Night Watch (Discworld 29)

'No thanks. I'll just haul him out the back way and drop him in an alley.'

'Is that all?'

'No. Then . . . I'll sign my name on his damn plaster cast. So he sees it when he wakes up. In bloody big letters so it won't rub off.'

'Now that's what I call a sensitive area,' said Lawn. 'You're an interesting man, sergeant. You make enemies like a craftsman.'

'I've never been interested in needlework,' said Vimes, hoisting the man on his shoulder. 'But what sort of things would a needlewoman have in her workbasket, do you think?'

'Oh, I don't know. Needles, thread, scissors, wool . . . that kind of thing,' said Mossy Lawn. 'Not very heavy things, then?' said Vimes. 'Not really. Why d'you ask?'

'Oh, no reason,' said Vimes, making a small mental note. 'Just a thought. I'll go and drop off our friend here while I've still got some mist to lurk in.'

'Fine. I'll have breakfast on when you get back. It's liver. Calves'.' The beast remembers. This time, Vimes slept soundly. He had always found it easier to sleep during the day. Twenty-five years on nights had ground their nocturnal groove in his brain. Darkness was easier, somehow. He knew how to stand still, a talent that few possess, and how to merge into the shadows. How to guard, in fact, and see without being seen.

He remembered Findthee Swing. A lot of it was history. The revolt would have happened with Swing or without him but he was, as it were, the tip of the boil. He'd been trained at the Assassins' School and should never have been allowed to join the Watch. He had too much brain to be a copper. At least, too much of the wrong kind of brain. But Swing had impressed Winder with his theories, had been let in as a sergeant and then was promoted to captain immediately. Vimes had never known why; it was probably because the officers were offended at seeing such a fine genn'lman pounding the streets with the rest of the oiks. Besides, he had a weak chest, or something. Vimes wasn't against intellect. Anyone with enough savvy to let go of a doorknob could be a street monster in the old days, but to make it above sergeant you needed a grab-bag of guile, cunning and street wisdom that could pass for 'intelligence' in a poor light. Swing, though, started in the wrong place. He didn't look around, and watch and learn, and then say, 'This is how people are, how do we deal with it?' No, he sat and thought: This is how the people ought to be, how do we change them?' And that was a good enough thought for a priest but not for a copper, because Swing's patient, pedantic way of operating had turned policing on its head. There had been that Weapons Law, for a start. Weapons were involved in so many crimes that, Swing reasoned, reducing the number of weapons had to reduce the crime rate. Vimes wondered if he'd sat up in bed in the middle of the night and hugged himself when he'd dreamed that one up. Confiscate all weapons, and crime would go down. It made sense. It would have worked, too, if only there had been enough coppers - say, three per citizen. Amazingly, quite a few weapons were handed in. The flaw, though, was one that had somehow managed to escape Swing, and it was this: criminals don't obey the law. It's more or less a requirement for the job. They had no particular interest in making the streets safer for anyone except themselves. And they couldn't believe what was happening. It was like Hogswatch every day. Some citizens took the not unreasonable view that something had gone a bit askew if only naughty people were carrying arms. And they got arrested in large numbers. The average copper, when he's been kicked in the nadgers once too often and has reason to believe that his bosses don't much care, has an understandable tendency to prefer to arrest those people who won't instantly try to stab him, especially if they act a bit snotty and wear more expensive clothes than he personally can afford. The rate of arrests shot right up, and Swing had been very pleased about that. Admittedly some of the arrests had been for possessing weaponry after dark, but quite a few had been for assaults on the Watch by irate citizens. That was Assault on a City Official, a very heinous and despicable crime and, as such, far more important than all these thefts that were going on everywhere.

