I get off the bus in 1870, leaving the supporting cast for The Warriors on the bus. I could have dragged them along to use as muscle, but they would’ve been more trouble than they were worth. Even spirits that dumb know how to do the “exact words” thing.
I even did ‘em a favor. I made it so they could truthfully tell their boss that they obeyed their orders: I didn’t go below 14th Street.
Exact words, my friends.
The street is made of brick, and it’s filled with people mostly dressed the way you’d expect people to dress in 1870. Ladies in corsets and bustles, men in bowlers and top hats. There are a few people from other eras of 14th Street as well: you have Dolly Gallagher-Levi from the turn of the Twentieth Century all dressed up and on her way to the Harmonia Gardens; you have a down-on-his-luck looking guy from the 1930’s slumped on a stoop. A yuppie from the Eighties walks arm-in-arm with a tie-dyed hippie chick from the Sixties. No one takes any notice of them, and they don’t take any notice of me either.
And of course, there’s commerce. The street is just bustling with Business: there are horse carts and hand carts, fancy shops and people hawing goods out of little trays hung around their necks. Did you know that back in this time, oysters were so common in the waters around New York that oyster carts were like hot dog carts now?
It does my heart and my power reserves good. I breathe it in deep, and try to ignore the smell of horse dung.
A horse-drawn trolley clatters by, but I don’t bother getting on. It’s not a long walk to where I’m going.
It’s like I told you in the last chapter: souls are about meaning. I’m looking for Boss Tweed, and I’m not going to find him at City Hall, or his mansion on Fifth Avenue, or even the Tweed Courthouse – especially not that last one, it wasn’t even finished when he fell from power.
No, if I want to find Boss Tweed, I need to come to this time – right at the height of his power, just before his fall – and I need to come to the place that he’s really associated with: Tammany Hall.
It’s a grand building, brick with marble columns and marble front steps. Bigger than the buildings around it, at least in 1870. Even so, there are thugs from various eras loafing on the front steps, making sure no one gets in to eavesdrop on the corruption. One who’s from more or less the right period gets up as I approach. He’s holding an axe handle – loosely, like he’s not trying to threaten nobody or nothin’, he just happens to be holding an axe handle, but of course he’s not fooling anybody and of course he doesn’t mean to – and smirking.
“You’re not welcome here, little lady,” he says. “So why don’t you just – “
I flip a nickel at him. He catches it automatically, then looks horrified as he realizes what he just did.
“Go jump in the river, kid, ya bother me,” I say. He marches off toward the Hudson as I turn my attention to the other loafers, who are now taking me a lot more seriously.
“Anyone else want to run a little errand for me?” I ask. They get out of my way fast. That’s smart of them. They don’t want to know what I can do with a dollar in 1870.
(You don’t need to worry about this kind of thing, by the way. Much. The tricks I can pull in the real world, with people, are a lot more subtle. Honestly, the easiest way for me to use money to get people to do what I want is just…use it as money.)
It’s just as well I didn’t have to spend any more anyway. If I go into Tammany Hall, I am officially playing in the Big Leagues. It doesn’t exist as an organization anymore in the real world and hasn’t since the Fifties, but here in the Soul of New York, this Hall is the beating heart of the City’s corruption. So I open the door and step inside.