by Tom Wolfe
The Cuban Suicide Squads… and so what did that make him? Oh, yeah… the Traitor in Chief. He was happy that this time it was the Mayor who got his dick caught in the door.
As he headed inside for the big “policy meeting,” he happened to glance up at the facade of City Hall, and his smile grew big enough for the gawkers to wonder what the Chief of Police thought was so funny. Miami’s was the weirdest of all the big-city city halls in the country, if you asked Cy Booker. It was a little two-story white stucco building done in the Art Moderne style, now called Art Deco, fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s. Pan American Airways had built it in 1938 as a terminal for their new fleet of seaplanes, which touched down and took off on Biscayne Bay upon their bulbous pontoon feet. But the seaplane future fizzled, and the city took the building over in 1954 and made it an Art Moderne city hall—and left the Pan American Airways logo on it! Yeah!—and not in just one place either. The logo—a globe of the world, flying aloft with Art Moderne wings on it and launched by the Art Moderne rays of the sun rising beneath it—this typical Art Moderne touch, promising a radiant future lit up by Man’s Promethean reach for the stars, was repeated endlessly, creating a frieze that wrapped around the entire building PAN AM PAN AM PAN AM PAN AM PAN AM beneath the cornice. There was something gloriously goofy about it… a big-city city hall proudly displaying a now-defunct airline’s seaplane terminal logo!… but this was Miami, and there you had it…
The Mayor’s conference room upstairs was not like any other big city’s mayoral conference room, either. The ceiling was low, and there was no table, just a random collection of chairs of varying sizes and comfort. It was more like a slightly beat-up little lounge in an aging athletic club. All the rooms up here, including the Mayor’s own office, were small and cramped. No doubt they were originally occupied by the work-a-daddies who did the accounting, procurement, and maintenance side of the seaplane operation. Now it was the Mayor’s domain. A phrase much resented in city halls across the country popped into the Chief’s head: “Good enough for government work.”
As he drew closer, he could see through the doorway. The Mayor was already there, along with his communications director, as City Hall PR flacks were now titled, a tall slender man named Efraim Portuondo, who could have been handsome if he weren’t so dour… and Rinaldo Bosch, a small pear-shaped man, only forty years old or so but bald as a clerk. He was the city manager, a title that didn’t mean much when a man like Dionisio Cruz was Mayor.
As soon as the Chief appeared at the door, the Mayor opened his mouth wide, primed to… swallow him, the gloomy flack, and the little bald man with a single gulp.
“Eyyyy, Chief, come on in! Have a seat! Catch your breath! Get ready! We got some a God’s work to do this morning.”
“Is that the same as Dio’s work?” said the Chief.
Abrupt silence… while the translingual logic of the crack linked up in all three Cubans’ heads… God equals Dios equals Dio’s…
A short bark of laughter from the communications director and the city manager. They couldn’t hold back, but they made it brief. They knew Dio Cruz would not be amused.
The Mayor gave the Chief a cold smile. “Okay, since you’re so fluent in Spanish, you’ll know what ‘A veces, algunos son verdaderos coñazos del culo’ means.”
Communications Director Portuondo and City Manager Bosch barked short laughs again and then stared straight at the Chief. From their big expectant eyes, he could tell that old Dionisio had put him in his place, and they were dying to see you and him fight. But the Chief figured it would be better not to get a translation. So he laughed and said, “Hey, just kidding, Mr. Mayor, just kidding, Dio… Dios… what do I know?”
The “Mr. Mayor” was just some mild irony he couldn’t resist tucking in. He never called him “Mr. Mayor.” When he was alone with the Mayor, he called him Dio. When other people were around, he never called him anything at all. He just looked at him and spoke. He couldn’t have explained exactly why, but he considered it a mistake to ever buckle under old Dionisio at all.
He could see that the Mayor was tired of this exchange anyway. He couldn’t stand coming out second best. Old Dionisio took a seat with a this-is-serious scowl on his face. So they all sat down.
“Okay, Chief,” said the Mayor. “You know this whole situation is bullshit, and I know it’s bullshit. This officer, this kid Camacho, is ordered to bring the guy down from the mast. So he climbs up and he brings the guy down, but first he has to put on some kind a ham-bone high-wire act. The whole thing is on TV, and now we got half the city yelling that we’re sitting on our hands while a leader of the anti-Castro underground gets legally lynched. I don’t need this.”
“But we don’t know that’s what he is,” said the Chief. “The Coast Guard says nobody’s ever heard of him, and nobody’s ever heard of the underground movement he says he leads, this El Solvente.”
“Yeah, but try telling that to all those people we got on our neck now. They’ll just tune out. This thing’s like some kind of a panic, like a riot or something. People believe it—they think he’s a fucking martyr. If we say otherwise… then we’re trying to pull off some kind a cheap trick, some kind a cover-up.”
“But what else can we do?” said the Chief.
“Where is the guy, the guy on the mast—where is he right now?”
“He’s being held on a Coast Guard ship until they decide to announce what they’re doing. They’ll probably wait awhile and let things blow over. In the meantime, they’re not gonna let him say another word. He’ll be invisible.”
