Open Sesame (34 page)

Fortunately, at least as far as the thieves were concerned, the Palace Guard had far more sense than to get in the way of a thousand and a half foul-tempered ships of the desert and contented themselves with arresting any market traders who stayed still long enough for obstruction, littering the pavement and a variety of quite imaginative public order offences. Once the people had fled or been removed, there were far fewer obstacles for the camels to bump into, and the guards finally managed to shoo them out of the main gate by the cunning expedient of setting fire to the dried fruit warehouse.

From then on, it should have been quite straightforward; but it wasn’t. Far from curbing their natural wanderlust, roping the camels together seemed to inspire them with a sense of purpose they would otherwise have lacked. Camels united, they seemed to say, can never be diverted. With a degree of precision you’d normally only expect from a regiment of soldiers or a top-flight flea-circus, the entire caravan took a sharp simultaneous left and headed off into the desert, in the general direction of Mongolia. Aziz, after waterskiing across the dunes behind the hindmost camel for half an hour or so, was on the point of cutting the rope and heading home with some fabrication about camels being temporarily out of stock and robbers waylaying them in a narrow pass somewhere when a wise thief suggested that they should try psychology.

It worked. As soon as the thieves galloped ahead of the procession and did everything they conceivably could to encourage them to follow the route they’d apparently chosen, all fifteen hundred of the loathsome beasts turned through a hundred and eighty degrees and started trudging back the way they’d just come. By dint of dragging on ropes, screaming abuse and trying with all their strength to pull their heads round, the thieves managed to keep the camels bang on course until they were safely penned up outside the entrance to their rocky fortress. Hence the old drovers’ saying, supposedly first coined on this occasion, that if you lead a camel away from water, you can make him drink.

‘Skip,’ Aziz called out. ‘Hey, Skip. We’ve got them. Do you want us to…?’

‘He’s not bloody well here,’ Rustem interrupted, returning from a fruitless search of the cave. ‘Buggered off somewhere with the prisoners, by the looks of it. Now what’ll we do?’

Aziz shrugged. ‘I think he wanted us to load up the treasure,’ he said. He sighed. No rest for the wicked.

‘What, all of it? There’s bloody tons of the stuff.’

‘Maybe that’s why he wanted all these camels,’ Aziz replied. ‘Look, I don’t know what he’s playing at, and neither do you. Don’t suppose we need to, either.’ He peered up towards the roof of the treasury; it looked for all the world like the mouth of a chocolate-loving giant, all huge gold teeth. ‘If we make a start now,’ he said, ‘we could be finished in a day or two.’

Rustem scowled. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but where’s he taking it? And where is he, come to that?’

‘Who knows?’ Aziz replied, with a fatalistic shrug. ‘Off enjoying himself, I s’pose.’

Aaaaaagh!

Whether he was falling or flying, flying or floating, floating or falling, John Fingers had no idea. Whatever it was, however, it was distinctly unpleasant, making him feel as if he was one of those newspaper photographs that turns out on close inspection to be nothing but a pattern of black dots; only in three, or four, or maybe even five dimensions. All in all, it was even nastier than a trip to the dentist’s, and he wished it would stop. Perhaps the most disconcerting part of the experience was the bland, bored speaking-clock-type voice he could hear in the back of his mind, endlessly bleating out lists of supermodels and famous actresses.

It had all started when the treasury door had burst open and his four prisoners had charged in waving weapons they’d found lying about in the corridors (that, as far as he could judge, was the thieves’ idea of chic interior design; where you or I would have plaster ducks, they had crossed scimitars and whacking great curvy knives) and insisting that he look in a mirror. Assuming that he had dandruff or something and that they were trying to persuade him to change his brand of shampoo, he’d humoured them; whereupon this strange and extremely unpleasant falling/flying/floating business had started, and here he apparently was. He had the impression that the contents of his stomach were offstage in some sort of parallel universe; probably just as well, or he’d have a weightless cloud of half-digested ravioli to cope with as well as everything else.

If ever I get out of this —

And then he landed, with a spine-jarring thump, in what looked and smelled uncommonly like an outsize flowerpot; one of those big red terracotta numbers they stock in the grander sorts of garden centre for Japanese millionaires to pot their bonzai giant redwoods into. After a moment or so devoted to recovering from the fall and swearing, he squirmed round, got his fingers over the rim of the pot and looked out.

