Going Postal (8 page)

She admires them
, Moist thought.
Whoo-ee. And…angels?

“Well, thank you,” said Moist. “I’d better be going. I’ll definitely…well, thank you, anyway.”

“What are you doing at the Post Office, Mr. von Lipwig?” said the woman as he opened the door.

“Call me Moist,” said Moist, and a bit of his inner self shuddered. “I’m the new postmaster.”

“No kidding?” said Miss Dearheart. “Then I’m glad you’ve got Pump 19 with you. The last few postmasters didn’t last long, I gather.”

“I think I heard something about that,” said Moist cheerfully. “It sounds as though things were pretty bad in the olden days.”

Miss Dearheart’s brow wrinkled. “Olden days?” she said. “Last month was
olden days
?”

L
ORD
V
ETINARI
stood looking out of his window. His office once had a wonderful view of the city and, technically, it still did, although now the roofline was a forest of clacks towers, winking and twinkling in the sunlight. On the Tump, the old castle mound across the river, the big tower—one end of the Grand Trunk that wound more than two thousand miles across the continent to Genua—glittered with semaphore.

It was good to see the lifeblood of trade and commerce and diplomacy pumping so steadily, especially when you employed clerks who were exceptionally good at decryption. White and black by day, light and dark by night, the shutters stopped only for fog and snow.

At least, until the last few months. He sighed and went back to his desk.

There was a file open. It contained a report from Commander Vimes of the City Watch, with a lot of exclamation marks. It contained a more measured report from Clerk Alfred, and Lord Vetinari had circled the section titled “The Smoking Gnu.”

There was a gentle knock at the door and the clerk Drumknott came in like a ghost.

“The gentlemen from the Grand Trunk semaphore company are all here now, sir,” he said. He laid down several sheets of paper covered in tiny, intricate lines. Vetinari gave the shorthand a cursory glance.

“Idle chitchat?” he said.

“Yes, my lord. One might say
excessively
so. But I am certain that the mouth of the speaking tube is quite invisible in the plaster work, my lord. It’s hidden in a gilt cherub most cunningly, sir. Clerk Brian has built it into its cornucopia, which apparently collects more sounds and can be swiveled to face whoever—”

“One does not have to see something to know that it is there, Drumknott.” Vetinari tapped the paper. “These are not stupid men. Well, some of them, at least. You have the files?”

Drumknott’s pale face bore for a moment the pained expression of a man forced to betray the high principles of filing.

“In a manner of speaking, my lord. We really have nothing substantial about any of the allegations, we really haven’t. We’re running a Concludium in the Long Gallery, but it’s all hearsay, sir, it really is. There’s…hints, here and there, but really we need something more solid…”

“There will be an opportunity,” said Vetinari. Being an absolute ruler today was not as simple as people thought. At least, it was not simple if your ambitions included being an absolute ruler tomorrow. There were subtleties. Oh, you could order men to smash down doors and drag people off to dungeons without trial, but too much of that sort of thing was bad for business, habit-forming, style-lacking, and very, very dangerous for your health. A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least
he
could tell the people he was their fault.

“—we would not normally have started individual folders at this time,” Drumknott was agonizing. “You see, I’d merely have referenced them on the daily—”

“Your concern is, as ever, exemplary,” said Vetinari. “I see, however, that you
have
prepared some folders.”

“Yes, my lord. I have bulked some of them out with copies of Clerk Harold’s analysis of pig production in Genua, sir.” Drumknott looked unhappy as he handed over the cardboard folders. Deliberate misfiling ran fingernails down the blackboard of his very soul.

“Very good,” said Vetinari. He placed them on his desk, pulled another folder out of a desk drawer to place on top of them, and moved some other papers to cover the small pile. “Now please show our visitors in.”

“Mr. Slant is with them, my lord,” said the clerk.

Vetinari smiled his mirthless smile. “How surprising.”

“And Mr. Reacher Gilt,” Drumknott added, watching his master carefully.

“Of course,” said Vetinari.

When the directors filed in a few minutes later, the conference table at one end of the room was clear and gleaming, except for a paper pad and the pile of files. Vetinari himself was standing at the window again.

