Open Sesame (29 page)

‘No,’ Akram replied. ‘Are you?’

‘Do me a favour,’ the voice said. There was a shuffling movement behind the rocks, and a unicorn trotted into view. It was the size of a small Shetland pony, rice-pudding coloured and chewing something in a half-interested manner. If its voice was anything to go by, it had either been born in south London or spent a long time there. There was a whisky-bottle cork on the end of its horn.

Akram stared at it, and his jaw dropped to such an extent that a passing ant could have used it as a staircase to get to his moustache. ‘Oh hell,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m back, aren’t I?’

‘Don’t ask me, mate. All depends,’ it added, ‘on where you just been. So, if this isn’t your mess, whose is it?’

Akram shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘Last thing I knew, I was in a coach being carried by a huge bird, somewhere over Southampton. Then there’s a bit I seem to have missed, after which I was wedged into the luggage compartment of that wreck over there. I was starting to think that perhaps things were getting a bit weird, but if I’m back in some blasted story…’

Something caught his eye and he stopped speaking. Poking out from under the crumpled chassis were a pair of small, elegant ladies’ shoes, with brass buckles and buttons up the side. The unicorn was looking at them, too.

‘I got you,’ it said. ‘You were in this house in, where was it you said? Southampton?’

‘That’s right,’ Akram replied. ‘Actually, it wasn’t a house so much as a coach, but we’ll let that slide for the moment. The obvious question’s got to be, are there any tin men, lions, scarecrows, witches or yellow brick roads anywhere in these parts?’

‘No.’

‘Bright green cities? Munchkins? Insufferably cute nineyear-old girls from the American grain belt? Wizards?’

The unicorn shook its head. ‘Never seen any,’ it said. ‘You reckon you might have come down in the wrong place?’

‘Very possibly,’ Akram replied, taking another look at the immediate vicinity and shuddering a little. ‘Mind you, it’d take a pretty extreme set of circumstances for this to be the right place for anything. Has it got a name, by any chance?’

‘Home,’ the unicorn replied. ‘That’s what I call it, anyhow. And it may not be the garden of bloody Eden, but that still doesn’t mean it’s improved by having scrap metal scattered all over it. You planning to clear it up, or what?’

‘Not really,’ Akram said. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know whose shoes those are poking out from under there, would you?’

‘Not got a clue, mate.’ The unicorn thought for a moment, rubbing behind its ear with a raised foreleg. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, though. Last few weeks or so, everything’s been up the pictures a bit. Things drifting in that don’t fit, if you get my meaning. Like, a few hours before all this lot turned up, we had a bloke come through here wanting to know if I’d come across a ninety-foot-high beanstalk. Day before yesterday there was this bird drooping around asking if I’d seen her sheep. Two days before that, we had the King of Spain’s daughter asking which way to the little nut tree. And now,’ it added reproachfully, ‘you. I think something’s cocked up somewhere and they haven’t yet sussed out how to fix it.’ The unicorn hesitated, shuffled its hooves, looked the other way and cleared its throat. ‘Talking of which,’ it continued, with a trace of embarrassment, ‘you haven’t noticed any stray virgins wandering about the place, have you? It’s not for me, you understand, it’s for my friend…’

Akram and the unicorn looked at each other for a moment.

‘The shoes,’ they said in chorus.

‘Not,’ the unicorn added, as it braced itself against the remains of the coach and pushed, ‘that they’re what you’d call your typical virgin’s footwear. Too much heel, for a start. Your typical virgin’s more into the sensible, hard-wearing, valuefor-money ranges. Those or slingbacks. Ready?’

‘Ready.’

They heaved, and the charred bulk shifted. At the last moment Akram, rather to his own surprise, looked away. ‘Well?’ he said.

‘Well,’ the unicorn replied, “tisn’t a virgin, at any rate.’

‘Oh,’ said Akram. ‘How on earth can you tell?’

‘Because,’ the unicorn answered, ‘I don’t think that sort of thing, you know, applies to suitcases. I mean, where little suitcases come from is either a department store or a mail order catalogue. Must be dead boring, being a suitcase.’

They examined the remains.

‘Pretty extreme way of getting it to shut,’ the unicorn said.

‘Usually, just sitting on ‘em does the trick.’

‘Quite,’ Akram replied, puzzled. What had a suitcase full of female clothing been doing on the coach, he asked himself. It wasn’t Michelle’s, as far as he could judge, and he reckoned he knew the thirty-nine thieves well enough by now to rule them out, too. Which left Ali Baba, the interloper he’d had the fight with, or somebody else he hadn’t noticed. Or…

An icicle of guilt stabbed his heart. He’d forgotten…

‘Fang!’ he shouted. The unicorn looked at him.

