Amnesty

by Aravind Adiga

Genres: City Life; Cultural Heritage; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A riveting, suspenseful and exuberant novel from the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger about a young illegal immigrant who must decide whether to report crucial information about a murder – and risk deportation.
Danny – Dhananjaya Rajaratnam – is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, denied refugee status after he has fled from his native Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he's been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal Australian life.
But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. When Danny recognizes a jacket left at the murder scene, he believes it belongs to another of his clients — a doctor with whom he knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported, or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of a single day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities.
Propulsive, insightful, and full of Aravind Adiga's signature wit and magic, Amnesty is both a timeless moral struggle and a universal story with particular urgency today.
‘Adiga is a real writer – that is to say, someone who forges an original voice and vision' SUNDAY TIMES
‘The most exciting novelist writing in English today.' A. N. WILSON
‘[Adiga] is not merely a confident storyteller but also a thinker, a skeptic, a wily entertainer, a thorn in the side of orthodoxy and cant . . . Adiga . . . displays what might be his greatest gifts as a postcolonial novelist: His strong sense of how the world actually works, and his ability to climb inside the minds of characters from vastly different social strata.' NEW YORK TIMES

Release date: January 1, 2021

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 272

Sample

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All of the coastline of Sri Lanka is indented, mysterious, and beautiful—but no place is more mysterious than Batticaloa. The city is famous for its lagoon, where extraordinary things can happen. The fish here can sing: true. Absolutely true. Place a reed to your ear, lean down from your paddleboat, and you will hear the music of the fish of the lagoon. At midnight, the water’s skin breaks, and the kadal kanni, mermaids, emerge out of the lagoon dripping with moonlight.

From the time he was about four or five years old, Danny had wanted to talk to a mermaid.

From the rooftop of his school, he could look over the palm trees and brightly painted houses of his city to the spot where the many-pointed, many-lobed lagoon narrowed before flowing into a greater body of water. Just before joining the Indian Ocean, the lagoon’s face burned like fire, like the unriddling of an ancient puzzle: the motto beneath his school’s coat of arms. Lucet et Ardet. Translated by the gray-robed priests as Shines and Burns. (But what shines? And what burns?)

Now Danny, standing up here, understood.

This lagoon shines. This lagoon burns.

He knew, as he watched the burning spot in the distance, that there was a second place where the lagoon joined the ocean; and that this spot was a secret one—hidden for most of the year, in a spot called Mugathwaram, the Face of the Portal, near the old Dutch lighthouse. Danny was sure it was there, at this hidden portal, that the kadal kanni came out into the open.

He had to wait till he was fifteen, a few years after his mother’s death, to find the Face of the Portal. One Saturday, telling his father that he was going to a school picnic, he sat pillion on a friend’s bicycle and went, for the first time in his life, to the old Dutch lighthouse and then beyond it, to the hidden beach, from where, he was told, you could see the second opening. When he got down from the bicycle, he was disappointed, because all he could observe in the distance was a continuous sandbar blocking this part of the lagoon: “There is no way it could flow out into the ocean here.” After covering the bicycle with palm leaves so that it would not be stolen, his friend, a Tamil Christian, said: “We have to go out there, and it will appear.” So he and Danny stole a boat from the lighthouse and then took turns rowing it all the way out to Mugathwaram. They drew nearer and nearer, beneath them the music from the fish grew louder and louder, and then it happened: the sandbar parted, its unity revealed to be an optical illusion, and now a gap of meters showed between the two arms of sand.

The Portal had opened.

In the middle of the gap gleamed the magic island of Mugathwaram, coral- and jellyfish-encrusted, on which the two boys alighted to watch—as cormorants, red-breasted sea eagles, broad-winged pelicans circled over their heads—the meeting and churning of waters. Currents of the lagoon flowing out and those of the Indian Ocean flowing in neutralized each other, producing an illusion of perfect stillness in the water: a solitary white egret stood with one black foot in the spot, to mark the gateway to the world.

