Night Watch

said Vimes. “And you’ve been picking up the odd dollar, have you?”
    They walked in silence for a moment. Then Sam said: “Have I got to give that dollar back, Sarge?”
    “Are you worth a dollar?” said Vimes.
    “I gave it our mum, Sarge.”
    “Did you tell her how you got it?”
    “I didn’t want it!” Sam blurted out. “But Corporal Quirke said—”
    “Was he worth listening to?”
    “Dunno, Sarge.”
    “You don’t know? I bet your mum didn’t bring you up to think like that,” said Vimes. No, she bloody well didn’t, he thought. She’d tan your hide, copper or not, if she’d known it was a dodgy dollar.
    “No, Sarge. But they’re all at it, Sarge. I don’t mean the lads, Sarge, but you only have to look round the city. Our rent’s going up, taxes go up, there’s these new taxes all the time, and it’s all just cruel, Sarge, it’s cruel. Winder sold us all to his mates, and that’s a fact, sir.” Young Sam’s face was red with indignation.
    “Hmm,” said Vimes. Oh, yes. Tax farming. What a clever invention. Good old Winder. He’d flogged the right to collect taxes to the highest bidders. What a great idea, nearly as good as banning people from carrying weapons after dark. Because a) you saved the cost of tax collectors and the whole revenue system, b) you got a wagonload of cash up front, and c) the business of tax gathering then became the business of groups of powerful yet curiously reticent people who kept out of the light. However, they employed people who not only went out in the light but positively blocked it, and it was amazing what those people found to tax, up to and including Looking At Me, Pal. What was it Vetinari had said once? “Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces”? Well, the tax farmers were very unsophisticated in the way they went about recouping their investment.
    He remembered those da— these days. The city had never seemed poorer but, by the gods, there was a lot of tax being paid.
    Hard to explain to a kid like Sam why poncing a dollar when you got the chance was a bad thing to do.
    “Put it like this, Lance Constable,” he said as they turned the corner. “Would you let a murderer off for a thousand dollars?”
    “No, sir!”
    “A thousand dollars’d set your mum up in a nice place in a good part of town, though.”
    “Knock it off, Sarge, I’m not like that.”
    “You were when you took that dollar. Everything else is just a-haggling over the price.”
    They walked in sullen silence. Then: “Am I going to get the sack, Sarge?” said the lance constable.
    “For a dollar? No.”
    “I’d just as soon be sacked, Sarge, thanks all the same. Last Friday we had to go and break up some meeting over near the University. They were just talking! And we had to take orders from some civilian , and the Cable Street lads were a bit rough and…it’s not like the people had weapons or anything. You can’t tell me that’s right, Sarge. And then we loaded some of ’em into the hurry-up, just for talking. Mrs. Owlesly’s boy Elson never came home the other night, too, and they say he was dragged off to the palace just for saying his lordship’s a loony. Now people down our street are looking at me in a funny way.”
    Ye gods, I remember, thought Vimes. I thought it was all going to be chasing men who gave up after the length of a street and said “it’s a fair cop, guv’nor.” I thought I’d have a medal by the end of the week.
    “You want to be careful what you say, lad,” he said.
    “Yeah, but our mum says it’s fair enough if they take away the troublemakers and the weirdies but it’s not right them taking away ordinary people.”
    Is this really me? Vimes thought. Did I really have the political awareness of a head louse?
    “Anyway, he is a loony. Snapcase is the man we ought to have.”
    …and the self-preservation instincts of a lemming?
    “Kid, here’s some advice. In this town, right now, if you don’t know who you’re talking to—don’t talk.”
    “Yes, but Snapcase says—”
    “ Listen. A copper doesn’t keep flapping his lip. He doesn’t let on what he knows. He doesn’t say what he’s thinking. No. He watches and listens and he learns and he bides his time. His mind works like mad but his face is a blank. Until he’s ready. Understand?”
    “All right, Sarge.”
    “Good. Can you use that sword you have there, lad?”
    “I did the training, yes.”
    “Fine. Fine. The