‘What?’

‘Fang,’ Akram repeated. ‘My tooth fairy. Where the hell has she got to?’

No sooner had the words passed through the luggage carousel of his larynx than there was a flash of lightning, a shower of silver sparkles and a clap of melodious thunder; and —

Akram stared.

‘Fang?’

The tall, slender, gorgeous creature standing before him smiled and nodded. ‘You remembered,’ she said. ‘Eventually,’ she added. ‘I expect you’re a terror for forgetting birthdays, too.’

At this point the unicorn whistled, stepped forward, sniffed at her embarrassingly, shook its mane in disappointment and walked pointedly away, leaving Fang blushing furiously. Akram, meanwhile, managed to get his lower jaw back into place and made a vague gesture to suggest that Fang had grown a bit since he’d last seen her. ‘What happened to you, then?’ he said.

‘I crossed the Line, dumbo. Hey, I like it here, it’s got all sorts of possibilities. An elf can, you know, really walk tall on this side.’

Akram frowned. ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘But before that. The last I saw of you was when we were…’

‘Why have you parked your bus on my suitcase?’

‘ Your suitcase?’ Akram quickly stooped down. Sure enough, the sponge bag was full of… He zipped it up again, quickly.

‘At last,’ Fang was saying, ‘I can cash that lot in. I got the address of a tooth broker over in the Emerald City who pays top dollar for quality stuff.’

‘The last time I saw you,’ Akram persevered, ‘you were with that loser Baba. He captured you, right? And I didn’t rescue you,’ he added.

Fang shrugged. ‘Actually, he’s not so bad. Professionally, of course, he’s a pretty useful contact. And anyway, it’s me owes you the apology, since I did sort of lead him straight to where you were hiding out.’

‘Ah.’

‘But,’ Fang went on, ‘that’s all right, too, because when the jet fighters from the family planning service blasted the coach to bits, I grabbed you and put you in the luggage compartment where I knew you’d be safe. That,’ she added meaningfully, ‘was before I knew you’d parked the damn thing on top of my suitcase.’

‘That was you?’

Fang nodded. ‘Talk about difficult,’ she said, with feeling. ‘Not you two; that blasted girl of yours. Must be because she’s half-human. She took a real crack on the head when the bus landed; for a minute there I thought she’d had her chips.’

‘Us two?’

‘In the end I had to clap my hands and yell, “I do believe in mortals,” at the top of my voice. You can’t begin to imagine how conspicuous that makes you feel.’

‘Us two?’

‘Um.’ Fang put her hands behind her back and looked away. ‘Yup. You and the, er, dentist.’

‘You mean to tell me you saved that bastard?’

Fang nodded. ‘For you,’ she said quickly. ‘Last thing you’d want, I’d have thought, is for him to slip through your fingers by dying before you could…’

‘Oh, right,’ Akram interrupted, scowling. ‘I’m sure that’s exactly how it was. And no teeth changed hands at any stage, needless to say.’

‘No they didn’t,’ Fang replied angrily. ‘Wasn’t time, for one thing. You reckon it’s easy grabbing hold of two grown men and shoving them in luggage holds in the time it takes for a jet fighter to fire a rocket? Try it sometime and see.’

‘Luggage hold.’

‘The other one,’ Fang explained. ‘On the other side of the coach.’

Akram nodded, and a smile started to seep through onto his face. ‘So with any luck,’ he said, ‘the bugger might still be there. Unconscious.’

‘No, he isn’t.’

Akram whirled round, to see Ali Baba standing directly behind him. In one hand he had the gun, and in the other a galvanised iron bucket, from which steam was rising.

Cue past life.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

‘Hello,’ Akram said.

A wry smile shuffled across Ali Baba’s face. ‘To put it mildly,’ he replied. ‘Now then, let’s get this over and done with before the water gets cold.’

Dragging his attention back from a particularly vivid reprise of a certain night at Farouk’s in Samarkand (he never could remember her name and the flashback always petered out round about the fourth veil; even so, it was probably his favourite bit), Akram raised his hands slowly into the air.

‘Where’s Michelle?’ he asked.

Ali Baba shrugged. ‘Safe, I hope. I think she must have made a run for it, because the thief chap seemed to be looking for her when I crept up and bashed him. I’ll go and look for her after I’ve dealt with you.’

‘You feel that’s necessary, do you?’

