Open Sesame (19 page)

‘Sure thing. Thanks.’

‘You really want to go there?’

‘You’ve been most helpful.’

‘And tell Rocco on the gate,’ she called after him, ‘if they’re going I wouldn’t mind the tall one’s boots for my kid brother.’

‘So,’ said the man behind the desk, ‘you come to me and you say, We kill your buddy the little bear, we’re terribly sorry, we won’t do it again. Is that it?’

Aziz nodded. Behind him, seventy-six feet shuffled nervously. ‘It was an accident, really,’ he said. ‘Well, not an accident as such, more a, what’s the word, misunderstanding.’ He remembered a good phrase from one of his juvenile court appearances. ‘A tragic fusion of coincidence, mistaken identity and good intentions gone dreadfully awry,’ he recited. On second thoughts, he wished he hadn’t; it hadn’t worked the first time, mainly because the coincidence had been the night watch coming down the alley at precisely the moment he was leaving the warehouse, the mistaken identity had been him thinking they weren’t the watch, and the good intention had been his intention to escape by climbing over the wall into what turned out to be the Khalif’s pedigree snake collection.

‘Sure,’ grunted the man behind the desk. ‘I believe you. So when the Momma Bear and the Baby Bear they come to me and say, Padrone, give us justice, I gotta tell them it was all a mistake and the guys are terribly sorry. Do you take me for a fool, or what? Rocco, get them outa my sight.’

Behind him, Aziz could hear footsteps, and metallic grating noises. Not for the first time, he sincerely wished he could have had his brain removed when he was twelve. ‘Look…’ he stuttered.

And then the man behind the desk did a strange thing. He smiled. ‘On the other hand,’ he said. He didn’t finish the sentence, but the movement noises in the background stopped as abruptly as if a tape had been switched off.

‘Yes?’ Aziz croaked.

‘Hey.’ The man spread his arms. ‘Everybody makes mistakes. I made a mistake, once,’ he added. ‘And I’m sure that if I was to put in a good word for you with the widow bear and the orphan bear—’

‘Yes?’

‘And you guys sign a legally binding contract to cut them in on, say, ninety per cent of everything you make for the next forty years—’

‘Yes?’

‘Plus a small contribution, say five per cent, to the Arabian Nights Moonshine Coach Club social fund—’

‘Yes?’ The man shrugged. It was an eloquent gesture. Louder and clearer than fifty-foot neon letters against a black background it said THIS COMMITS ME TO NOTHING BUT SO WHAT?

‘Then,’ he said, ‘you guys gonna be so grateful to me, you might consider doing me a small favour.’

‘Anything you say,’ Aziz replied, in a voice so small that a bat would need a hearing aid to hear it. ‘Padrone,’ he added.

‘That’s great,’ said the man. ‘Now, then. I gonna tell you a story.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The air was foul with the stench of burning bone. It’s a distinctive smell; not perhaps overwhelmingly revolting in itself, but unbearable once you know what it is. You can get used to it, of course; human beings can get used to virtually anything, given plenty of time and no choice in the matter whatsoever. Fortunately, Ali Baba wasn’t naturally squeamish, and he had the advantage of knowing that, although his drill turned so fast that the friction scorched the tooth as he drilled it, the patient never felt a thing because of the anaesthetic.

‘There you are,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Quick rinse and we’re done.’

Last patient of the day; no more drilling into people until eight o’clock tomorrow morning. A propos of nothing much, he wondered whether Akram the Terrible, his former great and worthy opponent, ever felt the same sense of deep, exhausted relief after a hard night’s murdering. Wash off the blood and the bits of bone, change into nice comfy old clothes, make a nice hot cup of something and collapse into a friendly chair by the fire; what, after all, could be better than that? Apart, of course, from not having to get all bloody and covered in bits in the first place.

He had switched off the lights and was just about to lock up when a white delivery van pulled up outside. Mr Barbour? Yes, that’s me. Delivery for you, if you’d just sign here. The driver handed him a crate about eighteen inches square, accepted his tip and drove away.

Ali Baba stood on the pavement for nearly a minute, feeling the weight of the box; then he unlocked the door and went back inside, locking up again afterwards. His heart was beating a little faster now, and he was beginning to sweat ever so slightly.

