Page 18 of 18
Chapter XXXVIII
Gudrun hadn't been able to make their evening drink date –something to do with deadlines- so they met outside El Tinto for Octeday lunch. Sacharissa thought that if it was going to be a boozy one –which wine quaffing suggested it would be- it was better to do it on a non-working day. They were greeted at the door by Alejandro, the handsome, muscly, long-haired waiter.
"Buenos dias, señoritas," he said, in his thick Hersheban accent. His great grandparents may have come from Hersheba but Alex had been born at the end of Sacharissa's street and had never been farther than Chirm since then.
"Afternoon, Alex," said Sacharissa.
"Good afternoon, Miss Cripslock," said Alex, dropping the act.
"This is my friend, Gudrun," she said, gesturing towards the dwarf.
"Encantado de conocerte," said Alejandro, dropping back into character.
"Forget it," said Sacharissa, "she's spoken for."
"Am I?" asked Gudrun, puzzled.
"Yes, you are," Sacharissa confirmed.
"Oh, that's nice for me," said Gudrun.
"Your usual table, miss?" asked Alex.
"Yes, please."
They quickly quaffed a bottle of La Putamadre, which Gudrun said was excellent, before confessing that she'd never quaffed wine before and was feeling a bit light-headed. Sacharissa ordered another bottle which she suggested they should sip while they ordered some food, and Gudrun suggested they might try a white. Hersheba was famous for its fish and other seafood and El Tinto's menu was famous even among Hershebans but, as its name suggested, it didn't recommend, or indeed even stock, any white wines. Eduardo, its proprietor, refused to acknowledge that such a thing even existed.
After a couple of more glasses of excellent red and as they began tucking into entrantes de mariscos1 Sacharissa decided to get down to business.
"You like working at The Guardian, don't you, Gudrun?" she asked.
"It's my dream job," Gudrun confirmed.
Really, thought Sacharissa, oh well each to their own, I suppose.
"But you're not very happy at the moment, are you?"
"No, I'm not," she replied, simply.
Gudrun always addressed William, Otto and Mr. Larssonson as "sir" and Selene as "miss" but she'd never treated Sacharissa as anything other than an equal. Sacharissa liked this, she thought, especially as she'd never thought of herself as Gudrun's superior, on the other hand, she'd wondered why Gudrun didn't, as she seemed so keen to behave like everyone else's inferior. So, she'd asked her.
"Oh, you could never be a boss, Sacharissa; you're too nice," Gudrun had said.
That had made her smile. It was a good thing, after all, wasn't it? She supposed.
"It's the Omnian thing, isn't it?" Sacharissa asked.
"Of course it is," said Gudrun, firmly, "we dwarfs know what it's like to be a minority that people look down on."
Sacharissa obviously wasn't going to say anything, but she couldn't help herself thinking it. Anyway, she sometimes had problems remembering that Gudrun was a dwarf; she certainly didn't look like one, what with the beardlessness and all. Mind you, when she was little people used to say she didn't look like a girl just because she had short hair.
"But The Guardian never says anything bad about the Omnians, if anything it only prints nice things."
"Oh, I know," said Gudrun, sounding slightly exasperated, "but it doesn't do enough to hold to account those rags that do."
"I think it's doing its best," said Sacharissa, defensively, and surprising herself.
"Oh, I know," Gudrun sighed, "but it isn't good enough."
She downed the remains of her glass and reached for the bottle which, rather disappointingly, she found empty. Before Sacharissa could even signal, Alejandro appeared with another, already opened, and refilled both their glasses.
"Oh, Miss Cripslock," said the waiter, "Señor Eduardo says he has a message for you."
"Really?" said Sacharissa, "Ok, I'll be over in a moment."
"Well, the message isn't exactly from the Señor, he's just holding it. It's a letter from your girlfriend, the blonde one. Shall I bring it over?"
The commotion of thoughts that suddenly went off inside her head had her reaching for her wineglass, and missing.
"Yes, please, Alejandro," she managed.
Alex was slightly confused by her using his fake name, but he bowed and took the empty bottle away:
"Si, Señorita."
