Free Odds and Gods by Tom Holt

‘Could you possibly tell me where I might be able to get cod, mushy peas, pickled gherkins and a really tasty chip butty, please? And jam roly-poly and a nice strong cup of tea,’ he added.
    The man and the woman looked at each other and conferred in a foreign language, which Frey (to the gods all things are known) thought was probably Portuguese.
    ‘Sorry,’ said the man haltingly. ‘No understan Inglis. Sorry.’
    Between gods and men there are differences, and there are similarities; as between, say, the very rich and the very poor. Divine public relations have in the past tended to play down the similarities, understandably enough; but in more recent years this approach has been revised. Hey guys, the gods now say, we aren’t really all that different. We’re just guys and gals, same as you. If you prick us, they say, do we not bleed? Well, no, actually, they admit, we don’t; and anyway that’s not a particularly apt example to choose, because anyone trying to prick us is likely to find himself on the bad end of many millions of volts of static electricity. But you know what we mean.
    Accordingly, it’s not too remarkable that as Frey continued his journey down the hill, and the man and his wife plodded on up the hill, exactly the same phrase should have leapt spontaneously into their minds.
    ‘Bloody tourists,’ they all thought.
     
    ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Henderson, ‘we’re all extremely concerned. Extremely. Taking off like that, a god of his age.’ She paused, and Julian’s extra-perceptive senses caught a whiff of a point being surreptitiously made. ‘I’m very much afraid,’ she said, ‘that Something might Happen to him.’
    ‘Really? Such as what?’
    Mrs Henderson shrugged, as if to say that in a curved universe, anything is by definition possible.
    ‘I’m sure he’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘After all, he is a god and fundamentally quite sensible, for his age. But with this terrible cold weather we’ve been having . . . And he hasn’t taken his blue pills with him.’
    ‘You don’t say.’ The two looked at each other, and electricity crackled in the air. It was as if the two thieves crucified on either side of Our Lord on that first Good Friday had put their heads together and decided to cut out the middle man. ‘His blue pills,’ said Julian slowly. ‘That could be serious.’
    ‘Very.’
    ‘I dread to think what might happen to him without his blue pills.’
    ‘Not that anything will, of course . . .’
    ‘No, of course not.’
    ‘It’s just that it’s always advisable to consider the very worst that might happen. Just in case.’
    ‘Quite so.’
    ‘Which is why,’ said Mrs Henderson, taking a deep breath and hoping very much that she hadn’t completely misinterpreted the messages emanating from under Julian’s eyebrows, ‘I’ve taken the liberty of engaging a, um, private enquiry agent to see if he can, um, find your godfather for us.’
    ‘Splendid. Splendid.’
    ‘A Mr Lundqvist.’
    ‘ Ah .’
    ‘He came very highly recommended.’
    ‘Top rate man. Exactly what I’d have done, in your position.’
    ‘Oh I am glad.’
    Julian allowed himself the luxury of a smile. It would cost a paying client about a year’s salary to be smiled at by Julian, but he treated himself to a smile a month at cost. ‘If Kurt Lundqvist can’t sort this business out,’ he said, ‘nobody can.’
     
    The same Kurt Lundqvist was, at that precise moment, locked in hand-to-hand combat with a tall gentleman with projecting teeth and a conservative taste in evening dress at the bottom of an open grave somewhere in what used to be called Bohemia.
    It should have been a perfectly straightforward job - go in, garlic under nose, whack the hickory smartly through the aorta and home in time to catch the closing prices on Wall Street - but he’d recently taken on a new assistant, and she wasn’t yet a hundred per cent au fait with the technical jargon of the supernatural