I’ll spare you the negotiations with Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie. They get repetitive.
Like La Guardia, Tweed, and the Butcher, they have deep roots in this town. Maybe even moreso. Their names are all over it, on libraries and museums and plazas and performance spaces. Places where people think about them every day. That means they still feel that they have ownership in this city, which is both good and bad. It’s good in that they still feel the same sense of noblesse oblige that they had in life, the same generosity that built all those libraries and museums and plazas and performance spaces..
It’s bad in that they feel that they literally own the place. But for now, even that’s a good thing, since it means that they don’t want Bill the Butcher and Boss Tweed – the Thug and the Thief, as LaGuardia calls them – to wreck it.
Like La Guardia and the two Bills, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie aren’t the men they were when they were alive. It’s hard to say if they ever were, and if so, how much of them is still left in there. They’re mostly the ideas of the men they used to be, now. They’re the Titans of Finance. They used to be the Titans of Industry, but times change.
There are others I could have contacted. The spirits of Broadway and Central Park would have been glad to help. Neither of them want The Thief or The Thug to be in charge again. But that would have taken time I don’t have. This needs to get done before Tweed and the Butcher figure out what I’m doing, or even that I’m doing something.
Then there are the ones I don’t contact because the price would be way too high, even for the kind of high-risk, high-reward deals I handle. There’s a chance that whoever wins this comes out in charge of New York, and there are choices worse than The Thug or The Thief. Some of them sleep in the Harbor or down deep in the darkest tunnels, the ones that were sealed as soon as they were opened. Others used to be human, but that doesn’t mean you want them to have control of the city’s future. Their idea of “urban renewal” would turn the city into a shining palace where almost no one would live.
And then there are the ones I didn’t bother because you don’t wake them up for something this minor. Yes, minor. You only call in Lady Liberty if you need to hold the sky together.
In the end, what it came down to is that I’m an economancer, and the Titans of Finance are my people, so to speak. I know how to get them to the table, how to get the best out of the deal, and how to make sure they don’t end up owning more of the City than they already do.
All of that’s done now. Everyone’s in place, ready to do what they need to do. Now I just need to do my part, and it’s a part I’ve been dreading.
I need to get Boss Tweed and Bill the Butcher in the same place.