It wasn't that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn't offer many opportunities not to break them. Swing didn't seem to have grasped the idea that the system was supposed to take criminals and, in some rough and ready fashion, force them into becoming honest men. Instead, he'd taken honest men and turned them into criminals. And the Watch, by and large, into just another gang. And then, just when the whole wretched stew was thickening, he'd invented craniometries. Bad coppers had always had their ways of finding out if someone was guilty. Back in the old days - hah, now - these included thumbscrews, hammers, small pointed bits of wood and, of course, the common desk drawer, always a boon to the copper in a hurry. Swing didn't need any of this. He could tell if you were guilty by looking at your eyebrows. He measured people. He used calipers and a steel ruler. And he quietly wrote down the measurements, and did some sums, such as dividing the length of the nose by the circumference of the head and multiplying it by the width of the space between the eyes. And on such figures he could, infallibly, tell that you were devious, untrustworthy and congenially criminal. After you had spent the next twenty minutes in the company of his staff and their less sophisticated tools of inquiry he would, amazingly, be proved right. Everyone was guilty of something. Vimes knew that. Every copper knew it. That was how you maintained your authority -everyone, talking to a copper, was secretly afraid you could see their guilty secret written on their forehead. You couldn't, of course. But neither were you supposed to drag someone off the street and smash their fingers with a hammer until they told you what it was. Swing would probably have ended up face down in some alley somewhere if it wasn't for the fact that Winder had found in him a useful tool. No one could sniff out conspiracies like Swing. And so he'd ended up running the Unmentionables, most of whom made Sergeant Knock look like Good Copper Of The Month. Vimes had always wondered how the man had kept control, but maybe it was because the thugs recognized, in some animal way, a mind which had arrived at thuggery by the long route and was capable of devising in the name of reason the kind of atrocities that unreason could only dream of. It wasn't easy, living in the past. You couldn't whack someone for what they were going to do, or what the world was going to find out later. You couldn't warn people, either. You didn't know what could change the future, but if he understood things right, history tended to spring back into shape. All you could change was the bits around the edges, the fine details. There was nothing he could do about the big stuff. The lilac was going to bloom. The revolution was going to happen. Well ... a kind of revolution. That wasn't really the word for what it was. There was the People's Republic of Treacle Mine Road (Truth! Justice! Freedom! Reasonably priced Love! And a Hard-Boiled Egg!) that would live for all of a few hours, a strange candle that burned too briefly and died like a firework. And there was the scouring of the house of pain, and the-

Anyway . . . you did the job that was in front of you, like unimaginative coppers always did. He got up around one in the afternoon. Lawn was closeted in his surgery, doing something that involved some serious whimpering on the part of something else. Vimes knocked on the door. After a moment it was opened a fraction. Dr Lawn was wearing a face mask and holding a very long pair of tweezers in his hand. 'Yes?'

'I'm going out,' said Vimes. 'Trouble?'

'Not too bad. Slidey Harris was unlucky at cards last night, that's all. Played an ace.'

'That's an unlucky card?'

'It is if Big Tony knows he didn't deal it to you. But I'll soon have it removed. If you're going to injure anyone tonight, can you do it before I go to bed? Thank you.' Lawn shut the door. Vimes nodded at the woodwork, and went out to stretch his legs and get some lunch. It was waiting for him, on a tray, around the neck of a man. Quite a young man, now, but there was something about the expression, as of a rat who was expecting cheese right around the next corner, and had been expecting cheese around the last corner too, and the corner before that, and, although the world had turned out so far to be full of corners yet completely innocent of any cheese at all, was nevertheless quite certain that, just around the corner, cheese awaited. Vimes stared. But why should he be surprised? As long ago as he could remember, there was always someone selling highly suspicious chemically reclaimed pork products in this town. The seller was very familiar. Just . . . younger. His expression lit up at the sight of an unfamiliar face. The seller liked to meet people who hadn't yet bought one of his pies. 'Ah, sergeant . . . Hey, what's the little crown mean?'

'Sergeant-at-arms,' said Vimes. 'That's like “sergeant with all the trimmings”.'

'Well, sergeant, could I interest you in a very special sausage inna bun? Guaranteed no rat? One hundred per cent organic? All pork shaved before mixing?' Why not? thought Vimes. And his stomach, liver, kidneys and lengths of intestine all supplied reasons, but he fumbled in his pocket for some change anyway. 'How much, Mr . . . er,' Vimes remembered in time, and made a show of looking at the name on the front of the tray, Dibbler?'

