The plus side was that Joe too felt as energetic as a poached egg and couldn't whip up much concern at the lack of client incentive to head off down the mean streets.

So clad in an off-white singlet and Bermuda shorts patterned with scarlet parrots sinking their beaks into rainbow-striped pumpkins, Joe sat at his desk and relaxed with his favorite book, Not So Private Eye, the reminiscences of Endo Venera, the famous Mafia soldier turned gumshoe. This was Joe's bible. Everything you needed to know about being a PI was here, except maybe how to stay awake.

His head nodded, and he slipped into a dream in which he and Beryl Boddington were sliding naked down an iceberg, and he wasn't at all pleased to have his descent interrupted by a voice saying, "Mr. Six- smith? Would you be Mr. Sixsmith?"

He opened his eyes and found he was being addressed by a Young Fair God.

He was thirty at most, tall, boyishly handsome, with hair that shone pale gold against the darker gold of skin glowing with a proper expensive Mediterranean yacht kind of tan, not the russet-and-red skin-peeling version which made any large gathering of Lutonians look like Vermont in the Fall. His lean athletic frame was clad in a linen jacket, cream slacks and an open-necked shirt white enough to signal surrender at half a mile. He looked, thought Joe, just like one of those hunks you see in up-market mail-order catalogs where, despite the alleged cutting out of the middle man, the gear still costs three times what you'd expect to pay down in Luton market.

But it wasn't this that caught and held Joe's attention. It was the fact that the guy looked cool. Not cool in the laid-back hey-man-how-you-doin'? kind of way, though that too. No, this guy looked like he was standing in some nice and easy air-conditioned zone of his own rather than the sauna of Joe's office. Perhaps this was a special deal available only to Young Fair Gods.

"Hope you don't mind. I just came in. The door was open," said the YFG. He had a quails'-eggs-easy-over- on-cinnamon-toast kind of voice.