In four years, they’d brought off three huge scores and were currently working on their fourth; for four years, the vast majority of the money had simply been counted and thrown down into the darkness of the vaults.
The truth was, Chains had trained them superbly for the task of relieving Camorr’s nobility of the burden of some of its accumulated wealth, but had perhaps neglected to discuss the possible uses of the sums involved. Other than financing further theft, the Gentlemen Bastards really had no idea what they were eventually going to do with it all.
Their tithe to Capa Barsavi averaged about a crown a week.
2
“REJOICE!” CRIED Calo as he appeared in the kitchen, just as Locke and Jean were moving the dining table back to its customary position. “The Sanza brothers are returned!”
“I do wonder,” said Jean, “if that particular combination of words has ever been uttered by anyone, before now.”
“Only in the chambers of unattached young ladies across the city,” said Galdo as he set a small burlap sack down on the table. Locke shook it open and perused the contents-a few lockets set with semiprecious stones, a set of moderately well-crafted silver forks and knives, and an assortment of rings ranging from cheap engraved copper to one made of threaded gold and platinum, set with flecks of obsidian and diamond.
“Oh, very nice,” said Locke. “Very likely. Jean, would you pick out a few more bits from the Bullshit Box, and get me…twenty solons, right?”
“Twenty’s good and proper.”
While Locke gestured for Calo and Galdo to help him set chairs back in place around the dining table, Jean walked back to the vault room, where there was a tall, narrow wooden chest tucked against the left-hand wall. He threw back the lid on its creaky hinges and began rummaging inside, a thoughtful expression on his face.
The Bullshit Box was filled to a depth of about two feet with a glittering pile of jewelry, knickknacks, household items, and decorative gewgaws. There were crystal statues, mirrors in carved ivory frames, necklaces and rings, candleholders in five kinds of precious metal. There were even a few bottles of drugs and alchemical draughts, wrapped in felt to cushion them and marked with little paper labels.
Since the Gentlemen Bastards could hardly tell the Capa about the true nature of their operations, and since they had neither the time nor the inclination to actually break into houses and clamber down chimneys, the Bullshit Box was one of the pillars of their ongoing deception. They topped it off once or twice a year, going on buying sprees in the pawnshops and markets of Talisham or Ashmere, where they could get whatever they needed openly. They supplemented it only slightly and carefully with goods picked up in Camorr, usually things stolen on a whim by the Sanzas or secured by Bug as part of his continuing education.
Jean selected a pair of silver wine goblets, a pair of gold-framed optics inside a fine leather case, and one of the little wrapped bottles. Clutching all of this carefully in one hand, he then counted twenty small silver coins off a shelf, kicked the Bullshit Box shut, and hurried back out to the dining room. Bug had rejoined the group and was ostentatiously walking a solon across the knuckles of his right hand; he’d mastered the trick only weeks previously, after long months of watching the Sanzas, who could each do both hands at once, reversing directions in perfect unison.
“Let us say,” said Jean, “that we have had a somewhat slothful week. Nobody expects much from second-story men when the nights are wet like this anyway; we might look out of place if we haul in too much. Surely His Honor will understand.”
“Of course,” said Locke. “Quite a reasonable thought.” He reached out and took the felt-wrapped bottle for close examination; his handwritten label identified it as sugared milk of opium, a rich ladies’ vice made from dried Jeremite poppies. He removed the label and the felt, then tucked the faceted glass bottle with its brass stopper into the burlap sack. The rest of the loot followed.
“Right! Now, is there any speck of Lukas Fehrwight still clinging to me? Any makeup or mummery?” He stuck out his arms and twirled several times; Jean and the Sanzas assured him that he was entirely Locke Lamora for the moment.
“Well, then, if we’re all our proper selves, let’s go pay our taxes.” Locke lifted the sack of “stolen” items and tossed it casually to Bug; the boy yelped, dropped his coin, and caught the sack with a muffled clatter of shaken metal.
“Good for my moral education, I suppose?”
“No,” said Locke, “this time I really am just being a lazy old bastard. At least you won’t have to work the barge-pole.”
3
IT WAS the third hour of the afternoon when they set out from the Temple of Perelandro, via their assorted escape tunnels and side entrances. A warm drizzle was falling from the sky, which was neatly divided as though by some ruler and stylus of the gods-low dark clouds filled the north, while the sun was just starting downward in the bright, clear southwest. The pleasant scent of fresh rain on hot stone welled up everywhere, briefly washing the usual city miasmas from the air. The Gentlemen Bastards gathered once again at the southwestern docks of the Temple District, where they hailed a gondola-for-hire.
The boat was long and shallow and heavily weathered, with a freshly killed rat lashed to the bow spar just beneath a small wooden idol of Iono; this was allegedly a peerless ward against capsizing and other misfortunes. The poleman perched at the stern like a parrot in his red-and-orange striped cotton jacket, protected from the rain by a broad-brimmed straw hat that drooped out past his skinny shoulders. He turned out to be a canal-jumper and purse-cutter of their acquaintance, Nervous Vitale Vento of the Gray Faces gang.
Vitale rigged a mildewy leather umbrella to keep some of the drizzle off his passengers, and then began to pole them smoothly east between the high stone banks of the Temple District and the overgrown lushness of the Mara Camorrazza. The Mara had once been a garden maze for a rich governor of the Therin Throne era; now it was largely abandoned by the city watch and haunted by cutpurses. The only reason honest folk even ventured into its dangerous green passages was that it was the heart of a network of footbridges connecting eight other islands.
Jean settled in to read from a very small volume of verse he’d tucked into his belt, while Bug continued practicing his coin manipulation, albeit with a copper-piece that would look much less incongruous in public. Locke and the Sanza brothers talked shop with Vitale, whose job, in part, was to mark particularly lightly guarded or heavily loaded cargo barges for the attention of his fellows. On several occasions, he made hand signals to concealed watchers on shore while the Gentlemen Bastards politely pretended not to notice.
They drew close to Shades’ Hill; even by day those heights were steeped in gloom. By chance the rain stiffened and the old kingdom of tombs grew blurred behind a haze of mist. Vitale swung the boat to the right. Soon he was pushing them southward between Shades’Hill and the Narrows, aided by the current of the seaward-flowing canal, now alive with the spreading ripples of raindrops.
Traffic grew steadily thinner and less reputable on the canal as they sped south; they were passing from the open rule of the duke of Camorr to the private dominion of Capa Barsavi. On the left, the forges of the Coalsmoke district were sending up columns of blackness, mushrooming and thinning out beneath the press of the rain. The Duke’s Wind would push it all down over Ashfall, the most ill-looking island in the city, where gangs and squatters contended for space in the moldering, smoke-darkened villas of an opulent age now centuries past.
A northbound barge moved past on their left, wafting forth the stench of old shit and new death. What looked to be an entire team of dead horses was lying in the barge, attended by half a dozen knackers. Some were slicing at the corpses with arm-length serrated blades while others were frantically unrolling and adjusting bloodstained tarps beneath the rain.