more completely. They had no reaction to his mightiness whatsoever.
Could it be that Dio’s chilliness had seeped out into the whole place? Things hadn’t been comradely between him and Dio ever since the day the two of them had it out over Hernandez and Camacho and the crack house bust… before an audience of five, but those five, given their position and their big Cuban mouths, were quite enough. They were witnesses to him caving in to Dio over his mortgage payments and his status as the big black Chief. Of course, they probably didn’t know about the mortgage payments, but the other part—they’d have to be off musing in another world not to get it immediately. The Chief had felt humiliated ever since… more than the witnesses in that room could have imagined. He had buckled under to that pretentious Cuban hack, Dionisio Cruz, him and his purely, blatantly, political concerns…
Have a seat… Dio’s keeper of the gate, a horse of a woman named Cecelia… who wore the false eyelashes of a nine-year-old playing Makeup in the mirror… above jaws the size of a Neanderthal’s… she had said, “Have a seat.” No excuse, no explanation, not even a smile or a wink to show she realized how bizarre this was… just “Have a seat.” A “seat,” in point of fact, was a wooden armchair, along with four or five other wooden armchairs, in a mean little space created by removing the front wall of a mean little office. The Chief had just passed this so-called waiting room in City Hall, and wouldn’t you know the kind of people you’d find in there? Anthony Biaggi, a sleazeball developer who had his eyes on some derelict school building and school yard up in Pembroke Pines… José Hinchazón, an ex-cop fired years ago during a corruption scandal who now ran a shady “security” service… an Anglo who looked to the Chief like Adam Hirsch, of the failing-tour-boat-and-bus Hirsches… Have a seat in a room with that bunch?
So the Chief, looking down, gave the horse face of Cecelia an ambiguous, unsettling grin he had used to good effect many times before. He narrowed his eyes and curled back his upper lip, revealing his top row of big white upper teeth, which looked even bigger against the background of his dark skin. It was meant to indicate that he was about to broaden it even more… into a grin of pure happiness… or chew her up.
“I’ll be down the hall”—he nodded his head in that direction—“when Dio is ready to see me.”
Cecelia wasn’t the kind who was likely to flinch. “You mean the waiting room,” she said.
“Down the hall,” he said, looking more and more like he was going to chew her up—and spit her out. He took one of his cards out and turned it over and wrote a telephone number on the back. He handed it to her and turned his ambiguous grin into a happy grin, which he hoped she would perceive as ironic and become even more unsettled or at least more confused.
When he walked back down the hall and passed the pathetic waiting room, he could tell out of the corner of his eye that all three of them were looking up at him. He turned toward them but acknowledged only one, Hirsch—and he didn’t really know which Hirsch this was, Adam or his brother Jacob.
As before, nobody was paying “Hi, Chief” homage from the mouth of an open door, which meant he couldn’t slip into anybody’s office and start up a conversation to kill time while he waited for a summoning… a summoning from his Cuban master.
Hell, he couldn’t just loiter in the hallway could he… Goddamned Dio! All of a sudden he had the gall to treat him like any other humble petitioner who turns up at the court pleading for something from the king.
There was no other solution but to go down to the lobby of this Pan Am city hall and make make-believe phone calls. People going in and out of City Hall saw him standing off to the side, tapping on the glass face of his iPhone. They were unaware of his fall from grace… so far, anyway… they clustered about him almost like rap fans… “Hi, Chief!”… “Hey, Chief!”… “What’s going down, Chief?”… “You da man, Chief!”… and he was kept busy parceling out the Hi, Big Guys and Hey, Big Guys incessantly… How ironic… Him! Cyrus Booker, Chief of Police, mighty black