Guards Guards - Arrest

Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, put his hand over his eyes.

“He did what?”

“I was marched through the streets, ” said Urdo van Pew, currently President of the Guild of Thieves, Burglars and Allied Trades. “In broad daylight! With my hands tied together!” He took a few steps towards the Patrician's severe chair of office, waving a finger.

“You know very well that we have kept within the Budget, ” he said. “To be humiliated like that! Like a common criminal! There had better be a full apology, ” he said, “or you will have another strike on your hands. We will be driven to it, despite our natural civic responsibilities, ” he added.

It was the finger. The finger was a mistake. The Patrician was staring coldly at the finger. Van Pew followed his gaze, and quickly lowered the digit. The Patrician was not a man you shook a finger at unless you wanted to end up being able to count only to nine.

“And you say this was one person?” said Lord Vetinari.

“Yes! That is-” Van Pew hesitated.

It did sound weird, now he came to tell someone.

“But there are hundreds of you in there, ” said the Patrician calmly. “Thick as, you should excuse the expression, thieves. ”

Van Pew opened and shut his mouth a few times. The honest answer would have been: yes, and if anyone had come sidling in and skulking around the corridors it would have been the worse for them. It was the way he strode in as if he owned the place that fooled everyone. That and the fact that he kept hitting people and telling them to Mend their Ways.

The Patrician nodded.

***

Guards Guards - p51-52