Night Watch - Terry Pratchett [24]
The captain’s door was open. The tired-looking old man behind the desk glanced up.
“Be seated,” said Tilden coldly. “Thank you, Snouty.”
Vimes had mixed memories of Captain Tilden. He had been a military man before being given this job as a kind of pension, and that was a bad thing in a senior copper. It meant he looked to Authority for orders, and obeyed them, whereas Vimes found it better to look to Authority for orders and then filter those orders through a fine mesh of common sense, adding a generous scoop of creative misunderstanding and maybe even incipient deafness if circumstances demanded, because Authority rarely descended to street level. Tilden set too great a store by shiny breastplates and smartness on parade. You had to have some of that stuff, that was true enough. You couldn’t let people slob around. But although he’d never voice the view in public, Vimes liked to see a bit of battered armor around the place. It showed that someone had been battering it. Besides, when you were lurking in the shadows you didn’t want to gleam…
There was an Ankh-Morpork flag pinned to one wall, the red faded to threadbare orange. Rumor had it that Tilden saluted it every day. There was also a very large silver inkstand with a gilt regimental crest on it, which occupied quite a lot of the desk; Snouty polished it every morning and it shone. Tilden had never quite left the army behind.
Still, Vimes retained a soft spot for the old man. He’d been a successful soldier, as these things went; he’d generally been on the winning side, and had killed more of the enemy by good if dull tactics than of his own men by bad but exciting ones. He’d been, in his own way, kind and reasonably fair; the men of the Watch had run rings around him, without him ever noticing.
Now Tilden was giving him the Long Stare With Associated Paperwork. It was supposed to mean: we know all about you, so why don’t you tell us all about yourself? But he really wasn’t any good at it.
Vimes returned the stare blankly.
“What is your name again?” said Tilden, becoming aware that Vimes was the better starer.
“Keel,” said Vimes. “John Keel.” And…what the hell…“Look,” he said, “you’ve only got one piece of paper there that means anything, and that’s the report from that sergeant, assuming he can write.”
“As a matter of fact, I have two pieces of paper,” said the captain. “The other one concerns the death of John Keel, what?”
“What? For a scrap with the Watch?”
“In the current emergency, that would be quite sufficient for the death penalty,” said Tilden, leaning forward. “But, ha, perhaps it won’t be necessary in this case, because John Keel died yesterday. You beat him up and robbed him, what? You took his money but you didn’t bother with the letters, because your sort can’t read, what? So you wouldn’t have known that John Keel was a policeman, what?”
“What?”
Vimes stared at the skinny face with its triumphantly bristling mustache and the small, faded, blue eyes.
And then there was the sound of someone industriously sweeping the floor in the corridor outside. The captain looked past him, growled, and hurled a pen.
“Get him out of here!” he barked. “What’s the little devil doing here at this time of night, anyway?”
Vimes turned his head. There was a skinny, wizened-looking man standing in the doorway, bearded and as bald as a baby. He was grinning stupidly and holding a broom.
“He’s cheap, sir, hnah, and it’s best if he comes in when it’s, hnah, quiet,” Snouty murmured, grabbing the little man by a stick-thin elbow. “C’mon, out you get, Mister Lousy—”
So now the crossbow wasn’t pointing at Vimes. And he had several pounds of metal on his wrists or, to put it another way, his arms were a hammer. He went to stand up…
Vimes woke up and stared at the ceiling. There was a deep rumbling somewhere nearby. Treadmill? Watermill?
It was going to be a corny