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no
eyes. But for all I know, there are stacks of jars with pictures of eyeless
horses on them. How do you know that this is the right one?”
    Anna lowered
her head. “I don’t know. Not for certain. Not until I see it, anyway. But I
admit that I’m worried.”
    “What about? You think that Marjorie will take offense to
what you’ve done and kick you out?
    You have to
admit you deserve it.”
    “No, I’m not
worried about that I know she’ll understand when I tell her. What really
worries me is what happens if it is the original jar.”
    “Anna,” I said.
“You’re trying to tell me that this jar is something special. I mean, what you’re
trying to say is that it’s magic. Is that it?”
    “Yes, that’s
exactly what I’m saying.”
    “But how can
you-”
    “Do you know
what jinni means?” she said hotly. “Have you any idea what jinni are?”
    I shook my
head. Most people have this wonderful knack for making me feel ignorant
    “Jinni,” she
said, “are more popularly known as genies. You remember Alladin and his
Wonderful Lamp? You remember all the stories of genies trapped in bottles? Jinni were the demons of Arabia, the powerful spirits of the
elements. There were jinni in the rocks, in the water,
in the skies, in every part of ancient life. Some were capricious and some were
not, but in those days it didn’t matter so much. The hierarchy of Arabian
magicians had learned how to control and punish jinni by spells and sorcerous
riddles. The worst thing you could ever do to jinni was to take away their
freedom and seal them in some enclosed space-like a lamp, or a jar, or a
bottle. That’s why you have all those stories about people letting jinni out of
bottles and the jinni being eternally grateful and promising to be their slaves
forever. That, unfortunately, was a fantasy.”
    I scratched my
ear. “Like everything else you’ve told me?”
    Anna turned
away. “I can’t make you believe me. I can only tell you what these stories are,
and that I’ve come across many Iranians who believe they’re true. Just because
all this happened a long time ago doesn’t make it a fantasy.”
    “All right,” I
said. “Supposing it isn’t a fantasy. What is so
worrisome about our particular jar?
    Apart from what
happened to Max Greaves, of course, and I don’t really see the connection.”
    “I don’t know,”
said Anna. “That’s what I wanted to find out before we tried to approach it or
open it. Forewarned is forearmed, isn’t it?”
    “But how can
anyone know what genies really did, if they ever existed? It says in that piece
from the Book of Magic that the court magicians kept the jars ‘in the style of
old’ and that was written five centuries B.C. I mean, we’re not going to find
anyone who remembers how it was back in the bad old days of genies.”
    “We have the
fairy stories and so on. We also have several occult Arabian books.”
    “And what do
they tell us?”
    “Not a lot. But
they do say that the jinni, once released from their confinement, were usually
angry and vengeful and almost impossible to control. Ali Babah’s jinn was supposed to be the most powerful of all jinni, so I
guess he was something to be reckoned with. The H-bomb of his
day.”
    “Nothing else?” I asked her.
    “Yes,” she
said, “There is something else. Something important.”
    “I’m going to
need convincing.”
    She shrugged,
as if she didn’t care if I believed her or not “Jinni would do anything,” she
explained, “to coax people to let them out of their prisons-their bottles or
lamps or whatever.
    Often, when the
magicians died, their jars of jinni would fall into the hands of people who
didn’t know what -they were, and the jinni would exert tremendous magical
influence on the owners of these jars to set them free. Of course, once the
stopper was out ..”
    She opened her
pocketbook again, searched for a moment, then handed
me a clipping from the London Daily Telegraph, dated April 26,