CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

‘And six means I get an extra muezzin on Aleppo, giving me three suits in baulk and two on the line, repiqued in green makes four thousand nine hundred and twenty-three, add ninety-three for the slam above the line makes six thousand and sixteen, plus four for his spurs makes six thousand and twenty, and it’s on a double Carpet so that’s twenty-four thousand and eighty, but I also get twenty for the finesse, making a grand total of twenty-five thousand and I win’

‘I hate you,’ said Akram.

‘I don’t care,’ Michelle replied happily, sweeping the pieces into her corner. ‘And that makes forty-eight games to me and, oh dear, none to you, what a shame, never mind, mugs away, your go.’

‘Don’t want to play any more.’

‘Your go.’

‘This is a silly game.’

‘Your go.’

‘We have been playing this game,’ Akram said, ‘for eighty-four hours non-stop. Bloody fine kidnap this turned out to be.’

‘You started it.’

‘I think I’ll call the police and give myself up.’

‘Okay,’ Michelle said, setting out the pieces. ‘But we’ll finish the set first. Your go.’

‘You sure you haven’t played this game before?’

‘Course I’m sure. But I think I’m slowly getting the hang of it. Are you going to throw those dice, or are you waiting for tectonic shift to move them for you?’

‘I’ve had enough of this game. Let’s play Dragons’ Teeth instead. You ever played Dragons’ Teeth? You’d like it.’

‘Throw,’ Michelle growled sternly, ‘the dice.’

‘All right, all right… Oh balls, double one.’

‘Hah!’

‘I’d offer you money to go away,’ Akram said, ‘but I’ve only got a five pound note and some copper. Which reminds me,’ he added. ‘What happens to employees who stay away from work for four days without even phoning in to pretend they’re ill?’

‘Usually,’ Michelle replied, ‘they get the sack. Why?’

‘Pity,’ Akram said, ‘I was just starting to like it a lot there. Did I happen to mention I got promoted to assistant manager?’

‘Only about sixty million times. Pretty academic now, I’d have thought. Now then - oh wonderful, double four. Now, do I want the Emir’s Palace, Samarkand? Might as well, I suppose.’

Akram cupped his chin between his hands. ‘It was inevitable, I suppose,’ he sighed. ‘It’s the bloody story catching up with me, I guess. You settle down, get a job, think you’ve escaped and then wham! there it is again, standing behind you breathing hot narrative down the back of your neck. Tell you what,’ he added. ‘I’ll bet you. If you win this game, I’ll let you go free. How does that sound?’

‘Chicken. Admit it, you just can’t take being beaten by a woman.’

Akram scowled. ‘Woman be blowed. As far as I’m concerned, any life form whatsoever that beats me at Racing Genie by a margin of forty-eight to nil is probably pushing its luck. If I ask you nicely, can I concede the last two games?’

‘No,’ replied Michelle, ‘I want to see you squirm.’

‘How do you do that, exactly? I’ve always thought of it as basically wiggling your head about while trying to make your shoulder blades touch each other.’

‘You’ll find out soon enough. Now stop chattering and get on with the game.’

‘What about your job, though? Won’t they be wondering where you’ve got to?’

‘I’ve been kidnapped,’ Michelle replied. ‘You don’t have to go to work if you’ve been kidnapped. Ask Helen of Troy or anyone.’

‘Or your father,’ Akram persisted. I’ll bet you he’s worried sick.’

‘No he isn’t,’ Michelle replied promptly. ‘I phoned him when you went to the loo.’

‘Oh. Right. And what did he say?’

‘Never redouble on only two utilities unless you’re finessing in baulk. He was right, too.’

‘Hey, that’s cheating.’

‘No it isn’t.’

‘Yes it is.’

‘No it isn’t.’

Akram stood up. ‘Do you think this is some sort of happy ending?’ he speculated. ‘I mean, happily at forty-eight to nil depends on which side of the board you happen to be, but ever after is starting to look like a definite possibility.’

‘Sit down and throw the dice.’

Akram shook his head. ‘No offence,’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s been great fun, if perhaps a little one-sided, but I think I’ll give it a bit of a rest for now. Do you realise,’ he added, ‘that my whole life is now in total ruins?’

‘Oh come on. You’ll get another job, I’m sure.’

‘It’s not that,’ Akram replied. ‘Just think, will you? For I don’t know how long, probably since Time began, I used to go round in a sort of little loop of robbing, killing and getting scalded to death by that bastard Ali Baba. Fine. I escape from all that, and I come here, with the sole intention of catching him and torturing him to death. The bastard stymies me again. But that’s fine, because for the first time in my lives I can see this little tiny ray of hope which says to me, Akram, you don’t have to do this kind of stuff any more. And that’s marvellous. I get a job, do something useful with my life, I don’t have to be a villain or a hero. And then you come barging in—’

‘All I wanted was a hamburger.’

