Djinn Rummy (12 page)

By dint of stuffing its pinion feathers into its ears and banging its head sharply against the side of the pit, the phoenix managed to hold out for an amazing seventeen minutes, during the course of which Kiss sang
Sweet Adeline
,
Way Down Upon The Swanee River
,
Mammy
,
Alexander's Ragtime Band
and three complete renditions of
Seventy-Six Trombones Followed The Big Parade
. Indeed, it was only when he took a deep breath and announced that there were fifty-seven thousand green bottles hanging on a wall that the phoenix screeched like a Mack truck braking on black ice and started throwing feathers.

‘Thank you very much,' Kiss called out, stuffing feathers into a sack. ‘Do you want a receipt?'

‘Shut up and go away, please.'

‘And no sneakily crawling out and coming after me, you hear?'

‘I wouldn't dream of it. Not unless I saw an affidavit
certifying you'd had your larynx removed first.'

Kiss slid the plank down into the pit, waved cheerfully, said goodbye and stepped off the ledge.

As he floated to the ground he entirely failed to notice the small figure huddled in the lee of the rocks, snapping furiously at him through a telephoto lens.

‘That's him,' said Philly Nine. ‘You think you can do it?'

‘I dunno.' Cupid frowned. ‘Let's see her again.'

Philly Nine shrugged and produced the other photograph. In it Jane was clearly visible, third from the left, second row down, holding a hockey stick.

‘Couldn't you get something a bit more up to date?' Cupid demanded;

Philly shrugged again. ‘If necessary,' he replied. ‘I didn't think it mattered. Anyway, I thought you were supposed to be blind.'

Cupid smiled wearily. ‘Man, there's all sorts of dumb things I'm supposed to be,' he replied. ‘And this photo is fifteen years out of date. Get me something better and then we can talk business.'

‘Wait there,' the genie said. Forty-five seconds later he was back.

‘That's more like it,' said Cupid, appraising the picture with a professional eye. ‘It's not going to be easy,' he added, after a few moments of close scrutiny.

‘Come off it,' Philly said. ‘To you, a piece of cake. Five minutes of your time, that's all I'm asking for.'

‘Rather longer than that,' Cupid replied. He tried holding the picture sideways, but it didn't seem to help.

‘Look.' Philly frowned. ‘You owe me, remember?'

About a thousandth of a second later, he wished he'd kept his mouth shut. The child was looking at him in a way that made his blood run cold.

‘Mister,' Cupid said, ‘I'm a Force Thirteen, I don't owe nobody
nothing
. You'd do well to remember that, unless you want to spend the rest of your life sending boxes of chocolates to a red-arsed monkey. Understood?'

‘Sorry.'

Cupid made a small gesture with his hands, signifying that the apology was accepted. ‘All I'm saying is,' he went on, ‘it's a tough assignment. The ballistics alone are gonna need a lot of careful planning. This ain't gonna be cheap, I can tell you that for nothing.'

Philly Nine smiled. ‘That,' he said confidently, ‘isn't a problem. Just so long as you can do it.'

‘Yeah.' Cupid nodded. ‘I can do it.' He laughed without humour. ‘It'll be one for the trade press, I'm telling you. For a start,' he went on, ‘there's the problem of the actual projectile. For her, it's got to be a frangible spire-point, or the chances are I'll just blow her away. For him, though, we're talking tungsten-core, full satin jacket stuff, the full treatment. Means there's no chance of a second shot if I miss the first time.'

‘You won't miss, Coops. You never do.'

The boy shrugged. ‘Always a first time. And supposing I do manage to do the job on them; I still gotta get myself outa there. Once your buddy here realises what I've done to him, he ain't gonna be pleased. ‘

Philly Nine stood up. ‘You'll find a way,' he said confidently. ‘That's why you're the best. It'll be worth your while.'

Cupid glanced back at the photographs and grinned wryly. ‘It'd better be,' he said, did a thumbnail impersonation of a lovestruck marmoset, and vanished.

 

Jane hesitated, feather duster in hand, and looked around her.