For the next couple of minutes Sacharissa didn't feel she was really in the restaurant at all. It had started with the word "girlfriend". No problem with that: she had a number of girl friends, of course, including Gudrun. But somehow "girlfriend" and Honeysuckle belonged together in a different way. But what was this message about? Was it a "Dear Joan" letter? Was it something worse? Could there be anything thing worse?
It turned out that there could be something worse. A great deal worse.
"…and Mr. Larssonson thinks the same thing because…" Gudrun was saying when Sacharissa had finished reading and held up her hand.
"Read this," she said, passing the letter over.
It was terrible, horrible, dreadful… she couldn't imagine why, or even how, people could be so vile. She was upset, of course she was, but yet the picture of the letter inside her head just looked like this:
"My darling Sacharissa,
All my love,
Your Honeysuckle."
The worst thing about the letter, the worst thing by a long way, was that it told her the woman she loved wasn't safe and was a long way away. But that didn't mean there was nothing she could do about it.
"We have to get back to the office," said Gudrun, suddenly –and surprisingly- sober.
"You go straight to the office," said Sacharissa, also amazingly clear headed, "I'll meet you there, but first I'm going to tell the Watch."
"Then we'll need a copy," said Gudrun, "can you get me paper and pencil?"
Gudrun was an old-fashioned dwarf who refused to use, "the miracle of the age" the incredible Leonardo pen called a Quirmo,2but Sacharissa did as she was asked. Eduardo was happy to help, though he was surprised that she declined his offer of his Quirmo. She then sat in astonishment, though only briefly, while Gudrun made a copy of the letter. She hadn't thought it possible that anyone, or any thing, could move that fast. When she'd finished, after only a few seconds, she passed the finished work over to Sacharissa.
"What do you think?" she asked.
Sacharissa hardly knew what to think. It was a near perfect facsimile; the handwriting virtually identical. An imp couldn't have done it better. Hells, Otto could hardly have photographed it better; except that the top and bottom were missing. Gudrun clearly thought these were irrelevant; as would The Watch, Sacharissa understood. As long as Gudrun kept the original safe she didn't mind.
When she'd paid they kissed goodbye at the entrance and went their separate ways.
"Guard that letter with your life," Sacharissa had said.
"I will, don't worry," Gudrun had replied.
But Sacharissa did worry, she worried every stifling step of the way to Psuedopolis Yard. The heat in the city these days was close to unbearable but there was more to it than just that, more even than the swarms of horrible flies, something dark, brooding and almost suffocatingly oppressive, like a storm that refused to break. It was bound to change soon, that's what everybody said. She knew that she wasn't the only one who was worried about what would happen when it did.
Unlike the Gudrun, the desk sergeant at the Watch station looked the way a proper dwarf woman ought to, Sacharissa thought. True, she had bows in her beard, but at least they were made of wire. She was constantly amazed that human men, William being a sub-prime example, were totally unable to tell what sex a dwarf was, at least not on first meeting, and often not thereafter either. How could they not tell? The eyes, the voice, the mannerisms; the way they moved… Men simply weren't very observant, she supposed; either that or just stupid.
"I wonder if I might speak to someone about a matter of some urgency," she said in her best formal tone.
Sergeant Boltmaker looked her up and down in a suspicious cop way3 that made Sacharissa feel as if she were standing there completely naked.
"You're Cripslock from The Guardian, aren't you?" she finally asked.
"Er, yes, ma'am," Sacharissa replied, warily.
"In that case," said Boltmaker, "you have a seat in the waiting room, miss and Captain Mudd will be along to see you directly."
It appeared that Sacharissa now had "credentials", at least as far as the Watch was concerned. After only a couple of minutes not one but two officers turned up, "credentials" indeed, especially as at least one of them was a vampire.
Even the thickest, least observant, most insensitive human male could spot a female vampire from three streets away. They didn't try to hide it because they couldn't have done if they'd wanted to; they were just born that way. Sensuality radiated off Sergeant von Humpeding like a bonfire on a winter's day. Sure, she was beautiful, but lots of human women were too. Her lips were a glistening wine-red, her lashes were long and delicate, while her lids were a deep purple and her finger and toe nails were painted black; but some human women were also good at makeup. What made the sergeant different was the dark allure: "desire me; I am dangerous" it said. These were the extremes they had to resort to just to attract a man; for a woman it was overpowering. Sally noticed that Sacharissa was on the verge of fainting, so concentrated hard to tone down her natural allure level until her victim –sorry, guest- began to breathe more easily.
