As for the details — well, they’d look after themselves. They always did. Sooner or later some other idiot of a human being would give him an opening, and he’d be back. What was forty years or so to an immortal?
Provided, of course, that no interfering little toe rag of a Force Twelve saw fit to stick his oar in, saving the planet with a twitch of his little finger before zooming away into the sunset. Some people, he reflected bitterly, don’t know the meaning of the word solidarity.
Yes, indeed. He broke off the summit of the mountain, brushed it clear of flags and ate it. Kiss would have to go, or he might as well stay in bed.
But how? Force Twelves can’t just be brushed lightly aside. Or even heavily aside, or aside with overwhelming force. It would be like trying to knock down a pterodactyl with a fly-swatter.
There are, however, ways and means. And of all the ways of killing a cat, Philly Nine reflected, drowning it in cream sure takes some beating.
There is a child.
His father was a brutal, sadistic bully; his mother a nymphomaniac married to a man (not the child’s father) many years older than herself, and crippled into the bargain.
Left to his own devices for most of his formative years, the child developed serious personality disorders at a very early age. By the time he turned thirteen, he was effectively past hope of cure.
Partly it was heredity, partly it was environment; partly, it was the child’s own basically vicious and perverted nature, which nobody ever took the slightest trouble to correct.
By the time he turned thirteen, the boy had developed a morbid fixation with shooting people. Because of his unusually privileged position, he’s able to indulge this ghastly obsession with total impunity.
Look at him. Fourteen years old, dressed from head to toe in camouflage gear, with a Stallonesque headband and pimples. He’s lying on his bed reading Soldier of Fortune magazine, and beside him on the duvet lies a state-of-the-art Macmillan sniper’s rifle, with a Bausch & Lomb 21X scope and integral flash suppressor. When he gets bored with doing nothing, he’ll go out into the street and start using it.
There’s nothing anyone can do about it. Nothing at all.
Despite the fact that this murderous infant ruins the lives of countless innocent people every day of the week, the authorities are powerless to act. They simply accept the situation and look the other way.
Because the child is a Force Thirteen genie — the only one — and his name is Cupid.
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.