to go. But before they can get down to the brass tacks of in-flight entertainment and meat-free meals for any vegetarian passengers, Keith’s gonna ‘need to come in there and make sure the hostages are okay’. Dalton says Keith can have a gander at them when they ‘get on the bus’ but that’s not good enough: ‘I just need to make sure you’re not leaving any bodies behind’. Dalton thinks it over, then agrees to meet him at the front door. Mitch thinks Keith is ‘crazy to go in there’.

Keith arrives and is frisked down. You wouldn’t have thought a bank populated by gun-toting potential psychopaths would get a huge number of voluntary visitors but this place is busier than Clapham Junction at rush hour. Dalton, ever the gracious host, walks Keith around the premises, though he’ll definitely compromise his future as a tour guide if he insists on continually pointing a gun at the visitors. He goes back into credit by offering Keith some gum but our hero is not a man to waste time masticating when there are hostages to inspect. Dalton shows him into one of the rooms where the captives are sitting on the floor, and we hear a woman crying, a dubious touch considering they’ve been there for hours and even the most tremulous of the hostages might have been expected to be showing a modicum of stoicism by now. On the other hand, Keith’s tie is pretty shocking so maybe that has set her off. Dalton shows Keith the other hostage-filled rooms. More muffled crying. This is all well and good but the bank is very dark, what with it now being night time, and it’s not like Dalton is showing Keith every nook and cranny. If he was going to ‘leave a body behind’ he could just bung it in a cupboard or something. Anyway, they come across Brian, not playing violent computer games for once, and Keith asks for his release. Dalton declines. Keith wants to know if he’s seen the lot, hostage-wise. ‘There are some who misbehaved.’ They go into yet another room where these trouble-making hostages have been gagged. Upon Keith’s arrival they all start whimpering in truly ludicrous fashion. Keith promises he will ‘get you all out of here’.

‘Tour is over’ Dalton announces, which Keith takes to mean that it’s time for a little Q&A. ‘What were you planning on doing if you actually got the plane and the pilots, huh?’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘You don’t want a plane. You never did … You saw ‘Dog Day Afternoon’. You’re stalling. Why? I don’t know. What’s the matter? You can’t get into the safe?’ ‘Perhaps.’ If Keith had stopped after ‘You’re stalling,’ he might have given Dalton a moment of worry, but instead he blunders on, admitting he’s still, essentially, pissing in the wind, and asking daft questions which Dalton can answer enigmatically. Even worse, he then opts for the old ‘there’s two ways out of this,’ standby. ‘The easy way, we walk out the front door together, or the hard boys cut the power, hit you with the tear gas, and come in strong through the glass. It’s your choice. You don’t want that. I don’t want that.’ Again with the ‘we want the same thing’ rubbish! Yes, after all the trouble he’s gone to, Dalton ‘wants to’ throw his hands up, forget any thoughts of improving his financial situation, and peaceably submit to a few years in prison. Keith presses on: ‘They’d like to do it tonight. You got night vision? You got gas masks?’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘I’m this close to ordering it.’ Unfortunately, as usual, Dalton is miles ahead of the game. ‘First, you don’t order an assault when no hostages have been killed and there’s no immediate threat. Second, if it ends that way, whatever happens, you don’t get to be the hero. You want to b******t me, try harder. Let’s go.’ Keith briefly ponders a riposte but realises he’s been taken to the cleaners yet again and equably gives his assent.

However, en route to the door, he tries another tack: ‘I tell you what. My ass is covered, sport. But I would not get too comfortable in here if I were you.’ Dalton is unruffled. ‘No? I got the cable guy coming on Wednesday.’ Keith laughs. ‘Why don’t you just walk out the door?’ ‘I will. I’m gonna walk out of that door when I’m good and ready.’ Keith quickly switches into car salesman mode, ‘Can I get you to do that today?’ but is met with silence. However, Dalton is surprisingly keen to continue the discussion and asks if Keith has ‘any other proposals?’ Even more inexplicably, Keith takes that as his cue to start moaning about his personal life. ‘Oh, please. Do not say ‘proposals’. My girlfriend, she wants a proposal from me.’ ‘You think you’re too young to get married?’ ‘No, I’m not too young. Too broke. Maybe I should rob a bank.’ Incredibly, Dalton wants to know more. I understand that he’s playing for time but feigning interest in the love life of this buffoon is well beyond the call of duty. ‘You love each other?’ ‘Yeah. Yeah, we do.’ ‘Then money shouldn’t really matter.’ ‘Thank you, bank robber.’ Exactly Keith! Dalton may be quick to hand out the old chewing gum (and he’s great with kids!) but he’s putting dozens of people through a terrifying, emotionally-scarring experience, solely to enrich himself. Yet he still has the chutzpah to claim money shouldn’t ‘really’ matter when it comes to affairs of the heart. And he carries on! ‘I’m just saying money can’t buy love.’ Keith is enormously grateful for the advice and is eager to hear more. ‘Why don’t we go across the street to the Killarney Rose, huh? Forget about this dangerous hostage situation. I’ll buy you a beer. My treat.’ Dalton doesn’t fancy it. ‘I’m trying to stay away from bars, if you know what I mean.’ That’s the lamest pun I’ve ever heard. It has to be said that this new loquacious Dalton is a bit of a prat. Keith agrees, offers his hand and, when Dalton takes it, he attacks. The pair roll down the stairs locked in combat but Keith STILL won’t quit with the annoying questions. ‘Cellblock or the graveyard?’ he enquires as they grapple. ‘Prison whites or a toe tag? Make up your mind. Tick tock, tick tock.’ Dalton keeps his masked face away from Keith’s prying hands and Steve or Steve-O arrives gun in hand to end their combat. ‘You just crossed the f*****g line,’ Dalton informs Keith, thrusting his gun towards him. ‘Buses, Kojak, parked outside. You think I’m bluffing? You roll the dice and see what happens.’ Keith takes his leave, probably wondering what bluff Dalton was referring to, considering he didn’t actually make any specific threat.