The captain was a different matter. Of course he was generally after different prey so needed to bait his traps accordingly. The haughty manner, the brooding gaze, the strong jaw, the broad shoulders…yip, he was a vampire too.
They led her off to an interview room where, had she not been spoken for, she would happily have let them both have their wicked way with her. Sally and Harry both realised that she was becoming intoxicated by their scent so decided to step outside for a little while. Before they did though, Harry poured her a small glass of Knurd.
"Here, drink this," He soothed, "it'll make you feel better."
If Sally had done the same thing then she would definitely have passed out.
"Can you tone it down a little bit?" Harry hissed at Sally in the corridor.
"Me," said Sally, "what about you? Do you fancy her or something?"
"Are you insane? She's not interested in me! But if you don't calm yourself she's going to have a heart attack. Can't you feel that!?"
"Oh, actually yes, I can, sorry," Sally apologised, "I just can't help myself."
"Of course you can, what are you talking about? You're a vampire."
"Only half."
"Well, half-control would do."
"I'm jealous," Sally stated flatly.
"You're jealous!?" asked Harry, incredulously, "of whom? Not little Miss Cripslock, surely?"
"Yes, little Miss Cripslock," huffed Sally, "and every other woman on the Disc that you're even nice to."
"Listen, sergeant, little Sacharissa is far more interested in you than me, or hadn't you noticed?"
"That doesn't matter," said Sally, "what matters is…"
"Enough!" cried Harry, exasperated, "we have work to do. We'll talk about this later."
"Yes, sir," Sally said, looking down, meekly, and fluttering her eyebrows.
"And don't try that act on me, sergeant, it doesn't work."
"Yes, it does," shy said, coyly.
"Well," Harry blustered, "even if it does, that's all the more reason not to…"
They were suddenly interrupted.
With her head full of fuzz and swim Sacharissa picked up the little glass and threw it back in one.
"Aaaargh!" she screamed and fell over backwards.
For a flash, the merest sliver of a second, everything was clear: there was reality, stripped of all illusion or disguise, naked and piercing in its searing ferocity. The vampires rushed back in.
"You're only supposed to sip it you daft girl!" cried Sally, sweeping her up in her arms and clutching her as tightly as the girl's body would bear while using all her powers to bring her heart-rate down from an almost uncountable number of beats to something close to normal. Then Sacharissa, finally, fainted.
"Can we perhaps continue this conversation later?" Harry asked Sally.
"Of course, sir," said Sally sweetly.
"Oh, for gods' sakes!"
When Sacharissa came round she was lying on a couch with a cold compress on her forehead. The two vampires were leaning over the desk reading the paper that she supposed she must have dropped during all the commotion.
"Eehh," she said
"Oh, you're awake," said Sally, coming over to her with a look of concern on her face, which Sacharissa assumed must be faked –though it felt real- and helping her up. "You gave me quite a turn."
And Sacharissa wasn't buying that for a second.
"Is this genuine?" asked Harry suspiciously.
"Absolutely, sir," she said, taking the chair that Sally had offered her.
"And how can you be sure of this?"
"It comes from my most reliable source inside the Bothermore organization," she replied.
"We'll need a name, I'm afraid," said Harry.
"No, no," said Sacharissa, firmly "I never give up a source."
"What, that bitch from The Post!?" exclaimed Sally, "pardon my Klatchian,"
"NO, NO! WHAT!?" cried Sacharissa, panicking. "I didn't say anything!"
"She, read it inside your head; that's why I asked you," Harry admitted.
"You can do that?" she asked, amazed.
They both nodded.
"Well, that's a dirty trick," Sacharissa harrumphed.
"We're cops," said Harry, with an apologetic smile "what can you expect?
