Making Money (34 page)

Ms. Houser was standing there, not gloriously naked and pink as so recently featured in the reverie, but in a plain brown coat and an unsuitable hat with feathers in it. Suddenly awake, he fumbled urgently in his pocket for his dentures, not trusting them with the custody of his mouth while he slept. He turned his head away in a flurry of unaccustomed embarrassment, as he fought to get them in, and then fought again to get them in and the right way up. They always fought back. In desperation he wrenched them out and banged them sharply on the arm of the chair once or twice to break their spirit before ramming them into his mouth once more.

“Wshg!” said Cribbins, and slapped the side of his face. “Why, thank you, ma’am,” he said, dabbing at his mouth with his handkerchief. “I am sorry about that, but I’m a martyr to them, I shwear.”

“I didn’t like to disturb you,” Ms. Houser went on, her horrified expression fading. “I’m sure you needed your sleep.”

“Not sleeping, ma’am but contemplating,” said Cribbins, standing up. “Contemplating the fall of the unrighteous and the elevation of the godly. Is it not said that the last shall be first and the first shall be last?”

“You know, I’ve always been a bit worried about that,” said Ms. Houser. “I mean, what happens to the people who aren’t first but aren’t really last, either? You know…jogging along, doing their best?” She strolled toward the door in a manner which, quite as subtly as she thought, invited him to accompany her.

“A conundrum indeed, Berenice,” said Cribbins, following her. “The holy texts don’t mention it, but I have no doubt that…” His forehead creased. Cribbins was seldom troubled by religious questions, and this one was pretty difficult. He rose to it like a born theologian. “I have no doubt that they will be found shtill jogging along, but possibly in the opposite direction.”

“Back toward the last?” she said, looking worried.

“Ah, dear lady, remember that they will by then be the first.”

“Oh yes, I hadn’t thought of it like that. That’s the only way it could work, unless of course the original first would wait for the last to catch up.”

“That would be a miracle indeed,” said Cribbins, watching her lock the door behind them. The evening air was sharp and unwelcoming after the warmth of the newspaper room, and made the prospect of another night in the flophouse in Monkey Street seem doubly unwelcome. He needed his own miracle right now, and he had a feeling that one was shaping up right here.

“I expect it’s very hard for you, Reverend, finding a place to stay,” Ms. Houser said. He couldn’t make out her expression in the gloom.

“Oh, I have faith, shister,” he said. “If Om does not come, He shendsh—Arrg!”

And at a time like this! A spring had slipped! It was a judgment!

But agonizing as it was, it might yet have its blessing. Ms. Houser was bearing down on him with the look of a woman determined to do good at any price.

Oh, it hurt, though; it had snapped right across his tongue.

A voice behind him said, “Excuse me, I couldn’t help noticing…are you Mr. Cribbins, by any chance?”

Enraged by the pain in his mouth, Cribbins turned with murder in his heart, but “That’s Reverend Cribbins, thank you,” said Ms. Houser, and his fists unclenched.

“’Shme,” he muttered.

A pale young man in an old-fashioned clerk’s robe was staring at him.

“My name is Heretofore,” he said, “and if you are Cribbins, I know a rich man who wants to meet you. It could be your lucky day.”

“Ish zat sho?” muttered Cribbins. “And if zat man ish called Coshmo, I want to meet him. It could be hish lucky day, too. Ain’t we the lucky ones!”

“Y
OU MUST HAVE
had a moment of dread,” said Moist, as they relaxed in the marble-floored sitting room. At least, Adora Belle relaxed. Moist was searching.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, as he opened a cupboard.

“Golems weren’t built to be free. They don’t know how to handle…stuff.”

“They’ll learn. And she wouldn’t have hurt the dog,” said Adora Belle, watching him pace the room.

“You weren’t sure. I heard the way you were talking to her. ‘Put down the ladle and turn around slowly’ sort of thing.” Moist pulled open a drawer.

“Are you looking for something?”

“Some bank keys. There should be a set of them somewhere around.”

Adora Belle joined in. It was that or argue about Gladys. Besides, the suite had a great many drawers and cupboards, and it was something to do while dinner was prepared.

