May Contain Traces of Magic

by Tom Holt

  The replacement genie was being difficult about going into the bottle; the customer was holding tightly onto the lamp, while Frank tried to squash the little swirling blue cloud down into the spout with the palm of his gloved hand. Clearly a generous man; he’d misjudged him all these years. But then, he thought, I’d never have guessed about his long-term companion unless I’d seen it for myself. Something like that must do strange and terrible things to you.

  A sort of shimmer effect. He tried to picture it. No, too vague.

  “Well, now.” He realised Dennis Slade was talking to him. “I think that’s everything. No, hang on, we haven’t done the dried water. Better make it six dozen, we’re down to our last carton. Been a hell of a run on it the last couple of weeks—if you hadn’t been coming in today I’d have had to phone you. Can you talk to the warehouse, see if they can’t hurry it up a bit?”

  Chris wrote up the order in his book, deliberately taking his time, but Frank was still fully occupied with the genie; he’d managed to stuff it in head first, but its claws and tail appeared to have got stuck, like Winnie the Pooh in the rabbit hole, and Angela was giving Chris meaningful looks; come on, let’s get out of here before they change their minds. Gandhi, he thought; and if that’s a coincidence I’ll eat my own head.

  He couldn’t stay in the shop any longer without drawing attention to himself, so he smiled, thanked Dennis Slade, asked him to get Frank to ring him about the thing they’d been talking about, and followed Angela back into the street—

  “How about that, then?” Her face, no longer pointed like a weasel’s but attractively heart-shaped, was glowing. “Two dozen of the BB27Ks, five dozen MP66As, a whole palletful of the Multi-Function Megacurses and fifty instant thunderstorms.” She smiled at him and said, “I can see why you like doing this job. It’s a real buzz, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve got to admit,” she rattled on, “I think I nearly blew it with the Megacurses. I could feel I was pushing him where he didn’t want to go, and he’d have taken twelve dozen just so I’d let him off the hook, but there was this little voice in my head saying, go on, you can do it, so I pressed him, and it was really close but I kept on and he gave in, and after that it was easy, I think I could’ve sold him anything by then. In the end I guess I was feeling sorry for him. After all,” she added sagely, “got to remember, we’re in this for the long term, the sustainable trading relationship. If we kid them into taking stuff they’ll never be able to shift, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. We want them to trust us to know what they need better than they do.”

  Angela got in the car and reached across to unlock the passenger door. Chris opened it, but didn’t get in. Scared?

  Well, naturally. But it wasn’t the fear so much as the bewilderment, “Hop in,” she ordered. “It’s MageWorld in Lichfield next, isn’t it?”

  Switzerland, he thought, Alps and banks and edelweiss and cowbells and men in leather trousers with feathers in their hats. Not in the EU, as far he could remember, so you’d need a visa, and very expensive, someone had told him, four quid for a beer and the cheese is all runny. Better, braver, to stay the course. He hopped in, as ordered, and put on his seat belt.

  “I was thinking,” Angela said, as she ground the jeep into first gear and pulled away, testing the reflexes of an oncoming lorry, “how’d it be if, instead of pushing the BB27Ks, we sort of try and make out they’re really hard to get hold of—you know, demand much higher than anticipated—and say we’re really sorry but we’re having to ration them, no more than six dozen per customer? That’ll make them scared they might miss out, and then we let them twist our arms and sell them eight—”

  A sort of shimmer effect. Well, maybe he’d recognise it when he saw it. Chris took the sunglasses out of his pocket and folded back the arms.

  “Mind if I borrow them?” Before he could answer, she’d snatched them out of his hand and shoved them onto her nose. “Thanks,” she said. “Bright sunlight when I’m driving gives me the most appalling headaches.”

  For the record, it was overcast, dark and gloomy, ideal vampire street-party weather. He took a deep breath and said, “Excuse me, but would you mind giving those back?”

