by Tom Holt
Where the hell were those two clowns with the camels?
‘… Michelle Pfeiffer, Sharon Stone, bzzZZZZwheeeshhhhZZZ-Zapcracklecrackle Princess Anne, Margaret Beckett…’
‘Yes,’ said Ali Baba, ‘I’ll admit, that was a flaw in my initial reasoning. I was rather counting on him coming down here, and since he hasn’t I can see that getting him to look in the mirror may present certain difficulties. I’d like to point out,’ he added, kicking over a three-legged stool, ‘that since there’s bugger all I can do about it, whingeing isn’t going to help. If you’re so bloody clever, you think of something.’
‘I’ve thought of something.’
‘Dad,’ said Michelle quietly, ‘calm down. This isn’t like you at all.’
Ali Baba sagged, as if his spine had just been removed and replaced with rice pudding, and he slumped against a wall. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not quite sure what’s come over me. To tell you the truth, I haven’t been feeling quite myself for a while now.’
‘I know,’ said Akram. ‘You know why?’
‘Weil?’
‘I think,’ Akram said slowly, deliberately looking the other way, ‘you’re starting to turn into me. A bit,’ he added. ‘Sort of me, anyway. Ever since you turned up at that warehouse place, all guns and swords and adrenaline. It’s just a thought,’ he concluded, ‘but maybe we’re sort of changing places in the story.’
Michelle shook her head. ‘Surely not,’ she said. ‘Because, hasn’t the thief bloke become you, hence the other thieves thinking he’s their boss? They can’t all be you, surely. Or are you not so much a person, more a way of life?’
By way of reply, Akram sighed. ‘Why is it,’ he demanded, ‘that all of a sudden everybody’s asking me questions and expecting me to know the damn answer? Time was, all anybody ever said when I was around was “Help, guards!” and “Aaargh!” And that was only if they happened to wake up before ’
‘I said,’ Fang repeated, ‘I’ve thought of something.’
The other three prisoners looked round. ‘Hello,’ said Akram, ‘you still here?’
‘Sesame,’ replied Fang. ‘That’s what it’s all about. You lot just wait here. Won’t be long.’ She grabbed the mirror, smiled into it, and vanished.
‘Hey,’ said the Godfather, with an impatient gesture, ‘you lost me.’
If only…
‘Be patient, will you?’ Scheherezade replied. ‘We’re just getting to the good bit now.’
‘But all this with the fairy and the thief and sesame,’ the Godfather protested. ‘I don’t understand. What’s gonna happen next?’
His wife sighed. ‘If you knew that,’ she pointed out, ‘there wouldn’t be much point having a story, would there? This is all just a little bit of suspense. Perfectly legitimate narrative device. Most people,’ she added, ‘quite like it.’
The Godfather ignored her. ‘And the camels,’ he said. ‘What’s with the goddamn camels? What for does this John Fingers want all them?’
‘To move the treasure, silly.’ She paused for a moment before continuing. ‘To move it out of the impregnable treasury, where nobody would ever have a chance of stealing it so long as the thieves were there even if they did know the password…’ Longer pause. ‘Out of there and then overland, in a long, straggly, probably inadequately guarded caravan en route to wherever he’s going.’
‘Hey!’
‘Which,’ Scheherezade ground on, ‘is a curious decision, don’t you think, bearing in mind that it’d probably only take a few good men - Rocco, say, and a couple of the others, to rob the caravan and make off with all that money…’ Having hammered the point so far home that you could probably have tethered an elephant to it, she left it at that and smiled sweetly. ‘That’s why the camels,’ she said. ‘Shall I go on, or do you have, um, business to attend to?’
The Godfather stubbed out his cigar and stood up. ‘Just wait there a second,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right back.’
Meg Ryan Daryll Hannah, IT’S ALL RIGHT IT’S ONLY ME, on second thoughts not Daryll Hannah, this is getting difficult Jodie Foster?
Eyebrow raised in bewilderment and disapproval, Ali Baba’s receptionist tore the page off the fax machine, stared at it again, screwed it into a ball and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. For one fleeting instant she’d thought it might be a message from Mr Barbour, explaining where the hell he was and why he hadn’t come in to work for a week. No such luck.
She shrugged, picked up the plant mister and sprayed the potted palm.