‘What the hell,' she said aloud, ‘has come over me?'

It was, looked at objectively, an awe-inspiring sight. Suffice it to say, her mother would have approved. She had ambivalent feelings about that.

Yes, it was tidy. Yes, it was clean. Spotlessly so, in fact. Any passing visitor could have eaten his dinner off the floor without any health risk at all, although he might have found it more convenient to use a plate. Furthermore, the curtains matched the carpets, the carpets matched the loose covers and the loose covers matched the lampshades. It was exactly the sort of interior that furniture polish advertisements are filmed in, and a Swiss mother-in-law couldn't have found a microbe or a granule of dust anywhere.

‘Yetch,' thought Jane.

Eight years' living on her own had accustomed Jane to a rather more bohemian environment: second-hand furniture, the floor hidden under discarded clothes and newspapers, a sink full of crockery and a kitchen floor that went crunch! when you stepped on it. She liked it that way. It was a statement, she'd always told herself, about her spiritual enfranchisement as a woman of the last decade of the twentieth century, the logical extension of the glorious principle to which Emmeline Pankhurst devoted her life.

And now look at it. ‘Why?' she demanded. No reply.

Perhaps, she mused, catching herself in the act of plumping up a cushion, it's simply a case of reverting to type. That in itself was a disquieting thought, for the women in her family were the sort that ironed socks and regarded any meal that didn't contain at least two boiled vegetables as a badge of heresy. No, it couldn't be that. It had to be something else.

It had to be something to do with the genie. Looking at
the scene before her, she realised that what it lacked was a man, entering stage left and being told to take off his muddy shoes and not to sit on the chairs in those trousers. The genie, however, didn't by the wildest stretch of the imagination fall into that category. The only thing he - it - would be likely to tread into the carpets would be stardust or blood, and quite often it didn't even wear legs, let alone trousers. Nor could it possibly be a case of the genie's taste subconsciously subverting her own. Left to himself, Kiss would have done the place out like a cross between the palace of Versailles and Sinbad's cabin. Perhaps . . .

Perhaps, Jane reasoned as she automatically straightened a picture, it's an instinctive reaction; an urge to counter the intrusion of bizarre supernatural forces into her life by making her environment as brain-numbingly mundane as possible. Well, she was made of sterner stuff than that. She fished a magazine out of the paper rack, opened it and laid it face down in the centre of the floor. Then she straightened it, folded it neatly and put it away again. It was all she could do to stop herself ironing it first.

‘This must stop,' she said firmly. The words seemed to soak away into the soft furnishings like water in a desert. Bad vibes.

That nest of tables hadn't been there this morning, had it? If anyone had told Jane a month ago that she'd ever deliberately own a nest of tables, she'd have laughed in his face. Yet there they were; with little coasters on them, to stop cups leaving rings on their sparkling glass tops. In her natural environment, cups grew on every available flat surface like mushrooms, and you had to give them a little tweak to break the gasket of solidified coffee that glued them down before you could remove them. And that, Jane knew in her heart, was the way it was meant to be. Not like
this. She felt like a daughter in her own home. It was intolerable.

As soon as Kiss got back from whatever errand she'd sent him on, she resolved, she'd tell him to clear it all away and put it back exactly how it had been, down to the last smeared glass and overstuffed dustbin bag. Until then, she would go out.

Where, though? She didn't know. The last four weeks, she realised, had been spent in an orgy of home-making, with occasional breaks for picnics in exotic places. She hadn't yet come to terms with the fact that she no longer had to work for a living, or go out shopping, or do anything at all. Which left her with nothing whatever to do.

There had been, she recalled, some talk of saving the world, and as hobbies go, she supposed it would do to be going on with; more socially useful than needlework, and cheaper than collecting Georgian silver snuffboxes. It wasn't, however, the sort of thing you could do every day of the week. She needed something else, and she was damned if she was going to spend the rest of her life buying clothes or going to cocktail parties. She wanted . . .

