d’Holbach followed Schuler’s instructions, getting in on the passenger’s side. There was a bullet hole in the vinyl seating and several holes in the door paneling. There’d been a tremendous battle over this car, sometime this morning. It might be quiet around Tammany Hall, but this was concrete proof that an occult war was starting in New York.
Schuler shut his door and started the vehicle. The radio was tuned to static and turned down low, almost inaudible. He pulled into gear without even looking at the Baron, without even looking at the street. It was as if he wasn’t there, as if the entire car was little more than an unconscious action, like breathing, like digestion. Schuler was listening to the whole world.
They U-turned in the intersection and ran the red light in both directions. There was a civvie’s car coming down 14th, but Schuler made no rush to avoid it. Nothing he could do this close to Tammany would catch the attention of secular police. The Hall’s secular shadow cast darkness across the park square and surrounding blocks, and the eyes of authority couldn’t penetrate the gloom. The friendship of the political machine, however weak it might’ve become, was still vital to police business in Manhattan.
The consequences of this rapid capture could be dire. While the Baron knew the Zombie’s presence would do a lot for his safety, nobody else outside Tammany would share his confidence. Their logic would be simple. The longer he remained in New York’s custody, the more likely it was that he’d hand over the Cat o’ Nine Lives.
Malik and Heckhaus would believe in the Baron’s failure. They’d trust that the only option left was to abandon the artifact or commit to open conflict.
In an occult war, who would win? With men like Schuler or Slavic artifacts like the Apples, occult forces had the undeniable advantage in assassinations and small-scale urban combat. However, prestige was quickly exhausted, and Langley’s secular forces were trained to defend cities and resist armies. If one of them made a move for the Cat, how would the war end? How would it be framed in the secular media? Somewhere in the thicket of possible answers rested the tiger of nuclear armageddon. If not today, then someday, it could wake at the smell of American and Russian blood. Once the Bolsheviks had the rest of the artifacts, conflict with Langley was inevitable, even planned. The tiger would roar, and all the threats and posturing of the Cold War would turn into a thunderstorm of bombs.
The only way out was to escape Tammany Hall quickly.
Schuler was the main reason that they couldn’t leave.
The Baron opted to reason with the Diviner, even if it was unlikely to succeed. “Meister Schuler, did you know that the Russians are fighting to see whether or not the Cat lands in Orthodox hands?”
“No,” Schuler said softly. “I’ve never cared.”
Schuler’s indifference was hard to fathom, but the Baron rolled with it. “I understand that attitude, but it’s important. If the Cat doesn’t end up in Orthodox hands by the end of today, we’re one step closer to nuclear war.”
“Makes sense,” Schuler said.
“So you believe me then? I’m trying to return the Cat in order to prevent conflict.”
“You don’t have to soften the blow,” Schuler said as they pulled onto 17th and drove along the face of Tammany Hall. “You want to stop the end of days.”
“Great. Then you know why I need to take the Cat and go.”
Schuler shrugged. “It’s not my problem.”
The Baron was taken aback. “Schuler, you believe me?”
“I do.”
“But you live in the same shadow of the bomb.”
“When it’s my time to die, I’m ready,” Schuler said. “What I ask myself is, do I think you’ll stop a nuclear war from happening?” He glanced at the Baron, flashing the copper of his frames through the light of a passing streetlamp. “And I answer, no. War is inevitable. The end is near, so I ask myself, what is it I value in these last years of life?” Schuler smiled, focusing on the Baron and leaving behind his reverie with the chorus of the gods. There was a sharpness to his eyes now—a specific attentiveness to detail, revealed in the way he moved. “Focusing like this gives me a headache, Baron. It makes me sick, after a time it makes my limbs shake. I have to lose focus to feel good again, to hear the music. It’s a taste of heaven here on Earth, when I lose focus—but Baron! When I’m listening to the divine music, I forget to eat. I forget to sleep. I need others to care for me. I need room and board, and nobody in the world will give me those things and my freedom at once… except for Boss Tweed.” Schuler turned away, but he didn’t zone out this time. He looked for the turn to the lot alongside the Hall and took it. “They say I’m a madman, and they’re right. I’m mad as a hatter. It keeps me healthy in man’s twilight.”
“You won’t save the world for your own pleasure?”
Schuler laughed dismissively. “Baron, please! Be reasonable. I’m not an evil man, but I am practical. I can’t save the world, but I can live all my days with all my heart.”
“You can save it. More than anyone.”
“No, I can’t. I’m not an army. I’m not a government or bomb. I’m a man. I channel the divine music because I am a tool of the gods, and they direct me hither and thither.” He wiggled a hand like a fish swimming upstream. “That is what I do. Unlike you, I am in their grace.” He pulled into a parking spot. “You make a misery of your final years, you know.”
