It's not easy working for the Mayor of New York. There's eight million people in the city - seven million if you believe the Feds, but who does? - all of them asking for a handout, fifty-one city council members who all need their feathers smoothed, a dozen unions, each of which could cripple the city if it went on strike, five boroughs that all want to secede from the city at least part of the time, and one Mayor who dumps all the tough decisions down to us aides because he's too busy running for Governor to worry about the city. The only bright spot in the job is that the ghost of Fiorello La Guardia has stopped haunting us. If you think I'm speaking metaphorically, I'll take that as a compliment. I spent a lot of time last year convincing the press that the ghost was only a hoax, and a press spokesman like me gets a lot of job satisfaction out of giving good spin to the newsfolks. I'm only talking to a rag paper like you because no one's going to believe you after that snow job I did last year - especially cause if anybody asks, I'm going to swear I never saw you before in my life. I figure I ought to tell the truth to somebody, but I don't see that I need to tell it to anybody reputable.

You understand we had good political reasons to keep the ghost off the headlines. It's bad enough living with the memory of La Guardia. He was Wonder-Mayor, he built half the bridges and parks in the city, he cleaned out the crooks from City Hall, and no matter how good a job you do, someone's going to say La Guardia did it better. Competing with his memory was already a strain - we didn't want to fight against the man himself.

Of course, at first we didn't know it was him. We got reports that a stub of a man, heavyset and middleaged, was showing up to drag people out of burning buildings, but nothing about him being Fiorello. We just thought we might have an arsonist on our hands, a screwball who went around setting buildings on fire and then sticking around to save his victims' lives. The first hint we got - by which I mean me, cause I was the one watching the TV that night - was from Channel Five News, Tony Ramirez live from Ozone Park at the Amerigo Vespucci Rest Home where a fire had just been put out. Tony, who looks like a young Ricardo Montalban and will be anchor at a network station before he's thirty, was interviewing this old woman in a wheelchair - her name flashed on the screen, Mrs. Lisa Venucci, who was hamming up her thirty seconds of fame like there was no tomorrow.

"Mrs. Venucci," said Tony, after asking her was the fire horrible (it was horrible), was she scared (she was scared), has she been in touch with her family (that's their car over there), "is it true that the Vigilante Firefighter also appeared here?"

"You mean the Mayor?" she asked. Tony looked puzzled. He didn't think he'd meant the Mayor. "He was here all right. He saved my Vito!" She lifted up a smudged and frightened kitten to the camera. It mewed. She grinned. "He was wonderful. He just ran into my room, didn't care about the flames, picked up Vito in his arms, and ran out again. I would have thanked him, but he was off again so quickly. He's like that, you know," she confided to the camera. "Always busy."

Tony just sort of stared at her like she was insane, and I giggled from my couch in front of the TV. The Mayor is a brave guy, but I couldn't picture him, out of shape as he is, running into a burning building. It looked like Tony couldn't either. "Mrs. Venucci," he said, very gently, "are you sure you haven't made a mistake? The Mayor is supposed to be in Buffalo." He listened to his earphone for a second. "Yes, he is."

"He was here," Mrs. Venucci repeated warmly. "I think I know Mayor La Guardia when I see him! Don't you talk down to me. Aren't you eyewitness news? Well, I'm an eyewitness, so you listen to what I say-" I clicked off my TV, and that was the last I ever saw of Mrs. Venucci, white hair blowing in the wind, mouthto yell at Tony Ramirez.

I was ready to start yelling at Tony the next day too when he started asking me questions about the ghost during the press briefing, a press briefing I had scheduled to talk about our support for the arts in New York City. "Mr. Paley," he asked, before any of the other reporters could get a word in, "do you believe the reports on Mayor La Guardia? If they're true, what's the Mayor's position?"

When I was a private citizen I would have said things like "What a bonehead question, Tony, what have you been smoking?" Since I was most officially a spokesman for His Honor the Mayor and the cameras were rolling I only said, "Tony, if you can get film of La Guardia endorsing us for re-election, we'll believe any report you give us, and we'll come out in favor of anything he does." I waited for the laughter to die down. "A sweet old lady said she saw La Guardia. I'm sure she thinks she did see him, but we don't believe in spooks except on Halloween. Next question."