'Four pence, sergeant.'

'And that's cutting your own throat, eh?' said Vimes jovially. 'Pardon?' said Dibbler, looking puzzled. 'I said, a price like that's cutting your own throat, eh?'

'Cutting my own . . . ?'

'Throat,' said Vimes desperately. 'Oh.' Dibbler thought about this. 'Right. Yeah. It is. You never said a truer word. So you'll have one, then?'

'I notice it says on your tray “Dibbler Enterprises, Est”,' said Vimes. 'Shouldn't it say when you were established?'

'Should it?' Dibbler looked down at his tray. 'How long have you been going?' said Vimes, selecting a pie. 'Let's see . . . what year is this?'

'Er . . . Dancing Dog, I think.'

'Since Tuesday, then,' said Dibbler. His face brightened. 'But this is only the start, mister. This is just to get a stake together. In a year or two I'm going to be a big man in this town.'

'I believe you,' said Vimes. 'I really do.' Dibbler looked down at his tray again as Vimes strolled off. 'Cutting my own throat, cutting my own throat,' he mumbled to himself, and seemed to like the sound of it. But then he focused more clearly on the tray and his face went pale. 'Sergeant!' he shouted. 'Don't eat the pie!' Vimes, a few yards away, stopped with the pie halfway to his mouth. 'What's wrong with it?' he said. 'Silly me. I mean, what's uniquely wrong with it?'

'Nothing! I mean . . . these are better!' Vimes risked another look at the tray. They all looked the same to him. Dibbler's pies quite often looked appetizing. Therein lay their one and only charm. 'I can't see any difference,' he said. 'Yeah, yeah, there is,' said Dibbler, sweat beading on his forehead. 'See? The one you got has that little pattern of pastry pigs on it? And all the others have pastry sausages? I'd hate you to think that, you know, I thought you were a pig or anything, so if you'll hand it over I'll happily give you, er, another one, that one's not the right one, er, not that it's a wrong one, but, er, with the pig and everything

Vimes looked into the man's eyes. Dibbler had yet to learn that friendly blankness that thirty years of selling truly organic pies would call into being. While the man stared in horror, he took a large bite out of the pie. It was everything that he had expected and nothing that he could identify. 'Yum,' he said and, with some concentration, eyes fixed on the luckless pieman, finished it all. 'I think it's quite possible no one else makes pies like you do, Mr Dibbler,' he said, licking his fingers in case he might want to shake hands with someone later on. 'You ate it all?' said Dibbler. 'Was that wrong?' said Vimes. And now relief rose off the man like smoke off a greenwood fire. 'What? No! That's fine! Jolly good! Want another one to help it down? Half- price?'

'No, no, one is more than enough,' said Vimes, backing away. 'You finished every bit?' said Dibbler. 'That was right, wasn't it?' said Vimes. 'Oh, yeah. Sure. Obviously!'

'Got to be going,' said Vimes, moving on down the lane. 'I'll look forward to seeing you again when I've got less appetite.' He waited until he was well out of sight before taking a few random turns in the network of alleys. Then he stepped into the shadow of a deep doorway and felt in his mouth for the piece of pie that had seemed curiously unchewable even by pie standards. Usually, if you found something more than usually hard or crunchy in one of Dibbler's Famous Pork Pies, the trick was either to swallow it and hope for the best or spit it out with your eyes closed. But Vimes felt around between gum and cheek and fished out a folded piece of paper, stained with unknowable juices. He unfolded it. In smudged pencil, but still decipherable, it read: Morphic Street, 9 o'clock tonight. Password: swordfish. Swordfish? Every password was swordfish! Whenever anyone tried to think of a word that no one would ever guess, they always chose swordfish. It was just one of those strange quirks of the human mind. That explained the guilt, anyway. A plot. Another damn plot, in a city full of plots. Did he need to know about plots? Anyway, he knew about this one. Morphic Street. The famous Morphic Street Conspiracy. Ha. He pushed the greasy scrap into a pocket and then hesitated.