The Gods Of Gotham (5 page)

“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.

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 very
bright 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 after me.

Neighbors trickled into the street under the charcoal sky, staring in awe and with a weird city-dweller’s thrill-seeking pleasure at the wide ribbon of flame on the upper floor. Behind us, at last the nearest fire bell rent the air with its shocking peals—single clangs to summon help to Ward One. Moments later, the answering echo erupted from the cupola of City Hall, beyond the park.

“Wait,” I said, pulling sharply at Julius’s shoulder.

The remaining windows of the storage facility began lighting up like a series of matchsticks—sparks had clearly invaded every story, fire devouring the interior as if the huge building were made of paper. Glass shattering in sudden pistol shots that I couldn’t quite understand.

Then I did understand, and that was far worse.

“This is Max Hendrickson’s store,” I whispered.

Julius’s brown eyes went wide.

“Jesus have mercy,” he said. “If the fire hits his stock of whale oil—”

Red flannel flashed past us as a volunteer fireman with his braces hanging off and his curious leather helmet drooping over his face careened around the corner of Exchange Place.
Hell-bent to claim the
nearest fire plug for his own engine company,
I thought with my familiar slight flare of disdain.
And thereby all the glory.

Meanwhile, it occurred to me that my future was now less than certain.

“Go, fetch your valuables,” Julius ordered before I said anything. “And pray you have a house an hour from now.”

I lived in Stone Street, two blocks below the southern terminus of New Street, down Broad, and I sprinted around the corner away from the doomed building with nothing but Mercy, my residence, and its four hundred dollars in silver on my mind. I would get that money if it killed me. Storefronts I’d passed a thousand times went by in an eyeblink, handcrafted chairs and leather-bound books and bolts of cloth just visible behind the darkened shop displays, my boots flying over eroding cobblestones, running as if hell were at my heels.

That was my first mistake. Hell turned out to be in front of me, over a block away from the New Street fire.

The instant my foot touched Broad, a detonation like a volcano erupting burst 38 Broad Street into a plume of rock, granite missiles the size of grown men sailing above me. The structure had hurled a quarry’s worth of stone into the buildings opposite by the time I skidded to a halt.

At first I thought,
Holy Christ, someone’s set a bomb in our midst.
But 38 Broad, I remembered in the back of my hellfire-dazzled mind as the mammoth warehouse rent itself in pieces before my eyes, was presently a saltpeter storage facility. It held shipments of gunpowder belonging to the well-liked merchant duo of Crocker and Warren. Which was a shame for New York, really. As thunder nearly shattered my eardrums, I thought,
Bad luck. A window must have been open,
for cinders from the oil fire in New Street had obviously been borne on the wind across the thoroughfare and into a room of
powder kegs. Amid the fury, airy curlicues of ash hung perfectly still high above the cobbles. Maybe it was thick of me to even ponder the role of luck at the time, but exploding saltpeter warehouses seem to have a slowing effect on my wits.

Belatedly, I turned to run. I’d taken two steps when I saw a woman flying past me, her mouth open and her face fixed in surprise, her hair streaming backward in a lazy arc. One shoe was blown from her foot, and the foot itself had a smudge of blood on the instep. And that was when I started seeing things funny, just as I realized that I was flying too. Then I heard—no,
felt
, for the world was silent—the entire earth ripping in half as easily and raggedly as an old piece of cotton.

When I opened my eyes again, the planet had inverted itself. And it was still busily exploding.

My head rested against a door still within its frame, but doors aren’t meant to be horizontal. I wondered why this one was. And why there seemed to be hulking pieces of stone surrounding me on all sides.

A tiny matchstick’s worth of flame nuzzled at the woman’s red calfskin shoe six inches from my hand. That single spark angered me terribly—its smug, devious approach. I wanted to save the shoe, return it to the flying woman, but I couldn’t seem to move my arms. The index finger of my right hand twitched, the movement of a dull, brained little animal. I glimpsed the sky through a crevice and wondered how dawn had risen so quickly.

“
Tim!
Timothy!”

I knew that voice. I felt a flood of irritation, and also of plain, stupid fear under the shock. He wasn’t too full of morphine to be standing, then. Of course not. That would be so
easy
. Instead, he was clearly striding into the very center of the bull’s-eye, with shrapnel and brimstone raining freely down upon his person. How very like him.

“
Timothy,
call out where you are! For the love of God, Tim, answer me!”

My tongue stuck stubbornly to the back of my teeth. I didn’t want that voice to see me sprawled in a Chinese dancing girl’s pose, unable to so much as lift a singed shoe. I didn’t want that voice anywhere near a warehouse acting like the world’s biggest cannon, either. But all I could register was a cottony sense of
no.

Something sticky and metallic was running down my cheek.

Light. Too much of it.

A flickering yellow blaze like a god-sized fireplace struck my eyes when someone began tearing away the rocks. Only my upper body had been partly buried. My legs were in the open air and soon enough my face was too, when a cleanly shaven but bearish figure tossed aside a heavy iron shutter.