"More than that," said Sacharissa, from about eighteen hands up, "and anyway, Katy doesn't write those horrible articles, they're written by a nasty little man and they just put Katy's name on them to deflect attention."
"Yes, and make people hate women," Sally conceded, "that does sound somehow familiar."
"Ladies, please," said Harry, "we're all on the same side here."
Neither of the women looked entirely convinced.
"Do you know this woman well?" Harry asked Sacharissa.
"Oh, yes, sir, very well," she enthused.
"Yes, you do, don't you," said Sally, with a wicked smile,4 "but not as well as you'd like."
Sacharissa felt her blush go all the way down to her toes.
"And you trust her?"
"With my life," Sacharissa squeaked.
"Good enough for me," Harry concluded. "Now, what to do about it?"
"Well," said Sacharissa, "The Guardian will publish this tomorrow; possibly even tonight."
Though she said it with some confidence , she knew she had no influence over editorial policy, which meant that Harry and Sally knew that too.
"Well," he decided, "though I would prefer it if you held off until the potential perpetrators returned from Bothermore Hall, I have no control over the free press…"
"More's the pity," muttered Sally.
"Sorry, what was that, sergeant?"
"Nothing, sir," said Sally, snapping to attention.
"Can I say that the Watch would like the people mentioned in the Bothermore Letter to help it with its inquiries?" asked Sacharissa.
"I don't know," said Harry, "have you tried saying it before?"
"Oh, yes," Sacharissa confirmed.
"Then by all means," said Harry.
"Can I quote you on that?"
"By all means," he replied, slightly puzzled.
"Thank you, sir," said Sacharissa, scribbling furiously in her notebook.
"Then I think this meeting is at an end," he concluded. "Thank you, Miss. Cripslock and we bid you, good day. I trust you will keep us informed of any future developments."
"Of course I shall, sir. Thank you, captain, and thank you, sergeant and good day to you."
Once she was back on the street she felt elated and was already running towards the press room. Yes it had been tense, fraught, difficult, embarrassing and occasionally even frightening, but she'd done what she'd come to do: she'd told the Watch what they needed to know and she'd got them on her –sorry, their- side, so overall she thought it had gone rather well.
"That didn't go well at all, did it?" said Harry.
"No, sir," Sally agreed.
"Oh well, can't have everything, I suppose."
"No, sir."
"I'm going arrange stakeouts for the offices of The Banner, The Post, The Tribune and The Chronicle and the Guild of Lenders. Plus the Little Valued Committee of Small Importance, or whatever it's called, in case any of these thing slimy things slitter in early."
"Yes, sir."
"Will you inform the Commander of all this, sergeant?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good. Shall I come round to your flat this evening?"
"Yes, please, sir."5
"Will it be very neat and tidy?" he asked, excitedly.
"Oh, yes, sir," she replied, breathlessly.
"Dusted?" he asked, tremulously.
"Of course, sir."
"Will you call me 'sir' all night?"
"No, sir."
"Oh well, can't have everything, I suppose."
By the time she reached headquarters Sacharissa was exhausted, having run virtually all the way. It was bad enough that she'd had to run in her daft, too tight, high-heeled shoes; but her ridiculous dress, in this heat, meant that by the time she reached the top door she was as wet as if she'd been standing under one of those new-fashioned Leonardo devices called a "rainer". A cold one of those right now would have been luxury, though the sweat was cooling her down at least a bit.
She had to bang on the door three times just to wake she sleepy dwarf who was sitting guard behind it and, once admitted, ran down the stairs so fast that she couldn't stop at the bottom and ran directly into Otto. He caught her, very gently, by the arms and it took a moment for her to realise that her feet weren't touching the ground.
"Good eefnink, Sacharissa," he said "I trust you are vell."
"Yes, thank you, sir," she giggled. There was too much of this 'sir' business going on at the moment, she thought. And far too much giggling. He lowered her gently to the floor and then simply went back to what he'd been doing without another word. Looking round the room she could see why: everyone was just too busy.
Gudrun was simply a whir of activity as she ran off print after print from her press. Otto and Selene took each copy and either hung it up to dry or blew strangely warm breath on it and folded it into a pile.