Outside, Mitch hustles up to Keith, eager for details. Keith has ‘got him right where I want him’. ‘Yeah? Where’s that?’ ‘Right behind me with my pants around my ankles but it’s a start.’ How lovely. Mitch has been on subsistence rations as far as getting good lines goes since the start of the film but his pickings have got really slim of late. All he does nowadays is squawk inane questions and murmur clichés. To whit, he mutters ‘Jesus Christ’ at this latest development and the pair march off.

Inside the room of the bank where Dalton’s Dynamos have dug a big hole , Steve or Steve-O articulately expresses his mounting disquiet at the way Dalton is conducting operations: ‘What the f*** man?’ Dalton wants to know ‘how long’ something is going to take. The Steve or Steve-O who isn’t haranguing Dalton (‘He got the drop on you. What if he saw your face? You know, you’re letting this cop get too f*****g close.’) says it will take ‘two, maybe three hours’.

Keith is inside the van giving Darius chapter and verse. ‘I gave him every excuse to blow my brains out. He doesn’t bite. Why? He ain’t the type.’ After briefly recapping the events of the day, Keith offers this analysis: ‘He’s up to something but it ain’t violence.’ Brilliant. (‘Keith, Keith. Some guy has broken into a bank and taken everybody inside hostage. What do you think?’ ‘Hmmmm. He’s up to something.’) Dalton checks in on the blower and tells Keith to use the camera on the truck to ‘give (him) a close-up on the second-floor window’. Rourke does the honours. Dalton waves to the camera then guns down a hostage with a sheet over his or her head. How ironic, Keith had just been banging on about how Dalton wasn’t the type for violence! I don’t think I’ve ever spotted a plot twist in my entire life but even I didn’t believe for a second that that was a real hostage. Nonetheless, Keith and Mitch are appalled and the former heads for the bank, via quite a memorable tracking shot which shows just the top half of his body moving along determinedly while chaos unravels behind him.

Dalton has made it downstairs in time to be calmly waiting for Keith at the door of the bank. Keith is not quite as relaxed: ‘What are you doing? What the f*** are you doing?’ ‘You mean beyond the obvious?’ ‘That’s what I mean. Come on, this ain’t no bank robbery (this ain’t no disco!’ - Talking Heads).’ Dalton is looking for a scapegoat. ‘This is your fault. I told you to get the buses.’ ‘F*** you! I didn’t kill anybody.’ Previously the pair have been yelling through the door at each other but Dalton now pops his head out. ‘I got 50 more people in here. You f*** with me again, I’ll give you two of the longest days of your life.’ Keith’s not looking to make trouble. ‘Just tell me what it is you really want and I’ll get it for you.’ ‘I’ve told you. Two buses, a plane,’ says Dalton in bored tones. ‘And box seats behind home plate at Yankee Stadium,’ jokes Keith, who has quickly recovered his equilibrium after watching someone get shot in cold blood on his watch. ‘Don’t b******t a b********er,’ he adds. ‘You planned every inch of this thing right from the start. You got everybody marching to your beat, including me, and I’m through buying it.’ Dalton is impressed. ‘You’re too damn smart to be a cop,’ he remarks. ‘Now get the f*** out of here.’ A creature of habit, he pulls out his gun to ensure speedy obedience. Keith embarks on a dangerous, and pretty pointless, game of ‘Call my Bluff’: ‘What? You going to shoot me? Do it. S***, you got nothing to lose. I damn sure ain’t got nothing to lose, so shoot me. Do it. Shoot me.’ ‘F*** you. Tell them to send someone sane over here.’ Dalton heads back inside.

Darius is on the phone, informing someone ‘we got a big problem’.

‘Hey, Detective, this ain’t your day,’ a random cop informs Keith. Cheers mate! Captain Coughlin has turned up and Keith heads over in penitent mood. ‘Look, I know you put your trust in me and I just …’ ‘Well, you’re a good cop. Frazier, I need more like you. But if you’re going down on this one, I can’t go with you.’ Keith starts trying to explain but Cap doesn’t want to hear it. ‘I go to bed, everything’s hunky-dory. I get a call at 3:15 and there’s what? A dead hostage.’ It’s a strange mind that considers it hunky-dory for a gang of armed robbers to be holding 50-odd people hostage, but we should probably have guessed old Cap wasn’t playing with a full deck when he classed Keith ‘I don’t know a digital transmitter from my elbow’ Frazier as a ‘good cop’. Keith is adamant he can ‘end this’ but it’s too late. ‘I got to answer to the Chief of D’s,’ Cap points out. ‘Darius is calling the shots on this. That’s it.’ Darius? John ‘call a raghead a raghead’ Darius? Cap really has lost his marbles. Keith nods imperceptibly, Cap wanders off. Keith goes over to Mitch, who asks: ‘What’d he say?’ ‘That’s it,’ Keith replies dejectedly. ‘S**t,’ says Mitch in annoyance, and walks off! I promise I won’t mention this again but I don’t think Mitch has had a line with more than three words in it for about half an hour.

