by Tom Holt
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.’
‘Bugger,’ Aziz said. ‘There’s always something, isn’t there? Right, we’ll have to go back.’
Even as he said it, a tiny voice perked up in the back of his mind and said Why, exactly? After all, a leader’s job is to lead, not be fetched like a kiddie from playschool. ‘When we’ve finished these,’ he added.
Quite how there came to be an inn, miles off the beaten track in the middle of a thousand square miles of scrub, sand and rock, the thieves hadn’t bothered to ask. For all they knew, it might be an exciting new form of virtual-reality mirage. If so, the virtual beer was nicely chilled and the virtual kebabs done to a turn. As for the dancing girls, they were virtually…
‘No rush,’ agreed Shamir, his mouth full of barbecued goat. ‘In fact, we’d probably be better off waiting for him here. I mean, this is the obvious place to look for us. If we’re all wandering around looking for each other it’ll only make matters worse.’
‘Especially since there’s two of them now,’ Hakim agreed.
‘Good point.’
‘Better than one,’ added Rustem, sagely. ‘Two heads I mean.’
Aziz leant back in his chair and let his belt out a notch. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if we’re going to be stuck here till they show up, we might as well have a drink and something to eat.’
‘Another drink,’ Hakim pointed out. ‘And something else to eat.’
‘Good idea, though. For all we know, it may be several days’ march to the next mirage.’
Aziz nodded. ‘We were lucky to find this joint,’ he said. A little bell rang in his head as he said it, but he ignored it. ‘Nice to have it to ourselves, as well.’
‘It’s always better if you come to these places out of season,’ Faisal agreed. ‘That way, you don’t get the Germans hogging the pool.’
‘What pool?’
‘The swimming pool.’
Aziz frowned. ‘What swim Oh, right, I can see it now.’ Funny, he couldn’t help reflecting, could have sworn it wasn’t there a moment ago. Maybe it was all a mirage after all. He pushed the idea around the plate of his mind like a piece of cold broccoli and decided to leave it. So it’s a mirage; so what? At least it didn’t have the Schmidt family from Dusseldorf sitting all round the edge of it in deck chairs. ‘I could just fancy a quick dip in a minute,’ he said. Assuming the water holds still long enough, added his subconscious. Then he cleared his mind of all such distractions, finished off his beer and waved to the waitress. ‘Here, miss,’ he said. ‘I’d like a loaf of bread, jug of the house white, collected works of Omar Khayyam, a tree and what time do you get off work?’
John Fingers opened his eyes.
Usually when he woke up with a headache, the worst thing he had to worry about was where he’d left his trousers the night before. On this occasion he still had his trousers, but that constituted pretty much the whole of the credit side of the ledger. Just a small selection of the things he didn’t have, on the other hand, were the gun, the ring, the girl and the faintest idea where he was. All in all, he’d have given a lot to be back in his nice familiar cell.
Self-pity was all very well; but fine notions jemmy no windows, as his old granny used to say. He sat up, rubbed the bump on the back of his head, and considered his position.
The bump was a pretty substantial clue, he reckoned. Obviously, while he’
d been chasing about after that bloody girl, someone had crept up behind him and belted him one. He scribbled in terrible vengeance at the foot of his mental agenda, staggered to his feet and looked around.
‘They went that way.’ He was so used by now to disembodied voices that he’d gone twenty yards before it occurred to him that since (a) there were no electrical appliances visible in this awful wilderness and (b) he’d lost the ring anyway, he ought to be excused hearing voices, and it wasn’t fair.
‘Who’s that?’ he demanded.
‘Down here.’
He looked down. Nothing but the dusty ground, his toecaps and his shadow. A shadow. Not necessarily his. ‘Huh?’ he said. It could, of course, be something to do with the bashing, and being out in the blazing desert sun without a hat; but that was almost certainly just wishful thinking. Either the light was playing silly buggers with him, or that wasn’t his shadow.
‘Please,’ he moaned. ‘Tell me it’s all my imagination.’
‘I can if you want me to,’ replied the voice affably. ‘I’d rather not if you don’t mind, though. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like lying to people I’ve only just met.’