On the walls was the front page. No, not the front page but the front pages. Either The Guardian was going international or it was trying to capture every possible reader in Ankh-Morpork; possible both. Between them William, Selene, Otto and Gudrun spoke a lot of languages, and understood their attendant cultures, so they were aiming for a wide readership, ridiculously so. Each front page bore an Otto photograph of Lord Bothermore's fat, ugly face under the title but they were all set with different headlines. Sacharissa wasn't skilled in languages –she only spoke AM, and a bit of Hersheban- but she had a good idea which languages these headlines represented and who was responsible for each:
"Meister des Hasses", beneath Bothermore's photo, was obviously from Otto and in Uberwaltsch. In the Genuanesse version Selene had placed "Nous accusons!" above the picture and in the Quirmzzi one "Pazzo!" below. Gudrun's dwarfish –Copperhead- exhortation: "Skær dette hoved med en økse!" was actually printed over Bothermore's face, which Sacharissa thought was almost certainly a publishing first, clever Gudrun. But the only ones she really understood were the ones she thought were certainly written by William. In the Hersheban version beneath Bothermore's photo ran the words: "Hijo de puta!"6
In the AM version there was one word above the photo and one below: above it was, in capitals, "DAMNED" and beneath it "TRAITOR". Much though she despised Lord Bothermore she couldn't see quite how the charge of treason was going to stick, but then editorial policy at The Guardian remained something of a mystery to her. She would have asked William but he was so busy in his office that he was chain-pencilling; he had a pencil in each hand, a pencil behind each ear and one between his teeth. He was trying to write with all of them simultaneously and looked busier than a bluebottle trying to find the open half of a half-open window.
She tapped him on the shoulder and he span round, so shocked that his mouth sprang open and the pencil fell out of it. She caught it deftly and held it up in front of him.
"You dropped this," she said.
"SCOOP!" he cried. All those capitals had clearly gone to his head.
"I thought that was Selene."
"Not anymore, you've taken her title."
"Thank the gods!" called Selene from the print-room.
"What have they got to do with it?" he shouted back.
"I have more stuff I need to write up," she said waving her hand in front of his mad, bulging eyes.
"Grab the other side of my desk," he said, "but be quick, we're on a deadline."
"Oh, is that what the problem is?" she said as she began to write up her notes, but sarcasm was clearly lost on him at the moment.
"Honestly though, Sacharissa," he said, in an earnest tone, this stuff is pure gold; it's going to make The Guardian's name."
"And hopefully save a few thousand Ominian lives," she said haughtily.
"Eh, hopefully is an adverb, so how can…?"
"Don't even start on that," she warned.
"Ok," he said, "I'm glad to see you kept your relationship with your source strictly professional."
"Ah, well, yes, on that front…" she began, flustered and blushing.
"Anything for a story, right?"
"Left!" she said, coldly, "as in: it should have been left in the barroom where you talk about these sorts of things with your drinking buddies."
"I don't have any drinking buddies," he said.
"I know, and I can't, for the life of me, think why," she sneered.
"Look," he suggested, "can we leave these things aside for the moment? We have a paper to get out.
"For the moment," she agreed, "duty first."
The first edition of The Guardian's Monday exclusive was already being sold on the streets before midnight and even then it was doing a roaring trade. By dawn, and the fourth edition, it was only through magic that the ink wasn't still wet.
1 This was Hersheban for "unidentifiable things from the depths of the Ocean, the nature of which it is best not to enquire into too deeply". It was a very economical language.
2 This fiendish device did not have to be dipped in ink as it contained a little tube of ink inside itself which fed a little ball instead of a point. Witchcraft was as nothing by comparison.
3 She knew lots of cops from The Duck, but they were different people off duty.
4 Female vampires were particularly good at this and sometimes competitions were held at balls to find who could smile most wickedly. Lucy had been universally acknowledged to be one of its most devilish proponents. Sally's wasn't even within a league but it was still more than a little mischievous.
5 It was now after six o'clock, after all.
6 In addition to being rather economical, Hersheban was famous for being rather abrupt. It had, for example, no words for "please" or "thank you". Or "fluffy".