Discworld 39 - Snuff

by Terry Pratchett

  Quietly, Carrot said, “Could you tell us anything more, madam?”

  The old goblin was silent for a moment and then said, “Inside cigar, wrapped in tobacco? Ask the man who sell tobacco!”

  Billy turned his granny’s brandy bottle upside down and not a drop came out.

  “One last thing, please, madam: how can we help our friend? By the sound of it he’s dreaming that he’s a goblin!”

  Little black eyes shone as the goblin said, “I trusting you for tobacco. Now trusting you for another bottle of brandy. Find goblin cave! Find goblin maiden! Only such a one will be able to grasp the pot, in hope one day of having child! So it goes, no other way. And big problem for you, Mr. Po-leess-man, is that goblin girl these days are hard to find. None here. Maybe none anywhere. We shrivel and shrink like old leaves. Goodbye until more brandy. No! Make that Cognac from Quirm. Special reserve. Sixty dollars if bought from Horrids on Broadway or two for one deal at Twister Boote’s bottle shop in the Shades. Slight taste of anchovy, but no questions asked and none answered.”

  The old voice went silent, and gently the watchmen came back to the stuff of reality around them, troubling images fading into recent memory.

  Carrot managed to say, “I’m so sorry to have to ask, but will this harm my sergeant? He seems to be having continuous nightmares and we can’t get the pot out of his hand!”

  “Three bottle of brandy, Mr. Po-leess-man?” translated Billy.

  Carrot nodded. “Okay.”

  “How long pot had him?”

  Carrot looked at Angua. “About two days, madam.”

  “Then get your man to a goblin cave as quick as you can, Mr. Po-leess-man. He may live. He may die. Either way, three bottle of brandy, Mr. Po-leess-man.” Small black eyes twinkled at Carrot. “So nice to meet a real gentleman. Hurry up, Mr. Po-leess-man.”

  The old lady slumped back into her mound of pillows and rugs. The audience was over, just like the brandy.

  “Granny likes you,” said Billy, his voice full of awe as he ushered them out. “I can tell. She never threw anything at you. Better get her the snuff and the brandy pretty soon, however, otherwise she might get a bit stroppy in an occult sort of way, if you hear what I’m saying, or rather, of course, what I ain’t saying. Nice to meet you folks, but old man King doesn’t like to see people not working.”

  “Excuse me, Billy,” said Carrot, grabbing him by his skinny arm. “Are there any goblin caves anywhere around here?”

  “You got what you wanted, officer. There ain’t none, as far as I know. I don’t care. You could try up-country, that’s my advice, but I really don’t care. If you find a goblin cave on a map you can bet your teeth there won’t be any goblins there anymore, not live ones, at least.”

  “Thank you very much for your assistance, Mr. Slick, and may I congratulate you on having a grandmother with such good grasp of contemporary vocabulary?” said Carrot.

  There was a delighted shriek from the direction of the dome, the walls of which were very thin.

  “Damn right! Granny Slick ain’t so thick!”

  “Well, perhaps we have a result,” said Carrot as they headed back into the city, “but, well, I know Ankh-Morpork is a melting pot of a city, but don’t you think it’s rather sad when people come here and forget their ancestry?”

  “Yes,” said Angua, not looking at him. “It is.”

  When they were back in Pseudopolis Yard, Carrot filled in Cheery with as much information as he could. “I’d like you to go and see the tobacconist. Ask him where his tobacco comes from. We know there’s lots of smuggling going on anyway, so he’ll be worried. It might be a nice idea to take along an officer whose mere presence will worry him a little more. Wee Mad Arthur is back from leave.”

  Cheery grinned. “In that case, I’ll take him. He worries everybody.”

  Mr. Bewilderforce Gumption was having a good day so far. He had been to the bank to deposit the takings and had bought two tickets to the opera. Mrs. Gumption would be very pleased about that and certainly more pleased than she was to be called a Gumption. She was always urging him into high society or, at least, higher society, but in some ways the name Gumption always held you back. And now he held open the door to his emporium and saw the policeman sitting patiently in the chair.

