Here I did my imitation of the wizard Zulkeh:
” ‘Tis a truth known to babes in swaddling clothes, the epistemological distinction ‘twixt bending and breaking! Did not the great sophist Euthydemus Srondrati-Piccolomini himself, in his ground-breaking A Loop Is But A Hole, argue that—”
Greyboar, the sourpuss, was not amused. But he gave up whining about professional ethics. Still and all, he made the rest of the afternoon miserable, muttering about “unforeseen entropic consequences” and such-like nonsense.
When the time came to leave, I was right glad of it. We hired a carriage. Bit too far to walk, and besides, wouldn’t be proper showing up at Avare’s mansion without suitably snooty transport. As much money as we were making for the job, I wasn’t about to quibble over a few shillings. The more so since it was midwinter. New Sfinctr’s winters are fairly mild—it’s about the only saving grace the city has, business opportunities aside. But a mild winter’s still not summer.
My misery wasn’t over, though, because Greyboar started whining all over again after I explained the details of the plan. It was the part about the brandy that upset him.
“And why shouldn’t we wait until after we’ve had the brandy?” I demanded. “Avare’s brandy is the best in town, you know that.”
“I don’t care,” grumbled the strangler. “You can twist professional ethics all you want, you miserable little lawyer, but I still think it’s going too far to drink a man’s brandy when you’re planning to put the big choke on him.”
“What’s the difference? He’s a chokee no matter how you look at it. And enough about professional ethics! He won’t start talking business until after the brandy, you know it as well as I do. So we finish the brandy—the best in the world, that brandy is—and then, when he starts in about a job, we just politely decline. If you want to be an absolute stickler about it, you can explain to him that we have a prior engagement which prevents us from accepting his commission—professional ethics, don’t you know? Then you give him the squeeze.”
He hemmed and hawed, but he came around eventually. I knew he would. He loved good brandy, Greyboar did, but he was too cheap to buy any for himself. Well, actually, it’d probably be more accurate to say that I was too cheap to let him.
At eight o’clock sharp, we presented ourselves at the front gate of the mansion. Henry himself came out to let us in. He ushered us through the grounds—waving off the dogs and their keepers—and into the mansion itself. He took off our overcoats and hung them in the vestibule. Then he led us up the main staircase onto the second floor, and from there it was but a short distance to the study.
I don’t know what it is about rich people that they always have to have a “study.” Not the scholarly types, as a rule, your robber barons. I’ll give Avare this much, his study actually had a lot of books in it. Nary a stuffed animal in the room. And the books all looked well read, too.
Of course, his library was highly specialized. One whole wall was taken up by much-thumbed copies of The Encyclopedia of Exploitation—all 788 volumes, he had the entire set. Another wall was taken up by leather-bound first editions. Top-flight stuff. All the great classics on the subject ever written by either one of the world’s great scholarly clans: Rockefeller Laebmauntsforscynneweëld’s trilogy: Plundering the Poor, Pillaging the Plebes and Peeling the Paupers. J. P. Sfondrati-Piccolomini’s Beg and Be Damned. On and on.
Secular writings, mostly, but he had a fair number of the Ecclesiarchy’s “Tomes for Troubled Times,” too—for instance, Paolo Pipa, Cardinal Bufo’s The Sin of Wages.
His proudest literary possession was encased in glass and mounted on the wall above the fireplace. The first time I saw it, I couldn’t believe it. But Avare assured us it was genuine. Only four authentic copies in the world, according to him. An ancient piece of vellum, bearing a fragment of the legendary Primitive Accumulation of Capital, by Genghis Laebmauntsforscynneweëld.
As usual, Avare greeted us from his easy chair by the fireplace. In all the hours I spent with the old guy, I never once saw him out of the chair. “At my age,” he’d explained, “one must conserve one’s energies. My legs have long since withered to sticks, but one doesn’t need legs to ruin rivals.”