by Tom Holt
Tap, tap, tap. A hairline crack appeared in the shell. The hen squawked and closed its eyes.
It’s the mark of a truly great strategist that he attacks, not his enemy’s weaknesses (which are sure to be carefully guarded) but his strengths. What surer way to flush Baba out than to steal the relics? Doubly so, because Baba too was a victim of his genetic heritage; he’d been born a hero, just as Akram was a villain in the bone. When it became apparent that a dark and sinister force had invaded Reality and was scooping up magic weapons and instruments of unearthly power, the poor fool would have no choice in the matter at all; he’d have to come out and fight, just as a doctor can’t stop himself giving first aid to an injured man he comes across in the street, even if the man turns out to be a lawyer, policeman or Member of Parliament. And then it would just be a matter of
Crack, went the eggshell. The hen glanced down, clucked wildly, slithered off the egg and made itself scarce, coming to rest under the vegetable rack. A moment later the two halves of the shell fell away, revealing the first phoenix ever to be hatched this side of the border.
Akram looked at the phoenix. The phoenix looked at Akram.
‘Hey,’ growled the bird, ‘just a cotton-picking minute.’
By the time it had finished saying that, of course, it had grown. From being the size of a small pigeon, it was already larger than a turkey, with power to add. Already its claws were as big as coathooks, its beak as long and sharp as a Bowie knife. Phoenixes mature fast; in less time than it takes to boil a half-full kettle they go from being cuddly, helpless infants to fully grown disturbed teenagers with antisocial habits and a pronounced weapons fetish. Imagine a stadiumful of Millwall supporters compressed into one streamlined, gold-feathered body seven feet tall at the wing, and you’re mind’s-eyeball to eyeball with a phoenix, age two minutes.
‘Gosh,’ said Akram, looking up. ‘Who’s a pretty boy, then?’
The phoenix regarded him with eyes like a Gestapo sergeant major’s. ‘You’re not my mummy,’ it said. ‘What gives around here?’
‘Would you like a sugarlump? Birdseed?’
‘I’ll have your liver if you don’t tell me what’s going on. Where’s my mummy?’
‘Ah,’ said Akram, ‘that’s rather a long story. You see, once upon a time, there was a man called Ali Baba …’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘Skip!’
No reply.
‘Skip! ‘
Echo sang back the word, adding her own trace element of mockery. Aziz flopped down on a ledge of rock near the mouth of the cave and scratched his head. The boss was nowhere to be found. He had gone, leaving a giant-sized hole in the Story. Although Aziz’s minuscule intelligence couldn’t begin to comprehend the vast implications of this, even he could feel that something was badly up the pictures and in urgent need of rectification.
Nature abhors a vacuum, preferring to clear up its loose ends with an old-fashioned carpet-sweeper. The loose ends thirty-nine of them, with all the cohesiveness and sense of purpose of the proverbial headless chicken - were doing their best, but it plainly wasn’t good enough. That’s what happens when you take both the hero and the villain out of a story. It’s a bit like removing the poles from a tent.
‘He’s not in the treasury,’ grunted Masood. ‘And his bed hasn’t been slept in.’
‘His camel’s still in the stable,’ added Zulfiqar. ‘And there’s no footprints in the sand, either. If he’s gone, he must have flown.’
Masood and Zulfiqar looked at each other. ‘The carpet,’ they said simultaneously.
Sure enough, it wasn’t there. Neither, of course, were the oil lamp, the phoenix’s egg, the magic sword, Solomon’s ring and half a dozen other supernatural labour-saving devices; Ali Baba had taken them with him to Reality. No way, of course, that the thieves could know that.
‘Why’d he want to do a thing like that?’ Aziz demanded.
‘Maybe it was something we said.’
Aziz frowned. Nominally the second-in-command of the band, he was fanatically loyal to Akram in the same way that the roof is loyal to the walls. ‘He wouldn’t just go off in a huff,’ he said. ‘Must be a reason. He’ll be off on a Quest or something, you mark my words. Give it a day or two and he’ll be back, with some priceless treasure snatched at desperate odds from its unsleeping guardian.’
Thoughtful silence.