Tony chimed in again, fast. "Mr. Paley, a lot of other folks at the fire say they saw La Guardia too. They're all old enough to remember him, one of them has eidetic memory, and she's willing to testify in a court of law that it was him. Are you saying the Mayor doesn't believe the testimony of twenty people?"

I wasn't going to say that twenty voters were liars, so I decided to duck the question. "Hey, Tony, maybe you should change your name to Geraldo." This time the wave of laughter was enormous, and Tony turned beet-red. "Ladies and Gentlemen, La Guardia died fifty years ago. The Mayor honors his memory, and honors it most by paying attention to the living, not the dead. Now, if we can get away from tabloid questions, I might even answer a few questions about the budget." They all perked up - mentioning the budget to reporters just then was like throwing meat to sharks - and Tony couldn't get another question in for the rest of the session. He looked daggers at me all hour long, and I remembered too late that a Hispanic reporter can get kidded a lot that he's going to become the next Geraldo. I had touched a nerve, which is not something I needed in a city where the press needs no excuse to get nasty. I looked for him afterwards to apologize, maybe to bribe him with some exclusive information, but he left before I could find him. My only comfort was that I had squashed the La Guardia story.

Of course, that comfort didn't stick around for long. Now that people knew what to look for - and they couldn't miss him after the Post and Newsday preempted the sports section to put his picture on their front pages - their were La Guardia sightings everywhere. He still showed up at fires, but also at drug busts, traffic jams, health inspections of restaurants, and city offices. Sometimes he rushed to help a policeman at his job, other times he would yell at an official he thought was working too slowly. He attracted the most notice at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Manhattan, when he yelled at a clerk who came back from his lunch break at three in the afternoon. The witnesses quoted him as saying, "What sort of a civil servant are you? You loaf around three hours and expect to get paid? Start working for a living or you're fired! You and everyone else who doesn't start working now!" Tony Ramirez and his cameras arrived five minutes later. They saw a cheering crowd, sweating civil servants, a line moving faster than it ever had before, but no La Guardia.

We wouldn't have minded the La Guardia sightings and the wave of La Guardia nostalgia alone, but with Tony Ramirez they turned into a political headache. Ramirez spread a network of contacts around the city so that he could get his camera crew to any sighting in under an hour. Every evening Channel Five had footage of a witness to the day's La Guardia event, a Ramirez research bit of what La Guardia had done the same way fifty years ago, and (the real killer) a Ramirez analysis of what La Guardia was doing better than the Mayor right now. The Ramirez spot got the highest Nielsens in the metropolitan area inside of a month, and our approval ratings started to plummet.

"We could shoot him," said Judy at our damage control meeting. Judy, Judy Horowitz who did the negative ads for our campaign, is a slasher pol. When in doubt, she told me once, mangle the opposition.

"Love to," I said, "but he's in front of a camera all day. Know a judge who can spring us for murder one, televised?"

"I meant La Guardia," she replied. "Ramirez we say has a vendetta against us. Lean on Channel Five till they switch him to five a.m. weather and forget about him. Do silver bullets work on ghosts?"

"Just on werewolves," said Jerrold White, who is black, and hates jokes about his name. To give you some idea of the emotional dynamics in the office, I should say now that we weren't a gorgeous mosaic of different ethnicities and genders who all eagerly served the Mayor in cooperative harmony. We were a lawyer, an ad man and a social worker who each wanted to be Mayor in ten years ourselves, spear carriers with ambition but no love for our present jobs. We would have actively hated each other if we didn't already hate the Mayor for leaving us to cover his ass while he gave speeches Upstate. "Judy, do you want to make the man into a martyr? The word on the street is that people like him, but they're not taking him too seriously. You know what'll happen if he goes? If people think we got rid of him, they won't vote for us for twenty years."

"Word on the street!" Judy sneered - she sneers well. "Word on the street last year was that everybody loved each other, and then we had another riot. Dennis, give me some poll numbers so I'll know something." She looked at me expectantly, and Jerrold glared at me like it was me who had insulted him, not Judy. I figured I'd try to soothe him. Jerrold is pretty useless at his job, but he has the Mayor's ear, so there was no use offending him.

