Open Sesame (13 page)

‘No!’ Akram’s expression conveyed the intensity of his agitation. ‘Not back there. Think about it, man. If I go back and you stay here, what happens to the story? You can’t have Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves without Ali Baba. The story’d just stop, and that’d be the end of me. If you make me go back, it’d be just as final as killing me now. More so, in fact, because then I’d never have existed in the first place.’

‘True.’ Ali Baba nodded gravely. ‘So what were you planning on doing? Defecting? Claiming narrative asylum?’

‘Call it whatever you like,’ Akram said. ‘Just so long as you don’t send me back. Deal?’

‘But you’ll promise not to try and kill me, ever again?’

‘You strike a hard bargain, you do.’ Akram looked from the scalpel to his immobilised body, and then back again. ‘Actually, you’d have made a good villain. You’ve got that cold, hard streak.’ Not to mention, he added under his breath, that basic ill-fated gullibility that makes a man who’s got his mortal enemy helpless at knifepoint insist on some absurdly overelaborate means of execution, involving candles burning through ropes, underground cellars slowly filling with water and girls tied to railway lines, which is tantamount to turning the bugger loose and saying, ‘See you next episode.’

‘Thank you,’ Ali Baba replied, evidently flattered. ‘I think you’d have made a good hero, not that there’s any other sort, but you know what I mean. It’s the way apparently insoluble moral dilemmas follow you around as if they were Mary’s lamb.’

Akram shuddered. ‘Must be awful, that. I expect you can’t go into a shop and buy a box of matches without first checking they were made from sustainable forests.’

‘That sort of thing. Right then. Do we have a deal?’

‘Suppose so.’ Akram cleared his throat. ‘Here goes, then. Hell, this is as bad as being back at school. I swear on my honour as a thief and a villain never to try and kill you again. Will that do, d’you think?’

‘Covers it pretty well. Better add actual bodily harm as well, just to be on the safe side.’

‘If you want. Here, you should have been a lawyer.’

‘That’s not a very clever thing to say to someone who’s still holding a knife on you. Just for that, we’ll add economic sanctions and reprisals against property. Okay?’

Akram shrugged. ‘If you insist. I’m sorry you’ve got such a low opinion of me that you see me as the sort of bloke who vents his wrath by chucking bricks through windows and letting tyres down.’

‘Just to be on the safe side.’

‘All right.’

There was a moment’s silence as the two opponents considered what they’d agreed. There was an absurd edge to it, Akram reflected, as if two duellists had flung away their swords in mid-fight and agreed to sort out their differences with best of three games of dominoes. But there was nothing frivolous about giving his word of honour. The bastard had been right on the money there. All in all, he felt like someone who’s hired a horsebox in order to go cattle-rustling in a muddy field, and ends up having to pay the farmer to pull him out with his tractor. If word of this ever reached home, he’d never be able to show his face there again.

‘That’s all right then,’ said Ali Baba, breathing a long, ostentatious sigh of relief. ‘I knew we’d get there in the end if we really set our minds to it. That just leaves the little matter of your iffy tooth.’ He picked up the scalpel and switched on the light. ‘You can have this on the house,’ he added, ‘as a sign there’s no hard feelings.’

‘Like a free alarm clock radio if I take out a policy within ten working days? What a generous man you are, to be sure.’

With that, Akram’s astral body made itself scarce, and spent the next quarter of an hour deliberately not watching what was happening to the old flesh and blood. Odd how some people are; Akram the Terrible habitually jeered in the face of death and laughed the swords of his enemies to scorn; but dentists’ drills and injections made him feel as if the bones of his legs had melted and seeped out through his toes.

Not long after Ali Baba had finished - a copybook extraction, needless to say, with the absolute minimum of hacking and slashing - the so-called Mr Smith woke up, groaned aloud and spat out a mouthful of blood and tooth debris. Ali Baba held his breath.

‘I eel ike I ust ent en ounds ith Ugar Ay Ennard,’ Akram mumbled, feeling his jaw with his hand. ‘At ad, as it?’

Ali Baba grinned and held up a pair of pliers, in which was gripped a thing like a badly peeled prawn. ‘If you don’t get at least one and six for this,’ he said, ‘your tooth fairy is ripping you off.’

Funny you should mention - ‘Anks ery uch, I’ll ear at in ind.’ He stood up, staggered and caught the back of the chair. ‘Ink I’ll o and it own in awr aiting oom, if at’s OK.’

‘Be my guest.’

