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 swore 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.

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.’