The other eight people were Altogether Andrews.
Altogether Andrews was one man with considerably more than one mind. In a rest state, when he had no particular problem to confront, there was no sign of this except a sort of background twitch and flicker as his features passed randomly under the control of, variously, Jossi, Lady Hermione, Little Sidney, Mr Viddle, Curly, the Judge and Tinker; there was also Burke, but the crew had only ever seen Burke once and never wanted to again, so the other seven personalities kept him buried. Nobody in the body answered to the name of Andrews. In the opinion of the Duck Man, who was probably the best in the crew at thinking in a straight line, Andrews had probably been some innocent and hospitable person of a psychic disposition who had simply been overwhelmed by the colonizing souls.
Only among the gentle crew under the bridge could a consensus person like Andrews find an accommodating niche. They’d welcomed him, or them, to the fraternity around the smoky fire. Someone who wasn’t the same person for more than five minutes at a time could fit right in.
One other thing that united the crew — although probably nothing could unite Altogether Andrews — was a readiness to believe that a dog could talk. The group around the smouldering fire believed they had heard a lot of things talk, such as walls. A dog was easy by comparison. Besides, they respected the fact that Gaspode had the sharpest mind of the lot and never drank anything that corroded the container.
‘Let’s try this again, shall we?’ he said. ‘If you sell thirty of the things, you’ll get a dollar. A whole dollar. Got that?’
‘Bugrit.’
‘Quack.’
‘Haaargghhh … gak!’
‘How much is that in old boots?’
Gaspode sighed. ‘No, Arnold. You can use the money to buy as many old—’
There was a rumble from Altogether Andrews, and the rest of the crew went very still. When Altogether Andrews was quiet for a while you never knew who he was going to be.
There was always the possibility that it would be Burke.
‘Can I ask a question?’ said Altogether Andrews, in a rather hoarse treble.
The crew relaxed. That sounded like Lady Hermione. She wasn’t a problem.
‘Yes … your ladyship?’ said Gaspode.
‘This wouldn’t be … work, would it?’
The mention of the word sent the rest of the crew into a fugue of stress and bewildered panic.
‘Haaaruk … gak!’
‘Bugrit!’
‘Quack!’
‘No, no, no,’ said Gaspode hurriedly. ‘It’s hardly work, is it? Just handing out stuff and takin’ money? Doesn’t sound like work to me.’
‘I ain’t working!’ shouted Coffin Henry. ‘I am socially inadequate in the whole area of doin’ anything!’
‘We do not work,’ said Arnold Sideways. ‘We is gentlemen of les-u-are.’
‘Ahem,’ said Lady Hermione.
‘Gentlemen and ladies of les-u-are,’ said Arnold gallantly.
‘This is a very nasty winter. Extra money would certainly come in handy,’ said the Duck Man.
‘What for?’ said Arnold.
‘We could live like kings on a dollar a day, Arnold.’
‘What, you mean someone’d chop our heads off?’
‘No, I—’
‘Someone’d climb up inside the privy with a redhot poker and—’
‘No! I meant—’
‘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 assasins. 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.