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  ‘Skip,’ he was saying, ‘can we go in now, please, because I don’t know about you but I’m bloody well freezing.’

  ‘Aziz?’

  ‘Here, Skip.’

  Akram looked round. He knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that behind that rock lurked his great and perpetual enemy, the accursed thief, his eventual slayer, Ali Baba. One blow of his sword would be all it would take. His brain ordered his heels to spur on his horse. Nothing.

  ‘Skip?’

  Now then, Akram told himself, no need to panic, or at least not yet. ‘Aziz,’ he said, ‘I think there’s someone lurking behind that rock.’

  ‘Surely not, Skip.’

  ‘I think there is.’

  ‘Imagination playing tricks on you, Skip. Look, no offence, but I really am bursting for a pee, so if you wouldn’t mind just—’

  Akram drew in a deep breath. ‘Aziz,’ he said, ‘just go and have a look, there’s a good chap. Won’t take you a moment.’

  ‘Skip—’

  ‘Aziz!’

  A moment later, Aziz came back. While he’d been gone, Akram had distinctly seen a movement behind the door, heard the sound of rapid, terrified breathing. He was there, dammit.

  ‘Nothing, Skip. Not a dicky bird. Now, can we please go in?’

  Feebly, Akram waved him on; and then his horse started to move, and when he ordered his hand to pull on the reins, it flatly refused. Thirty seconds or so later, the door slammed shut behind them.

  Bugger, said Akram to himself.

  And, sure enough, when they returned to the cave next evening, after a hard day’s killing and stealing up and down the main Baghdad-Samarkand road, they found the treasure-chests empty, all the gold and silver and precious stones lost and gone for ever. No poll-tax bailiff ever did such a thorough job.

  ‘Bloody hell, Skip,’ wailed the thirty-nine thieves, ‘we’ve been done over! Now who on earth could have found out the password?’

  Ali Baba, you fools; Ali Baba the palm-oil merchant, who lives in the house beside the East Gate. Ali Ba …

  ‘No idea,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Search me.’

  And then Fazad had picked up a slipper, and they’d all crowded round to have a look, and someone had said, Presumably this slipper belongs to the thieving little snotrag what done this, and he’d heard himself say, Yes, presumably it does, now all we’ve got to do is find who it belongs to, and what he really wanted to do was bite his own tongue out for saying it and not saying A** B***, and if he had to go through with this he’d go stark staring mad; except of course he wouldn’t, because it wasn’t in the story. Inside, though, he’d go mad, and then in all likelihood his brain would die, and he’d be stuck here doing this ridiculous thing for ever and ever and ever.

  Late that night, in his sleep, he hit on the solution. He’d outwit the bastard. He’d change. He’d go straight.

  It was, after all, completely logical. He knew, better than any man ever born, that crime didn’t pay. From the first day you step out of line and swipe a bag of dates off the counter while the stallholder isn’t looking or tell your mum there wasn’t any change, it’s only a matter of time before the lid comes off the palm-oil jar and the hot water comes sploshing down. But he was wise to that now. He’d change. He’d be good.

  Better than that. He’d change the whole story.

  Instead of being the baddy, he’d be the goody.

  Somehow.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Michelle woke up. If she’d been on the jury when Macbeth was brought to trial for murdering sleep, she’d have argued for an acquittal on the grounds of justifiable homicide. Loathsome stuff, sleep; it fogs your brain and leaves the inside of your mouth tasting like a badly furred kettle.

  ‘Wakey wakey,’ trilled the alarm clock. ‘Rise and shine.’

  ‘Oh shut up,’ Michelle grunted. She’d been in the middle of a very nice dream, and now she couldn’t remember a thing about it. She nuzzled her head into the pillow, trying to find the spot where she’d left the dream, but it had gone, leaving no forwarding address.

  ‘Jussa minute,’ she said. ‘Did you just say something?’

  Tick, replied the clock.

  ‘Shut up,’ Michelle replied, ‘and make the tea.’

