Going Postal - Terry Pratchett [120]
“Mr. Pony,” said Gilt quietly, “I think what I see here is a conflict of cultures. Would you mind strolling along to my study, please? Igor will make you a cup of tea. Thank you so much.”
When Pony was gone, Greenyham said: “Do you know what worries me right now?”
“Do tell us,” said Gilt, folding his hands across his expensive waistcoat.
“Mr. Slant is not here.”
“He has apologized. He says he has important business,” said Gilt.
“We’re his biggest clients! What’s more important than us? No, he’s not here because he wants to be somewhere else! The damn old revenant senses trouble and he’s never there when it all goes bad. Slant always comes out smelling of roses!”
“That is at least more fragrant than his usual formaldehyde,” said Gilt. “Don’t panic, gentlemen.”
“Somebody did,” said Stowley. “Don’t tell me that fire was accidental! Was it? And what happened to poor old Fatty Horsefry, eh?”
“Calm down, my friends, calm down,” said Gilt. They’re just merchant bankers, he thought. They’re not hunters, they’re scavengers. They have no vision.
He waited until they had settled down and were regarding him with that strange and rather terrifying look that rich men wear when they think they may be in danger of becoming poor men.
“I expected something like this,” he said. “Vetinari wants to harry us, that is all.”
“Reacher, you know we’ll be in big trouble if the Trunk stops working,” said Nutmeg. “Some of us have…debts to service. If the Trunk fails for good, then people will…ask questions.”
Oh, those pauses, thought Gilt. Embezzlement is such a difficult word.
“Many of us had to work very hard to raise the cash,” said Stowley.
Yes, keeping a straight face in front of your clients must be tricky, Gilt thought. Aloud, he said, “I think we have to pay, gentlemen. I think we do.”
“Two hundred thousand?” said Greenyham. “Where do you think we can get that kind of money?”
“You got it before,” murmured Gilt.
“And what is that supposed to mean, pray?” said Greenyham, with just a little too much indignation.
“Poor Crispin came to see me the night before he died,” said Gilt, calm as six inches of snow. “Babbled about, oh, all sorts of wild things. They hardly bear repeating. I think he believed people were after him. He did, however, insist on pressing a small ledger on me. Needless to say, it is safely locked away.”
The room fell silent, its silence made deeper and hotter by a number of desperate men thinking hard and fast. They were, by their own standards, honest men, in that they only did what they knew or suspected that everyone else did, and there was never any visible blood, but just now they were men far out on a frozen sea, who’d just heard the ice creak.
“I strongly suspect that it’ll be a bit less than two hundred thousand,” said Gilt. “Pony would be a fool if he didn’t leave a margin.”
“You didn’t warn us about this, Reacher,” said Stowley resentfully.
Gilt waved his hands.
“We must speculate to accumulate!” he said. “The Post Office? Trickery and sleight of hand. Oh, von Lipwig is an ideas man, but that’s all he is. He’s made a splash, but he’s not got the stamina for the long haul. Yet, as it turns out, he will do us a favor. Perhaps we have been…a little smug, a little lax, but we have learned our lesson! Spurred by the competition, we are investing several hundred thousand dollars—”
“Several hundred?” said Greenyham. Gilt waved him into silence, and continued: “—several hundred thousand dollars in a challenging, relevant, and exciting systemic overhaul of our entire organization, focusing on our core competencies while maintaining full and listening cooperation with the communities we are proud to serve. We fully realize that our energetic attempts to mobilize the flawed infrastructure we inherited have been less than totally satisfactory, and hope and trust that our valued and loyal customers will bear with us in the coming months as we interact synergistically