Dog Bites Man by James Duffy Page A

mountain coming to Muhammad? He found out when the governor, looking like a miniature Michelin Man in her unfashionable alpaca parka, arrived at the scheduled time the next afternoon. She wasted no time on small talk but quoted Eldon's inaugural address on the subject of saving the people's money and then made her bid for the Governor's Rooms.
    "We should carry out the original intention," she told him. "If I use this space, we can cut back on the rent we pay uptown. A win-win game."
    Eldon was more than a little confused. He had been vaguely aware that the suite in question was called the Governor's Rooms, but he had never been inside it. And certainly no governor he remembered had used it. Now he was confronted with the prospect of having a politician who loathed him sitting practically on his lap.
    "Randilynn, I don't think this is such a great idea. You have your offices uptown and in Albany, I have mine here. Why make confusion? And if there's any formal agreement to make the space upstairs available to you, I'm unaware of it. No, Randilynn, the more I think about it, no. I don't have to do it, and I won't."
    "Okay, Mr. Mayor. Have it your way. But when I walk out of here, I'm going straight to Room Nine, to the reporters. I'm going to tell them that all your talk about economy and saving money is bullshit. Presented with a practical suggestion for saving a fewthousand—in state money, not city, I grant you—you turned it down. Instead you declared war on the governor. That what you want?"
    Eldon needed time, which he now asked for.
    "Can I get back to you? I really have to think this through."
    "Twenty-four hours. Then I go to the mattresses."
    "Randilynn, I'll call you tomorrow."
    In a hurried conference with Jack Gullighy after the governor had left, the two men agreed that she had them "by the balls," as she would have put it. If he persisted in turning her down, the two men knew
The Post-News
would fan the flames and turn the petty dispute into a civil war, a blood feud. And she would yap interminably about the money Eldon refused to save.
    "Let Randy Randy use the goddam rooms," Eldon concluded. "It's not worth putting up a fight. Just one condition—her people have to call us whenever she leaves the building, so that I never have to run into her."

THIRTEEN
    O ne of Mayor Hoagland's campaign proposals had been to find ways and means of increasing tourism in New York City. Money exacted from tourists was an effective and efficient way of pumping up the local economy, he had argued: increasing revenues through the sales and hotel taxes, enhancing the city's status as a cultural hub for the world, promoting employment among less privileged citizens—actors and artists, busboys and bartenders.
    Some residents, strolling in midtown, wondered if the promotional efforts that Hoagland intensified had gone too far, confronted as they were with regiments of foreigners marching five across. But Eldon persisted and his persistence had paid off in healthy increases in the revenues attributable to the tourist trade.
    His Office of Tourism had sponsored a poll to find out just who was coming to visit and spend. The results were hardly surprising: Europeans and Asians and Latin Americans, of course, but newly prosperous residents of the Third World as well. Domestically, Southerners and Midwesterners dominated, with Californians, presumably content with the Disneyland they called home, lagging far behind.
    There was one strange incongruity—residents of upstate New York tended to avoid the metropolis. Reviewing the results with Esther Henriques, his commissioner of tourism, Eldon theorized that the upstaters had been brainwashed by the Sodom-and-Gomorrah rhetoric of their parochial legislators. And he urged Ms. Henriques to find ways to correct the anomaly.
    Having given this command, he was hardly in a position to object when Esther informed him that she had arranged for a "New York City Day" at the annual