Tom Holt: Djinn Rummy

“Well, thanks,” he said, lowering Jane gingerly to floor level. “That was an experience, you know?”

“Oh. Have we finished dancing, then?”

Abmi smiled wanly. The tendons of his left arm were throbbing like wrenched harpstrings, and there were calluses all over his palm where Jane’s heels had galled him. “Hey,” he said, “have you any idea what the guys will do to me, monopolising the foxiest chick in the joint? No way,” he added, with perhaps a scruple more vehemence than the context could accommodate. “Ciao, baby, I gotta fly.” Which he did. In fact, for the record, he put a girdle round the earth in twenty-seven minutes thirteen seconds and hid inside a wardrobe until he was sure Jane hadn’t followed him.

Jane returned to Kiss’s table and sat down.

“I have enjoyed myself,” she said. “We must come here again.”

There was a queue.

You can tell of rationing. You can pontificate about the first day of the January sales. You can boast of your experiences in the line for day-of-performance tickets for Phantom of the Opera. But this was a queue to end all queues; so long that it projected sideways into several quite recherché dimensions, so crammed with repressed potential energy that it hovered on the brink of forming a black hole. It was, of course, an auditions queue; and nearly every genie in the Universe was in it.

When you have a queue comprising something in excess of 1046 supernatural beings who can flit through time and space with the reckless abandon of a Porsche with diplomatic plates hurrying to a meeting through the Rome rush-hour, queue-jumping ceases to be bad manners and becomes a challenge to the fundamental laws of physics. The Past became a frenzied jumble of genies bashing each other over the head and locking each other in cupboards so as to preclude their presence on the day in question; while a gigantic troll stood with folded arms in the doorway of the Future to keep back the stream of genies who reckoned they’d avoid the crush by fast-forwarding through Time. The Present was under the control of an only slightly less formidable young woman with glasses and a clipboard.

“Next,” she said.

At the back of the queue there was a hard core of genies who hadn’t the faintest idea what the audition was for, but who felt sure that they were right for the part. The general opinion was that God was staging Aladdin, with a strong minority faction holding to the view that Springsteen had been taken ill on the eve of the big open-air concert in Central Park, and a stand-in capable of imitating him down to the last chromosome was urgently required. Both versions, although speciously attractive, were wrong.

The door to the small office where the auditions were taking place opened, and a dejected genie slumped out. A voice from inside called out, “Don’t call us, we’ll—” as the door closed again.

Next in line was the Dragon King of the South-East. As the girl with the clipboard took his name and nodded him towards the door, he straightened his hair, shot his cuffs, and took a deep breath.

The Big Time beckoned. He strode through the doorway.

“Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this…” he said. The three men behind the desk gave him a look.

“He’s too tall,” said the bald man wearily. “Next.”

Dragon Kings are nothing if not adaptable. In the time it took for his vast brain to formulate the wish, he had reduced himself by twenty per cent.

“Too short,” muttered the skinny man with the glasses. “Goddamn time-wasters.”

The Dragon King cleared his throat. "Scuse me,” he said, “but stature’s not a problem with me. You give me the measurements, I’ll come across with the body.”

“Voice too squeaky,” sniffed the freckled man with the cigar. “OK, Cynthia, let’s see the—”

“The voice needn’t be a problem either,” the Dragon King interrupted, in a pitch that made the foundations of the building quiver. “Just give me a hint, and I can—”

The freckled man looked up for the first time. “Can he dance?” he asked the universe in general.

“Doesn’t look like he can,” replied the bald man, raising his voice over the machine-gun cracking of the King’s heels on the parquet. “Two left feet.”

The King, by now rather flustered, took this for a specification, made the necessary modifications, lost his footing and fell over.

“Next,” said the skinny man. The Dragon King got up and silently left the room.

“Hey, Cynthia,” the bald man called out, “are there many more of these deadbeats out there?”

“Quite a few, Mr Fomaldarsen,” the girl with the clipboard replied.

“Any of them look any good to you?”

“No, Mr Fornaldarsen.”

“OK, send ’em home.” The bald man glanced down. “Except,” he added quickly, “for this one. Recommendation from Zip Kortright.” He checked the name. “Guy by the name of — goddamn stupid names these jerks have — Philadelphia Machinery and Tool Corporation the Ninth. Is he out there?”

“I’ll just check for you, Mr Fornaldarsen.”

The door closed. After a moment, the three men looked at each other.

“Waste of time,” said the freckled man. “Told you it would be.”

“We’ll see this Philadelphia guy,” replied the skinny man. “You never know your luck. Never known Kortright send up a complete turkey.”

The door opened — to be precise, it was virtually blown open by the noise of 1046 genies all protesting at once — and a tall, slim figure walked in, sat in the chair and crossed her legs.

There was silence.

“Hey,” said the bald man, “it’s a girl.”

“Correct,” said Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation IX. “You see? Putting your lenses in this morning has already paid dividends.”

“What’s Korty thinking of, sending us a girl?” snarled the skinny man. “We don’t need a girl, we need a guy.”

The girl parted her lips and smiled.

“On the other hand,” mumbled the bald man, “have we actually thought this through? I mean, now I think of it I can see where, if we were to make the hero a girl…”

“It’d beef up the middle,” agreed the freckled man. “There’s that goddamn flat spot between the fight with the chainsaws and the bit where he blows up the Golden Gate Bridge. If we made him a girl, we could put in a bit with her and her kids, you know, mom stuff…”

“Like Cagney and Lacey,” agreed the skinny man.

“Excuse me,” said the girl.

The three men looked at her.

“Could one of you gentlemen possibly tell me what the film’s about?”

“Hey,” objected the bald man, “what’s that got to do with you?”

“Well, now,” the girl said, flicking a few microns of cigar ash off her knee, “if I don’t know what the film’s about, how do I know whether I want to be in it?”

There was stunned silence; and the genie, who could after all read minds, watched with amused pleasure as the idea began to take shape in all three brains simultaneously.

She wants to know if it’s the sort of film she’d like to be in.

If we want her, she might not accept.

She must be good.

The bald man cleared his throat. “OK,” he said, “it’s like this. There’s this guy—”

“Or girl,” interrupted the skinny man.

“Or girl, yeah, and she’s got this brother who was killed in Vietnam—”

“Big flashback sequence,” explained the freckled man. “All the footage they couldn’t use in Full Metal Jacket.”

“Only,” the bald man went on, “really he wasn’t, OK, it was just a dream, and in fact he’s hiding out from the Mob—”

“Columbian drug barons.”