Making Money (20 page)

“Mr. Dibbler has opened an account with five dollars,” said Bent.

“And I have brought along a sausage for your little doggie,” said Dibbler.

“Why do you need a loan, Mr. Dibbler?” said Moist, watching Mr. Fusspot sniff the sausage carefully.

“I want to expand the business, sir,” said Dibbler.

“You’ve been trading for more than thirty years,” said Moist.

“Yessir, thankyousir.”

“And your products are, I think I can say, unique…”

“Yessir, thankyousir.”

“So I imagine that now you need our help to open a chain of franchised cafés trading on the Dibbler name, offering a variety of meals and drinks bearing your distinctive likeness?” said Moist.

Mr. Fusspot jumped down from the desk with the sausage held gently in his mouth, dropped it in the corner of the office, and tried industriously to kick the carpet over it.

Dibbler stared at Moist, and then said, “Yessir, if you insist, but actually I was thinking about a barrow.”

“A barrow?” said Bent.

“Yessir. I know where I can get a nice little secondhand one with an oven and everything. Painted up nice, too. Wally the Gimp is quitting the jacket-potato business ’cos of stress and he’ll let me have it for fifteen dollars, cash down. A not-to-be-missed opportunity, sir.” He looked nervously at Mr. Bent and added, “I could pay you back at a dollar a week.”

“For twenty weeks,” said Bent.

“Seventeen,” said Moist.

“But the dog just tried to—” Bent began.

Moist waved away the objection. “So we have a deal, Mr. Dibbler?”

“Yessir, thankyousir,” said Dibbler. “That’s a good idea you’ve got there, about the chain and everything, though, and I thank you. But I find that in this business it pays to be mobile.”

Mr. Bent counted out fifteen dollars with bad grace and began to speak as soon as the door closed behind the trader.

“Even the dog wouldn’t—”

“But humans will, Mr. Bent,” said Moist. “And therein lies genius. I think he makes most of his money on the mustard, but there’s a man who can sell sizzle, Mr. Bent. And that is a seller’s market.”

The last prospective borrower was heralded first by a couple of muscular men who took up positions on either side of the door, and then by a smell that overruled even the persistent odor of a Dibbler sausage. It wasn’t a particularly bad smell; it put you in mind of old potatoes or abandoned tunnels—it was what you got when you started out with severely foul stink and then scrubbed hard but ineffectually, and it surrounded King like an emperor’s cloak.

Moist was astonished. King of the Golden River, they called him, because the foundation of his fortune was the daily collection of the urine his men made from every inn and pub in the city. The customers paid him to take it away, and the alchemists, tanners, and dyers paid him to bring it to them.

But that was only the start.

Harry King’s men took away everything. You saw their carts everywhere, especially around dawn. Every rag-and-bone man and rubbish picker, every dunnikin diver, every gongfermor, every scrap-metal merchant…you worked for Harry King, they said, because a broken leg was bad for business, and Harry King was all about business. They said that if a dog in the street looked even a bit strained, a King’s man would be there in a flash to hold a shovel under its arse, because prime dog muck fetched 9p a bucket from the high-class tanners. They paid Harry. The city paid Harry. Everyone paid Harry. And what he couldn’t sell back to them in more fragrant form went to feed his giant compost heaps downriver, which on frosty days sent up such great plumes of steam that kids called them the cloud factories.

Apart from his hired help, Harry was accompanied by a skinny young man clutching a briefcase.

“Nice place you got here,” said Harry, sitting down in the chair opposite Moist. “Very sound. The wife’s been on at me to get curtains like that. I’m Harry King, Mr. Lipwig. I’ve just put fifty thousand dollars in your bank.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. King. We shall do our best to look after it.”

“You do that. And now I’d like to borrow one hundred thousand, thank you,” said Harry, pulling out a fat cigar.

“Have you got any security, Mr. King?” said Bent.

Harry King didn’t even look at him. He lit the cigar, puffed it into life, and waved it in the general direction of Bent.

“Who’s this, Mr. Lipwig?”

“Mr. Bent is our chief cashier,” said Moist, not daring to look at Bent’s face.

“A clerk, then,” said Harry King dismissively, “an’ that was a clerk’s question.”

