by Tom Holt
‘Aziz.’
‘Skip?’
‘Just see if there’s any post in the box, there’s a good lad.’
For a moment it looked quite promising, as Aziz clambered out with his arms full of envelopes. Once they’d sorted out the junk mail, however, there was nothing left except a receipt from the lawn mower people and a dead lizard.
And then they were standing in front of a breathtaking curtain of sheer grey rock, extending upwards into the sky like the biggest, nastiest office block you ever saw, and John Fingers knew they’d arrived at the front gate. Something less like a gate you’d be hard put to imagine; all the king’s horses, men and heavy artillery couldn’t smash a hole in that lot, not in a million years. The only discordant notes were the doorknocker, a hundred feet above the ground and made of solid brass, and the little plaque saying Beware Of The Dog.
‘What Dog?’
‘Ah,’ said Aziz, grinning. ‘We haven’t actually got a dog. We just put that there to frighten away burglars.’
‘We get a lot of them, do we?’
‘Burglars? Well, no; except us, of course, but we live here, so we don’t count.’ Aziz considered the point, obviously for the first time. ‘Hey, it only goes to show how well the notice works, eh, Skip?’
John Fingers stood for a moment, staring upwards until he began to feel dizzy, and wondering what in hell’s name he was doing there. Then he remembered; treasure. Ah yes, the treasure. According to these idiots, behind that massive slab of rock there was a very large jackpot indeed. When he’d tried to get specific details, the idiots had been a bit vague; call him prosaic if you like, but John Fingers didn’t consider inexhaustible and beyond the dreams of avarice to be satisfactory terms of measurement. Going by the rough internal dimensions of the cavern which he’d finally managed to prise out of them, and taking a fairly arbitrary standard for the amount of gold bullion you could pile up in a square metre, he reckoned there was enough there to buy three fairly standard passenger airliners, and almost enough to pay the interest on public sector borrowing for an hour. That much. The dreams of avarice, if avarice had eaten too much cheese the night before. John Fingers found his enthusiasm slowly seeping back.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Anybody got the key?’
Aziz looked at him. ‘There isn’t a key, Skip,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to say the magic words.’
John Fingers made a small growling noise, like a tiny dog trying to pick a fight with a Charolais bull. ‘And what are the magic words, then?’ he asked.
‘Stop kidding around, Skip,’ Aziz replied. ‘You’re a great kidder, you are.’
‘That’s me all over,’ John Fingers replied. ‘Look, you lot stay here and don’t move. I’m just going to, er, look at something.’
Having retreated to a respectable distance, John Fingers positioned himself carefully between the sun and the ground, and said, ‘Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘Well,’ he said impatiently, ‘what’s the bloody password?’
‘You mean you don’t know?’ replied his shadow. ‘Come off it. Everybody knows the password.’
‘Then it must be a singularly useless password if everybody knows it. Except, it would seem, me.’
‘Everybody,’ the shadow explained, ‘on your side of the Line. You probably learned it at your mother’s knee; you know, when you were little and she told you stories.’
John Fingers’ face hardened, indicating an extreme level of tact deficiency. ‘Not me,’ he replied, ‘on account of my mother not telling me stories. Lies, yes. Like, I’d ask her, Mummy, why’s my carrycot full of pretty beads and why mustn’t I tell the lady at the till about them. Then, when I was three and a bit, we started Elementary Shoplifting and Mugging for the Under-Fives. Never any time for stories in our family. So what’s the password?’
The shadow seemed taken aback. ‘But you must know the story,’ it said, bewilderment clogging its voice. ‘Everybody knows the … Except you, apparently. Bugger me, just my luck, we’re going to have to do this the hard way. All right, watch the rock to your left.’
‘Why?’
‘Just shut up and do as you’re told.’
John Fingers shrugged and looked.
‘It’s a rabbit,’ he said.
‘That’s just to give you the idea,’ the shadow said, as a silhouette rabbit waggled its ears at him from the cliff-face opposite. ‘Now then, concentrate.’