Inside the van, Darius, Coughlin and some cops are planning to assault the bank. I doubt Dalton and the Steves are quaking in their boots at the prospect. Darius has a schematic of the building and doesn’t like what he sees. There’s only one entrance and ‘then we got to make it up the stairs blind. Once we get up there, we’re right out in the open. They have the advantage of cover, they can pick us off like sitting ducks. (While he waxes pessimistic we see footage of this putative attack playing out.) Then if we make it across the floor and down the stairs, we still can’t tell the homies (?) from the good guys until they shoot at us’. Darius seems to have captured the consensus because another cop chimes in: ‘Even if it isn’t rigged with explosives, it’s still a f*****g nightmare.’ We cut to more shots of the would-be attack: hostages screaming, gunplay, one of the ‘homies’ is shot. We cut back to the van, where a moustachioed gent points out, ‘And let’s not forget the possibility of hostages being killed.’ We see one of the robbers being shot as he tries to use a hostage as a human shield. Darius weighs in again: ‘Well, our best hope is to separate them from the hostages. If we can get two or three upstairs and take them out?’ ‘Kill them,’ says Coughlin. Footage of that scenario being played out. One of the plotters (possibly Coughlin again) plays devil’s advocate: ‘What if there’s more than four?’ Back to Darius: ‘That’s what’s so nuts about it. Anybody in a painter’s suit could be a perp.’ A cop in a bandana has an idea, ‘Maybe we should dress our guys up like a bunch of painters’. Come off it mate, this is a serious business, not some Whitehall farce! No one shouts him down though, and earlier random cop adds: ‘And we should use rubber bullets. Take head shots. Put their lights out.’ ‘This all sounds too complicated for me,’ says Coughlin reaching for the door and shouting, ‘Keith, Mitch, come out of the diner, you’re back on the team.’ Not really. Despite all the negatives, you know he’s going to order the attack anyway. In reality, the camera now switches position to show us that Ren and Stimpy have actually been sitting there the whole time, quietly listening and looking exceedingly grim. ‘Rubber bullets it is baby,’ says Coughlin. That’s easy for him to say, I highly doubt he’ll be putting his ample backside anywhere near the line of fire.

Sitting with Keith, Mitch gets his longest line for hours, but sadly it’s not good tidings. ‘If this goes down wrong they’re going to dump this whole mess in your lap, you know?’ I’m not sure that would be the case and Keith thinks otherwise too: ‘I’m making first grade.’ Mitch reverts to type: ‘What?’ ‘I’m making Detective First Grade. Things ain’t all they appear to be.’ Mitch is outraged as Keith explains how ‘the Mayor and our mystery guest’ can be thanked for his wholly undeserved promotion, which, by the way, I don’t remember being in any way definitively agreed. ‘Everybody’s getting theirs. I’m gonna get mine,’ is Keith’s justification. ‘I’ll be outside’. He leaves so Mitch closes his eyes, put his head back and amuses himself thinking of ways to murder Keith. Either that or he takes his trite remarks quota into three figures for the film by musing ‘What a day, what a day.’

Miles out of the loop and with time on his hands, Keith chats to a sympathetic Collins outside. Keith wants to know more about the time Collins was menaced by a 12-year-old with a gun. ‘Last year, up in the 33rd,’ says Collins. ‘I was breaking up a fight about a half a block from the high school. This one little spic is getting his clock cleaned by another one.’ Right-on Keith tells him to ‘tone down the colour commentary,’ although he’s been letting Darius get away with similar all day. Collins looks pissed off but continues, ‘So I bust up the fight, I turn around and this kid is pointing a .22 at my chest.’ ‘Which kid was this?’ asks Keith. ‘Another kid, an … African-American.’ ‘An African-American, right?’ ‘Came out of nowhere. I didn’t see him.’ The upshot is that Collins got ‘shot in the f*****g chest’. Riled, he continues, ‘So you’ll pardon my euphemisms Detective, but I would rather wind up an old bigot than a handsome young corpse. (Keith finds this hilarious.) Now, no offence Detective, but I’m just trying to keep them away from us (?). Now, what do you say we just get these people safely out of the bank?’ ‘I hear that.’ ‘And I’ll try and watch what I say in the future. You never know who’s listening.’ Keith looks overly serious. Well, I think we all learnt something from that conversation … namely that if film-makers deleted pointless, extraneous scenes, we’d all be rewarded with leaner, better movies. Unfortunately, they all want their ‘pictures’ to clock in at around two hours, so we are subjected to Collins’s homespun wisdom.

That said, Collins’s odd remark about how ‘you never know who’s listening’ has given Keith an idea. We find him again on his own inside the van, trying to dismantle the suitcase-type thing scrawled with Dalton’s demands which old Vikram brought out earlier on. This is all perfectly believable. When bank robbers send out their instructions on unusual objects, it’s standard practice to just read the demands, then toss the object to one side, rather than examine it thoroughly in case there’s any evidence to be unearthed. Keith and Co don’t even seem to have brushed it for fingerprints. Nor have they even tried to open it, which proves to be an error of judgement because, when Keith does so, he uncovers an easily findable listening device. He throws it down in annoyance, as if this was a malign twist of fate rather than breathtaking incompetence.

