Winter's Tale Read Online Free PDF

“Pearly, no one in New York has a golden room, not even the richest banker. It’s a waste of time. To steal that much gold would take a hundred years.”
    “That’s where you’re wrong,” Pearly said. “We’ll do it in a day.”
    “A day?”
    “Like stealing poultry. And you think there’s no golden room? You’re wrong. There are many millions of rooms and enclosed spaces in this city that stretches limitlessly down below the ground, up into the air, and into an infinite maze of streets. There might be more golden rooms in the city than there are stars in the heavens.”
    “How could that be?” asked Blacky Womble.
    “Have you ever heard of Sarganda Street, or Diamond Row, or the Avenues of the Nines and Twenties?”
    “In New York?”
    “Indeed—thoroughfares hundreds, thousands of miles long, that twist and coil and have branching from them innumerable intertwining streets each grander than the one before it.”
    “Are they in Brooklyn? I don’t know Brooklyn. No one does really. People always go there and never come back. Lotsa streets in Brooklyn nobody ever heard of, like Funyew-Ogstein-Crypt Boulevard.”
    “That’s some sort of Hebrew thing. But yes, they are in Brooklyn, and in Manhattan too. They run through each other, and are overlaid.” Pearly’s eyes were electric lights. Blacky Womble didn’t always understand Pearly (especially when Pearly would send him out late at night to fetch a gallon of fresh paint), but he knew that Pearly got results, and he loved to watch him bristle and sweat, going at things like a wrestler or a boxer, unearthing treasures from the empty air, possessed and directed like an oracle. “The Avenues of the Nines and Twenties are coiled around one another like two copulating snakes. They run for thousands of miles.”
    “In which direction, Pearly?”
    “Up! Straight up!” answered Pearly, pointing at the dark ceiling, his eyes disappearing only to leave behind blank white eggs. Blacky Womble, too, stared at the darkness, and saw gray coilings and blue flashes. It was like being held over an infinitely deep pit. He forgot about gravity. He flew. His eyes were swallowed up by the loom of streets that Pearly had opened to him for just that instant. When he returned, he found Pearly gazing into his face, all set for business, as calm and sober as a laundry clerk on the day after Christmas.
    “Even if Sarganda Street and the Avenues of the Nines and Twenties...”
    “And Diamond Row.”
    “And Diamond Row, do exist, how are we going to steal enough gold to make a golden room? Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea. But how will we work it?”
    “The only way to do it is to steal it from one of the gold carriers that come through the Narrows.”
    Blacky Womble was taken aback. The Short Tails were the best of the gangs, the most powerful, the most daring. But they had never even robbed a major bank, except once, and that was one of those temporary branches that could be broken into with a can opener. The gold carriers were out of the question. First, no one really knew when they made port, because they set their courses on random generators (wire cages inside of which tumbled surplus Mah-Jongg blocks engraved with longitudes and latitudes). These ships zigged and zagged over the seas in incredible patterns. For example, to go from Peru to New York, one of the fast carriers might call at Yokohama six times—though a nondelivery port call for a gold carrier consisted of saluting from fifty miles at sea with a blue flare, and then vanishing into the night and distance. There was no way to know where one would be and when; they abhorred the sea-lanes; their arrivals were swift and unexpected. In fact, most people in New York did not know of them. Bakers baked their endless rows of cookies; mechanics worked at oily engines that smelled of flint and steel; and bank clerks worked their lines, piecing out and taking in tiny sums through the organizational baleen of