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