by Tom Holt
Inside, it was at least a little bit cooler. They walked up to the counter, flopped down onto barstools and ordered three quarts of goat’s milk and three club sandwiches. Ten minutes and a good deal of noise later, they were in a much better state to ask penetratingly shrewd questions.
‘Here, miss,’ said Aziz. ‘You seen Akram the Terrible round here lately?’
The barmaid - dear God, where did he find them? Under flat stones, probably - looked up from the glass she was polishing. ‘You just missed him,’ she said.
Hassan stood up at once and started for the door, but Aziz waved him back. He’d been in Jim’s before, and knew that Time here wasn’t only relative, it was third-cousin-twiceremoved. ‘How long since he was here?’ he asked.
The barmaid shrugged. ‘Couple of months, maybe three. He left with a bear.’ ^
Aziz managed to silence Farouk before he could ask with a bare what and get them all thrown out. ‘Oh yes?’ he replied, as nonchalantly as possible. To be painfully honest, Aziz was to nonchalance as a pterodactyl in Selfridges’ is to looking inconspicuous, but he gave it his best shot. ‘This bear,’ he added, ‘Wouldn’t happen to be in here, would he?’
The barmaid shook her head. ‘You just missed him,’ she replied.
‘Don’t tell me,’ muttered Aziz. ‘He left with Akram the Terrible, right?’
‘If you know, why ask?’
Aziz got up. ‘Not to worry,’ he sighed. ‘Look, if you see this bear, tell him we’d like a word, okay?’
‘Why not tell him yourself?’ the barmaid said. ‘I can tell you where to find him.’
In many lifetimes of violence and mayhem, Aziz had never hit a woman, mostly because they wouldn’t keep still; but he wasn’t one of those narrow-minded types who shrink away from new experiences. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘fine. Could you please tell me where …?’
The barmaid thought about it for a moment. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Go back out the way you came about seven leagues and you’ll come to a big forest, right? Take the main road, then second on your left, third right past the charcoal burner’s, then follow your nose and you’ll come to a little cottage.’
Aziz squirmed a little in his seat. ‘Brightly painted red door? Shiny brass knocker? Red and white curtains with pretty flowers and stuff?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Big mat with Welcome? Climbing roses round the porch? Little goldfish pond out front with a couple of rustic benches?’
‘You know the place, then?’
Aziz nodded. He knew the place all right. He’d be able to picture it in his mind’s eye for the rest of his life as the house where he single-handedly killed the ferocious bear. ‘This bear he went off with,’ he said, his voice sounding odd because of the dryness of the roof of his mouth. ‘Lady bear, was it?’
‘No. Gentleman bear - I mean, it was a male. Great big brute, huge claws.’
‘Ah.’
‘Real nice personality, mind. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Called Derek.’
‘Oh.’
‘Can’t say as much for his friends, though. Very pally with some really heavy types, if you know what I mean.’
‘Fat people?’
The barmaid shook her head. She didn’t speak, but she mouthed the words the mob so distinctly that a lip-reader would have asked her not to shout. ‘Wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of that lot,’ she added with a grimace. ‘That Derek was in here one time, these pirates jogged his elbow, made him spill his condensed milk. Three months later, they fished what was left of ‘em out of a lime pit out behind Tom Thumb’s place. Only able to identify them from the dental records.’
‘I see.’
‘This bear,’ the barmaid said, studying Aziz’s face as if expecting to have to pick it out of a lineup at some later stage. ‘What you want him for, anyway?’
‘We’re friends of Ak hey, watch it, Skip, that was my ankle.’
‘Wrong bear,’ said Aziz loudly. ‘Not the one we were thinking of, was it, lads? I mean, the bear we were thinking of is small. Honey-coloured. Lives in an abandoned sawmill over by the Hundred Acre Wood. Well, thanks for the milk.’
By the time they were out of Jim’s and back in the fresh air, Aziz was as white as a sheet. A very dirty sheet, from the bed of someone who never washes, but white nevertheless.
‘Okay, lads,’ he said. ‘I think we may be in a bit of trouble here.’
‘Trouble, Skip?’