‘Anybody looked to see if the Thrift Club kitty’s still there?’ asked Hanif. ‘Not,’ he added quickly, as Aziz treated him to a paint-stripping scowl, ‘that I’m casting whatsits, aspersions. Someone might just have a look, though.’
‘It’s still there,’ replied Saheed. ‘And the tea money. Beats me what can have happened to him. Unless,’ he added darkly, ‘he’s been kidnapped.’
‘Get real,’ snapped Mustafa, from behind his sofa-thick eyebrows. ‘Who’d be stupid enough to kidnap the Skip? It’d be like trying to lure a man-eating tiger by tying yourself to a tree. No, he’s gone off on a bender somewhere. Give it a couple of days and they’ll bring him home in a wheelbarrow.’
Another thoughtful pause; nearly a whole year’s ration used up in five minutes. The thieves were, after all, born henchmen.
Henchmen are, quite reasonably, designed for henching; thinking is something they wisely prefer to leave to the professionals.
‘Well,’ said Aziz, trying to appear nonchalant and laid back about the whole thing, and making a spectacularly poor job of it, ‘in the meantime, we’d better just carry on as normal. Agreed?’
Muttering. ‘Suppose so,’ Masood grunted uncertainly. ‘After all, caravans don’t rob themselves. What’s first up for today, anyone?’ ‘
There was an awkward silence, broken by Hanif saying, ‘Well, don’t look at me.’ Not that anybody had been, or was likely to, if they had any sense.
‘This is daft,’ said Zulfiqar. ‘I mean, we’ve been thieving and looting together, oh, I don’t know how long, we should all know the bloody ropes by now. It’s not exactly difficult, is it? We find someone with lots of money, we take it off him, and if he gets awkward we bash him.’
‘Yeah?’ Aziz retorted angrily. ‘All right, then, Clever Effendi, go on. Who’s the mark, where and when do we do the job, who does what, where do we fence the stuff afterwards? You don’t know, do you?’
‘So, maybe I don’t,’ Zulfiqar admitted. ‘All I’m saying is, we do this for a living, we should be able to work these things out from first principles. Like, where’s the best place to look for a lot of rich geezers?’
Mental cogs ground painfully. ‘Well,’ suggested Shamir, ‘what about the Wazir’s palace? Always a lot of wealthy toffs hanging around there.’
There was a chorus of Right-ons and Go-for-its, until someone pointed out that the palace was also the Guard headquarters, and known criminals who set foot within the precincts tended to end up with a marvellous view of the nearby countryside from the top of the City gate. All right, suggested another thief, what about doing over some of the shops in the Goldsmith’s Quarter? That seemed like a brilliant suggestion, until Aziz remembered that three-quarters of the goldsmiths paid Akram anti-theft insurance (‘If your premium is received within seven working days, you’ll be entitled to receive this fantastic combination coffee-maker/muezzin, absolutely free’) and unfortunately, what with the Chief doing all the paperwork and keeping the books, he hadn’t a clue which ones they were.
‘This is pathetic,’ observed Hanif, after an embarrassed hush. ‘Do you mean to say that without the Chief, nobody’s got the faintest idea what to do?’
Aziz nodded. ‘You only really appreciate people when they’re not there any more,’ he added sententiously.
Hanif shot him a glance suggesting that he’d relish the opportunity to appreciate Aziz a whole lot. ‘All right, then,’ he replied, ‘so we need a leader. Let’s choose a new one. Strictly temporary,’ he added quickly, ‘until the Boss comes home. Well, how about it?’
‘Like who?’
<
br /> Awkward silence. It occurred to thirty-nine thieves simultaneously that (a) Hanifs suggestion was extremely sensible, and (b) whoever it was that got landed with the job of explaining how sensible it was to Akram when he returned, it wasn’t going to be him. When the topic of promotion in a bandit gang is discussed, the expression ‘dead men’s shoes’ tends to get used a lot, usually in the context of their being found in a pit of quicklime.
‘Well,’ said Zulfiqar, licking his dry lips, ‘there’s only one candidate, surely. I mean, who’s been Akram’s trusty right-hand man for as long as any of us can remember?’