When he’d gone Ali Baba sat down on the arm of the chair, closed his eyes and tried to lock and bolt the door against the memory of what had happened. Then he hit the intercom and sent for Miss Partridge.

Obviously, it was going to be one of those days; because she had pretty much the same problem with her junk tooth as Akram had. As he fitted the face mask over Michelle’s nose and turned on the gas, he decided that what he really wanted above all was for this day to end and be replaced by a nice straightforward one with no complications.

Hiss, went the gas, and the patient in the chair slumped into unconsciousness. Now then: seal —

He turned, and stared. In the chair, sharing exactly the same space to the cubic millimetre, were not one but two bodies; one fast asleep, the other sitting bolt upright and gawping at him as if he was one of the dinosaur skeletons in the Natural History Museum.

‘Bugger me, I don’t believe it,’ he wailed. ‘Not another one.’

CHAPTER NINE

‘There’s a cat over there with boots on.’

It had been one of those days. ‘Pull the other one, Sadiq, it’s got ruddy bells on. Now, if you’ve quite—’

‘Straight up, Skip, no bull. Look for yourself if you don’t believe me.’

What, Aziz asked himself, would the Guv’nor have done, had he been here? Silly question; if he’d been here, they’d be safely back on their own turf, where things like this didn’t happen and cats didn’t wear boots so much as have them thrown at them. But if he had been there, he’d have snapped something like ‘Silence in the ranks!’ and they’d all have shut up like ironmongers at 5.25 on a Saturday when you desperately need a new hacksaw blade. Either you’ve got it, Aziz admitted sadly to himself, or you haven’t, and he hadn’t. Slowly, he turned round.

‘All right, you lot,’ he said, after a while, ‘nobody said to stop marching. Haven’t you men ever seen a cat with boots on before?’

‘Actually, Skip, now you come to mention it, no.’

‘Well you have now. Come on, move it.’

For the record; the cat, seriously terrified by the sight of thirty-nine heavily armed men tramping straight towards it, abandoned its original plan of catching a brace of partridges with which to whet the appetite of the King and thus gain favour for his master, and scarpered. Being hampered by a pair of huge, unwieldy boots it tripped over, fell off a wall and broke its neck, leaving its master to fend for himself. The princess he should have married later eloped with a footman, who abandoned her, six months pregnant, when the King finally and irreversibly cut her out of his will. There had been quite a lot of that sort of thing going on lately, as a result of the intrusion of Aziz and his followers into stories where they had no place to be, and the consensus of opinion throughout Storybook land was that the stupid bastards should be hung up by the balls and left to die.

An hour after the cat incident, they reached a castle. By now they were starving hungry, and it was coming on to rain. They hammered at the door, but nobody answered it.

‘Maybe they’re out,’ ventured Hussain.

‘Slice of luck for us, then,’ replied Achmed, pulling his cloak over his head. ‘Breaking and entering is our speciality, after all.’

Aziz looked up at the lofty battlements and rubbed his chin. ‘Bugger of a wall to climb,’ he said dubiously. ‘Must be twenty, twenty-five foot if it’s a yard. You checked out the gates, Faisal?’

‘Tight as a pawnbroker’s arse, Skip. If we had the big jemmy we’d maybe stand a chance, but without it…’

‘Just a minute.’ Hakim grabbed Aziz by the shoulder and pointed. ‘Some fool’s only left a beautiful great rope hanging out the window. Look, that tower over there by the gateway.’

He was right. ‘Stone me,’ said Aziz, impressed. ‘What a stroke of luck! All right, then, Faisal, Hakim, Shamir, up that rope quick as you like and open the gates. Anybody tries to stop you, scrag ‘em.’

It was an odd sort of a rope, being golden-yellow and made from some very soft, fine fibre; but it was plenty strong enough to take Shamir’s twenty-odd stone. He vanished through the tower window, and a moment later the rest of the gang heard a shriek, a scream, a female voice using words that even the thieves didn’t know (although they could guess the general idea fairly well from context) and a loud, heavy thump. Five minutes later, the gates opened.

‘What the hell kept you?’ Aziz demanded. His three faithful henchmen looked away. Hakim blushed. Shamir hastily wiped lipstick off his cheek.

‘Well,’ Hakim mumbled, ‘there was this bint, right…’

‘Two of’em,’ Faisal corrected him. ‘One right little cracker, and a raddled old boiler with a face like a prune. Really snotty about it all, she was. Told us our fortunes good and proper.’

‘She fell off the wall,’ admitted Shamir. ‘It was an accident, honest.’

