Headscratchers / The Truth

• How exactly were the New Firm expecting to frame Lord Vetinari for embezzlement, as per their original plan? The best they would have been able to do would be to put an unconscious Vetinari down next to a cartoonishly large hoard of coins, and hope that the palace staff would conclude that he was inexplicably running away for an unknown reason.
  • They weren't planning on anything more than that. That was all they'd been hired to do, knock him out and dump next to a pile of cash and a saddled horse. The conspirators were the ones who thought they'd be able to parlay that into an embezzlement charge, and it was working. It didn't need to stick in the long run, it just needed to create enough of a confused power vacuum to insert their replacement Patrician.

• How comes that Vetinari, who has spies everywhere, and probably has spies spying on his other spies, did not know that he has a perfect double in a nearby city?
  • Timing? Vetinari gets reports, but (to me) it's heavily implied that his informants either come in on a schedule, come when called, or come when they believe they have important information — and for the last one, they still have to actually make it to Vetinari to make the report. And, he may have been told, at most, "I thought I saw someone that put me in mind of you."
    Also, he was surprised by Charlie's appearance, but this may be more be due to a 'Mirror Effect': He has seen his own face in a mirror, but seeing Charlie would put him in the position of seeing "his face" the same way everyone else sees it, unreversed by the mirror.
  • Besides, even Vetinari needs to have some reason to become aware of something important, and if Charlie had lived a relatively discreet life where he wasn't meeting people that often, it doesn't seem implausible to assume that he just never found himself in a position where more people would comment on his resemblance to Vetinari (and that's assuming the New Firm didn't have to do something like give him a haircut to make the resemblance more effective).
  • Plus even if Vetinari was aware of Charlie's existence, suddenly coming face to him with him outside of his office would still be surprising.
  • And in an era before TV or (ahem) newspapers, it's not like people living in other cities know what Vetinari looks like beyond (at best) a general description, and so any associates of Charlie wouldn't have a reason to spread news of the resemblance.