‘All I wanted was to be real. You come barging in, and all that goes out of the window, I’m back to where I was, but at least I’ve got a chance of getting my revenge on Ali Baba because I’ve got you. And now that’s all stuffed up on me, because we’ve spent the last couple of days playing some damn kid’s game, I couldn’t kill you even if I wanted to, and your criminally negligent, stony-hearted excuse for a father isn’t prepared to lift a finger to rescue you. Excuse me, I have to go and feed the phoenix.’

Michelle looked at him. ‘You don’t want to kill him any more, do you?’

‘Of course I don’t,’ Akram snarled. ‘What the bloody hell good would killing the feckless jerk do me? Absolute waste of everybody’s time.’

‘Then don’t,’ Michelle replied.

‘What?’

‘Don’t kill him.’ Michelle shrugged. ‘Don’t kill anybody. I know it sounds a bit strange at first, but you’ll get used to it. They say the after-breakfast murder’s the hardest one to give up. Once you’ve learned to do without that, you’ll find kicking the habit entirely will be surprisingly easy.’

Akram gestured impatiently. ‘You think it’s that easy, you stupid bloody mortal? You really believe I can just…’

‘Yes.’

Fang opened her eyes.

‘Where … ?’ she croaked.

A bright light, as hard and unfriendly as the headlights of an oncoming truck, hit her in the eyes. She started to wince away, but found she couldn’t.

‘Ah,’ said a voice above her. ‘You’re awake.’

The reason she couldn’t move, she discovered, was that she was tied up. Her memory was racing, like the wheels of a car stuck fast in mud. The last thing she could remember was a smell. Gas …

‘This,’ said the voice, ‘isn’t going to hurt a bit.’

Gas. A huge cache of teeth; and she’d been piling them up and wishing she’d brought the block and tackle, when suddenly there’d been this foul sweet smell, and then her arms and legs had stopped working.

‘Not a bit. This is going to hurt a whole lot.’

She remembered. ‘Aaaaagh!’ she said.

She’d gone back to the dentist’s surgery where they’d found the safe, because she’d been convinced there were teeth hidden around the place somewhere. And just as she’d found this mind-bending hoard, a light had blazed in her eyes and the gas had hit her and she’d realised that she’d been set up; Ali Baba had put out that great big stash of teeth as a decoy, and she’d flown straight in. She craned her neck to see what was holding her arms and legs. Dental floss.

‘You certainly took your time coming back,’ Ali Baba was saying. He was holding the drill in his right hand. ‘For a while there, I thought I’d misjudged you. Now you’ve got two choices.’

‘Eek.’

‘Either,’ he went on, switching on the drill, ‘you can tell me where that bastard’s holding my daughter, or else I’ll fill you full of amalgam. What’s it to be?’

‘I’ll talk.’

‘You do that. While you still can.’

Another lesson learnt the hard way; never underestimate a dentist. As he unwound the dental floss, he explained that as soon as he’d opened the floorsafe and found the sixpence she’d left there, he’d known that the way to find Michelle was through her.

‘I knew you’d come back for the teeth,’ he said. ‘It was just a matter of being patient. And now, here you are. You’re being very sensible, by the way. You probably haven’t seen the really big drill. It’s thicker than you are. You wouldn’t have liked it at all.’

She contemplated making a run for it; but that ceased to be a practical possibility when he took a great big lump of silicone impression material and moulded it round her foot, like an old-fashioned ball and chain. There’d be no chance of hobbling two steps together, let alone flying, with that stuck on the end of her leg.

‘Did you ever see Marathon Man?’ he was saying. ‘No? Pity. It’d make scaring the living daylights out of you so much easier if we shared a common frame of reference. Never mind, I’ll just have to do the best I can with crude physical violence.’

‘I said I’ll talk,’ Fang squeaked, as he revved the drill. ‘Please,’ she added, as he slowly and ghoulishly counted out forty-six silver sixpences, explaining as he did so that he was old-fashioned enough to believe in payment in advance. ‘I’ll take you straight there, I promise.’

‘I’m delighted to hear it. Well then, no time like the present. Just wait there a moment while I get a few things.’