“Ah, gentlemen. So kind of you to come for this little chat,” he said. “I was enjoying the view.”

He turned around sharply and confronted a row of puzzled faces, except for two. One was gray and belonged to Mr. Slant, who was the most renowned, expensive, and certainly the oldest lawyer in the city. He had been a zombie for many years, although apparently the change in habits between life and death had not been marked. The other face belonged to a man with one eye and one black eyepatch, and it smiled like a tiger.

“It’s particularly refreshing to see the Grand Trunk back in operation,” said Vetinari, ignoring that face. “I believe it was shut down all day yesterday. I was only thinking to myself that it was such a shame, the Grand Trunk being so vital to us all, and so regrettable that there’s only one of it. Sadly, I understand the backers of the New Trunk are now in disarray, which, of course, leaves the Grand Trunk operating in solitary splendor and your company, gentlemen, unchallenged. Oh, what am I thinking of?
Do
be seated, gentlemen.”

He gave Mr. Slant another friendly smile as he took his seat.

“I don’t believe I know
all
these gentlemen,” he said.

Mr. Slant sighed. “My lord, let me present Mr. Greenyham of Ankh-Sto Associates, who is the Grand Trunk Company’s treasurer, Mr. Nutmeg of Sto Plains Holdings, Mr. Horsefry of the Ankh-Morpork Mercantile Credit Bank, Mr. Stowley of Ankh Futures (Financial Advisers), and Mr. Gilt—”

“—all by himself,” said the one-eyed man calmly.

“Ah, Mr. Reacher Gilt,” said Vetinari, looking directly at him. “I’m so…
pleased
to meet you at last.”

“You don’t come to my parties, my lord,” said Gilt.

“Do excuse me. Affairs of state take up so much of my time,” said Lord Vetinari brusquely.

“We should all make time to unwind, my lord. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, as they say.”

Several of the assembly paused in their breathing when they heard this, but Vetinari merely looked blank.

“Interesting,” he said.

He riffled through the files and opened one of them. “Now, my staff have prepared some notes for me, from information publicly available down at the Barbican,” he said to the lawyer. “Directorships, for example. Of course, the mysterious world of finance is a closed, aha, ledger to me, but it seems to me that some of your clients work, as it were, for each other?”

“Yes, my lord?” said Slant.

“Is that normal?”

“Oh, it is quite common for people with particular expertise to be on the board of several companies, my lord.”

“Even if the companies are rivals?” said Vetinari.

There were smiles from around the table. Most of the financiers settled a little more easily in their chairs. The man was clearly a fool about business matters. What did he know about compound interest, eh? He’d been classically educated. And then they remembered that his education had been at the Assassins’ Guild School, and stopped smiling. But Mr. Gilt stared intently at Vetinari.

“There are ways—extremely honorable ways—of assuring confidentiality and avoiding conflicts of interest, my lord,” said Mr. Slant.

“Ah, this would be…what is it now…the glass ceiling?” said Lord Vetinari brightly.

“No, my lord. That is something else. I believe you may be thinking about the ‘Agatean Wall,’” said Mr. Slant smoothly. “This carefully and successfully ensures that there will be no breach of confidentiality should, for example, one part of an organization come into possession of privileged information which could conceivably be used by another department for unethical gain.”

“This is fascinating! How does it work, exactly?” said Vetinari.

“People agree not to do it,” said Mr. Slant.

“I’m sorry? I thought you said there is a wall—” said Vetinari.

“That’s just a name, my lord. For agreeing not to do it.”

“Ah? And they do? How wonderful. Even though in this case the invisible wall must pass through the middle of their brains?”

“We have a Code of Conduct, you know!” said a voice.

All eyes except those belonging to Mr. Slant turned to the speaker, who had been fidgeting in his chair. Mr. Slant was a longtime student of the Patrician and knew that when he appeared to be a confused civil servant asking innocent questions, it was time to watch him closely.

“I’m very glad to hear it, Mr.…?” Vetinari began.

“Crispin Horsefry, my lord, and I don’t like the tone of your questioning!”

