by Tom Holt
But just suppose they’re right; or, to be exact, not conclusively wrong. Suppose, when you fall asleep and your soul takes leave of your body for a while, you turn left out of your skull instead of right and find yourself on the other side of the looking-glass, or inside the picture on the wall. Just suppose; or, put it another way, make believe.
‘Oh,’ said Akram. He was fast asleep, dead to the world. Put a hot iron on his stomach and he wouldn’t even flinch.
He was also sitting up rubbing his eyes, and realising that the man in the white coat leaning over his physical body with a small, sharp knife in his hand was Ali Baba, the palm-oil merchant. He shut his eyes, cringed and muttered Fuck, fuck, fuck! under his breath. It was one of those moments.
Maybe, whispered the eternal optimist within him, the bastard hasn’t seen me, and if I’m really quiet I can just sneak back and hide inside this tall, bearded geezer who would appear in some respects to be me. Gently does it…
Akram’s astral body knocked over the glass of nice pink water. There was a musical tinkle, like the first laugh of a baby that brings a new fairy into the world, and Akram froze.
‘Oh for pity’s sake,’ said Ali Baba. ‘It’s you.’
There was no obvious reply to that; and for ten seconds, Neverland Mean Time, they just stared at each other, while the nice pink water seeped into the carpet.
‘Damn,’ said Akram.
Ali Baba’s fingers were holding the scalpel rather tightly. ‘Of all the chairs,’ he said slowly, ‘in all the dentist’s surgeries in all the world, why did he have to come into mine? This is …’
‘Quite,’ Akram replied. ‘Though I don’t really know what you’ve got to complain about, since you’re not the one whose sworn enemy’s standing over him with a sharp instrument.’
‘Sharp instr’ The clatter of dropping pennies was almost audible. ‘So I am,’ said Ali Baba slowly. ‘Do you know, if you hadn’t pointed it out, I might never have thought of it. Now then, this may hurt quite a lot.’
With great precision he laid the sharp edge of the scalpel against Akram’s jugular vein, took a deep breath and let it go again.
‘Well go on, then,’ Akram snapped. ‘Sooner you do it, the sooner I get back to my nice warm oil-jar. I suppose. In any case, stop pratting about and get on with it.’
Ali Baba frowned. His hand was as still as Akram’s body. ‘I’m not sure about this,’ he said. ‘Slitting a defenceless man’s throat while he’s asleep. More in your line of country, I’d have thought.’
‘Want to change places? I’m game.’
‘No.’ Ali Baba shook his head. ‘Thanks all the same, but that wouldn’t be right either. Mind you,’ he added, scratching his ear with his left hand, ‘I don’t know why I’ve come over all indecisive and Hamlety all of a sudden. After all, last time I saw you I was dead set on scalding you to death in a whacking great pot. Without anaesthetic,’ he added, shuddering slightly. ‘Maybe the tooth business has turned me soft in my old age.’
‘That’ll be right,’ Akram sneered. ‘Strikes me you’re ideally suited to a career in which you spend all day inflicting pain on helpless people cowering before you. You bastard,’ he went on, with considerable feeling, ‘what the hell harm did I ever do you? I mean you personally? Sure, I did a lot of antisocial things, a throat cut here, an entire household massacred there, but not to you.’
‘Not for want of trying,’ interrupted Ali Baba gently.
‘Only after you’d ripped me off,’ Akram snapped. ‘Broken into my place, swiped my pension fund, nicked my life’s savings, made me look a complete and utter prawn in front of the whole profession. You’ve got to admit, a man might be expected to get a trifle vexed. And then, when I try and even the score up a bit, you dowse me down with boiling water as if I was an ants’ nest or something. So please, we’ll have a little bit less of it from you, if you don’t mind.’
‘Ah,’ said Ali Baba, without moving. ‘But you’re the villain.’
‘Bigot.’
‘Not up to me, is it?’ Ali Baba shook his head. ‘It’s just the way it is. Me goody, you baddy. And now,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘presumably you’ve come after me all this way just to get your revenge, and what happens? Old Mister Fate plonks you down helpless and immobilised in my dentist’s chair while I stand over you with a knife. I think that may well constitute a strong hint.’
