Open Sesame

by Tom Holt

  The man behind the counter smiled patiently. ‘Take your time,’ he said. ‘Actually, I’d recommend the Chicken Danish Brunch.’ There was, Heaven help us, a flicker of genuine, unfeigned enthusiasm in the poor man’s eyes as he spoke. ‘My personal favourite,’ he added, ‘for what that’s worth.’

  Michelle shrugged. ‘So what’s that got in it?’ she asked.

  The man straightened his back with - yes, dammit, with pride as he recited, ‘It’s a scrummy fillet of marinaded prime chicken, served traditional Danish-style in an open sandwich with choice of relish, all on a sesame seed bun.’

  The speech went past Michelle like an InterCity train through a Saturdays-only backwoods station. ‘I’m sorry?’ she said. ‘I missed that.’

  ‘Okay. It’s a scrummy—’

  ‘Edited highlights, please.’

  ‘No problem. Chicken, open sandwich, sesame seed bun.’

  Michelle shook her head. It was noisy inside, noisy even for a Macfarlane’s on a Friday night, and her ears were still ringing from Mr Sobieski from Accounts informing the world that ever since his baby left him, he’d found a new place to dwell. ‘Say again, please,’ she shouted back. ‘Didn’t quite catch…’

  The man nodded and smiled. ‘Sandwich,’ he said. ‘Open. Sesame…’

  ‘Open sesame?’

  (‘Two down. One to go.’)

  ‘Sesame seed bun.’ Something strange had happened to the man’s face. It was as if he was being used as a guinea pig by a blind acupuncturist. ‘Guaranteed to make your taste-buds … Don’t I know you?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You sound like someone I used to know.’

  As he spoke, he saw that her purse was open on the counter, and there was her Visa card. Part of the shared heritage of thieves and lawyers is an ability to read upside down without even having to think about it: MICHELLE PARTRIDGE.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘My imagination,’ Akram replied; while he was saying the words, shutters came down in his eyes, like a snake’s transparent eyelids. ‘Do forgive me. Alternatively, the Saigon Ribs Surprise is very popular. There’s a choice of dips, we’ve got Tangy Orange, Bar-B-Q, Byzantine Lemon …’

  Her purse also contained a receipted gas bill, with her address. Akram’s eyes lapped up the information like a cat drinking milk.

  ‘I’ll have that, please,’ Michelle said quickly. ‘Who did I remind you of?’

  ‘Forget it, please,’ Akram muttered. ‘That was in another country, and besides, the sonofabitch is dead.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Which dip? We got orange, barbeque, lemon …’

  ‘Orange.’

  ‘Coming right up. That’ll be three pounds seventy-five, please.’

  Now I know who he is, Michelle realised. He was in the waiting room, the day I—

  ‘Your change,’ said Akram. ‘Enjoy your meal, have a nice day.’

  ‘Thank you. I—’

  The two girls behind her, who had been very patient so far, eased past and ordered hamburgers. She stood for a moment, at right angles to the queue, clutching her bag and trying to think.

  Akram. Akram the Terrible! Here!

  ‘Excuse me.’ She elbowed one girl out of the way and stood heavily on the other’s toe. ‘Sorry,’ she growled. ‘Look, is your name Akram, by any chance?’

  The man looked at her, and pointed at his lapel badge. It read: JOHN, ASST MGR.

  ‘So sorry,’ she whispered, and fled.

  Of all the hamburger joints in all the towns in all the world, Akram reflected, as he locked up that night. Just when I was starting to get somewhere. Just when I was beginning to get some vague idea of what happiness might possibly be like. And now it’s back to the old routine.

  Just a minute, he reflected. Just because I’ve found Ali Baba’s daughter (how come he’s got a daughter, and what in buggery is she doing this side of the goddamn Line?) doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve got to do anything about it. I can just ignore it. Forget I ever saw her. Take no notice.

  I could indeed. And then, for an encore, I could hitch a ride on a flying pig and save myself the bus fare home. Get real, Akram.

  Get real —

  If only. Chance, he muttered to himself as he switched on the alarm, would be a bloody fine thing. He’d seen or read somewhere that humans had a proverb: Mankind cannot stand too much reality. As far as he was concerned, Mankind didn’t know it was born.