He was in a kitchen.

A perfectly normal kitchen, goddamnit; with worktops and cupboards and a cooker and a fridge and a washing machine and a dishwasher and a deep fat fryer and a blender and a telephone and a fax/answering machine and a tumble drier and an electric kettle —

A familiar perfectly normal kitchen, one he’d been in quite recently. That wasn’t as much help as it might seem at first glance. In the course of his business he passed through a lot of kitchens, usually stealthily and by torchlight. After a while, though, they all start to look the same, whereas for some reason he distinctly remembered this one. Why?

Because, he realised, this is the flat where I stole that fucking sodding bloody ring, the one that caused all this…

As he looked round, he noticed that the kettle, standing on the worktop directly above his head, was just coming to the boil. It was balanced rather precariously on the edge; in fact, all it would take to dislodge it would be the disturbance caused by the steam charging about inside trying to find the exit. Our old friend Brownian motion, at it again.

He was in the act of reaching up to push it away or switch it off when he came to the conclusion that it was too late; the kettle had boiled, overbalanced and started to topple down onto him. A bloke could have a nasty accident —

Cue past life.

His boyhood. Playing tag in the dusty square. His father, coming home drunk. Stealing loose change from the jar by the fireside —

AND NOW —

Joining the gang of scruffy, good-for-nothing kids who were the despair and terror of the neighbourhood. Being the leader. Fighting the big, curly-haired boy, twice his size but slow and a coward at heart. The sheer pleasure of smelling fear on his opponent’s breath (hang on a second) before hitting him, again and again and again, with the stone that’d happened to find his outstretched hand—

BANDIT, MURDERER, THIEF—

Feeling the warmth of someone else’s blood on his skin; not unpleasant, quite the opposite. Looking up, to see the awe, the terror, the respect in the faces of the other kids. Learning, then and there, that in the final analysis, respect is everything (now just a minute), no matter what you have to do in order to earn it —

VOTED FIFTEEN YEARS IN SUCCESSION—

Running. Being hunted. Hearing the breathing of the men who were chasing him, five yards or so away in the darkness. Feeling his own heart actually stop; and then the sickening wave of relief (I don’t remember that) as they went away —

AKRAM THE TERRIBLE —

‘Jesus flaming Christ!’ John Fingers roared as the water hit him. ‘You stupid bastards, that wasn’t me! You’ve got the wrong —’

THIS WAS YOUR LIFE.

This is your life…

A young boy stands up in the middle of a ring of his peers. In his right hand he’s holding a bloodstained stone. At his feet, a dead body. Nobody speaks.

‘I…’

The boy closes his mouth again, and lets the stone drop. He notices that both his hands are red. The other boys start to back away.

‘Akram,’ one of them says, ‘I think you’ve killed him,’

I am not Akram, my name is John Fingers Smith and I demand to see the British consul. ‘I…’

Another boy snuggles back behind the shoulders of his fellows. ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ he says, pointing. ‘I saw him, he did it on purpose, I saw him do it.’

‘I…’ You bastards, what have you done to my body, give me my body back or I’ll wring your bloody necks.

‘Yes,’ says the boy, ‘I killed him. So what? Served him right.’

‘Akram…’

There’s no way, do you hear me, absolutely no way I’m going to stand for this, look, I’ve got rights, you just wait till London hears about this, you’ll have Stormin’ Norman and half a million tanks round your ears before you can say United Nations…

‘Run!’

But…

‘They’re coming! Quick, Akram, run!’

But it wasn’t me. I’ve been framed…

‘Run!’

Men appear in the distance, shouting and waving their arms. The boy looks round wildly. He stiffens, like a deer hearing a twig break.

I’ll get you for this, you scumbags. One of these days I’ll be back and I’ll bloody well get you…

The boy runs.

Fifteen hundred camels are a bloody nuisance. Fifteen hundred camels laden down with gold, silver, precious stones, lapis lazuli, freshwater pearls, works of art and limited edition collectors’ commemorative porcelain statuettes are about as much aggravation as it’s possible to get without standing in front of a registrar or minister of religion and saying, ‘I do.’

‘Yes,’ repeated Hakim for the fifteenth time, ‘but where are we actually going?’