He squished the ball of tacky silicone down onto the arm of the chair, imprisoning her while he tucked the gun into the waistband of his trousers and wrapped the sword in a black bin-liner. ‘You have no idea,’ he said cheerfully, ‘how much I’m looking forward to this. Which is strange,’ he added, ‘because ever since I arrived on this side of the Line I’ve tried my best not to inflict gratuitous pain and injury, and now here I am getting ready to slice your friend up as thin as Danish salami. I guess it’s a case of the exception that proves the rule. Ready?’

It was insult spot-welded to injury for Ali Baba to mould the ball of sticky onto the bottom of his rear-view mirror, leaving Fang to dangle upside-down like some sort of horrible mascot, but she wasn’t in any frame of mind to make anything of it. She was too busy feeling extremely ill.

‘Which way?’ he asked.

‘Left,’ Fang replied, ‘then second on your right into Pordand Avenue.’

‘Thanks. The whole reason,’ Ali Baba continued, ‘why I went into dentistry once I arrived here was this horrid feeling of guilt, because of what I’d done; you know, the palm-oil jars and the boiling water. I assume you know about all that? Good. All right, I decided, now I’m here I’m going to devote the rest of my life to curing pain and alleviating suffering. Pretty noble sentiments, don’t you think?’

‘Uhg,’ Fang replied, swaying crazily as Ali Baba swung the wheel for the right-hand turn. ‘Carry on here for about half a mile, then left at the lights.’

‘Thank you. The sad part of it is,’ Ali Baba went on, ‘that all that time, I was living in mortal terror of Akram showing up. And I mean really serious terror. You have no idea how much it costs in electricity when you sleep with the light on all the time. Strictly speaking, I ought to make him pay me for that. And then there’s all the alarm systems and infra-red cameras and surveillance gear. None of it’s cheap, you know. And all that was because I was afraid of him. That’s a bit of a joke, in the circumstances.’

‘Left here. What are you going to do?’

‘Kill him,’ Ali Baba replied casually, indicating and waiting for a lorry to pass. ‘As painfully as I sensibly can. I’m not going to bother with anything elaborate, of course, because once you start on that track you’re virtually inviting the bastard to escape. Ye gods, though, I’m looking forward to this. I mean, we’re talking very old scores indeed here. He’s going to think boiling water was on the soppy side of humane.’

‘Right. Urn …’

‘And dentistry,’ Ali Baba went on, one hand on the wheel, ‘gives you some fairly esoteric insights into the nature of pain, with specific reference,’ he added, smiling dreamily, ‘to agony.’ He glanced up at the rear-view mirror, caught a glimpse of his reflection in it, and looked back at the road. ‘And when I’ve finished with him,’ he said, ‘we must have a chat about you.’

John Fingers cleared his throat. Thirty-nine eager faces turned and looked at him.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Here’s the plan.’

He wasn’t sure why he’d said that. It seemed appropriate somehow, but he didn’t actually have a plan, more a sort of rough pencil sketch, with lots of rubbing out and a shopping list on the other side. Maybe it was a case of the situation bringing out the best in him.

‘Seaview Road,’ he said. ‘The industrial units. Now I want a nice clean job, in and out as quickly as possible, no messing around. Any questions?’

‘Skip.’

‘Yes?’

‘What’s an industrial unit?’

On the negative side, it had to be admitted, they were all thick. You’d be hard put to it to find thirty-nine dozier people this side of a cryogenic vault. ‘It’s a sort of shed,’ he explained.

‘A shed?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Who’d keep anything worth nicking in a shed?’

Patience, John Fingers muttered to himself. ‘Not that sort of shed,’ he replied. ‘More a sort of - well, unit.’

‘You mean a shed for keeping gold and jewels in?’

More patience. ‘It’s not actually gold and jewels we’re after,’ he said, ‘more your sort of portable power tools and petty cash style of thing. I mean,’ he added, as thirty-nine faces suddenly became as glazed as a row of cucumber frames, ‘don’t get me wrong, if we do happen across any gold and jewels it’ll be a nice bonus. But what we’re actually on the lookout for is electric drills, orbital sanders, arc-welding gear, anything we can get a few bob for down the car boot sale.’

He paused, and was immediately deluged in a flood of requests for footnotes. He held up his hand for silence. ‘Let’s keep it simple, shall we?’ he said. ‘If it’s not nailed down, we pinch it. All right?’

Thirty-nine heads nodded. ‘Right, Skip.’

‘Then let’s go.’

‘Skip.’

‘Oh for crying out— Yes?’

‘Why can’t we steal anything that’s been nailed down? Is it a curse, or something?’

‘No, it’s just - yes, that’s right, it’s a curse. Can we go now, please?’

Why me, he reflected, as he backed the coach out into Merrivale Crescent. I was never cut out to be a gang leader. The Smiths have always been loners, single operators; mostly, he was realistic enough to admit, because of their almost supernatural knack of getting caught, but never mind.

