Open Sesame (21 page)

How would it look on the other hand?

With a shrug he lifted the ring out of the box and checked it for hallmarks. None. It wouldn’t fit, of course; he could tell that without trying. It was a piece of cheap tat for the teenage market, probably less than five parts silver in any case. If I tried it on, it’d only get stuck.

No it wouldn’t.

Yes it would.

‘Armed police hold it right there move so much as the smallest hair on your bum and we ‘ll blow you away!’

So it’s true, a part of John Fingers II’s brain noted with interest, extreme terror really does have an effect on the bowels and turn the knees to water. Why the hell is that? Bloody useless survival mechanism; not the evolutionary trait most likely to ensure the success of the species. He shuddered from head to toe, realising as he did so that he was breaking the embargo on movement. This only made matters worse.

‘Move one millimetre and you’ll go home in a plastic bag we have the building surrounded. Nobby where’s that SWAT team this is a recorded — Oops, force of habit, damn.’

With infinite daring, John Fingers II frowned. Something funny here. For one thing, the voice seemed to be coming from inside his head.

Where were the searchlights?

Where, come to that, were the police?

‘Hey,’ he said aloud, ‘what’s going on here?’

‘Shuttup you another peep out of you and you’re a dead man. Nobby I want those snipers in here now.’

There was something about the voice, definitely coming from inside him somewhere, that entirely failed to convince. There were no police. It was some kind of daft booby-trap.

The hell with it. Anybody who would have you believe that running away is a dying art should watch a member of the Smith family getting the hell out of residential property where they have no right to be. From unfreezing to shinning down the ladder and sprinting off down the back alley, the whole process took John Fingers II less than three minutes. If only Stanley Fingers III had been alive to see it, he’d have been proud.

The getaway car was parked just round the corner. He dived in, slammed the door and turned the key. Wouldn’t start.

‘No petrol.’

Who said that?

‘I mean, what kind of pillock steals his getaway car from a garage forecourt? Next time, at the very least, look at the damn fuel indicator.’

Out of the car, slam the door, run for it. As he ran, he seemed to be able to hear his watch advising him to slow down, since a man of his age and weight was risking a coronary sprinting round the place like a twelve year old, it could feel his pulse against its strap and he was definitely overdoing it. Look, there’s a bus, why don’t you hop on that?

It was good advice, but John Fingers II chose to ignore it. Instead, he flopped down in a heap in a shop doorway, hyperventilating like an asthmatic extractor fan. A moment or so later, he looked up. There was a policeman standing over him. Oh…

‘Here,’ said the policeman, staring. ‘You all right?’

‘Urg,’ replied John Fingers II.

‘You gone a funny colour,’ the policeman said. ‘I’m going to call an ambulance.’

‘No!’ He managed to get hold of a lungful of air from somewhere. ‘Don’t do that. I was just going, anyhow.’

‘Huh? Oh well, please yourself. Move along there. You got a home to go to?’

John Fingers II nodded. Some stray pellet of common sense lodged in his brain and told him to pretend to be drunk. ‘Jus’ going, offisher. Been out for a li’l drink. G’night.’

The policeman frowned and watched him stand up, stagger a little (not method acting; knees still water) and set off on an unsteady course down the street.

‘Jesus!’ muttered the watch. ‘Close call or what? It was touch and go back there.’

Without a second thought, John Fingers II unstrapped his watch, dropped it on the ground and stepped on it. He imagined that as the glass went crunch under his heel, he heard a tiny thin scream.

‘What d’you do that for, you bastard?’ said a voice in his head.

John Fingers II stopped dead in his tracks. He had a heart-sinking feeling that the parking meter to his immediate left had just spoken to him; it was either that or the voice of conscience, and there were lots of reasons why it wasn’t the latter. He swallowed hard and turned ninety degrees.

‘You talking to me?’ he asked the parking meter.

‘Why don’t you pick on someone your own size, you big bully?’ replied the parking meter. ‘Never done you any harm, that watch, and you just stove its bleedin’ head in. How’d you like it if some great big bastard came and stood on your head just ‘cos you were trying to be friendly?’

In the circumstances, John Fingers II decided that a nonverbal response would be appropriate. Accordingly he unshipped his jemmy from the purpose-sewn inside pocket of his coat and dealt the parking meter three extremely sharp blows. Problem solved, apparently; no more voices inside his head. When he was satisfied that normality had been restored, he replaced the jemmy and walked on.

‘You’ll pay for that,’ muttered a traffic light.

‘We know where you live,’ added the Belisha beacon.