Danny knew he had guessed right. This was where the kadal kanni were most likely to come up. Sitting side by side, he and the Christian friend waited for a mermaid. The tide began to rise, and the boat they had brought began to rock. The light dimmed; the ocean had become the color of old family silver. By now his father, who expected him home at five-thirty every evening to begin his homework, would be sitting outside with a rattan cane. Danny waited. He had a friend by his side; he was not frightened. They were not going back without talking to a mermaid.

Australia

Housecleaner, Danny was about to reply, sixty dollars an hour, but instead smiled at the woman.

Strapped to his back was what resembled an astronaut’s jet-booster—a silver canister with a blue rubber nozzle peeping out and scarlet loops of wire wrapped around it—but it was just a portable vacuum cleaner, Turbo Model E, Super Suction, acquired a year ago at Kmart for seventy-nine dollars. In his right hand, a plastic bag with the tools of his trade.

“I asked,” repeated the Australian woman, “what are you?”

Maybe, Danny thought, she’s annoyed by the golden highlights in my hair. He sniffled. From the outside Danny’s nose looked straight, but from the inside it was broken; a doctor had informed him when he was a boy that he was the proud owner of a deviated septum. Maybe the woman was referring to it.

“Australian,” he hazarded.

“No, you’re not,” she replied. “You’re a perfectionist.”

Only now did she indicate, by pointing with a finger, that she was talking about his way of having breakfast.

In his left hand was a half-eaten cheese roll, which he’d made himself while walking by opening a packet of Black & Gold $2.25-for-ten cheese slices that he’d brought with him along with his cleaning equipment, and placing two slices in the middle of a sixty-cent wholemeal bun—and then the woman, who had apparently been observing him combine things into a sandwich and take a bite out of it, had made these remarks to him.

Shifting his vacuum on his back, Danny chewed and examined what was left of his self-made cheese roll and looked at the Australian woman.

So this is why I have, he thought, become visible. Because my way of eating bothers her. After four years, he was still learning things, still making notes to himself: Never walk and eat in daylight. They see you.

Now talk your way out of this, Dhananjaya. Maybe you should say: I used to do the triple jump in school. Hop, skip, and leap? Same way: plan, eat, and walk. I do these things all at once.

Or maybe a story was needed, a quick but moving story: My father always said no, I couldn’t eat while walking, so now it’s a form of rebellion.

Sometimes, though, with white people, all you have to do is start thinking, and that’s enough. Like in a jungle, when you find a tiger in your path, how you’re supposed to hold your breath and stare back. They go away.

Although she certainly appeared to be going away, the woman suddenly changed her mind and turned back to shout: “That’s irony, mate. What I just said about you being a perfectionist.”

Did she mean, thought Danny as he finished the sandwich on his way to the end of Glebe Point Road, from where he would take a left and walk up to Central Station, that I don’t do anything well?

His forehead was furrowed now with the woman’s word: irony.

Danny knew what the dictionary said it meant. In practice, he had noted, its uses were more diverse, slippery, and usually connected to a desire to give offense with words. Irony.

So by calling me a perfectionist, she must have meant…

Fuck her. I like eating like this.

Danny made himself another sandwich on his way to Central, and then a third one on the platform, as he waited for the 8:35 train to St. Peters Station.

His five-foot-seven body looked like it had been expertly packed into itself, and even when he was doing hard physical labor his gaze was dreamy, as if he owned a farm somewhere far away. With an elegant oval jaw, and that long, thin forehead’s suggestion of bookishness, he was not, except when he smiled and exhibited cracked teeth, an overseas threat. On his left forearm a bump, something he had not been born with, showed prominently, and he had let his third fingernail on the right hand grow long and opalescent. His hair had fresh highlights of gold in it.

8:46 a.m.

The train was nearly full. Danny had a seat by a window. Stroking his fingers through his golden hair, for which he had paid $47.50 at a barbershop in Glebe, he became aware that he was being watched and turned toward the Asian man with the black-and-white shopping bag.

The man was looking not at Danny but at his backpack.

Even worse.

An astronaut faced growing competition these days, it was a fact. Two-man, three-man Chinese teams were spreading over Sydney offering the same service, at the same price, in half the time. And let’s not even talk about the Nepalis. Four men at the price of one.