“These aren’t my final years,” the Baron said.
“You’re going into the Hall with the Cat,” Schuler insisted. “If you have some chain of logic where this is a loss and nuclear armageddon hangs from the end, I think you can call it now. It’s already over.” He shut off the car. “I’m sorry, Baron.”
“You’re Nero fiddling while Rome burns.”
“There weren’t any fiddles in Rome,” Schuler corrected.
“Another reason you shouldn’t aspire to be him. Let me go.”
“You’re a man in the riots, throwing cups of water at the Circus while she burns.” Schuler opened his door. “You’re not leaving. Boss Tweed will want to see you immediately.”
The lot wasn’t officially for Tammany Hall alone. It was the next address up, pay to park. Despite this, the watchman on post didn’t rise from his chair. His head tipped up from his book in his booth, recognized Schuler, and dropped back down to read again.
Sunrise was maybe an hour out now. The streetlights around Tammany were shining on the first scraps of pedestrian traffic in this area, professional men and women at the extreme ends of corporate America. CEOs, CFOs and sundry other officers of finance were up early, an alphabet soup wrapped up in expensive tailored suits of black or grey. Clerical workers, secretaries and human computers filtered between them, readying themselves for the mentally rote but vital processes of sorting numbers, of turning the crank on the economic machine.
It’d be some hours yet before politicians, lawyers, and criminal contacts finished their breakfasts and came around the Hall to barter for territory, money, and control.
The Baron exited the car and followed Meister Schuler south along the face of the Hall. It was a three story building, dark red brick trimmed in white marble and smooth grey Tennessee limestone. Small, shallow arches rose over every window and door, and the Hall itself was capped with a large semicircle of brick and stone, which rested over a half-eye of window glass. It was easy to imagine someone standing on a high ladder, looking out of that dark shimmering surface at the world below.
If the Baron hadn’t seen the interior twenty-five years ago, he would’ve believed that Boss Tweed still spied from that perch with a jaundiced eye. Truth be told, it was just a high window to let light into the titular meeting hall at the building’s heart.
That hall was not where they’d be going.
The Zombie was standing outside the door beside Enzu Guerra, the enforcer whose arm was still in a cast and sling. “He got here ahead of us,” the Zombie called, gesturing to his new companion.
Schuler skirted around Enzu, not rudely ignoring him but already sinking back into his relaxed semi-fugue. He wasn’t losing his identity or forgetting himself, but the outcome was eerily similar. He hummed and passed through as if everything else were decoration.
Enzu stepped forward to shake the Baron’s left hand awkwardly. His salt-and-pepper beard was mashed to one side, the tip crooked left as if caught in a permanent gale. He’d slept on wet hair and woken up without time to preen. “d’Holbach,” he said, “is it true?”
“Is what true, Enzu?”
“Zeddie says you need to deliver the Cat o’ Nine Lives to the Russians.”
If the man was friendly to the Zombie after such violence, he was either cowed or unshakably brave. Enzu appeared to be the latter, so the Baron repeated the facts for his consideration. “If the Orthodox faction loses the ikon, Stalin’s Bolsheviks win a security payout of one Apple of Perun and the Lazy Woman. That’s the short and long of it.”
Enzu squinted, an unfocused glare at the future. “Easy assassinations,” he judged.
“That’s right. It’ll be war if they ever bring their weapons to bear on American resources. Stalin will have a third of the Slavic arsenal today, who knows how many tomorrow.”
Enzu scratched his beard. “Who have you been fighting with then?”
“Members of the American Communist Party. They’re a fifth column for the Bolshevik faction.” The complications could wait for the boss. Enzu only needed enough to know that the Baron was the “good guy.” They could pretend yesterday’s violence was forgivable because of the Baron’s good intentions, and Enzu might act as their ally on the inside. Support was a rare luxury in the lion’s den. The Baron would let a man into his confidence to have it.
“Jesus, so this Soviet business is the truth.” Enzu looked grim.
“Mostly true.”
“You got to tell General Osman about this,” Enzu said.
“He will,” Schuler muttered from the open double doors. The desk guards inside were picking up phones, making calls. “I’ve brought him to talk with the triumvirate.”
“Just tell them what you told me, Baron,” Enzu said.
“They’ll want to take the Cat,” the Baron said, “There’s no way they’d give it up.”
“I know, I know. But you have to give them a chance. They’re smart men, Baron. You’ve just got to convince them that it ain’t worth the cost. You got to persuade them, please.”
“We’ll try,” the Zombie said.
The Baron smiled congenially at Enzu. “Talk to me after our meeting with Tweed. All right?”
“Sure, Baron.” Enzu gave him a brief, lazy salute. “Good luck.”