"I think Jerr's right on this one," I said. He didn't smile at me, but he looked a little less sullen. "Our numbers our lousy, but they'd only go down if they thought we'd gotten rid of him. Not to bring you down to earth or anything, Judy, but can we drop the Ghostbusters mindset and discuss this seriously? Obviously we need to find out who this hoaxer is and lock him up in Bellevue, but what do we do till then? I say we need to ride this wave and stage a La Guardia celebration. We could start giving out La Guardia medals, name a street after him - get the cameras on us, not the nut. What do you think?"

Judy gave me one of her looks of utter contempt, the sort she stays up late practicing in the mirror. I felt my cheeks turn hot and red, though I learned enough to ignore her a long time ago. "What I think is that there's a ghost running around the city, and you're too dumb to know it, Dennis. If Ramirez was arranging this, we'd know it - hell, if anybody human was putting on a scam this big, we'd have gotten a whisper. I've heard zip, it's a ghost till I learn otherwise. Meanwhile he's killing us, and I say we need to kill him before our careers go flush down the toilet with the Mayor's." We both looked at each other like the other was insane or stupid, and Jerrold adjourned the meeting fast, before we killed each other.

"Maybe we could exorcise him," he said as we left, but neither Judy or I was paying attention. This was a sensible idea, but we heard them so rarely from Jerrold that we usually ignored him. His real skill was keeping the rest of us from flying off the handle with each other, and it suddenly hits me that that was the real reason why the Mayor hired him. At any rate, Judy and I left in a huff, and we ended up doing nothing, just like Jerrold advised.

I did my best not to believe in ghosts, even when my secretary said he'd seen La Guardia stop a mugging on the BMT, and my sister swore she'd seen him chew out a street minister in Times Square for preaching too loudly. But I had to face facts too, when he preempted my own radio interview. I was going on the air to explain how the Mayor was going to handle the strike of the newspaper deliverymen, was about thirty seconds in to my spiel when one of the radio engineers burst into the booth to tell me I wasn't on the air. "What the hell is on?" I asked, and we tuned in to hear La Guardia reading the comics over the air. I'll never forget what he sounded like. You know those old movies with Edward G. Robinson or Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney? There's a tough guy, maybe with a heart of gold, and he rat-a-tats out his lines so you know he's a good working class Joe, no particular ethnic group, just an all-American guy. That's what Fiorello - La Guardia - Fiorello sounded like, except he was real. He was talking to the kids. "A lot of you didn't get the comics today, and I know you're getting a bum deal. You know who's to blame? The louses who own the papers and won't give their workers a fair wage, they're to blame, and the bedhuggers who won't take a good deal when they're given it, they're to blame too. They're all out for a buck, and they don't care a hoot that you didn't get your comics to read. But you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna ignore them and read the comics anyway. I've got the Post here, which is a yellow rag but it has the comics unlike the snoots at the Times. First up we've got Garfield. OK, Garfield is under his blanket, and he's thinking-" we couldn't find him anywhere in the station, and we looked everywhere, but his voice was coming from somewhere, and he read the entire comics page. He used different voices for all the characters, he was really funny, and if I didn't hate the guy for coming back to New York and ruining my job, I'd have signed up to work for him then and there.

Before he left he did one more thing to make my life miserable. The last words he spoke that night were, "And don't forget the Mayor. He's a lazy bum, he doesn't give two hoots for the city, and he let this strike happen. Phone him up and give him a piece of your mind, that's what I say! Tell him to be a full time Mayor, or you'll kick him out. This is Fiorello La Guardia - God bless you and good night." Now, there weren't more than a few thousand people listening to the station when Fiorello signed on, but they all called all of their friends, and I swear half the city was listening before he signed off. Our phone banks were jammed the next three days with citizens telling off the Mayor.