  When he got home, the tooth fairy was waiting for him. That, he reckoned, put the tin lid on it.

  ‘Not now,’ he said, as she fluttered down from the ceiling like a large moth, the sort that chews holes in chain-mail shirts.

  ‘Yes, but listen

  ‘I said not now.’ He flumped into the armchair, kicked his shoes off, and put his hands behind his head. All other considerations beside, he’d had a long day, been on his feet for most of it, and he badly wanted to go to sleep. It occurred to him that on the other side of the Line, he never got as tired as this, even if he’d been in the saddle all day and out burgling and killing all night. In Storybook land, everyone has boundless energy and extraordinary (by Real standards) stamina. In Storybook land, people only keel over from exhaustion when the story demands that they say, ‘I’m done for, you go on without me’; which is the hero’s cue to pick up his worn-out colleague and carry him for two days across the desert.

  ‘Listen!’

  Akram turned, his hand partly raised as if to swat. ‘Well?’ he snapped. ‘This had better be important. Anything less than world-shattering, and the only loose teeth around here are going to be your own.’

  Tooth fairies are, of course, first-class narrators, and it took Fang less than thirty seconds to explain about her discovery. When she’d finished, Akram nodded slowly.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘so that is pretty world-shattering.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And,’ said Fang impatiently, ‘as in, what are we waiting for? Come on, it’s after midnight already.’

  Akram held up his hand, as if he was God directing traffic. ‘Not so fast,’ he said. ‘Admittedly, the obvious course of action would be to go immediately and steal this thing.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Ninety-nine out of a hundred villains would already be out of the door and halfway down the street by now. The hundredth would be hobbling along behind the other ninety-nine, cursing the day he got lumbered with a wooden leg.’

  ‘Right. So why are we …?’

  ‘But,’ said Akram, ‘you overlook one minor detail. I’m not a villain any more. I’m through with all that, remember? I’m a good guy now.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said the tooth fairy. ‘What’s got into you, anyway? If you’ve got some sort of hyper-subtle master plan…’

  Akram shook his head. ‘Nope,’ he replied. ‘Look, my fluttering friend, watch my lips. I am not interested. I don’t do that stuff any more. I mean it,’ he added, as Fang made a vulgar noise implying disbelief. ‘If I still wanted to nail Ali Baba, I’ve got an even better trick up my sleeve. I’ve found his daughter. I could put the snatch on her, demand that he release me from my promise, and then go scrag the fucker.’ He paused for a moment. Without realising he was doing it, he’d taken such a tight grip on the arm of his chair that the wood was creaking. With an effort he let go. ‘But I’m not going to,’ he went on, putting his fingertips together and crossing his legs, as smoothly as a chat-show host. ‘So, it was terribly sweet of you to think of me and if there’s anything I can do that doesn’t involve nutting people in the mouth so you can swipe their teeth, you just name it. But I’m not interested. You got that, or would you like me to tap it out on your head in Morse code with this teaspoon?’

  At first, all Fang could do was stare at him, as if waiting for the practical joker to pull off the rubber Akram mask and say, ‘Fooled you!’ When it finally sank in that he was serious, the fairy couldn’t trust herself to speak. She buzze
d furiously to her shoebox, dived in and dragged the lid shut after her. Shortly afterwards, the flat was filled with the sound of a tiny person crying.

  ‘Cut that out, will you?’

  ‘Snf.’

  ‘Look,’ said Akram, raising the lid a few millimetres. ‘I’ve brought you something, see? It’s a left front incisor, I found it at work, a customer left it in a Triple Swiss Fondueburger. Don’t you want it?’

  The lid slammed.

  ‘I’ll leave it here for you,’ said Akram, slightly shaken. ‘For when you’re a bit less overwrought. Look, it’s still got most of its original plaque.’

  From inside the box came a tiny voice telling him where he could put his lousy rotten tooth. The recommendation was biologically feasible, but not something you’d suggest to someone whose shoebox you were living in. Akram shrugged.

  ‘If you don’t want it,’ he said, ‘there’s plenty that will. I’ll put it under my pillow, and we’ll see if it’s still there in the morning.’

