The Truth

by Terry Pratchett

  “Bugrit.”

  “Right. You stick with me and you won’t go far wrong.”

  “Bugrit.”

  “Really? Well, I spose that’ll have to do. Bark, bark.”

  Twelve people lived under the Misbegot Bridge and in a life of luxury, although luxury is not hard to achieve when you define it as something to eat at least once a day and especially when you have such a broad definition of “something to eat.” Technically they were beggars, although they seldom had to beg. Possibly they were thieves, although they only took what had been thrown away, usually by people hurrying to be out of their presence. Outsiders considered that the leader of the group was Coffin Henry, who would have been the city’s champion expectorator if anyone else had wanted the title. But the group had the true democracy of the voteless. There was Arnold Sideways, whose lack of legs only served to give him an extra advantage in any pub fight, where a man with good teeth at groin height had it all his own way. And if it wasn’t for the duck whose presence on his head he consistently denied, the Duck Man would have been viewed as well-spoken and educated and as sane as the next man. Unfortunately, the next man was Foul Ole Ron.

  The other eight people were Altogether Andrews.

  Altogether Andrews was one man with considerably more than one mind. In a rest state, when he had no particular problem to confront, there was no sign of this except a sort of background twitch and flicker as his features passed randomly under the control of, variously, Jossi, Lady Hermione, Little Sidney, Mr. Viddle, Curly, the Judge, and Tinker; there was also Burke, but the crew had only ever seen Burke once and never wanted to again, so the other seven personalities kept him buried. Nobody in the body answered to the name of Andrews. In the opinion of the Duck Man, who was probably the best in the crew at thinking in a straight line, Andrews had probably been some innocent and hospitable person of a psychic disposition who had simply been overwhelmed by the colonizing souls.

  Only among the gentle crew under the bridge could a consensus person like Andrews find an accommodating niche. They’d welcomed him, or them, to the fraternity around the smoky fire. Someone who wasn’t the same person for more than five minutes at a time could fit right in.

  One other thing that united the crew—although probably nothing could unite Altogether Andrews—was a readiness to believe that a dog could talk. The group around the smoldering fire believed they had heard a lot of things talk, such as walls. A dog was easy by comparison. Besides, they respected the fact that Gaspode had the sharpest mind of the lot and never drank anything that corroded the container.

  “Let’s try this again, shall we?” he said. “If you sell thirty of the things, you’ll get a dollar. A whole dollar. Got that?”

  “Bugrit.”

  “Quack.”

  “Haaargghhh…gak!”

  “How much is that in old boots?”

  Gaspode sighed. “No, Arnold. You can use the money to buy as many old—”

  There was a rumble from Altogether Andrews, and the rest of the crew went very still. When Altogether Andrews was quiet for a while, you never knew who he was going to be.

  There was always the possibility that it would be Burke.

  “Can I ask a question?” said Altogether Andrews, in a rather hoarse treble.

  The crew relaxed. That sounded like Lady Hermione. She wasn’t a problem.

  “Yes…Your Ladyship?” said Gaspode.

  “This wouldn’t be…work, would it?”

  The mention of the word sent the rest of the crew into a fugue of stress and bewildered panic.

  “Haaaruk…gak!”

  “Bugrit!”

  “Quack!”

  “No, no, no,” said Gaspode hurriedly. “It’s hardly work, is it? Just handing out stuff and takin’ money? Doesn’t sound like work to me.”

  “I ain’t working!” shouted Coffin Henry. “I am socially inadequate in the whole area of doing anything!”

  “We do not work,” said Arnold Sideways. “We is gentlemen of les-u-are.”

  “Ahem,” said Lady Hermione.

  “Gentlemen and ladies of les-u-are,” said Arnold gallantly.

  “This is a very nasty winter. Extra money would certainly come in handy,” said the Duck Man.

  “What for?” said Arnold.

  “We could live like kings on a dollar a day, Arnold.”

  “What, you mean someone’d chop our heads off?”

  “No, I—”

  “Someone’d climb up inside the privy with a red-hot poker and—”

  “No! I meant—”

  “Someone’d drown us in a butt of wine?”

  “No, that’s dying like kings, Arnold.”