“What is this key for?” she asked after a mere few seconds. Moist turned. Adora Belle held up a silvery key on a ring. “No, there’ll be a lot more than that,” said Moist. “Where did you find that, anyway?”

She pointed to the big desk. “I just touched the side here and—Oh, it didn’t do it this time…”

It took Moist more than a minute to find the trigger that slid the little drawer out. Shut, it disappeared seamlessly into the grain of the wood.

“It must be for something important,” he said, heading for another desk. “Maybe he kept the rest of the keys somewhere else. Just try it on anything. I’ve just been camping here, really. I don’t know what’s in half of these drawers.”

He returned to a bureau and was sifting through its contents when he heard a click and a creak behind him and Adora Belle said, in a rather flat voice: “You did say he entertained young ladies up here, right?”

“Apparently, yes. Why?”

“Well, that’s what I call entertainment.”

Moist turned. The door of a heavy cupboard stood wide-open.

“Oh, no,” he said. “What’s all that for?”

“You are joking?”

“Well, yes, all right. But it’s all so…so black.”

“And leathery,” said Adora Belle. “Possibly rubbery, too.”

They advanced on the museum of inventive erotica just revealed. Some of it, freed at last from confinement, unfolded, slid, or, in a few cases, bounced onto the floor.

“This…” Moist prodded something, which went spoing! “…is, yes, rubbery. Definitely rubbery.”

“But all this here is pretty much frilly,” said Adora Belle. “He must have run out of ideas.”

“Either that or there were no more ideas to be had. I think he was eighty when he died,” said Moist, as a seismic shift caused some more piles to slide and slither downward.

“Well done him,” said Adora Belle. “Oh, and there’s a couple of shelves of books, too,” Adora Belle went on, investigating the gloom at the back of the cupboard. “Just here, behind the rather curious saddle and the whips. Bedtime reading, I assume.”

“I don’t think so,” said Moist, pulling out a leather-bound volume and flicking it open at a random page. “Look, it’s the old boy’s journal. Years and years of it. Good grief, there’s decades.”

“Let’s publish it and make a fortune,” said Adora Belle, kicking the heap. “Plain covers, of course.”

“No, you don’t understand. There may be something in here about Mr. Bent! There’s some secret…”

Moist ran a finger along the spines. “Let’s see, he’s fifty-two, he came here when he was about thirteen, and a few months later some people came looking for him. Old Lavish didn’t like the look of them—Ah!” He pulled out a couple of volumes. “These should tell us something, they’re around the right time…”

“What are these, and why do they jingle?” Adora Belle said, holding up a couple of strange devices.

“How should I know?”

“You’re a man.”

“Well, yes. And? I mean, I don’t go in for this stuff.”

“You know, I think it’s like horseradish,” said Adora Belle thoughtfully.

“Pardon?”

“Like…well, horseradish is good in a beef sandwich, so you have some. But one day a spoonful just doesn’t cut the mustard—”

“As it were,” said Moist, fascinated.

“—and so you have two, and soon it’s three, and eventually there’s more horseradish than beef, and then one day you realize the beef fell out and you didn’t notice.”

“I don’t think that is the metaphor you’re looking for,” said Moist, “because I have known you to make yourself a horseradish sandwich.”

“All right, but it’s still a good one,” said Adora Belle. She reached down and picked up something from the floor.

“Your keys, I think. What they were doing in there we shall never know, with any luck.”

Moist took them. The ring was heavy with keys of all sizes.

“And what shall we do with all this stuff?” Adora Belle kicked the heap again. It quivered, and somewhere inside something squeaked.

“Put it back in the cupboard?” Moist suggested uncertainly. The pile of passionless frippery had a brooding, alien look, like some sea monster of the abyss that had been dragged unceremoniously from its native darkness into the light of the sun.

“I don’t think I could face it,” said Adora Belle. “Let’s just leave the door open and let it crawl back by itself. Hey!” This was to Mr. Fusspot, who’d trotted smartly out of the room with something in his mouth.

“Tell me that was just an old rubber bone,” she said. “Please?”

“No-oh,” said Moist, shaking his head. “I think that would definitely be the wrong description. I think it was…was…it was not an old rubber bone, is what it was.”

“N
OW LOOK,” SAID
Hubert, “don’t you think we’d know if the gold had been stolen? People talk about that sort of thing! I’m pretty certain it’s a fault in the crossover multivalve, right here.” He tapped a thin glass tube.

