Jingo (17 page)

“Are you the man Vimes?” the enfezzed one demanded.

“Well, I’m Commander Vimes—”

“We demand the release of the Goriff family! And we won’t take any excuses!”

Vimes blinked. “Release?”

“You have locked them up! And confiscated their shop!”

Vimes stared at the man, and then he looked across the room at Sergeant Detritus.

“Where did you put the family, sergeant?”

Detritus saluted. “In der cells, sir.”

“Aha!” said the man in the fez. “You admit it!”

“Excuse me, who
are
you?” said Vimes, blinking with tiredness.

“I don’t have to tell you and you can’t beat it out of me!” said the man, sticking out his chest.

“Oh, thank you for telling me,” said Vimes. “I do hate wasted effort.”

“Oh, hello, Mr. Wazir,” said Carrot, appearing behind Vimes. “Did you get the note about that book?”

There was one of those silences that happen when everyone has to reprogram their faces.

Then Vimes said, “What?”

“Mr. Wazir sells books in Widdy Street,” said Carrot. “Only I asked him for some books on Klatch, you see, and one of the ones he gave me was
The Perfumed Allotment, or, The Garden of Delights
. And I didn’t mind because the Klatchians invented gardens, sir, so I thought it might be a very useful cultural insight. Get inside the Klatchian mind, as it were. Only it, er, it…er…well, it wasn’t about gardening…er…” He started to blush.

“Yes, yes, all right, bring it back if you like,” said Mr. Wazir, looking a little derailed.

“I just thought you ought to know in case you hadn’t…in case you sold…well…it could shock the impressionable, you know, a book like that…”

“Yes, fine—”

“Corporal Angua was so shocked she couldn’t stop laughing,” Carrot went on.

“I will have your money sent round directly,” said Wazir. His expression turned vengeful again. He glared at Vimes.

“Books are unimportant at this time! We demand you release my countrymen now!”

“Detritus, why the hell did you put them in the cells?” said Vimes wearily.

“What else we got, sir? Dey’re not locked in and dey got clean blankets.”

“There’s your explanation,” said Vimes. “They’re our guests.”

“In the cells!” said Wazir, relishing the word.

“They’re free to go whenever they like,” said Vimes.

“I’m sure they are
now
,” said Wazir, contriving to indicate that only his arrival had prevented officially sanctioned bloodshed. “You can be sure the Patrician will hear about this!”

“He hears about everything else,” said Vimes. “But if they leave here, who is going to protect them?”

“We are! Their fellow countrymen!”

“How?”

Wazir almost stood to attention. “By force of arms, if necessary.”

“Oh,
good
,” said Vimes. “Then there’ll be
two
mobs—”

“Bingeley-bingeley beep!”

“
Damn
!” Vimes slapped at his pocket. “I don’t
want
to know I haven’t got any appointments!”

“You have one at eleven pee em. The Rats Chamber, at the palace,” said the Dis-organizer.

“Don’t be stupid!”

“Please yourself.”

“And shut up.”

“I was just trying to help.”

“Shut up.” Vimes turned back to the Klatchian bookseller.

“Mr. Wazir, if Goriff wants to leave with you, we won’t stop him—”

“Aha! You may well try!”

Vimes told himself that there was no reason at all why a Klatchian couldn’t be a pompous little troublemaker. But he felt uneasy about it, like a man edging along the side of a very deep crevasse.

“Sergeant Colon?”

“Yessir!”

“See to this, will you?”

“Yessir!”

“Diplomatically.”

“Right, sir!” Colon tapped the side of his nose. “Is this politics, sir?”

“Just…just go and fetch the Goriff family and they can…” Vimes waved a hand vaguely. “They can do whatever they like.”

He turned and walked up the stairs.

“Someone has to protect my people’s rights!” shouted Wazir.

They heard Vimes stop halfway up the stairs. The board creaked under his weight for a second. Then he continued upward, and several of the watchmen started breathing again.

Vimes shut his office door behind him.

Politics
! He sat down and scrabbled through the papers. It was much easier to think about crime. Give him good honest crime any time.

He tried to shut out the outside world.

Someone had beheaded Snowy Slopes. That was a
fact
. You couldn’t put it down to a shaving accident, or unreasonably strong shampoo.

And Snowy had attempted to shoot the Prince.

