It wasn’t actually that hard to get Bill the Butcher and Boss Tweed in the same room, though it did take a bit of fast-talking in both cases.
I just told each of them that the other wanted to meet to discuss terms of surrender.
I don’t blame Bill the Butcher for buying it. He had every reason to believe that I’d be too scared to try anything clever. But Tweed really should have known better.
The location is important. They’ve gone to the mattresses, and neither wants to come out of their strongholds. If they’re going to meet at all, it has to be somewhere neutral.
Somewhere neutral to them, at least.
That’s how we find ourselves in Delmonico’s.
I know it sounds strange to say this about a restaurant, but Delmonico’s runs deep. It was the first fine dining establishment in America. They say Baked Alaska and Lobster Newberg were invented there, along with a few other dishes that have a bit less evidence behind them. Deep in the heart of the financial district, it’s still a fine dining establishment, elegant and expensive, where connections are made and business gets done.
In other words, it’s my territory. Not that it would be enough to help me against either one of them, let alone both.
Or rather, it would be my territory if it wasn’t an evening from sometime in the late Thirties. That makes it someone else’s.
Both of them walk in like they own the place, Boss Tweed coming in through front door , Bill the Butcher through the kitchens. They seem to expect some sort of reaction, but the people in white tie sitting at the tables are just phantoms, more scenery than independent beings.
As soon as they catch sight of each other, they realize that something’s wrong. No one looks that chipper if they’re coming to surrender.
The Butcher reacts like the wily old predator he is, diving for the kitchen door. Powerful as he is, he didn’t get this far by fighting at a disadvantage if he has a choice.
But this time he doesn’t. The door won’t open. He whirls on me.
“What did you do?” He bellows. “You two-bit card-trick joke, what did you do?”
“It’s not about what she did, boys.”
La Guardia stands up from the table where he’d been sitting unnoticed. As he walks past me, he hands me his hat.
“It’s about what I’m going to do.”
All the doors to the dining room slam shut. The shutters snap shut over the windows.
Boss Tweed looks at me, and his face is pale. It’s the most human I’ve seen him look.
“Young lady, this is an express violation of our – “
“I agreed to evict Bill the Butcher from the Five Points,” I say, cutting him off. “Nothing more. And I’ve done that.”
A contract can bind someone like me, but you’d better make sure every “t” is crossed and “i” is dotted. He of all beings should have known that.
“Oh you have, have you?” The Butcher blusters. He turns to La Guardia. “You think you can take both of us?” He nods at Tweed, who nods back and takes a surprisingly dangerous-looking fighting stance. The Thug and The Thief – enemies, but with a common enemy in The Law.
La Guardia just grins.
“Not by myself,” he answers. “But between me and my backers…”
The Butcher doesn’t react, but Tweed’s eyes widen. The Butcher is a thug, but Tweed is a politician, and La Guardia just said the most dangerous word in politics.
La Guardia starts to glow.
Time for me to go.
That hat that LaGuardia handed me?
There’s a legend about La Guardia. Supposedly he sat in as a magistrate one day, and tried a case where an old man had stolen a loaf of bread. He fined the old man, then remitted the fine, then fined everyone in the room fifty cents for living in a city where a man had to steal bread to survive. Supposedly the old man left the courtroom with $47.50 in his hat and “the light of heaven” in his eyes. Must have been a popular story in the Depression, but there’s no indication it ever really happened. Here in New York’s memory, that doesn’t matter so much. Freely given, that hat and the $47.50 in it, would be some of the most powerful Economancy in New York City, unless you could find the original beads that bought Manhattan.
The world goes white and I jump free as the evening of September 26, 1937 at Delmonico’s is sealed off forever.