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

drags for a gentleman friend?” called out a slouched rough. “Do we arrest her? Ain’t whoring a crime?”
    About a dozen men laughed outright at this question. Two or three whistled. Silently, I agreed with them.
    “Sure thing,” Matsell replied placidly. “Second thought—she’d have to go with you nice and quiet and you’d need the men who bought her to testify in court, so why don’t you start by building the world’s biggest holding cell and let us know when you’re finished.”
    Another ripple of laughter, and for the second time I felt a barbed twinge of interest. This was obviously going to be a job that required some thought from day to day, not work that turns a man into a glorified donkey.
    “Back to it, then: if you start dragging every owl you see into the station house on whoring charges, I’ll send you to hell myself. No one has that kind of time. Fees from the city have been abolished, but whether you accept rewards from pleased citizens is your own business,” our chief announced, reading down his long nose from his scribbled notes. “We’ve sacked the following inspection departments: streets, parks, public health, docks, hydrants, pawnbrokers, junk shops, hacks, stages, carts, roads, and lands-and-places. Thosemen are now you. The Sunday temperance wardens and the bell ringers are gone. Those men are also you. The fifty-four fire wardens are gone. Who are they now, Mr. Piest?”
    The crab-faced old scoundrel in the Dutch boots jumped to his feet with his wrinkled fist in the air crying, “We are! We’re the fire wardens, we’re the shield of the people, and God bless the good old streets of Gotham!”
    A round of applause and crude hoots that were exactly half sardonic and half approving went up.
    “Mr. Piest here is one of the old guard,” Chief Matsell coughed, pushing his spectacles up his nose. “You want to know how to find stolen property, talk to him.”
    I privately doubted whether Mr. Piest, who’d discovered the egg on his vest and was scraping at it with his thumbnail, could find his own arse. But I kept dark about it.
    “The majority of you lot will be appointed as roundsmen today, but there are a few special positions still open. I see a great many firemen here. Donnell, Brick, Walsh, and Doyle, you’re fire liaisons and I’ll be appointing more. Anyone here speak flash?”
    I was almost startled by the reaction—dozens of hands shot into the air, primarily from the wickedest-seeming American dead rabbits, the Britishers with tattoo marks, and the most scarred-up Irishmen. The Germans, almost universally, held their peace. Meanwhile, the air had turned lightning-sweet and thunderstormish. Whatever these positions were, they obviously were the shortest route to direct dealing with New York’s underbelly.
    “Don’t be modest, Mr. Wilde,” Matsell added mildly.
    I glanced in shock at our chief from under the brim of my hat. I’d felt downright transparent an instant before, but seemed like I’d been wrong.
    Flash, or flash-patter, is the curious dialect spoken by foisters,panel thieves, bruisers, dice burners, confidence men, street rats, news hawkers, addicts, and Valentine. I’ve heard tell it’s based on British thieves’ cant, but damned if I’ve ever heard them compared. It’s not a language, exactly—it’s more like a
code.
The words are slang substitutes for everyday speech, employed when a bloke who already knows the patter would prefer the bespectacled accountant sitting next to him to mind his own bloody business. The word
flash
itself, for instance, means a thing is about as spruce as possible. Of course, most of the men and women who speak it are poor. So some of our street youth grow up jabbering nothing else. And every day more honest workaday folk accidentally use flash terms like “my pal” and “kick the bucket,” but those are pretty amateur corruptions of everyday language. Matsell meant a higher level of expertise.
    And not only was