Free The Gods Of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye Page A

me well enough to either notice or mention that niggling fact, and I was back to scrupulously avoiding Val, and so it was fine.
Everything was fine.
    On the morning of August twenty-first, for the first time my own body awoke with a gentle slip into consciousness at around three o’clock. It ought to have been a sign, but I didn’t notice. And so I watched the veil of clouds from my window that would smother the city until the storm broke. An atmosphere like being drowned.
    Downstairs I left a penny on the clean countertop and took a roll of bread from the basket of yesterday’s leavings. Shortcuts. Placing my wide-brimmed hat on my head and the roll in my pocket, I set off for the Tombs, where my day’s long shift commenced. My beat had for a fortnight been a pretty fascinating blur, though I was wary about admitting as much. But I may as well be frank: I was a roundsman on a
very
interesting circuit. As for what
roundsman
entails, the word is its own definition: I walked in a circle until someone wanted arresting. Simple as that, and yet how engaging it was, to pass steady and silent through scores of people, casually scrutinizing them, making certain none of them needed any help or meant any harm.
    After I signed in at the Tombs, my route took me up Centre Street. The trains with their enormous horses lumbered past me, wheels churning thick cinders into pavement dust for the bootblacks to erase. When I reached the imposing gasworks building at the corner of Canal and Centre, I turned left. Canal seemed to me a wonderful pulsing fray of a street—greengrocers crushed up against haberdashers, windows stuffed with gleaming shoes, windows packed with bolts of turquoise and scarlet and violet silks. Above the profusions of clocks and of straw hats lived the clerks and laborers and their families, men’s elbows resting on high sills as they sipped their morning coffee. On the north side as I reached Broadway stood a hackney stand, the tops of the four-wheeled coaches thrown open to the pinkening sky, drivers smoking ninepin cigars and gossiping while awaiting the first fares of the day.
    Broadway was my cue to turn south. If there’s a wider street on earth than Broadway, a street more roiling, a street with a more dizzying pendulum swing between starving opium fiends with the rags rotting off of them and ladies in walking gowns bedecked like small steamships, I can’t imagine it nor do I want to. Colored footmen sitting atop phaetons and wearing summer straw hats and pale greenlinen coats whirred past me that morning, one nearly colliding with a Jewess selling ribbons from a wide hinged box hung around her neck. Ice delivery men from the Knickerbocker Company, shoulders knotted with painful-seeming muscles, strained with iron tongs to hoist frozen blocks onto carts and then wheeled their cargo into the opulent hotels before the guests awoke. And weaving in and out, mud-crusted and randy and miraculously nimble, trotted the speckled pigs, rubbery snouts nuzzling the trampled beet leaves. Everything begrimed but the storefront windowpanes, everything for sale but the cobblestones, everyone pulsing with energy but never meeting your eye.
    From Broadway I turned east onto Chambers Street. On my left rose the elegant brick-fronted offices of lawyers and the coolly shuttered consulting rooms of physicians. To my right, meanwhile, squatted City Hall Park, encompassing not merely City Hall but the Hall of Records. Everything in it either sordid or brown. When I’d reached the end of that grassless canker, I’d find myself at Centre Street and make straight for the Tombs once more.
    It was where Centre Street crossed Anthony, just a block before the Tombs, that things got leery.
    In the two weeks I’d been a policeman, I’d made seven arrests. Each within spitting distance of where Centre crossed Anthony. Two gang coves on the mace, which is what my brother and the rest of the swindlers call swindling, selling fake stock