  Cheery Littlebottom stood up. “Mr. Bewilderforce Gumption?”

  He tried to smile. “I generally see Fred Colon, officer.”

  “Yes. And it’s Sergeant Littlebottom. But strangely enough it’s about Sergeant Colon that I’m visiting you today. Do you remember giving him a cigar?”

  Mr. Gumption was suffering from the illusion that many people have that policemen don’t see people lying all the time, so he said, “Not as I recall,” to which Cheery replied, “Mr. Gumption, it is a well-known fact that Sergeant Colon buys or otherwise procures his tobacco requirements from your noble establishment.”

  Once again Bewilderforce led off on the wrong note. “I want to see my lawyer!”

  “I’d like to see your lawyer as well, Mr. Gumption. Perhaps you’d send someone to collect him while I and my colleague wait here?”

  Bewilderforce looked around bewildered. “What colleague?”

  “Oh, aye, that’ll be me well enough,” said the constable known, sometimes briefly, as Wee Mad Arthur, who had been lurking behind a packet of cigarettes.

  Two police officers are far more than doubly worse than one, and Cheery Littlebottom took advantage of the sudden panic to say, carefully, “It’s a very simple question, Mr. Gumption. Where did that cigar come from?”

  Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase “The innocent have nothing to fear,” believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like “The innocent have nothing to fear”; but Bewilderforce was fearful—she could see him sweating.

  “We know you’re a smuggler, Mr. Gumption, or perhaps I should say that you take advantage of very good deals when they are, ahem, presented to you. Right now, however, all I need from you is to tell me where that cigar came from. Once you’ve been so kind as to tell me that, we’ll walk out of this building in a happy and cooperative frame of mind.”

  Bewilderforce brightened up. Cheery continued, “Of course, other departments of the Watch might wish to visit you in due course. At the moment, sir, you just have to deal with me. Do you know where that batch of cigars came from?”

  Valiantly Bewilderforce tried it on. “I buy from dealers all the time,” he said. “It’d take me ages to go through the records!”

  Cheery kept smiling. “No problem there, Mr. Gumption, I’ll call for my expert colleague Mr. A. E. Pessimal, right now. I don’t know if you know of him? It’s amazing how quickly he can work through paperwork and I’m sure he’ll find time in his busy schedule to help you out at no cost whatsoever.”

  Five minutes later a gray-faced and breathless Bewilderforce handed Cheery a small scrap of paper.

  Cheery looked up at him. “Howondaland? I thought that tobacco mostly came from Klatch?”

  Bewilderforce shrugged. “Well, they’ve been starting up plantations in Howondaland now. Good stuff, too.” Feeling a little bit bolder, Bewilderforce went on. “All properly paid for, I can tell you. Yes, I know there’s smuggling going on, but we don’t have any truck with that. No need to when you can get a pretty good deal by buying in bulk. It’s all in my ledgers. Every invoice. Every payment. All set down properly.”

  Cheery relented. A. E. Pessimal could probably find something to excite him somewhere in the Gumption ledgers. After all, business was business. But there was business and there was bad business. It didn’t do to get complicated. She stood up. “Thank you very much for your assistance, Mr. Gumption. We’ll trouble you no further.”

  Bewilderforce
hesitated and said, “What’s up with Fred Colon? He’s a bit of a scrounger, I don’t mind saying, but I would hate anything to have happened to him. It wasn’t …poison or anything, was it?”

  “No, Mr. Gumption. His cigar started singing to him.”

  “They don’t usually do that,” said Bewilderforce nervously. “I’ll have to check my stock.”

  “Please do that, sir. And while you’re doing so perhaps you’ll look out for this little list of snuff products?”

  The tobacconist took it from her carefully. His lips moved and he said, “That’s quite a lot of snuff, you know.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Cheery. “I’m authorized to pay cash down.”

  Bewilderforce looked extremely bewildered. “What? Policemen pay?”

