Snuff (Discworld 39)

“Well, there’s Dave who runs the Dog and Badger,” Feeney volunteered.

“And he is an upstanding citizen?” said Vimes.

“I have seen him sitting down,” said Feeney, “but he knows the score, if you get my meaning.”

Vimes nodded and waited a few minutes before Feeney returned with a crowbar, a bandy-legged man and a small tail of people who, for the moment, until proved otherwise, had to be counted as “innocent bystanders.”

They gathered around as Vimes prepared to open the barrel. He announced, “Pay attention, gentlemen. I believe this barrel contains contraband goods.” He rolled up his sleeves—“You see that I have nothing up my sleeves, but a crowbar in my hand”—and with some effort on his part the lid of the barrel came off, and the smell of tobacco was overpowering. And some of the bystanders decided it was now time to take the wonderful opportunity for a quick nonchalant walk.

Vimes pulled out bale after bale of brown leaves bound with cotton. “Can’t take too much on the coach,” he said, “but if Mr. Dave here will, as an upstanding member of the community, sign to say that he saw me pull these from a sealed barrel, then you, Mr. Feeney, will take a brief statement and we can all go about our business.”

Feeney beamed. “Oh, very well spotted, commander! I reckon you could hide anything in this stink, eh?” After a moment he looked at Vimes and said, “Commander?”

Vimes appeared to look through him and said, “You’re going to go far, Chief Constable Upshot. Let’s empty the whole barrel, shall we?”

He didn’t know where the thought had come from. Maybe from first principles. If you were going to smuggle, where would you stop? What would your market be? How would you get the best price per pound of product carried? He pulled and pulled at the bundles, and one, almost at the bottom of the barrel, was noticeably heavier than the others. Trying to keep his expression unchanged, he handed the heavy bundle to Feeney and said, “I’d be grateful if you and Mr. Dave would open this bundle and tell me what you see inside.” He sat down on the barrel and took a pinch of snuff while behind him he heard the rustling, and then Feeney said, “Well, commander, what this appears to be—”

Vimes held up a hand. “Does it look like stone dust to you, Feeney?”

“Yes, but—”

Vimes held up his hand again. “Does it appear to have little red and blue flecks in it when you hold it to the light?”

Sometimes the ancestral copper in Feeney picked up the vibration. “Yes, Commander Vimes!”

“Then it’s a good job for you and your friend Dave”—Vimes glanced at the said Dave for the second time and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt—“that the two of you are not trolls, because if you were you’d be stone dead, as it were, right now. The stuff you are holding is Crystal Slam, I’d bet my badge on it. Troll kids use it as a drug, do you know that? They take a hit as small as your little pinky and think they can walk through walls, which they invariably do, too, and when they’ve done it a few times more they drop down dead. It’s illegal everywhere in the world, and very difficult to make because the smell when they’re boiling it up is unmistakable; you get a lot of sparks too. Selling it is a hanging offense in Ankh-Morpork, Uberwald and every troll city. Diamond King of Trolls gives a very handsome bounty to anyone who presents him with evidence of manufacture.”

Vimes looked hopefully at the aforesaid Dave, just in case the man would take the bait. No, he thought, they wouldn’t do it round here. All this tobacco must come from somewhere hot, and that means a long way away.

Gingerly, they broke open other barrels and found plenty of tobacco and several packs of very high-class cigars, one or two of which Vimes put in his breast pocket for detailed forensic examination later, and, somewhere at the bottom of every barrel, there were neat packets of Crystal Slam, Slunkie, Slab, Slice and Slap, all of them very nasty—although Slap was generally considered to be a recreational drug, at least if your idea of recreation was waking up in the gutter not knowing whose head you had on.

As many samples as possible were piled into the coach and Vimes only stopped when it started to creak. The other barrels were piled up and, at Vimes’s instigation, a very proud Chief Constable Upshot set fire to them. When the controlled drugs caught alight there was a brief display of pyrotechnics and Vimes

thought to himself that this was only the start of the fireworks.

