Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  “But you have to consider the context, Dio, the whole—”

  “The context is, your goddamned good cop is shitting all over our African American community! If that’s a good context, then we got a bigger problem. And that problem is leadership. What else could it be?”

  That brought the Chief up short—so short, he couldn’t get a word out. What the hell was happening all of a sudden? He was putting his job on the line, his whole career, on behalf of some twenty-five-year-old Cuban cop named Nestor Camacho? And that was being manly? After fifteen years of working hard, going the extra mile, risking your life, stepping right over racism as if it were a speed bump on the road to glory, becoming a leader of men, you risk it all… on some Cuban kid? But how could he get out of this… without showing that with a single sentence Dio had delivered such a rocket to the crotch, it had turned the supposed Ultimate Man into a pussy?

  And Dionisio knew the fight was over, with that one punch, didn’t he… for he now dropped the sarcasm and spoke in a soothing, healing tone. “Look, Cy, when I appointed you chief, I had total faith in your abilities, your courage, and a lot of other things that would make you a natural leader, and I still do. You’ve never done anything that’s made me feel like I made the wrong decision… and one of those other things was my hope that with you as our chief, we could overcome many mistakes that had been made in the past. For example, I hoped to show our African American community that yes, they may have gotten the short end before, but now they were going to have not just somebody to stand up for their interests… they would have the Man himself. That’s a good thing, and it’s also a powerful symbol. Now, when that Man on the Mast thing happened, I told you to put Camacho on ice for a while. So what did you do? You gave him a medal and a ‘lateral transfer,’ and not to a horse in the park, because the only ones he could annoy there would be the goddamned rats and squirrels. No, that would be a lateral transfer with a ‘dip,’ I think you said.” The Mayor was heating up again, and slipping the leash off his sarcastic attack dog. He seemed to know that the Chief was down for the count. “In a situation like this one, no one person is the issue. You know what I mean? You want to stand up for one of your men, and that’s commendable. But right now, you and me, we got the obligation to stand up for hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people who can’t follow the fine points. You know what I mean?”

  The Chief found himself nodding yes… and immediately realized that he had done the same thing, meekly nodded yes, a moment ago… They must be marveling at their leader’s jujitsu powers of persuasion… Just like that he reduces Black Superman to about the omnipotence of a smoked oyster—they being the boys Friday. They’re all staring. They’re not glowering. No, they’re fascinated, like little boys. They’ve got the best seats in the house… for watching the Incredible Shrinking Chief… shrink. You can’t put anything past our Dionisio Cruz, can you! All of five-feet-six, but he can handle any six-foot-four Supernegro who gets in his way. That’s why he’s… the caudillo. He doesn’t accuse el negro of anything, he doesn’t threaten el negro with anything… or not in any form you could introduce as evidence… he just lays out his net, and in no time… Gotcha!… el negro’s inside the net, struggling… punching thin air… trapped in a net of words.

  “All they know,” the Mayor continued, “is that here’s this young cop, this kid—what?—four years on the force?—and everywhere he goes, the Four Horsemen follow… Racism, Chauvinism, Ethnic Slurs, and… uhhh…” He had been going great until that point. Now he was stuck. He couldn’t come up with a fourth mounted equestrian scourge. “… uhhh… and all the rest of it,” he finished off with, lamely. “You know what I mean?”

  What bullshit! He couldn’t sit here and nod yes to stuff like that! So he said, “No, I don’t, Dio.” But it came out just as lamely as little Dionisio’s uhhh… and all the rest of it. It came out just as faint as his own yes nods. He put no heart into it… It was very noble, defending one of his men, a lowly one, too… but was it really noble if it put in jeopardy all the things you could do for your real brothers?

  ::::::It was as if Dio was reading my e-mail.::::::

  “Look, Cy, the issue is not whether Camacho is a bad cop or a good cop. I’m willing to grant you that point. Okay? But he’s become something bigger than himself. He’s become a symbol of something that cuts everybody in this town to the quick. Your loyalty, which I admire, doesn’t alter the situation. I’m sure the kid never even thought about it at the time. But the facts are the facts. Twice in the last few months he’s made whole communities see red… He’s gotten their bowels in an uproar… He’s treated them like dirt; don’t you think your department could possibly get on with its work without this twenty-five-year-old kid’s services?”

