Nine Lives Last Forever (20 page)

The van paused long enough to clear traffic, and then it turned right onto the highway that ran along the coast. I felt the curve of the road as it threaded through the narrow track between the Cliff House and the rocky bluff of Sutro Heights.

Monty slowed the engine to navigate a blind turn. After the short span of a couple hundred feet, he turned left into a parking lot. I knew from my jogging experience that this lot serviced the trailhead for the Lands End recreational area, a park that covered the water’s edge from here to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Monty hummed to himself as he opened his driver’s side door and stepped outside. I peered out along the top rim of the seat partition, trying to see what in the world he was doing.

Monty was not a runner, a jogger, or even a casual walker. He took great pride in maintaining a fastidious appearance at all times: dressy slacks, neatly pressed collared shirts, and leather pointed-toe loafers. As a rule, he generally avoided any situation where he might risk breaking a sweat.

I was surprised, then, to see that Monty had changed clothes when he’d stepped inside his studio earlier that morning. He was now wearing a white T-shirt, blue sweatpants, and, I noted before sliding back below the partition, a pair of shiny white tennis shoes.

I waited for the slamming crunch of the driver’s side door before I poked my head back up again. I watched in awe as Monty’s slim figure jogged across the parking lot to the trailhead. Beyond the edge of the lot, the trail dropped out of sight down a steep slope toward the ocean. Monty reached the trail’s entrance and quickly sank from view.

The sun was just breaking its morning half-light. To the left, beneath the rise of the road, the distinctive outline of the Cliff House etched the horizon. I slowly eased out the back door, closely hugging the van’s shadow.

A pair of joggers passed me, chatting with each other as they took off across the parking lot. I followed them to the trailhead and looked down the embankment.

Montgomery Carmichael off on a vigorous, early morning run—I simply refused to believe it. I scanned the hillside, trying to make sense of Monty’s atypical behavior.

The trail led down a flight of stairs that had been cut into the sandy, eroding soil of the hillside’s upper embankment with the use of four-by-four beams. A loose post-and-rope fencing structure lined both sides of the path to discourage visitors from trampling the hillside’s carpet of freshly planted succulents. Rows and rows of tiny yellow flowers bent toward the rising sun as the plants sucked in a morning drink of dew.

Scattered across the lower roll of the hillside lay the ruins of the Sutro Baths. Occasional piles of crumbling bricks gave hints of the huge complex that had burned to the ground almost half a century earlier. At the bottom of the hill, up against a rocky interface with the ocean, the gutted remnants of Sutro’s seawall still retained enough integrity to fill a large, stagnant pool with water.

A manicured running path cut off toward the Lands End trail about forty feet down from the parking lot’s entrance. I watched as Monty’s blue-suited figure bypassed the running route and progressed into the lower portion of the ruins.

A minute later, Monty reached the bottom of the hill, near the spot where the ocean’s foaming waves broke against the seawall. He spread his long arms out for balance as his white tennis shoes trod carefully across the crumbling flat edge of the wall. At the opposite end of the wall, he stepped off into the eroded remains of the Baths’ lowest foundation.

I continued my descent on the trail, puzzling on Monty’s suspicious foray into the Sutro Baths ruins. This seemed far more in line with his personality than a coastline jog, but what, I wondered, was he up to?

Monty was now twenty feet past the first section of the seawall; he had begun to navigate through a maze of chipped concrete that surrounded the remnants of the Baths’ semi-intact pool. The outlines of the pool’s long rectangular shape stretched out parallel to the ocean. Several families of ducks circled through the brown brackish water, occasionally diving beneath its surface to chase a bottom-crawling insect or a small, briny fish.

The formal structured trail with its carefully chiseled steps and side barriers transitioned into a sandy dirt path occasionally interspersed with uneven stretches of chewed-up asphalt. It was as I reached this point that I lost sight of Monty’s blue sweatpants down in the ruins.

An ominous, prominently positioned sign warned of the likelihood of sudden powerful waves and cautioned me against proceeding further. The posting included a drawing of a flailing stick-figured man being swept out to sea by an unanticipated surge of water. Grimacing, I continued on.

