Open Sesame (27 page)

The situation at the start of Phase Four, as revealed by the newly restored light, is as follows:

Ali Baba, backed up against the wall, is trying to strangle Akram; who in turn is doing his best to pull away and, rather less successfully, breathe. As if he didn’t have enough to contend with, he’s now further hampered in his movements by an extremely boisterous and single-minded shadow, which couldn’t care less about breathing and is really only interested in inflicting mayhem on Ali Baba. Since Akram and his shadow only have the one pair of hands between them, this complicates matters no end. John Fingers, having contrived to soak himself from head to foot with boiling water from his own kettle, has fallen backwards over a small trestle table and knocked himself silly on the floor; in doing so dislodging a tooth, for which Fang is currently writing him out a receipt. Michelle is lying on the ground, not moving.

And … action.

Akram, scrambling to get a foothold, kicks Ali Baba’s gun across the floor. John Fingers, coming round and finding himself the apparent recipient of yet another unsolicited present from Destiny, grabs hold of it rather cack-handedly, presses the trigger, and sends a bullet neatly and fortuitously through the lightbulb. One immediate consequence of this is that Akram’s shadow promptly vanishes, leaving Akram free to punch Ali Baba scientifically on the point of the jaw, thereby knocking him out and simplifying the situation enormously in time for the beginning of Phase Five.

This is John Fingers’ Phase, so it’s appropriate to reflect that he has every reason to feel aggrieved and bewildered with the way things have been going. True, he’s up one gun (Browning M1910 seven-shot automatic, he instinctively noticed, street value no more than Ł150, if that) and a solid silver sixpence; but he’s been terrified, shot at or in the general direction of, facially edited to the extent of one upper front tooth, drenched in boiling water and stunned by a concrete floor. About the only part of him that doesn’t hurt is his hair and he’s standing, as far as he can tell, on a dead girl; not an agreeable situation for a man with seventeen previous convictions.

‘Well,’ said the gun. ‘Don’t just stand there.’

And a moment later, he wasn’t; because Michelle, whose skull had been grazed by the second bullet, woke up under his left foot, wriggled and screamed. That, as far as John Fingers was concerned, was about as much as he could reasonably be expected to take. He neither knew nor cared what was going on, provided it carried on doing it without him. He started to back off, only to find that again there was a wall tiresomely in the way.

There was also, he was annoyed to discover, a man advancing on him with a large adjustable spanner (seveneighths Bahco, nice bit of kit but still only a fiver, top whack, down the car boot sale) clutched in his large, powerful hand. Of course, he wasn’t to know that the man was Akram the Terrible, but he didn’t need an awful lot of background information to work out that the spanner wasn’t intended to be used for tightening nuts, unless of course they were his.

‘Stay where you are,’ he said, pointing the gun at Michelle’s head, ‘or the girl…’

‘Skip? You in there, Skip?’ Aziz’s voice, outside in the yard. Both men heard it, recognised it and felt an immediate surge of relief.

‘Yes,’ they said.

The phoenix rose into the night sky, wings whirring, tail streaming behind it like a Chinese New Year dragon. Its brain, roughly the size and density of a Land Rover engine, was disturbed by a whirlwind of conflicting messages, until it resembled nothing so much as a vigorously shaken snowstorm paperweight. A dominant theme was fear; bright lights, noises, bangs - far back in its profoundly confused genetic matrix there were pheasant genes, and the sound of gunfire acted directly on the wing muscles, bypassing the usual decisionmaking machinery entirely. Less urgent, but still influential, was the feeling that running away at the first hint of trouble was somehow conduct unbecoming, and any self-respecting fabulous beast would at least have hung around long enough to find out what was going on and whether the general trend of the narrative made it likely that it’d be needed. Having it away on its wingtips was more chicken than phoenix, it couldn’t help thinking; and headless chicken at that. Without realising it, the giant bird halved its airspeed and let up a little on adrenaline production.

The mental debate moved up a gear, the main issue being revealed as self-preservation versus loyalty. The latter concept wasn’t a familiar one; when phoenixes stand by their man, it’s generally to make it easier to get their claws into his neck. On the other hand, they are honourable beasts, as befits their pedigree and status within the avian kingdom. It had responsibilities to Akram; it had sheltered under his roof and eaten his birdseed. This was, it felt, just the kind of situation where the advice of an older, wiser phoenix would have been extremely helpful. Since it was by definition the oldest and wisest phoenix around, however, as well as the youngest and doziest, it was on is own. Oh well. ‘Bugger,’ it said. It had slowed down so much that it either had to accelerate or turn. Without really understanding why, it turned.