‘We know where your children go to school,’ added a phone box. ‘Or at least,’ it added, ‘we know where they used to go to school, before they burnt it down …’

‘Burnt it down?

‘Well,’ admitted the phone box, ‘nothing was ever proved, but they’ve got a pretty good idea it was the Smith boys.’

‘Hell’s bells,’ the Belisha beacon muttered. ‘Whole family’s a gang of hooligans, then.’

‘Scum of the earth,’ muttered a parked car. ‘Ought to be run out of town, the lot of’em.’

‘Hey!’ John Fingers II protested. There was a cold silence.

‘Well?’ said the clock over Gale & Sons, Jewellers (Estd. 1908. Robbed by the Smith family 1909, 1912, 1919, 1927, 1932 (twice), 1936, 1939, 1948, 1961, 1974 and 1977).

‘What’s going on? I mean, is this for real, or what?’ John Fingers II wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Are you things really - talking?’

‘What if we are? You never heard a speaking clock before?’

‘Yes, but…’

‘Which reminds me. In 1948 your father nicked my ornamental bracket. I want it back.’

‘Yes,’ John Fingers II repeated, ‘but how?’

Silence. ‘You mean you don’t know?’ said the traffic light, incredulously.

‘He doesn’t know,’ said the car.

‘What a pillock!’

‘They’re all pillocks in that family,’ commented the clock. ‘When his great-grandad robbed this shop in 1912 …’

‘Stan Smith who used to live in Inkerman Street?’ queried the phone box. ‘Thick as potato soup, that bugger was. I remember one time …’

‘Shut up!’ John Fingers II shrieked, and his voice rattled conspicuously in the empty street. ‘That’s better,’ he added. ‘You, the red square bugger. How come I can understand what you’re saying?’

The things sniggered. It was only when John Fingers II got his jemmy out again and started patting it against the palm of his left hand that the phone box answered him.

‘The ring, stupid,’ it said. ‘Silver ring, bit of glass stuck in it, you’re wearing it right now’

‘Fine.’ John Fingers II jerked open the phone box door, stepped inside and put both hands lightly round the cable connecting the cradle to the receiver. ‘Now then, tell me all about it.’

Had John Fingers II been standing just inside the door of Ali Baba’s surgery, instead of inside a phone box half a mile away, he’d have heard the singularly unpleasant and distressing shriek of a lock being picked. It was probably just as well that he wasn’t, or he’d have been unable to sleep for a month.

Locks, when you think about it, have either a very nasty or a very nice life, depending on their mechanical orientation. Either they hunch rigidly in the doorframe with their wards gritted and think of England, or they go with the flow and relish every moment of it. Even the kinkiest lock, however – a triple-deadlocked Chubb, for example, or the Marquis de Ingersoll - could never pretend to enjoy being picked, even by a master cracksman with the most finely honed Swiss-made picklocks. All that Akram the Terrible knew about the art was what he’d learned from a quarter of an hour with a book from the mobile library. He could count himself lucky he wasn’t wearing the ring, either.

‘Right,’ said Akram, ‘we’re in. Where did you say this safe is?’

‘This way.’ Fang fluttered through the dark air like a very cheap, damp firework. She couldn’t exactly hear locks, but on some plane or other she was sensitive to the vibes in a way that no human could ever be; in the same way, perhaps, that horses are supposed to refuse to pass the place where a murder has happened. She had put it on record that she’d wanted to come in through the window.

‘Just a minute,’ Akram said, shortly afterwards. ‘I may be being a bit thick here. I hope I’m being a bit thick, because if I find out you’ve brought me out here in the middle of the night to steal dental floss and denture moulding compound, I’m going to pull your wings off with a pair of rusty pliers.’

‘Under the floorboards,’ Fang snarled. ‘It’s his safe.’

Muttering something about a ruddy funny place to hide supposedly cosmos-overturning artefacts, Akram got down on his hands and knees, inserted his jemmy and pulled. Because Akram was tall, barrel-chested and very, very strong, the jemmy snapped.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Right, I take your point. These floorboards aren’t just to keep you from putting your foot through downstairs’ ceiling, are they?’

Fang shook her head. ‘If you’d been listening,’ she said, ‘you’d have realised that. Serves you right if you’ve pulled a muscle.’

‘It’s some sort of hex, isn’t it? Magic, all that crap.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you know the key, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re going to tell me what it is?’

‘Possibly.’

‘But first,’ Akram sighed, ‘you’re going to rub my nose in it because I was rude and snotty and didn’t listen when you told me all about it.’

‘Of course not.’ Fang scowled. ‘That’d be childish. All you’ve got to say is the magic word.’