“Snot fair,’ Akram growled. ‘I never had the advantages you had.’
‘Advantages?’
‘Too bloody right, advantages. Took me twenty years hard graft to get that hoard together. You come along, just happen to overhear the password, and bingo! You’re incredibly rich. And then, whenever it comes to a fight, there’s the Story creeping up behind me with half a brick in a sock, waiting to bash my skull in as soon as my back’s turned. I don’t mind people being born with a silver spoon in their mouths, but I do resent it when it’s my ruddy spoon.’
‘Which you stole from its rightful owner.’
‘All right.’ Akram scowled. ‘So it might not be mine. Sure as hell wasn’t yours. But even that I wouldn’t mind so much if on top of all that, you weren’t the bastarding hero. As far as I’m concerned, that really is the limit.’
Ali Baba sighed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What would you do if you were me? Come on, if you’re so clever.’
The words crumpled on Akram’s lips and he was silent for a comparatively long time. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied at last. ‘That’s a trick question, that is, because I’m a villain.’
‘You’re a trained throat-cutter.’
‘City and Guilds,’ Akram confirmed. ‘And I assume you also have some piece of paper with a seal on it that authorises you to cut bits off people. What’s that got to do with anything?’
Suddenly Ali Baba smiled. When expatriates meet in a strange land, there’s always a bond between them, no matter how incompatible they are in all other respects. ‘Looks like we’re stuck,’ he said, slowly and deliberately placing the scalpel into the steriliser.
‘Stuck?’
Ali Baba nodded. ‘Something somewhere’s gone wrong,’ he said.
Just then the intercom buzzed. For a moment, Ali Baba hadn’t the faintest idea what the noise could be; he whirled round, and his hand groped instinctively for the scalpel he’d just put down.
‘I think your receptionist wants a word with you,’ said Akram scornfully.
‘You’re quite right. Hello? I’m still engaged with Mr …’ He turned back and whispered, ‘Remind me. What’s your name supposed to be?’
‘Smith.’
‘Smith!’
Akram grimaced. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘she took me by surprise.’
‘Sorry to bother you,’ quacked the receptionist’s voice. ‘Just to let you know Miss Partridge is here, and can you fit her in? The filling’s worked loose and there’s some discomfort.’
Ali Baba nodded. ‘Tell her that’s fine. Anybody waiting?’
‘No, your twelve o’clock rang in to cancel, so you’re clear through to half past.’
‘Much obliged.’ He flipped the switch, then turned back to the paralysed body and the floating soul in his chair. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said.
‘Not at all,’ Akram replied petulantly. ‘Good of you to fit in slitting my throat for me at such short notice. Next time you kill me - I have this terrible, inevitable feeling that there will be a next time - I’ll try and remember to make an appointment.’
‘Look.’ Ali Baba was speaking in a we’re-both-reasonablepeople-we-can-talk-this-through voice that, in context, Akram found downright insulting. ‘Let’s see if we can’t get this mess sorted out. Just you and me, and the hell with the story. You on?’
‘Gosh,’ Akram replied, staring pointedly at the scalpel still in Ali Baba’s hand, ‘I’m so bewilderingly spoilt for choice, how can I possibly decide? Go on, then, let’s hear it.’
Ali Baba perched on the radiator, put the scalpel down within easy reach and
folded his arms. ‘The way I see it,’ he said, ‘is like this. I’m a hero, right?’
‘If the word can encompass people who rob other people blind, try and kill them and then run away, then yes, no question. So?’
‘And you’re a villain.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Well, then.’ Ali Baba spread his hands in a bewildered gesture. ‘Someone has blundered. Because here I am, supposed to be cutting your jolly old throat, when throat-cutting is your job. And there’s you, at my mercy, trying to use your wits to talk me out of killing you, which is hero stuff. It’s all back to front. If I kill you and you die, we’ll both be hopelessly out of character.’
‘That,’ remarked Akram, ‘will probably be the least of my problems.’
‘Now then,’ Ali Baba resumed. ‘What about this? I let you go -‘
‘Hey! Why didn’t I think of that?’
