Going Postal

that if I hadn’t done that you wouldn’t be now trying to collect all your teeth in your hat. Which you are not wearing, I notice. This must be your secret identity. Sorry, was that the wrong thing to say? You spilled your drink.”
    Moist wiped beer off his lapel.
    “No, this is me,” he said. “Pure and unadorned.”
    “You hardly know me and yet you invited me out on a date,” said Miss Dearheart. “Why?”
    Because you called me a phony , Moist thought. You saw through me straight away. Because you didn’t nail my head to the door with your crossbow. Because you have no small talk. Because I’d like to get to know you better, even though it would be like smooching an ashtray. Because I wonder if you could put into the rest of your life the passion you put into smoking a cigarette. In defiance of Miss Maccalariat I’d like to commit hanky-panky with you, Miss Adora Belle Dearheart…well, certainly hanky, and possibly panky when we get to know each other better. I’d like to know as much about your soul as you know about mine…
    He said : “Because I hardly know you.”
    “If it comes to that, I hardly know you, either,” said Miss Dearheart.
    “I’m rather banking on that,” said Moist. This got a smile.
    “Smooth answer, slick. Where are we really eating tonight?”
    “Le Foie Heureux, of course,” said Moist.
    She looked genuinely surprised. “You got a reservation?”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “You’ve got a relative that works there, then? You’re blackmailing the maître d’?”
    “No. But I’ve got a table for tonight,” said Moist.
    “Then it’s some sort of trick,” said Miss Dearheart. “I’m impressed. But I’d better warn you, enjoy the meal. It may be your last.”
    “What?”
    “The Grand Trunk Company kills people, Mr. Lipwig. In all kinds of ways. You must be getting on Reacher Gilt’s nerves.”
    “Oh, come on ! I’m barely a wasp at their picnic!”
    “And what do people do to wasps, do you think?” said Miss Dearheart. “The Trunk is in trouble, Mr. Lipwig. The company has been running it as a machine for making money. They thought repair would be cheaper than maintenance. They’ve cut everything to the bone, to the bone . They’re people who can’t take a joke. Do you think Reacher Gilt will hesitate for one minute to swat you?”
    “But I’m being very—” Moist tried.
    “Do you think you’re playing a game with them? Ringing doorbells and running away? Gilt’s aiming to become Patrician one day, everyone says so. And suddenly there’s this…this idiot in a big gold hat reminding everyone what a mess the clacks is, poking fun at it, getting the Post Office working again—”
    “Hang on, hang on,” Moist managed. “This is a city, not some cow town somewhere! People don’t kill business rivals just like that, do they?”
    “In Ankh-Morpork? You really think so? Oh, he won’t kill you. He won’t even bother with the formality of going through the Guild of Assassins. You’ll just die. Just like my brother. And he’ll be behind it.”
    “Your brother?” said Moist. On the far side of the huge room, the evening’s fight began with a well-executed Looking-At-Me-In-A-Funny-Way, earning two points and a broken tooth.
    “He and some of the people who used to work on the Trunk before it was pirated— pirated , Mr. Lipwig—were going to start up a new Trunk,” said Miss Dearheart, leaning forward. “They’d scraped up funding somehow for a few demonstration towers. It was going to be more than four times as fast as the old system, they were going to do all kinds of clever things with the coding, it was going to be wonderful. A lot of people gave them their savings, people who’d worked for my father. Most of the good engineers left when my father lost the Trunk, you see. They couldn’t stand Gilt and his bunch of looters. My brother was going to get all our money back.”
    “You’ve lost me there,” said Moist. An ax landed in the table, and vibrated.
    Miss Dearheart stared at Moist and blew a stream of smoke past his ear.
    “My father is Robert Dearheart,” she said distantly. “He was chairman of the original Grand Trunk company. The clacks was his vision. Hell, he designed half of the mechanisms in the towers. And he got together with a group of other engineers, all serious men with slide rules, and they borrowed money and mortgaged their houses and built a local system and poured the money back in and started building the