Adventure? God forbid! Travel, to see strange sights and brave new worlds? She could go anywhere with a wish; but without the hanging about in departure lounges and lugging suitcases off carousels that gave travel its true meaning. All genuine wanderers know that it is better to travel uncomfortably than to arrive. Simply closing your eyes and finding yourself in Madagascar was as pointless as staying at home and arranging plastic flowers. What the hell did she want out of life?

But the idea of telling the genie, thank you very much, the rest of eternity's your own, was somehow repellant; it would be such a waste, like telling God you'd had a better
offer. All the wish-fulfilment dreams you've ever had, there for the asking; no, there was no way she could say goodbye to all that. It would be cowardice, she'd never forgive herself, and she'd have to go back to doing her own washing-up.

There must, she reassured herself, be some purpose to all this. Although she'd never taken much interest in fairy stories when she was a girl, she could at least remember that genies didn't just happen to people out of a clear blue sky; there was always a plot of some sort, a sequence of events leading up to the genie, and a series of adventures following its arrival, concluding in the overthrow of evil, the righting of wrongs and the happiness ever after. To jump straight from the middle of the story to the end would violate the first law of narrative, and the laws of narrative make the laws of thermodynamics look weedy in comparison. Break the laws of narrative and you don't get let off with thirty hours' community service; they lock you up in a story and throw away the bookmark. No, something was going to happen, whether she liked it or not, and it was probably going to involve a life-and-death struggle with the forces of darkness. Gosh, Jane said to herself, what a cheerful prospect to look forward to. And aren't I the lucky one?

Why me, though? Well, why not? Presumably everybody else was busy. That was the sort of question she would have to leave to whoever was telling the story.

She glanced at the clock. Even if she was going to have to save the world, she reckoned, she'd probably still have enough time to wash her hair first.

 

In an upstairs window of the house opposite, Cupid adjusted his headband, chambered a round in his rifle and
drew a skin-tight leather glove on to his right hand with his teeth. Through his telescopic sight (with the special rose-tinted filter) he could see Kiss trudging wearily back across the sky, his arms full of feathers. The girl was still under the hair-dryer, reading a book. The timing was going to have to be absolutely right.

No worries. Back in the old bow-and-arrow days, it was true, he had occasionally made a mistake. Now, however, he had technology as well as destiny on his side, not to mention the steadiest trigger finger in the Universe. At anything less than six hundred yards, provided the visibility was even half-way adequate, the course of true love was guaranteed to run smooth. He breathed in and felt his heartbeat slow down.

Now the genie was floating in through the window. The girl was looking up from her book. Here, the genie was saying, where do you want me to put all these feathers? Cupid half-closed his left eye and took up the slack on the trigger.

The first shot brayed out in the still air - only Cupid could hear it, of course - followed by the rattle of the bolt as he worked the second round into the chamber. No need to ask whether the first bullet had found its mark; the genie's mouth had already flopped open in that uniquely gormless way that can only mean one thing. With a half-smile, Cupid brought the crosswires to bear on Jane's heart and let his finger tighten round the trigger . . .

A spider, which had been spinning its web directly overhead, fell on the back of his neck. At the last moment, just as the sear slipped its bent, he twitched sharply, jerking the rifle sideways -

- and a potted fern, which had accompanied Jane from one flat to another for the last six years without really being
aware of her existence, suddenly noticed with heartstopping intensity how entrancingly her hair curled round the nape of her neck -

- swore, worked the action and steadied the butt in the pocket of his shoulder. Ignoring the spider, which was trying to tunnel down under the collar of his combat jacket, Cupid half-emptied his lungs and eased off the trigger. For a split second the image before his eyes blurred, as the rifle jumped in a fierce spasm of unleashed energy. Then the picture cleared . . .

Gotcha! The room opposite was suddenly full of pink hearts, floating in the air like big, fat balloons. The whole street was heavy with the stench of roses.

Quickly and carefully, making no more noise than a stalking leopard, Cupid gathered up his equipment and got the hell out.

 

Fire crackled in the withered stems of the mistletoe, casting an eerie red glow on the lichen-covered stones of the circle. It illuminated seven faces.