  She didn’t seem to have heard him, “Usually I keep a pair in the glove box,” she said, “but like a fool I didn’t put them back last time, and now can I find them? These are pretty good, not too dark. I can’t be doing with those polaroid things.”

  “If you ask me, they’re a bit heavy.”

  “Really? Can’t say I noticed. And we needn’t just stick to the BB27Ks,” Angela went on. “We can sort of drop hints there’s a snarl-up with shipping or something, four or five lines in danger of running out, so panic-buy now while stocks last.”

  She laughed attractively. “I expect all this is really old stuff and I’m reinventing the wheel like-mad, but—”

  Chris tried to make a grab for the glasses, but she was too quick for him. She slapped away his hand so hard that he yelped. “What’re you doing?” she squealed, but he tried again. This time she swerved, whacked into the central crash barrier, bounced off it and ended up in the long grass at the side of the road. But she still had the glasses.

  She took them off and closed her fist around them. “That was pretty stupid,” she said. “We could’ve been—”

  “Who are you?” he said.

  Angela turned her head and looked at him, and all the glamour was gone. Her face was thin and sharp again, her nose a beak, her mouth a two-dimensional line. “Are you feeling all right?” she said.

  “No. Answer the fucking question.”

  A moment of perfect stillness and quiet; then she shrugged. “Give you a clue,” she said. “Nice shirt.”

  “What? Oh, you mean—”

  “Got one just like it,” she said, “only in pale blue. Lieutenant Angela Schlager, Demon Control directorate.” She paused, then said, “You’re supposed to give me the password.”

  For a moment Chris’s mind went blank, then he realised: she doesn’t know it’s not my shirt. DS. He scrabbled in his memory, then said, “Delendi sunt.”

  She nodded briskly. “That’s the trouble with this organisation,” she said. “Paranoia. Nobody talks to anybody else. I mean, it wouldn’t have killed Dave Burnoz to tell me you’re on the Job too.”

  Without thinking, Chris said, “Is he—?”

  Angela laughed. “There you go,” she said. “Proves my point. You work for the creep—at least, that’s your cover—and you don’t even know he’s on the bloody team. We’re all so busy playing spies, we end up with a stupid situation like this. In fact, if you hadn’t been wearing the logo I’d never have guessed, either. A bit bloody obvious, by the way,” she added.

  “You know they’re only supposed to be worn off duty, like the baseball caps.”

  Baseball caps, Chris repeated to himself. Yes, of course an organisation like that would have baseball caps, and sweatshirts and sports bap and probably golf umbrellas too, all with the logo on. You were probably issued with them on compulsory paintball weekends.

  “Sorry,” he said. “About—”

  She shrugged. “My fault,” she replied. “Should’ve guessed as soon as I saw the glasses.” She leaned across him, opened the glove compartment and produced an identical pair. “Did you really think I was—you know?”

  He nodded. “Sorry about that, too,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” she said indulgently. “So, what’ve you got?”

  Ah. Then inspiration struck him, and he said, “You first.”

  That was OK, apparendy. “Well,” Angela said, “I’m almost certain we’ve traced it to Nottingham, which means it’s very likely that the first one you saw was just a scout, probably from a completely different faction and not really anything to do with our boy. Obviously, your run-in yesterday shows that they don’t know any more than we do, which I guess is encouraging. It’s the second one that’s got us puzzled. We think—�
� She paused to look him in the eye. “We think that that one was her.”

  It took Chris a moment to remember how his mouth worked. Where is she? the demon had asked. “You think so?”

  Angela nodded. “It all fits, doesn’t it? Look, we know she’s on the run and the other factions are after her. She needs a place to hide, but she desperately wants to be able to come back, as soon as it’s reasonably safe. Where better to go to ground till the heat’s off? I mean, nobody would think of looking for her there, and even if the other lot found her, they wouldn’t be able to break in, at the very least she’d be protected as long as she sat tight. What do you think?”

