Free The Last Nightingale by Anthony Flacco Page B

GREATEST EARTHQUAKE AND FIRES
    L IEUTENANT G REGORY M OSES WAS SERVING as Acting Station Chief at the City Hall precinct house. It was only a temporary position, and he never let himself forget that. The job had literally fallen into his lap with the Great Earthquake, and it had somehow remained there throughout the four weeks since. Nearly everything about the job still felt new, and virtually none of it was comfortable. Moses’ decades of experience as the department's Keeper of Records never gave him any reason to expect to find himself as a station chief. And since Moses had never tasted the curse of political ambition, the personality traits necessary for leadership were baffling to him. After so many quiet years in the Record Keeping Department, padding back and forth among the stacks and files, the instant promotion and its never-ending urgencies felt about as natural as a suit of needles.
    There was no avoiding it. Moses was promoted at the direct order of Police Chief Dinan on the very day of the quake, after Station Chief Winkle took a fatal brick to the skull. Somebody pulled one of the precinct's old command-succession charts from the City Hall ruins to see who was next in line for the job, but it turned out that every individual above Moses on the list was either dead or missing. Chief Dinan read all the way down to number seven in the succession line, farther down than anybody ever ex-pected circumstances to actually go:
Head of the Record Keeping Department.
    Moses’ rank of lieutenant had always been a simple perquisite grafted onto his job, a reminder that confidentiality was of the essence. For many years, the first order of secrecy down at City Hall had fallen to him. All the friends and relatives of the "Committee of Fifty," plus the city's other backroom organizations, were able to carry out their lives inside a zone of official silence. No matter how nasty certain personal events might have become, all of the appropriate sensitive events were reliably covered over and permanently forgotten. While it was true that Moses’ line of work made him the custodian of a world of secrets, rather like a father confessor, they weren't the kinds of things that were helpful in running a police station and the precinct that it serves.
    Accordingly, each one of these thirty days since the Great Earthquake had felt like a long trudge through knee-deep water. Every moment was impossibly hard. Not only was Moses inexperienced with command, but while he called the morning roll and handed out the daily assignments, his brain burned with a pervasive sense that he was in
highly
dangerous territory.
    Back when the news of his fateful promotion had first reached him, Moses experienced it as some sort of dark anti-miracle, something sent by demons—every pound of fat on his body quivered with the realization that this uncanny opportunity had come to him at precisely the wrong moment in his life. He was a good hundred and fifty pounds overweight, having long since passed "portly" and landed firmly in the territory of the morbidly obese. Back in the Becord Keeping Department, nobody ever called him to task about it. There was an unspoken agreement that Moses was to be tolerated, so long as he did solid and reliable work, never betrayed any secrets, and stayed out of sight among the stacks.
    Until the Great Earthquake struck, he was safe in his humble ambition of efficiently running the Becord Keeping Department and knowing that he would be left in peace to slowly die inside ofhis expanding carcass. And he found that the relief of giving up on life provided a strange form of comfort to his depressed condition. Moses was loath to be the center of attention anywhere, especially in a command position as he was now, responsible for dozens of officers who could see at a glance that he was unfit for the job.
    Now he couldn't get the eyeballs off of him. For the last four weeks, his bizarre turn of fortune had forced him to stay on the