Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

“No unlicensed thieving, surely?” he said.[6]

“I shall look into it directly!” stuttered the head thief. “Depend upon it!”

The Patrician gave him a sweet smile. “I'm sure I can, ” he said. “Thank you for coming to see me. Don't hesitate to leave. ”

The thief shuffled out. It was always like this with the Patrician, he reflected bitterly. You came to him with a perfectly reasonable complaint. Next thing you knew, you were shuffling out backwards, bowing and scraping, relieved simply to be getting away. You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn't, he sent men to come and take it away.

When he'd gone Lord Vetinari rang the little bronze bell that summoned his secretary. The man's name, despite his handwriting, was Lupine Wonse. He appeared, pen poised.

You could say this about Lupine Wonse. He was neat. He always gave the impression of just being completed. Even his hair was so smoothed-down and oiled it looked as though it had been painted on.

“The Watch appears to be having some difficulty with the Thieves' Guild, ” said the Patrician. “Van Pew has been in here claiming that a member of the Watch arrested him. ”

“What for, sir?”

“Being a thief, apparently. ”

“A member of the Watch? ” said the secretary.

“I know. But just sort it out, will you?”

The Patrician smiled to himself.

It was always hard to fathom Lord Vetinari's idiosyncratic sense of humour, but a vision of the red-faced, irate head thief kept coming back to him.

One of the Patrician's greatest contributions to the reliable operation of Ankh-Morpork had been, very early in his administration, the legalising of the ancient Guild of Thieves. Crime was always with us, he reasoned, and therefore, if you were going to have crime, it at least should be organised crime.

And so the Guild had been encouraged to come out of the shadows and build a big Guildhouse, take their place at civic banquets, and set up their training college with day-release courses and City and Guilds certificates and everything. In exchange for the winding down of the Watch, they agreed, while trying to keep their faces straight, to keep crime levels to a level to be determined annually. That way, everyone could plan ahead, said Lord Vetinari, and part of the uncertainty had been removed from the chaos that is life.

And then, a little while later, the Patrician summoned the leading thieves again and said, oh, by the way, there was something else. What was it, now? Oh, yes...

I know who you are, he said. I know where you live. I know what kind of horse you ride. I know where your wife has her hair done. I know where your lovely children, how old are they now, my, doesn't time fly, I know where they play. So you won't forget about what we agreed, will you? And he smiled.

So did they, after a fashion.

And in fact it had turned out very satisfactorily from everyone's point of view. It took the head thieves a very little time to grow paunches and start having coats-of-arms made and meet in a proper building rather than smoky dens, which no-one had liked much. A complicated arrangement of receipts and vouchers saw to it that, while everyone was eligible for the attentions of the Guild, no-one had too much, and this was very acceptable-at least to those citizens who were rich enough to afford the quite reasonable premiums the Guild charged for an uninterrupted life. There was a strange foreign word for this: inn-sewer-ants. No-one knew exactly what it had originally meant, but Ankh-Morpork had made it its own.

The Watch hadn't liked it, but the plain fact was that the thieves were far better at controlling crime than the Watch had ever been. After all, the Watch had to work twice as hard to cut crime just a little, whereas all the Guild had to do was to work less.

And so the city prospered, while the Watch had dwindled away, like a useless appendix, into a handful of unemployables who no-one in their right mind could ever take seriously.

The last thing anyone wanted them to do was get it into their heads to fight crime. But seeing the head thief discommoded was always worth the trouble, the Patrician felt.

...

Captain Vimes knocked very hesitantly at the door, because each tap echoed around his skull.

“Enter. ”

Vimes removed his helmet, tucked it under his arm and pushed the door open. Its creak was a blunt saw across the front of his brain.

He always felt uneasy in the presence of Lupine Wonse. Come to that, he felt uneasy in the presence of Lord Vetinari-but that was different, that was down to breeding. And ordinary fear, of course. Whereas he'd known Wonse since their childhood in the Shades. The boy had shown promise even then. He was never a gang leader. Never a gang leader. Hadn't got the strength or stamina for that. And, after all, what was the point in being the gang leader? Behind every gang leader were a couple of lieutenants bucking for promotion. Being a gang leader is not a job with long-term prospects. But in every gang there is a pale youth who's allowed to stay because he's the one who comes up with all the clever ideas, usually to do with old women and unlocked shops; this was Wonse's natural place in the order of things.

Vimes had been one of the middle rankers, the falsetto equivalent of a yes-man. He remembered Wonse as a skinny little kid, always tagging along behind in hand-me-down pants with the kind of odd skipping run he'd invented to keep up with the bigger boys, and forever coming up with fresh ideas to stop them idly ganging up on him, which was the usual recreation if nothing more interesting presented itself. It was superb training for the rigours of adulthood, and Wonse became good at it.

Yes, they'd both started in the gutter. But Wonse had worked his way up whereas, as he himself would be the first to admit, Vimes had merely worked his way along. Every time he seemed to be getting anywhere he spoke his mind, or said the wrong thing. Usually both at once.

That was what made him uncomfortable around Wonse. It was the ticking of the bright clockwork of ambition.