  ::::::I wondered when he was finally going to get to this point. And when he did, I was going to draw a line in the sand and dig in.::::::

  “Yeah, I do know what you mean,” he found himself saying. But he said it with a sigh, like a man yielding—unwillingly, of course—to destiny. “And I don’t like it.” That part came out as not much more than a mutter.

  At that point the Mayor’s expression and his tone turned fatherly. “Cy, I want to tell you a couple of things about this city. These are things you probably already know, but sometimes it helps to hear them out loud. I know it helps me… Miami is the only city in the world, as far as I can tell—in the world—whose population is more than fifty percent recent immigrants… recent immigrants, immigrants from over the past fifty years… and that’s a hell of a thing, when you think about it. So what does that give you? It gives you—I was talking to a woman about this the other day, a Haitian lady, and she says to me, ‘Dio, if you really want to understand Miami, you got to realize one thing first of all. In Miami, everybody hates everybody.’ ”

  The flack Portuondo chuckled as if the Boss were having his little joke. Dio shot him a reproving glance and continued: “But we can’t leave it at that. We have a responsibility, you and me. We got to make Miami—not a melting pot, because that’s not gonna happen, not in our lifetimes. We can’t melt ’em down… but we can weld ’em down… weld ’em down… What do I mean by that? I mean we can’t mix them together, but we can forge a secure place for each nationality, each ethnic group, each race, and make sure they’re all on the same level plane. You know what I mean?”

  The Chief hadn’t a clue. He wanted to say he had never heard such bullshit in all his born days, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. What’s happened to Old Chief? He knew, but he didn’t want to put it into words, not even inside his own head. What happened… happened the moment Dio said, “… then we got a bigger problem. And that problem is leadership.” The rest of the plot played out in a flash in the Chief’s head. All Dio had to do was to fire Chief Booker and say, “We put him in a position of leadership and he couldn’t even look out for his own people. A real leader would create an atmosphere in which this kind of thing wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen. So I’m going to appoint a new chief, someone strong enough to change the mental atmosphere around here, a real leader… and he will also be from our African American community.”

  African American community, my ass. The Chief wondered if he or any of the rest of the Cubans in here staring at him so as not to miss a delicious moment of this masterful lip-lashing—he wondered if anybody had ever heard Dionisio, Paragon of Democracy, utter the term African American before… except in the presence of a TV camera or some sentinel of the press. The Chief had begun to resent the term every time it came slithering out of the mouth of white hypocrites like Dio. White? Every Cuban in this room thought of himself as white. But that wasn’t the way real white people thought of them. They ought to hang around Pine Crest a little bit or the Coral Beach Yacht Club or some meeting of the Villagers of Coral Gables. That would curl their hair for them! To the real white boys they were all brown people, colored folks, just a shade or two lighter than he was.

  You know what I mean?
The Chief wasn’t nodding a little yes this time. This time he was shaking his head back and forth. It was a no, his yawing head was, but it was a yawning yaw and a pallid no, so insignificant that old Dio took no notice of it whatsoever. “So that brings us to the question of what we do with Officer Camacho,” said the Mayor. “He’s a mote in the eye for half of Miami. You know what a mote is? It’s from the Bible. A mote is like a speck of dust that gets in the eye. It’s just a speck of dust, but it’s irritating. It’s really irritating. In the Bible people seem to spend half their time removing motes. A mote’s not gonna kill you, but it’ll put you in a very bad mood. You know what I’m saying?”