  Walking the streets in the company of Wee Mad Arthur presented a difficulty even for a dwarf like Cheery Littlebottom. He was around six inches high, so if you spoke to him while you walked you sounded like a madman. On the other hand, he heartily disliked being picked up. You just had to put up with it. Most people made a slight detour if they saw Wee Mad Arthur in any case.

  They arrived back at the Watch House and reported to Carrot and the first thing he said to Cheery was, “Do you know where there are any goblin caves, Cheery?”

  “No, sir. Why do you ask?”

  “I’ll explain later,” said Carrot. “It’s fairly unbelievable. Did you find out anything from old Gumption?”

  Cheery nodded. “Yes, sir. Sergeant Colon’s haunted cigar came from Howondaland, no doubt about it.”

  Carrot stared at her. “I didn’t think there were goblins in Howondaland? All Jolson’s family come from there.” He snapped his fingers. “Hang on one moment.” He ran down the corridor to the canteen and came back followed by Constable Precious Jolson, a lady for whom the word large simply would not do. Everything about her was, as it were, family-sized, including her good nature. Everybody liked Precious. She seemed to be a fountainhead of jolliness with always a cheerful word for anybody, even when she was picking up a brace of drunks and throwing them into the hurry-up wagon.

  After brief questioning Precious said, “Dad sent me over there last year, remember, wanted me to find my roots. Can’t say I took to it, really. Nice weather. Not much to do. Not very exciting really, unless you try to stroke one of the cats, they get kind of stroppy. Never heard of goblins there, not the sort of place for them, I suspect. Excuse me, captain, can I get back to my tea now?”

  The silence that followed was broken by Carrot, who said, “Howondaland is months away by boat, and broomsticks don’t work very well over water, even if we could persuade the wizards to lend us one. Any ideas?”

  “Crivens!” said Wee Mad Arthur. “No problemo! I reckon I could get there in less than a day, ye ken.”

  They stared at him. Wee Mad Arthur was small enough to ride on the back of any bird larger than a medium-sized hawk—his aerial broadcasts from the sky concerning traffic hold-ups in the city* were a regular feature of Ankh-Morpork street life—but all the way to another continent?

  He grinned. “As ye ken, I was away for a wee while lately, making the acquaintance o’ my brothers, the Nac mac Feegle? Weel, they fly the birds a lot, and there’s a thing they have called the craw step, ye ken? And I reckon I’m canny enough to use it, ye ken.”

  “That’s three kens in one speech, Wee Mad Arthur,” said Angua, to laughter from the rest of the watchmen. “You really got into the Feegle thing, didn’t you!”

  “Oh, ye may scoff, but I’m the only one of ye scunners who knows why we get so many big birds flying over the city at this time o’ year. Ankh-Morpork is hot! See the big plume of smoke and fumes? That’s all heat. It lifts ye up, a free ride that puts the wind under your wings. Have ye heard of the surreptitious albatross? No, because only me and the Professor of Ornithology at the university know about it, and he only knows because I told the scunner. Outside the mating season it never touches ground. That’s not the only thing that’s odd. It’s an eagle masquerading as a type of albatross. Ye could call it a shark o’ the sky, and I reckon one of them will do me nicely. They like the city. They hover up where you’ll never see them unless you really know how to look. There’s always one about, and I could leave today. What you say?”

  “But, constable,” said Carrot, “you’ll freeze that high up in the sky, won’t you?”

  “Oh aye, I ken my thermal drawers may not be sufficient, which is why the word ‘brandy’ is about to enter this conversation. Trust me on this, captain. I reckon I can be back within twa days.”

  “How many is that?” said Angua.

  Wee Mad Arthur rolled his eyes. “Two, captain, for the likes o’ you.”

  In fact it took Wee Mad Arthur only an hour to identify the peaceful-looking bird drifting happily high above the city with the meal it had just had courtesy of a seagull, the feathers of which were even now drifting gently toward the cityscape below. The surreptitious albatross had no enemies that it couldn’t easily digest, and paid little attention to the nondescript and relatively harmless hawk soaring toward it, right up until it found Wee Mad Arthur landing on its back. It struggled but was unable to reach the Feegle, because he was sitting comfortably and had his hands around its neck; Wee Mad Arthur tended toward the swift methods of domesticating wildlife.