‘What? Oh I see, right. Two words. First word, door. Gate. Something like a gate. Something swinging, something opening, no, shorter, open. Open. Right, next word. Three, oh right, three syllables. Nasty smell, stink, lavatory, drains, like drains, sewers, cesspit, shorter, oh, right, cess. Open cess. Next syllable, sandwich, eating, sandwich filling, God I hate this game, I was always lousy at it when I was a kid, sandwich filling let’s see, chicken tikka, no, prawn, tuna fish salad, cheese, ham, oh right. Open cess ham. Last syllable, finger pointing, finger pointing at me, me. Open cess ham me.’
‘Again.’
‘Open cess ham me. Hey, what a peculiar password.’
‘Again.’
‘Open Sesame’
Whereupon sesame opened.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘Hello , this is Michelle Partridge’s answering machine, I’m sorry there’s nobody here to take your call right now, so if you’ll leave your name and where the hell have you been, we’ve been worried sick about you.’
What constitutes a telephone depends on which side of the Line you happen to be. Storyside, of course, they don’t have the banana-shaped pieces of plastic we have here; instead, they use seer-stones, crystal balls, magic mirrors and similar gadgets, which work on pretty much the same principle but don’t go wrong quite so often, and you don’t have to pay the standing charges. Until recently, it was virtually impossible to patch into the Storyside network from Realside, and vice versa. With privatisation and the abolition of the BT monopoly, the advent of Mercury and the like, the situation has changed and, in theory at least, you can now gabble away across the Line to your heart’s content. In practice, of course, it’s not quite so simple; even so, it’s still easier to ring Tom Thumb or the Seven Dwarves than, say, Los Angeles.
‘Sorry,’ Michelle replied. ‘Look…’
‘And speak up, will you? I can hardly hear you.’
‘Sorry,’ Michelle hissed, closing her hand around the small silver ring she’d just borrowed from her father. ‘Look, I’ve got to whisper, I don’t want anybody to hear me.’
‘Then you’re going the right way about it. I can’t, for starters.’
‘Anybody here. I’m a prisoner in a cave. I’m talking to you on a mirror.’
‘A what? Hey, have we got a crossed line?’
‘… Kate Moss, Drew Barrymore, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Demi Moore…’
‘It’s this blasted mirror,’ Michelle explained. ‘Used to belong to a wicked stepmother; you know - mirror, mirror, on the wall, all that sort of thing? Anyway, why I’m calling is ’
‘.. .Julia Roberts, Yasmin Le Bon, Elizabeth Hurley…’
‘ Because I need you to do something up for me, quick as you can, and call me back. Okay? Probably won’t take you five minutes; you can get the vacuum cleaner and the kitchen steps to do the heavy lifting.’
‘I can try,’ the answering machine replied. ‘But listen, what do you mean, captured? And where exactly are you? I’ve been trying to get your number from the exchange but it doesn’t seem to want to tell me.’
Michelle scowled. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll call you back. What I need you to do ’
‘… Jerry Hall, Helena Christensen, Kelly Klein, Isabella Rosellini…’
‘Is, get the big bottle of olive oil from the cupboard under the sink and a really large flowerpot, block up the drain hole in the bottom, get a saucer or a small plate or something’
‘… Esther Rantzen, Judi Dench, Margaret Thatcher…’
Michelle swo
re under her breath. ‘It’s no good,’ she muttered, ‘this stupid thing’s on the blink again, I think somebody must have dropped it or banged it or something. Look, I’ll have to call you back.’
‘Yes, but…’
The mirror went dead, leaving Michelle with a momentary feeling of great and frightening distance, such as one might expect at the end of a tantalisingly brief contact with the normal and everyday. Then she reflected that she’d just been asking her answering machine to get her hoover to go through the kitchen cupboard, which put things back in perspective somewhat.
‘Well?’ Akram demanded.
‘I got through,’ she replied. ‘I gave it half the message and then the mirror started playing up. I’ll try again later if I get the chance; otherwise we’ll just have to hope…’ She was going to say, hope the answering machine uses its initiative, but that would be silly; rather like urging an invertebrate to put its back into it. ‘We’ll just have to hope,’ she repeated, and as she did so, it occurred to her that that was sillier still, in context.