  ::::::No:::::: but this time the Chief didn’t bother to make any response, not in any fashion. He was acutely aware of how he must have looked to the other Cubans in the room. He had let himself gradually slouch back into the depths of the chair. So he straightened up and slowly thrust his shoulders back in a half-hearted attempt to show these Cuban brownies that he still had a massive chest. It was a pretty halfhearted thrust, however. How much longer could he afford to let the Mayor fuck with him like this before it came down to either losing all claim to manhood—or else getting up, walking the six or seven feet to where the Mayor was sitting, and yanking him up out of his seat by his head of hair with one hand and slapping him across his fucking brown face with the palm of his hand and then the back of his hand the palm and then the back the palm the back the palm the back palm back palm back palm back palmbackpalmback until that brown face turns red as a rare meatball and he’s sobbing because he’s been totally humiliated by a Man—

  ::::::—oh sure, Superman… Tell me who, in fact, is just sitting here with his speechless mouth hanging open.::::::

  “So how do we remove this pair, Camacho and the sergeant, Hernandez, from the public’s eye? I’ve done more of this, canning sinners, no matter what the circumstances, than you have. And I can tell you there’s no gentle way to do it. You have to come right out and say it: ‘These two have revealed themselves as racists, and we can’t have people like that in our Department.’ That’s the way you have to do it. Pow! Pow! It’s painful but it’s quick. One sentence—no, two sentences—and it’s over.” He began slapping palms up and down so that they grazed each other in the well, we’ve cleaned that up, haven’t we, and it’s over and done with manner. Then he compressed his lips and gave the Chief a little wink, as if to say, “Aren’t you glad we got that worked out?”

  It was the wink that did it… that little wink… with that wink Dionisio had made too deep an incursion into the Chief’s manhood. Every one of Dionisio’s boys Friday was blank faced and enjoying this humiliation intensely. Old Dionisio is a piece of work, isn’t he? Snicker snacker snicker snacker snicker snacker he’s got the scissors out and he’s cut el blowhard negro up into little insignificant pieces in no time.

  That little wink—those smug blank Cuban faces—the Chief felt like he had left his own body through astral projection and was beholding another creature when he snapped out, “We can’t do that, Mayor Cruz.”

  It wasn’t an exclamation. It came out with a seething sound. The “Mayor Cruz,” as opposed to Dio or Dionisio, said it was time to get serious.

  “Why not?” said the Mayor.

  “It would jeopardize the morale of the whole Department.” The Chief knew that was a big exaggeration, but it was out on the table now, and the Chief pressed on. “Every cop who’s ever had to fight one a these crackhead slimeballs and go rolling in the dirt with him or had to pull a gun, every one a them puts himself inside the hide of Camacho and Hernandez the moment he hears about it. Every one a them can feel the adrenaline pumping. Every one a them knows the feeling of fighting for his life, because he don’t know who he’s tangling with, and every one a them knows he’s not himself when it’s over. Every one a them knows the feeling of fear turning into pure hate. There’s nothing in between. If you videotape everything cops say to these scumbags when they finally got ’em restrained and have enough breath to say anything at all, that tape would scorch the hair off every head in Miami. That’s just the nature of the beast, because don’t kid yourself, at that point you’re an animal.”

  The room went silent. The Chief’s vehemence and impudence were a shock. After a few beats the Mayor came back to life. “So what these two cops said about African Americans doesn’t bother you… as the highest-ranking African American in this city?”

  “Yeah, the words bother me,” said the Chief. “I’ve had to listen to that shit ever since I was four or five years old, and I know what the urge to kill is. But I’ve also been in the shoes of cops like Camacho and Hernandez—many times. And I know that every vile thought you’ve ever had in your head—the animal in you is likely to say it out loud. Look, Dio, this thing happened in a crack house. You got to be afraid when you enter one a them, because with dope comes guns. As it was, the biggest guy in the house tries to choke Sergeant Hernandez. Hernandez pulled his gun and would have shot the guy, except that Camacho jumped on the guy’s back, and Hernandez was afraid he might shoot Camacho, too. Camacho clamps some kind of wrestling hold on the guy and rides him until he’s out of gas and gives up. If he’d been able to get Camacho off his back, he woulda killed him and yanked his head off for good measure. None a that comes out when you just read from a tape of what they said.”

  “Okay. Okay,” said the Mayor. “I get your point. But my point is we’ve got a big African American population here, and they’ve been here a long time. A thing like this could set off another riot. They always riot over the same thing, the criminal justice system. That’s not gonna happen on my watch. Your Camacho and Hernandez… they go, Cy… for the good of the city.”

