Djinn Rummy

FIVE

High up in the Himalaya mountains, the very roof of the world, Kiss crouched low on a ledge a mere inch or so wide, held his breath, and waited.

“It’s vitally important to us genies,” he could hear himself saying to Jane in an unguarded moment, “that we retain our unique cultural heritage and ancient folkloric traditions and way of life.”

Jane had nodded sympathetically, gone away and read up the subject of what genies traditionally did. Accordingly, he had nobody to blame but himself.

“Come on, you goddamn treacherous sonofabitch,” he muttered under his breath. The mutterings froze in the subzero air and fell away, tinkling, down the sheer side of the rock-face. Fortunately, the wind drowned the noise.

On the blind side of the jagged outcrop of rock to which Kiss was clinging perched a bird. Not just any bird; the rarest, most fabulous, most acutely perceptive, biggest and worst-tempered bird in existence. Its plumage was a scintillating shower of jewelled colour, sparkling and shimmering in the clear, sharp light. It had a wing-span of fifty feet and claws that could disembowel an elephant as easily as undoing a zip.

“Cone on, my son,” Kiss whispered. Although he couldn’t see the bird, he could hear the soft click as its heavily bejewelled, scalpel-sharp beak pecked at the trail of peanuts he had carefully laid the previous afternoon. Fortunately the phoenix, although rare, magical and incredibly dangerous, is not particularly intelligent. When it suddenly finds a trail of dry roasted peanuts extending along a ledge towards the mouth of a cave thirty thousand feet above sea level, it doesn’t stop to ask how on earth they got there. Yum, it thinks, lunch.

This, together with the incalculable value of their tail-feathers, is probably the real reason why phoenixes are so rare.

There are easier ways of obtaining phoenix feathers, however, than snaring them with peanuts and pitfall traps. The inhabitants of the Himalayas hit on a much more efficient method not long after the discovery of gunpowder. Genies, however, have obtained phoenix plumage the hard way since time immemorial, and so, regretfully, Kiss had left behind the Mannlicher-Schoenauer.600 Nitro Express rifle that common sense suggested was the best way of going about the job, and had instead packed peanuts, string and a folding shovel.

Peck, peck, peck. Aaaaargh! Crunch. About time too, Kiss sighed, and shuffled quickly along the ledge and round the corner, to peer down into the pit he had spent six hours digging the previous evening.

A baleful red eye glared up at him out of the darkness.

“All right,” croaked a hoarse voice. “It’s a fair cop, guy, I’ll come quietly. I don’t think,” it added.

Kiss frowned. “Be reasonable,” he said. “A couple of feathers and you can be on your way. There’s no way you can get out of there otherwise.”

From the pit, the sound of unfriendly cackling. “You want feathers, chum, you come down here and get them. It’s quite cosy in here out of the wind, I’m in no hurry.”

The genie rubbed his chin, nonplussed, and drew his collar tighter around his numb ears. His plan, although admirably simple and flawlessly executed, had only extended as far as getting the phoenix into the trap. Once he’d reached that stage, he had assumed, the rest of it would somehow take care of itself.

“Don’t be stupid,” he growled. “You’re just being a bad loser. You make with the feathers, I’ll make with the plank of wood. Agreed?”

“Up yours.”

“I can starve you out.”

“I carry six months supply of nutritional material around with me in the form of subcutaneous fat,” replied the bird smugly. “If that’s your game, you’d better have brought plenty of sandwiches.”

Kiss pursed his lips. The full extent of his preparations consisted of a thermos flask of, by now, lukewarm tea and the remainder of the peanuts. True, he could fly back to Katmandu, stock up on chocolate and be back in thirty seconds, but he had an idea that by the time he returned the phoenix would be out of there and circling overhead with its bowels puckered ready for pinpoint-accuracy bombing. Phoenix guano is the third most corrosive substance in the entire cosmos.

“I’ll roll a rock on top of you,” he ventured. “See how you like that.”

“You’d crush the feathers,” the bird replied. “A right prat you’d look going back to the princess or whoever it is you’re doing this for holding something looking like a second-hand pipe cleaner.”

“All right,” Kiss conceded. “So it’s a stalemate. Let’s negotiate.”

“Bugger off.”

Tiny silver bells started ringing in Kiss’s brain. “Fair enough,” he said, “if that’s the way you want to play it, don’t say I didn’t give you every chance.”

The red eye blinked. “Bluff,” it snarled. “Look, you sling your hook and we’ll say no more about it. Can’t say fairer than—”

Kiss began to sing.