‘It’ll be all right,’ said Ali Baba unexpectedly, holding out his hand for the ring. Michelle had given it to him before she stopped to ask herself why; after all, it was her ring, her aunt had left it to her. Or someone, an old woman she used to go and visit, had given it to her and she’d assumed it was the old woman’s to give. So; did it belong to Ali Baba? Only because he’d stolen it from Akram, who’d himself stolen it from someone else, presumably now long since deceased in circumstances of extreme prejudice. She might have said something about this if she’d actually wanted the wretched thing; as it was, she didn’t. You don’t, after all, kick and scream and drum your heels on the floor and demand to have your ingrowing toenail put back when the chiropodist’s just dug it out.
‘Now then,’ Ali Baba went on, slipping the ring on and closing his fist around it. ‘Before we move on to phase two, how’d it be if we just think it through for a moment and make sure we know what it is we’re supposed to be doing. For once in the history of the Universe, let’s try and do something properly.’
Michelle and Akram nodded. Fang, who was sulking, went on facing the other way and pretending not to be able to hear them. That, as far as Ali Baba was concerned, was no bad thing. As befitted someone in his line of business he had particularly fine teeth, and he couldn’t help feeling that smiling in the presence of a tooth fairy’s a bit like sunbathing in full view of the vultures, lying on a big plate with a cruet beside you.
‘As I see it,’ Ali Baba said, ‘it won’t be long before our host comes back, unlocks the door and shoos us out to be executed or tortured or whatever. Probably tortured,’ he added. ‘I don’t suppose he’s brought us here and locked us up in the coal cellar just because he’s starting a collection of trans-dimensional freaks. Now, when he shows up, we’ve got to get him to look in that peculiar mirror Michelle was talking to just now’ He stopped and turned to her. ‘You think that thing’s up to it? I mean, ordinary phone messages are one thing, but…’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Michelle replied. ‘On the other hand, it’s all we’ve got; I mean, if we want to be pessimistic and look on the dark side of it all, we really aren’t spoilt for choice. Like, what if the machine at the other end isn’t switched on, or it’s engaged, or the men have just turned up to cut it off?’
‘Maybe it’ll scramble the bastard,’ Akram growled. ‘No bad thing if it does.’
Michelle looked at him. That last remark had sounded a little bit more in character; except that she’d never had much evidence of the bloodcurdling villain side of him. Even as a kidnapper he’d been no more terrifying than, say, the average car park attendant or pizza delivery man; and since they’d been here, on what she’d come to believe was indeed the other side of this mysterious Line everybody was so fussed about, he’d been milder than a vegetarian biryani. Which was, of course, no bad thing in general terms, she supposed.
On the other hand, right now when a savage and ruthless killing machine might just come in quite handy, he’d apparently turned into the sort of bloke who’d have no hangups at all about staying home with the kids while his wife went out to work, and would probably be all sensitive and interested in colour schemes and wallpaper patterns. The expression ‘shadow of his former self crossed her mind fleetingly, until it was rounded up by the Taste Police and thrown out on its ear.
Ali Baba stood up. ‘Seems to me,’ he said, stifling a yawn, ‘that all this is very true, but not really much help to us at the moment. I mean, yes, it’s a bloody stupid idea in the first place and there’s no way in the world it ought to work. On the other hand we are in horseshit stepped so far, et cetera; we might as well do something as sit around until we get our fat heads chopped off. Let’s do it now, shall we? Get it over with.’
‘All right,’ Akram said. ‘Here goes, then.’
To say that John Fingers, after half an hour in the thieves’ treasury, was all open-mouthed with wonder would be an understatement. More precisely; if he’d been back in Southampton and standing on the dock at the Ferry terminal, he’d have been in grave danger of having cars drive in under his teeth and down his throat under the misapprehension that he was the ferry.
‘I mean, look at it,’ he said for the seventeenth time. ‘Just look.”
Aziz and Hakim exchanged guilty looks. ‘Yeah, well,’ Aziz mumbled. ‘We were meaning to get it tidied up, honest, but what with one thing and another there just wasn’t time.’
