“What is it with your boy Camacho?” he said. “The kid’s a one-man race riot.” He was not joking. “Who’s he got left to shit on? The Haitians, maybe? And it’s not as if he’s a deputy chief or even a captain. He’s just a cop, for Christ’s sake, a twenty-five-year-old cop with a proven ability to piss people off in gross numbers.”
The Chief knew what was coming next. Dio was going to demand that he can him. The Chief didn’t have this feeling often… of not being sure of himself… On his good days his confidence and charisma kept Dio and his whole Cuban gang off-balance. He had been in gun battles, real shootouts. He had risked his life to save cops under his command, including Cuban cops, God knows. He had two medals for valor. He had presence. In this room it would take two Cubans standing side by side to have shoulders as wide as his… three of them to come up with a neck as wide as his… forty of them, or maybe four hundred, to have his willingness to risk his own hide for what was right… He really did jump off that six-story roof onto a mattress that looked the size of a playing card from up there. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he was a man… and nobody else in this room was. His confidence, his vitality, that certain look he had in his eyes. In this arena it didn’t matter what color he was. He radiated that rarest and most radiant of all auras… no one could help but behold… the Man! At this moment that wasn’t the way they regarded him, however… He could tell. At this moment they saw only un negro… and that damned negro was on the spot, because if that negro weren’t un negro, nuestro negro, our negro, doing what we tell him to do, he wouldn’t even rate being in this room… None of Dio’s boys had dared so much as twitch an eyebrow… even Dio… but he knew what they thought they were now looking at… just another black hambone in a costume.
That got the Chief’s back up. “What is it with Camacho?” he said, giving the Mayor a 300-watt stare in the eyeballs. “Since you’ve asked”—in the choir many eyebrows now twitched; they had never heard the Chief speak sarcastically to the Mayor before—“the short answer and the long answer and the in-between answer is, he’s a damned good cop.”
The room went silent. Then the Mayor said, “Okay, Cy, he’s a damned good cop. I guess we have to take your word for that. After all, you’re the top cop in this town; you’re the commander in chief. So what’s the problem here? We’ve got your damned good cop, and he and another cop are caught on YouTube abusing a citizen of our African American community, calling him an animal and a jigaboo and a subhuman moron with shit for brains—”
“He’s a drug dealer, Dio!” The Chief’s voice rose and hit a couple of not very commanding notes.
“And that makes it okay for Camacho to address this suspect—this African American suspect—as if he’s a member of a race of subhumans, a bunch of animals? I hope that isn’t what you’re telling me, Cy.”
“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