Making Money

‘Yessir. I know where I can get a nice little second-hand one with an oven and everything. Painted up nice, too. Wally the Gimp is quitting the jacket potato business ’cos of stress and he’ll let me have it for fifteen dollars, cash down. A not-to-be-missed opportunity, sir.’ He looked nervously at Mr Bent and added: ‘I could pay you back at a dollar a week.’

‘For twenty weeks,’ said Bent.

‘Seventeen,’ said Moist.

‘But the dog just tried to—’ Bent began.

Moist waved away the objection. ‘So we have a deal, Mr Dibbler?’

‘Yessir, thankyousir,’ said Dibbler. ‘That’s a good idea you’ve got there, about the chain and everything, though, and I thank you. But I find that in this business it pays to be mobile.’

Mr Bent counted out fifteen dollars with bad grace and began to speak as soon as the door closed behind the trader. ‘Even the dog wouldn’t—’

‘But humans will, Mr Bent,’ said Moist. ‘And therein lies genius. I think he makes most of his money on the mustard, but there’s a man who can sell sizzle, Mr Bent. And that is a seller’s market.’

The last prospective borrower was heralded first by a couple of muscular men who took up positions on either side of the door, and then by a smell that overruled even the persistent odour of a Dibbler sausage. It wasn’t a particularly bad smell, putting you in mind of old potatoes or abandoned tunnels; it was what you got when you started out with a severely foul stink and then scrubbed hard but ineffectually, and it surrounded King like an emperor’s cloak.

Moist was astonished. King of the Golden River, they called him, because the foundation of his fortune was the daily collection his men made of the urine from every inn and pub in the city. The customers paid him to take it away, and the alchemists, tanners and dyers paid him to bring it to them.

But that had been only the start. Harry King’s men took away everything. You saw their carts everywhere, especially around dawn. Every rag-and-bone man and rubbish siever, every dunnikin diver, every gongfermor, every scrap-metal merchant … you worked for Harry King, they said, because a broken leg was bad for business, and Harry was all about business. They said that if a dog in the street looked even a bit strained a King’s man would be there in a flash to hold a shovel under its arse, because prime dog muck fetched 9p a bucket from the high-class tanners. They paid Harry. The city paid Harry. Everyone paid Harry. And what he couldn’t sell back to them in more fragrant form went to feed his giant compost heaps downriver, which on frosty days sent up such great plumes of steam that kids called them the cloud factories.

Apart from his hired help, King was accompanied by a skinny young man clutching a briefcase.

‘Nice place you got here,’ said Harry, sitting down in the chair opposite Moist. ‘Very sound. The wife’s been on at me to get curtains like that. I’m Harry King, Mr Lipwig. I’ve just put fifty thousand dollars in your bank.’

‘Thank you very much, Mr King. We shall do our best to look after it.’

‘You do that. And now I’d like to borrow one hundred thousand, thank you,’ said Harry, pulling out a fat cigar.

‘Have you got any security, Mr King?’ said Bent.

Harry King didn’t even look at him. He lit the cigar, puffed it into life, and waved it in the general direction of Bent.

‘Who’s this, Mr Lipwig?’

‘Mr Bent is our chief cashier,’ said Moist, not daring to look at Bent’s face.

‘A clerk, then,’ said Harry King dismissively, ‘an’ that was a clerk’s question.’

He leaned forward. ‘My name is Harry King. That’s your security, right there, an’ it should be good for a hundred grand in these parts. Harry King. Everyone knows me. I pay what’s owing an’ I take what’s owed, my word, don’t I just. My handshake is my fortune. Harry King.’

He slammed his huge hands down on the table. Except for the pinky of his left hand, which was missing, there was a heavy gold ring on each finger, 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, but Harry waved him back into his seat.

‘You want to watch that Bent,’ he said. ‘There’s something funny about him.’