‘You’re not my shadow, are you?’
‘I am now.’
‘Fine. Can I go home now, please?’
The shadow seemed to flicker slightly. ‘You are home,’ it said.
‘Oh, really?’ John Fingers toyed with the idea of jumping hard on the shadow’s head but dismissed it. ‘This is some bit of Southampton I never got around to seeing, is it? Easy enough to miss, a bloody great big desert. Probably sandwiched in between the docks and the new shopping precinct.’
‘I’m so glad you’ve got a sense of humour,’ replied the shadow cheerfully. ‘I’ve got this feeling we’re going to get along famously’
John Fingers sighed, and sat down on a convenient tree-stump. Oh, his heart sighed within him, for the stately Victorian architecture, the vibrant atmosphere of the mess hall, the almost sensuous texture of the mailbag between his fingers and, when Old Mister Sun winked at him over the western horizon, the cool monastic solitude of dear old B583. In his time he’d said a great many harsh and unkind things about prison, but at that precise moment he’d have given all the magic silver rings in the universe to be back where you could tell the bad guys by their clothes and the locks didn’t whisper things about you behind your back.
‘I could run away,’ he said aloud.
‘You what?’
‘I could wait till nightfall,’ said John Fingers, ‘when there’s no sun and no shadows; then I could run away and you’d never have a clue where to find me.’
‘Try it. See how far you’d get.’
Maybe, John Fingers theorised, it’s only bluffing. After all, it’s only a shadow. From what he could remember of his education, a shadow is basically nothing but an absence of light caused by one’s body getting in the way of the sun; but he’d been paroled before they’d got to that part of the course, so he couldn’t be certain. There was something in the voice inside his head that suggested otherwise.
‘Want to try an experiment?’
‘No,’ John Fingers replied. ‘We did those in science O level when I was in the Scrubs, we had to cut up frogs and things. And there was stuff with iron filings and magnets, too. No offence, but I don’t think we’ve got time.’
‘We’ll try an experiment. Walk forwards. Go on, there’s no catch. I’m going to stay here. If you walk away, I won’t try and follow you.’
‘Straight up?’
‘On my word as a two-dimensional optical effect.’
‘Okay.’ John Fingers shrugged, grinned and remained rooted to the spot.
‘Go on, then.’
‘I’m trying.’ It was just, he couldn’t help remembering, like when he’d been a kid and he and Ginger Bagworth used to play Ronnie and Reggie. An intrinsic part of every session was make-believe setting your opponent’s feet in concrete and chucking him off the dock, and one time Ginger actually got hold of some quick-drying cement from somewhere and filled the cardboard box with it… Just like that, only several degrees of intensity worse.
‘Now,’ continued the voice smugly, ‘let’s go for a walk.’
Before he knew much more about it, John Fingers was marching briskly along at a smart pace, four miles per hour or so. Backwards. What really impressed him was the way he carefully walked round a tree-stump he hadn’t even known was there.
‘Satisfied?’
John Fingers took a deep breath. ‘If I do exactly what you tell me,’ he said, ‘will you promise never to do anything like that again?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Fancy telling me how you do that?’
‘Actually,’ said the shadow, ‘I could explain, but you wouldn’t understand. If you hadn’t spent all your time in those science classes trying to make dynamite, perhaps you could follow it, but it’s too late now.’
‘All right,’ said John Fingers wearily. ‘Now will you let go of me?’
‘Sure.’
A moment later, he was on his face in the dust. Slowly, as if expecting his own teeth to bite him, he hauled himself to his feet and dusted himself off. ‘So,’ he sighed. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Excuse me,’ Ali Baba said, his voice reverberating loudly, ‘but would anybody mind if I took this bucket off my head?’
Akram nodded, realised that this wasn’t much use in the circumstances and said, ‘Fine, go ahead. You all right, by the way?’ he added. ‘I thought that water was supposed to be boiling hot.’