‘The other one didn’t seem to mind, though,’ Hakim went on. ‘In fact, she seemed dead chuffed. It was her hair we climbed up, by the way.’

‘Her hair?’

Hakim nodded.

‘Stairs fallen down or something? Fire drill?’

‘Search me, Skip,’ Hakim replied, with a shrug. ‘Weird bloody lot they are in these parts, if you ask me. What now, Skip? Do we loot the place, or what?’

The castle proved to be well worth the effort of getting in. Apart from food and dry clothes and plenty of books and things to make a fire with, there were whole chests and trunks full of jewels and precious stones. The girl didn’t seem in the least put out by their depredations; in fact, she kept trying to kiss them, and seemed puzzled by the fact that they were rather more interested in the contents of the kitchen and the counting-house. Finally she got Achmed in a sort of half-nelson and started nibbling his ear, until Aziz managed to prise her off. Even then, she kept following them around, sighing embarrassingly and murmuring ‘My hero!’ That part of it worried Aziz no end, although he kept his concern to himself. His grasp of theory was tenuous at the best of times, but even he knew that villains doing hero stuff was bad news, liable to upset the balance of supernature. Rounding up his men like the headmistress of a Borstal kindergarten, he shooed them out of the castle, promised the girl they’d write, and quick-marched out of it as fast as possible. In their haste, one of them trod on a frog that’d been hanging around the castle for weeks, ogling the girl and saying ‘Give us a kiss, give us a kiss,’ in frog language; but they weren’t to know that.

‘Not another one!’

Michelle, or her spiritual essence, goggled at him as if she’d just swallowed a goldfish. ‘Another what?’ she asked. ‘Hey, this anaesthetic of yours doesn’t seem to be terribly good.’

‘Look down,’ Ali Baba replied.

Curiously enough, Michelle’s next words - ‘Who’s that in the chair?’ - were precisely the words that Daddy Bear, now prematurely deceased, should have spoken on discovering that Goldilocks had broken in. How they got there is a matter for the fabulonometrists to determine, but the answer is probably something to do with random catalyst dispersal and chaos theory. It’s probably not significant that she said them twice.

‘Maybe,’ Ali Baba was saying meanwhile, ‘there’s a leak in the pipe and I’ve been inhaling the stuff without knowing it. Never heard it caused hallucinations, but you never know.’

‘Pardon me,’ Michelle replied, affronted. ‘If there’s anybody hallucinating around here, I should think it’s me. I can see my body down there. Shouldn’t there be a strong bright light or something?’

Ali Baba sighed. ‘I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that,’ he said. ‘Obviously you don’t know. On reflection, perhaps I shouldn’t tell you, either. It’d only worry you.’

‘Thanks a heap. That’s really set my mind at rest, you know?’

‘True.’ Ali Baba leaned back against the radiator and took a deep breath. ‘If my theory’s right,’ he said, ‘and I have this really depressing feeling that it is, you’re not actually real. I mean, from Reality, don’t you know. I think you’re someone out of a story.’

‘A story

‘Before you start yelling for two doctors and a white van,’ Ali Baba continued, ‘maybe I’d better tell you, if you promise not to breathe a word. What am I saying, they wouldn’t believe you anyway, not when you tell them you only know I’m crazy because I started gibbering at you while your astral body was floating three feet up in the air. I’m not from these parts, either.’

‘A story,’ Michelle repeated. ‘Do you know, you’re the second person to tell me that in twenty-four hours.’

‘Really? Who was the first?’

‘My fridge freezer.’

‘Right. Fine. Now then, this may hurt a little but if it does I really couldn’t give a damn. Say Aaah.’

‘No, wait, listen.’ Michelle frowned, and crumpled her astral hands tightly into a ball. ‘Listen,’ she repeated. ‘For some time now I’ve been convinced I’m going crazy, ever since my great-aunt died. I inherited this ring, and it makes me think I can understand machines talking. All the electrical gadgets in my flat have been talking to me.’

‘Understand machines,’ Ali Baba repeated, in a voice as flat as the square at Edgbaston. ‘A ring. Silver.’

‘Yes.’ Michelle stared at him. ‘How’d you know?’

‘Quite plain, with a jewel or a bit of coloured glass stuck in it. Really ordinary, ugly-looking thing.’

‘That’s it. Where did you say you were from?’

‘Where did you say you got it?’

They regarded each other warily, like two undercover Klingon agents meeting by chance in Trafalgar Square. Ali Baba broke the silence.