After I descended another forty or fifty feet, I reached the spot where I had seen Monty turn off into the ruins. I passed a second warning sign, this one offering more dire predictions for anyone foolish enough to wander so far down the cliff.

Nervously biting my lip, I crept along the top of the same seawall Monty had traversed, trying to split my concentration between the ledge’s loose footing and the waves crashing on the rocks just below.

As I reached the end of the wall and hopped off, I regained sight of Monty. Oblivious to the safety warnings, he sat down on an outcropping of concrete next to the stagnant swimming pool and began taking off his tennis shoes.

I crept up behind a pile of concrete so that I could sneak in closer. Monty finished removing his shoes and stood up, barefoot, next to the edge of the swampy pool of water. He stretched his arms out over his head, as if preparing for some type of strenuous physical activity—then he stripped off his white T-shirt.

I gasped at the sight of his bony, narrow chest. A light sprinkling of curly brown hairs dotted the otherwise pale expanse of his skin.

Eeeek, I screeched internally. This was far more of Monty than I had ever hoped to see.

But he wasn’t done yet. Before I could blink, he slid off his sweatpants to reveal a pair of tight-fitting baby blue swim trunks. I covered my face with my hands, trying to obliterate the shocking image now seared into my memory.

As I huddled behind the concrete pile, I heard the slapping snap of spandex on skin immediately followed by a large human-sized splash. Anxiously, I looked back up over the pile of concrete to the pool of water.

A small duffle bag that Monty must have been carrying with him sat open on the ledge next to the stack of clothing. Monty stood chest-deep in the murky water, struggling to fit a snorkel mask over his head. A pair of rubber flippers poked out of the mouth of the bag, waiting to be slipped onto Monty’s feet.

I shivered, imagining how chilly the water must be. When the Baths were in operation, a system of heaters had been used to warm the water for the swimmers. No such warming device was working on the pond where Monty was now immersed. Even in the heat of San Francisco’s warmest day, the seawater collected in the pool would have been a frigid, icicling temperature. At this early hour of the morning, it had to be bone-shattering cold. I couldn’t imagine what would have inspired Monty to jump in.

To my surprise, Monty appeared unaffected by the freezing water. Once he had put on his snorkeling equipment, he started swimming down the length of the pool. When he reached the far end, he turned, moved over about one yard to the left, and began his return. He continued to swim back and forth, as if in formation, sweeping along the surface of the dingy water, his eyes submerged as he breathed through the air tube of the snorkel. A small family of ducks squawked angrily at him, but he paid them no heed.

After about ten minutes worth of this regimented paddling, Monty and his snorkel tube dove beneath the surface, leaving behind nothing but a stream of bubbles.

THE MAYOR’S RECEPTIONIST
sat primly at her desk in the anteroom outside of his office on the second floor of City Hall, preparing to sort through the towering heap of Friday morning’s mail. The receptionist stretched her arms up over her head as she surveyed the haphazard collection of envelopes, packages, and postcards spread across the surface of her desk. With a quiet sigh, she cracked her knuckles, slid on a pair of white cotton gloves, and attacked the pile.

First, she culled out all of the standard letter-sized items and placed them into a neat, even-sided stack. Meticulously, she slit open the long edge of each envelope, scanned its contents, and categorized the correspondence.

Invitations to upcoming events took the most prominent position on her desk. These represented valuable opportunities for free publicity, and the Mayor’s staff tried hard to work them into his schedule. Rarely did the Mayor stay more than five minutes at these photo ops, but his personal photographer closely shadowed his every move to ensure that each brief appearance was extensively documented. The Mayor was expected to be a prime contender in the coming year’s gubernatorial race, and the voluminous photo catalogue of his bright, flashing smile standing next to constituents of every possible ethnicity, age, gender, and social status would be used to create a wide array of campaign literature.

The receptionist flipped through the stack of invitations, identified the ones the Mayor was the most likely to accept, and set them aside for his perusal.

