Eight“Mr. Laurent, Hector de Vile. Sorry we didn’t have an opportunity to meet at Basil’s fund-raiser, but glad we’re making up for it now. Do sit down.”
Aristide had a strong sense of “pinch yourself to see if this is true” as he sat with one of California’s two sitting senators in the Lick House bar and billiards room on the corner of Montgomery and Sutter Streets.
It was an appropriate setting for the man who many said ran California even though he spent a good deal of his time in Washington. Lick House was considered the finest hotel west of the Mississippi, a three-story-high and two-blocks-wide masonry pile with a 400-seat-dining room modeled on one James Lick has seen in the Royal Palace in Versailles.
Aristide fleetingly wondered if this was the same bar where the boxer Tommy Ch