‘Skip?’

Aziz was looking at two men. They were both tall, dark, lean, broad-shouldered, with curly black hair, pointed beards and regulation coal-black eyes. There the resemblance ended.

The problem was that neither of them actually looked very much like Akram, the way Aziz remembered him; except that, when it came to the crunch, he found he couldn’t remember all that clearly what Akram did look like. Well yes, he was tall, dark, lean, broad, curly, pointed and coal-eyed. So were twenty-seven of the thirty-nine thieves. So, when the occasion demanded, was Douglas Fairbanks. Proves nothing. To make matters worse, they both sounded almost but not quite right, like Akram doing voice impressions with a handkerchief over his mouth. It wouldn’t have mattered all that much if they hadn’t both been ordering him to do contradictory things.

‘Skip?’ he repeated. ‘Here, what’s going—?’

He wasn’t allowed to finish the question, because the air was suddenly full of the noise of sirens. The police, having heard no shots for over five minutes, had guessed that the combatants had sorted out their differences, and were moving in to arrest the survivors.

Being still relatively new to this side of the Line, Aziz didn’t actually know about policemen and sirens and flashing blue lights, but his profession had given him a pretty good set of instincts; good enough to convince him that the men in blue uniforms streaming in through the mangled gates probably weren’t autograph hunters. Reluctantly he decided that something had to be done and that he was still stuck with the horrible job of doing it.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘all of you. We’ll sort it out later.’

‘But…’

‘But…’

‘Move! The authority in his own voice amazed him, and for one moment he firmly believed that he was Akram, and had been all along. Interesting though the theory was, however, this was neither the time nor the place. ‘You lot,’ he ordered a random selection of thieves, ‘bring ‘em all. Follow me.’

‘Where to?’

It was a very good question, and Aziz hadn’t the faintest idea what the answer was. So he drew his scimitar, yelled, ‘Charge!’ at the top of his voice, and ran out into the yard to see what would happen.

In the event, it all seemed to work out rather well. The blue guys who probably weren’t autograph hunters started to run towards him, caught sight of the scimitar and appeared to think better of it, presumably remembering that they hadn’t been formally introduced and not wishing to commit a social faux pas. This left Aziz with a clear run to the big fifty-seater coach they’d all come in. Since the rest of the lads were following him, also waving their scimitars and shouting, Aziz came to the conclusion that for once, the flow was worth going with. Just to be on the safe side he uttered a bloodcurdling yell and brandished his sword even more flamboyantly, narrowly missing his own ear.

The moment when the last straggling thief scrambled aboard and pulled the door to after him was, however, the high water mark of the flow; after that, it started looking alarmingly like they were about to go with the ebb. The autograph-nothunters had blocked off the exit from the yard with two white cars and were shouting things through megaphones. As far as Aziz could tell, what they were actually saying was, ‘Ark wark fark argle wargle fargle,’ but you didn’t need a United Nations trained simultaneous translator in order to get the gist.

‘We all here?’ he demanded.

‘Yeah, Skip, I mean Guv.’

‘Anybody remember to bring the two scrappers? The girl and that bloke?’

‘Yeah, Guv. Oh, and by the way.’

‘What?’

‘That bloke,’ said Rustem, his face wallpapered from side to side with an idiot grin. ‘I think it’s Ali Baba.’

‘Fine,’ Aziz replied. ‘Why am I not surprised? Fuck it, we’ll sort it all out later. Right now—’ Right then, Ali Baba woke up.

He had been having a strange dream.

He dreamed that he was standing in front of the Godfather’s desk. Directly in front of him, cigar-smoking and ominously looming, was the Godfather himself. Sitting beside him, rather less congruously, was a stout woman in a yashmak. She appeared to be knitting a pair of socks.

‘Well?’ said the Godfather.

Ali Baba blinked. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘No offence and all that, but well what?’

‘Your wishes,’ the Godfather replied. ‘You got three of them, remember.’

‘Two,’ the stout woman interrupted. ‘He already used one.’