That’s why Danny came with his own stuff. He had invested his capital. In addition to the portable vacuum on his back, he carried, in a plastic bag, a paper roll, disposable pads, a foam spray that he used on glass, and a fire-alarm-red rubber pump that would suck the problems from any toilet bowl. Sure, every home keeps a vacuum and brushes and sprays in a closet somewhere, but a cleaner impresses with his autonomy.

Aussies are a logical people, a methodical people.

Also in his plastic bag: a small but thorny potted plant with care instructions stuck into the dirt (I AM A CACTUS ), which he had bought for $3.80 from a woman who sat next to the park in Glebe, and which he planned to give someone later in the day.

A surprise gift.

At Erskineville Station, the Asian man stood up with his shopping bag just before the glass door opened, and Danny knew he was not a rival. That black-and-white bag did not have a portable vacuum inside. This was just a busybody on the train.

Stretching back, running his fingers through his hair, Danny sniffed them to check if the scent of the dye they used at the barbershop was still detectable—nasty stuff—and then raised his fingers to his scalp to stroke himself again.

Legendary.

He remembered the way Sonja’s eyes lit up when she saw his hair. “Weird.” That was what she’d said. That was a compliment. Because people in Australia were famished for what was weird, self-assuredly weird, even belligerently weird: like a Tamil man with golden highlights in his hair. A minority. And once you found out what that word minority means over here, tasted the intoxicant of being wanted because you were not like everyone else, how could anyone possibly tell you to go back to Sri Lanka and once again live as a minority over there?

To celebrate his golden head of hair, Sonja had made dinner in Parramatta the previous night, and Danny had kept looking at her as he ate, refreshing his vision of himself through her vision of him.

I’m here in Australia, he thought. I’m almost here.

True, after the flush of triumph following the first night in bed with Sonja, which was also his first time with someone not Tamil, he was confused by the idea of seeing the vegan Vietnamese girl again. He’d always thought that like marries like. How do you end up with a woman who doesn’t speak Tamil, or know a thing about your heritage? Danny reconciled himself to love. There were precedents at hand. In Malaysia, for instance, so many Chinese-Tamil marriages had taken place. Not that Sonja was Chinese, of course, but he was just saying. These half-Tamil/half-Chinese children did very well in life. One of them had come to Batticaloa for a summer. He lived like a millionaire.

A root of a banyan tree, in a village near Batticaloa, burst through the corrugated tin shed protecting the grave of a pir, a Muslim saint, and touched his green cement grave like a giant’s finger: here on this new continent, Danny remembered that transgressing banyan root, remembered it like one who knew that life had not yet expanded sufficiently through him or through his body.

So he met her again, and then again, and their relationship was now into its second year.

Sonja believed in things. Veganism. Socialism. LGBT rights. Political views. The developers control the Labor Party, yes, but the developers are the Liberal Party. Do you see the difference, Danny? Some of these things Danny didn’t even understand, but he knew Sonja stood on them. Her Beliefs. He liked that about her. He also liked that her place in Parramatta had a spare room. After dinner, Danny went over there and sat by the duvet on the bed, playing with the table lamp, while shouting answers to the questions she asked from the kitchen.

“Yes! Vocational enrichment! I will investigate evening classes at the TAFE! You are so right, Sonja! Cleaning is not enough!”

Maybe she got the hint. Maybe she’d invite him to live in the spare room.

This morning she had called him just before starting work at the hospital—reminding him, ostensibly, to buy the cactus, but he knew it was just to hear his voice—and when she had asked, “What is your plan for this week?,” for she believed that everyone needed a plan, both for life and for each of its individual weeks, Danny had replied: “The average weekly take-home pay, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, is one thousand one hundred—”

“That’s not what I meant,” she had said, laughing. “I meant what is your plan for this week regarding seeing me?”

He got up. Shifting the weight of the canister on his back, he stood by the glass door. He checked the time on his phone: its back had fallen off, and Danny had used Band-Aids to strap the battery into place. The display glass was cracked, an accident, and the time was four minutes fast, by design. The goal was to alternate anxiety—late late late—with relief—four extra minutes, remember, four extra—a pattern that intensified Danny’s sense of duty.

Hissing hydraulically, the glass doors opened at St. Peters Station. Danny hefted his plastic bag and stepped out onto the platform.

Another workday began.