Next, the receptionist moved on to the large pile of constituent mail. Some of this correspondence related to legitimate proposals to improve life in the city: suggested maintenance projects, modifications to traffic or safety ordinances, changes to sections of the housing code, and the like. She shifted the most reasonable requests to the top of the pile, although she doubted any of them would ever reach the Mayor’s in-box. Few constituent ideas passed the litmus test of the Mayor’s recently hired campaign manager.

Since his arrival, the campaign manager had insisted on personally vetting any new policy or initiative for statewide suitability. The rest of California already considered San Francisco to be an outlying bastion of crazy, kooky liberals. The Mayor was seen by many across the state as a prime example of this caricature. The campaign manager had firmly clamped down on any new proposal that might further enhance that image, severely curtailing the Mayor’s legislative agenda.

The campaign manager was a burly, forceful figure, and the receptionist didn’t much like his brash, overbearing manner. But he was deemed an important cog in the machinery that promised to propel the Mayor’s nascent political career forward, so, she resolved with an irritated grunt, she would just have to put up with him.

The receptionist turned her attention to the remainder of the constituent correspondence—that not containing serious proposals or complaints. Of all of the Mayor’s daily mail, this group of letters most accurately reflected the wacky, irreverent personality of San Francisco’s citizenry. These missives, she knew from long experience, would include bizarre, random commentary on all manner of odd issues, including, of course, the Mayor’s highly controversial sweptback hairstyle. Lately, the receptionist mused as she ran a mental tally, the volume of hair mail was far outpacing that of all other categories.

The receptionist shook her head and shoved the entire mound of constituent mail into a large interoffice envelope for the campaign manager. Wryly, she surveyed the bulging package. The campaign manager would never state such a thing out loud, but she suspected the main reason he read the constituent mail had nothing to do with the Mayor’s legislative initiatives. The campaign manager was greatly concerned about the public’s perception of the Mayor’s hair.

The receptionist pulled the last pile of mail to the center of her desk. This collection included thank-you notes, mostly for the Mayor’s numerous public appearances of the previous week. The receptionist saw no reason to burden the Mayor with this correspondence; typically she simply filed each one into the folder for the related event. But as she sifted through the cards she’d accumulated in this stack, one of the names scribbled on the signature line caught her attention.

“Surely not,” the receptionist muttered to herself. She skimmed the information in the note and quickly pulled out the Mayor’s calendar. There, listed at 2:45 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, was a name on the appointment ledger that caused the receptionist’s eyes to pop in panic.

She, herself, had spent the afternoon at an excruciatingly painful dentist appointment having a root canal done on one of her molars. Two days later, she was still unable to chew anything more resilient than a mound of Jell-O on the right side of her mouth.

A temp had been brought in to handle the Mayor’s affairs for the afternoon. That woman, the receptionist thought grumpily, had better not ask for a recommendation. She had returned from the dentist’s office to find the reception desk a cluttered, disorganized mess. What’s more, the room had been filled with a strange orange-infused scent of stale fish. And now this—an utterly and completely inappropriate appointment had somehow made its way onto the Mayor’s calendar.

The receptionist leaned back in her chair and rubbed her temples, wondering if she should call the campaign manager immediately.

One of the receptionist’s primary responsibilities was to screen the Mayor’s appointments for any potentially embarrassing interviews that might endanger his future political prospects. As part of this duty, she scrupulously studied the credentials of each individual who requested time on his calendar. She’d caught a few unregistered lobbyists and the occasional underhanded political spy, but the bulk of her efforts were directed at far more obvious targets. The receptionist spent the vast majority of her time walling off the Mayor from the leagues of his amorous female fans.

Being young, handsome, and recently divorced, the Mayor was constantly sought out by all manner of persistent women. The groupies, as the campaign staff called them, followed the Mayor with a level of devotion typically reserved for rock stars and movie actors. These desperate women showed up, en masse, at each and every one of the Mayor’s public appearances—another reason the campaign manager sought to keep those stops as brief as possible.