‘Darius. Darius, don’t make a move!” Keith bawls into a radio. ‘It’s all f****d up!” Darius asks what he’s on about. ‘They heard everything we said in the M.C.C (ah, Mobile Command Centre! It would have been so much classier if I had called it that all this time, instead of simply ‘the van’). ‘What?’ says Darius, although Keith was speaking pretty clearly. ‘The drawer with the demands in it (and that’s what that thing was, this is a hugely informative 20 seconds). They heard everything we said … They bugged us!’ Mitch is running around in a panic by the way. I love the incredulous tones Keith uses to relay this information, as if sticking a bug in some drawer is the most Machiavellian feat of criminal cunning he’s ever encountered. Darius, idiotic to the last, rebuts this by saying, ‘No, no, no. I’m going in’ and we see Dalton sitting at a desk, calmly listening in. ‘Shit,’ he says, though even that’s strange, considering he presumably heard them planning this assault half an hour or so ago.

We briefly see Stevie, mask off (yes, it’s Miss ‘I violated Section 34 double-D?’ from earlier - everything is falling neatly into place) before she puts it back on and her and Dalton start lobbing smoke canisters around. ‘Get everyone together,’ he instructs so she bawls ‘Steve! Steve-O!’ while chucking a couple more gas canisters down a corridor. The boys duly come running. ‘They’re coming in,’ Dalton informs them. ‘Everybody good?’ They are indeed. They head off to get the hostages, who are herded out, screaming as usual. ‘Everybody up the f*****g stairs,’ shouts Dalton and the hostages charge. We move to a vantage point outside the bank and see an explosion within, before the doors swing open and, after a lengthy pause, the hostages begin to emerge, shouting ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!’ No prizes for guessing how the police react. They start gunning them down! Yes, they’re only using rubber bullets and yes, they do know the robbers are also wearing painter’s gear, and yes, the emergence of the hostages onto the street is an unexpected development, to say the least, but wouldn’t you wait until you saw a weapon before starting to shoot people indiscriminately? Even more unbelievably, it’s Darius who sees sense and orders a cease fire, although he has to shout it about eight times before anyone obeys, though they must all be able to clearly hear him through their earpieces. I’ll say it once more, then forever hold my peace. This police unit as a whole, from the top dogs like Coughlin, Keith and Darius, to the lower-downs who delivered the pizzas, are the most inept ever portrayed on film (Drebbin and the Naked Gun gang not excluded). I think Collins is the only cop whose dignity remains intact.

The hostages raise their hands and pull their masks off while the police wade in and throw them to the floor. They slap on the handcuffs while Keith, Mitch and Darius look on. ‘Don’t take any chances,’ Darius tells his men. We see a distraught Nancy, who protests: ‘It wasn’t me! I’m not a criminal!’ and we also see Stevie and, I think, Steve and Steve-O, who have melded in with the hostages.

After further shouting, the ‘E.S.U. team’ lead the charge into the bank. It’s deserted, so Keith and Mitch head in behind them. The team go into the store room but find it ‘clear!’. Dalton has presumably ensconced himself in the hole underground. Keith approaches the team leader and asks about the dead hostage but there’s no sign of him or her. ‘If it ain’t here, you must’ve missed something,’ Darius insists but the team boss disagrees. ‘Maybe, but I’m pretty sure we’re the only ones moving around down here. Check this out (he walks towards the safe). They forgot to rob the joint.’ ‘Holy s**t,’ says laconic Mitch but Keith is far more interested in the fact his poorly-executed brinkmanship may not have cost any lives after all. ‘We’re still looking,’ TL continues, ‘but there are no bad guys, no booby traps, no tunnels (?), no damage.’ No tunnels, but a roomy underground den where the man behind all this is lying low until the dust settles. Would they really not have found him at some point? What about that laser-imaging thing where human bodies show up as red, wouldn’t that lead them to Dalton in a trice? ‘And nothing missing,’ points out Mitch, graciously given a three-word line by the screenplay writers. Keith is hacked off. ‘Great, great, great. We’ll put out a city-wide description for David f*****g Copperfield then huh?’ He marches aggressively over to the TL as he says this, begging to be laid out, but TL heroically restrains himself. ‘I’m not trying to tell you your jobs, Detectives, but unless they swam out through the toilets, whoever did this is upstairs sucking pavement.’ Keith realises he’s been a dick and pats TL on the back. ‘All right, good job.’ TL leaves but Darius spots the bags full of mobile phones. Keith empties them out, but before he can find the one with the best camera phone and start taking photos of Darius gurning around in the safe they are called away again. As he leaves, Keith barks ‘Collins (what’s he doing in there?). Grab a uniform (!), make a quick count of that money in there, all right?’ That’s a bank safe. A busy bank in the one of the busiest cities in the world. I don’t think any count of the money in there is going to be too ‘quick’, though Collins has only got himself to blame for needlessly hanging around. ‘Don’t let anybody get tempted, including you!’ is Keith’s parting shot. Nice to be trusted by your superiors.

Keith goes up to a couple of cops and asks what they’ve found. ‘You’re going to love this one. Toy guns.’ Keith is thrown one to examine. ‘Fake guns. You got to be kidding me.’ The only way Keith would know a replica gun from the real kind would be if he took aim at his own head, pulled the trigger and nothing happened, so he quickly tosses it to Darius, who has entered with Mitch. ‘As if it wasn’t weird enough already,’ observes Mitch, who continues to descend into self-parody. Over his radio, Darius is called to the ‘ladies room’. How embarrassing!