  It was a radio alarm clock teamaker, a free gift from an insurance company - free in the sense that all she’d had to do in order to receive it was promise to pay them huge sums of money every month for the rest of her natural life. She’d managed to disconnect the radio, but the teamaking aspect still functioned, albeit in a somewhat heavy-handed manner. First, there was a rumbling; until you were used to it, you assumed something nasty was happening deep in the earth’s crust, and expected to see molten lava streaming off the bedside table and onto the carpet. After the rumbling came the whistling, which generally put Michelle in mind of a swarm of locusts being slowly microwaved. The whistling was followed by the gurgling, the snorting and the Very Vulgar Noise; and then you could have your tea. You were also, of course, wide awake. If God has one of these machines, then He’ll be able to use it to wake the dead come Judgment Day. And have a nice cup of tea ready and waiting for them, of course.

  ‘Drink it while it’s hot.’

  Michelle blinked. If this was still the dream, it had taken a turn for the worse and frankly, she didn’t like its tone. She raised her head and gave the clock a long, bleary stare.

  ‘What did you just say?’ she asked.

  Needless to say, the clock didn’t answer. Clocks don’t; apart, of course, from the Speaking Clock, and there the problem is to get a word in edgeways. Not that it ever listens to a word you say. Michelle shook her head in an effort to dislodge the low cloud that seemed to have got into it during the night, and swung her feet over the edge of the bed.

  It was half past eight. ‘Oh hell!’ she shrieked. ‘You stupid machine, why didn’t you tell me?’

  Scattering bedclothes, she lunged for the bathroom and started to turn on taps. So loud was the roar of running water that she didn’t hear a little voice replying, somewhat resentfully, that she hadn’t asked.

  When the other thirty-nine thieves had gone to sleep, Akram stood up, waited for a moment or so, and then walked quietly over to the big bronze door of the Treasury.

  ‘It’s me,’ he hissed. ‘Now shut up and open.’

  The door was, sure enough, magical; but it wasn’t so magical that it could cope with two apparently contradictory orders at half past three in the morning. “Scuse me?’ it said.

  Akram winced. ‘Quiet’ he hissed. ‘Now open the blasted door, before I give you a buckled hinge.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m sure,’ the door whispered back, and opened. ‘Satisfied?’

  ‘Shut - I mean, be silent. And stay open till I tell you.’

  Once inside, he lit a small brass lamp, having first gingerly removed the lid and shaken it to make sure it was empty; you don’t go around carelessly lighting small brass lamps in Arabian Nights territory, unless of course you fancy explaining to a twenty-foot-high genie precisely why his beard has just disappeared in a puff of green smoke. The flickering light was just enough to enable him to make out the massive gold casket that lay against the end wall. He concentrated.

  Big smile. Flamboyant gesture. ‘Crackerjack!’ he exclaimed.

  The big gold casket had once been the property of Soapy Shamir; Baghdad bazaar’s top-rated game show host, until his sudden and unexpected demise. It too was magical. If you knew the words, it opened, no trouble at all. But if you got them wrong and it failed to recognise you, the only way to get it open was to answer twenty general knowledge questions, Name That Tune in Four, guess the identity of the mystery guest celebrity and slide down a chute into a large vat of rancid yoghurt. Fortunately, Akram hit just the right note of synthetic cheerfulness, and the lid yawned slowly back.

  Inside the casket, the Forty stored their most valuable treasures; items so far beyond price that sharing them out among the company was out of the question.
They were, in fact, completely useless; far too readily identifiable to sell, and worth too much to apportion. In consequence they just sat there from stocktake to stocktake, their mindblowing notional value being written up in the accounts in line with the retail price index to the point where Faisal the Accountant had to have a special 3-D abacus built just to do the maths.

  There were jewelled eyes of little green gods, enough firebird feathers to stuff a large cushion, bottomless purses, magic weapons, diamonds the size of cauliflowers, all the usual junk that eventually clutters up a long-established hoard. Akram swore and scrabbled. The object he was looking for was small and dowdy: a plain silver band, with what looked like a little chip of coloured glass stuck in it. Just as he was starting to get worried, Akram found it. Ah!

  The legendary—

  The priceless—

  The genuine—

  The one and only—

  King Solomon’s Ring.

  Yes, Dirty Ahmed’s mother had said when they first brought it back, with its previous one careful owner’s finger still wedged inside, but what’s it actually for? Ah, they’d replied, it’s magical. Really, said Mrs Ahmed, with a long sigh, another one of them, how nice. Still, you could give it somebody as a present. Somebody you don’t like all that much, probably. No, they’d said, listen, it’s really really magical. You can use it to talk to birds and animals.