When they choose to do so, genies can sing well; heartbreakingly, soul-meltingly well. A genie can, if he sets his mind to it, sing solo duets; even barbershop.

Alternatively, they can sing badly. Very badly indeed. 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. Further more, 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, 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 repellent; 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 heart-stopping 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.

“Ready?”

“Yup.”

The Chief Druid winced slightly. Although he was aware of how vitally important it was to attract keen new blood to the Circle, so that the ancient secrets could be passed down to generations yet unborn, he still hadn’t come to terms with young Kevin’s attitude. The sceptical part of him still harboured a suspicion that Kevin, who was an insurance broker, had only joined in the hope of picking up new clients.

However.

“We shall now,” he said gravely, “link hands and invoke the Goddess.”

“Ready when you are, Humph.”

Ready when you are, Humph. It was at time like this that he wondered whether there was any point in passing down the ancient secrets. There was a sporting chance, he reflected gloomily, that if the Goddess did materialise Kevin would immediately leap forward and try to sell her a unit-linked endowment policy.

“Everybody join hands,” he went on, “and keep holy silence in the presence of… Are you all right back there, Mr Prenderby?”

“Yes, thank you, Chief Druid.”

“It isn’t time for your pills yet, is it?”

“Not for another half-hour, thank you, Chief Druid.”

“That’s all right, then.” The Chief Druid glanced round. His flock were waiting, with all the silent embarrassment of grown men asked to hold hands with other grown men who they’d probably see again the next day, but wearing suits and ties rather than long grey woollen gowns. He cast another sprig of mistletoe on to the fire and took a deep breath.

WHOOSH!

“Stone the flaming crows!” The Chief Druid recognised the voice of Shane, who was on an exchange visit arranged with the Order’s New South Wales congregation. He cringed. Just his rotten luck, he said to himself. The one time the Goddess actually manifests herself in my Circle, and the first person to greet her is this antipodean lout.

“Hello, boys,” said the Goddess.

She stood in the centre of the fire, which had leapt up to meet her like a large, friendly dog. Red tongues of flame licked round her, and her head was surrounded by a chaplet of pale blue light.

“G’day, Miss.” The Australian shook his hand free from the clammy paw of Mr Prenderby (who looked like he was going to need his pills sooner than usual) and extended it gingerly. A long, yellow, spotted snake materialised out of the fire and curled round his forearm as far as the elbow.

“And what,” drawled the Goddess, “can I do for you?”

“Excuse me.” Kevin’s voice. The Chief Druid couldn’t bear to watch. It shouldn’t be like this, he told himself; it wasn’t like this in the books.

The Goddess turned her head and smiled politely, like the Queen being introduced to the teams at half-time during the Cup Final. Kevin smiled back, instinctively using the wide grin he used for Putting Clients At Their Ease.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but I take it you are the, um, Goddess? No offence, but I think we ought to just… rivet-rivet-rivet.”

The Circle froze, and the only sound was the sobbing of the wind and the frantic croaking of the small yellow frog that had once been Kevin.

“Satisfied?” asked the Goddess. “Or would you like me to do something really convincing?”

The six druids fell simultaneously to their knees.

“Now then,” said the Goddess briskly, “to business. Any requests, anybody?”

No reply. The Goddess clicked her tongue.

“Oh come on, people,” she said, “I’m sure you didn’t drag me all the way down here just to chat about the weather. Anybody for a bumper harvest? Rain for the crops? The winner of the 3.15 at Chepstow?”

The Chief Druid ran a desperate scan through the jumbled mess between his ears, but nothing occurred to him. He briefly considered saying, “All hail!” but decided that She’d take that as a reference to the weather, a subject she apparently wasn’t inclined to discuss.

“Well,” said the Goddess, “if nobody wants anything at all, we’d better just fast forward to the wicker-cage bit, and then call it a day.”

For crying out loud, somebody say something. The Chief Priest swung a hasty glance round the Circle, but nobody was moving. They were all frozen like snakes watching a mongoose; except for Mr Prenderby, who had nodded off again.

“I see.” The Goddess sighed. “Well then, the wicker-cage it is, then. And whose turn is it to be burnt alive this evening? I do hope somebody’s remembered to bring some matches.”

“I have a request, Majesty.”

The Chief Druid’s relief was short-lived, because the words were still hanging in the crisp night air when he realised that the voice that had spoken them was his own.

“Splendid,” the Goddess said. “Right, what’ll it be?”

“Um.” The Chief Druid felt his tongue dragging like sandpaper across the roof of his mouth. “Do you know,” he went on, “it’s just slipped my mind for a moment.”

“Has it really?”