‘ In return for your word of honour that you’ll pack in trying to kill me and toddle off back to where you belong. Problem solved. What d’you reckon?’ Akram felt his throat become dry. ‘When you say word of honour…’
‘As in honour among thieves,’ Ali Baba went on, smiling brightly. ‘Because everybody knows that the word of Akram the Terrible is his bond. Akram the Terrible could no more welch on his word of honour than fly in the air. When did Akram ever break his word? Never. Everybody knows that, it’s all to do with respect and stuff. So you see, that way I’d be far safer than if I actually did cut your throat.’
‘Now just a minute …’
‘The more I think about it,’ Ali Baba said, sliding off the radiator and walking excitedly around the room, ‘the better it gets. We’d both still be in character, you see. I’d be being magnanimous and merciful, which is ever so Hero, much more so than just silly old winning. Any old fool can win’
‘Except me, apparently.’ ‘But it takes a hero to win properly. Okay, that’s fine. And you’ll still be in character, because your really high-class bespoke villains always keep their word; you know, the old twisted nobility thing. Then I don’t have to spend all weekend scrubbing blood out of my carpet, you get to give up this pestilential vendetta thing - I’m sure it must be costing you a fortune, all the time spent chasing after me when you could be out thieving - and go quietly home, where you’
‘No!’ Akram’s expression conveyed the intensity of his agitation. ‘Not back there. Think about it, man. If I go back and you stay here, what happens to the story? You can’t have Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves without Ali Baba. The story’d just stop, and that’d be the end of me. If you make me go back, it’d be just as final as killing me now. More so, in fact, because then I’d never have existed in the first place.’
‘True.’ Ali Baba nodded gravely. ‘So what were you planning on doing? Defecting? Claiming narrative asylum?’
‘Call it whatever you like,’ Akram said. ‘Just so long as you don’t send me back. Deal?’
‘But you’ll promise not to try and kill me, ever again?’
‘You strike a hard bargain, you do.’ Akram looked from the scalpel to his immobilised body, and then back again. ‘Actually, you’d have made a good villain. You’ve got that cold, hard streak.’ Not to mention, he added under his breath, that basic ill-fated gullibility that makes a man who’s got his mortal enemy helpless at knifepoint insist on some absurdly overelaborate means of execution, involving candles burning through ropes, underground cellars slowly filling with water and girls tied to railway lines, which is tantamount to turning the bugger loose and saying, ‘See you next episode.’
‘Thank you,’ Ali Baba replied, evidently flattered. ‘I think you’d have made a good hero, not that there’s any other sort, but you know what I mean. It’s the way apparently insoluble moral dilemmas follow you around as if they were Mary’s lamb.’
Akram shuddered. ‘Must be awful, that. I expect you can’t go into a shop and buy a box of matches without first checking they were made from sustainable forests.’
‘That sort of thing. Right then. Do we have a deal?’
‘Suppose so.’ Akram cleared his throat. ‘Here goes, then. Hell, this is as bad as being back at school. I swear on my honour as a thief and a villain never to try and kill you again. Will that do, d’you think?’
‘Covers it pretty well. Better add actual bodily harm as well, just to be on the safe side.’
‘If you want. Here, you should have been a lawyer.’
‘That’s not a very clever thing to say to someone who’s still holding a knife on you. Just for that, we’ll add economic sanctions and reprisals against property. Okay?’
Akram shrugged. ‘If you insist. I’m sorry you’ve got such a low opinion of me that you see me as the sort of bloke who vents his wrath by chucking bricks through windows and letting tyres down.’
‘Just to be on the safe side.’
‘All right.’
There was a moment’s silence as the two opponents considered what they’d agreed. There was an absurd edge to it, Akram reflected, as if two duellists had flung away their swords in mid-fight and agreed to sort out their differences with best of three games of dominoes. But there was nothing frivolous about giving his word of honour. The bastard had been right on the money there. All in all, he felt like someone who’s hired a horsebox in order to go cattle-rustling in a muddy field, and ends up having to pay the farmer to pull him out with his tractor. If word of this ever reached home, he’d never be able to show his face there again.
