“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 “And this photo is fifteen years out of date.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—