Aziz shuddered. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he replied. ‘I just reckon it might be sensible if we found something like a cave or a very deep hole, just for a year or so. That’d make a nice change, wouldn’t it?’
‘But Skip, what about finding Ak?’
‘ShutupF
‘Sorry, I’m sure.’
Aziz mopped his face with his shirt tails. ‘Anybody know of anywhere like that?’ he asked. ‘Near here, preferably. In fact, as near as possible?’
Hanif frowned. ‘You okay, Skip?’ he asked, concerned. ‘You seem a bit edgy.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Shamir. ‘Like a bear with a sore’
‘Quiet!’ Aziz snapped, and then took a deep breath. On reflection, he told himself, belay that last instinct. It was no earthly use trying to hide from Them; after all, wherever he led his wretched followers in Storybook land, they’d be strangers, out of place in some other folks’ story, conspicuous as a goldfish in a lemon meringue pie. So; they couldn’t hide. Popular theory would have them believe that as a viable alternative they could run, but Aziz wasn’t too sure about that; not in curly-toed slippers, at any rate. Well, now; if you can’t hide and you can’t run, what can you do?
Whimper?
Sham dead?
Forget the second alternative, in case Death is attracted to the sincerest form of flattery. Aziz reached a decision. He’d try whimpering. After all, it wasn’t as if they were spoilt for choice, and in the final analysis they had nothing to lose but a complete set of limbs and their lives.
‘Wait there, I may be gone some time,’ he said, and went back inside.
‘You again,’ said the barmaid.
Aziz nodded. ‘You said something about the bear having, um, friends,’ he said. ‘I’d like to meet them.’
‘You would?’
‘Yes,’ said Aziz. ‘Please,’ he added, remembering his manners.
The barmaid stared at him, as if speculating how he’d look in one of those fancy jackets with long sleeves that do up at the back. ‘Why?’ she said.
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Aren’t they all?’
‘That depends,’ Aziz replied. For his part, he had the feeling that his own particular narrative was in serious danger of being cut down into an anecdote. ‘Don’t change the subject. How do I meet these guys?’
The barmaid shrugged. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Go back out the way you came about three leagues and you’ll come to a ruined castle. After that, you take the first right then second on your left, second right past the little pigs’ house, straight on up the hill until you come to a crossroads, you’ll see a long drive leading up to a big house. Say Rosa from Jim’s sent you, but it’s nothing to do with her. Okay?’
‘Sure thing. Thanks.’
‘You really want to go there?’
‘You’ve been most helpful.’
‘And tell Rocco on the gate,’ she called after him, ‘if they’re going I wouldn’t mind the tall one’s boots for my kid brother.’
‘So,’ said the man behind the desk, ‘you come to me and you say, We kill your buddy the little bear, we’re terribly sorry, we won’t do it again. Is that it?’
Aziz nodded. Behind him, seventy-six feet shuffled nervously. ‘It was an accident, really,’ he said. ‘Well, not an accident as such, more a, what’s the word, misunderstanding.’ He remembered a good phrase from one of his juvenile court appearances. ‘A tragic fusion of coincidence, mistaken identity and good intentions gone dreadfully awry,’ he recited. On second thoughts, he w
ished he hadn’t; it hadn’t worked the first time, mainly because the coincidence had been the night watch coming down the alley at precisely the moment he was leaving the warehouse, the mistaken identity had been him thinking they weren’t the watch, and the good intention had been his intention to escape by climbing over the wall into what turned out to be the Khalifs pedigree snake collection.
‘Sure,’ grunted the man behind the desk. ‘I believe you. So when the Momma Bear and the Baby Bear they come to me and say, Padrone, give us justice, I gotta tell them it was all a mistake and the guys are terribly sorry. Do you take me for a fool, or what? Rocco, get them outa my sight.’
Behind him, Aziz could hear footsteps, and metallic grating noises. Not for the first time, he sincerely wished he could have had his brain removed when he was twelve. ‘Look…’ he stuttered.
And then the man behind the desk did a strange thing. He smiled. ‘On the other hand,’ he said. He didn’t finish the sentence, but the movement noises in the background stopped as abruptly as if a tape had been switched off.