  I think I could quickly learn to love runny cheese and cowbells. “It’s possible, certainly,” he said. “But—”

  “I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to argue that if you and I could figure that out, so could they, and so they didn’t need to scoop you in yesterday. Well, maybe they’re just thick, or maybe they don’t talk to each other, just like us.” She shrugged. “What’s your take on all that? I mean, you’re the one it all happened to, you actually saw her. Well?”

  Chris thought of all the films, and the cop shows, and smiled gently as he said, “Sorry, can’t tell you that. At least, not till I’ve cleared it with Jill first.”

  It was the only name he had to drop, but sometimes one is enough. Angela’s eyes widened for a moment. “You report directly to Colonel Ettin-Smith?”

  He nodded; the stern, taciturn type. “You’ve come across her, then.”

  “She recruited me,” Angela replied, “in my first term at Loughborough. Sorry,” she added, “I hadn’t realised you were special ops.”

  Indulgent grin, setting a bewildered subordinate at her ease. “It’s like you said,” he told her, “nobody talks to anybody else in this man’s organisation.” (He was quite proud of ‘this man’s’, though he couldn’t remember offhand where he’d got it from. MASH or The A-Team, probably.) “Anyhow,” he went on, “now we’ve got that straight, tell me something.”

  Eager nod. “Sure.”

  “Why the Instaglamour cream?”

  “Oh,” Angela said. “That.” She shook her head. “Does it bother you? Only I can—”

  “It’s not that,” Chris said. “I was just curious. You do know reps aren’t allowed to use it.”

  “Aren’t they? Oh.”

  He smiled. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I expect Dennis and Frank’ll just assume you have a naturally bubbly and outgoing personality.”

  “Right.” She nodded. “Actually, that’s all it is. I mean, you’ve seen what I’m like without this muck all over my face. Bit of a handicap when you’re trying to get people to tell you things. So yes, sometimes I use the cream. But I won’t do it again, if it bothers you.”

  “You carry on, if it helps you get the job done,” Chris said magnanimously. “Right,” he went on, “we’d better get a move on, or we’ll be late for MageWorld. Don’t want to blow our cover, do we?”

  The rest of the day was fraught and rather weird, but a considerable improvement nevertheless. Now that Chris had revealed himself as a fellow demon-hunter, Angela seemed to regard him as not just a colleague but a friend, and started telling him her life story. He learned, for instance, that she’d sworn to devote her life to the cause when her best friend’s cousin’s boyfriend’s mother’s nephew had been attacked and horribly maimed by demons, so that when Jill arrived at Loughborough on a recruiting drive Angela had jumped at the chance. “I’ve always wanted to do something that mattered,” she said. “You know, to make the world a better place and stuff. Originally it was going to be either working with endangered tapirs in Borneo or raising consciousness about the plight of the exploited copra miners of Kiribati, but then I realised what my true mission in life was and, well, since then, I’ve never really looked back.”

  A slice of luck, Chris couldn’t help thinking, for the copra miners of Kiribati, but he was generous enough not to begrudge it to them. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “To have a really genuine vocation, I mean.”

  Angela did a no-big-deal shrug. “You’re the same, I bet,” she said. “I mean, none of us are in this for the money or the pension scheme. How about you?”

  He was too weary to make something up, so he gave her an edited version of what had happened in the girls’ toilets at school. It went down well.

  “So you’ve known Colonel Ettin-Smith for years,” Angela said. “That must’ve been awesome. I mean, she’s so committed.”

  “I guess,” he replied. “But you know what it’s like with people you were at school with. Even when they’re seventy and all high court judges and Cabinet ministers, you can’t ever really bring yourself to believe they’re grown-ups.”

  “I didn’t have any friends at school,” she replied solemnly. “I hated them, and they all hated me.”

  That he could believe. “Oh well,” he said. “All different now, I expect.”

  “No, not really.” She overtook a cyclist; he watched the poor devil in the mirror as he battled to regain control. “But I’ve got my work, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

  “Quite,” Chris said.

