John Lescroart - A Certain Justice

He turned over, pulling the comforter over his head. Two more rings. Three. Then silence again.

See? A dream.

At seven-forty in the morning the mayor of San Francisco, Conrad Aiken, stood looking out over yet another tent city, this one in the Civic Center Park, directly below where he stood partially hidden behind the flags of the United States and of California on the ceremonial balcony area over the magnificently carved double-doorways of City Hall.

As had been the case for the past day and a half, he was having trouble assimilating the information before him. Here he was, the executive in charge of the billion-dollar-plus budget of one of the world's most well-loved and beautiful cities, the destination of thousands of tourists every year, one of the convention capitals of the country, a mecca for gourmets, a center of liberalism and the arts, with the sixth greatest opera house in the world, a haven for the have-nots, homeless and homosexuals of the rest of the country, and he felt as though it had all fallen to pieces around him in a matter of hours.

Through the thin morning fog smoke from cooking fires was rising in wisps over the tents. In his mind's eye it recalled the image he had seen in photographs since his childhood – San Francisco struggling to rise from the ashes of the Great Quake of 1906, until today the city's darkest hour. Before, the image had always struck him as hopeful – the citizens pulling together to rebuild their lives and homes – but today, looking down over the tents, hearing the thrum of boom boxes, the sporadic voices raised in frustration or anger, the reality was anything but hopeful.

Aiken was meeting with the eleven members of the Board of Supervisors in fifteen minutes and he had no idea what he was going to tell them. Worse, in spite of his best efforts with selected staffers whom he had cultivated as moles, he had no real sense of what they might recommend to him. Experience told him that whatever they came up with was unlikely to be productive, although it would vastly increase his workload, undermine his authority and dilute whatever substantive efforts that might be called for and even already in the works.

He'd put the Board off all day yesterday, hoping the situation would somehow blow over quickly, but with the assassination the previous night of the city's district attorney, Chris Locke, which had sparked a new wave of nocturnal riots, there was no longer any pretending that this was going to go away.

Donald, Aiken's administrative assistant – a tall, well-groomed single man of thirty-five – appeared at his elbow. They both stood unmoving for a full minute. 'If you'd like an opinion…' Donald ventured.

Aiken, still lost in his thoughts, nodded. Donald was an asset – ears always to the ground, open lines of communication with everyone at City Hall and blessed with a keen sense of politics, positioning, strategy. 'I'll take anything you can give me.'

Donald was holding a folder that Aiken hadn't noticed. Now he opened it and handed the poster of Kevin Shea to his boss. Aiken had seen it a hundred times. He was sick to death of it, but he'd listen to Donald. He looked over and up at him, thinking not for the first time that Donald would be the perfect assistant if he weren't so damn tall.

'Okay? What about it?'

'I spent all day yesterday walking these hallowed halls, and my sense is that if you don't immediately take charge of the meeting this morning with the simplest possible message you are going to have an unqualified political disaster.'

Aiken had come to this same conclusion on his own. The members of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco were elected in city-wide, non-district elections. No one person represented any geographical area – a Nob Hill or a Hunters Point or Castro Street. In effect each member of the Board represented – embodied – an agenda . Aiken's experience was that this tended to make consensus very difficult on many issues.

Further exacerbating the problem with the Supes – as they were called when not referred to as the Stupes – was their salary structure. The San Francisco charter provided that each supervisor made twenty-four thousand dollars per year. (Which meant that their own clerks and secretaries made twice what they did.) In other words, anyone who needed to work to make a living could not be a supervisor.

So many individuals – including Conrad Aiken – had come to hold the view that the members of the Board were for the most part abysmally ignorant of the rudiments of the workplace. This failing was often combined with a disdain for compromise, an almost sublime disregard for reality, at least as Aiken knew it.

What the Supes did have, in general, was time, personal financial security that insured isolation and sycophancy – and opinions. Positions. Attitudes. Ideas. Yes, these all were present in spades, clubs, diamonds and, mostly, hearts. Ideas abounded on the Board. And, although they had no executive power, they could recommend action to be taken by the mayor. Police action, for example. Or declaring Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to be a Sister City to San Francisco. Or holding off on freeway reconstruction after an earthquake until an environmental impact report could be prepared on the danger such reconstruction would pose to the indigenous frog population of the China Basin.

The mayor didn't have to take any of their recommendations, but if he chose to ignore them he did so at his political peril. Somewhere among these dilettantish positions – white, Hispanic, gay, Oriental, African-American, feminist – there resided an absolute majority, and that is what it took to get elected mayor.

Aiken took the poster from his aide. 'And this is going to help me take charge, Donald?'

'I think Senator Wager was right yesterday about this. When she was here.'

' I remember, Donald. With what exactly?'

'And especially now, with Chris Locke's death. I think what we've got to do is go in there and up the ante. Every one of the Supes is going to be pushing in his or her own direction. There are a thousand cameras in the chamber already – everybody's going to want to make a speech, decry the violence, pass their own resolution… well, you know.'

Aiken knew. 'So what's this about upping the ante?'

'March right in there, take the podium and admit that we – all of us, the whole city – have obviously and for too long been ignoring the racial tension that has been here among us. We've been hiding our heads in the sand. Especially here at City Hall.'

Aiken smiled grimly. 'Well, that's true enough.'

'No, listen. There is a point here. We have been negligent – ignoring the truth that inequality still exists here, that there is justified rage out there in the streets among the regular citizens, especially among the black community. It is obvious that we are – all of us – to blame for the deaths both of Arthur Wade and now of Chris Locke. We have a debt – we have a debt to repay.'

'Donald, this is getting a little thick.'

'True, but when the silver-tongued devil speaks…' A look of conspiracy.

'By that you mean, of course, my own self…'

Donald nodded. 'This is only the general idea, sir. In your words, it will not come out heavyhanded.'

The mayor was accustomed to the flattery, but he thought Donald was probably correct – he knew he did have a gift for oratory. And one thing the Board was usually receptive to was an appeal to their collective liberal guilt. If he started by telling them how they'd all caused this problem themselves, or contributed to it, he just might be able to get something past them. 'All right,' he said, 'what's the rest of the general idea?'

'That before we consider any of the Board's proposals, before we do anything else, we must take immediate measures to integrate the alienated black community back into the mainstream of decision-making and public life. To reach out to them. Something symbolic.'