‘That’s all right then,’ said Ali Baba, breathing a long, ostentatious sigh of relief. ‘I knew we’d get there in the end if we really set our minds to it. That just leaves the little matter of your iffy tooth.’ He picked up the scalpel and switched on the light. ‘You can have this on the house,’ he added, ‘as a sign there’s no hard feelings.’
‘Like a free alarm clock radio if I take out a policy within ten working days? What a generous man you are, to be sure.’
With that, Akram’s astral body made itself scarce, and spent the next quarter of an hour deliberately not watching what was happening to the old flesh and blood. Odd how some people are; Akram the Terrible habitually jeered in the face of death and laughed the swords of his enemies to scorn; but dentists’ drills and injections made him feel as if the bones of his legs had melted and seeped out through his toes.
Not long after Ali Baba had finished - a copybook extraction, needless to say, with the absolute minimum of hacking and slashing - the so-called Mr Smith woke up, groaned aloud and spat out a mouthful of blood and tooth debris. Ali Baba held his breath.
‘I eel ike I ust ent en ounds ith Ugar Ay Ennard,’ Akram mumbled, feeling his jaw with his hand. ‘At ad, as it?’
Ali Baba grinned and held up a pair of pliers, in which was gripped a thing like a badly peeled prawn. ‘If you don’t get at least one and six for this,’ he said, ‘your tooth fairy is ripping you off.’
Funny you should mention - ‘Anks ery uch, I’ll ear at in ind.’ He stood up, staggered and caught the back of the chair. ‘Ink I’ll o and it own in awr aiting oom, if at’s OK.’
‘Be my guest.’
When he’d gone Ali Baba sat down on the arm of the chair, closed his eyes and tried to lock and bolt the door against the memory of what had happened. Then he hit the intercom and sent for Miss Partridge.
Obviously, it was going to be one of those days; because she had pretty much the same problem with her junk tooth as Akram had. As he fitted the face mask over Michelle’s nose and turned on the gas, he decided that what he really wanted above all was for this day to end and be replaced by a nice straightforward one with no complications.
Hiss, went the gas, and the patient in the chair slumped into unconsciousness. Now then: seal
He turned, and stared. In the chair, sharing exactly the same space to the cubic millimetre, were not one but two bodies; one fast asleep, the other sitting bolt upright and gawping at him as if he was one of the dinosaur skeletons in the Natur
al History Museum.
‘Bugger me, I don’t believe it,’ he wailed. ‘Not another one.’
CHAPTER NINE
‘There’s a cat over there with boots on.’
It had been one of those days. ‘Pull the other one, Sadiq, it’s got ruddy bells on. Now, if you’ve quite’
‘Straight up, Skip, no bull. Look for yourself if you don’t believe me.’
What, Aziz asked himself, would the Guv’nor have done, had he been here? Silly question; if he’d been here, they’d be safely back on their own turf, where things like this didn’t happen and cats didn’t wear boots so much as have them thrown at them. But if he had been there, he’d have snapped something like ‘Silence in the ranks!’ and they’d all have shut up like ironmongers at 5.25 on a Saturday when you desperately need a new hacksaw blade. Either you’ve got it, Aziz admitted sadly to himself, or you haven’t, and he hadn’t. Slowly, he turned round.
‘All right, you lot,’ he said, after a while, ‘nobody said to stop marching. Haven’t you men ever seen a cat with boots on before?’
‘Actually, Skip, now you come to mention it, no.’
‘Well you have now. Come on, move it.’
For the record; the cat, seriously terrified by the sight of thirty-nine heavily armed men tramping straight towards it, abandoned its original plan of catching a brace of partridges with which to whet the appetite of the King and thus gain favour for his master, and scarpered. Being hampered by a pair of huge, unwieldy boots it tripped over, fell off a wall and broke its neck, leaving its master to fend for himself. The princess he should have married later eloped with a footman, who abandoned her, six months pregnant, when the King finally and irreversibly cut her out of his will. There had been quite a lot of that sort of thing going on lately, as a result of the intrusion of Aziz and his followers into stories where they had no place to be, and the consensus of opinion throughout Storybook land was that the stupid bastards should be hung up by the balls and left to die.