The museum authorities hadn’t been best pleased when he’d called them up and asked for it back. He’d reminded them that it was only a loan, and pointed out that there had been a recent spate of thefts of similar objects. He mentioned in passing that he had a receipt. When they put the phone down on him, he rang straight back, ignored their claim that he’d got a wrong number and was now talking to NexDay Laundry Services, and demanded to speak to the Director. And so forth. Eventually they agreed to return it by armoured van, with Ali Baba paying the carriage charges. Then, having added (quite unnecessarily, in Ali Baba’s opinion) that at least that meant one less card to send this Christmas, they rang off.

And here it was. He sighed and shook his head. If only the poor fools had realised what they’d actually got there, not all the bailiffs and court orders in the universe could ever have prised it away from them.

Yes. But. Bailiffs and court orders are one thing, but the greatest ever burglar in either of the two dimensions was something else entirely; and if Akram was still out there somewhere, plotting and scheming to find a way of nailing his ancient foe without transgressing the letter of his oath, then leaving this thing in the deepest vault of the most secure museum in the world was pretty much the same as laying it out on the pavement with a big flashing light on top to show him where to find it. It’d be criminal negligence of the most horrible and bloodcurdling variety to let it stay where it was. There could only be one safe place for it from now on, and that was under the loose floorboard in the store cupboard in Ali Baba’s surgery.

‘Blasted thing,’ he muttered under his breath, as he carried it up the stairs. ‘Wish I’d never pinched it in the first place.’

All loose floorboards are not the same. For a start, this one didn’t creak. Nor could it be prised up with a crowbar and the back of a claw hammer. In fact, were a hostile power to drop a nuclear bomb on Southampton, the only thing guaranteed to be completely undamaged would be Ali Baba’s loose floorboard. It’d still be loose, of course; exactly the same degree of looseness, not a thousandth of a millimetre tighter or wobblier.

Carefully - drop it and the consequences didn’t bear thinking about - he lowered it into the hole and then stood back, hands on knees, to catch his breath and say the password. He did so, replaced the board and muttered the self-activating spell. Finally, he locked up and went home.

After he’d gone, the rogue tooth fairy that’d been hanging around the place all day in the hope of picking up sixpenny-worth of second-hand calcium clambered out of a half-empty pot of pink casting medium, looked around to make sure all was clear, and landed heavily on the loose floorboard. It wobbled, but it wouldn’t budge.

‘Bugger,’ muttered Fang.

Three quarters of an hour later, she gave up the unequal struggle. During this time she’d snapped or blunted two dozen drill bits, broken a whole box of disposable scalpels and banged her own thumb with a two-pound lump hammer (don’t ask what it was doing in among the tools of Ali Baba’s trade, because unless you’ve got film star’s teeth and will never need to go to a dentist again, you really don’t want to know). There was no way of getting in without the password, and although she knew perfectly well what it was, having overhead Ali Baba setting it, she was just a fairy and couldn’t say it loud enough. A pity; the contents of Ali Baba’s improvised floor safe were worth more to her than all the molars ever pulled. If only she could get her hands on it, then she could name her price; including her old job back and sixpences enough to buy Newfoundland.

Nothing for it; she needed human help. But who? Not a problem. She knew just the man. In fact, he was her landlord.

With a savage buzz she memorised the location of the loose board, checked the office waste-paper basket for teeth one last time, and flew home.

Aren’t human beings wonderful?

Well, actually, no; but they do sometimes manage to achieve wonderful things, albeit for all the wrong reasons. One of their most remarkable abilities, which gained them the coveted Golden Straitjacket award for most gloriously dizzy instinctive behaviour five thousand years running in the prestigious Vicenza Dumb Animals Festival, is their exceptional knack of ignoring the most disturbingly bizarre circumstances simply by pretending they don’t exist. No matter how radical the upheaval, as soon as the dust has settled a little and it’s relatively safe outside the bunker, out they go again to weave their spiders’ webs of apparent normality over whatever it is they don’t want to come to terms with, until the web becomes as rigid and substantial as a coral reef.

Michelle, for example, found that if she went to work as usual, stayed on after hours doing overtime and then went straight on to meet friends for a drink or a movie,, so that she was almost never at home before midnight or after seven-thirty am, she could go hours at a time without thinking strange thoughts or feeling the naggingly persistent lure of the ring. It was like living on the slopes of an active volcano but without the views and the constant free hot water.