  “I shouldn’t reckon there is a butt of wine big enough that you couldn’t drink your way out of it,” muttered Gaspode. “So, what about it, masters? Oh, and mistress, o’course. Shall I—shall Ron tell that lad we’re up for it?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Okay.”

  “Gawwwark…pt!”

  “Bugrit!”

  They looked at Altogether Andrews. His lips moved, his face flickered. Then he held up five democratic fingers.

  “The ayes have it,” said Gaspode.

  Mr. Pin lit a cigar. Smoking was his one vice. At least, it was his only vice that he thought of as a vice. The others were just job skills.

  Mr. Tulip’s vices were also limitless, but he owned up to cheap aftershave because a man has to drink something. The drugs didn’t count, if only because the only time he’d ever got real ones was when they’d robbed a horse doctor and he’d taken a couple of big pills that had made every vein on his body stand out like a purple hosepipe.

  The pair were not thugs. At least, they did not see themselves as thugs. Nor were they thieves. At least, they never thought of themselves as thieves. They did not think of themselves as assassins. Assassins were posh, and had rules. Pin and Tulip—the New Firm, as Mr. Pin liked to refer to them—did not have rules.

  They thought of themselves as facilitators. They were men who made things happen, men who were going places.

  It has to be added that when one says “they thought” it means “Mr. Pin thought.” Mr. Tulip used his head all the time, from a distance of about eight inches, but he was not, except in one or two unexpected areas, a man given much to using his brain. On the whole, he left Mr. Pin to do the polysyllabic cogitation.

  Mr. Pin, on the other hand, was not very good at sustained, mindless violence, and admired the fact that Mr. Tulip had an apparently bottomless supply. When they had first met, and had recognized in each other the qualities that would make their partnership greater than the sum of its parts, he’d seen that Mr. Tulip was not, as he appeared to the rest of the world, just another nut job. Some negative qualities can reach a pitch of perfection that changes their very nature, and Mr. Tulip had turned anger into an art.

  It was not anger at anything. It was just pure, platonic anger from somewhere in the reptilian depths of the soul, a fountain of never-ending red-hot grudge; Mr. Tulip lived his life on that thin line most people occupy just before they haul off and hit someone repeatedly with a wrench. For Mr. Tulip, anger was the ground state of being. Pin had occasionally wondered what had happened to the man to make him as angry as that, but to Tulip the past was another country with very, very well guarded borders. Sometimes Mr. Pin heard him screaming at night.

  It was quite hard to hire Mr. Tulip and Mr. Pin. You had to know the right people. To be more accurate, you had to know the wrong people, and you got to know them by hanging around a certain kind of bar and surviving, which was kind of a first test. The wrong people, of course, would not know Mr. Tulip and Mr. Pin. But they would know a man. And that man would, in a general sense, express the guarded opinion that he may know how to get in touch with men of a Pin-like or Tulipolitic disposition. He could not exactly recall much more than that at the moment, due to memory loss brought on by lack of money. Once cured, he may indicate in a general kind of way anothe
r address where you would meet, in a dark corner, a man who would tell you emphatically that he had never heard of anyone called Tulip or Pin. He would also ask where you would be at, say, nine o’clock tonight.

  And then you would meet Mr. Tulip and Mr. Pin. They would know you had money, they would know you had something on your mind, and, if you had been really stupid, they now knew your address.

  And it had therefore come as a surprise to the New Firm that their latest client had come straight to them. This was worrying. It was also worrying that he was dead. Generally the New Firm had no problem with corpses, but they didn’t like them to speak.

  Mr. Slant coughed. Mr. Pin noticed that this created a small cloud of dust. For Mr. Slant was a zombie.

  “I must reiterate,” said Mr. Slant, “that I am a mere facilitator in this matter—”

  “Just like us,” said Mr. Tulip.

  Mr. Slant indicated with a look that he would never in a thousand years be just like Mr. Tulip, but he said: “Quite so. My clients wished me to find some…experts. I found you. I gave you some sealed instructions. You have accepted the contract. And I understand that as a result of this you have made certain…arrangements. I do not know what those arrangements are. I will continue not to know what those arrangements are. My relationship with you is, as they say, on the long finger. Do you understand me?”