For this we called the Mayor back from a tour he had planned in Long Island. He got the papers delivered again before the week was out, but it didn't do us any good. Some people said he didn't do it quickly enough, other people gave Fiorello the credit, and everybody noticed that he left the city for another speaking tour as soon as the strike was over. We all begged him to stay, but he wasn't listening to us anymore. He had Albany on the brain, and nothing else was getting through to him.

We had another meeting, and this time Jerrold was in charge. I still thought he was an ignoramus, but Judy and I were willing to admit he knew more about ghosts than we did. "Exorcism," he repeated. "You can get a Catholic priest - I saw that in the Amityville Horror. Then there's those Chinese sorcerers who wave sticks to get rid of demons. Haitian voodoo guys if you know where to ask."

"Ask the Hassids if they know how to get rid of a dybbuk," added Judy. "They owe us a favor for that fiddle with the education budget. Also I know a witch from college who could use the money. I'll phone her up."

"How do we know which one to get?" I asked. "I've been doing some research. The guy was half-Jewish, half-Italian, he was brought up Protestant, and I don't even know if he believed in exorcism."

Jerrold harrumphed wisely. "Word on the street is we should get an exorcist from each community. We want to make this exorcism something which will bring the city together. We don't want to exclude anybody Dennis, put it out that we're hosting a religious conference on - on - on urban spirituality. That ought to go over well."

"Right," I said like an obedient little drudge. "You really think this is going to work, Jerr? I pretty certain Fiorello wasn't that interested in religion."

"It'll work," said Jerrold, very seriously. "We'll use every religion in the book, and one of them's got to work. Otherwise he couldn't be here."

"Besides," added Judy with just a hint of a smile, "he keeps on saying the city can do anything it puts its mind to. Nu, we're putting our mind to getting rid of him. Can't fail." And on that cheery note the meeting broke up.

Of course it did fail. We didn't have any trouble summoning him - it began to seem like he was living in Gracie Mansion. I even saw him coming out of a shower in a terrycloth bathrobe early one morning. The trouble was getting rid of him once we'd gotten him here; either the exorcism didn't work, or the exorcist didn't want to get rid of him anymore. The voodoo guy had a cousin in a south Florida detention cente, and Fiorello promised he'd pull strings to get him refugee status (kept his word too; the cousin and his whole family are living in Flatbush now, and they just named their youngest kid Fiorello Ouverture Namphy). The Hassid, a Lubavicher named Chaim Vilner, he sucked into a discussion of the Cabalah and the Talmud. Fiorello had been doing some reading since he died, Vilner said, and he wasn't going to send such a studious dybbuk off to Ketev Mriri. He also said not to bother him again, or he'd get every Lubavicher in Brooklyn to vote against us in the next election, which he might do anyway since we were so meshuggah as to want to get rid of a good spirit. The priest Fiorello just terrorized. He called him a reactionary old cuss, sneered at the holy water, and berated him for supporting the death squads in El Salvador. The old man was shaking when he left, and last I heard he'd been transferred to Armonk for a rest.

We kept on trying, but nothing worked. When we ran out of exorcists he materialized up in the lounge where we were resting. "Tammany grifters!" he yelled at us. "Leeches! You can try to run Fiorello H. La Guardia out of this city, but he ain't running. I know your type. It's plug uglies like you that try to stuff ballot boxes and put George Washingtons into voters' pockets on Election Day, so they won't notice you're taking Ben Franklins out of the city kitty and into your own grubby little hands. You think you can have your way, but the people aren't going to stand for it. I thought you were just lazy, but you're rotten, rotten to your stinking little souls. Well, I'm getting rid of you! I'm here to fight for the little man-"

"You're sure little enough." I interrupted. You'd think I'd learn not to make nasty cracks after the trouble I got into with Ramirez, but my tongue doesn't know enough to keep still. His face turned purple, and he started hopping up and down with anger, all there was of him.

"WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH A LITTLE GUY? WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH A LITTLE GUY?" There was a lot more, about how I could go to hell and where I could put my goddam WASP height and that I'd learn better manners, and he disappeared in a rage.

"Well," said Judy, "that was pretty dumb of you, Dennis. On the other hand, better you than me. Right, Jerrold?"

