Making Money

was missing, there was a heavy gold ring on each of them, and each ring was incised with a letter. If you saw them coming at you, as for instance in an alley, because you’d been skimming something off the take, the last name you would see would be H*A*R*R*Y*K*I*N*G. It was a fact worth keeping in the forefront of your brain, in the interests of keeping the forefront of your brain.
    Moist looked up into the man’s eyes.
    “We shall need a lot more than that,” growled Bent, from somewhere above Moist.
    Harry King didn’t bother to look up. He said, “I only talks to the organ grinder.”
    “Mr. Bent, could you step outside for a few minutes,” said Moist brightly, “and perhaps Mr. King’s…associates will do the same?”
    Harry King nodded almost imperceptibly.
    “Mr. Lipwig, I really—”
    “Please, Mr. Bent.”
    The chief cashier snorted, but followed the thugs out of the office. The young man with the briefcase made as if to leave as well, but Harry waved him back into his seat.
    “You want to watch that Bent,” he said to Moist. “There’s something funny about him.”
    “Odd, maybe, but he wouldn’t like to be called funny. So, why does Harry King need money, Mr. King? Everyone knows you’re rich. Has the bottom dropped out of the dog-muck business? Or vice versa?”
    “I’m cons-sol-id-ating,” said King, grinning. “This Undertaking business…there’s going to be a few opportunities for a man in the right place. There’s land to buy, palms to grease…you know how it is. But them other banks, they won’t lend to King of the Golden River, for all it’s my lads what keeps their cesspits fragrant as a violet. Them stuck-up ponces’d be up to their ankles in their own piss if it weren’t for me, but they holds their noses when I walks by, oh yeah.” He stopped, as if a thought had occurred to him, and went on. “Well most people do, o’course, it’s not like a man can take a bath every five bloody minutes, but that bunch of bankers still gives me the cold shoulder even when the wife has scrubbed me raw. How dare they! I’m a better risk than most of their smarmy customers, you can bet on that. I employs a thousand people in this city, mister, one way or another. That’s a thousand families lookin’ to me for their dinner. I might be about muck, but I don’t muck about.”
    He’s not a crook, Moist reminded himself. He pulled himself out of the gutter and beat his way to the top in a world where a length of lead pipe was the standard negotiating tool. That world wouldn’t trust paper. In that world, reputation was all.
    “A hundred thousand is a lot of money,” he said aloud.
    “You’ll give it to me, though,” said King, grinning. “I knows you will, ’cos you’re a chancer, same as me. I can smell it on you. I smell a lad who’s done a thing or two in his time, eh?”
    “We all have to eat, Mr. King.”
    “’Course we do. ’Course we do. An’ now we can sit back like a coupla judges an’ be pillows of the community, eh? So we’ll shake hands on it like the gentlemen we ain’t. This here,” he went on, laying a huge hand on the shoulder of the young man, “is Wallace, my clerk what does the sums for me. He’s new, on account of the last one I had I caught fiddlin’ me. That was a laugh, as you can imagine!” Wallace didn’t smile.
    “I probably can,” said Moist. Harry King guarded his various premises with creatures that could only be called dogs because wolves aren’t that insane. And they were kept hungry. There were rumors, and Harry King was probably happy about that. It paid to advertise. You didn’t double-cross Harry King. But it worked both ways.
    “Wallace can talk numbers with your monkey,” said Harry, standing up. “You’ll want to squeeze me, right enough. Business is business, and don’t I know it. What do you say?”
    “Well I’d say we have an agreement, Mr. King,” Moist said. Then he spat on his hand, and held it out.
    It was worth it to see the look on the man’s face.
    “I didn’t know bankers did that,” said Harry.
    “They don’t often shake hands with Harry King, then,” said Moist. That was probably overdoing it, but King winked, spat on his own hand, and grasped Moist’s. Moist had been prepared, but even so, the man’s grip ground his finger bones together.
    “You’re more full of bullshit than a frightened herd on fresh pasture, Mr. Lipwig.”
    “Thank you, sir. I take that as a