The Baron followed Schuler through the doors with the Zombie right behind him. Once the doors closed, the Zombie pulled the Cat out of his pocket and gripped it tight in his left hand. There was no hiding it, but there was also no doubt that taking it would be a tussle with the world’s oldest murderer.
“Scratch any calls to security,” Schuler said to the desk guards, “Call the old man’s club. The Chinaman is our guest today. No complaints.”
“Yes, sir.” The guard hung up the phone and redialed.
“Tell them the Baron is here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not Chinese,” the Zombie complained.
“Are some of them secular?” the Baron asked quietly.
“Both,” Schuler said. He guided them into an elevator at the side of the lobby, but didn’t enter with them. “I’ll follow you up. See you there.”
The Baron couldn’t fault the man for being security conscious. He wouldn’t be able to dodge the Zombie in a tiny box, so he sent them up alone.
The elevator doors shut, leaving them in a momentary privacy. The Zombie made a quick comment. “We have no leverage here.”
“They don’t have much leverage either,” the Baron noted.
The Zombie opened his hand and looked at the Cat. “It’s their home turf.”
“The artifact is in our hands. Schuler knows he couldn’t take it from you.”
The Zombie grunted. “They might threaten you for it. We can’t actually do anything to any of these men. If I kill one of them, you’re a dead man, and they know it.”
The Baron shrugged. It was true, but it wasn’t worth worrying about. “I didn’t want you to kill anyone anyways. We’re minimizing the body count.”
“Yeah.” The Zombie closed his hand around the ancient artifact.
They stepped out into an office hallway with egg-shell walls and baby blue carpeting. This was the secular business of Tammany Hall. Offices were labeled with names and titles, several of them with emeritus attached. It was a true nobility. Executives and directors were kept on the payroll long after they’d stopped serving the political machine, and union dues were fed like roughage into their insatiable wallets. It was a shameful bureaucracy, old and bloated. Without the occult core, the secular organization would’ve collapsed under its dead weight.
“Care to guess which elevator Schuler will take?” the Zombie asked. “I could whack him like a mole. Cave his skull in and call it a morning well spent.”
“None,” the Baron said. “Listen carefully. None of the others are running.”
After a few seconds, a stairwell door opened further down the hall. Schuler waved them over with a drunken stagger. “To the north, towards Hyperborea.”
They followed the Diviner down the hall towards a grand pair of intricately carved oak double doors. The ornate brass handles stood above a pair of multicolored tassels. It was a design stolen from the Orient, a mimic of an ostentatious temple door.
“Most of the nobles are out today,” Schuler muttered, “on account of the weather. Cold, uncomfortable atmosphere, smelling of yesterday’s gunpowder.” He sniffed deeply. “But I feel the age of the triumvirate.” He pulled open the doors. The crimson carpet was immaculate. The cultured smells of cigars and cocktails faintly spiced the air. Something delicious and fatty had been fried in cast iron, a servant’s kitchen preparing breakfast for the masters.
They stepped inside, and Schuler shut the grand doors behind them. There were so many rooms here, spreading off the main hall. Lounges, pool tables, parlors, bars—and televisions. From one spot, the Baron could see more of the boxes at once than he’d seen in a TV dealership. Nearly every room contained one of the glassy, dark machines. He’d once read that there were no more than fifty-thousand televisions in North America, and three-fifths of them were in New York City. NBC was here. The New York cult was here. Considering the prevalence of sets in this temple, the Baron wondered if there wasn’t a connection between occult wealth and the growing secular media empire. Tammany Hall was technically sacred ground, but there was no rule against technological wonders. In a home of the gods, they watched television.
Schuler led them deeper, beneath metal chandeliers and around corners strengthened with elaborate wooden trim. The lights were low but persistent. A man might rest in any of these windowless rooms, collapsed on an armless couch while pretending that the furnace heaters and dim lamps were thick coals in fireplaces, smoldering straight till dawn.
Then they reached the end of the main hall, passing an empty secretary’s desk to reach the heart of the temple. There was a step up to the last door, which Schuler opened first.
It was a central courtroom, a place to stand before the triumvirate. Closed gates barred the steps up to a raised semicircle and a judicial bench staffed with three ancient men.
The triumvirate shifted, glaring down at their guests. They were seated in three grand, blood red chairs with high backs, thrones of wood and velour. Behind those chairs were simple doors, one breaking left, one breaking right, and one going directly back. These were the entrances to the personal apartments of the occult leaders, all three too old and too infamous to return to the secular world.
Tremendous shelves crowded the walls between their seats, burdened with stacked bottles of liquor and wine, rising in Incan tiers to the ceiling and organized by color and clarity to form a cloud of grim darkness around the center and a crystal lightness to either side.
