Read Online The Gods Of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye - Free Book Online

that didn’t touch anything else.
    We entered the courtroom in the same stride. He scurried off to find a seat and I did the same, taking in the scene as I settled onto a bench usually devoted to trial lawyers. Here the walls were neatly whitewashed, the judge’s high altar standing empty before us. I raked my eyes across my new cohorts.
    A fool’s motley coat would have looked uniform next to the seated mob. There seemed about fifty of them, and again I felt like a patch of vacant silence in the middle of a tumult. Irish aplenty, their laborers’ hands choked with veins and their chins jutting with red side whiskers, looking wary and combative in dingy blue coats with long tails and old brass buttons. Black Irish too, pale and thick-shouldered, squinting cannily. Scattered Germans with patient, dogmatic expressions, arms folded over their chests as they spoke. Americans with their collars turned down, whistling Bowery music-hall tunes and elbowing their laughing friends.
    Finally, me and the crablike old man in the Dutch boots, awaiting orders. He with considerably more visible enthusiasm than I.
    “Welcome, gentlemen! I’m proud to be addressing the policeof the Sixth Ward of the First District of the great City of New York.”
    Scattered clapping. But I was too deeply struck by the man who’d just launched himself through the small judges’ door to the left of the judicial bench to bother. I’d last seen him in the middle of an inferno, after all, so I spent a moment to look him over more carefully. If there was a single new policeman Justice George Washington Matsell didn’t fascinate, I’ll own I missed the fellow.
    Matsell, I later learned, was only thirty-four when he was selected by a Democratic majority in the Common Council to serve as the first New York City chief of police. But the man before us, standing ponderous as a walrus and twice as weathered, seemed much older. His twin reputations for holiness and debauchery must have preceded him, but—apart from realizing that he was unforgettable in person—I don’t think anyone even began to take his measure that day. I can say now for a fact that he’s equally intelligent and bluntly forceful. He’s also near enough to tipping three hundred pounds on the scale. His whole fleshy face is based on the shape of a capital
A
: small brows drawn tight toward his nose, deep folds from his nostrils to his thin, downward-pointing lips, fainter creases continuing from his mouth down his jowls.
    “That pack of dead herrings known as Harper’s Police, or the bluecoats, has been permanently disbanded, thank Christ. Congratulations on your new appointments, to be terminated at the end of one year,” Matsell called out in a flat baritone, pulling a piece of notepaper from his yards of grey sack coat and peering at it through round spectacles. “After election results—should the balance of the Common Council and the assistant aldermen remain the same—naturally you’re welcome to reapply.”
    He’d just described why men like Valentine are so very busy: a big enough political upset means all your friends are out of work and living in broken-down abandoned train cars north of the porousborders of civilization around Twenty-eighth Street. Elections decide which horde of rats gets to gnaw at the bones. I felt a bit like a rat just knowing how I came to be there, for if there were any voters save Democrats present, they kept good and snug about it.
    “Some of you,” the chief continued, “look as if you’re itchy to know what exactly you’re going to be
doing
.” A few dark laughs and a shuffling of boots. “Your shifts are sixteen hours. During those sixteen hours a day—or night, of course—you are charged with the prevention of crime. If you see a man breaking into someone’s ken, arrest him. If you see a vagrant child, collect it. If you see a woman pick the pocket of a tourist, collar her.”
    “How about if she’s just a mab strolling the back