The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Lynch, Scott Page 0,65
a plain, neat description of our relationship, yes. All the Right People are Barsavi’s soldiers. His eyes, his ears, his agents, his subjects. His pezon. Barsavi is…a particular sort of friend. I did some things for him, back when he was coming to power. We rose together, you might say—I got special consideration and he got the, ah, entire city.”
“Special consideration?”
It was as pleasant a night for a stroll as Camorr ever produced during the summer. A hard rain had fallen not an hour before, and the fresh mist that spread its tendrils around buildings like the grasping hands of spectral giants was slightly cooler than usual, and its odor wasn’t yet saturated with the redolence of silt and dead fish and human waste. Other people were few and far between on Coin-Kisser’s Row after Falselight, so Locke and Chains spoke fairly freely.
“I’ve got the distance. Which means—well, there are a hundred gangs in Camorr, Locke. A hundred and more. Certainly I can’t remember them all. Some of them are too new or too unruly for Capa Barsavi to trust them as well as he might. So he keeps a close eye on them—insists on frequent reports, plants men in them, reins their actions in tightly. Those of us that don’t suffer such scrutiny”—Chains pointed to himself, then to Locke—“are sort of presumed to be doing things honestly until proven otherwise. We follow his rules and pay him a cut of our take, and he thinks he can more or less trust us to get it right. No audits, no spies, no bullshit. ‘The distance.’ It’s a privilege worth paying for.”
Chains stuck a hand in one of his cloak pockets; there was the pleasing jingle of coins. “I’ve got a little show of respect for him right here, in fact. Two-tenths of this week’s take from the charity kettle of Perelandro.”
“More than a hundred gangs, you said?”
“This city has more gangs than it has foul odors, boy. Some of them are older than many families on the Alcegrante, and some of them have stricter rituals than some of the priestly orders. Hell, at one point there were nearly thirty capas, and each one had four or five gangs under his thumb.”
“Thirty capas? All like Capa Barsavi?”
“Yes and no. Yes, that they ran gangs and gave orders and cut men open from cock to eyeballs when they got angry; no, that they were anything like Barsavi otherwise. Five years ago, there were the thirty bosses I talked about. Thirty little kingdoms, all fighting and thieving and spilling each other’s guts in the street. All at war with the yellowjackets, who used to kill twenty men a week. In slow weeks.
“Then Capa Barsavi walked in from Tal Verrar. Used to be a scholar at the Therin Collegium, if you can believe it. Taught rhetoric. He got a few gangs under his thumb and he started cutting. Not like a back-alley slasher, but more like a physiker cutting out a chancre. When Barsavi took out another capa, he took their gangs, too. But he didn’t lean on them if he didn’t have to. He gave them full territories and let them choose their own garristas, and he cut them in on his take.
“So—five years ago, there were thirty. Four years ago, there were ten. Three years ago, there was one. Capa Barsavi and his hundred gangs. The whole city—all the Right People, present company included—in his pocket. No more open war across the bloody canals. No more platoons of thieves getting strung up all at once at the Palace of Patience. Nowadays they have to do them two or three at a time.”
“Because of the Secret Peace? The one I broke?”
“The one you broke, yes. Good guess, presuming I’d know about that. Yes, my boy, it’s the key to Barsavi’s peculiar success. What it comes down to is, he has a standing agreement with the duke, handled through one of the duke’s agents. The gangs of Camorr don’t touch the nobles; we don’t lay a finger on ships or drays or crates that have a legitimate coat of arms on them. In exchange, Barsavi is the actual ruler of a few of the city’s more charming points. Catchfire, the Narrows, the Dregs, the Wooden Waste, the Snare, and parts of the docks. Plus the city watch is much more…relaxed than they ought to be.”
“So we can rob anyone who isn’t a noble?”
“Or a yellowjacket, yes. We can have the merchants and the money-changers