He leaned forward. “My name is Harry King. That’s your security, right there, an’ it should be good for a hundred grand in these parts. Harry King. Everyone knows me. I pay what’s owing an’ I take what’s owed, my word, don’t I just. My handshake is my fortune. Harry King.”

He slammed his huge hands down on the table. Except for the pinkie of his left hand, which was missing, there was a heavy gold ring on each of them, and each ring was incised with a letter. If you saw them coming at you, as for instance in an alley, because you’d been skimming something off the take, the last name you would see would be H*A*R*R*Y*K*I*N*G. It was a fact worth keeping in the forefront of your brain, in the interests of keeping the forefront of your brain.

Moist looked up into the man’s eyes.

“We shall need a lot more than that,” growled Bent, from somewhere above Moist.

Harry King didn’t bother to look up. He said, “I only talks to the organ grinder.”

“Mr. Bent, could you step outside for a few minutes,” said Moist brightly, “and perhaps Mr. King’s…associates will do the same?”

Harry King nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Mr. Lipwig, I really—”

“Please, Mr. Bent.”

The chief cashier snorted, but followed the thugs out of the office. The young man with the briefcase made as if to leave as well, but Harry waved him back into his seat.

“You want to watch that Bent,” he said to Moist. “There’s something funny about him.”

“Odd, maybe, but he wouldn’t like to be called funny. So, why does Harry King need money, Mr. King? Everyone knows you’re rich. Has the bottom dropped out of the dog-muck business? Or vice versa?”

“I’m cons-sol-id-ating,” said King, grinning. “This Undertaking business…there’s going to be a few opportunities for a man in the right place. There’s land to buy, palms to grease…you know how it is. But them other banks, they won’t lend to King of the Golden River, for all it’s my lads what keeps their cesspits fragrant as a violet. Them stuck-up ponces’d be up to their ankles in their own piss if it weren’t for me, but they holds their noses when I walks by, oh yeah.” He stopped, as if a thought had occurred to him, and went on. “Well most people do, o’course, it’s not like a man can take a bath every five bloody minutes, but that bunch of bankers still gives me the cold shoulder even when the wife has scrubbed me raw. How dare they! I’m a better risk than most of their smarmy customers, you can bet on that. I employs a thousand people in this city, mister, one way or another. That’s a thousand families lookin’ to me for their dinner. I might be about muck, but I don’t muck about.”

He’s not a crook, Moist reminded himself. He pulled himself out of the gutter and beat his way to the top in a world where a length of lead pipe was the standard negotiating tool. That world wouldn’t trust paper. In that world, reputation was all.

“A hundred thousand is a lot of money,” he said aloud.

“You’ll give it to me, though,” said King, grinning. “I knows you will, ’cos you’re a chancer, same as me. I can smell it on you. I smell a lad who’s done a thing or two in his time, eh?”

“We all have to eat, Mr. King.”

“’Course we do. ’Course we do. An’ now we can sit back like a coupla judges an’ be pillows of the community, eh? So we’ll shake hands on it like the gentlemen we ain’t. This here,” he went on, laying a huge hand on the shoulder of the young man, “is Wallace, my clerk what does the sums for me. He’s new, on account of the last one I had I caught fiddlin’ me. That was a laugh, as you can imagine!” Wallace didn’t smile.

“I probably can,” said Moist. Harry King guarded his various premises with creatures that could only be called dogs because wolves aren’t that insane. And they were kept hungry. There were rumors, and Harry King was probably happy about that. It paid to advertise. You didn’t double-cross Harry King. But it worked both ways.

“Wallace can talk numbers with your monkey,” said Harry, standing up. “You’ll want to squeeze me, right enough. Business is business, and don’t I know it. What do you say?”

“Well I’d say we have an agreement, Mr. King,” Moist said. Then he spat on his hand, and held it out.

It was worth it to see the look on the man’s face.

“I didn’t know bankers did that,” said Harry.

“They don’t often shake hands with Harry King, then,” said Moist. That was probably overdoing it, but King winked, spat on his own hand, and grasped Moist’s. Moist had been prepared, but even so, the man’s grip ground his finger bones together.

“You’re more full of bullshit than a frightened herd on fresh pasture, Mr. Lipwig.”

“Thank you, sir. I take that as a compliment.”

