Moist stared. He'd felt the snap of the rope, the choke of the noose! He'd seen the blackness welling up! He'd died!
‘I'm offering you a job, Mr Lipwig. Albert Spangler is buried, but Mr Lipwig has a future. It may, of course, be a very short one, if he is stupid. I am offering you a job, Mr Lipwig. Work, for wages. I realize the concept may not be familiar.'
Only as a form of hell, Moist thought.
‘The job is that of Postmaster General of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office.'
Moist continued to stare.
‘May I just add, Mr Lipwig, that behind you there is a door. If at any time in this interview you feel you wish to leave, you have only to step through it and you will never hear from me again.'
Moist filed that under ‘deeply suspicious'.
‘To continue: the job, Mr Lipwig, involves the refurbishment and running of the city's postal service, preparation of the international packets, maintenance of Post Office property, et cetera, et cetera—'
‘If you stick a broom up my arse I could probably sweep the floor, too,' said a voice. Moist realized it was his. His brain was a mess. It had come as a shock to find that the afterlife is this one.
Lord Vetinari gave him a long, long look.
‘Well, if you wish,' he said, and turned to a hovering clerk. ‘Drumknott, does the housekeeper have a store cupboard on this floor, do you know?'
‘Oh, yes, my lord,' said the clerk. ‘Shall I—'
‘It was a joke!' Moist burst out.
‘Oh, I'm sorry, I hadn't realized,' said Lord Vetinari, turning back to Moist. ‘Do tell me if you feel obliged to make another one, will you?'
‘Look,' said Moist, ‘I don't know what's happening here, but I don't know anything about delivering post!'
‘Mr Moist, this morning you had no experience at all of being dead, and yet but for my intervention you would nevertheless have turned out to be extremely good at it,' said Lord Vetinari sharply. ‘It just goes to show: you never know until you try'
‘But when you sentenced me—'
Vetinari raised a pale hand. ‘Ah?' he said.
Moist's brain, at last aware that it needed to do some work here, stepped in and replied: ‘Er... when you... sentenced... Albert Spangler—'
‘Well done. Do carry on.'
‘—you said he was a natural born criminal, a fraudster by vocation, an habitual liar, a perverted genius and totally untrustworthy!'
‘Are you accepting my offer, Mr Lipwig?' said Vetinari sharply.
Moist looked at him. ‘Excuse me,' he said, standing up, ‘I'd just like to check something.'
There were two men dressed in black standing behind his chair. It wasn't a particularly neat black, more the black worn by people who just don't want little marks to show. They looked like clerks, until you met their eyes.
They stood aside as Moist walked towards the door which, as promised, was indeed there. He opened it very carefully. There was nothing beyond, and that included a floor. In the manner of one who is going to try all possibilities, he took the remnant of spoon out of his pocket and let it drop. It was quite a long time before he heard the jingle.
Then he went back and sat in the chair.
‘The prospect of freedom?' he said.
‘Exactly,' said Lord Vetinari. ‘There is always a choice.'
‘You mean... I could choose certain death?'
‘A choice, nevertheless,' said Vetinari. ‘Or, perhaps, an alternative. You see, I believe in freedom, Mr Lipwig. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based. Now... will you take the job? No one will recognize you, I am sure. No one ever recognizes you, it would appear.'
Moist shrugged. ‘Oh, all right. Of course, I accept as natural born criminal, habitual liar, fraudster and totally untrustworthy perverted genius.'
‘Capital! Welcome to government service!' said Lord Vetinari, extending his hand. ‘I pride myself on being able to pick the right man. The wage is twenty dollars a week and, I believe, the Postmaster General has the use of a small apartment in the main building. I think there's a hat, too. I shall require regular reports. Good day.'
He looked down at his paperwork. He looked up.
‘You appear to be still here, Postmaster General?'
‘And that's it?' said Moist, aghast. ‘One minute I'm being hanged, next minute you're employing me?'
‘Let me see... yes, I think so. Oh, no. Of course. Drumknott, do give Mr Lipwig his keys.'
The clerk stepped forward and handed Moist a huge, rusted keyring full of keys, and proffered a clipboard. ‘Sign here, please, Postmaster General,' he said.
