The Gods Of Gotham Read Online Free PDF Page A

never know where another conversation was headed for the rest of my life.
    “Give me fifty dollars and I’ll see you’re a rich man by the end of the fortnight, Tim!” shrieked Inman from yards away in the roiling vat of bodies. “Sam Morse’s telegraph can make you a
king
!”
    “Take your fairy money and go to hell,” I returned cheerfully, reaching for a slop rag. “You ever play the market, Julius?”
    “I’d likelier burn money than speculate it,” Julius answered without looking at me, deftly pulling the corks from a row of drenched champagne bottles with his wide fingers. He’s a sensible fellow,quick and quiet, with fragrant tea leaves braided into his hair. “Fire can heat a man’s soup. You calculate they know the Panic was their doing? You think they remember?”
    I wasn’t listening to Julius any longer by that time. Instead, I was dwelling thick as laudanum on the last thing Mercy had said to me.
    Don’t think you’ve hurt my feelings. I’m not married to the name, after all.
    It was the only sentence directly to the purpose I’d ever heard her say, I think. At least, it was the first since she was about fifteen, and even so, the remark had a sideways charm to it. So that was a heady, graceful moment. The moment when I discovered that Mercy saying something near-plain is every bit as beautiful as Mercy talking circles like a flame-red kite in the wind.
    At four in the morning, I passed Julius an extra two dollars as he propped the mop handle in the corner. He nodded. Worn to a thinly buzzing alertness, we headed for the steps leading up to the awakening city.
    “You ever wonder what it’s like to sleep at nighttime?” I asked as I locked the cellar door behind us.
    “You won’t catch me in a bed after dark. Keep the devil guessing,” Julius answered, winking at his own joke.
    We reached the street just as dawn flared with grasping red fingers over the horizon. Or so the corner of my eye thought, as I settled my hat on my head. Julius was quicker to catch on.
    “Fire!”
Julius bellowed in his low, smooth voice, cupping his hands around his sharply defined lips.
“Fire in New Street!”
    For a moment, I stood there, frozen in the dark with a streak of scarlet above me, already acting about as useless as a broken gas-lamp inspector. Feeling the same sickness in my belly the word
fire
always causes me.

TWO
    The explosion was heard at Flushing and supposed to be the shock of an earthquake. Cinders fell on Staten Island, and for several miles over in New Jersey, the sun was obscured by smoke during the forenoon.
    •
New York Herald
, July 1845 •
     

     
    T he third floor of the storefront across the street from us looked as if it had imprisoned an amber sun. Fierce yellow tongues were eating away the outer windows, the fire already laying claim to what must have been a vast inner storeroom. Fires in these parts are about as common as riots, and every bit as fatal, but here one raged in plain sight without anyone having yet given the alarm. So whatever the cause, it had been horribly quick—a lamp left lit near a pile of cotton wool, a cigar end in a rubbish bin. Any small, stupid, deadly mistake would serve. It’s a large warehouse that faces Nick’s, taking up much of the small block, and my heart took a second dip in my chest when I recognized that a glow so verybright must have reached throughout the entire floor and now surely raged against the wall of the adjacent building.
    Julius and I were racing toward the blaze an instant later. You run toward as-yet-undiscovered fires in New York, not away from them, offering your own help until the all-volunteer fire companies arrive on the scene. People have roasted for want of a hand out a window. I glanced behind us, longing for the clang of the fire bell even though I detested the sound.
    “How can no one have seen it yet?” I gasped.
    “It’s not sensible.” Stopping, Julius sent up the cry of “Fire!” again and then hurtled