Keith and Mitch accompany him and they are handed a blood stained sheet and some sort of remote device. ‘We can stop looking for that body,’ says Darius, although him, Keith and Mitch haven’t really been looking for anything so much as standing around and waiting for others to do the dirty work. Mitch grins inanely at the wackiness of it all while Keith spells it all out. ‘Fake guns. Fake execution. Nobody goes home till we get everybody’s story.’ ‘But detective, the hostages all seemed a bit stressed out so we’ve let them go home,’ says one of the cops. ‘You didn’t need their names or anything did you?’ Of course not. Keith’s latest statement of the blindingly obvious is met with silence, and here comes yet another messenger. ‘Cap, we got something else in the storage room.’ I’m guessing it’s not a dishevelled, slightly-pissed off looking Dalton. Yet again, Keith and Mitch horn in on Darius’s action and they are shown …

… some bin bags on the floor of the storage room, filled with people’s clothes. Keith literally looks for a second, then asks where the men’s room is and races off, without even bothering to pass comment on this latest find.

It’s not been an all-time great day for the hostages, the innocent ones at least, who are still lying around on the road. A coach pulls up to take them to the police station and they are stood up and searched first. ‘Female hostages to be searched by female officers only,’ shouts a disembodied voice through a megaphone, which the subtitles claim is the ubiquitous Collins. He counted that loot pretty damn fast and, once more, what would he be doing calling the shots anyway? I think the subtitles may be in error. The hostages are photographed and asked for their names. It’s a bit of a melee and hard to tell what’s what but I believe Stevie claims her name is ‘Valerie Keepsake’. Peter Hammond and Chaim both make appearances, Nancy rails at some unfortunate cop: ‘f*****g c********r’, Steve (or Steve-O) keeps himself to himself and one of the bank security guards freaks out. ‘Get him on the bus,’ insists subtitled ‘Collins’. We pan down the bus, so we can examine battered, bruised and fatigued-looking hostages. Cheer up guys, it’ll be something to tell the grandkids.

Coughlin walks over to a desk where Keith is looking dejected. ‘This thing is a mess. They thought this one out, soup to nuts.’ Coughlin: ‘So, lay it out for me.’ Keith obliges, ‘We photograph everybody that came out of the bank. We sit them down, we question them, we show them the photos. Most of them can’t point to anybody that’s guilty of anything. We ask them if they could recognise anybody who was not one of the bad guys. Even if we considered someone as a possible suspect, there’s one or two or three other people that would rule them out. It’s like the thing never happened.’ ‘What about prints?’ ‘Everywhere. So what? All it shows is that these people were there.’ ‘Alibis?’ ‘Just about everyone. Even if their alibi was weak, a hostage would identify them as being one of the good guys.’ I take alibi to mean an ‘I couldn’t have been there because I was here and these people saw me’, type defence so that last exchange is odd. We know they were all present at the bank and Keith had already established that everyone had been identified by someone else as a hostage. Personally, I’m surprised the solution to ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ didn’t get an airing at this point (I won’t spell it out explicitly in case any readers are halfway through the book as we speak). Back to Coughlin. ‘Piors?’ ‘We got one employee who had some juvie stuff. One customer had … (Keith pauses to cough. He’s certainly no Jack Bauer. He goes to the toilet, he clears his throat, and, a harsher critic than me might add, he fails to get the job done.) an out-of-state warrant for child support. Another one had a couple of priors, G.L.A. mostly. Again, same problem. Plus, he was a f*****g idiot.’ ‘Bank cameras?’ says Coughlin, who is blatantly going through the motions. ‘Useless. I’m telling you they thought of everything. Almost…We haven’t found that .357 or the perp that was holding it.’ ‘If you did, there’d be no prints on it anyway. (Pause) Bury it.’ Keith can’t believe what he’s hearing, and is, for once, briefly lost for words. ‘Captain, this thing stinks to high hell. I mean, somebody did something here.’ ‘You got no robbery. No suspects. Nobody’s breathing down my neck to come up with answers. I’m not gonna breathe down yours. Bury it.’ Keith remains stupefied, ‘I wasn’t expecting this.’ ‘I promise you, I’ll find you guys more cases to solve.’ And New York’s criminal fraternity say a hearty three cheers to that. Cap, you can find him all the cases you want, but don’t stake your hopes for promotion on his success rate. Keith looks at him suspiciously but acquiesces and sidles off. ‘Oh, here’s something that you probably didn’t expect,’ Cap calls out. ‘They found that missing Madrugada money.’ ‘No s***.’ ‘You want to know where it was?’ ‘In my bank account?’ ‘No.’ ‘My summer house in Sag Harbour?’ ‘No (chuckling).’ ‘My wallet?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then, no. I don’t want to know.’ Pretty drab scene. We laugh at Mitch for his straight-man routine but he’s sorely missed when absent.

Here he is now though, and he’s in classic mid-season form! ‘This is b******t man.’ Mitch has got a massive bee in his bonnet about the fact that they’re still working on a case about which no one else gives a hoot. He then starts a diatribe about Keith’s ‘accusers’. ‘I say we go after them all, Keith, Michael Corleone style. ‘Michael Corleone, do you renounce Satan?’ ‘Yes, I renounce him.’’ Mitch makes daft gun-shooting noises. Luckily, Keith is paying him as much attention as usual, namely none whatsoever, and is studying the safety deposit box records. ‘There’s no 392... According to these records, it doesn’t exist. (That) Pinstriped, mayonnaise, lying m********r.’ I love a musical reference so I can’t resist pointing out how well that line would have fitted into ‘Give Me Some Truth’ by John Lennon. Mitch, who a minute ago was preaching violent revolution, points out that Coughlin said they should ‘move on’ but Keith is up and on the march.