‘Yes?’ Aziz croaked.
‘Hey.’ The man spread his arms. ‘Everybody makes mistakes. I made a mistake, once,’ he added. ‘And I’m sure that if I was to put in a good word for you with the widow bear and the orphan bear’
‘Yes?’
‘And you guys sign a legally binding contract to cut them in on, say, ninety per cent of everything you make for the next forty years’
‘Yes?’
‘Plus a small contribution, say five per cent, to the Arabian Nights Moonshine Coach Club social fund’
‘Yes?’ The man shrugged. It was an eloquent gesture. Louder and clearer than fifty-foot neon letters against a black background it said THIS COMMITS ME TO NOTHING BUT SO WHAT?
‘Then,’ he said, ‘you guys gonna be so grateful to me, you might consider doing me a small favour.’
‘Anything you say,’ Aziz replied, in a voice so small that a bat would need a hearing aid to hear it. ‘Padrone,’ he added.
‘That’s great,’ said the man. ‘Now, then. I gonna tell you a story.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The air was foul with the stench of burning bone. It’s a distinctive smell; not perhaps overwhelmingly revolting in itself, but unbearable once you know what it is. You can get used to it, of course; human beings can get used to virtually anything, given plenty of time and no choice in the matter whatsoever. Fortunately, Ali Baba wasn’t naturally squeamish, and he had the advantage of knowing that, although his drill turned so fast that the friction scorched the tooth as he drilled it, the patient never felt a thing because of the anaesthetic.
‘There you are,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Quick rinse and we’re done.’
Last patient of the day; no more drilling into people until eight o’clock tomorrow morning. A propos of nothing much, he wondered whether Akram the Terrible, his former great and worthy opponent, ever felt the same sense of deep, exhausted relief after a hard night’s murdering. Wash off the blood and the bits of bone, change into nice comfy old clothes, make a nice hot cup of something and collapse into a friendly chair by the fire; what, after all, could be better than that? Apart, of course, from not having to get all bloody and covered in bits in the first place.
He had switched off the lights and was just about to lock up when a white delivery van pulled up outside. Mr Barbour? Yes, that’s me. Delivery for you, if you’d just sign here. The driver handed him a crate about eighteen inches square, accepted his tip and drove away.
Ali Baba stood on the pavement for nearly a minute, feeling the weight of the box; then he unlocked the door and went back inside, locking up again afterwards. His heart was beating a little faster now, and he was beginning to sweat ever so slightly.
The museum authorities hadn’t been best pleased when he’d called them up and asked for it back. He’d reminded them that it was only a loan, and pointed out that there had been a recent spate of thefts of similar objects. He mentioned in passing that he had a receipt. When they put the phone down on him, he rang straight back, ignored their claim that he’d got a wrong number and was now talking to NexDay Laundry Services, and demanded to speak to the Director. And so forth. Eventually they agreed to return it by armoured van, with Ali Baba paying the carriage charges. Then, having added (quite unnecessarily, in Ali Baba’s opinion) that at least that meant one less card to send this Christmas, they rang off.
And here it was. He sighed and shook his head. If only the poor fools had realised what they’d actually got there, not all the bailiffs and court orders in the universe could ever have prised it away from them.
Yes. But. Bailiffs and court orders are one thing, but the greatest ever burglar in either of the two dimensions was something else entirely; and if Akram was still out there somewhere, plotting and scheming to find a way of nailing his ancient foe without transgressing the letter of his oath, then leaving this thing in the deepest vault of the most secure museum in the world was pretty much the same as laying it out on the pavement with a big flashing light on top to show him where to find it. It’d be criminal negligence of the most horrible and bloodcurdling variety to let it stay where it was. There could only be one safe place for it from now on, and that was under the loose floorboard in the store cupboard in Ali Baba’s surgery.
‘Blasted thing,’ he muttered under his breath, as he carried it up the stairs. ‘Wish I’d never pinched it in the first place.’