Suddenly finding himself the leader of a gang of fanatically loyal, desperately eager to please, terminally stupid desperadoes wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind when he woke up that morning; but it had been a pretty strange day in any case. A pretty strange week, come to that.

‘Watch my offside front wing,’ growled the coach.

‘Shut up, you.’

Obviously it wasn’t a coincidence. A less straightforward man would be trying to puzzle it all out at this point, but John Fingers wasn’t like that. When things dropped on him from Heaven, he didn’t stare up at the sky and demand an explanation; nor did he hold them up to the light or shake them to see if they rattled. No; he accepted them at face value, filed off the serial numbers where appropriate and, whenever possible, immediately sold them in pubs. In this instance Destiny had, for reasons best known to itself, endowed him with the ability to talk to consumer durables and a gang of thirty-nine semi-skilled assistants.

John Fingers wasn’t remotely interested in where they’d come from; not knowing where things came from was bred in the bone as far as he was concerned. Somewhere in the vastness of the Universe there was a lorry with a duff tailgate, from which all these wonders had tumbled into his lap. His role was to make the best of them he could. It was a way of life that seemed to work with video recorders, forty-piece canteens of cutlery, socket sets, wax cotton jackets, answering machines and all sorts of other things that came his way; no reason he could see why it shouldn’t apply to miracles.

If he hadn’t been so preoccupied with thoughts of this nature, he might have noticed that he was sharing Seaview Road with a big blue Volvo, which drew up round the corner as he parked the coach outside the entrance to the industrial estate and opened the doors.

‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘You two, Whatsyername and Thing, see to the gates. The rest of you …’

Perhaps he should have been more explicit. Rashid and Yusuf, answering to the generic names he’d given to all his new-found followers, had seen to the gates by charging them with their heads. They evidently had very hard heads. Ah well, he told himself, at least it’s got the gates open.

‘Right, that’ll have to do,’ he said briskly. ‘You lot, follow me.’

If they’d been wearing caps and carrying satchels, you’d have reckoned it was a school party. As they trooped through the mangled gates, furtive as an express train, inconspicuous as North America, the curtains of the darkness parted for a moment and a shadowy figure fell in behind them, followed them for a while, mumbled something into the top pocket of his coat and sneaked off into the shadows.

‘This,’ muttered Ali Baba, crouching in the doorway of Unit 13, ‘is getting a little bit worrying.’

‘You’ve noticed, at last.’

Ali Baba shook his head. ‘That large party of idiots over there,’ he whispered. ‘I think I recognise them. Hang on, we can double-check this.’ He counted up to forty and then nodded. ‘What in hell’s name are they doing here? And who’s the new leader?’

‘Does it matter?’ Fang replied, her teeth chattering. ‘Look, they’ve gone off down the other end of the estate. Let’s get on with it and then you can let me go.’

‘You think you’re going to be let go? Really? That’s that stuff, what’s it called, optimism. Never could get the hang of it myself.’

It was at this point that Ali Baba felt the loss of King Solomon’s ring. Most of the time he was glad, on balance, to be rid of it; having to stop and pass the time of day with every lock and thermostat and circuit-board you meet takes up such a lot of time, and generally speaking gets you absolutely nowhere. Just occasionally, though, it can be astonishingly helpful.

‘You wouldn’t happen to know,’ he asked, ‘exactly how one goes about shooting off a lock? It looks so easy in the films, but in real life I haven’t a clue how to go about it.’

‘Why not just try the handle?’ Fang replied.

Ali Baba shrugged and, with the intention of showing what a silly suggestion that was, gave the door handle a half-hearted twist. The door opened.

‘Good Lord,’ he said. Then he kicked the door hard and charged in.

There are people who can simply blunder into difficult, dangerous situations and expect to be able to carry it off by trusting their instincts and riding their luck. They’re the sort of people who also win lottery prizes with the first ticket they buy and attract the attention of off-duty Hollywood talent scouts at karaoke evenings at their local pubs. Unless you’re one of these, playing the law of averages with a full Legal Aid certificate in your pocket, it’s best to do it the other way and think things through carefully before kicking open doors and sprinting through. You never know what you’re likely to find on the other side.

In Ali Baba’s case, it turned out to be a very large, bad-tempered bird. His specialised knowledge meant that he was able to identify it as a phoenix, but unfortunately it didn’t extend to what you do to mollify one when you’re two feet away from it and looking down its throat. At least he was able to eliminate one possibility straight away. Saying, ‘Now then, nice bird,’ had no perceptible effect whatsoever.