  Nothing from the shoebox except bitter snuffling. Akram shrugged. Maybe she had a point, at that; but if she thought he was going to chuck away what might be his one and only chance to break out of the Story just to please a tiny gossamer-winged garbage collectress, she was deluding herself and that was all there was to it. It’d be like giving all your property to the poor, dressing up in sackcloth and wandering forth to preach to the birds just in order to get your picture on page seven of the Assisi Evening Examiner.

  And anyway, he reassured himself, as he rolled into bed and switched off the light, virtue’s its own reward, or so it says in the rule book. The better I am, the better I get. Turning down two opportunities for revenge in one day must mean I’m getting positively beatific. I bet that if I keep this up, I’ll be so good I can sell my second-hand bathwater as beaujolais nouveau.

  He fell asleep; his sleep lapsed into dreaming, and in his dream he was back across the Line and standing in front of the Fairy Godfather’s desk with a terrified grin on his face and (since this was a dream) a schoolboy’s cap on his head and an exercise book down the back of his trousers.

  ‘So,’ said the Godfather, ‘you wanna be good?’

  ‘Yes, padrone.’

  ‘So you wanna be a hero?’

  ‘Yes, padrone.’

  ‘And you wanna nail that sonofabitch Ali Baba so good he’ll wish he’ll never be born again?’ And then Akram wanted terribly, terribly much to say No, padrone and he could feel himself straining the muscles of his brain as he tried to stop the other word, the one beginning with Y, squirming out through the gate of his teeth; but, since it was one of that sort of dream - I knew I shouldn’t have finished off the two leftover Cheese Double Whammyburgers before we closed up, but isn’t it a sin to let good food go to waste? - all he could do was stand back from himself and look the other way, and try not to listen —

  ‘Yes, padrone.’

  And now the Godfather is laughing; big man, big laugh. ‘Your wish is my command,’ he says. ‘To hear is to obey. Rocco, you heard?’

  ‘Yeah, boss.’

  ‘So obey.’

  ‘Yeah, boss.’

  ‘But that’s impossible,’ Akram could hear himself protesting. ‘If I’m the good guy and the hero, how come I can nail the creep Baba? I thought nailing people, I was through with all that.’

  And a close-up of the Godfather’s face; cigar clamped in corner of masonry jaw, black eyes burning. ‘Hey,’ he says softly, ‘show some godamn respect. I mean, who’s telling this story, you or me?’

  Because it’s a dream, one of that sort of dreams (all our cheeseburgers are made with a hundred per cent pure natural milk cheese; okay, it’s industrial grade cheese, it’s rolled out in huge fifty-metre sheets in a processing plant that’s a dairy the way Greenwich Village is a village, but eat it late at night and you’ll find out if it’s real cheese or not) Akram finds he’s no longer in the Godfather’s study; he’s standing behind a huge boulder in a cleft in a cliff-face, and it’s dark, and there’s a troop of horsemen riding in, he can hear their horses breathing and the soft tinkle of their mailshirts, the clink of their swords in their scabbards. He wants to run but he can’t, and the leader of the troop rides up to the rock face, only a yard or so from where he’s cowering and he says -

  I know that voice!

  — ‘Open sesame!’ whereupon a door opens out of what looked for all the world like solid rock, and as it swings open on its hinges it creaks ever so slightly, and the leader of the troop rides past; and over his coat of mail he’s wearing a white coat, and there’s a scalpel, not a sword, by his side, which is why they call him Ali Baba the Terrible, leader of the Forty Dentists. And he looks up from writing Open Sesame on his shirt-sleeve and through the space between door and doorframe, Akram can just see inside the cave, and it’s stuffed full of gold - gold teeth, gold bridgework, gold dental plates, gold fillings prised out of the heads of screaming, dying men …

  And of course, it makes sense, in a way; because surely stealing makes you a thief, even if it’s thieves you steal from. On the other hand (but, since this is a dream, there’s no actual contradiction; dream-logic is as flexible as a lawyer’s promise) thieves are outlaws, and anything you do to a thief is perfectly fair; hell, you can kill thieves if you want to and still be as good as, well, gold (unfortunate simile, in the circumstances; all those teeth - ) and so what, you don’t get all hung up and conscience-stricken when you pour boiling water on an ants’ nest, do you? And most of all, if you will go eating cheese last thing at night, what possible right have you got to complain if you have bad dreams?

