Wish You Were Here (21 page)

‘Wie bitte, wunderschön Fräulein?'

‘Oh . . . !' With painful effort, Janice closed her eyes and counted to ten. They were still there when she opened them again; ten lovesick goblins, grinning at her like something out of a Mills & Boon version of
Nightmare On Elm Street
. She decided to give sweet reason one last go before resorting to screaming and kicking.

‘Guys,' she said, trying to sound friendly, ‘no offence, but it's a non-starter, really. I mean, look at me, will you? I said look, damnit,' she added, as ten pairs of round red eyes gazed yearningly into hers, ‘not gawp. Come on, let's keep some hold on reality here. You - are . . .' She swallowed hard before saying the word. ‘Goblins. Orcs. Little short guys who eat people. Really neat, hunky goblins, I feel sure, and if I was a lady goblin I'd be tattooing your phone numbers on the back of my hand right this minute, you bet. But I'm
not
a lady goblin, now am I? I mean, do I look like a lady goblin? No, forget I said that. Just, um, take it from me. Like, you know, no fangs. Not quite up to speed in the talons department. I . . .'

She tailed off. It was hopeless. Whatever she did just seemed to make it all infinitely worse.

She would, she acknowledged, pay good money to anybody who could prevent the big scaly one at the back from playing the mandolin.

‘All right,' she growled, ‘you asked for it.' She stalked forward and kicked the nearest goblin on the point of the shoulder, as hard as she could.

The goblin grinned soppily at her, and blushed khaki.

‘Heeelp!' she screamed, pulling half-heartedly at the hem of her windcheater. ‘Help, anybody! Rape! Rape!'

She stopped yelling, and looked round defiantly. None of the goblins seemed to have moved an inch. If anything, they'd moved a bit closer. To protect her, probably.

‘Oh, for Christ's sake!' she panted. ‘Don't you guys ever—?'

That was as far as she got before an eagle suddenly swooped down and carried her away.

 

Calvin Dieb stopped running, looked round, saw no goblins and sank, exhausted, onto a tree stump. A moment later, a butterfly fluttered up and perched on his shoulder.

‘That's you, right?' Dieb gasped.

‘You got it,' the butterfly replied. ‘Quick, aren't you?'

‘Goes with the territory,' Dieb said, his eyes shut. ‘God, I haven't run like that since, gee, the early eighties, maybe even since Jimmy Carter was President.' He opened his eyes and grinned. ‘I remember that also seemed like a bad dream, at the time. Did I lose them?'

‘The goblins? Sure. Happen to you a lot, that sort of thing?'

Dieb shook his head. ‘Scarcely ever,' he replied. ‘Which is odd, come to think of it. I mean, I guess I piss off more people in an average week than most people do in a lifetime, but for some reason none of them ever seems to want to get even. I mean, not with me personally, using the medium of physical violence.' Dieb shrugged. ‘I'm not complaining. Just odd, that's all. I mean, if I did to me some of the things I do to other people, I guess I'd want to rip my lungs out.'

The butterfly fluttered its wings. ‘Perhaps other people aren't as vindictive as you, Mr Dieb. Perhaps they're . . .' The butterfly was silent for a moment, while it searched for the right word. ‘Nicer,' it said. ‘You ever considered that?'

‘Listen,' Dieb replied. ‘Nobody ever made money in the legal profession being nice. It's like you don't make good ice cream with a blowtorch. It's just not the right technique.'

The butterfly didn't reply; instead, it spread its wings and flitted away.

‘Hey,' Dieb called after it, ‘what did I say? Come back!'

But the butterfly kept on flying, until it was nothing but a speck against the sky, and then just a remembered place where a speck was last clearly discernible. Dieb stood up, and then sat down again. ‘Hey!' he said quietly.

And then the speck was visible again. It grew. And it grew. When it was larger than a butterfly, Calvin Dieb looked at it and saw that it wasn't a butterfly. It was something bigger, a long way away, closing in fast.

‘Hey!' he said.

As it approached, coming in low across the lake, the underside of its huge wings and body were reflected sharply in the water; black and white wing feathers, white belly feathers, red feet, black talons. Its eyes were round and yellow, and it shrieked.

‘Look,' Dieb said, backing away, ‘I didn't mean anything against nice guys in general. I got a lot of respect for nice guys. Some of my best friends—' He checked himself; his instincts suggested that this was no time for playing origami with the truth. ‘Some of my best friends,' he therefore said, ‘have a lot of respect for nice guys.Well, not friends as such, more like business acquaintances . . .'

The eagle towered, put its wings back and dropped out of the sky towards him, talons outstretched. There was no point in trying to run, Dieb knew; another thing that goes with the territory is the sure and certain knowledge that there's no defence against things that drop on you from a great height. In Calvin's experience, that usually meant writs, but he had a shrewd idea that it probably applied to huge birds as well.

‘Now you understand,' said the bird, halting its onslaught six inches or so from Calvin's head and hovering, ‘where the expression
legal eagle
comes from. What's it feel like, being underneath for a change?'

Calvin lowered his arms from above his head and looked up. He could see the points of the talons; amazing how anything not made in a precision engineering workshop could be so sharp. ‘Subtlety,' he said, in a rather wobbly voice, ‘doesn't come easily to you, I can tell.'

‘Lay it on with a trowel, that's my motto,' the eagle replied. ‘I mean to say, where's the point in being subtle when you're trying to get a point across to a pig-ignorant jury? Chances are half of them are blacks and Hispanics anyway. That sort wouldn't understand subtlety if you smashed their teeth in with it.'

‘Hey!' Calvin said. ‘I may be a lot of unpleasant things, but nobody can say I'm a racist. I'm Jewish, for God's sake. We know all about that stuff.'