And then; well, you can only play chicken on the Great Road of Chaos for so long before you make a slight error of judgement. In Michelle’s case, her mistake lay in stopping off for a bite to eat after an evening’s rather self-conscious cheerleading for the office formation karaoke team. Perhaps it was the strain of having to put a brave face on Mr Pettingell from Claims singing You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog in a Birmingham accent so broad you could have used it as a temporary bridge over the Mississippi that sapped her instinctive early warning systems; or perhaps it was just that her number was up.

‘I’ll have the …’ She hesitated, and squinted at the illuminated menu above the counter. She’d originally intended to have the Treble Grand Slam Baconburger, large fries, regular guava shake; but a glance at the ten-times-life-size backlit transparency overhead made her doubt the wisdom of that decision. For one thing, it was too brightly coloured. Mother Nature reserves bright reds and yellows for warning livery for her more indigestible species, such as wasps and poison toadstools. The sight of the ketchup and relish in the illustration must have triggered an ancient survival mechanism. She had another look at the menu, searching for something there wasn’t a picture of.

‘I’ll try the …’ For a fleeting moment she was tempted by the Greenland Shark Nuggets ‘n’ Bar-B-Q Dip, but the moment passed. If God had intended people to eat sharks, as opposed to vice versa, he would have modified the respective blueprints accordingly.

The man behind the counter smiled patiently. ‘Take your time,’ he said. ‘Actually, I’d recommend the Chicken Danish Brunch.’ There was, Heaven help us, a flicker of genuine, unfeigned enthusiasm in the poor man’s eyes as he spoke. ‘My personal favourite,’ he added, ‘for what that’s worth.’

Michelle shrugged. ‘So what’s that got in it?’ she asked.

The man straightened his back with - yes, dammit, with pride as he recited, ‘It’s a scrummy fillet of marinaded prime chicken, served traditional Danish-style in an open sandwich with choice of relish, all on a sesame seed bun.’

The speech went past Michelle like an InterCity train through a Saturdays-only backwoods station. ‘I’m sorry?’ she said. ‘I missed that.’

‘Okay. It’s a scrummy—’

‘Edited highlights, please.’

‘No problem. Chicken, open sandwich, sesame seed bun.’

Michelle shook her head. It was noisy inside, noisy even for a Macfarlane’s on a Friday night, and her ears were still ringing from Mr Sobieski from Accounts informing the world that ever since his baby left him, he’d found a new place to dwell. ‘Say again, please,’ she shouted back. ‘Didn’t quite catch…’

The man nodded and smiled. ‘Sandwich,’ he said. ‘Open. Sesame…’

‘Open sesame?’

(‘Two down. One to go.’)

‘Sesame seed bun.’ Something strange had happened to the man’s face. It was as if he was being used as a guinea pig by a blind acupuncturist. ‘Guaranteed to make your taste-buds … Don’t I know you?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You sound like someone I used to know.’

As he spoke, he saw that her purse was open on the counter, and there was her Visa card. Part of the shared heritage of thieves and lawyers is an ability to read upside down without even having to think about it: MICHELLE PARTRIDGE.

‘Do I?’

‘My imagination,’ Akram replied; while he was saying the words, shutters came down in his eyes, like a snake’s transparent eyelids. ‘Do forgive me. Alternatively, the Saigon Ribs Surprise is very popular. There’s a choice of dips, we’ve got Tangy Orange, Bar-B-Q, Byzantine Lemon …’

Her purse also contained a receipted gas bill, with her address. Akram’s eyes lapped up the information like a cat drinking milk.

‘I’ll have that, please,’ Michelle said quickly. ‘Who did I remind you of?’

‘Forget it, please,’ Akram muttered. ‘That was in another country, and besides, the sonofabitch is dead.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Which dip? We got orange, barbeque, lemon …’

‘Orange.’

‘Coming right up. That’ll be three pounds seventy-five, please.’

Now I know who he is, Michelle realised. He was in the waiting room, the day I—

‘Your change,’ said Akram. ‘Enjoy your meal, have a nice day.’

‘Thank you. I—’

The two girls behind her, who had been very patient so far, eased past and ordered hamburgers. She stood for a moment, at right angles to the queue, clutching her bag and trying to think.

Akram. Akram the Terrible! Here!

‘Excuse me.’ She elbowed one girl out of the way and stood heavily on the other’s toe. ‘Sorry,’ she growled. ‘Look, is your name Akram, by any chance?’