For a moment it seemed that even the chairs themselves edged away from him. Mr. Horsefry was a youngish man, not simply running to fat but vaulting, leaping, and diving toward obesity. He had acquired, at thirty, an impressive selection of chins, and now they wobbled with angry pride.
*

“I do have a number of other tones,” said Lord Vetinari calmly.

Mr. Horsefry looked around at his colleagues, who were somehow, suddenly, on the distant horizon.

“I just wanted to make it clear that we’ve done nothing wrong,” he muttered. “That’s all. There is a Code of Conduct.”

“I’m sure I’ve not suggested that you have done anything wrong,” said Lord Vetinari. “However, I shall make a note of what you tell me.”

He pulled a sheet of paper toward him and wrote, in a careful copperplate hand: “Code of Conduct.” The shifting of the paper exposed a file marked “Embezzlement.” The title was, of course, upside down to the rest of the group and, since presumably it was not intended to be read by them, they read it. Horsefry even twisted his head for a better view.

“However,” Vetinari went on, “since the question of wrongdoing had been raised by Mr. Horsefry,” and he gave the young man a brief smile, “I am sure you are aware of talk suggesting a conspiracy among yourselves to keep rates high and competition nonexistent.” The sentence came out fast and smooth, like a snake’s tongue, and the swift flick on the end of it was: “And, indeed, some rumors about the death of young Mr. Dearheart last month.”

A stir among the semicircle of men said that the shoe had been dropped. It wasn’t a welcome shoe, but it was a shoe they had been expecting and it had just gone
thud
.

“An actionable falsehood,” said Slant.

“On the contrary, Mr. Slant,” said Vetinari, “merely mentioning to you the existence of a rumor is not actionable, as I am sure you are aware.”

“There is no proof that we had anything to do with the boy’s murder,” snapped Horsefry.

“Ah, so you too have heard people saying he was murdered?” said Vetinari, his eyes on Reacher Gilt’s face. “These rumors just
fly
around, don’t they…”

“My lord, people talk,” said Slant wearily. “But the facts are that Mr. Dearheart was alone in the tower. No one else went up or down. His safety line was apparently not clipped to anything. It was an accident, such as happens often. Yes, we know people say his fingers were broken, but with a fall of that distance, hitting the tower on the way, can that really be surprising? Alas, the Grand Trunk Company is not popular at the moment and so these scurrilous and baseless accusations are made. As Mr. Horsefry pointed out, there is no evidence whatsoever that what happened was anything more than a tragic accident. And, if I may speak frankly, what
exactly
is the purpose of calling us here? My clients are busy men.”

Vetinari leaned back, closed his eyes, and placed his fingers together.

“Let us consider a situation in which some keen and highly inventive men devise a remarkable system of communication,” he said. “What they have is a kind of passionate ingenuity, in large amounts. What they don’t have is money. They are not
used
to money. So they meet some…people, who introduce them to other people, friendly people, who for, oh, a forty-percent stake in the enterprise
give
them the much-needed cash and, very important, much fatherly advice and an introduction to a really
good
firm of accountants. And so they proceed, and soon money is coming in and money is going out but somehow, they learn, they’re not quite as financially stable as they think, and really do need
more
money. Well, this is all fine, because it’s clear to all that the basic enterprise is going to be a money tree one day, and does it matter if they sign over another fifteen percent? It’s just money. It’s not
important
in the way that shutter mechanisms are, is it? And then they find out that
yes
, it is. It is
everything
. Suddenly the world’s turned upside down, suddenly those nice people aren’t so friendly anymore, suddenly it turns out that those bits of paper they signed in a hurry—were
advised
to sign by people who smiled all the time—mean that they don’t actually own anything at all, not patents, not property, nothing. Not even the contents of their own heads, indeed. Even any ideas they have now don’t belong to them, apparently. And somehow they’re
still
in trouble about money. Well, some run and some hide and some try to fight, which is foolish in the extreme, because it turns out that everything is legal, it really is. Some accept low-level jobs in the enterprise, because one has to live and in any case the enterprise even owns their dreams at night. And yet actual illegality, it would appear, has not taken place. Business is business.”