“I say we do the same thing with Officer Camacho. Put him somewhere he’ll be invisible.”
“Like where?”
“Oh… ummmm… I got it! Put him in that industrial area out toward Doral,” said the Mayor. “Nobody goes there except to repair coke furnaces and lubricate earth-moving equipment.”
“So what would Camacho do out there?”
“Oh, I don’t know… They ride around in patrol cars, they protect the citizens.”
“But that’s a demotion,” said the Chief.
“Why?”
“Because that’s where he started out. He was a beat cop. The Marine Patrol is one a the special units. He can’t be demoted. That’s like saying we did the wrong thing and this officer fucked up. He didn’t do anything wrong. Everything was done by the book, in the routine way… except for one thing.”
“Which is…?” said the Mayor.
“Officer Camacho risked his life to save this guy. He did a hell of a thing, when you think about it.”
“Yeah,” said the Mayor, “but the guy wouldn’t a needed saving if the officer hadn’t a tried to grab him.”
“Even if you believe that, he did a hell of a thing all the same. He locked his legs around the guy seventy feet up in the air and carried him all the way down to the water, swinging hand over hand down the jib sail cable. You know—you won’t like this, but we’re gonna have to give Officer Camacho a medal of valor.”
“What!?”
“Everybody knows he risked his life to save a man. The whole city saw it. His fellow cops all admire him, no matter who they are. They all think of him as really brave, except that they’d never say it—that’s taboo. But if he doesn’t get the medal, it stinks of politics right away.”
“Jesus Christ!” said the Mayor. “Where you gonna do this? In the main auditorium at the Freedom Tower?”
“No… it can be done quietly.”
The communications director, Portuondo, spoke up. “The way you do it is, you put out a press release the day after the ceremony with all kinds of announcements, commendations, traffic flow decisions, whatever, and you list Officer Camacho’s award about eighth down the line. It’s done all the time.”
“Okay, but we still gotta make the guy invisible. How do we do that if you can’t make him a beat cop?”
“All you can do is give him a lateral transfer,” said the Chief, “to another special unit. Ther
e’s the Marine Patrol, which he’s in now, there’s the CST—Crime Suppression Team—the SWAT Team, the—”
“Hey!” said the Mayor. “How about the Mounted Police! You never see those guys except in the park. Put him on a goddamned horse!”
“I don’t think so,” said the Chief. “That’s known as a lateral transfer with a dip. That would be pretty obvious in a case like this… putting him on a horse in a park.”
“You got a better idea?” said the Mayor.
“Yeah,” said the Chief. “The SWAT Team. It’s the most macho of them all, because you’re always marching into a line of fire. You do battle. The guys are mostly young, like Officer Camacho; you gotta be in fantastic shape. The training—at one point you have to jump from the top of a six-story building onto a mattress. I’m not kidding… a mattress. If you can’t make yourself do it, you don’t make it onto the SWAT Team. You got to be young to do it without getting hurt, but that’s only part of it. As you get older, you begin to value your hide a lot more. I’ve seen it a hundred times in police work. You’re older, you’ve got a higher rank, you’re getting higher pay, you’ve got ambition itching under your skin. Every instinct you got is telling you, ‘You’re too valuable now, you’ve worked too hard to get there, your future is so damned bright. How could you possibly risk it all by doing a damn fool thing like that, jumping from six stories up… onto a fucking mattress?’ ” The Chief could see that he had their rapt attention, Dionisio Cruz’s, the flack Portuondo’s, and the little bald city manager’s. They were staring at him with the nice big unsophisticated eyes of boys. “Yeah… looking down on the mattress from the top of that six-story building—the damn thing looks about the size of a playing card, and that flat, too. If an older man is there on the roof and looking down like that, he starts thinking about some… first things, as they say in church.” Oh, yeah! Now he had all three of the Cubans mesmerized. Now for the coup de grâce. “Every year when the SWAT candidates get to that part of the training… I make the jump myself. I want these kids to feel like, ‘Jesus Christ, if the Chief does it, and I put my toes on the edge of the roof… and there’s no way I can make my legs go into the jump mode… then I’ll be branded as a pathetic little pussy the rest of my life.’ I want those guys to refuse to fail.”
For a moment none of the Cubans said a word. But the Mayor couldn’t contain his emotions any longer. “Fuckin’ A!” he cried. “That’s it! If Officer Camacho likes action so goddamned much—take him right up on top of the building and show him the mattress!”
The Chief chuckled somewhere deep inside. ::::::Gotcha.::::::
But all of a sudden ::::::Aw, shit!:::::: he just thought of something, a big something… and he had to go and turn the Mayor and the yes-men into bug-eyed little boys with ninety seconds of SWAT Team lore, starring himself… He lowered his head and rocked it from this side to that side to this side to that side, slowly, and muttered out loud, “Damn!” Then he looked at the three of them and compressed his lips so tightly the flesh ballooned out above them and below them. “The kid would be perfect for the SWAT Team, but we can’t do it. We can’t just move somebody onto the SWAT Team for political reasons. They’d spot that right away. Every cop knows who Nestor Camacho is, or they do now. We’ve got forty-one cops on a waiting list for the SWAT Team right now. They’ve all volunteered… and talk about competition! Nobody can mess around with SWAT Team recruitment, not even the Chief.”
