The Truth

suddenly tilting slope. “How old would he be now?”
    “Sixteen,” said the Patrician. “That’s over a hundred in dog years.”
    Wuffles dragged himself into a sitting position and growled, releasing a gust of stale odors from the depths of his basket.
    “He’s very healthy,” said Hughnon, while trying not to breathe. “For his age, I mean. I expect you get used to the smell.”
    “What smell?” said Lord Vetinari.
    “Ah. Yes. Indeed,” said Hughnon.

    As Lord Vetinari’s coach rattled off through the slush towards Gleam Street it may have surprised its occupant to know that, in a cellar quite nearby, someone looking very much like him was chained to the wall.
    It was quite a long chain, giving him access to a table and chair, a bed, and a hole in the floor.
    Currently, he was at the table. On the other side of it was Mr. Pin. Mr. Tulip was leaning menacingly against the wall. It would be clear to any experienced person that what was going on here was “good cop, bad cop” with the peculiar drawback that there were no cops. There was just an apparently endless supply of Mr. Tulip.
    “So…Charlie,” said Mr. Pin, “how about it?”
    “It’s not illegal, is it?” said the man addressed as Charlie.
    Mr. Pin spread his hands. “What’s legality, Charlie? Just words on paper. But you won’t be doing anything wrong .”
    Charlie nodded uncertainly.
    “But ten thousand dollars doesn’t sound like the kind of money you get for doing something right, ” he said. “Not for just saying a few words.”
    “Mr. Tulip here once got even more money than that for saying just a few words, Charlie,” said Mr. Pin soothingly.
    “Yeah, I said, ‘Give me all the —ing cash or the girl gets it,’” said Mr. Tulip.
    “Was that right? ” said Charlie, who seemed to Mr. Pin to have a highly developed death wish.
    “Absolutely right for that occasion, yes,” he said.
    “Yes, but it’s not often people make money like that,” said the suicidal Charlie. His eyes kept straying to the monstrous bulk of Mr. Tulip, who was holding a paper bag in one hand and, in the other hand, a spoon. He was using the spoon to ferry a fine white powder to his nose, his mouth, and once, Charlie would have sworn, his ear.
    “Well, you are a special man, Charlie,” said Mr. Pin. “And afterwards you will have to stay out of sight for a long time.”
    “Yeah,” said Mr. Tulip, in a spray of powder. There was a sudden strong smell of mothballs.
    “All right, but why did you have to kidnap me, then? One minute I was locking up for the night, next minute—bang! And you’ve got me chained up.”
    Mr. Pin decided to change tack. Charlie was arguing too much for a man in the same room as Mr. Tulip, especially a Mr. Tulip who was halfway through a bag of powdered mothballs. He gave him a big friendly smile.
    “There’s no point in dwelling on the past, my friend,” he said. “This is business. All we want is a few days of your time, and then you end up with a fortune and—and I believe this is important, Charlie—a lifetime in which to spend it.”
    Charlie was turning out to be very stupid indeed.
    “But how do you know I won’t tell someone?” he insisted.
    Mr. Pin sighed. “We trust you, Charlie.”
    The man had run a clothes shop in Pseudopolis. Small shopkeepers had to be smart, didn’t they? They were usually sharp as knives when it came to making just the right amount of wrong change. So much for physiognomy, thought Mr. Pin. This man could pass for the Patrician even in a good light, but while by all accounts Lord Vetinari would have already worked out all the nasty ways the future could go, Charlie was actually entertaining the idea that he was going to come out of this alive and might even outsmart Mr. Pin. He was actually trying to be cunning! He was sitting a few feet away from Mr. Tulip, a man trying to snort crushed moth repellent, and he was trying guile . You almost had to admire the man.
    “I’ll need to be back by Friday,” said Charlie. “It’ll all be over by Friday, will it?”

    The shed that was now leased by the dwarfs had in the course of its rickety life been a forge and a laundry and a dozen other enterprises, and had last been used as a rocking horse factory by someone who had thought something was the Next Big Thing when it was by then one day away from becoming the Last Big Thing. Stacks of half-finished rocking horses that Mr. Cheese had been unable to sell for the back rent