  Akram woke up.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said.

  Stories grow, stories spread; and if you smuggle a story across the Line, don’t go whining to the doctor when it starts frothing at the mouth and bites you.

  ‘Fang.’

  ‘ Snfnottalkingtoyousnf.’

  ‘Fang,’ Akram repeated, ‘get your coat. We’re going out.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  J.F. Smith paused, his left foot on the top rung of the ladder, his right knee braced against the windowsill, and listened.

  Far away, the railway hummed and growled, providing the nocturne’s bass section. A little closer, the constant composite hum of traffic. Apart from that, nothing except the slow, regular pulse of his own heartbeat. Satisfied, J.F. Smith pulled down the sash, stuck his head in through the window and started to wriggle.

  Destiny is a high-flown, rather romantic-sounding name for a whole host of factors outside one’s own control that shape the course of one’s life. Of these, where you happen to be born and who your parents are is perhaps the most important. J.F. Smith, for example, was born to follow one trade and one only. Anything else would have been as unthinkable as a teenage lion dropping in to the careers office asking if they had any openings for apprentice lambs. The fact that he’d actually been baptised John Fingers Smith came as no surprise to anybody who knew the family. They had been craftsmen in the burgling trade in Southampton ever since Henry V had strung up the first John Smith for stealing arrows from the quivers of the archers embarking for the Agincourt campaign.

  The really remarkable thing about this great tradition was that, nearly six hundred years later, the Smith family still wasn’t all that good at it; as witness the fact that John Fingers II, now in his fifty-second year, had just got out of prison for the seventh time, coincidentally on precisely the same day as Jason Fingers (19) and Damian (18) had started their first adult sentences in the same nick. The Governor, a man with a keen sense of tradition, had been keeping their greatgrandfather’s old cell ready and waiting for them ever since they were released from youth custody. It had their name on the door and everything.

  As for this house; well, John Fingers could remember his father knocking it off in 1956 - he’d held the ladder for him, and it had been his momentary lapse of attention that had led to John Fingers I spending 1956-1960 in dear old B583. To judge by the paintwork, i
t was probably the very same sash as he was lifting now that had fallen on John Fingers I and held him pinned by the neck until the police arrived.

  Having spent a few moments in silent contemplation, John Fingers II slithered through, landed in a heap and switched on his torch. In Dad’s time, of course, this had still been a big private house, rather than a slightly down-market conversion into three flats. It was asking a bit much to expect to find any decent gear in a place like this; video, CD player, microwave, answering machine (except that they were now so cheap as to be scarcely worth the stealing) and maybe a few quid in loose cash if you were very lucky. You could forget silver, jewellery or works of art. Today’s burglar, sad to say, is little more than a glorified furniture remover cum electrician.

  Still, he told himself as he swung the torch round in a slow, careful arc, you never know. More for form’s sake than anything else, he started pulling out the drawers and examining them for ring-boxes and jewellery cases.

  (‘Well, don’t just sit there, you moth-eaten excuse for a burglar alarm. Ring, damn you.’

  ‘I can’t. I’ve got a loose wire.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘But I have, really. I’ve been waiting for her to notice it for weeks.’

  ‘Oh. Of all the … Cordless screwdriver! Get your useless arse over here at the double!’)

  Hello, John Fingers II demanded of himself, what’s this? He flipped open the lid of the little blue box, and sighed. Just a poxy little plain silver ring with a chip of glass stuck in it; you could buy half a dozen of these off a market stall, brand new and totally legit, for a tenner. Assuming you wanted one, let alone ten. On the other hand —

  How would it look on the other hand?

  With a shrug he lifted the ring out of the box and checked it for hallmarks. None. It wouldn’t fit, of course; he could tell that without trying. It was a piece of cheap tat for the teenage market, probably less than five parts silver in any case. If I tried it on, it’d only get stuck.