Four dark steel-rimmed chimney stacks, like Egyptian obelisks, rose right outside the station, as if declaring, This Is Where It Ends—though in truth it did not end here, there, or anywhere—always expanding, this city of Sydney, except for those people for whom it was always contracting. Danny walked. He saw, behind suburban fences, tropical plantains, begonia leaves whose undersides were as red as the tongue of a man chewing betel juice, and frangipani trees whose white petals, fallen over the pavement, partially covered handwritten signs in chalk—ABSOLUTELY NO FREE PARKING HERE—PLEASE PLEASE ELIMINATE CHILDHOOD CANCER. Peeping through the charcoal-colored slats, a pitbull terrier, guardian of the secrets of white people, growled.

Danny sneezed. A blue mist sat in the trees like on a throne and the smell of smoke was everywhere: he guessed at once there was a fire in the mountains. Tonight on TV news, they would say: Bushfires that began last night near Blackheath are being put out right now, though we might smell the smoke for days in parts of the city.

He walked by a parked car inside which he observed a pink rubber shark, a newspaper dedicated to racing and betting, and a lovely relic, a mounted globe, the kind that the supervillain flips on a finger. Danny had stooped before the globe, searching for Sri Lanka, when from behind, someone—

Move.

—said something.

He turned but found nothing human there.

A plane flew low and loud over the suburb, passing from one building to another, the red Qantas logo appearing and disappearing.

A pair of broken classical columns had been deposited by the next gray fence; and next to the columns lay a decapitated cement statue, which represented, Danny felt, one of those gods that white people worshipped before Jesus. With the hint of smoke in the air, it was as if this Sydney suburb had summarized centuries of ruination in a night. Danny looked at the statue, wondering if it would make a good gift for Sonja, a better one than the $3.80 cactus he had in his plastic bag, when he heard it again.

It was a brown man’s voice.

Walking around the fence, Danny saw the owner of the voice in the garden. He was wearing a gray mover’s uniform, phone wedged against his right shoulder, and talking, as he ripped cardboard sheets apart with casual power. Each thrust of his brutal forelimbs said: I am here, Australians. Whether you see me or not, standing right here.

Stopping his work, the muscular man dropped the cardboard and looked at Danny as if he meant to speak to him.

This brown man was Javanese or Malaysian, surely—not one of ours.

Before Danny could say anything, the muscular man turned to the right, shifted about as if finding a direction, then got down on his knees and closed his eyes. His lips moved. After turning his face from side to side, the brown man began to touch his head to the pavement while saying something. Ah. He’s praying, realized Danny. He was looking at me to see if I was a Muslim too and wanted to join him.

Some human bodies generate time from within them. Like this man’s, right now. All the ticking hands in Sydney were being reset to his heart.

They did it five times a day, didn’t they?

So is this the second or the third? Danny wanted to ask as the praying man turned his face from side to side before touching his forehead to the earth again.

An angel with a red-and-green tail materialized over their heads: when Danny looked up, he saw that it was, appropriately enough, an Emirates flight. Sydney airport was not far away.

He sneezed again, and wondered if he had disturbed the praying man.

With a final look at the Indonesian, who, done with his prayer, was again handling furniture, Danny moved.

Thirty-six Flora Street rose above its neighbors, a three-story brick building, bare and basic, built for young professionals. Danny divided Sydney into two kinds of suburbs—thick bum, where the working classes lived, ate badly, and cleaned for themselves; and thin bum, where the fit and young people ate salads and jogged a lot but almost never cleaned their own homes. Erskineville was in the second category. In a suburb like this, a building like 36 Flora Street, with fifteen or twenty units, was a honeypot for a weekly cleaner. Danny sometimes couldn’t believe he had just one regular job here.

First, the key.

A man could break into half the homes in Erskineville just by looking under the doormat or behind the second flowerpot. Here, the key was left someplace even more obvious. Danny raised the broken lid of the mauve mailbox and removed a shiny silver object from it.

Then he entered 36 Flora Street and ran up the stairs.

8:57 a.m.

Empty. Daryl the Lawyer was rarely at home on Monday or Tuesday. Even if you came in the evening to do the place. Sometimes you saw these clients once, on the first day, when you set the schedule, and then never again for months. Years.

