The Patrician nodded.
"I shall deal with the matter momentarily, " he said. It was a good word. It always made people hesitate. They were never quite sure whether he meant he'd deal with it now, or just deal with it briefly. And no one ever dared ask.
Van Pew backed down.
"A full apology, mark you. I have a position to maintain, " he added.
"Thank you. Do not let me detain you, " said the Patrician, once again giving the language his own individual spin.
"Right. Good. Thank you. Very well, " said the thief.
' 'After all, you have such a lot of work to do, '' Lord Vetinari went on.
"Well, of course this is the case. " The thief hesitated. The Patrician's last remark had barbs on it. You found yourself waiting for him to strike.
"Er, " he said, hoping for a clue.
"With so much business being conducted, that is."
Panic took over the thief's features. Randomised guilt flooded his mind. It wasn't a case of what had he done, it was a question of what the Patrician had found out about. The man had eyes everywhere, none of them so terrifying as the icy blue ones just above his nose.
"I, er, don't quite follow... "he began.
"Curious choice of targets. " The Patrician picked up a sheet of paper. " For example, a crystal ball belonging to a fortune teller in Sheer Street. A small ornament from the temple of Offler the Crocodile God. And so on. Gewgaws. "
"I am afraid I really don't know-" said the head thief. The Patrician leaned forward.
"No unlicensed thieving, surely?" he said.
"I shall look into it directly!" stuttered the head thief. "Depend upon it!"
The Patrician gave him a sweet smile. "I'm sure I can, " he said. "Thank you for coming to see me. Don't hesitate to leave. "
The thief shuffled out. It was always like this with the Patrician, he reflected bitterly. You came to him with a perfectly reasonable complaint. Next thing you knew, you were shuffling out backwards, bowing and scraping, relieved simply to be getting away. You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn't, he sent men to come and take it away.
When he'd gone Lord Vetinari rang the little bronze bell that summoned his secretary. The man's name, despite his handwriting, was Lupine Wonse. He appeared, pen poised.
You could say this about Lupine Wonse. He was neat. He always gave the impression of just being completed. Even his hair was so smoothed-down and oiled it looked as though it had been painted on.
"The Watch appears to be having some difficulty with the Thieves' Guild, " said the Patrician. "Van Pew has been in here claiming that a member of the Watch arrested him. "
"What for, sir?"
"Being a thief, apparently. "
"A member of the Watch? " said the secretary.
"I know. But just sort it out, will you?"
The Patrician smiled to himself.
It was always hard to fathom Lord Vetinari's idiosyncratic sense of humour, but a vision of the red-faced, irate head thief kept coming back to him.
One of the Patrician's greatest contributions to the reliable operation of Ankh-Morpork had been, very early in his administration, the legalising of the ancient Guild of Thieves. Crime was
always with us, he reasoned, and therefore, if you were going to have crime, it at least should be organised crime.
And so the Guild had been encouraged to come out of the shadows and build a big Guildhouse, take their place at civic banquets, and set up their training college with day-release courses and City and Guilds certificates and everything. In exchange for the winding down of the Watch, they agreed, while trying to keep their faces straight, to keep crime levels to a level to be determined annually. That way, everyone could plan ahead, said Lord Vetinari, and part of the uncertainty had been removed from the chaos that is life.
And then, a little while later, the Patrician summoned the leading thieves again and said, oh, by the way, there was something else. What was it, now? Oh, yes...
I know who you are, he said. I know where you live. I know what kind of horse you ride. I know where your wife has her hair done. I know where your lovely children, how old are they now, my, doesn't time fly, I know where they play. So you won't forget about what we agreed, will you? And he smiled.
So did they, after a fashion.
And in fact it had turned out very satisfactorily from everyone's point of view. It took the head thieves a very little time to grow paunches and start having coats-of-arms made and meet in a proper building rather than smoky dens, which no one had liked much. A complicated arrangement of receipts and vouchers saw to it that, while everyone was eligible for the attentions of the Guild, no one had too much, and this was very acceptable - at least to those citizens who were rich enough to afford the quite reasonable premiums the Guild charged for an uninterrupted life. There was a strange foreign word for this: inn-sewer-ants. No-one knew exactly what it had originally meant, but Ankh-Morpork had made it its own.