And so had Ossie, but Ossie only
thought
he was an assassin. Everyone else thought he was a weird little twerp who was as impressionable as wet clay.

A lovely idea, though. You used a
real
murderer, a nice quiet professional, and then you had—Vimes smiled grimly—someone else to take the fall. And if he hadn’t taken a less metaphorical fall the poor twisted little sod would have
believed
he was the murderer.

And the Watch was supposed to believe it was a Klatchian plot.

Sand in their sandals…The
nerve
of it! Did they think he was stupid? He wished Fred had carefully swept up the sand, because he was damn well going to find out who’d put it there and they were going to
eat
it. Someone wanted Vimes to chase Klatchians.

The man on the burning roof. Did he fit in? Did he
have
to fit in? What could Vimes recall? A man in a robe, his face hidden. And a voice of a man not just used to giving commands—
Vimes
was used to giving commands—but also used to having commands obeyed, whereas a member of the Watch treated orders as suggestions.

But some things didn’t have to fit. That was where “clues” let you down. And the damn notebook. That was the oddest thing yet. So
someone
had carefully ripped out several pages after Snowy had written whatever he’d written. Someone bright enough to know the trick of looking at the pages underneath for faint impressions.

So why not pinch the whole pad?

It was all too complicated. But somewhere was the one thing that’d make it simple, that would turn it all into sense—

He flung down his pencil and wrenched open the door to the stairs.

“What the hell’s all this noise?” he yelled.

Sergeant Colon was halfway up the stairs.

“It was Mr. Goriff and Mr. Wazir having a bit of what you might call an argy-bargy, sir. Someone set fire to someone else’s country two hundred years ago, Carrot says.”

“What, just
now
?”

“’s all Klatchian to me, sir. Anyway, Wazir’s gone off with his nose in a sling.”

“Wazir comes from Smale, you see,” said Carrot. “And Mr. Gorriff comes from Elharib, and the two countries only stopped fighting ten years ago. Religious differences.”

“Run out of weapons?” said Vimes.

“Ran out of rocks, sir. They ran out of weapons last century.”

Vimes shook his head. “That always chews me up,” he said. “People killing one another just because their gods have squabbled—”

“Oh, they’ve got the same god, sir. Apparently it’s over a word in their holy book, sir. The Elharibians say it translates as ‘god’ and the Smalies say it’s ‘man.’”

“How can you mix them up?”

“Well, there’s only one tiny dot difference in the script, you see. And some people reckon it’s only a bit of fly dirt in any case.”

“Centuries of war because a fly crapped in the wrong place?”

“It could have been worse,” said Carrot. “If it had been slightly to the left the word would have been ‘liquorice.’”

Vimes shook his head. Carrot was good at picking up this sort of thing. And I know how to ask for vindaloo, he thought. And it turns out that’s just a Klatchian word meaning “mouth-scalding gristle for macho foreign idiots.”

“I wish we understood more about Klatch,” he said.

Sergeant Colon tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially.

“Know the enemy, eh, sir?” he said.

“Oh, I know the
enemy
,” said Vimes. “It’s Klatchians I want to find out about.”

“Commander Vimes?”

The watchmen looked round. Vimes narrowed his eyes.

“You’re one of Rust’s men, aren’t you?”

The young man saluted.

“Lieutenant Hornett, sir.” He hesitated. “Er…his lordship has sent me to ask you if you and your senior officers would be so good as to come to the palace at your convenience, sir.”

“Really? Those were his words?”

The lieutenant decided that honesty was the only policy.

“In fact he said, ‘Get Vimes and his mob up here right now,’ sir.”

“Oh, did he?” said Vimes.

“Bingeley-bingeley beep!” said a small triumphant voice from his pocket. “The time is eleven pee em precisely!”

The door opened before Nobby knocked, and a small stout woman glared out at him.

“Yes, I am!” she snapped.

Nobby stood with his hand still raised. “Er…are you Mrs. Cake?” he said.

“Yes, but I don’t hold with doing it except for money.”

Nobby’s hand did not move.

“Er…you can tell the future, right?” said Nobby.

They stared at one another. Then Mrs. Cake thumped her own ear a couple of times, and blinked.

“Drat! Left my precognition on again.” Her gaze unfocused for a moment as she replayed the recent conversation in the privacy of her head.