As people came running out to see what was happening, Vimes reassured them of his bona fides and explained that Mr. Flutter would be away for a while, and could somebody please look after the birds. The responses he got made it clear that the neighborhood considered a world without Mr. Flutter and his stinking turkeys would be a much better world, so the last thing that Vimes did was to open the sheds and let the wretched creatures take their chances.

As a last little bright idea, Vimes beckoned to the nervous Dave and said, “Diamond King of Trolls will be very appreciative of this day’s work. Of course, as serving officers we wouldn’t be able to take any remuneration…”

“We wouldn’t?” said Feeney hopelessly.

Vimes ignored this and continued, “I will, however, see to it that your help today is suitably rewarded.” The publican’s face lit up. Something about the words diamond and rewarded in the same sentence does that to a face.

They traveled with the creaking coach doors locked, but with a window slightly open because Mr. Flutter was currently not somebody you would wish to be in any confined space with: he appeared to be sweating turkeys.

King’s evidence! That was a result! Flutter hadn’t thought about arguing, and Vimes had seen his expression as the Summoning Dark’s statement was presented to him. Vimes had noticed every wince and shiver of recollection that, taken together, added up to rights well banged. King’s evidence! Any man would opt for that to save his skin, or maybe for a better class of cell. You took King’s evidence to save your miserable hide and it might indeed do so, but at a price, and that price was death by hanging if you lied. It was one of the absolutes: lying when you had turned King’s evidence was the lie of lies. You had lied to the judge, you had lied to the King, you had lied to society, you had lied to the world, and thus the cheerful Mr. Trooper would welcome you to the gallows, and shake your hand to show you there were no hard feelings, and shortly afterward would pull the lever that would drop you from the world you had betrayed, and stop…halfway down.

And then, of course, there were the troll drugs. The evidence of their existence worried Flutter so much that he invented new gods to swear to that he knew nothing about them. Vimes believed him. As far as Flutter was concerned, the barrels contained nothing more than tobacco. Good old tobacco, nothing harmful about tobacco, and smuggling it was, well, it really was like a game, everybody knew that. Nothing wrong with outsmarting the revenue, that was what the revenue was for! Vimes thought, isn’t that how I’ve always said it worked? Little crimes breeding big crimes. You smile at little crimes and then big crimes blow your head off.

Flutter was sitting miserably on the opposite seat, possibly fearing being kicked to death by trolls, but then, as Vimes had noted, Flutter probably feared everybody. And so Vimes found it in his heart to offer him not so much a crumb as a bacon sandwich of good news. “You were in the company of a violent man, Ted. You thought you were just going to make life difficult for a copper, and suddenly you were an accessory of the first part to murder and, even if unwittingly, tangled up in extremely serious troll narcotics, the worst there is. But you’ve got into bad company, Ted, and I will say so in court.”

Hope appeared in Flutter’s red-rimmed eyes, and he said, “That’s very kind of you, sir.” That was it. No swagger, no whining, just gratitude for mercies received and fervently hoped for.

Vimes leaned forward and offered the bewildered man his snuffbox. Flutter took a large pinch and sniffed it up so hard that the inevitable sneeze tried to escape via his ears. Ignoring this, and the faint haze of brown in the air, Vimes leaned back and said cheerfully, “I’ll have a word with the screws in the Tanty, they always owe me anyway…” Vimes looked at the hopeful face and thought, Blast it. I know they’re pretty crowded right now. A squirt like him would be on a hiding to nothing, whatever I do. Oh well. He carried on, “No, Mr. Flutter, tell you what I’ll do, at least we’ll put you in a cell in Pseudopolis Yard. How about that? It can be lonely in a cell all by yourself, but some might consider that a blessing, especially after fifteen minutes in some parts of the Tanty and, besides, my lads are fairly chatty when there’s not much happening. We also have a better class of rat, the straw is fresh and we don’t gob in your stirabout, and if you’re helpful and don’t keep people awake at night, then you’ll be as right as rain.”

“You won’t have any trouble from me, commander!” The words came tumbling, frantic to be heard and terrified that they might not.

“Glad to hear it, Ted,” said Vimes jovially. “I like a man who makes the right choices! Incidentally, Ted, who suggested you play the little trick on the hill?”