  Long, unimpressed silence from Mrs Ahmed. Right, she’d said eventually. Like, Who’s a pretty boy, then? and Here, Tiddles and Gihtahtavit, yer useless bag o’ fleas. Gosh, how useful. No, not like that, Mrs Ahmed, like really talk to them, you know? Talk to them so’s they’ll understand you. And then they talk back to you.

  Put like that, they had to admit, it hadn’t really been worth sacking the desert temple, scaling the glassy-smooth walls, putting the fifty implacable guardians to the sword, et cetera, et cetera, just to be able to say, Hello, nice weather for the time of year to a jerbil. Birds and animals, they soon discovered, are never going to put Oscar Wilde out of a job. Get past the weather, activities of local predators, likely places to feed, and pretty soon you’re into embarrassed silences and Gosh-is-that-the-time. Anyone who’s ever bought anything from an Innovations catalogue will be familiar with the syndrome. So, ultimately, the ring went to live in the casket along with all the rest of the really priceless treasures or, as Mrs Ahmed described them, the white elephants. And there it had remained.

  But…

  To the innocent-souled Chinese alchemist, the black granular powder that goes Bang! when you set fire to it is an amusing novelty, useful for making pretty fireworks. It’s only when someone comes along with the notion of sticking it in a stout iron tube and ramming a cannonball down on top of it that the trouble starts. Carefully, Akram took the ring, slid it down onto his finger and grinned. Then he turned to face the casket.

  ‘Hello, box,’ he said.

  Hello, yourself. Here, just a tick. I can understand you.

  ‘Me too,’ Akram replied. ‘Good fun, isn’t it?’

  Not really. It’s a quarter to four in the morning. There’s locks trying to get some sleep.

  ‘Later.’ Akram scowled. ‘First,’ he went on, ‘I want to ask you something. It’s important, and I haven’t got much time. Pretty soon, all those clowns are going to wake up, and we’ll ride off to rob the Joppa caravan, and when we get back, that bastard Baba’ll have snuck in here and looted the place. Now, I want you to do something for me.’

  Just a tick. How come you know all this?

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Akram growled. ‘Just take it from me, I know. Look, for reasons I haven’t got time to go into, I know I’m stuck in this bloody story business, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. Every time I try, I fail. Now, I’ve worked out that if only I can get this magic ring out of this cave, there’s this very, very remote chance I can use it to chat up the mechanism that makes this whole story nonsense tick, and then I’ll be away, free and clear. But,’ Akram added, savagely bitter, ‘that’s one thing I can’t do. You could, though.’

  I could?

  ‘No trouble,’ Akram cooed. ‘Piece of cake. All it needs is, when Baba’s lugging you out through the cave door, you accidentally open your lid and chuck out the ring. It falls in that little cleft in the rock, on the right as you come in. Then, when we get back, I pick it up and I’m away. What d’you reckon? It’d mean ever so much to me.’

  The lid creaked. I dunno. I’d get in all sorts of trouble.

  Akram growled dangerously. ‘Not nearly as much trouble,’ he hissed, ‘as you would if you don’t. I can see to that.’

  Are you threatening me?

  ‘Yes.’

  Ah. Right. Fine. In that case, I’ll see what I can do.

  The dentist looked up at the clock, sighed with relief, and hit the intercom buzzer.

  ‘That’s it for tonight, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘Please say yes.’

  Crackle. ‘Actually,’ the intercom replied, ‘Mrs Nugent is here, she hasn’t got an appointment but she wondered if you might possibly be able to fit her in.’

  The dentist closed his eyes. It had been a long day, he was feeling shattered and he wanted very much to go home. Dentists get tired, too. If you prick them, do they not bleed? If you tickle them, do they not laugh? If you turn up at a quarter to eight, half an hour after surgery’s supposed to have finished, after they’ve been on their feet without a break since eight in the morning, do they not tell you to go away and come back first thing tomorrow?

  Apparently not.

  ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘Show her in. And then,’ he added, ‘lock the doors, bar the windows and hang out the radiation warning signs, because that’s it.’

