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speculation gave way to crisis, David L. Cohen was ensconced in a suite of offices on the second floor of City Hall doing what he always seemed to be doing: sorting out the mess that had been unceremoniously handed to him by someone else. He was quite brilliant at it.
    Municipal government in Philadelphia had never been known for the hum of its efficiency. It was Lincoln Steffens, in his oft-cited quote, who had once described the city as “corrupt and contented.” But even this sight seemed more peculiar than normal, as if occupying forces, finally realizing the futility of the war, had staged a midnight evacuation. Rooms that should have had furniture in them were barren. What few desks did remain had been emptied so that nothing was left, not even a paper clip. In the aftermath of the upheaval, a few items had been left behind. A half-filledbottle of wine lay inside the drawer of one file cabinet, and given the fortune at the end of the administration of the city’s outgoing mayor, W. Wilson Goode, it seemed remarkable that the contents hadn’t been downed in one merciful gulp. A pile of binders in pale blue covers had been unceremoniously dumped on top of another file cabinet, as if whoever had put them there just hadn’t gotten around to throwing them into the trash. They seemed innocuous enough, binders that might contain press releases announcing ribbon cuttings and holiday street festivals and other events that so often had passed for earth-shattering milestones in the sputter of a city on the brink of bankruptcy. But as David Cohen thumbed through the binders, he discovered they contained something else altogether: the executive orders that Mayor Goode had enacted during his tenure. Many of them were still in effect. They still had a significant impact on the 1.6 million people who lived in the city. Cohen gave a short burst of laughter that sounded a little bit like a car alarm, rising out of nowhere in the silence of the office he was about to inherit. Then he just shook his head, his way of acknowledging that he was entering a world where rules of logic and reason did not have the remotest application, light years beyond the Peter principle or Murphy’s law or anything else commonly used to explain failure. Why had someone left the executive orders of the mayor of America’s fifth largest city in a heap on top of a file cabinet?
    Why not?
    Dressed in gray jeans, a plaid work shirt, and sneakers on a Sunday morning, Cohen labored methodically to restore some semblance of balance and order. With all the details to attend to before tomorrow’s mayoral inauguration at 10:00 A . M . at the Academy of Music, he hadn’t slept in nearly seventy-two hours, and that was a literal calculation. But with the exception of a skin color that looked like instant oatmeal, he didn’t seem affected in the slightest. He went about his unpacking, unwrapping the little trinkets and memorabilia that he had brought with him from his former employer, the prestigious law firm of Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, where he had been a legend by the time he was thirty. But the phone kept ringing. And when the phone didn’t ring, the beeper he wore on his belt like a six-shooter went off. The mayor-elect, Edward G. Rendell, was calling with the breathless agitation of a child. He was supposed to give an inauguration-eve phone interview to one of the local radio stations, and he didn’t have the right number. Cohen had it at his fingertips, as if he had been expecting the call. He continued to unpack, delicately lifting eachitem from the paper towel in which he had wrapped it—a tray for memos and correspondence, a little wooden box with a calculator inside—and arranging them in the room so they stood at perfect right angles. He seemed unfazed by the thick coat of grime on the windows, which looked as if it had been there since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, or by the cockeyed view showing little more than the dark