Read The Gods Of Gotham for Free Online

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 shepherdinga 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 recreationalwalks. 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.
    “Oh, my dear God,” said a woman carrying at least fifty pounds of sugar in a neatly stamped sack, peering at my face. “You ought to see a doctor, sir.”
    I barely heard her. I’d slumped to the grass with the rocking chairs and sacks of flour. Meanwhile thinking the only thought an ambitious fellow from New York would’ve indulged in as he lost consciousness while the city was erupting.
    If I have to save for another ten years,