Inside the courthouse, Keith talks to ‘Judge Pasqua,’ thanks him and says he’ll ‘pick it up tomorrow’. How do I know it was ‘Judge Pasqua’? Because Madeleine is back, she’s mysteriously at the courthouse herself and she’s as grating as ever. She wants to know what ‘business (Keith has)’ with the judge. ‘Police business.’ She wonders why he isn’t burying the case as instructed, so he explains that he’s got ‘a job to do, Miss White’. ‘And since when is your job more important than your career? Or did you forget our arrangement?’ ‘We didn’t have any arrangement.’ Madeleine flicks on her condescension switch: ‘Let me tell you how this works. You …’ but Keith’s finally had it up to here. ‘No, let me tell you how this works. You press here to record and you press here to play. (Keith is showing her a cassette player.)’ It plays back the conversation Keith had when he met Madeleine and the Mayor in the car, except this time we get to hear what was said after Keith had denied involvement in the ever-tedious Madrugada business. Mayor, smarmy: ‘We’d like to be in your corner on that.’ Keith, self-righteous: ‘In exchange for what? I mean, what, do you want me to do something unethical? I mean, no disrespect to the both of youse, but I don’t need you to be in my corner, Mr Mayor. Look, I’m innocent.’ Madeleine, threatening: ‘Innocent or guilty, you’re still going down.’ Mayor, authoritative: ‘Give Miss White whatever she needs, or your career is over. Done. Kaput.’ Not very Mayor-like language your honour! Keith stops the tape but Madeleine fails to see what he has proved. ‘So? You gave me what I wanted. Your career is blossoming and all is right with the world.’ Keith is nosey though, and wants to know what ‘Case (was) hiding’. ‘You know, there’s a famous saying by the Baron de Rothschild. ‘When there’s blood on the streets, buy property.’ I think Mr Case really took that sentiment to heart. But he is no different to half the Fortune 500. Let it go, Detective. You’re a good cop. The city needs you.’ Keith walks off down a spiral staircase, unimpressed. As am I, if that’s how Madeleine justifies working for Case. His motto was more: ‘If there’s blood on the streets, make friends with the guys causing it to be spilt’. The Baron’s version is pithier, I admit.

After a pleasant, Madeleine-free period, here she is once again. For some reason Case is having his hair cut in a room out back beyond the gent’s toilets but Madeleine breezily strolls through anyway, claiming she ‘(has) an appointment’. They greet each other in congenial fashion and she sits down, while Case, immaculately coiffed, gets rid of ‘Vincent’. ‘Detective Frazier turned out to be quite sharp,’ Madeleine reports. ‘But I just fast-tracked his career a little and he’s under control.’ We see a shot of Keith being given a framed certificate and looking at it quizzically. Well he might, I hear you all say! Case wants to know ‘about the envelope’. ‘Well, the gang leader is going to hang on to it, as an insurance policy to keep you from seeking revenge. Clearly, he has a very low opinion of you (said with a fair amount of relish).’ Case wonders why. ‘In a nutshell, (because) you got rich doing business with the Nazis during the Holocaust.’ Case admits it. ‘It was 60 years ago. I was young and ambitious. I saw a short path to success and I took it. I sold my soul. And I’ve been trying to buy it back ever since. But you and this mystery man, you have an understanding?’ ‘I think so. And he managed to get out of there with that envelope. If someday he comes back to blackmail you, well, you’ll pay him. And you’ll get it back. So, I guess that’s it.’ ‘I suppose so.’ ‘B******.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘He didn’t go through all that just to stick your envelope under his mattress. They left money untouched, Arthur. He had to have walked out of there with something else. There had to have been something in that box that was worth more to him than your envelope. You don’t have to tell me (that’s big of her). There’s only one thing it could be anyway … Diamonds.’ ‘And then there’s the ring,’ Case adds. ‘Cartier ring. It belonged to the wife of a Parisian banker. Wealthy family of French Jews. And when the war came along, the ring and everything else they owned was confiscated and they were shipped off to concentration camps. None survived. We were friends, I could have helped them. But the Nazis paid too well.’ Sorry for just transcribing that long conversation verbatim, without much commentary, but it’s so expositional to the plot that I thought it was justified. Case wants to be assured that Madeleine won’t blab about all this ‘despite whatever you may think’. He passes a cheque over to her. She smirks and, for a moment, I thought she was going to walk off without her payment but, to be fair, she stays in character and takes it. ‘I’d love to tell you what a monster you are, but I have to help bin Laden’s nephew buy a co-op on Park Avenue (remember the guy she was talking to earlier?).’ Case laughs. ‘If that were true, you wouldn’t tell me.’ ‘We’re listing you as a reference,’ she says and walks off looking insufferably pleased with herself. Case sighs and tries to throw his cheque-book onto the counter but it falls back off and onto the ground. Re: Madeleine’s payment. She didn’t recover the envelope, nor did she recover the diamonds or the ring. AND, because of that failure, Case may be blackmailed at some point (we may know it’s unlikely Dalton would bother but Case doesn’t) and will have to part with another large wad of cash to avoid being exposed. As Seinfeld would say, ‘Good work Nancy Drew!’ And yet she receives her payment in full and Case also has to help her out with her latest nefarious project.