‘Ark!’ screamed the phoenix, flapping its wings. ‘Ark ark graaaaoar!’

Two and a half seconds later, Ali Baba was able to add drawing a gun and shooting at it to his definitive list of counter-productive ways to deal with an angry phoenix. He was just about to add falling flat on his face and cowering when Fang said, ‘It’s all right, he’s with me.’

‘Then what was all the shooting in aid of?’ the phoenix grumbled. ‘Daft bugger, he could do somebody an injury.’

Ali Baba looked up, puzzled. ‘Tooth fairy?’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘What’s going on? Why are you on my side all of a sudden?’

Fang grinned. ‘That’s three molars and a couple of upper front canines you owe me, Mister Dentist,’ she replied. ‘I may be small, but I’m not stupid. Would you like me to switch the light on? It’ll be so much easier if we can all see what we’re doing.’

A moment later, the light snapped on. The phoenix, dazzled, let out a pained squawk and huddled away into a corner, leaving Ali Baba face to face with Akram and Michelle.

‘This is …’ Akram began to say, but he got no further. This is where it starts getting complicated. Let’s break it up into five phases.

As soon as he saw Akram, Ali Baba raised the gun, pointed it at Akram and said ‘You bastard!’ That’s as far as he got, so we’ll leave him for a moment and go back to Michelle.

She had started off with the intention of getting between Akram and her father, calming the situation down, getting a conversation going and then leaving them to it while she made a nice conciliatory cup of tea. Seeing Ali Baba raise the gun, however, she rapidly revised her plans and ducked behind Akram, saying, ‘Eeek!’ We’ll leave her there for the time being, and turn to Akram.

Actually, Akram didn’t do much, apart from starting to say ‘This is …’ and thinking better of it. Whatever he may have had in mind to do, the situation was radically altered by the light coming on. This meant that he now had a clear, sharply-defined shadow on the whitewashed wall behind him.

Finally, just to complete the picture, this was the precise moment when John Fingers opened the back door to Unit 13 and walked straight in, to find himself staring down the barrel of Ali Baba’s gun.

One last thing. The electric kettle, which Michelle had put on a short while ago, now came to the boil and switched itself off. That’s Phase One.

Phase Two began with Akram’s shadow. It wasn’t in the sunniest of moods to begin with, thanks to Akram’s devious use of subdued lighting to keep it in its place. Suddenly restored, it snatched its chance, swept along the wall and went for Ali Baba’s throat, dragging Akram along behind it like a very small child clinging to a huge kite on a windy day. Instinctively, Ali Baba swung round to face it and fired the gun. Dentistry and skill at arms are not mutually exclusive, but proficiency at one doesn’t necessarily imply competence at the other. He missed badly. There was a scream.

For the phoenix, still recovering from its nasty experience with the light, a sudden loud noise in a confined space was the last straw. Rising like a startled pheasant (the comparison is only partially appropriate, because it was ten times bigger than the largest pheasant ever recorded) it rocketed towards the open door in a flurry of pounding wings, cannoned into Ali Baba and sent him spinning against the wall before hurtling away into the night in the general direction of the Isle of Wight.

John Fingers, wondering what the hell he’d just walked into, had meanwhile grabbed the kettle, as being the nearest remotely useful object to hand, with the intention of throwing boiling water in the face of the man who was pointing the gun at him. His principal mistake lay in not unplugging the kettle first. As it was, the kettle remained firmly tethered to the wall, ruining his aim. There was another scream.

That’s Phase Two.

Phase Three kicks off with Ali Baba hitting the wall. The back of his head connected with the light switch, turning the light off. Akram’s shadow immediately vanished. Akram himself, suddenly released, tripped over something - possibly a dead body - on the ground, lurched forward, slipped on the wet floor and went crashing into Ali Baba, hitting him in the solar plexus with his head. Feeling Ali Baba’s fingers round his throat, he grabbed wildly for something to pull himself up by, found the wall and, quite by chance, switched the light on again. End of Phase Three.

The situation at the start of Phase Four, as revealed by the newly restored light, is as follows:

Ali Baba, backed up against the wall, is trying to strangle Akram; who in turn is doing his best to pull away and, rather less successfully, breathe. As if he didn’t have enough to contend with, he’s now further hampered in his movements by an extremely boisterous and single-minded shadow, which couldn’t care less about breathing and is really only interested in inflicting mayhem on Ali Baba. Since Akram and his shadow only have the one pair of hands between them, this complicates matters no end. John Fingers, having contrived to soak himself from head to foot with boiling water from his own kettle, has fallen backwards over a small trestle table and knocked himself silly on the floor; in doing so dislodging a tooth, for which Fang is currently writing him out a receipt. Michelle is lying on the ground, not moving.

