I step through the door into a Tammany Hall that never existed.
The real Tammany Hall was a place where rich and influential men met to discuss political and economic strategy. Those men might not have actually been very respectable or refined, but they tried to look it.
This Tammany Hall is a parody of hoopty-do politics out of political cartoons and old movies. It looks more like the inside of a barn than the marble building outside. Straw and sawdust is spread on the wooden floor. There are brass spittoons here and there (okay, the real Tammany Hall probably had those), but nobody bothers to use them. A man in a cheap suit stands on a rickety wooden stage, hoarsely haranguing the crowd, but I can’t hear him over the shouting and laughing and cheering. The crowd includes men from every social class, high society to roustabout, but they are all men, and they’re all white. By the standards of the 1870’s, not today. Not an Italian among them, and very few Irishmen.
Unlike outside, they’re all in-period. I’m getting close to the center of Boss Tweed’s power, his literal comfort zone, so of course it looks like the time and place when he was most comfortable.
No one takes any notice of me as I cross the room to the inner sanctum. I wonder if they even see me, or perceive me with whatever senses they have. I should be shining like Times Square, a star of power and commerce, but time gets weird down here in the Deep Soul. As far as they’re concerned, I may be 150 years away.
(And how do I know that the ordinary-looking office door I’m about to open is the inner sanctum? I can smell the greed. You might think I’d like it, but I don’t. A true economancer doesn’t like greed any more than lawyers actually like to do business with dishonest people. Greed’s whole purpose is to gather everything to itself, and that starves commerce to death in time. That’s what it smells like: rotting commerce.)
I take a deep breath as I lay my hand on the door handle. Here’s where it gets really dangerous. If what I’m about to face is just New York’s spirit of greed and corruption wearing Boss Tweed’s name, then I’m still in control. If the human man William Magear Tweed is still in there anywhere, the situation gets unpredictable. People have emotions and priorities other than greed. If I make him mad enough, there might not be anything that’s enough to bribe him with. And in his street-fighting youth with the fire departments, Bill Tweed was known for being good with an axe.
I throw the door open, and it’s only years in this business that keeps me from gasping out loud. I’ve seen worse, but not much.
The “inner sanctum” is a luxurious office that’s at least as big as the whole building looks from the outside. There’s an oak desk the size of a Buick, but Boss Tweed isn’t sitting at it. He’s floating twenty feet in the air.
Boss Tweed has only the faintest resemblance to anything that might ever have been human. He’s ten feet tall and so fat he’s nearly spherical, like in the political cartoons by Thomas Nast that brought him down the first time. All around his bulk there are…appendages…with sucking mouths and grasping hands. One of which, I note with some dismay, is holding an axe. All of them have their own neat little sleeve in his suit, though.
Equally twisted parodies of lawyers, building contractors, and aldermen are orbiting him like planets orbiting a star.
Then he notices me, and he settles to the ground, and he’s just a bald, bearded, middle-aged fat man in an old-fashioned suit. Doesn’t look like such a bad guy, really. He’s still holding the axe, though. Corruption always has the possibility of violence. He sets it down on that massive slab of desk and straightens his bow tie before turning to talk to me.
“Why good morning, Miss Jessalyn,” he says. “I’m glad you could make it. I have a business proposition I’d like to discuss with you.”
