Making Money (Discworld 36)

'Yes, but what do you do in the evenings?'

'I double-check the day's totals in my office, sir. I find counting very... satisfying.'

'You're very good at it, yes?'

'Better than you can imagine, sir.'

'So if I save ninety-three dollars forty-seven a year for seven years at two and a quarter per cent, compound, how - '

'$835.13 calculated once annually, sir,' said Bent calmly.

Yes, and twice you've known the exact time, thought Moist. And you didn't look at a watch. You are good with numbers. Inhumanly good, perhaps...

'No holidays?' he said aloud.

'I did a walking tour of the major banking houses of Uberwald last summer, sir. It was most instructive.'

'That must have taken weeks. I'm glad you felt able to tear yourself away!'

'Oh, it was easy, sir. Miss Drapes, who is the senior clerk, sent a coded clacks of the day's business to each of my lodging houses at the close of business every day. I was able to review it over my after-dinner strudel and respond instantly with advice and instructions.'

'Is Miss Drapes a useful member of staff?'

'Indeed. She performs her duties with care and alacrity.' He paused. They were at the top of the stairs. Bent turned and looked directly at Moist. 'I have worked here all my life, Mr Lipwig. Be careful of the Lavish family. Mrs Lavish is the best of them, a wonderful woman. The others... are used to getting their own way.'

Old family, old money. That kind of family. Moist felt a distant call, like the song of the skylark. It came back to taunt him every time, for example, he saw an out-of-towner in the street with a map and a perplexed expression, crying out to be relieved of his money in some helpful and hard-to-follow way.

'Dangerously so?' he said.

Bent looked a little affronted at this directness. 'They are not at home to disappointment, sir. They have tried to declare Mrs Lavish insane, sir.'

'Really?' said Moist. 'Compared to who?'

The wind blew through the town of Big Cabbage, which liked to call itself the Green Heart of the Plains.

It was called Big Cabbage because it was home to the Biggest Cabbage in the World, and the town's inhabitants were not very creative when it came to names. People travelled miles to see this wonder; they'd go inside its concrete interior and peer out through the windows, buy cabbage-leaf bookmarks, cabbage ink, cabbage shirts, Captain Cabbage dolls, musical boxes carefully crafted from kohlrabi and cauliflower that played 'The Cabbage Eater's Song', cabbage jam, kale ale, and green cigars made from a newly developed species of cabbage and rolled on the thighs of local maidens, presumably because they liked it.

Then there was the excitement of BrassicaWorld, where very small children could burst into terrified screams at the huge head of Captain Cabbage himself, along with his friends Cauliflower the Clown and Billy Broccoli. For older visitors there was of course the Cabbage Research Institute, over which a green pall always hung and downwind of which plants tended to be rather strange and sometimes turned to watch you as you passed.

And then... what better way to record the day of a lifetime than pose for a picture at the behest of the black-clad man with the iconograph who took the happy family and promised a framed, coloured picture, sent right to their home, for a mere three dollars, P&P included, one dollar deposit to cover expenses, if you would be so good, sir, and may I say what wonderful children you have there, madam, they are a credit to you and no mistake, oh, and did I say that if you are not delighted with the framed picture then send no further money and we shall say no more about it?

The kale ale was generally pretty good, and there's no such thing as too much flattery where mothers are concerned and, all right, the man had rather strange teeth, which seemed determined to make a break from his mouth, but none of us is perfect and what was there to lose?

What there was to lose was a dollar, and they add up. Whoever said you can't fool an honest man wasn't one.

Round about the seventh family, a watchman started taking a distant interest, so the man in dusty black made a show of taking the last name and address and strolled into an alley. He tossed the broken iconograph back on the pile of junk where he had found it  -  it was a cheap one and the imps had long since evaporated  -  and was about to set off across the fields when he saw the newspaper being bowled along by the wind.

To a man travelling on his wits, a newspaper was a useful treasure. Stuck down your shirt, it kept the wind off your chest. You could use it to light fires. For the fastidious, it saved a daily resort to dockweed, burdock or other broad-leaved plants. And, as a last resort, you could read it.

This evening, the breeze was getting up. He gave the front page of the paper a cursory glance and tucked it under his vest.

His teeth tried to tell him something, but he never listened to them. A man could go mad, listening to his teeth.

When he got back to the Post Office, Moist looked up the Lavish family in Whom's Whom. They were indeed what was known as 'old money', which meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant. Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something you kept quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port. Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and rogue was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.

They'd been rich for centuries. The key players in the current crop of Lavishes, apart from Topsy, were first her brother-in-law Marko Lavish and his wife Capricia Lavish, daughter of a famous trust fund. They lived in Genua, as far away from other Lavishes as possible, which was a very Lavish thing to do. Then there were Topsy's stepchildren, the twins Cosmo and Pucci, who had, the story ran, been born with their little hands around one another's throat, like true Lavishes. There were also plenty more cousins, aunts and genetic hangers-on, all watching one another like cats. From what he'd heard, the family business was traditionally banking, but the recent generations, buoyed by a complex network of long-term investments and ancient trust funds, had diversified into disinheriting and suing one another, apparently with great enthusiasm and a commendable lack of mercy. He recalled pictures of them in the Times's society pages, getting in or out of sleek black coaches and not smiling very much, in case the money escaped.

There was no mention of Topsy's side of the family. They were Turvys, apparently not grand enough to be Whoms. Topsy Turvy... there was a music-hall sound to it, and probably Moist could believe that.