Denials froze on thirty-eight lips. Suddenly, everyone was looking at Aziz. ‘Who, me?’ Aziz said, taking two steps backwards. ‘Now hang on a minute …’
‘It’s what he’d have wanted.’
‘Natural choice. No question about it.’
‘Every confidence.’
‘But I’m stupid,’ Aziz protested vehemently. ‘Ask anybody. Thicko Aziz, makes two short planks look like Slimmer of the Year. You need brains to be a leader.’
The general consensus of the meeting seemed to be that the whole point of having brains was managing not to be a leader. That way, assuming you had brains, you might get to keep them. Aziz could feel tendrils of loyalty reaching out towards him like the tentacles of a giant squid.
‘Let’s take a vote on it,’ said a voice at the back.
‘Yeah.’
‘Vox populi, vox Dei.’
A brief flurry of democracy later, Aziz was duly elected as, to quote the job description he drafted for himself, Acting Temporary Substitute Locum Caretaker Second-InCommandIn-Chief of the Thirty-Nine Thieves. There was a brief, improvised inauguration ceremony, in which the successful candidate was chased three times round a rocky outcrop, jumped on by his obedient henchmen and tied to a barrel. His henchmen then asked to know his pleasure.
‘I’m your new leader, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’ve got to do what I say?’
‘Right.’
‘Right. First off, elect a new bloody leader.’
‘Get stuffed.’
Aziz sighed, mentally playing devil’s advocate to the concept of constitutional monarchy. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘what about this? And this,’ he added, ‘is a real order.’
‘Go on.’
Aziz swallowed hard and tried to sound stern. He was about as good at it as a bowl of thoroughly melted ice cream, but it was the best he could manage. ‘My orders are,’ he said, ‘we find Akram. Preferably,’ he added, ‘before he finds us.’
There was a similar feeling of dislocation at the house of Ali Baba, when it was discovered that the Master had apparently gone off in the night with two small saddlebags, a packed lunch and the unspavined camel. The most demonstrative reaction came from Yasmin, the sloe-eyed houri who (although of course she didn’t know it) was to have suggested the business with the palm-oil jars and the boiling water.
‘Bastard!’ she said.
She said a great deal more, too; best years of my life, when I think of all I’ve done for him, the grapes I’ve peeled, all that wobbly dancing with a chunk of glass in my belly-button … Grief-stricken, you might say. Desolate. Inconsolable.
So, while other members of the household busied themselves with various tasks incidental on the Master’s departure, such as the removal of small, portable valuables to places of safety and calling on the estate agent to get the house on the market as quickly as possible, Yasmin stormed off to her room to do some serious sulking, although she did stop off at the Counting-House on the way in case there was any loose cash lying around that might prove a temptation to the servants.
‘Coward,’ she muttered under her breath - Ali Baba hadn’t left any money on the desk, but he’d carelessly left a substantial sum in the safe hidden behind the sliding screen in the secret chamber under the false chimney-breast, where any Tom, Dick or Yusuf might find it - ‘Spineless, gutless, yellow-livered’
Of all the parts of a story, the Love Interest is probably the most resilient, and the nastiest to get on the wrong side of. A woman scorned is bad enough; a woman scorned when the glass slipper is, so to speak, millimetres from her foot is perhaps the most ferocious thing imaginable this side of a thermonuclear holocaust. As she stormed dramatically up the main staircase, she stopped for a moment to pick up an exquisite painted silk miniature of her beloved and press it fervendy to her heart.
‘You can run,’ she said to it, ‘but you can’t hide.’
‘Wait here,’ Akram hissed.
The phoenix glowered at him and went on nibbling insulation off the telephone cable. It was amazing the effect that twenty thousand volts had on the creature; namely, none at all.
Squatting uncomfortably on the window-ledge, several hundred feet above Bloomsbury, Akram fished in his pocket for his folding jemmy. If his careful reconnaissance was correct, this window would get him in to the staff toilet on the top floor of the British Museum, leaving him the relatively simple task of making his way past an impenetrable jungle of electronic pratfalls, breaking into a reinforced glass case without making a sound, and then retracing his steps back to this window. The tricky part would be persuading the phoenix to let him climb on its back again.