Hold on a minute, Moist thought, this is only one city. It's got gates. It's completely surrounded by different directions to run. Does it matter what I sign?
‘Certainly,' he said, and scribbled his name.
‘Your correct name, if you please,' said Lord Vetinari, not looking up from his desk. ‘What name did he sign, Drumknott?'
The clerk craned his head. ‘Er... Ethel Snake, my lord, as far as I can make out.'
‘Do try to concentrate, Mr Lipwig,' said Vetinari wearily, still apparently reading the paperwork.
Moist signed again. After all, what would it matter in the long run? And it would certainly be a long run, if he couldn't find a horse.
‘And that leaves only the matter of your parole officer,' said Lord Vetinari, still engrossed in the paper before him.
‘Parole officer?'
‘Yes. I'm not completely stupid, Mr Lipwig. He will meet you outside the Post Office building in ten minutes. Good day.'
When Moist had left, Drumknott coughed politely and said, ‘Do you think he'll turn up there, my lord?'
‘One must always consider the psychology of the individual,' said Vetinari, correcting the spelling on an official report. ‘That is what I do all the time and lamentably, Drumknott, you do not always do. That is why he has walked off with your pencil.'
Always move fast. You never know what's catching you up.
Ten minutes later Moist von Lipwig was well outside the city. He'd bought a horse, which was a bit embarrassing, but speed had been of the essence and he'd only had time to grab one of his emergency stashes from its secret hiding place and pick up a skinny old screw from the Bargain Box in Hobson's Livery Stable. At least it'd mean no irate citizen going to the Watch.
No one had bothered him. No one had looked at him twice; no one ever did. The city gates had indeed been wide open. The plains lay ahead of him, full of opportunity. And he was good at parlaying nothing into something. For example, at the first little town he came to he'd go to work on this old nag with a few simple techniques and ingredients that'd make it worth twice the price he'd paid for it, at least for about twenty minutes or until it rained. Twenty minutes would be enough time to sell it and, with any luck, pick up a better horse worth slightly more than the asking price. He'd do it again at the next town and in three days, maybe four, he'd have a horse worth owning.
But that would be just a sideshow, something to keep his hand in. He'd got three very nearly diamond rings sewn into the lining of his coat, a real one in a secret pocket in the sleeve, and a very nearly gold dollar stitched cunningly into the collar. These were, to him, what his saw and hammer are to a carpenter. They were primitive tools, but they'd put him back in the game.
There is a saying ‘You can't fool an honest man' which is much quoted by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men. Moist never knowingly tried it, anyway. If you did fool an honest man, he tended to complain to the local Watch, and these days they were harder to buy off. Fooling dishonest men was a lot safer and, somehow, more sporting. And, of course, there were so many more of them. You hardly had to aim.
Half an hour after arriving in the town of Hapley, where the big city was a tower of smoke on the horizon, he was sitting outside an inn, downcast, with nothing in the world but a genuine diamond ring worth a hundred dollars and a pressing need to get home to Genua, where his poor aged mother was dying of Gnats. Eleven minutes later he was standing patiently outside a jeweller's shop, inside which the jeweller was telling a sympathetic citizen that the ring the stranger was prepared to sell for twenty dollars was worth seventy-five (even jewellers have to make a living). And thirty-five minutes after that he was riding out on a better horse, with five dollars in his pocket, leaving behind a gloating sympathetic citizen who, despite having been bright enough to watch Moist's hands carefully, was about to go back to the jeweller to try to sell for seventy-five dollars a shiny brass ring with a glass stone that was worth fifty pence of anybody's money.
The world was blessedly free of honest men, and wonderfully full of people who believed they could tell the difference between an honest man and a crook.
He tapped his jacket pocket. The jailers had taken the map off him, of course, probably while he was busy being a dead man. It was a good map, and in studying it Mr Wilkinson and his chums would learn a lot about decryption, geography and devious cartography. They wouldn't find in it the whereabouts of AM$ 150,000 in mixed currencies, though, because the map was a complete and complex fiction. However, Moist entertained a wonderful warm feeling inside to think that they would, for some time, possess that greatest of all treasures, which is Hope.