“Christ, Tim. Julius Carpenter just saved your hide, telling me which way you’d gone. There’s nary yet breathing in this street.”

I blinked at my six-years’-elder brother, the soot-grimed mountain of a hook-and-ladder man with his ax swinging freely from his belt and his face obscured by the inferno behind him. The anger in my chest grew watery, mingled with sudden relief. When he pulled me up by the arms, I bit down on a yell and managed by some miracle to keep my feet once I was upright. He threw my arm over his coarse red shirt before setting off fast as I could keep pace with him, back the way I’d come, both of us stumbling through the rubble as if it were ankle-deep sand on a beach.

“There’s a girl, Val,” I rasped. “She landed very near me. We have to—”

“Gingerly, gingerly,” growled Valentine Wilde. I’d never have heard him through the pervasive ringing if he’d not been two inches from my ear. “You’re more than half hocused, aren’t you? Wait till we’re out of this and I can see you better.”

“She—”

“I saw a piece of her, Timothy. She’ll be put to bed with a shovel. Shut your head a moment.”

I don’t remember much more until Valentine had reached a brick wall under a gaslight back on New Street and propped me up against it. What had been a half-deserted stone business thoroughfare was now an overturned hornet’s nest. At least three volunteer engine companies had already arrived, and a viciously tight thread of visible tension ran between each and every man in a red shirt. Not a one was brawling, or bickering over fire plugs, or donning brass knuckles. Every time one firefighter met another’s eye, his only expression was
And next? And next?
Half of them were looking at my brother, their eyes skimming toward him and then fixing.
Wilde. Wilde isn’t afraid of anything. Wilde sees his way clear. Wilde runs into infernos as if they’re rose gardens. All right, Wilde. And next?
I wanted to force them all quiet with my bare hands over their mouths, make them stop calling out to him.

What exactly do they expect him to do about the city exploding?

“You’re well and truly buttered, my boy. Get to the nearest dispensary,” Valentine ordered. “I’d cart you up to the hospital, but it’s too far and the boys need me. The whole stait’ll burn if we—”

“Get to it, then,” I coughed bitterly. Maybe if I went along with him for once, he’d see reason out of pure contrariness. Nothing makes me more furious than my brother’s obsession with open flame. “I have to stop home, and then I’ll—”

“Don’t rig with me,” my brother snapped. “Get to a doctor. You’re hurt worse than you think, Tim.”

“Wilde! Give us a hand, it’s spreading!”

My brother was swallowed by a bedlam of red shirts screaming orders at one another and sending feathers of spray from their hoses to slice midair through the lazy pincurls of smoke. Looking away from Val purposefully with a hard jerk of my neck, I could see the bloated figure of Justice George Washington Matsell shepherding
a clutch of whimpering females away from burning apartments toward the Custom House steps. Matsell is no mere politician; he’s half legend to locals, a highly visible figure, not least because he weighs about as much as a bison. Following a trusted civic leader like Justice Matsell seemed a likely direction to head for safety.

But I, either because I was infuriated or because I’d been knocked in the head, staggered toward my home. The world as I knew it had gone mad. Small wonder I had as well.

I walked south through a snowstorm in which the flakes were the color of lead, feeling reckless and unmoored. Bowling Green has a fountain at the center—a glad, gushing fountain, rivers tumbling over its lip. The fountain burbled away, but a man couldn’t hear it because the surrounding brick buildings had flames pouring like waterfalls out their windows. Red fire raged upward and glassy red water pounded downward and I staggered past the trees with my arms around my stomach, wondering why my face felt like I’d just stepped out of the salt water at Coney Island and turned in to a cold March wind.

Stone Street, when I reached it, proved a battlement of fire, my own house disintegrating into the earth even while it was being carried away on the updrafts. Just the sight of it pulled me to pieces a little. In my mind’s eye, as the wasted runoff from the fire engines began to trickle past my feet, soon gushing with chicken bones and bits of trampled lettuce, I imagined my molten silver coursing along the cobble cracks. Ten years of savings looked like a mercury river, painting mirrors on the soles of my boots.

“Only chairs,” sobbed a woman. “We had a table, and he might have grabbed the linens. Only chairs, only chairs, only chairs.”

I opened my eyes. I’d been walking, I knew, but they must have been shut. I was at the southmost tip of the island, in the middle of Battery Gardens. But not as I’d ever seen it.

The Battery is a promenade for those who have time for recreational
walks. It’s blanketed with cigar stubs and peanut shells, yes, but the wind from the ocean carries the care right out of my bones, and the sycamores don’t stop my view of the New Jersey forests across the Hudson. It’s a grand place, and locals and tourists alike lean on the iron rails in the afternoons, all staring off over the water alone together.

But the Battery was now a furniture warehouse. The woman rocking back and forth over her chairs had four of them—while to my left, a small hill of cotton bales had been rescued from the fire. Chests of tea were mounting like a dizzying Tower of Babel above a gigantic pile of broomsticks. The air that had been foul with summertime half an hour earlier reeked with the cindery dust of burning whale oil.