Winter's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

their graceful human hands, never knowing that the wealth of great kingdoms was all around them, filtering through the streets of lower Manhattan like a tide in the reeds.
    Of the many millions, perhaps ten thousand had seen a gold carrier in the harbor or tied up at its fortified pier for half an hour of off-loading, and of these no more than a thousand or so had known what they had seen. Of this thousand, nine hundred were honest, and did not think of larceny. Of the hundred who did, fifty were broken-down wrecks, not even criminal enough to steal from themselves. Of the rest, twenty might have been able, but had turned their talents to other things (such as opera, publishing, and the military); twenty were qualified criminals but lacked organizational skills, followings, and resources; five came up with inept and laughable schemes; and four might have tried it but for fatal accidents, coincidental distractions, and sudden dyspepsia—which is not to say that they would have succeeded. The one left was Pearly Soames, but even for him it was almost an impossible task, as these ships were the fastest and most agile in the world. They were well armed and armored. Deep in their hulls were stupendous vaults that could be opened only when the ship docked at one of the fortified piers, and special extraction mechanisms had pulled from the hull a series of alloy steel rods which tightly caged time-locked doors behind which were ten high-security stalls where the gold was locked in explosive strongboxes. An army guarded each removal.
    Though Blacky Womble was a Caucasian, he was blacker than cobalt, and unlike the rest of the Short Tails, he wore a shiny black leather jacket. His hair was meshed about his ears in frightening whorls much like the path of Sarganda Street. His teeth were the closest match there was to Pearly’s eyes. They were pointed like spires, serrated like long mountain ranges or institutional bread knives, crescent-shaped like scimitars, as sharp as finely honed scalpels, as strong as bayonets. And yet, somehow, he had a gentle, pacifying smile that could have rocked a baby to sleep. Despite the teeth, he was a nice man (for a Short Tail). He knew that Pearly’s color gravity was all-consuming, that Pearly walked a thin line between madness and capability, always upping the stakes in service of his lust for color, and thereby retaining the loyalty of the Short Tails in never failing to amaze them. But it had to crash sometime, and they were waiting for Pearly to lose his touch. Blacky thought the time had come.
    “Pearly, I fear for you,” he said directly.
    Pearly laughed. “You think I’ve gone around the bend.”
    “I won’t tell anyone about this. I won’t say anything. That way, you can think it o—”
    “It’s decided already. I’m going to tell the others. At the meeting.”
    They held their meetings underground or far above it, for the secret deliberations of thieves could not take place in healthy locations such as common rooms or town squares, where they might have become democratic and open, aired-out, unfestering, and cool. They were held in deathly chambers or on the highest towers, confronting either the grave or an open abyss. Pearly used these sites to cook up his plots and galvanize the Short Tails. They felt privileged to convene on the piers of the Brooklyn Bridge, waist-deep in not entirely empty water tanks, nestled in terror between the spars of the Statue of Liberty’s crown, in the cellar beneath an opium den on Doyer Street, or at the edge of the central sewer fall, sitting like picnickers in the dark by the side of Niagara.
    “Spread the word,” Pearly said to Blacky Womble. “The meeting will be at midnight, Tuesday next, in the cemetery of the honored dead.”
    Blacky Womble choked and his eyes collapsed into his face. He might have understood a gathering in high wind atop the city’s tallest tower, or one of those plucky convocations they had in the rafters of Central