Djinn Rummy by Tom Holt Page A

quiet.’
    â€˜You asked me a question.’
    â€˜Did I? Sorry.’ Jane closed her eyes and tried to clarify her mind. ‘Will you help me with this?’ she asked.
    â€˜Depends,’ Kiss replied huffily, ‘on whether I’m allowed to talk.’
    â€˜Oh, stop being aggravating.’ Jane took a deep breath. ‘There I was,’ she said, ‘an ordinary person -’
    Kiss cleared his throat. ‘Jane Wellesley,’ he recited. ‘Age, twenty-eight. Height, five feet one inch. Weight -’
    â€˜Thank you, yes. Following a distressing scene with someone I had thought really cared about me -’
    â€˜Vince. Vincent Martin Pockle. Age, thirty-one. Height, six feet two inches. Eyes a sort of -’
    â€˜Either help,’ Jane snapped, ‘or go and empty the dustbins. Following a distressing scene, I resolved - stupidly, I admit - to kill myself. When I opened the aspirin bottle, out jumped a genie.’
    â€˜At your service.’
    â€˜Or so it seemed. At any rate, at the time I accepted you at face value, and I’ve been doing so ever since.’
    â€˜So I should damned well -’

    â€˜Ever since,’ Jane went on, ‘I’ve been ordering you to do seemingly impossible things, and you’ve apparently been doing them. The things you bring appear to be real.’
    â€˜You and I are going to fall out in a minute if you carry on with all this seems-to-be stuff,’ Kiss growled. ‘The last person to call me a liar to my face, namely the erstwhile Grand Vizier of Trebizond, spends most of his time these days sitting on a lily-pad going rivet-rivet-rivet and wondering why people don’t bring him things to sign any more. I invite you to think on.’
    â€˜And now you tell me,’ Jane continued, ‘that another genie - was he one of the ones we met at that peculiar night club?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Another genie is planning to destroy the human race, using overgrown carnivorous plants. And it’s not,’ Jane added, after glancing at her watch, ‘April the first. Now then, what the hell am I meant to make of all that?’
    Kiss shrugged. ‘The best you can,’ he replied. ‘It’s called coping. Like I said, some people find it helps to posit the existence of an omnipotent supreme being. I know for a fact He does. Other people,’ Kiss added, materialising a decanter and a soda syphon, ‘get drunk a lot. It all comes down to individual preferences in the long run.’
    â€˜Look -’
    â€˜As a matter of fact, He’s all right, and so’s the second one, Junior. It’s the Holy Ghost you’ve got to watch out for. Forever walking through walls with its head under its arm, which for someone in its position is taking light-hearted frivolity a bit too far, in my opinion. Still, there it is . . .’
    â€˜Kiss . . .’
    â€˜Not to mention,’ the genie continued, ‘jumping out during seances and banging things on tables. And, of
course, trying to exorcise it is an absolute hiding to nothing. Sorry, you were saying?’
    â€˜What is going on?’
    The genie shrugged. ‘Can’t rightly say,’ he replied. ‘By the looks of it, some raving nutcase or other’s decided to annihilate his own species. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you get used to it. You get used to pretty well everything eventually.’
    â€˜I see.’ Jane started to pick at the stitching on her shoe. ‘Happen a lot, does it?’
    â€˜Once every forty years, on average. Usually, though, it’s just a war. When We get involved, it tends to get a bit heavy. Still, like I told you the other day, for every genie commissioned to destroy the world there’s another told off to save it, so things even out in the long run. Last time I looked, the planet was still here.’
    Jane opened her eyes. ‘I think I’m beginning to see,’