‘If I knew the magic bloody word, I wouldn’t be crawling to you, you overgrown gnat.’

‘Not that magic word. The magic word.’

‘Oh for crying out —’ Akram paused. ‘Please?’

‘That’s better. Actually,’ she added, ‘it’s not that difficult to guess. In context, that is.’

A look of pain flitted across Akram’s face. ‘Oh come on,’ he said. ‘You’re not trying to tell me —?’

Fang nodded.

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘Dear God.’ Akram rocked back on his heels and took a deep breath. ‘Open Sesame,’ he said.

The floorboard slowly rose. Underneath it was a plain cardboard box, wrapped in brown paper and lashed up with Sellotape where it had recently been opened. Akram, however, could feel the intensity of the thing. It was as if a Mancunian who’d spent the last fifty years as a restaurant critic in Languedoc had wandered into a little cafe and unexpectedly found steak and kidney pudding, chips and peas on the menu. It was the kind of homesickness that makes you realise just how sickening home really is.

‘Marvellous,’ Akram muttered, making no move to touch the box. ‘Now what the hell am I supposed to do?’

‘Steal it.’

Akram nodded slowly. ‘I have this depressing feeling you’re right,’ he replied.

‘Why depressing?’ the tooth fairy demanded. ‘For pity’s sake, if that’s what I think it is, it’s the single most valuable object in this whole solar system. God only knows what the Americans’d give you for it. Kansas, probably.’

‘I know exactly what it is,’ Akram replied. ‘Look, let me try to explain. Does the expression fairytale ending mean anything to you?’

Fang nodded. ‘Extreme good fortune, followed by a happy ending, happily ever after, C-in-a circle The Walt Disney Company, followed by a date.’

‘Exactly.’ Akram nodded emphatically. ‘Things like this just don’t happen in real life, agreed?’

‘Well,’ replied Fang uncertainly. ‘Not often, anyway.’

‘About as often as fourteen pigs playing aerial polo. In fairytales, however, it’s the norm, right? Happens all the time.’

‘So they tell me,’ the tooth fairy said. ‘Not that I’d know, having been stuck this side of the Line all my life. What of it?’

Akram sighed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Now, just suppose you were flying down the street and you came across a huge luminous plastic spaceship with little green men running up and down the gangplank and Alpha Centauri Spacecraft Corporation; Product of More Than One Constellation stencilled on the side. Maybe you’d think, Hey, what’s this doing here? And maybe you’d guess that the aliens had landed. Yes?’

‘Conceivably,’ Fang conceded. ‘So?’

Akram pointed to the parcel. ‘This thing’s from the other side of the Line,’ he said. ‘So’s the happy ending that comes with it. I’ve just escaped from there. When you’ve just broken out of Colditz and you’re buying a train ticket to Geneva, you don’t ask for a return. As far as I’m concerned, this has all been too easy. That thing’s an obvious plant.’

‘No it isn’t,’ Fang objected. ‘If it was, it’d have leaves and a stalk and …’

‘Be quiet. If I open that,’ Akram continued, as much to himself as to Fang, ‘it’ll mean I’m back in the story. Every day for the rest of my life I’ll have a page number in the top left-hand corner.’

Fang bit her lip. Maybe the glamour of the parcel was starting to affect her, or maybe she was just curious. ‘Open it,’ she said. ‘Go on. Just having a look won’t commit you to anything.’

‘Balls.’

‘You know you want to really.’

‘Go away.’

‘Just a little peep,’ whispered Fang, ‘can’t do any harm.’

‘Drop dead,’ Akram replied, opening his penknife and cutting the Sellotape. ‘Opening this would be an awfully big mistake, you mark my words.’

Fang frowned. ‘Don’t you mean adventure?’ she queried.

‘As far as I’m concerned, it’s the same thing.’ He slit the last loop of tape, folded back the cardboard, reached in and lifted out a plain earthenware jar.

‘I see,’ said Fang after a moment’s silence. ‘A potted plant..’

Akram didn’t reply. He was staring at the lid of the jar. I could open it, he told himself. And then, either whatever’s in there will come out, or I’ll go in, and in the long run it’ll amount to the same thing. He screwed his eyes tight shut and said aloud, ‘I wish this thing would go away.’ When he opened them again, it was still there. Which meant that he didn’t have any of the Godfather’s three wishes left. Which meant he’d used them. Something, he told himself, like using the atomic bomb; at first it seems to solve all sorts of problems, and then, some time later, you begin to think that on balance it’d have been rather better if maybe you hadn’t.