'Someone'd drown us in a butt of wine?'
'No, that's dying like kings, Arnold,'
'I shouldn't reckon there's a butt of wine big enough that you couldn't drink your way out of it,' muttered Gaspode. 'So, what about it, masters? Oh, and mistress, o' course. Shall I-- shall Ron tell that lad we're up for it?'
'Indeed,'
'Okay,'
'Gawwwark... pt!'
'Bugrit!'
They looked at Altogether Andrews. His lips moved, his face flickered. Then he held up five democratic fingers.
'The ayes have it,' said Gaspode.
Mr Pin lit a cigar. Smoking was his one vice. At least, it was his only vice that he thought of as a vice. All the others were just job skills.
Mr Tulip's vices were also limitless, but he owned up to cheap aftershave because a man has to drink something. The drugs didn't count, if only because the only time he'd ever got real ones was when they'd robbed a horse doctor and he'd taken a couple of big pills that had made every vein in his body stand out like a purple hosepipe.
The pair were not thugs. At least they did not see themselves as thugs. Nor were they thieves. At least they never thought of themselves as thieves. They did not think of themselves as assassins. Assassins were posh and had rules. Pin and Tulip - the New Firm, as Mr Pin liked to refer to themselves - did not have rules.
They thought of themselves as facilitators. They were men who made things happen, men who were going places.
It has to be added that when one says 'they thought' it means 'Mr Pin thought'. Mr Tulip used his head all the time, from a distance of about eight inches, but he was not, except in one or two unexpected areas, a man given much to using his brain. On the whole, he left Mr Pin to do the polysyllabic cogitation.
Mr Pin, on the other hand, was not very good at sustained, mindless violence, and admired the fact that Mr Tulip had an apparently bottomless supply. When they had first met, and had recognized in each other the qualities that would make their partnership greater than the sum of its parts, he'd seen that Mr Tulip was not, as he appeared to the rest of the world, just another nutjob. Some negative qualities can reach a pitch of perfection that changes their very nature, and Mr Tulip had turned anger into an art.
It was not anger at anything. It was just pure, platonic anger from somewhere in the reptilian depths of the soul, a fountain of never-ending red-hot grudge; Mr Tulip lived his life on that thin line most people occupy just before they haul off and hit someone repeatedly with a spanner. For Mr Tulip, anger was the ground state of being. Pin had occasionally wondered what had happened to the man to make him as angry as that, but to Tulip the past was another country with very, very well-guarded borders. Sometimes Mr Pin heard him screaming at night.
It was quite hard to hire Mr Tulip and Mr Pin. You had to know the right people. To be more accurate, you had to know the wrong people, and you got to know them by hanging around a certain kind of bar and surviving, which was kind of a first test. The wrong people, of course, would not know Mr Tulip and Mr Pin. But they would know a man. And that man would, in a general sense, express the guarded opinion that he might know how to get in
touch with men of a Pin-like or Tulipolitic disposition. He could not exactly recall much more than that at the moment, due to memory loss brought on by lack of money. Once cured, he might indicate in a general kind of way another address where you would meet, in a dark corner, a man who would tell you emphatically that he had never heard of anyone called Tulip or Pin. He would also ask where you would be at, say, nine o'clock tonight.
And then you would meet Mr Tulip and Mr Pin. They would know you had money, they would know you had something on your mind and, if you had been really stupid, they now knew your address.
And it had therefore come as a surprise to the New Firm that their latest client had come straight to them. This was worrying. It was also worrying that he was dead. Generally the New Firm had no problem with corpses, but they didn't like them to speak.
Mr Slant coughed. Mr Pin noticed that this created a small cloud of dust. For Mr Slant was a zombie.
'I must reiterate,' said Mr Slant, 'that I am a mere facilitator in this matter--'
'Just like us,' said Mr Tulip.
Mr Slant indicated with a look that he would never in a thousand years be just like Mr Tulip, but he said: 'Quite so. My clients wished me to find some... experts. I found you. I gave you some sealed instructions. You have accepted the contract. And I understand that as a result of this you have made certain... arrangements. I do not know what those arrangements are. I will continue not to know what those arrangements are. My relationship with you is, as they say, on the long finger. Do you understand me?'
'What --ing finger is that?' said Mr Tulip. He was getting jittery in the presence of the dead lawyer.
'We see each other only when necessary, we say as little as possible.'
'I hate --ing zombies,' said Mr Tulip. That morning he'd tried something he'd found in a box under the sink. If it cleaned drains, he'd reasoned, that meant it was chemical. Now he was getting strange messages from his large intestine.
'I am sure the feeling is mutual,' said Mr Slant.
'I understand what you're saying,' said Mr Pin. 'You're saying that if this goes bad you've never seen us in your life--'
'Ahem...' Mr Slant coughed.