‘And don’t be all night about it’ the phoenix called after him. ‘Some of us do have better things to do than perching up draughty roofs in the freezing cold …’
It was still squawking when Akram, having dropped twelve feet onto a stone floor, landed feather-light and froze motionless. He listened. Apart from the distant sound of the phoenix complaining to the night air about Some People Who Have No Consideration For Others (owing to the nature of his somewhat irregular lifestyle he had never married, but there had been times when, trapped in a wardrobe or linen cupboard of a house he’d burgled, he’d had opportunities to eavesdrop on matrimony, so he knew what it sounded like) there was silence. A cistern dripped. Something electric hummed. Noises like these are the authentic sound of a building snoring. He relaxed and groped for the door.
It took him an hour of painstaking, heart-in-mouth work to reach the gallery where the glass case was. Naturally, he’d memorised the floor-plan and counted the number of paces from the door to the case, so the complete darkness was no handicap to him. He’d had the benefit of a year’s apprenticeship with Foggy Mushtaq, the legendary blind burglar of Joppa, who had taught him that all in all, sight is the most expendable of a thief s five senses, and as he felt with the tip of a goose quill for the wires he had to cut, his eyes were in fact tightly shut. Snip. Job done.
‘Psst.’
Once, for a joke, Daft Harit had woken his chief from a fitful doze by putting a handful of ice cubes, stolen five minutes earlier from the Emir’s own ice-house, down the back of his neck. The fact that for the rest of his short life Daft Harit was known instead as One-Eared Harit is a tribute more to Akram’s lightning reflexes than his ability to take a joke; but there had been a split second, a period of time so brief that there is no recognised unit of measurement small enough to quantify it, when he’d been completely at a loss and hadn’t known whether he was coming or going. Thus, when the voice said ‘Psst’ a millimetre or so from his ear, a small voice in the outback of his brain groaned and muttered, Shit, not again.
Managing in the nick of time to countermand his instinctive reaction, Akram kept perfectly still and said, ‘Hello?’
‘Hello yourself.’
Go on then, be enigmatic, see if I care. ‘Who’s there?’ he asked, as quietly and calmly as he could.
‘Me.’
Maybe, Akram suggested to himself, I’ve actually fallen asleep on the job and this is a nightmare. ‘Who’s me?’ he asked.
‘Don’t you know?’
‘No.’
‘Give you three guesses.’
‘Look
‘Go on. Three guesses.’
‘All right. The Prophet Mohammed?’
‘No.’
‘Stanley Baldwin.’
‘No.’
‘Kenneth Branagh.’
‘No. When I tell you, you’ll kick yourself.’
Any minute now, said Akram to himself, a certain amount of kicking may well take place, but I doubt very much whether I shall be the recipient. ‘Stop pratting about,’ he hissed ferociously. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m the djinn,’ the voice replied. ‘From inside the lamp inside this glass case. My name’s Ibrahim Ali Khan, but my friends call me Curly.’
Akram’s eyes were still shut so he couldn’t close them as a symptom of frustrated disappointment. It was a bit of a blow, nevertheless; to go to all this trouble and then have your supposedly invincible magic djinn turn out to sound just like the ghost of Kenneth Williams. ‘Curly,’ he repeated.
“Cos I wear curly-toed shoes,’ explained the djinn. ‘Who’re you?’
‘My name is Akram the Terrible.’
‘That’s an unusual surname. And what’s the V stand for?’
‘Shut up.’
‘No it doesn’t, otherwise it’d be Akram S. Terrible.’
I could, of course, just leave, quietly and without fuss. There’s nothing in the rules says I’ve got to take this pillock with me. On the other hand… ‘Be quiet,’ Akram whispered. ‘And watch out, I’m going to break the glass.’
‘Need any help?’
‘No, thank you, I’m perfectly capable.’
Crackl
WHAAWHAAWHAAWHAAWHAAWHAA!
Bugger, snarled Akram under his breath, must have missed one. The noise was so loud that the shock of it paralysed him for a moment; it was like being in the same room as a forty-foot-high two-year-old who doesn’t want to go to bed. Just a minute…