And … action.

Akram, scrambling to get a foothold, kicks Ali Baba’s gun across the floor. John Fingers, coming round and finding himself the apparent recipient of yet another unsolicited present from Destiny, grabs hold of it rather cack-handedly, presses the trigger, and sends a bullet neatly and fortuitously through the lightbulb. One immediate consequence of this is that Akram’s shadow promptly vanishes, leaving Akram free to punch Ali Baba scientifically on the point of the jaw, thereby knocking him out and simplifying the situation enormously in time for the beginning of Phase Five.

This is John Fingers’ Phase, so it’s appropriate to reflect that he has every reason to feel aggrieved and bewildered with the way things have been going. True, he’s up one gun (Browning M1910 seven-shot automatic, he instinctively noticed, street value no more than Ł150, if that) and a solid silver sixpence; but he’s been terrified, shot at or in the general direction of, facially edited to the extent of one upper front tooth, drenched in boiling water and stunned by a concrete floor. About the only part of him that doesn’t hurt is his hair and he’s standing, as far as he can tell, on a dead girl; not an agreeable situation for a man with seventeen previous convictions.

‘Well,’ said the gun. ‘Don’t just stand there.’

And a moment later, he wasn’t; because Michelle, whose skull had been grazed by the second bullet, woke up under his left foot, wriggled and screamed. That, as far as John Fingers was concerned, was about as much as he could reasonably be expected to take. He neither knew nor cared what was going on, provided it carried on doing it without him. He started to back off, only to find that again there was a wall tiresomely in the way.

There was also, he was annoyed to discover, a man advancing on him with a large adjustable spanner (seveneighths Bahco, nice bit of kit but still only a fiver, top whack, down the car boot sale) clutched in his large, powerful hand. Of course, he wasn’t to know that the man was Akram the Terrible, but he didn’t need an awful lot of background information to work out that the spanner wasn’t intended to be used for tightening nuts, unless of course they were his.

‘Stay where you are,’ he said, pointing the gun at Michelle’s head, ‘or the girl…’

‘Skip? You in there, Skip?’ Aziz’s voice, outside in the yard. Both men heard it, recognised it and felt an immediate surge of relief.

‘Yes,’ they said.

The phoenix rose into the night sky, wings whirring, tail streaming behind it like a Chinese New Year dragon. Its brain, roughly the size and density of a Land Rover engine, was disturbed by a whirlwind of conflicting messages, until it resembled nothing so much as a vigorously shaken snowstorm paperweight. A dominant theme was fear; bright lights, noises, bangs - far back in its profoundly confused genetic matrix there were pheasant genes, and the sound of gunfire acted directly on the wing muscles, bypassing the usual decisionmaking machinery entirely. Less urgent, but still influential, was the feeling that running away at the first hint of trouble was somehow conduct unbecoming, and any self-respecting fabulous beast would at least have hung around long enough to find out what was going on and whether the general trend of the narrative made it likely that it’d be needed. Having it away on its wingtips was more chicken than phoenix, it couldn’t help thinking; and headless chicken at that. Without realising it, the giant bird halved its airspeed and let up a little on adrenaline production.

The mental debate moved up a gear, the main issue being revealed as self-preservation versus loyalty. The latter concept wasn’t a familiar one; when phoenixes stand by their man, it’s generally to make it easier to get their claws into his neck. On the other hand, they are honourable beasts, as befits their pedigree and status within the avian kingdom. It had responsibilities to Akram; it had sheltered under his roof and eaten his birdseed. This was, it felt, just the kind of situation where the advice of an older, wiser phoenix would have been extremely helpful. Since it was by definition the oldest and wisest phoenix around, however, as well as the youngest and doziest, it was on is own. Oh well. ‘Bugger,’ it said. It had slowed down so much that it either had to accelerate or turn. Without really understanding why, it turned.

‘Skip?’

Aziz was looking at two men. They were both tall, dark, lean, broad-shouldered, with curly black hair, pointed beards and regulation coal-black eyes. There the resemblance ended.

The problem was that neither of them actually looked very much like Akram, the way Aziz remembered him; except that, when it came to the crunch, he found he couldn’t remember all that clearly what Akram did look like. Well yes, he was tall, dark, lean, broad, curly, pointed and coal-eyed. So were twenty-seven of the thirty-nine thieves. So, when the occasion demanded, was Douglas Fairbanks. Proves nothing. To make matters worse, they both sounded almost but not quite right, like Akram doing voice impressions with a handkerchief over his mouth. It wouldn’t have mattered all that much if they hadn’t both been ordering him to do contradictory things.

