So last time, I tried to deliver an eviction notice to Bill the Butcher, New York’s personal spirit of violence, on behalf of Boss Bill Tweed, New York’s spirit of greed. It’s exactly as ridiculous as it sounds and it was not my idea. Much to my entire lack of surprise, Bill the Butcher wasn’t having it and kicked me straight out of his headquarters in the Five Points and into the Collect Pond, which was the same place but about 100 years further into the past. Frankly, I counted myself lucky. Still, to get where I needed to be, I would have needed to take two horse carts, a carriage, a streetcar, and a subway, which would have taken time I just don’t have.
So I tapped my emergency stash. I used the power from a gold double-eagle coin from Bill’s time to power my way up through all those layers of New York City’s memory. It got me where I needed to go, but as will happen when you have an emergency and have to spend whatever it takes, I’m completely tapped out. The coin is still worth millions in the physical world, but it won’t buy me a cup of coffee here in the City’s Soul.
So where was it I needed to go so fast?
City Hall.
Not the real New York City Hall, which is nice enough but not really all that impressive and is kinda overshadowed by the Manhattan Municipal Building, which is itself just a pretty office building if you think about it.
This is the City Hall you can’t fight. The City Hall that oughtta do something…because it can do something. It can do anything, if it chooses to, at least within New York. It doesn’t loom miles into the sky like some of the more famous skyscrapers here in the Soul of the City, but it’s still much bigger than it is in the physical world, made of gleaming marble instead of granite or limestone. The statue of Justice on top – the top being a huge dome instead of a meek little cupola – has a flaming sword, and she is not blindfolded. The City never forgets that all of that Respectability is built on the bones of the Five Points.
Whatever, I’m just glad she’s there.
I enter City Hall with no trouble – no metal detectors on this side, after all – and immediately get lost. Because of course I do. It’s City Hall.
I wander around for what seems like hours, but may not actually be any time at all. Or it might be centuries, it’s hard to tell. Usually I’d slip someone a buck to guide me, but like I said…tapped out. I wish I had a bureaumancer with me. Yes, those are a thing, and they’re more powerful than you’d think. Remember that some pantheons are bureaucracies.
So I’m just about desperate enough to see if I can find the ghost of a shoeshine boy or something and see if they’ll help me for a dime when someone taps me on the shoulder.
“Excuse me young lady, can I help you?
I turn around, and see a short, fat, heavy-jowled man with a loud tie. He looks middle-aged, maybe a little over fifty, but his hair is still dark and done up in what might be a comb-over and I just have to go back to how short he is because he’s one of the few grown men I’ve ever been able to look down at.
I know who he is immediately. Like Boss Tweed and Bill the Butcher, he looks like an ordinary man on the surface, but he’s surrounded by a thick sense of power. Like them, he’s one of the hearts of New York. But he’s not the monster that they are.
But even if I hadn’t been able to sense that, I might have recognized him anyway. There’s a fair chance that any New Yorker might. Eighty years later, and there’s still never been anyone like him.
Fiorello LaGuardia.
“Yes, Mr. Mayor. Yes, you can.”