Around the backs of the room were rolling carts stacked with food and clean plates, a buffet of rich aromatic meats and fruits, dry and heavily seasoned or wet and swimming in juice, capable of standing for hours without losing their intense flavor or delicious texture.
Cabinets with further liquids stood beside them—fruit juices, sodas, syrups and medicinal tinctures of bitter plants and fouler chemistries. At the very bottom stood jars of powders, pills, and other sundry highs and lows. Dishes were scattered across the bench, left casually for someone else to collect.
“Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach,” said one familiar voice.
The man on the left had a broad, flat, clean-shaven face, mildly asymmetrical, as if his head was slightly turned aside and he was looking past the Baron even when their eyes met. He had short, curly storm-grey hair, shallow lines, and a nose that was broad and long, projecting down and not out. It might’ve been smashed in a fight more than fifty years ago, when his day job was burglary and armed robbery for the mob. He wore stately robes of shimmering royal purple, closed along the front with a line of matte black buttons.
“High Oracle Gagliano,” the Baron addressed.
Gagliano had officially died in ‘51, but in truth he’d permanently retired to this hidden place in order to rule over his occult flock. He was the religious leader of the world’s largest cult, the shepherd of a New World empire, and the adjudicator of the nobles who would inhabit this place on better days—when there wasn’t a rumor of Soviet attack. His primary responsibility was to be the Oracle of Oracles, to hear the greatest tasks given to distant lands and to dispatch elite cultists to snipe them or aid in their completion. Otherwise, he presided over internal conflicts within New York territory, deciding based on testimony who would be allowed to earn the prestige for a particular task or redistributing that prestige if it was won by the wrong man.
“Atheist, you’ve brought a lot of hell to my city,” said the man on the right.
He was muscular and thick, and not running to fat like the other two members of the triumvirate. He bore a tremendous full beard, snow white but thick and glossy. It cascaded onto his expansive chest, covering up any medals that might be decorating his uniform. He clearly tailored his health with prestige—his hands were blemished like overripe fruit, yet his eyes and build suggested a young sailor’s vigor. He’d wished for the vitality to seed his favored son—he was too old to bed a woman otherwise. His family even shared the same tendency towards body hair, though the old man’s tailoring was tidier and covered up both sleeves and collar. It was only the immenseness of his white mane that suggested how heartily his hair grew.
“I’m not responsible, General Osman, but I’m sorry.”
The senior Osman was a centenarian, the second member of the New York cult to extend their lives at the expensive ratio of three units of prestige to one unit of restored youth. His responsibility was to lead the military might of New York. Vassal cults were bound by one law—might makes right—and General Osman’s command was mightiest of all. Even in far distant Europe, his missionaries arrived with the demand to submit or perish. Those who paid the tithe to New York were spared the rod. Those who rebelled were crushed, burned and scattered by Osman’s forces, up to and including Meister Schuler if the conflict was extreme.
In turn, those who swore loyalty were protected. If an enemy sought to conquer vassal territory, no defense would be fiercer than the “White Lion’s roar,” as Osman called his occult retribution. New York’s Cult was a feudal system and a protection ring; Osman was a warrior-prince and underboss.
“You have the Cat o’ Nine Lives,” said the eldest at the center.
This pear-shaped man was dressed in a 19th century business suit, roughly adorned and roughly tailored yet made from fine materials. His bowtie was in a shameful state, but this studied sloppiness was a deliberate defiance. Tradition didn’t rule this man. He defined tradition. Even now, he was sloppily bearded and half-bald. Even now, he lived with a perpetual squint of exhaustion and a ruddy complexion. Time had ravaged him, even as prestige had dragged him back from the brink of death again and again. This year, he was almost one hundred and thirty, and purging his body of cancers, inflammations, and other maladies had cost the cult dearly.
But if not for him, where would the cult be? What purpose would it have? Who would hold the center by sheer authority and the raw will to order atrocity and pillage mercilessly? He’d faked his death nearly three-quarters of a century ago, escaping from Ludlow Street Jail when it became obvious that the government would no longer parley with him or honor any bargains offered to his name. He’d stolen too much for too long to earn any forgiveness from that world, so he’d sunk into this one and lived in this place since the twenties, never stepping outside to see the sun.
“Boss William Magear Tweed.” The Baron bowed slightly.
Altogether, these men ruled from the throne. They were the shadow behind New York, defining its occult purpose and crafting policy with absolute authority. They delegated much to others, trusting that the best administration ran itself as smoothly as any industrial machine. They were the engineers of human organizations, the reason that Tammany Hall was still a meaningful name. This place was once renowned for a marvelous ring of corruption, a democratic party machine. Now, it was the rotten heart of an occult world power.
Author’s Note:
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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