  The Chief started swinging his head from side to side, all the while staring the Mayor right in the eyes. “Can’t do it,” he said. “Can’t do it.” He was seething again.

  “You’re not leaving me a hell of a lot of room here… Chief Booker…” The Mayor’s sudden formality was more portentous than the Chief’s. He had more to back it up with. “Somebody’s got to go.”

  Sonofabitch! This one knocked the chief off his feet… down for the count… He could feel his defiance fading… This job was the biggest thing in his whole life… his family included. Chief of Police of Miami—he had never dreamed of such a thing when he became a young cop fifteen years ago… a young black cop… and now he ran the police department in a major American city… thanks to that man right there, Dio… and now he was putting Dio in the position of having to throw him off that eminent peak, and it was a long way down… for the ex-Chief, him and his salary of $104,000 and his house in Kendall… which cost $680,000… which he never could have swung if the UBT Bank hadn’t set him up with a $650,000 mortgage at the near-prime rate of 1.2%… which they never would have done, never, were it not important for them to do favors for Mayor Cruz… which they would foreclose faster than you could say subprime borrower… reducing him just like that from being the Man, though Black, to being another subprime deadbeat black man… He’d have to take the kids out of the Lorimer School… all that, in addition to getting himself stigmatized, big-time, as a traitor to his own people. Oh, Dionisio would see to that. He’s no genius, Dio, as the world defines genius, but he sure is a genius looking out for his own hide… and a cutthroat genius, if he has to be—

  —and in that microsecond of awareness, all these thoughts hit him, in a single flash of many neurons, and zzzzzaaaapped his vows and his courage all at once—

  —but not his accursed vanity. Oh no, not for a second. His new vow was not to come up looking like just a run-of-the-mill weakling in front of Dio’s Cuban choir, these brownies, these potted palms… his jury. Oh, they would love to see the Big Man, the Chief, the gran negro crawling in front of old Dionisio the way they crawled. They’d love it.

  His mind began racing… and then he got it… or he got something. “Well,” he said, “let me just give you one piece of advice.” ::::::See, I’ve give
n in without having to put it that way! I’m the one handing out the advice to him!:::::: Out loud he said, “Camacho and Hernandez… fired over this?—discharged outright? The union’s gonna go apeshit, and the union’s run by two real loudmouths, and both a them’s Cuban. They’ll keep this thing going for a month, they’ll turn it into a real inferno, they’ll have black folks” ::::::I’m damned if I’m going to say “African American” and sound like I’m walking on broken glass the way they do:::::: “seeing a whole regiment of Cuban cops giving them the finger. You know what I mean?” ::::::Christ, did I really just say you know what I mean?:::::: “What we find works better is, we do what we call ‘relieve ’m from duty.’ The cop has to give up his gun and get relegated to a desk job, and we announce it very loud—once. And everybody gets it right away—everybody. Everybody realizes that taking a cop’s gun and badge away from him is like a public castration. After that nobody knows and nobody cares if he still exists. He vanishes. He’s the living dead.” He stares into the Mayor’s eyes some more. He tries to look as sincere as any man who ever lived.

  The Mayor looks at the city manager and at Portuondo, the flack. They’re trying, but the boys Friday can’t pick up any cue as to what they now think. They just stare back at him like five mugs on a shelf.

  Finally the Mayor turns back to the Chief. “Okay. But they damn well better vanish. You know what I mean?… If I hear so much as a hiccup out of either one of them, somebody else is gonna vanish. And you… know… what I mean.”

  Two hours later, which is to say about 10:30 a.m., in Dr. Norman Lewis’s office, nothing could have been further from Magdalena’s thoughts than YouTube or her old Hialeah beau, Nestor Camacho. To her, all her juvenile days had receded into a dim and dimmer, outworn, outcast, outclassed past. This morning she was obsessed with the brilliant dawn of… him in her life. He had invited her and Norman to dinner on Friday, just a few days from now, at Chez Toi. Restaurants in Miami didn’t come any grander than Chez Toi, or so Norman informed her. She had never heard of it before. Chez Toi!! Norman went on about it in tones of socially religious awe. Oh, he was excited, too, Norman was, but not even remotely the way she was.