Aziz, who’d been fending off this question with ‘It’s not far now’, ‘We’re on the right road’, ‘Shut your face’ and similar cunning evasions, finally broke down and admitted that he didn’t know.

‘You don’t know}’

‘That’s what I just said, isn’t it?’ Aziz snapped. ‘Weren’t you listening, or are the holes in the side of your head just for ventilation?’

A man of many faults, Hakim did at least have the virtue of persistence; except that in his case, it wasn’t a virtue. ‘You don’t know,’ he reiterated. ‘We load up all that gold and jewels and stuff and piss off into the desert and you don’t know where we’re going.’

‘Yes.’

‘I see.’ A look of indescribable deviousness dragged itself across Hakim’s face, stopping in the foothills of his nose for a rest. It was probably just as well that Hakim had never played poker; his thoughts were so perfectly mirrored in his face that if he ever did sit down to a friendly game of five-card stud, he’d have lost all his money before the seal was broken on the deck. ‘So Akram doesn’t know either,’ he continued. ‘Where we’re going, I mean.’

“Spose not. Why?’

‘We’re heading off into the wilderness with all the dosh, and Akram doesn’t know where we are.’

‘I said, yes. Now if you’ve…’ Slow, or rather glacier-like, on the uptake he might be; but when the penny finally dropped in Aziz’s mind, it did so with quite devastating force. Reining in his mule, and doing his best to ignore the camel that was apparendy trying to lick the wax off his eardrum, Aziz sat for a moment in a surmise so wild it’d have made stout Cortes look like a six-countries-in-four-days American tourist.

‘Are you suggesting,’ he muttered in a low voice, ‘that we sort of, walk off with it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good idea.’

Even as he said the words, Aziz was aware that he was guilty of an understatement on a par with referring to the First World War as a bit of a scrap. For years, a lifetime, far longer than any of them could remember, they’d been amassing this truly awesome hoard of pure wealth; and in all that time, nothing had ever been said about divvying up, sharing out or spending. The thought had never even crossed Aziz’s mind before, for much the same reason that elderly people in wheelchairs don’t try and cross the M6.

‘Hang on, though,’ objected a thief. ‘What about when Akram finds out? He’ll skin us alive.’

Hakim smirked. ‘If he finds out,’ he replied. ‘And if he catches up with us. And if the thirty-nine of us are ready to hold still and let ourselves be skinned by the one of him. Think about it,’ he urged. ‘All that gold and stuff, it’s wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. And a one-thirty-ninth share of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice is -‘ He paused, wrestling with the mental arithmetic. ‘Wealth beyond the dreams of eating cheese last thing at night,’ he concluded triumphantly. ‘Or, put it another way, loads of treasure. Right, then; show of hands?’

Not, you might think, the most democratic way for a thieves’ co-operative to vote in a country governed according to Islamic law; nevertheless, unanimous is unanimous. Admittedly, several of the voters were persuaded to join in the general hand-raising by the feel of sharp metal in the small of their backs; but friendly persuasion is what democracy’s all about.

‘Right,’ said Hakim, ‘that’s settled, then. Soon as we reach the next oasis we’ll have a share-out and work out what we’re going to do about splitting up. That all right with everyone?’

‘Okay,’ murmured the Godfather, ‘what’s the plan?’

Scheherezade, shivering perhaps a trifle more than the slight desert breeze justified, nodded her head. ‘Piece of cake, really,’ she replied. ‘We wait till they come past. Then I give the signal, you all jump out and scrag the lot of’em. Then—’

‘Jump outa what?’

That, as far as Scheherezade was concerned, was her cue. ‘I’ve already thought of that,’ she announced. ‘You see that big row of empty jars standing there beside the road?’

The Godfather nodded. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I think I’m way ahead of you already. Rocco, Tony, you get the guys and go climb into those jars there. I’ll come and join you in a minute.’

The Godfather’s grey-suited companions, who had been expecting at least one nasty brush with bandits and the like, let go a sigh of relief. This, they felt, was rather more like it. By a curious chance, there were thirty-nine of them. By an even odder chance, Scheherezade had laid on a total of forty palm-oil jars.

‘Okay,’ observed the Godfather. ‘Where you gonna hide, then?’

‘Me?’ Scheherezade went through a pantomime of thinking about it. ‘How about behind the tea urn?’ she suggested.