Back to Dalton, spouting that bilge from the start of the film, ‘the who, the where, etc, etc’. His ‘cell’ looks pretty luxurious. He’s even using his mobile for Pete’s sake. It looks like a room that was already there, not a hastily constructed cubby-hole. While he hear him burbling, Dalton examines the diamonds and the ring, which he has in a nice little pouch. Then we watch the Steves putting up walls and suchlike earlier on, so it looks like they’ve just walled off part of the storeroom. Although in that case, what was the hole for and wouldn’t any of the bank employees notice the wall had been moved in. Maybe not, if it wasn’t moved in by much, considering that they may not spend huge amounts of time in the storeroom. Anyway, we can conjecture on that at our leisure because it’s time to go, so Dalton turns off the lights and emerges out into the room from behind some boxes. Good job no one’s around while all this goes on eh? He covers the hole back up. In a car outside, Steve points out that Dalton is ‘going to smell like s**t’. Steve-O: ‘What do you expect after a week?’ Chaim is there! I wasn’t counting on that. ‘Why do you think I rolled down the window?’ he says. Stevie laughs. Dalton’s really not in much of a rush, can he be that certain no one ever goes into the storeroom? He puts on sunglasses, a New York Yankees cap and a ruck-sack. Hold your horses though, Scarlett and Rhett have turned up outside! This causes consternation amongst the criminal contingent and they give Dalton a buzz. ‘That cop Frazier and his partner are walking into the bank.’ I know you’re all thinking it but I’m going to say it anyway. Coincidence or what? At the precise moment Dalton decides to stroll out with his ill-gotten gains, a whole week since the robbery took place, Morecambe and Wise decide to put in an appearance at the bank. ‘Are they coming for me?’ Dalton wonders. ‘Can’t say. It’s just the two of them.’ Dalton rather tentatively begins to walk out but gradually picks up speed. It seems to be easier than you might surmise to stroll around in the nether regions of banks undetected. As Keith comes up the stairs Dalton bangs into him as he goes the other way but the pair merely exchange apologies and move along. Keith greets ‘Mr Hammond’, who wishes him and Mitch a ‘good morning’. Dalton exits. ‘Just like he planned,’ says Stevie, admiringly.

Back inside, Keith remains eager to get his mitts on the missing safety deposit box ‘392’, and has got a court order allowing him to do just that. Back outside, Dalton walks over to the car, looking justifiably pleased with himself. He hands Chaim the bag, shakes hands with Steve and exchanges a long kiss with Stevie, while Steve-O ‘thank(s) God’ for his safe return. ‘Where is it?’ asks Chaim. ‘I left it in there.’ ‘Why did you do that? You left the ring.’ ‘Trust me. I left it in good hands.’

Time for a voiceover from Dalton: ‘I’m no martyr. I did it for the money. But it’s not worth much if you can’t face yourself in the mirror. Respect is the ultimate currency (the crooks drive off while Hammond shows Bonnie and Clyde where the safety deposit boxes are). I was stealing from a man who traded his away for a few dollars. And then he tried to wash away his guilt. Drown it in a lifetime of good deeds and a sea of respectability. It almost worked, too. But inevitably, the further you run from your sins, the more exhausted you are when they catch up to you (what a load of old bollocks, and I still want to know how Dalton is so knowledgeable about Chase’s misdeeds from over half a century ago. Anyway, while he’s been rabbiting melodramatically, the boys have opened the box to find … a ring, a few chewing gum wrappers and a note). And they do. Certain. It will not fail.’ Keith examines the ring and is suitably impressed. ‘What do you think that’s worth?’ The film is clearly drawing to a conclusion but there’s still time for Mitch to drop one last clanger, as he laughingly remarks, ‘If you got to ask, man, you can’t afford it’. That just doesn’t make any sense. If he’s got to ask he’s … not a diamond appraiser, although the initial fault probably lies with Keith for asking in the first place. ‘Thank goodness my girlfriend ain’t here,’ says Keith, apparently of the opinion that she would demand he steal the ring and propose on the spot. He turns to the note, which simply says ‘Follow the ring.’ Mitch looks, altogether now … bewildered!

Sonny and Cher head to the opulent offices of Mr Arthur Case. Everybody’s least favourite carpetbagger politely asks after Keith’s health. ‘I am great. Nobody got killed at the bank. Everybody’s happy. My kind of day.’ Case pours himself a drink. ‘I was most impressed by the way you handled that business … Whenever I hear the term ‘New York’s finest’ you’re who I think of (Saints preserve us!). You keep the rest of us safe and make it look easy.’ Keith laughs, as do the watching audience. ‘What’s so amusing?’ Case wonders. ‘When you say ‘the rest of us’ Mr Case, I mean, you got to look around. ‘The rest of us’ is a category that you haven’t qualified for in a long time.’ Keith definitely carries a bit of class envy around with him. Listen to the diamond thief old chap, money can’t buy you happiness. ‘Touché, Detective. I won’t deny it. I’ve done well.’ Despite his good humour, Keith remains ‘very confused’ . ‘I got a case where armed robbers laid siege to your bank (a siege is surely when you surround a building or town, so if anyone was laying siege to the bank it was the police, but hey, let‘s not be pedantic when Case is about to twist in the wind).’ Mitch wants to confirm that it is, in fact, Chase’s bank. He’s the ‘Chairman of the Board of Directors’. Keith: ‘Then ita-zita-vene-gazoo (I’m not quite sure what unusual magicians Keith was exposed to as a kid). The robbers disappear. Poof. And they don’t take a nickel, right?’ Chase is now on the run, so he tries to play down the bank’s significance. ‘It’s a tiny part of our organisation.’ However, Keith is dogged in pursuit, ‘No robbers. No real victims. No loot missing. It’s got to be the first time in law-enforcement history.’ He turns to that renowned criminology scholar Mitch to confirm that this is indeed the case. Mitch has ‘never heard of it before’. Time to resort to profanity: ‘You got to ask yourself, ‘what the f*** happened?’ don’t you Mr Case?’ Case doesn’t like Keith’s tone. ‘Then give me a straight answer. It’s the founding bank of your empire. You built it. It’s your baby. Give me a straight answer. What do you think happened?’ Case insists he is clueless but Keith doesn’t buy it and posits his own theory. ‘I think you sent that woman in there to patch things up. Miss White, I think you paid her. What was she doing in there?’ Bravo Keith, although you’d think he might have wondered this earlier. Case finds the theory ‘absurd’ but Keith shuts him up by barking ‘three ninety-two’ across the desk. ‘Safe deposit box three ninety-two. What’s the story on that?’ Case pleads innocence yet again, Keith flat-out calls him a liar. ‘I looked at all the records. At first glance, everything looked fine, but there was one safe deposit box that had no records. I mean, going all the way back to 1948. So I started thinking. Who would have the answer to this riddle? Probably the man who forgot to mention that he built the bank in the first place in 1948. It doesn’t add up, Mr Case.’ Case gets up and tries to bring proceedings to a halt. ‘It’s something really bad, isn’t it?’ Keith speculates. ‘Mr Frazier, I have spent my whole life serving humanity,’ says Case. ‘You can ask anyone who knows me (the camera pans across a selection of awards and paraphernalia on a shelf. Case is with Maggie Thatcher in one photo, which doesn’t massively enhance his humanitarian credentials). They’ll vouch for me, and for the things that I’ve done.’ Keith plays his final ace, ‘You think they’ll vouch for you after I find out the truth about this ring? (He has it on his finger.) I don’t think so. (Long pause.) Oh, by the way, that thing you said about us being New York’s finest? I want you to know, we really appreciate that.’ ‘How gracious.’ Keith puts his hat on aggressively. ‘Let’s go. We’re gonna follow that ring.’ I didn’t realise this was all based on a Tolkien novel. Mitch hangs around for a bit to glare at Case hilariously.