Lowering his backpack, Danny dropped it on the floor; removing his T-shirt, he hung it on the bathroom door.

Rule number one: To stay ahead of the competition, always wear a white singlet. As he explained to his girlfriend, “People think the Chinese are cleaner because they don’t have body hair.”

Rules, it’s all about rules.

Many of us flee chaos to come here. Aussies are an optimistic and methodical people and they are governed by law. Understanding the concept of the rule that cannot be broken is vital to adjusting here. (“Through my contradictions you grow: an immigrant addresses the native,” page 24.)

The most useful paragraph of the book. From that one graph and its truths, Danny had forged himself so many rules, and as a result of these rules he was now charged with the weekly cleaning of twelve flats around inner Sydney and an entire house in Rose Bay with a view of blue water and yachts that he cleaned for $110 twice a month, though he did pay nine dollars each time for a car share to the house and back.

Danny tapped on his singlet. He coughed.

One more rule: Never wear a face mask, like many Chinese freelancers do—it scares the customers. Dust? Grime? Inhale, inhale.

Strapping the Turbo Model E to his back, he went to work, making sure not to trip over the dull bloodred cord plugged into the wall.

Bada-bada-bada-bum: making noise whenever he hit a tough spot, Danny moved his vacuum over the carpet. His cell phone, via headphones, played him Golden Oldies. Backstreet Boys. Madonna. Celine Dion. Nothing Tamil; everything English. As he moved, he could see three twenty-dollar bills weighed down by the wicker basket in which the lawyer hoarded twenty- and fifty-cent coins.

Danny saw, and saw, but did not touch.

Not till he was done with the vacuuming. Money left on the honor system, money taken on the honor system. Sixty dollars for cleaning the flat, two bathrooms included, fifteen dollars per extra toilet or bathroom.

Legendary Cleaner.

Danny felt sure that Daryl the Lawyer, House Number Four, had been the first to give him that name; now everyone said it. He had never felt comfortable with that epithet; and, as he reached around the sofa with his vacuum, he wondered if this was another manifestation of that odd, offensive word: irony. He would have to ask Sonja.

Is Daryl the Lawyer mocking me by calling me Legendary Cleaner?

Why do you call him Daryl the Lawyer? Maybe you’re mocking him. That was the kind of thing she would say: point for point.

That woman.

Badabadabadum… He drove the vacuum nozzle under a rocking chair. “Daryl the—! Daryl the—!” Danny raised his voice over that of the vacuum’s roar. Here I come, Daryl the Lawyer!

No cleaner becomes a legendary one without a certain level of aggression against his client.

Prrrompppp. Danny trilled his lips. Ever since his boyhood, he had been making these sounds whenever doing something unpleasant. Badabadabadabump…

His vacuum snout went through room after room. The canister on his bag, inflated with hot air and dust, relaxed when Danny turned the machine off.

Vacuum put away, dishes done, tables and chairs down, now for the core of the job. You will be judged by your toilets. And your toilets will be judged by the bowls. Removing his gloves as he came out of the toilet, he sat on the lawyer’s chair and surveyed the living room.

He picked up a wine-colored leather volume from the lawyer’s bookshelf: The Reliance of the Traveller: A Guide to Islamic Law.

Don’t they ever read books about Hindu law? White people. Obsessed with Muslims. Because they’re frightened of them. He flipped through the book.

One afternoon in Lakemba—a tip about a for-cash housepainting job from Abe, his Japanese-Brazilian abseiling friend—Danny had seen three Arab men on a porch, each stripped to the waist, each with a sheeshah, exhaling sultanish smoke over a garden of rust and rubbish. Some of Sydney’s western suburbs—very, very thick bum—were filthy, front yards full of rotting wood, overturned shopping carts, little canals slicked over with white petals; but this Muslim mansion was easily the dirtiest thing he had seen in Australia. Danny loved it. Of course you admired the fuck you white guy attitude, but still you had to wonder, how the hell did people like this become legal, unless there was someone at the Department of Immigration who actually decided: “You don’t look like a terrorist. Sorry, you’ll never get into Australia. Next! Yes, you with the big beard, you can come in for sure!” See: the other day Yahoo! News had this story of an overweight extremely blind Malaysian guy, who plays the guitar, actually can’t play it at all, and the Aussies had an online signature campaign for him, because he’s Muslim, and gave him permanent residency. I tell you, there are Tamil men burning themselves alive.