“Yes, Majesty.”

“Would it help,” the Goddess went on, “if I just quickly read your mind? It won’t take me two seconds.”

“Please don’t trouble yourself, Majesty.”

“It’s no trouble.” Suddenly the Chief Druid was horribly aware of the Goddess’s eyes; he could feel them poking into his brain like knitting needles. No question at all that she could see exactly what he was thinking.

“I see,” said the Goddess. “Yes, I can see your request in there, plain as day.”

“You can?”

“Of course I can, silly.” The Goddess smiled at him. “You want me to afflict the world with seven plagues, don’t you?”

“I do? I mean, yes, of course. How clever of you to—”

“You want me to trample the Unbeliever like a worm under the claw of the gryphon. You want me to unleash the fury of the Nine Terrible Winds, and visit the wrath of Belenos upon the heads of the ungodly.”

The Chief Druid nodded. As he did so, he was aware that he was on the receiving end of some pretty old-fashioned looks from the rest of the Circle (particularly Mr Cruickshank, who taught Drama at the local junior school and had a Greenpeace sticker in the back window of his Citroën) but he ignored them. “Quite right,” he stuttered. “My sentiments exactly, er, Majesty.”

The Goddess nodded. “Fine,” she said. “Ordinarily, that’d be a pretty tall order, but since it’s you—”

“Excuse me.”

The Chief Druid’s head whirled round like a weathervane in a hurricane. Mr Cruickshank had raised his hand.

“Yes?”

“Excuse me, Goddess,” said Mr Cruickshank, his eyes nearly popping out of his head, “but, if you don’t mind me asking—”

“Yes?”

“These seven plagues…”

“Ah yes.” The Goddess dipped her head placidly. “Mr Owen will correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, dropping a smile in the Chief Druid’s direction, “but what I think he had in mind was plagues of hail, brimstone, frogs, sulphur, locusts, giant ants and burning pitch. That’s right, isn’t it?”

The Chief Druid felt his head nod.

“In any particular order, or just as it comes?”

“Oh, as it comes. Whatever’s the most convenient for you.”

“Thank you.” The Goddess considered for a moment. “In that case,” she said, “I think we’ll set the ball rolling with locusts. Is that all right with everyone?”

A flash of blue lightning rent the night sky, and six heads rapidly nodded their agreement.

“You’re sure? It’s your request, after all.”

“No, really,” gabbled the Chief Druid. “Locusts, by all means.”

“Locusts it shall be, then,” the Goddess replied. “Will Tuesday be soon enough, do you think?”

The Chief Druid shuddered. He had spent that afternoon planting out his spring cabbages. He assured the Goddess that there was no hurry.

“Oh, I think I should be able to manage Tuesday. Now then, any more for any more?”

Apparently not. A few seconds later, the Goddess was gone. As she sped through the fog and filthy air, she gave herself a little shake and turned back into the genie Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation IX.

A genie with a mandate.

The small yellow frog that had once been Kevin hopped slowly across the blasted heath.

Right now, he might be a small yellow frog; but not so long ago he had been an insurance broker, and we have already seen how insurance is like a pyramid — (Huge, incomprehensible, hideously expensive, completely unnecessary and specifically designed only to be of any benefit to you once you’re dead? Well, quite; but also…) — a pyramid, with tens of thousands of little people like Kevin at the bottom, and a small number of very big people indeed at the top.

If one of the little people at the bottom shouts loud enough, one of the big people at the top will hear him.

Exhausted, the little yellow frog crawled the last few agonising inches and flopped into a stagnant pond. For two minutes he lay bobbing in the brackish water, gathering his strength.

They will hear him, because there is money at stake; and money is the ultimate hearing aid.

The little yellow frog stretched his legs and kicked feebly. A small string of bubbles broke the surface of the water. Deep down, among the pondweed and the mosquito larvae, Kevin rested, took stock of his position, and reflected on what he had to do next.

First, he had to file a claim. Without the policy document to hand, he couldn’t be sure that there wasn’t something in the fine print that excluded being turned into a frog from the All Risks cover; Act of Goddess, probably. But there was no harm in trying.

Second, he had to report to his superiors.

The loss adjusters at the top of the pyramid have a refreshingly dynamic approach to their art. Instead of simply coming on the scene when the dust has settled and trying to make the best of a bad job, they prefer to think positive. The best way to adjust a loss, they feel, is retrospectively.

Not long afterwards, a small yellow head appeared above the surface of the pond, blinked, and turned its snout towards the waning moon.

“Rivet,” it said. “Rivet-rivet-rivet.”