  ‘Righty-ho, Mr B.’

  Three quarters of an hour and a flawless root-fill job later, the dentist shooed out the receptionist, washed the coffee-mugs, swept the floor and switched out the lights. From the street below, amber light flared through the frosted glass window, printing the words

  DENTAL SURGERY

  A. BARBOUR

  across the far wall.

  A last glance at his watch; eight forty-five, just enough time to go home, iron tomorrow’s shirt, make a sandwich, feed the goldfish and go to bed. No wonder that each year, tens of thousands of the world’s brightest and best young men and women turn to face the morning sun and declare, ‘A dentist’s life for me!’ To experience the thrill of a new mouth to peer into every day; to keep up the relentless struggle against the tartar hordes, to battle against plaque, to hunt the wily abscess through the rugged foothills of the back molars. Why Doc Holliday packed in dentistry for a life of loose women, gambling and whisky, he could never hope to understand.

  On the other hand…

  Goodnight, chair. Goodnight, drill. Goodnight, little glass for the yummy pink mouthwash. God bless. See you in the morning. You may be all I’ve got, but you’re a bloody sight better than what I had before.

  Night didn’t so much fall as ooze, filling the courtyard with deep, sticky shadows. Next door’s cat skittered homewards, a dead thrush between its jaws. Fingers Masood and Crusher Jalil, flower of the Baghdad City Guard, tried the door of the jeweller’s shop, first with their hands and then with a crowbar, satisfied themselves that it was adequately secured against felonious entry, and departed, muttering.

  Pale yellow light, escaping from the back door of Ali Baba’s sumptuous mansion into the courtyard, silhouetted the kitchen maid as she tottered sleepily out to the back step with a small jar in her hands. In the top of the jar was a piece of paper, inscribed: FORTY JARS TODAY PLEASE, OILMAN.

  She put it carefully down beside the formidable row of empties, yawned, and went back inside. Night coagulated. All was quiet.

  When a courtyard in the middle of a city is this quiet, it’s because something is wrong. Look inside any of the forty catering-size palm-oil jars lined up outside the back door, and you’ll know immediately what the anomaly is. Palm oil is a liquid, wher
eas bandits are profoundly solid. There are also other differences, the most important of which is: palm oil is good for you.

  ‘Skip.’

  ‘Not now, Aziz.’

  ‘Yeah, but Skip!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look,’ continued one of the oil-jars, whispering as loudly as an elephant falling through a conservatory roof. ‘D’you think we’re going to be stuck here long, because I’ve got pins and needles all over and I’m really desperate for a pee.’

  ‘Tough. You’ll have to wait till we’ve done the murder and had our revenge.’

  ‘And how long d’you reckon that’ll take?’

  I know the answer to that exactly, Akram sighed to himself.

  Seven hours, eighteen minutes and twelve seconds. ‘No idea,’ he replied. ‘Could be three hours, could be fifteen minutes. Just hold your water and stop blathering.’

  Aziz, who didn’t know what the word blather meant but could guess from context, fell silent; and for the next half hour nothing could be heard apart from the distant sounds of Baghdad’s nocturnal street life, which is (unless you’re very careful) exciting and short.

  And then - bang on time, reflected Akram morosely, if it wasn’t dark you could set your sundial by her - Yasmin the sloe-eyed houri opened the back door a crack and peered out, waiting to make sure everything was quiet. Just for fun, with the sense of doomed failure of a realist writing to his MP, Akram tried to push off the lid of his jar and escape, but his motor functions weren’t interested. It was as if his whole body had taken the phone off the hook, stuffed a sock under the clapper of the bell and settled down to a quiet game of brag somewhere cosy and remote in his great intestine.

  Now, Akram said to himself, this is where she changes the notes -

  Yasmin, on tiptoe, nips daintily across, removes the note from the small jar and substitutes another: NO OIL TODAY, PLEASE

  Back inside the house, two, three, and here comes the urn -

  Enter Yasmin and Ali Baba, wheeling a trolley with a huge copper vessel on it. Steam rises. When the spigot’s directly over the first jar (Fat Hussein), out comes a torrent of boiling water, there’s a faint cry, and the forty thieves have become the thirty-nine thieves plus one bandit-flavour pot noodle.