The eagle continued to hover, although its wings didn't move; it was as if the frame had frozen. ‘So,' it said, ‘finally there's something nice we can say about you, congratulations. You think that's a good reason why I shouldn't scarf you up in my nice sharp talons and rip your chest open?'

Calvin blinked. ‘Is there any reason why you should?' he said.

‘Yeah, sure,' the eagle replied, still motionless. ‘I'm bigger than you are. I'm stronger and faster and smarter and I can afford the very best legal advice money can buy. That's what gives me wings, man, that's how come I can fly.' The eagle flexed its claws, lazily, with confidence. ‘The law is my shepherd, Mr Dieb, wherefore shall I lack nothing. It maketh me to lie fluently in green pastures.'

‘Hey,' Calvin said, benighted under the vast shadow of the bird's wings, ‘cut it out, will you? I guess you made your point some time ago.'

The eagle opened its hooked beak wide. ‘Objection overruled,' it said. ‘I'm bigger than you, and I've got wings. Unless you've got a gun, or a better lawyer, you're mine.'

But Calvin stepped back and folded his arms. ‘But that's not the way it is,' he replied, ‘and you know it. I fight for the little guy, too. I sue the big corporations for the little kid who's been scarred for life by some firebug toy they couldn't be bothered to test properly. I take on the big hospitals when they've crippled some guy when they've cut corners to save a buck. Where there's some poor dumb broad whose old man's beating the shit out of her, I get her the injunction and the divorce. You get the hell off my back, bird, or I'll have the law on you.'

But the eagle flapped its wings, and they cracked in the air like a whip. Dieb felt the talons hook in the collar of his five-thousand-dollar coat, and suddenly his feet lifted off the ground. All the air was bumped out of his lungs, and the coat was strangling him where it pressed up under his arms. He felt as if he was being crucified.

‘Legal eagle, huh?' said the bird, as they hung in the air, so high up that their reflection in the lake below was nothing but a tiny speck. ‘So make your own way home from here.'

‘Hey!' Calvin shouted.The eagle let go, and flew away, back to its eyrie in the southern mountains.

Although he instinctively knew it was inadvisable, Calvin looked down. And what a lot of down there was to look at, all of a sudden. Vast, unfathomable expanses of down, to be followed in short order by all the splat! he could possibly wish for.
No thanks
, he muttered to himself, and he spread his wings.

Now where in hell did they come from?

Not that I'm complaining. No way. I like them so much I think I'll buy the company.

He concentrated until he could feel the air tingling in the feathers of his wingtips, as his mind hunted feverishly through the manual for something about how to manoeuvre. But all it could find was the long legal note disclaiming liability, and a load of guff about use of non-standard spares invalidating the warranty. Legal eagle, he said to himself. Well, yes. Seventy-five per cent of being a lawyer involves being stuck in precarious situations and not knowing what the hell you're supposed to do next. The trick is not to let anybody else see that you don't know.

In this case, gravity. One false move, one slight hint that he didn't actually know how to fly this thing, and gravity would be up at him like a ton of bricks.

And what did he always tell himself, in these situations?
Hey, relax. We'll just wing it from here and see what happens
.

He relaxed, and spread his wings. And the sky rushed down at him like a falling roof.

 

 

‘T
his it?'Wesley spluttered, hauling himself over a ledge of rock.

‘Yes.'

‘Oh,
good
.' His hands hurt; there was rather less skin on his knuckles than there ought to be, according to the specification, and he had cramp in his tendons running right up into his elbow. For a man who, twenty-four hours previously, had he thought about it, wouldn't have been entirely sure he
had
tendons, it was a sudden and not entirely pleasant reversal of circumstances.

‘Ouch,' he observed. ‘Ow.' He huddled on the ledge and hugged his arm ostentatiously, waiting for the Indian to sympathise.

‘The eyrie's up there,' whispered Talks To Squirrels, nodding his head towards an opening in the cliff wall facing them. ‘Chances are, your eagle's one of the ones that live there.'

‘
One
of the . . .'

‘Of course,' the Indian went on, his voice so low as to be scarcely audible, ‘scaling the cliff'll be relatively straightforward. Presumably you've got a plan for what we do after that.'

Wesley looked at the cliff - forty-odd feet of smooth, slightly concave rock - and thought,
relatively straightforward
. ‘Tell you what,' he said. ‘You tell me how you'd set about it, and then I'll sort of chip in with my comments and observations. I'd hate for you to get the idea I was muscling in.'

‘If you're happy with that,' the Indian replied. ‘Well, if it was me, as soon as I'd scaled the cliff—'

‘Uh.'

‘Sorry?'

‘No,' Wesley said, ‘go on, please. Don't let me interrupt you.'

The Indian nodded. ‘All I was going to say was, once I'd scaled the cliff I'd be thinking in terms of a direct frontal assault - you know, take out as many of them as I could, wave a torch around, set light to a few eagles, let them spook the rest, and hope I'd be able to find the girl and get clear before they knew what was happening.'

‘Ah,' said Wesley. ‘I see. And you think that'd work?'

‘No,' the Indian replied brightly. ‘How d'you think I got to be a ghost in the first place?'

‘Oh.'

‘And that was just normal-sized eagles,' Talks To Squirrels went on. ‘One minute I was standing on this ledge fitting an arrow to my bowstring and thinking,This is easier than I thought, and the next minute I was tumbling back down the cliff, banging my head on stuff and saying
Eeeeee
. Of course, when
you
do it, maybe it'll all work out OK. After all, I'd never done anything like this before.'

‘You hadn't?'

‘I led kind of a sheltered life,' Talks admitted. ‘Was I dumb, or what? I mean, only a complete idiot would imagine you could work something like this out from first principles.'