Making Money

Spangler. A good hangman knows exactly how much rope to give a man, and had dropped him out of one life and into another.
    Could anyone have recognized him? But he was the least recognizable person in the world when he wasn’t wearing his golden suit! When he was young, his mother sometimes went home from school with the wrong child!
    And when he wore the suit, people recognized the suit. He hid by being conspicuous…
    It had to be a scam of some kind. Yes, that was it. The old “guilty secret” job. Probably no one got to a position like this without accumulating some things they’d rather not see made public. But it was a nice touch to include the bit about affidavits. It was there to set a nervous man to wondering. It suggested that the sender knew something so dangerous that you, the recipient, might try to silence him, and he was in a position to set the lawyers on you.
    Hah! And he was being given some time in which, presumably, to stew. Him! Moist von Lipwig! Well, they might just find out how hot a stew could get. For now, he shoved the paper in a bottom drawer. Hah!
    There was a knock at the door.
    “Come in, Gladys,” he said, rummaging in the in tray again.
    The door opened and the worried, pale face of Stanley Howler appeared around it.
    “It’s me, sir. Stanley, sir,” it said.
    “Yes, Stanley?”
    “Head of stamps at the Post Office, sir,” Stanley added, in case pin-point identification was required.
    “Yes, Stanley, I know,” said Moist patiently. “I see you every day. What is it that you want?”
    “Nothing, sir,” said Stanley. There was a pause, and Moist adjusted his mind to the world as seen through the brain of Stanley Howler. Stanley was very…precise, and as patient as the grave.
    “What is the reason for you, coming here, to see me, today, Stanley?” Moist tried, enunciating carefully in order to deliver the sentence in bite-size chunks.
    “There is a lawyer downstairs, sir,” Stanley announced.
    “But I’ve only just read the threatening—” Moist began, and then relaxed.
    “A lawyer? Did he say why?” he said.
    “A matter of great importance, he said. There’s two watchmen with him, sir. And a dog.”
    “Really?” said Moist calmly. “Well, you’d better show them up, then.”
    He glanced at his watch.
    Oh…kay…Not good.
    The Lancre Flyer would be leaving in forty-five seconds. He knew he could be down that damn drainpipe in eleven seconds. Stanley was on his way below to bring them up here, call that thirty seconds, maybe. Get them off the ground floor, that was the thing. Scramble onto the back of the coach, jump off when it slowed down for the Hubwards Gate, pick open the tin chest he’d got stashed in the beams of the old stable in Lobbin Clout, get changed and adjust his face, stroll across the city to have a coffee in that shop near the main watch house, keep an eye on the clacks traffic for a while, stroll over to Hen and Chickens Court, where he had another trunk stored with “I Don’t Know” Jack, get changed, leave with his little bag and his tweed cap (which he’d change for the old brown bowler in the bag in some alley, just in case Jack had a sudden attack of memory brought on by excessive money), and he’d mosey down to the slaughterhouse district and step into the persona of Jeff the Drover and hang out in the huge, fetid bar of the Butcher’s Eagle, which was where the drovers traditionally damped down the road dust. There was a vampire in the Watch these days and they’d had a werewolf for years, too. Well, let those famously sharp noses snuff up the mixed cocktail stink of manure, fear, sweat, offal, and urine and see how they liked it! And that was just in the bar—if anything, it was worse in the slaughterhouses.
    Then maybe he’d wait until evening to hitch a lift on one of the steaming dung carts heading out of the city, along with the other drunk drovers. The gate guards never bothered to check them. On the other hand, if his sixth sense was still squawking, then he’d run the thimble game with some drunk until he’d got enough for a little bottle of perfume and a cheap but decent thirdhand suit at some shonky shop and repair to Mrs. Eucrasia Arcanum’s Lodging House for Respectable Working Men, where with a tip of a hat and some wire-rimmed spectacles he’d be Mr. Trespass Hatchcock, a wool salesman who stayed there every time his business brought him to the city and who brought her a little gift suitable for a