  “What —ing finger is that?” said Mr. Tulip. He was getting jittery in the presence of the dead lawyer.

  “We see each other only when necessary, we say as little as possible.”

  “I hate —ing zombies,” said Mr. Tulip. That morning he’d tried something he’d found in a box under the sink. If it cleaned drains, he’d reasoned, that meant it was chemical. Now he was getting strange messages from his large intestine.

  “I am sure the feeling is mutual,” said Mr. Slant.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” said Mr. Pin. “You’re saying that if this goes bad you’ve never seen us in your life—”

  “Ahem…” Mr. Slant coughed.

  “Your afterlife,” Mr. Pin corrected himself. “Okay. What about the money?”

  “As requested, thirty thousand dollars for special expenses will be included in the sum already agreed.”

  “In gems. Not cash.”

  “Of course. And my clients would hardly write you a check. It will be delivered tonight. And perhaps I should mention one other matter.” His dry fingers shuffled through the dry papers in his dry briefcase, and he handed Mr. Pin a folder.

  Mr. Pin read it. He turned a few pages quickly.

  “You may show it to your monkey,” said Mr. Slant.

  Mr. Pin managed to grab Mr. Tulip’s arm before it reached the zombie’s head. Mr. Slant did not even flinch.

  “He’s got the story of our lives, Mr. Tulip!”

  “So? I can still rip his —ing stitched-on head right off!”

  “No, you cannot,” said Mr. Slant. “Your colleague will tell you why.”

  “Because our legal friend here will have made a lot of copies, won’t you, Mr. Slant? And probably lodged them in all kinds of places in case he di—in case—”

  “…of accidents,” said Mr. Slant smoothly. “Well done. You have had an interesting career so far, gentlemen. You are quite young. Your talents have taken you a long way in a short time and given you quite a reputation in your chosen profession. While of course I have no idea about the task you are undertaking—no idea whatsoever, I must stress—I have no doubt that you will impress us all.”

  “Does he know about the contract in Quirm?” said Mr. Tulip.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Pin.

  “That stuff with the wire netting and the crabs and that —ing banker?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the thing with the puppies and that kid?”

  “He does now,” said Mr. Pin. “He knows nearly everything. Very clever. You believe you know where the bodies are buried, Mr. Slant.”

  “I’ve talked to one or two of them,” said Mr. Slant. “But it would appear that you have never committed a crime within Ankh-Morpork, otherwise, of course, I could not talk to you.”

  “Who says we’ve never committed a —ing crime in Ankh-Morpork?” Mr. Tulip demanded.

  “As I understand it, you have never been to this city before.”

  “Well? We’ve had all —ing day.”

  “Have you been caught?” said Mr. Slant.

  “No!”

  “Then you have committed no crime. May I express the hope that your business here does not involve any kind of criminal activity?”

  “Perish the thought,” said Mr. Pin.

  “The City Watch here are quite dogged in some respects. And the various Guilds jealously guard their professional territories.”

  “We hold the police in high regard,” said Mr. Pin. “We have a great respect for the work they do.”

  “We —ing love policemen,” said Mr. Tulip.

  “If there was a policeman’s ball, we would be among the first to buy a ticket,” said Mr. Pin.

  “’Specially if it was mounted on a plinth, or a little display stand of some sort,” said Mr. Tulip, “’cos we like beautiful things.”

  “I just wanted to be sure that we understood one another,” said Mr. Slant, snapping his case closed. He stood up, nodding to them, and walked stiffly out of the room.

  “What a—” Mr. Tulip began, but Mr. Pin raised a finger to his lips. He crossed silently to the door and opened it. The lawyer had gone.

  “He knows what we’re —ing here for,” Mr. Tulip whispered hotly. “What’s he —ing pretending for?”

  “Because he’s a lawyer,” said Mr. Tulip. “Nice place, this,” he added, in a slightly overloud voice.

  Mr. Tulip looked around.

  “Nah,” he said dismissively. “I fort that at the start, but it’s just a late eighteenth-century copy of the —ing Baroque Style. They got dimensions all wrong. Didja see them pillars in the hall? Didja? —ing sixth-century Ephebian with Second Empire Djelibeybian —ing finials! It was all I could do not to laugh.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Pin. “As I have remarked before, Mr. Tulip, in many ways you are a very unexpected man.”