‘Skip?’ he repeated. ‘Here, what’s going—?’

He wasn’t allowed to finish the question, because the air was suddenly full of the noise of sirens. The police, having heard no shots for over five minutes, had guessed that the combatants had sorted out their differences, and were moving in to arrest the survivors.

Being still relatively new to this side of the Line, Aziz didn’t actually know about policemen and sirens and flashing blue lights, but his profession had given him a pretty good set of instincts; good enough to convince him that the men in blue uniforms streaming in through the mangled gates probably weren’t autograph hunters. Reluctantly he decided that something had to be done and that he was still stuck with the horrible job of doing it.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘all of you. We’ll sort it out later.’

‘But…’

‘But…’

‘Move! The authority in his own voice amazed him, and for one moment he firmly believed that he was Akram, and had been all along. Interesting though the theory was, however, this was neither the time nor the place. ‘You lot,’ he ordered a random selection of thieves, ‘bring ‘em all. Follow me.’

‘Where to?’

It was a very good question, and Aziz hadn’t the faintest idea what the answer was. So he drew his scimitar, yelled, ‘Charge!’ at the top of his voice, and ran out into the yard to see what would happen.

In the event, it all seemed to work out rather well. The blue guys who probably weren’t autograph hunters started to run towards him, caught sight of the scimitar and appeared to think better of it, presumably remembering that they hadn’t been formally introduced and not wishing to commit a social faux pas. This left Aziz with a clear run to the big fifty-seater coach they’d all come in. Since the rest of the lads were following him, also waving their scimitars and shouting, Aziz came to the conclusion that for once, the flow was worth going with. Just to be on the safe side he uttered a bloodcurdling yell and brandished his sword even more flamboyantly, narrowly missing his own ear.

The moment when the last straggling thief scrambled aboard and pulled the door to after him was, however, the high water mark of the flow; after that, it started looking alarmingly like they were about to go with the ebb. The autograph-nothunters had blocked off the exit from the yard with two white cars and were shouting things through megaphones. As far as Aziz could tell, what they were actually saying was, ‘Ark wark fark argle wargle fargle,’ but you didn’t need a United Nations trained simultaneous translator in order to get the gist.

‘We all here?’ he demanded.

‘Yeah, Skip, I mean Guv.’

‘Anybody remember to bring the two scrappers? The girl and that bloke?’

‘Yeah, Guv. Oh, and by the way.’

‘What?’

‘That bloke,’ said Rustem, his face wallpapered from side to side with an idiot grin. ‘I think it’s Ali Baba.’

‘Fine,’ Aziz replied. ‘Why am I not surprised? Fuck it, we’ll sort it all out later. Right now—’ Right then, Ali Baba woke up.

He had been having a strange dream.

He dreamed that he was standing in front of the Godfather’s desk. Directly in front of him, cigar-smoking and ominously looming, was the Godfather himself. Sitting beside him, rather less congruously, was a stout woman in a yashmak. She appeared to be knitting a pair of socks.

‘Well?’ said the Godfather.

Ali Baba blinked. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘No offence and all that, but well what?’

‘Your wishes,’ the Godfather replied. ‘You got three of them, remember.’

‘Two,’ the stout woman interrupted. ‘He already used one.’

A pained expression flitted over the Godfather’s face. ‘You gotta excuse my wife,’ he said icily. ‘She ain’t got no manners, she don’t know how to behave in company. You got three wishes, and …’

‘Two. Getting across the Line and becoming a dentist was one wish. That leaves two.’

‘That wasn’t a wish, that was a separate deal,’ the Godfather snapped, restraining his rising annoyance King Canutefashion. ‘For that he gave us the ring, remember? So three.’

‘Two, because the stuff with the ring was just a cover. As soon as he was across we chucked it away.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Ali Baba. ‘I hate to interrupt, but could I just get this absolutely straight in my mind? You want me to use my three wishes now?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yes, but it’s two.’

‘Will you be quiet?’

‘I can be as quiet as a tiny bloody mouse and it still won’t alter the fact that it’s two wishes, not three. The trouble with some people is …’

The Godfather banged his fist on the table, dislodging a small china paperweight inscribed A Present From Palermo. It fell to the floor, rolled a little way and then, disconcertingly, vanished. He stood up, leaned across the desk until his chin was no more than six inches from the tip of Ali Baba’s nose, and smiled.

