When I left San Francisco, I offered him my loft in exchange for managing the entire building. Meeting with him was on my list of things to do now that I was back in town
We were almost to the hotel. I realized I was starving. And wanted nothing more than some San Francisco clam chowder in a bread bowl. It was my comfort food.
“Hey, you hungry?” I said, turning down the music.
He shrugged. “I’m a dude. I can always eat.”
“Do you have time to swing by the wharf? I’m buying.”
“I took the rest of the day off. I didn’t know where we were going or what you needed.”
I made a note to pay him for the entire day. But meanwhile, my mouth was watering.
“Let’s go then. I’m ravenous. I haven’t had a bowl of chowder for years.”
Two
Mayor Anthony Ferraro hated that he had to be surrounded by bodyguards.
He was trying to walk through the airport like a goddamn normal person and yet they flanked him as though some maniac was going to scream like a banshee and charge him with a butcher knife. For chrissakes, they’d already gone through security. The only people with weapons were law enforcement or TSA.
But he knew his irritation was misplaced. And that it was the smart thing to do.
After that threat on his life last week, everyone in his campaign was rattled.
It had been a pretty specific threat too.
At least one other member of the opera gala fundraising committee had received the same threat. But unlike that threat, this one had proved that the person knew where he lived.
Like the threat that his colleague on the gala fundraising committee had received, he was told that unless he shut down the opera, he would pay with his life.
It was ridiculous.
He’d been brought up to speed about the earlier controversy surrounding the opera in New York City as soon as he was asked to be on the committee last year, but recently, the threats had come to his city as the date of the performance grew closer.
The San Francisco Opera was now in rehearsals for The Death of Engleberg, which had sparked protests during its New York opening by those claiming the performance was anti-Semitic and glorified terrorism.
The opera was about the 1985 hijacking of an Italian cruise ship by terrorists. During the hijacking, a Jewish man, Leon Engleberg, who used a wheelchair, was murdered by the terrorists. After the New York premiere, Engleberg’s two daughters released a statement condemning the opera saying, “We are outraged at the exploitation of our parents and the coldblooded murder of our father as the centerpiece of a production that appears to us to be anti-Semitic.”
As soon as the San Francisco opera announced that its season would feature the opera, protests began. Now that the opera had started rehearsals, thinly veiled threats had been sent to the singers, members of the opera’s board of directors, the opera gala fundraising committee, and various members of the San Francisco Opera Association. The FBI and San Francisco Police Department had actually assigned security details to the opera and its members.
While the mayor would not give in to the demands to cancel or condemn the opera, he did agree to the precautions his campaign staff insisted upon.
He was no stranger to hostile people. Growing up as a politician’s son had exposed him to all sorts of unhinged whack jobs. The difference was this person knew where he lived.
“Sir?” One of his bodyguards was herding him. He’d been so lost in thought, he’d not followed their strict orders to stick to the side of the concourse.
He looked up to do a course correction and froze. He stopped dead in his tracks.
The woman coming toward him wasn’t the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen—or been with for that matter—but she seemed the most…he tried to put his finger on the word…most sensual? Maybe that was it. But it was more.
She was sensual and exuded something that he could only describe as unbridled power.
And he loved power. Power was his drug. It was what he lived for.
He could identify it in another person instantly.
And this woman had it.
It was intoxicating.
He watched her pass and then turned his head, mesmerized.
“Sir?”
“What?” he said, unintentionally snapping at the man at his shoulder. “Sorry. I…I…” he trailed off. What was he going to say? He was in love? He was struck dumb at seeing a beautiful woman?
Finally, he formed some words.
“Who was that?”
“Who, sir?” the man said, glancing behind them. He looked too. She was gone.
“Never mind.”
As he strode through the airport, heads turned.
He was used to it.
As the youngest mayor of one of the country’s biggest cities, he had been on the cover of magazines and on the front page of newspapers around the world.
His face was a little too recognizable, he thought.
But it was all part of the job.
His father had been a rock star. Politicians across the country still talked about him.
He needed to carve out his own identity.
While his father would consider it beneath him to stop and talk to plebeians on the street, Mayor Ferraro made a point to do that.
That’s why, when a woman came up to him at the airport, he lifted a hand for his bodyguards to let her approach.
“Mayor Ferraro,” the woman said. “I just want you to know that you have changed my life.”
He smiled and tilted his head, waiting.
She blurted the rest of the story out.
Apparently, she’d been down in the dumps and homeless, and when he had approved the permanent homeless camp on Van Ness Street and ordered job training workshops held there every Friday, she had taken the workshop and turned her life around.
Now, she was working full time as an office manager and had her own apartment.
“I owe all of it to you,” she said. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you.”
Then she licked her lips and looked at him, and he knew exactly