Ali Baba looked at him. ‘It was,’ he replied, ‘once upon a time. But you kept me standing around chatting so long it went lukewarm. So, no ill effects. Thank you,’ he added, puzzled, ‘for asking. Why?’
‘No reason,’ Akram replied. ‘I was just concerned, that’s all.’
‘Concerned?’ Ali Baba narrowed his eyes, until his eyebrows looked like one continuous furry hedge. ‘You’re not supposed to be concerned. What’s got into you?’
That, Akram realised, was a very good question; except that it was more a case of what had left him. ‘The shadow,’ he murmured. ‘Here, it’s gone. I haven’t got a shadow at all. Hey, can you see a shadow?’
‘Now you mention it…’
‘That explains it,’ said Akram, grinning. ‘Somehow or other I’ve managed to give the wretched thing the slip. It means ’ He hesitated, his manner rather like that of a Greek philosopher who, halfway down the High Street with no bathrobe and the loofah still in his hand, is asked to explain exactly what useful purpose the shattering new concept he’s just stumbled across is designed to achieve, other than getting the bathmat wet.
‘Well?’
Akram shrugged. ‘For a start,’ he said, ‘it means I don’t have to kill you if I don’t want to. Hell, I don’t have to kill anyone if I don’t want to. That’s pretty remarkable, when you come to think of it.’
A small but irreverent noise from Fang indicated that she wasn’t so sure. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘I go weeks at a time without killing anybody. Everywhere you look, there’s people not killing anybody. Sure it’s nice, but I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting to be invited on chat shows.’
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Akram replied, pulling the clip out of the gun and drawing the round from the breech. ‘As far as I’m concerned, it’s bloody marvellous.’
‘Odd you should mention it,’ Ali Baba interrupted. He turned the bucket over, put it on the ground and sat on it. ‘I think I must be feeling the same way. For instance, if someone were to bring me Akram’s head on a platter right now, I’d probably ask them to take it away and fetch me a simple cheese salad instead.’
All four of them were silent. It was one of those peak-in-Darien moments, with Akram and Ali Baba being stout Cortes, and Michelle and Fang bringing up the rear, so to speak, unable to tell whether the boss is undergoing a deep spiritual experience, or has just remembered he’d forgotten to feed the go
ldfish before leaving Spain. When the inscrutability of it all got too much for her, Michelle cleared her throat and politely asked if someone would explain to her precisely what the hell was going on.
Ali Baba and Akram looked at each other.
‘I don’t think we’re a hundred per cent sure,’ Ali Baba said. ‘All we do know is, your man here and I have been trying to kill each other since the Bible was still in copyright, and now we don’t want to any more.’ He glanced at Akram and raised an eyebrow. ‘You agree with that?’ he asked.
‘Sure. It’s a bit disconcerting,’ Akram replied. ‘On the one hand it’s a really great feeling, like waking up and realising you haven’t got to go to work ever again. On the other hand, there is this nagging question of what the hell we’re going to do with the rest of our lives.’
‘You want a suggestion?’ said Fang crisply. ‘Bearing in mind that between you, presumably, you know where there’s this huge hoard of gold, silver and precious stones, guarded by a magic door to which you happen to know the password? Ho hum, it sure beats me. If I was in your shoes, I’d be absolutely flummoxed.’
‘You mean,’ said Ali Baba slowly, ‘we split the treasure between us and go and sort of - do something with it? Rather than just fight over it, I mean?’
‘The verb to spend keeps popping into my mind in this context,’ Fang muttered, ‘can’t imagine why.’
‘Could we, do you think?’ Ali Baba asked uncertainly. ‘It’d mean the end of the Story, for good and all. If there’s no treasure, the whole thing falls to bits. No treasure, nothing to steal, nothing to fight about. Hey, that’s neat.’
Fang nodded enthusiastically. ‘Mind you,’ she added, ‘it wouldn’t be fair to expect you boys to do all that spending by yourselves. I mean, that’d be one hell of a responsibility to saddle you with. I couldn’t live with myself if I thought I’d lumbered you with a rotten job like that.’
‘Many hands,’ Michelle agreed, ‘make light work. You can put me down for a share, too.’