Last week this man in Melbourne, this Jaffna man, covered himself in petrol and lit himself with a match when they wouldn’t give him refugee status. Who gets it? This Malay Muslim.

Between Muslim and Tamil there had been frequent violence when Danny was growing up. Satrukondan, Xavierpuram, Siththandy: old names, old bloodshed.

Done with Islamic law. But as Danny bent to put the book back in the lower shelf of the bookcase, he had a clear view of the sofa and beneath it, and he saw a ball under the sofa.

It had rolled all the way up to the wall.

In Australia the unwritten rule is that the cleaner never bends down to touch anything below the level of a coffee table. Owner has to pick everything up from the floor before you begin work. There are rules on both sides of this business. (“We have to clean up the place so the cleaners can clean up afterward,” one of his clients, possibly Daryl the Lawyer, had grumbled.) Back home, though, the rule is that while the maid will bend and scrub all you want, she will never touch anything above the level of the coffee table for fear of being accused of theft. Danny smiled. Prrrpmmm. Badabadadum.

Let’s do it. Let’s impress him.

Spread-eagling himself on the carpet, Danny reached with his flexed fingers under the sofa only to find it out of reach. The blue ball.

Prrrrrp. Ba-da-da-da-dum—

He extended his fingers—

“The average weekly take-home pay is eleven hundred fifteen dollars and forty cents, according to the Bureau of…”

“… the Bureau of Staaaa-tis-tics…”

—till rubber tickled the tips.

(“My strange boy,” his mother used to say. When she found out, for instance, that Danny was the one cutting all the thorns out of the roses in her garden: “The thorns are here to protect the roses. If you remove them, you don’t make the roses safer. My strange, strange son.”)

We are a legendary cleaner.

Danny’s fingers reached for the ball—gripped it—and extracted it from far beneath the sofa and presented the object from the darkness to Danny’s nose. A ball: a blue ball. He smelled. Using his long fingernail, he scraped at the blue skin and smelled it again.

An acridity like nonliving body odor, which reminded Danny.

Don’t forget the cactus: she’s working at St. Vincent’s today.

It was a different hospital or aged-care center each week for her. “It’s all privatized now,” she said. “We have to work where the agency sends us and for as long as they tell us or that’s the last time I ever work.”

I should go back and get that Greek statue as a gift.

Up on his knees, Danny walked over to the lawyer’s table and deposited the blue ball there, pressing it with his palm to hold it in place, as he looked around the flat.

When he was a boy, he had asked a neighbor, recently returned from abroad, “What is the city of Toronto like?” The neighbor had asked, “Do you know what the Galadari Five Star Hotel in Colombo is like?” Danny had nodded. “Every square inch of the city of Toronto is like that.”

The things they tell you about the West before you come here. No part of Australia is like the Galadari International. Sydney is filled with roaches, crickets, and flying bugs, except for any room that Danny had just gone over with his vacuum, sponge, and mop.

Legendary Cleaner.

His phone, which was certainly not legendary, beeped at once.

9:16 a.m.

Message from your phone company:

As we continue to build a mobile network for the future, we will have to say goodbye to older forms of technology. That means that the phone you appear to be using, a 2G phone, will no longer work from next week. Buy a new 3G phone as soon as possible from our website, our many convenient retail stores, or any of our retail partners.

The messages had begun two weeks ago. Danny had kept deleting them.

“Welcome, sir,” the man at the convenience store or retail partner says, “a new phone for you, sir? Certainly, sir. What is your tax file number, sir? Do you have your passport with you, sir?”

From the lawyer’s kitchen, the smell of broccoli broke into his nose; his bowels tightened. After all these years, his stomach was unreconciled to that nastiness. How could they eat it, these people, in such quantities, and raw? Broccoli!

Still recoiling from the smell of that vegetable, Danny picked his T-shirt off the hook and then dressed himself before paying himself, removing one by one the three twenty-dollar bills