When she’d gone, the tooth fairy crawled out from under the fax machine, dusted herself off and looked around. There it was. Good.
The potted palm. There’s one in every dentist’s waiting room; a big, slightly lopsided, pointless-looking thing with flat, papery leaves and a general air of wishing it was somewhere else. It sits in a pot two sizes too small for its roots, and it’s probably there just so that the room will contain one living thing more wretched-looking than the paying customers. Nobody knows where they all come from, although the chances are there’s a big nursery somewhere outside Northampton that specialises in them, having seen a window in the market around about the time the bottom fell out of triffidfarming.
At least, you assume it’s a palm of some sort; that’s if you can be bothered. Of course, for all you know it might be an annual herbaceous tropical and subtropical plant with seeds used in various ways as food and yielding an oil used in salads and as a laxative.
Fang squared up to the plant and spat on her hands. Fine, she muttered to herself, I’ve done the easy bit; faxed myself across the Line without getting squashed, dissipated or lost in the switchboard. Now it starts to get a bit tricky.
No way her arms would go round the flowerpot; she’d have to get the other side of it and push.
And then, assuming that she found a way round the trifling matter of fitting a four-foot-high three-dimensional pot-plant into the paper feed of a fax machine and sending it to a magic mirror whose number she didn’t actually know, that’d be the second easiest part done, leaving them to have a go at the difficult bit. And the difficult bit was going to be horribly difficult; in fact, the whole idea was so offputting that it was only the thought that they’d all be blown up, beheaded or converted into random molecules and dispersed long before they even got near the difficult bit that was keeping her going. Ah well. Here goes.
‘… Andie McDowell OUCH! THAT HURT!’
‘There,’ said Fang, emerging breathless and bedraggled from the mirror. ‘Here you go. What do you reckon to that, then?’
Ali Baba looked down. ‘It’s an aspidistra,’ he said, ‘how nice. What am I supposed to do with it?’
For a small portion of a second Fang was tempted to make a suggestion; since she was back to full human size, however, she decided it wouldn’t be ladylike, and desisted.
‘Not an aspidistra,’ she panted. ‘Look at the label.’
Akram picked out the little white plastic flag, read it and smiled. ‘Neat,’ he said. ‘Absolutely no way it’ll work, mind you, but a lovely piece of imaginative thinking.’ He handed the plastic flag to Michelle, who read it and gave it back.
‘So that’s what a sesame plant looks like,’ she said. ‘Hang on, though. Are you seriously trying to suggest that if we put this thing against the door and say open, sesame…’
It was probably the most enjoyable four seconds of Fang’s life so far. The tremendous feeling of smugness when the plant hopped out of its pot, waddled across on root-tip to the massive oak door and kicked it in was so utterly, orgasmically satisfying that she wouldn’t have swapped it for every molar ever pulled. With her head held high, she walked over to the doorway and pushed the shattered remains of the door aside.
‘Yes,’ she said, with a little bow. ‘Come on.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
One camel is a bloody nuisance. By a mathematical paradox inexplicable except in the far dimensions of pure mathematics, fifteen hundred camel
s are a million times worse. Buying fifteen hundred camels wasn’t really a problem. Fortuitously, Aziz and his thirty-eight colleagues arrived in Baghdad just in time for the start of the annual camel fair, attended by livestock dealers from every corner of Central Asia, so all Aziz had to do was stand on an upturned jar, yell, ‘We’ll take the lot,’ at the top of his voice, and start distributing money from the ten large sacks they’d brought with them for the purpose.
The point at which the last camel-dealer had walked away, slightly lopsided from the weight of his purse and hugging himself with sheer delight, was the moment the problems began in earnest. Take fifteen hundred camels, tie them together nose to tail with rope and point them at the city gates, and you have a spectacularly graphic illustration of Brownian motion in action; the only real difference being that Brown’s justly celebrated particles don’t bulldoze their way through crowded bazaars knocking over trestles and gobbling up the stock in trade of the fresh fruit stalls. Nor do they leave an evil-smelling brown trail behind them, sufficient to mulch all the roses in the continent of Asia. Nor, come to that, do they bite the market inspectors and commissioners of traffic, spit in the faces of the city wardens and wee all over the Emir’s palanquin.
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 el
se’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!’