"Amen," he said, and they sauntered away before I got hit with a bolt of lightning or something. We didn't even try to come up with a new plan on how to deal with La Guardia. We were just going to roll with the blows.

The blows weren't long in coming, and when they came they were fast and furious. Fiorello was on an anti-corruption kick, and there was a lot of corruption out there to find. People started calling the radio WLGK - What La Guardia Knows - and more people were listening to radio then watching TV for the first time in forty years. It was sort of fun to hear what he'd found out each day - fun like going through a roller coaster blindfolded. I'll give you an idea of what just three days was like. Monday he found ghost workers on the Manhattan Borough President's payroll, Tuesday he uncovered a scam to double-bill the city in the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and Wednesday he was gleefully telling the city that the Police Commissioner was on the take. It wasn't a question of low poll numbers anymore - we had recall petitions coming in with fifty thousand signatures apiece. The press was taking bets on which of us would go to jail first. We would have been arrested inside of two weeks, except that Fiorello had revealed that the D.A. was on the take too. She was last seen boarding an Air Paraguay plane.

You'd think with all this the Mayor would come back to Gracie Mansion, but it was like we had the plague or something. Actually, the Mayor played a cagy game all along. The man was squeaky clean, and I mean he bathed in borax soap twice a day. He did people favors, but it was through people like me and Judy, with no threads going back to him. You could tape him twenty-four hours a day - and I did, to see if I could find something to shift the heat to him - but there wasn't a smoking gun anywhere, nothing but a lot of ambiguous comments on whatever we told him. Fiorello knew this too. Anyways, that's the only reason I can think of that he never attacked the Mayor directly. Whatever the reason was, the Mayor stayed out of the city like a good little boy and played footsie with the moneyed types in the suburbs. I'd have taken notes on how he kept out of trouble, but I was too busy holding the line against the press. The first week I called it spin control; from then on it was damage control.

You know how you have nightmares when you say to yourself this can't get any worse, and then it does? About one day before the President's visit to the UN I remembered he was coming, and it hit me I was living that nightmare. I tried to prepare, ordered extra-tight security, but I knew in advance it was no use. Sure enough, Fiorello showed up. You probably remember this, cause this "hoax" hit the front page of every newspaper in the world. There was the President, the Governor, the Mayor and maybe five thousand Chinese-Americans gathered at the U.N. Plaza to hear the President explain why the U.S. was just going to slap China on the wrist for the human rights violation de jour. The President stepped up to the podium, but it was Fiorello's voice that came out on the speakers. I didn't catch much of what he said since I was too busy running to disconnect the wires, but I heard the sentences that got on the evening news - "America isn't in the business of trading with tinhat tyrants. We don't need to make a few businessmen rich off the blood of Chinese prisoners. We don't need to hang our heads in shame when our leaders bow to the Beijing butchers." There was more, but what I remember most was the audience wildly cheering after the mike was cut, and the president's face turning red as a cherry. Also, I remember the booing after he explained that that wasn't him speaking the last five minutes, and what his speech really said.

After that the Mayor agreed to meet with us. "Agree" isn't really the word - he came to yell at us. His jowls looked like turkey wattles and his breath smelled of half digested caviar. "Incompetents! Idiots! Do you know what you and that ghost you let run loose have done today?"

"Nossir!" we chorused, and I mean literally. None of us three was going to dare answering him individually.

"As I understand it, the Chinese think the President has insulted them and they want an apology. The Japanese and the Europeans are calling him a gibbering idiot or a fool - they're right, but that's neither here nor there - and the President thinks he's been humiliated. You want to know who he's blaming?"

"Fiorello?" I ventured. I'm a hopeless optimist, you know.

The Mayor snorted. "Wrong, numbskull. He's blaming me. You know what else? He's really pissed at me, and he's taking it out on the city. He's cutting off our Federal money as of the next budget, all he can snip away. Now, do you think I'll get to Albany if the city is going bankrupt?"

"It might play well upstate," Jerrold said.

