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