“I don’t think the Glooper ith wrong, thur,” said Igor gloomily.

“Igor, you realize that if the Glooper is right then I’ll have to believe there is practically no gold in our vaults?”

“I believe the Glooper ith not in error, thur.” Igor took a dollar out of his pocket and walked over to the well.

“If you would be tho good ath to watch the ‘lotht money’ column, thur?” he said, and dropped the coin into the dark waters. It gleamed for a moment as it sank beyond the pockets of mankind.

In one corner of the Glooper’s convoluted glass tubing a small blue bubble drifted up, dawdling from side to side as it rose, and burst on the surface with a faint gloop.

“Oh dear,” said Hubert.

T
HE COMIC CONVENTION,
when two people are dining at a table designed to accommodate twenty, is that they sit at either end. Moist and Adora Belle didn’t try it, but instead huddled together. Gladys stood at the other end, a napkin over one arm, her eyes two sullen glows.

The sheep skull didn’t help Moist’s frame of mind at all. Peggy had arranged it as a centerpiece, with flowers around it, but the cool sunglasses were getting on his nerves.

“How good is a golem’s hearing?” he said.

“Extremely,” said Adora Belle. “Look, don’t worry, I have a plan.”

“Oh, good.”

“No, seriously. I’ll take her out tomorrow.”

“Can’t you just—” Moist hesitated, and then mouthed: “
change the words in her head?
”

“She’s a free golem!” said Adora Belle sharply. “How would you like it?”

Moist remembered Owlswick and the turnip. “Not much,” he admitted.

“With free golems you should change minds by persuasion. I think I can do that.”

“Aren’t your golden golems due to arrive tomorrow?”

“I hope so.”

“It’s going to be a busy day. I’m going to launch paper money and you’re going to march gold through the streets.”

“We couldn’t leave them underground. Anyway, they might not be golden. I’ll go and see Flead in the morning.”

“We will go and see him. Together!”

She patted Moist’s arm. “Never mind. There could be worse things than golden golems.”

“I can’t think what they are,” said Moist, a phrase that he later regretted. “I’d like to take people’s minds off gold—”

He stopped and stared at the sheep, which stared back in a calm enigmatic way. For some reason Moist felt it should have a saxophone and a little black beret.

“Surely they looked in the vault,” he said aloud.

“Who looked?” said Adora Belle.

“That’s where he’d go. The one thing you can depend on, right? The foundation of all that’s worthy?”

“Who’d go?”

“Mr. Bent is in the gold vault!” said Moist, standing up so quickly that his chair fell over. “He’s got all the keys!”

“Sorry? Is this the man who went haywire after making a simple mistake?”

“That’s him. He’s got a Past.”

“One of those with a capital P?”

“Exactly. Come on, let’s get down there!”

“I thought we were going to have a romantic evening?”

“We will! Right after we get him out!”

T
HE ONLY SOUND
in the vaults was the tap-tap-tapping of Adora Belle’s foot.

It was really annoying Moist as he paced up and down in front of the gold room, by the light of silver candlesticks that had been gracing the dining-room table.

“I just hope Aimsbury is keeping the broth warm,” said Adora Belle. Tap-tap tap-tap.

“Look,” said Moist. “Firstly, to open a safe like this you need to have a name like Fingers McGee, and secondly, these little lock picks aren’t up to the job.”

“Well, let’s go and find Mr. McGee. He’s probably got the right sort.” Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

“That won’t be any good because, thirdly, there’s probably no such person, and, fourthly, the vault is locked from the inside and I think he’s left the key in the lock, which is why none of these work.” He waved the key ring. “Fifthly, I’m trying to turn the key from this side with tweezers, an old trick which, it turns out, does not work!”

“Good. So we can go back to the suite?” Tap-tap tap-tap.

Moist peered again through the little spyhole in the door. A heavy plate had been slid across it on the inside, and he could just make out a glimmer of light around the edges. There was a lamp in there. What there was not, as far as he knew, was any kind of ventilation. It looked as though the vault had been built before the idea of breathing caught on. It was a man-made cave, built to contain something you never intended to take out. Gold didn’t choke.