‘You know what they say,’ he said pleasantly, ‘about having dinner in a Sicilian restaurant? How when you’ve finished they don’t bring you a bill, but years later they come to you and ask you to do them a small favour? Well, Mister Baba, I hope you enjoyed your meal. Do we understand each other?’

‘Absolutely,’ Ali Baba replied, nodding enthusiastically. ‘Consider your drift definitively caught. But what do you want me to wish for?’

The Godfather grinned. ‘Any minute now,’ he said, ‘you gonna wake up. You gonna find yourself in a big yellow bus with thirty-nine thieves, Akram, your daughter and a guy called John Smith who I don’t think you know. You shot at him, but you don’t know him. All round this bus, you gonna find armed police. I think you might wanna wish you was out of there. Am I right?’

‘That would certainly seem reasonable,’ Ali Baba agreed, ‘in the circumstances you describe. Please do go on.’

‘And then,’ the Godfather continued - he was so close now that Ali Baba could plainly see his rather second-rate bridgework; somehow, that made him feel better. ‘Then you gonna find that Akram’s gotta sword, the thirty-nine thieves all got swords, John Smith’s gotta gun, and you ain’t got nothing except maybe the courage of your convictions. I figure maybe you gonna wish the ironmongery was a bit more evenly distributed.’

‘Quite.’

‘But,’ the Godfather continued, ‘that still ain’t gonna solve all your problems, because until Akram’s dead and all his men, and you and your daughter are far away where you’re gonna prove very hard to catch, you won’t never be sure they ain’t gonna show up all over again. But on that side of the Line —’ There was, Ali Baba observed, an infinity of disgust packed into the little word that. Significant, he felt. ‘On that side of the Line, if you go killing guys all over the place, you gonna make yourself very conspicuous, and you don’t want that. So I’m figuring, maybe you’ll wanna come back here, where you belong, where all your friends are. After all,’ he added, with an expansive gesture that entirely failed to inspire confidence, ‘you only skipped out to escape from Akram and his boys, so if they’re all dead, you can come home. Now, what could be better than wishing to come home?’

‘Ah,’ Ali Baba said. ‘I see.’

‘That’s three,’ said the stout woman. ‘He’s only got two.’

For a second or so, Ali Baba was convinced the Godfather was about to explode. It was gruesomely fascinating, watching him consciously, deliberately stopping himself from being angry. It was rather like watching a film of a fire in an oil refinery being played through the projector backwards. It’d be even more interesting to watch from five hundred yards away through a powerful telescope, of course, because then he could concentrate properly without the distraction of extreme fear.

‘He’s got three,’ the Godfather said. ‘You got that?’

‘Not that it matters much,’ the woman went on, ignoring him, ‘because you can easily run the first and third wish together and arrive at exactly the same result. I’d do that if I were you, and that’d put an end to all this silly bickering.’

‘Good idea,’ said the Godfather. He picked up a heavy marble ashtray in his left hand and squeezed it, reducing it to fine dust. ‘Why don’t we do just that?’

The phoenix banked, turned and dived. Far below there were lights, noises and scurrying humans. It fought down the instinctive rush of panic; it had already been a phoenix, a pheasant and a chicken. It had no desire to be a mouse as well.

It put its wings back, glided low, and accelerated, feet outstretched. There were eagles as well as pheasants in its ancestry, not to mention a whole host of large, featherless flying lizards with leather wings and huge pointed beaks. It was time to prove that it had inherited rather more from its forebears than a few sticks of old furniture and a broken clock.

Ali Baba woke up. ‘I wish …’he said.

Claws extended, the phoenix swooped. There was a merry tinkling of glass as its talons caved in the side windows of the coach, and a dizzying, terrifying moment when it seemed that even those huge wings couldn’t produce enough uplift to haul a Mercedes coach and forty-three human beings straight up into the air. That was, of course, perfectly natural. For a thousand generations, Mankind used to worry itself sick with the thought that come dawn tomorrow, the sun might not quite have the legs to rise and shine.

At ground level, the policeman with the megaphone stopped argle bargling in mid fargle and stood motionless for a while, his lower jaw nearly touching his bootlaces. Then, being a policeman and properly trained to deal with all possible contingencies, he ordered the coach to come back.

It didn’t work.

With infinite regret, and blaming it all on the pernicious respect-dissipating effects of so-called community policing, he gave the order to open fire.

Or at least, he tried to. He got as far as ‘Open’, but before he could complete the command a passing tooth fairy darted into his mouth, neatly yanked out his dental plate, shoved a silver sixpence in its place and flew away. A split second later it flew back, hovered for a moment in front of the megaphone, and completed the sentence for him.

‘Sesame,’ it said.

Whereupon the sky opened.