  He had his work too, of course. Angela, however, continued to be an unethically-magically-enhanced asset, even managing to bounce Bernie Playce of Orion Sorcery into taking six dozen bottled genies and a whole case of blessings. Chris was pleased, but surprised; as far as he was concerned, the glamour had worn off as soon as he accused her of using it. Bernie, however, showed all the signs of a glamour victim—bulging eyes, glazed expression, difficulty with words with an S in them—so apparently it was working on him. Presumably an open accusation broke the spell; worth remembering. By the time she dropped him off outside his flat that evening, he’d sold more in a day than he usually managed in a good week.

  There was a note from Karen on the kitchen table: emergency meeting at the office, didn’t know when she’d be back. Chris scowled at it and threw it away. If she’d been home, he’d been going to tell her the whole story, just to get it out of his system—and, after all, she was in the business, considerably more knowledgeable and high-powered than he was, for all he knew she might have been able to come up with a sensible course of action. Instead, he phoned Jill and got her answering machine. He left a message: call me as soon as you can.

  He microwaved a pizza, poured himself the last can of beer and switched on the telly, which offered him a choice between snooker, two soaps and a makeover show. He reckoned he’d suffered enough for one day, so he switched off and decided to play some music while he caught up on his ironing, which had been building up rather, to the point where it represented the domestic equivalent of Third World debt. For some reason he couldn’t seem to find any of his usual comfort listening, just heaps of Karen’s stuff, which tended to give him headaches. At the back of the drawer, however, he unearthed a CD he couldn’t remember having seen before. It had an all-black sleeve, on which glowed the silver words Now That’s What I Call Really Bad Music 56. Hm, he thought, and glanced at the list on the back. Nothing he’d ever heard of, but he was intrigued, and put it on.

  As a professional salesman, Chris was impressed; here was an item of merchandise that really did deliver exactly what it promised on the box. But there’s a sort of magic about extremely bad music, when you’re in just the right kind of mood; you carry on listening in awed fascination to see if it can get any worse, and you’re rarely disappointed. He stuck it for twenty-five minutes, and found he’d polished off six shirts, nine handkerchiefs, eight tea-towels and a couple of pillowcases without even noticing. Charms to soothe, he thought; he took the disc out, jailed it securely in its box, and stuck it in his jacket pocket.

  Jill rang back as he was putting the iron away.

  “Angela Schlager,” she repeated. “Yup, I know her all right.”

  “Thin girl. Pointy face.”

  “That’s her. Looks a bit like she stole a magic rin
g five hundred years ago, and she’s been guarding it in a cave under a mountain ever since. Keen, though. Maybe a bit too keen. Why?”

  Chris explained, all except the polo-shirt bit; instead, he attributed his outing of her to intuition. It didn’t sound right, but Jill didn’t pick him up on it. “It’s going to be a bit awkward,” he went on. “I mean, I’m stuck with her for weeks still. What if I say something and she realises I’ve been lying?”

  “You’ll feel really stupid,” Jill replied reasonably. “Talking of which, why did you pretend to be one of us? It seems such an odd thing to do.”

  Minus the polo shirt and Angela leaping to conclusions on the strength of it, the story did seem a bit dubious. “Dunno, really,” he replied. “I guess I wanted to find out what she knew.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  “In case it was something to do with all this horrible stuff that’s been happening to me. Which it is, obviously.” He hesitated, then said, “I don’t suppose you can tell me—”

  “You don’t suppose exactly right Sorry.”

  “Ah well.” Chris tried to sound more disappointed than he actually was; really, though, he was more concerned with getting off the subject of why he’d pretended to be an undercover demon-hunter. “Well, that’s all I wanted to ask, really. Thanks.”

  “No problem. Oh, by the way,” Jill added. “We’re finished with your car, so you can have it back. We’ll drop it round first thing in the morning so you can use it for work.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “Not sure I could’ve taken another day of your esteemed colleague’s driving. I mean, she did a fantastic job of taking my mind off being haunted by demons, but on balance I think the demons are less of a threat.”