"Thank you," said the Mayor. "That was breathtakingly stupid. Don't you think I haven't thought of that? You know we can't carry the state just with upstate. We need at least a third of the city votes too. Now, you all know I'm not taking the rap for this little disaster. You are. When I start cutting the city payroll, you three are going to head the list of pink slips. If I didn't figure you were still the best guys around to get me out of this hole, I'd fire you right now. As it is, I'll wait till I've come back from grovelling to the President. If that ghost isn't gone by then, you're fired!" Fiorello would have been proud of him, the way he yelled at us to shape up. He was effective too - I never worked harder than I did during the next few weeks.

That was the moral I learned from this last year - good, old-fashioned American hard work pays off, and we got rid of Fiorello at long last. Politics being what they are, you're going to get different stories on who gets the credit for disappearing him. Judy and Jerrold say it was their campaign. They started hitting him on all the issues they didn't have back in the thirties and the forties - abortion rights, gay rights, shrinking tax base, welfare versus workfare, what to do with drug addicts and the homeless, all the meat for a good political campaign. Also they asked how much he'd been paying for taxes since he died, and what sort of levers he had to pull to come back from the afterworld - basic character issues we should have gotten him on earlier, but were too rattled to think about. It's amazing what you can think of when you're afraid of losing your job.

Me, I think Judy and Jerrold were hurting him in the polls, but he wouldn't have gone away if it weren't for me. It was my bright idea, goddammit, and I want the world to know, even if it's only through your crappy little tabloid. It was the Saturday evening Fiorello had told the city about the little nest egg I got from the teachers' union, and I had about forty eight hours before Ramirez nailed me to the TV screen as Public Enemy Number One - my only break was that his show didn't run Sunday. Both Fiorello and Ramirez had phoned up to gloat at me - I really did piss them off, didn't I? Anyway, I was cowering at home in my bed with a blue funk as wide as the Pacific Ocean, when suddenly it hit me. The perfect answer. I phoned up the Mayor in Binghamton, tried the idea out on him, and got him to agree to come down to Gracie Mansion for a press conference the next day. He thought it was a good idea too.

It was a great speech the Mayor gave. I should know, I collated it from the best of Fiorello's old harangues back in the Great Depression. Times are tough, but we're going to build a new and better New York. We'll build new parks, expand the airport, dig new tunnels for the subway system, employ every able-bodied citizen who wants work. Real can-do stuff. The best part of it I saved for last. "We only need," orated the Mayor, "the money to carry through these projects. It will be money well spent, an investment to remake New York City as the city of the future, once more the leading city in the world. Unfortunately, the City cannot raise all the money needed out of its own resources. Therefore I have requested five billion dollars from Albany to enable us to carry out the New New York Improvement Plan. We will need to fight for our money. No matter how worthy the cause, there are blind and reactionary men who will oppose our requests. Fortunately, the City has a fighter, a worthy son who will battle every entrenched interest in the state to make sure that New York City gets its fair share. I refer to my special emissary to Albany, Fiorello H. La Guardia. Fiorello, come up and speak to the press."

He did. He was emotional. He promised to do his best for us, to fight on till victory, to come back to New York City in triumph. Then he disappeared, and he hasn't been seen in the City since. I don't follow upstate news if I can help it, so I haven't heard what he's been doing in Albany.

Back here in the Big Apple things went back to normal. Without La Guardia Ramirez didn't have any evidence on me and the teachers - generous guys, those teachers - and I slapped him so hard with a libel suit that his ears must be still ringing. Last I heard he was the host for a late night talk show in Nova Scotia. The citizens of this fine metropolis, bless'em, have a short memory, and we got to forget about Fiorello before long. Even the President forgave us after a little, and so did the People's Republic after we sold them a new consulate cheap. The Mayor isn't really popular, but who can be in this city? Nobody hates us, and that's enough.

What sort of proof do I have? I don't have to prove anything to you, you schmuck. You're a reporter, you go look for proof! No, I want the story to get into print somewhere. I'll give you a scoop, which is a doozy as well as being all the proof you need. You know the Mayor's campaign for Governor? The man figures he really doesn't want to go to Albany after all, not if Fiorello is hanging around up there. He's running for Senator instead, and you can put that on the front page of your rag and see how many papers you sell. Unless you've heard of any ghosts in Washington, in which case all bets are off.