“Forty-one cops want to do this?” said the Mayor. “Forty-one cops can’t wait to jump from six stories and land on a mattress to qualify to go get shot at?”
The Chief started tapping the side of his forehead in the pantomime that says, “That’s using your head.” “You answered it yourself, Dio! ‘Can’t wait to get shot at’! There you have it! There’s a certain kind of cop who came to play. You know what I’m saying?”
The Mayor looked away glumly for a moment. “Well… I don’t care where you put Officer Camacho, as long as you get him off the goddamned water. Okay? But wherever you—what’s the word you like?—lateral transfer?—wherever you lateral transfer this TV acrobat a yours, he’s gotta do that thing. That’s gotta be one a the conditions.”
“What thing?” said the Chief.
“That thing with the mattress. If he likes action so goddamned much and has to go around breaking my balls, then you gotta take him right on up to the roof—and show him the mattress!”
The next afternoon Nestor iPhoned John Smith. “John,” he said, “you game for a cup of coffee? I got something to show you.”
“What?”
“I don’t wanna just tell you. I want to show it to you, in person. I wanna see the smile on your face.”
“Hey, you’re sounding up today. When I left yesterday, the look on your face—you should have seen it. You looked like you’d lost your last friend.”
Nestor: “You took the words right out of truth. But I got tired of feeling angry, angry at everybody who turned their back on me. One thing about anger is it sort of revs you up and gets the juice flowing. You wanna know what I did yesterday between the time you left and the shift started? I went on Craigslist and found an apartment in Coconut Grove. In three hours on a Sunday afternoon I did that. Anger is a wonderful thing if you get really angry.”
“That’s great, Nestor!”
“Oh, it’s a dump, it’s too small, and I’m sharing it with a ‘graphic artist,’ whatever that is, and I get to listen to all the goddamned wacked-out kids who hang around Grand Avenue until about four in the morning. They sound like alley cats. You know that sound, that sort of, I guess, yowl cats make when they’re outdoors at night… yowling for sex? That’s what these kids sound like. You know that sound?”
“Hey, we are up today, aren’t we!” said John Smith.
“I’m not up—it’s like I told you. I’m angry,” said Nestor. “Hey, where are you right now?”
“I’m at the paper.”
“Well, then, get up off your ass and leave the building and meet me at that restaurant Della Grimalda. It’s right near you.”
“I don’t know. As I say, I’m at the paper—and besides, I wouldn’t peg you as the Della Grimalda type.”
“I’m not. That’s the whole point. Neither is any other cop, and I don’t want any other cops around when I show you what I got.”
Long sigh… Nestor could tell that John Smith was weakening. “Okay, Della Grimalda. But what do you want to get there?”
“Two cups of coffee,” said Nestor.
“But Della Grimalda is a real restaurant. You can’t just walk in there and take a seat and order two cups of coffee.”
“I don’t know it for a fact, but I’ll bet you a cop can—and he won’t have to pay a dime.”
When John Smith arrived at Della Grimalda, Nestor was already sitting comfortably at a table for two by a window amid the place’s swag and bling—having a cup of coffee. John Smith took a seat, and a very attractive waitress brought him a cup of coffee, too. He looked all around. There were only two other customers in the whole restaurant, about forty feet away, and they were obviously finishing a big meal. Their table gleamed with a regular flotilla of stemware of every sort and squadrons of hotel silver.
“Well,” said John Smith, “I have to hand it to you. You did it.”
Nestor shrugged and produced a stiff nine-by-twelve envelope from under his chair, handed it to John Smith, and said, “Be my guest.”
John Smith opened it and withdrew a piece of cardboard that served as backing for a large photograph, about six by nine inches. Nestor had been looking forward to watching John Smith’s expression when it dawned on him what he had his hands on. The pale WASP didn’t disappoint. He lifted his wondering eyes from the photograph and stared at Nestor.
“Where the hell did you find this?”
It was a remarkably clear digital photograph, in color, of Sergei Korolyov at the wheel of a screaming-red Ferrari Rocket 503 sports car—with Igor Drukovich in the buc
ket seat beside him. Igor had a waxed mustache that came all the way out to here on either side. Korolyov looked like a real star, as usual, but anybody’s eye was going to fasten right away upon Igor, Igor and his mustache. The mustache was a real production. It took off from between his nose and his upper lip and flew all the way out to here—an astonishing distance—and he had waxed the ends and twirled them into points. He was a big man, probably close to fifty years old. In the I’m-an-artist manner he wore a long-sleeved black shirt open down to his sternum, giving the world a look at his big hairy chest. It was a hirsute triumph almost as grand as the mustache.
“Remember you asked if I could get you access to police files? This picture is from the Miami-Dade Police headquarters. They took it four years ago.”