“And just to keep your monkey happy, I’ll deposit the deeds of the paper mill, the big yard, and a few other properties,” said Harry. “Give ’em to the man, Wallace.”

“You should have said that in the first place, Mr. King,” said Moist, as some impressive scrolls were handed over.

“Yeah, but I didn’t. Wanted to make sure of you. When can I have my money?”

“Soon. When I’ve printed it.”

Harry King wrinkled his nose. “Oh, yeah, the paper stuff. Me, I like money that clinks, but Wallace here says paper’s the coming thing.” He winked. “And it’s not like I can complain, since ol’ Spools buys his paper off ’f me these days. Can’t turn me nose up at me own manufacture now, can I? Good day to you, sir!”

Mr. Bent strode back into the office twenty minutes later, his face like a tax demand, to find Moist staring vaguely at a sheet of paper on the worn green leather of the desk.

“Sir, I must protest—”

“Did you nail him down to a good rate?” said Moist.

“I pride myself that I did, but the way you—”

“We will do well out of Harry King, Mr. Bent, and he will do well out of us.”

“But you’re turning my bank into some sort of—”

“Not counting our friend Harry, we took in more than four thousand dollars today,” said Moist briskly. “Most of them were from what you’d call poor people, but there’s far more of them than rich people. We can set that money to work. And we won’t lend to scoundrels this time, don’t you worry about that. I’m a scoundrel, and I can spot them a mile off. Please pass on our compliments to the counter staff. And now, Mr. Bent, Mr. Fusspot and I are going to see a man about making money.”

T
EEMER AND
S
POOLS
had gone up in the world because of the big stamp contract. They’d always done the best printing work in any case, but now they had the men and muscle to bid for all the big contracts. And you could trust them. Moist always felt rather guilty when he went into the place; Teemer and Spools seemed to represent everything that he only pretended to be.

There were plenty of lights on when he went in. And Mr. Spools was in his office, writing in a ledger. He looked up and, when he saw Moist, smiled the smile you save for your very best customer.

“Mr. Lipwig! What can I do for you? Do take a seat! We don’t see so much of you these days!”

Moist sat and chatted, because Mr. Spools liked to chat.

Things were difficult. Things were always difficult. There were a lot more presses around these days. T&S were staying ahead of the game by staying on top of it. Regrettably, said Mr. Spools, with a straight face, their “friendly” rivals, the wizards at Unseen University Press, had come a cropper with their talking books—

“Talking books? That sounds a good idea,” said Moist.

“Quite possibly,” said Spools, with a sniff. “But these weren’t meant to talk, and certainly not to complain about the quality of their glue and the hamfistedness of the typesetter. And of course now the university can’t pulp them.”

“Why not?”

“Think of the screaming! No, I pride myself that we are still riding the wave. Er…was there something special you wanted?”

“What can you do with this?” said Moist, putting one of the new dollars on the table.

Spools picked it up and read it carefully. Then, in a faraway voice, he said: “I did hear something. Does Vetinari know you’re planning this?”

“Mr. Spools, I’ll bet he knows my shoe size and what I had for breakfast.”

The printer put down the bill as if it were ticking.

“I can see what you are doing. Such a small thing, and yet so dangerous.”

“Can you print them?” said Moist. “Oh, not that one. I made up a batch just to test the idea. I meant high-quality bank notes, if I can find an artist to draw them.”

“Oh, yes. We are a byword for quality. We’re building a new press to keep pace with demand. But what about security?”

“What, in here? No one has ever bothered you so far, have they?”

“No, they haven’t. But up until now we haven’t had lots of money lying around, if you see what I mean.”

Spools held the note up and let it go. It wafted gently from side to side until it landed on the desk.

“So light, too,” he went on. “A few thousand dollars would be no problem to carry.”

“But kind of hard to melt down. Look, build the new press in the Mint. There’s a lot of space. End of problem.”

“Well, yes, that would make sense. But a press is a big thing to move, you know. It’ll take days to shift it. Are you in a hurry? Of course you are.”

“Hire some golems. Four golems will lift anything. Print me dollars by the day after tomorrow and the first thousand you print are a bonus.”

“Why are you always in such a hurry, Mr. Lipwig?”

“Because people don’t like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.”