“I think we’re sorted out,” she said. She looked at Nobby and sniffed. “You’d better come in. Mind the carpet, it’s just been washed. And I can only give you ten minutes ’cos I’ve got cabbage boilin.”

She led Corporal Nobbs into her tiny front room. A lot of it was occupied by a round table covered with a green cloth. There was a crystal ball on the table, not very well covered by a pink knitted lady in a crinoline dress.

Mrs. Cake motioned Nobby to sit down. He obediently did so. The smell of cabbage drifted through the room.

“A bloke in the pub told me about you,” Nobby mumbled. “Said you do mediuming.”

“Would you care to tell me your problem?” said Mrs. Cake. She looked at Nobby again and, in a state of certainty that had nothing to do with precognition and everything to do with observation, added: “That is, which of your problems do you want to know about?”

Nobby coughed. “Er…it’s a bit…you know…intimate. Affairs of the heart, sort of thing.”

“Are
women
involved?” said Mrs. Cake cautiously.

“Er…I hope so. What else is there?”

Mrs. Cake visibly relaxed.

“I just want to know if I’m going to meet any,” Nobby went on.

“I see.” Mrs. Cake gave a kind of facial shrug. It wasn’t up to her to tell people how to waste their money. “Well, there’s the tenpenny future. That’s what you see. And there’s the ten-dollar future. That’s what you get.”

“Ten dollars? That’s more’n a week’s pay! I’d better take the tenpenny one.”

“A very wise choice,” said Mrs. Cake. “Give me your paw.”

“Hand,” said Nobby.

“That’s what I said.”

Mrs. Cake examined Nobby’s outstretched palm while taking care not to touch it.

“Are you going to moan and roll your eyes and stuff?” said Nobby, a man out to get his tenpenn’orth.

“I don’t have to take cheek,” said Mrs. Cake, without looking up. “That sort of—”

She peered closer, and then gave Nobby a sharp look.

“Have you been playing with this hand?”

“Pardon?”

Mrs. Cake whipped the crinoline lady off the crystal and glared into the depths. After a while she shook her head.

“I don’t know, I’m sure…oh, well.” She cleared her throat and spoke in a more sibylic voice. “Mr. Nobbs, I see you surrounded by dusky ladies in a hot place. Looks a bit foreign to me. They’re laughing and chatting with you…in fact, one of them’s just handed you a drink…”

“None of ’em are shouting or anything?” said Nobby, mystified.

“Doesn’t look like it,” said Mrs. Cake, equally fascinated. “They seem quite happy.”

“You can’t see any…magnets?”

“What’re they?”

“Dunno,” Nobby admitted. “I ’spect you’d know ’em if you saw ’em.”

Mrs. Cake, despite a certain rigidity of character, couldn’t help but be aware of a drift in Nobby’s speculation.

“Some of the ladies look…nubile,” she hinted.

“Ah, right,” said Nobby, his expression not changing in any way.

“If you understand what I mean…”

“Right. Yes. Nubile. Right.”

Mrs. Cake gave up. Nobby counted out ten pennies.

“And that’ll be soon, will it?” said Nobby.

“Oh yes. I can’t see very far for tenpence.”

“Happy young ladies…” mused Nobby. “Nubile, too. Definitely something to think about.”

After he’d gone, Mrs. Cake went back to her crystal and sneaked a whole ten dollars’ worth of precognition for her own curiosity and satisfaction, and laughed about it all afternoon.

Vimes was only half surprised when the doors to the Rats Chamber opened and there, sitting at the head of the table, was Lord Rust. The Patrician wasn’t there.

He was
half
surprised. That is, at a certain shallow level he thought, that’s odd, I thought you couldn’t budge the man with a siege weapon. But at a dark level, where the daylight seldom penetrated, he thought:
of course
. At a time like this men like Rust rise to the top. It’s like stirring a swamp with a stick. Really big bubbles are suddenly on the surface and there’s a bad smell about everything. Nevertheless, he saluted and said:

“Lord Vetinari on his holidays, then?”

“Lord Vetinari stepped down this evening, Vimes,” said Lord Rust. “Pro tem, of course. Just for the duration of the emergency.”

“Really?” said Vimes.

“Yes. And I have to say that he anticipated a certain…cynicism on your part, commander, and therefore asked me to give you this letter. You will see that it is sealed with his seal.”

Vimes looked at the envelope. There was certainly the official seal in the wax, but—