  The surreptitious albatross fought for yet more height by constantly spiraling up on the huge wide pillar of free lift—as Ankh-Morpork was known and understood by the avian community—and Wee Mad Arthur passed the time by memorizing a tiny penciled map of the world. Really, it wasn’t difficult. On the whole, continents aren’t hard to find, and neither are the edges of continents, where by general consensus, you tended to find ships moored. Wee Mad Arthur was the world expert at looking for things from above, which amused him, given that most people who wanted to see Wee Mad Arthur had to look down.

  Oh well, he thought, let’s go!

  It was called the craw step, and the Nac mac Feegle of the chalk country had carefully shown their brother how it works when you are sitting on top of a large bird.

  People in Ankh-Morpork looked up at the bang high above and then, given that the sky was still clear, lost interest. Meanwhile, on one astonished surreptitious albatross sat one hugely satisfied Feegle, who settled down in the feathers and began to eat a piece of the single hardboiled egg and two-inch slice of bread that were his rations for the trip,* while the universe rushed past them making a noise like weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

  Darkness had lasted about four hours when Vimes was woken by a small boy bouncing up and down on the bed, and therefore on Sam Vimes, and saying, “Willikins has found a bird that just died. Dad! Mum says I can di …ssect it if you say it’s all right, Dad!”

  Vimes managed a mumbled, “Yes, all right, if your mother says so,” before slipping back into the black. And the black spread around him. He heard himself thinking: the Summoning Dark could tell me everything I need to know, and that is the truth. But would the truth that it told me be the truth, and how would I know that? If I rely on it then in some way I become its creature. Or perhaps it becomes mine? Perhaps we have an accord and it helped me under Koom Valley and because of that the world is a better place? Surely the darkness has no reason to lie? I’ve always liked the night, the dead of night, those nights that are sheer blackness, making dogs nervous and causing sheep to leap their hurdles out of terror. Darkness has always been my friend, but I cannot let it be my master, though sooner or later I will have to take an oath, and if I lie, me, the chief policeman, then what am I? How could I ever again rebuke a copper for looking the other way?

  He turned over among the pillows. And yet the cause is good. It is a good cause! The man Stratford did kill the goblin girl, I have the evidence of his associate and the word of a being whose assistance has been of material use to society. Admittedly, I have put a man in fear,
but then, people like Flutter are always in fear, and better that he fears me than Stratford, because I at least know when to stop. He’s just another red ball on the baize, and for that matter, I suppose, so is Stratford. He’ll have a boss. They always have a nobby boss because nearly everybody around here is either a worker or nobby, and as far as I know practically everybody doesn’t have a good word to say for goblins. It’s a target-rich environment, and the trouble with a target-rich environment is that it is useless if you don’t know which target you have to aim at.

  Vimes dropped back into deep sleep, and was almost instantly shaken awake by the best efforts of his son, industriously pounding on the heap that was Vimes in slumber. “Mum says to come, Dad. She says there’s a man.”

  Vimes wasn’t a dressing-gown type of person, so he struggled back into his clothing and made himself as presentable as a man could who needed a shave and didn’t appear to have the time to get one.

  There was a man sitting in the lounge, wearing a fantailer hat, jodhpurs and a nervous smile, three things that mildly annoyed Vimes. A nervous smile generally meant that somebody was after something they shouldn’t have; he personally thought a fantailer looked silly; and as for the jodhpurs, no man should meet a copper if he is wearing trousers that make his legs look as though he has just burgled a house full of silverware and shoved it hastily down his trousers. In fact, Vimes thought he could see the outline of a teapot, but possibly that was his eyes playing mischievous tricks on him.

  The wearer of this presumably self-inflicted triple misfortune stood up as Vimes entered. “Your grace?”