Outside, Mitch demands to see Keith’s shoe. This is going to be some ass-kissing thing about how he kicked Chase all round New York isn’t it? Yes, I’m afraid so. ‘Cause I have never seen anybody put their foot that far up a guy’s ass.’ Keith absolutely loves it. ‘Oh man. You cut him an ass the length of the Lincoln Tunnel. We’re gonna need a traffic cop on that s***.’ Keith has never heard anything so hilarious in his life. Bid Mitch a fond farewell, that’s the last we’ll see of him. Appropriate scene to go out on, with two pals apparently clowning around but one unquestionably in the senior role. Let’s not be churlish though, Mitch has been one of the joys of the film, if at times unintentionally.

Keith bowls into some restaurant ‘looking for the mayor’. ‘May I have your hat, please?’ asks an officious type. ‘No, you cannot. Get your own.’ Ha, ha! I’d imagine one of the best things about being a policeman is that you can be gratuitously rude to officious types without fear of repercussion. Madeleine and some nerd are dining with the Mayor and she is informing him that ‘they’re looking to invest $4 billion over the next four years’. Keith crashes the party. ‘Sorry to interrupt you Mr Mayor, but there’s an old American saying, ‘When there’s blood on the streets, somebody’s got to go to jail.’’ I know it pertains to Madeleine’s remark from earlier but that’s still a pretty bizarre opening salvo. Keith shows the company the ring. The mayor tells ‘Edwin’ the nerd to sod off, in so many words. Madeleine thinks Keith is ‘looking for closure’. He’ll go along with that. ‘This is the number of the War Crimes Issues office in Washington, D.C.’ He hands it to Madeleine, who apparently doesn’t have a phone-book of her own. ‘How’d you like to be on the front page of the New York Times?’ she enquires. ‘That’d be great. Make sure they spell my name right, though.’ ‘You made copies?’ Of what? The ring? Bit of a puzzler this scene. Is Case going to get done for having the ring or is it simply going to be restored to its rightful owners? Then again, the family it belonged to all died and they may not have any descendents. Keith, as his wont, laughs uproariously while everyone else remains stony-faced. ‘Please. We got to keep the real criminals off the streets, Your Honour. All right, well, thanks for lunch.’ He ambles away, leaving Madeleine to face the music. ‘War crimes, huh?’ says the Mayor. ‘What have you got me into this time?’ She looks somewhat chastened at last.

Keith returns to his apartment after a fun day putting the wind up people. Sylvia’s brother is sleeping on the settee. Keith goes into another room and whispers ‘Mama?’ Sylvia is lying on the bed. ‘Did you bring Big Willie?’ she asks. ‘And the twins.’ They kiss. Keith wants to ‘get his gun off’ before they get down to business. She poses sexily in his hat and he laughs happily. Ever since the end of the hostage crisis, Keith has been having the time of his life. We see the certificate he was given earlier: ‘Certificate awarded to Keith Frazier. In recognition of your dedication, superior achievement and outstanding service to the New York City Police Department and to the city of New York as witnessed by your designation as DETECTIVE FIRST GRADE (their caps)’. The certificate is dated August 12 2005 - my birthday! An auspicious date all round. Keith puts his gun, badge and phone away. What’s this in his pocket? It’s a sparkler! His mind leaps back to when he crashed into Dalton in the bank. That’s right, Keith. You crashed into your nemesis and let him stroll off into the sunset. We hear an earlier conversation. Keith: ‘Why don’t you just walk out the door?’ Dalton: ‘I will. I’m gonna walk out of that door when I’m good and ready.’ A look of dawning comprehension creeps across Keith’s face. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he murmurs. Then he laughs and admires the diamond. ‘Come on honey. The handcuffs are getting cold (what, have they been in the oven?)’ Sylvia says enticingly. Keith really is a jammy bastard.