Something about John Fingers’ demeanour suggested that he wasn’t listening. He opened the lid of a yard-long solid gold casket, gawped for a few seconds and let it drop. The valuation and unit pricing circuits in his brain had burnt out twenty minutes ago. The only problem was…
‘How,’ he said aloud, ‘in buggery am I going to get this lot home?’
‘We are home, Skip. At least,’ Aziz amended, ‘you said we were. Or I thought you said…’
And then, of course, there was the problem of converting it all into money. Some of John Fingers’ best friends were receivers of stolen goods, but for this lot you wouldn’t need a fence so much as the Great Wall of China. Even if you only released one per cent of it at a time, the market would flood so quickly that only a few bubbles on the surface would remain to mark where it had once been.
‘Hey,’ he said, sitting down on a coal-scuttle full of snookerball-sized cut rubies, ‘where did you jokers get all this gear from? It’s amazing. Makes Fort Knox look like a piggy-bank.’
Aziz shrugged helplessly. ‘We had a good last quarter, Skip. According to the auditor’s interim statement, takings rose by an encouraging twenty-seven point six four three per cent, whereas fixed overheads, interest on borrowing, bad debts and incidental non-recurring liabilities fell by seven point three nine two per cent as against the same quarter last year. Added to which the reduction in labour costs owing to Saheed falling off a roof and Massad sticking his foot in one of those horrible spiky trap things has resulted in a highly favourable cash reserves position, fuelling rumours of a record interim dividend once provision has been made for advance corporation tax, which we don’t pay anyway ‘cos we always chuck the collectors down a well.’ Aziz paused to draw breath, and a thought struck him. ‘You know all that as well as I do, Skip. Why did you ask?’
‘Huh? Oh, don’t mind me. Look, I want you to go into the nearest town and buy me a thousand camels.’
‘Sure thing, Skip.’
John Fingers double-checked his mental arithmetic. ‘Make that fifteen hundred,’ he said. ‘Plus three thousand big panniers, two miles of rope and as much as you can get of whatever it is camels eat. Okay?’
‘You got it, Skip.’
‘Right. You still here?’
‘Yes, Skip. That’s how come you can talk to me.’
‘Go away.’
‘I’m on that right now, Skip. ‘Bye.’
Alone with his thoughts, John Fingers began to work out ways and means. First, he’d sell just a little bit
- this fire bucket full of diamonds, for example, or that breadbin of pearls - and use the money to buy a small uninhabited island somewhere; something remote and utterly godforsaken where nobody had ever bothered to go. Then he could pretend he’d discovered a really amazingly rich gold mine there, which’d explain where all this stuff came from. Security’d be a bit of a headache, of course; except that with what was in this tea-chest and the smaller of those two packing cases, he could buy a half dozen reconditioned submarines and still have change left over for a couple of squadrons of fighters.
What it really boiled down to was, is there enough money in the whole wide world to buy all this stuff, even with generous discounts for cash and bulk purchases? Or was he going to have to pump countless billions of dollars of subsidies into the economies of the leading industrial nations just so that eventually they’d generate enough wealth to be able to afford to buy from him? Whatever; there were difficulties, sure enough, but even so he couldn’t help feeling that it was a definite step up from stealing hubcaps and nicking the lightbulbs out of bus station waiting rooms.
Having resolved on a course of action and granted himself the luxury of two minutes unrestrained gloating, John Fingers allowed his mind to drift into the strange whirlpool of thoughts, impressions and memories that made up his recollections of what had happened since he burgled that flat and stole that weird ring.
Having considered the position from a number of viewpoints and made of it what little sense he could, he came to the conclusion that his present situation was a bit like the very latest in jet passenger aircraft. He didn’t have the remotest idea of how it all worked or why it was doing what it was doing, and there was an unpleasant feeling in the back of his mind that if it crashed, it was likely to crash big. On the other hand, it didn’t look like he actually needed to know how it all worked, and it sure beat the shit out of walking. Provided he could get out of this place with even a half per cent of the dosh, he didn’t give a stuff. Burglary, like the privatised electricity industry, is all about power without responsibility, and getting away with it.