All loose floorboards are not the same. For a start, this one didn’t creak. Nor could it be prised up with a crowbar and the back of a claw hammer. In fact, were a hostile power to drop a nuclear bomb on Southampton, the only thing guaranteed to be completely undamaged would be Ali Baba’s loose floorboard. It’d still be loose, of course; exactly the same degree of looseness, not a thousandth of a millimetre tighter or wobblier.
Carefully - drop it and the consequences didn’t bear thinking about - he lowered it into the hole and then stood back, hands on knees, to catch his breath and say the password. He did so, replaced the board and muttered the self-activating spell. Finally, he locked up and went home.
After he’d gone, the rogue tooth fairy that’d been hanging around the place all day in the hope of picking up sixpenny-worth of second-hand calcium clambered out of a half-empty pot of pink casting medium, looked around to make sure all was clear, and landed heavily on the loose floorboard. It wobbled, but it wouldn’t budge.
‘Bugger,’ muttered Fang.
Three quarters of an hour later, she gave up the unequal struggle. During this time she’d snapped or blunted two dozen drill bits, broken a whole box of disposable scalpels and banged her own thumb with a two-pound lump hammer (don’t ask what it was doing in among the tools of Ali Baba’s trade, because unless you’ve got film star’s teeth and will never need to go to a dentist again, you really don’t want to know). There was no way of getting in without the password, and although she knew perfectly well what it was, having overhead Ali Baba setting it, she was just a fairy and couldn’t say it loud enough. A pity; the contents of Ali Baba’s improvised floor safe were worth more to her than all the molars ever pulled. If only she could get her hands on it, then she could name her price; including her old job back and sixpences enough to buy Newfoundland.
Nothing for it; she needed human help. But who? Not a problem. She knew just the man. In fact, he was her landlord.
With a savage buzz she memorised the location of the loose board, checked the office waste-paper basket for teeth one last time, and flew home.
Aren’t human beings wonderful?
Well, actually, no; but they do sometimes manage to achieve wonderful things, albeit for all the wrong reasons. One of their most remarkable abilities, which gained them the coveted Golden Straitjacket award for most gloriously dizzy instinctive behaviour five thousand years running in the prestigious Vicenza Dumb Animals Festival, is their exceptional knack of ignoring the most disturbingly bizarre circumstances simply by
pretending they don’t exist. No matter how radical the upheaval, as soon as the dust has settled a little and it’s relatively safe outside the bunker, out they go again to weave their spiders’ webs of apparent normality over whatever it is they don’t want to come to terms with, until the web becomes as rigid and substantial as a coral reef.
Michelle, for example, found that if she went to work as usual, stayed on after hours doing overtime and then went straight on to meet friends for a drink or a movie,, so that she was almost never at home before midnight or after seven-thirty am, she could go hours at a time without thinking strange thoughts or feeling the naggingly persistent lure of the ring. It was like living on the slopes of an active volcano but without the views and the constant free hot water.
And then; well, you can only play chicken on the Great Road of Chaos for so long before you make a slight error of judgement. In Michelle’s case, her mistake lay in stopping off for a bite to eat after an evening’s rather self-conscious cheerleading for the office formation karaoke team. Perhaps it was the strain of having to put a brave face on Mr Pettingell from Claims singing You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog in a Birmingham accent so broad you could have used it as a temporary bridge over the Mississippi that sapped her instinctive early warning systems; or perhaps it was just that her number was up.
‘Ill have the …’ She hesitated, and squinted at the illuminated menu above the counter. She’d originally intended to have the Treble Grand Slam Baconburger, large fries, regular guava shake; but a glance at the ten-times-life-size backlit transparency overhead made her doubt the wisdom of that decision. For one thing, it was too brightly coloured. Mother Nature reserves bright reds and yellows for warning livery for her more indigestible species, such as wasps and poison toadstools. The sight of the ketchup and relish in the illustration must have triggered an ancient survival mechanism. She had another look at the menu, searching for something there wasn’t a picture of.
‘Ill try the …’ For a fleeting moment she was tempted by the Greenland Shark Nuggets ‘n’ Bar-B-Q Dip, but the moment passed. If God had intended people to eat sharks, as opposed to vice versa, he would have modified the respective blueprints accordingly.