A pained expression flitted over the Godfather’s face. ‘You gotta excuse my wife,’ he said icily. ‘She ain’t got no manners, she don’t know how to behave in company. You got three wishes, and …’

‘Two. Getting across the Line and becoming a dentist was one wish. That leaves two.’

‘That wasn’t a wish, that was a separate deal,’ the Godfather snapped, restraining his rising annoyance King Canutefashion. ‘For that he gave us the ring, remember? So three.’

‘Two, because the stuff with the ring was just a cover. As soon as he was across we chucked it away.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Ali Baba. ‘I hate to interrupt, but could I just get this absolutely straight in my mind? You want me to use my three wishes now?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yes, but it’s two.’

‘Will you be quiet?’

‘I can be as quiet as a tiny bloody mouse and it still won’t alter the fact that it’s two wishes, not three. The trouble with some people is …’

The Godfather banged his fist on the table, dislodging a small china paperweight inscribed A Present From Palermo. It fell to the floor, rolled a little way and then, disconcertingly, vanished. He stood up, leaned across the desk until his chin was no more than six inches from the tip of Ali Baba’s nose, and smiled.

‘You know what they say,’ he said pleasantly, ‘about having dinner in a Sicilian restaurant? How when you’ve finished they don’t bring you a bill, but years later they come to you and ask you to do them a small favour? Well, Mister Baba, I hope you enjoyed your meal. Do we understand each other?’

‘Absolutely,’ Ali Baba replied, nodding enthusiastically. ‘Consider your drift definitively caught. But what do you want me to wish for?’

The Godfather grinned. ‘Any minute now,’ he said, ‘you gonna wake up. You gonna find yourself in a big yellow bus with thirty-nine thieves, Akram, your daughter and a guy called John Smith who I don’t think you know. You shot at him, but you don’t know him. All round this bus, you gonna find armed police. I think you might wanna wish you was out of there. Am I right?’

‘That would certainly seem reasonable,’ Ali Baba agreed, ‘in the circumstances you describe. Please do go on.’

‘And then,’ the Godfather continued - he was so close now that Ali Baba could plainly see his rather second-rate bridgework; somehow, that made him feel better. ‘Then you gonna find that Akram’s gotta sword, the thirty-nine thieves all got swords, John Smith’s gotta gun, and you ain’t got nothing except maybe the courage of your convictions. I figure maybe you gonna wish the ironmongery was a bit more evenly distributed.’

‘Quite.’

‘But,’ the Godfather continued, ‘that still ain’t gonna solve all your problems, because until Akram’s dead and all his men, and you and your daughter are far away where you’re gonna prove very hard to catch, you won’t never be sure they ain’t gonna show up all over again. But on that side of the Line —’ There was, Ali Baba observed, an infinity of disgust packed into the little word that. Significant, he felt. ‘On that side of the Line, if you go killing guys all over the place, you gonna make yourself very conspicuous, and you don’t want that. So I’m figuring, maybe you’ll wanna come back here, where you belong, where all your friends are. After all,’ he added, with an expansive gesture that entirely failed to inspire confidence, ‘you only skipped out to escape from Akram and his boys, so if they’re all dead, you can come home. Now, what could be better than wishing to come home?’

‘Ah,’ Ali Baba said. ‘I see.’

‘That’s three,’ said the stout woman. ‘He’s only got two.’

For a second or so, Ali Baba was convinced the Godfather was about to explode. It was gruesomely fascinating, watching him consciously, deliberately stopping himself from being angry. It was rather like watching a film of a fire in an oil refinery being played through the projector backwards. It’d be even more interesting to watch from five hundred yards away through a powerful telescope, of course, because then he could concentrate properly without the distraction of extreme fear.

‘He’s got three,’ the Godfather said. ‘You got that?’

‘Not that it matters much,’ the woman went on, ignoring him, ‘because you can easily run the first and third wish together and arrive at exactly the same result. I’d do that if I were you, and that’d put an end to all this silly bickering.’

‘Good idea,’ said the Godfather. He picked up a heavy marble ashtray in his left hand and squeezed it, reducing it to fine dust. ‘Why don’t we do just that?’

The phoenix banked, turned and dived. Far below there were lights, noises and scurrying humans. It fought down the instinctive rush of panic; it had already been a phoenix, a pheasant and a chicken. It had no desire to be a mouse as well.