Ali Baba nodded. ‘Since we’re back on this side of the Line again, and since I have you defenceless and at my mercy, I think it might be a good idea. Now, are you going to hold still while I pour this lot over you, or do I have to kneecap you first?’

A series of lightning-fast calculations, involving the distance to the nearest cover, ditto between Ali Baba and himself, the probability (to three decimal places) of not getting shot if he made a break for it and sundry other relevant factors, flitted through Akram’s mind. To give the program time to run, he temporised. ‘Seems to me,’ he said, ‘you had all those that time I came to see you about my teeth. Why didn’t you do it then?’

Ali Baba shrugged. ‘That was over there,’ he replied, ‘here’s here. Back flipside, I’m a peace-loving humanitarian dentist whose life is devoted to curing pain rather than inflicting it which, I might add, is what I’d rather do, if it was up to me. But it isn’t. On this side I’m the instant-dead-bandit-just-addboiling-water man, and that’s all there is to it. I guess a stereotype’s gotta do what a stereotype’s gotta do. By the way, if you think you can get out of it by keeping me talking till the water cools down, forget it, because I’d just as soon shoot you through the head as boil you. Ready?’

He raised the gun, and then lowered it again. ‘Do you mind?’ he said irritably. ‘I’m trying to kill someone here.’

‘Tough,’ replied Fang, who was now standing directly in front of Akram. ‘Go pick on someone your own size.’

Ali Baba made a few mental measurements. ‘You, for instance,’ he suggested. ‘If you insist, I’m quite happy to blow you away too, because all I’ve got to do is clap and you’ll come back to life. Nice try, all the same.’ He frowned and looked down at the gun. ‘Yes, all right, I’m being as quick as I can. Just try and be patient, will you?’

‘I see you got the ring back, then.’

‘Yes, and don’t change the subject.’ He put down the bucket and assumed a tidy two-handed grip on the gun. ‘Like that? Left hand a bit further forward? God, you’re fussy. And no, I don’t give a damn if it does tickle.’

‘It’s all right, Fang,’ said Akram. He was trying very, very hard not to look directly over Ali Baba’s left shoulder. ‘You stay out of this. It’s a very brave thing you’re doing, but…’

Fang was now also not looking in the same direction. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Well, so long. It was really nice knowing you. Thanks for the shoebox.’

‘You’re welcome. It was a pleasure.’

‘On the count of three,’ Ali Baba said, taking aim. ‘Ready or not.’

A slight buzz of panic threatened to cloud Akram’s mind but he fought it back. ‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘That root fill you did for me.’

‘Bit academic now.’

‘I realise that. But I thought I’d mention it anyway. It’s been giving me rather a lot of gyp lately.’

‘It can’t do,’ Ali Baba said, his brow furrowing. ‘I removed the nerve, there’s nothing left in there to hurt. You must be imagining it.’

Akram shrugged. ‘If only,’ he said. ‘But, like you say, that’s neither here nor there. It’s lucky for you I’ll be dead in three seconds, isn’t it? Otherwise you’d have had to go back in and sort it all out.’

‘It was a perfectly good job,’ Ali Baba retorted. ‘I can’t help it if you’ve got an unusually vivid imag—’

He didn’t complete the word because, at that precise moment, Michelle crept up the last eighteen inches, grabbed the bucket and emptied it over his head. The gun, muttering something about if you want a job doing properly, fired two shots, but Ali Baba’s hands were flailing wildly about, and all he managed to do was scare off the unicorn; which, after a perfunctory sniff at Michelle, was about to leave anyway.

‘Kill him!’ Fang shouted. ‘Go on, get the gun, and —’

‘No.’ Akram, having relieved Ali Baba of the pistol, put on the safety and dropped it into his pocket. Since he didn’t have the ring, he was spared the gun’s views on recent events, which was probably just as well.

‘Everybody finished?’ said Michelle, standing in front of her father and folding her arms in what Akram mentally categorised as a what-time-do-you-call-this manner. ‘Splendid. By the way,’ she added, taking a long look at Fang, ‘who’s your girlfriend?’

Akram sighed, sat down on a rock and cupped his chin in his hands. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ muttered the Godfather unpleasantly. ‘But not long enough.’

‘Don’t be so impatient,’ replied his wife. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’

‘Aziz.’

‘Yeah?’

‘We’ve forgotten something.’

‘Yeah? What?’

‘The Skip, for one.’

‘Or rather, two,’ added a thief, using his fingers as a makeshift abacus. ‘Akram and the new bloke.’