  Mr. Tulip walked over to a shrouded picture and tweaked the cloth aside. “Well, —me, it’s a —ing de Quirm,” he said. “I seen a print of it. Woman Holding Ferret. He did it just after he moved from Genua and was influenced by —ing Caravati. Look at that —ing brushwork, will ya? See the way the line of the hand draws the —ing eye into the picture? Look at the quality of the light on the landscape you can see through the —ing window there. See the way the ferret’s nose follows you around the room? That’s —ing genius, that is. I don’t mind telling you that if I was here by myself I’d be in —ing tears.”

  “It’s very pretty.”

  “Pretty?” said Mr. Tulip, despairing of his colleague’s taste. He walked over to a statue by the door and stared hard at it, then ran his fingers lightly across the marble.

  “I fort so! This is a —ing Scolpini! I’d bet anything. But I’ve never seen it in a catalogue. And it’s been left in an empty house, where anyone could just —ing walk in and nick it!”

  “This place is under powerful protection. You saw the seals on the door.”

  “Guilds? Bunch of —ing amateurs. We could go through this place like a hot knife through —ing thin ice, and you know it. Amateurs and rocks and lawn ornaments and dead men walking about…we could knock this —ing place over.”

  Mr. Pin said nothing. A similar idea had occurred to him, but in him, unlike his colleague, deed did not automatically follow upon what passed for thought.

  The Firm had, indeed, not operated in Ankh-Morpork before. Mr. Pin had kept away because, well, there were plenty of other cities, and an instinct for survival had told him that the Big Wahooni* should wait a while. He’d had a Plan, ever since he’d met Mr. Tulip and found that his own inventiveness combined with Tulip’s incessant anger promised a s
uccessful career. He’d developed their business in Genua, Pseudopolis, Quirm—cities smaller and easier to navigate than Ankh-Morpork, although, these days, it seemed they increasingly resembled it.

  The reason that they had done well, he’d realized, was that sooner or later people went soft. Take the trollish Breccia, f’rinstance. Once the Honk and Slab route had been established all the way to Uberwald, and the rival clans had been eliminated, the trolls had got soft. The tons acted like society lords. It was the same everywhere—the big old gangs and families reached some kind of equilibrium with society and settled down to be a specialist kind of businessman. They cut down on henchmen and employed butlers instead. And then, where there was a bit of difficulty, they needed muscle that could think…and there was the New Firm, ready and willing.

  And waiting.

  One day there’d be time for a new generation, Mr. Pin thought. One with a new way of doing things, one without the shackles of tradition holding them back. Happening people. Mr. Tulip, for example, happened all the time.

  “Hey, will you —ing look at this?” said the happening Tulip, who had uncovered another painting. “Signed by Gogli, but it’s a —ing fake. Look at the way the light falls here, wilya? And the leaves on this tree? If —ing Gogli painted that, it was with his —ing foot. Probably by some —ing pupil…”

  While they had been marking time in the city, Mr. Pin had followed Mr. Tulip, trailing scouring powder and canine worming tablets, through one after another of the city’s art galleries. The man had insisted. It had been an education, mostly for the curators.

  Mr. Tulip had the instinct for art which he did not have for chemistry. Sneezing icing sugar and dribbling foot powder, he was ushered into private galleries, where he ran his bloodshot eye over nervously proffered trays of ivory miniatures.

  Mr. Pin had watched in silent admiration while his colleague spoke colorfully and at length on the differences between ivory faked the old way, with bones, and the —ing new way the —ing dwarfs have come up with, using —ing refined oil, chalk and —ing Spirits of Nacle.

  He’d lurched over to the tapestries, declaimed at length about high and low weaving, burst into tears in front of a verdant scene, and then demonstrated that the gallery’s prized thirteenth-century Sto Lat tapestry couldn’t be more than a hundred years old because, “see that —ing bit of purple there? No way was that —ing dye around then. And…what’s this? An Agatean embalming pot from the P’gi Su Dynasty? Someone took you to the —ing cleaners, mister. The glaze is rubbish.”