a this-is-serious scowl on his face. So they all sat down.
“Okay, Chief,” said the Mayor. “You know this whole situation is bullshit, and I know it’s bullshit. This officer, this kid Camacho, is ordered to bring the guy down from the mast. So he climbs up and he brings the guy down, but first he has to put on some kind a ham-bone high-wire act. The whole thing is on TV, and now we got half the city yelling that we’re sitting on our hands while a leader of the anti-Castro underground gets legally lynched. I don’t need this.”
“But we don’t know that’s what he is,” said the Chief. “The Coast Guard says nobody’s ever heard of him, and nobody’s ever heard of the underground movement he says he leads, this El Solvente.”
“Yeah, but try telling that to all those people we got on our neck now. They’ll just tune out. This thing’s like some kind of a panic, like a riot or something. People believe it—they think he’s a fucking martyr. If we say otherwise… then we’re trying to pull off some kind a cheap trick, some kind a cover-up.”
“But what else can we do?” said the Chief.
“Where is the guy, the guy on the mast—where is he right now?”
“He’s being held on a Coast Guard ship until they decide to announce what they’re doing. They’ll probably wait awhile and let things blow over. In the meantime, they’re not gonna let him say another word. He’ll be invisible.”
“I say we do the same thing with Officer Camacho. Put him somewhere he’ll be invisible.”
“Like where?”
“Oh… ummmm… I got it! Put him in that industrial area out toward Doral,” said the Mayor. “Nobody goes there except to repair coke furnaces and lubricate earth-moving equipment.”
“So what would Camacho do out there?”
“Oh, I don’t know… They ride around in patrol cars, they protect the citizens.”
“But that’s a demotion,” said the Chief.
“Why?”
“Because that’s where he started out. He was a beat cop. The Marine Patrol is one a the special units. He can’t be demoted. That’s like saying we did the wrong thing and this officer fucked up. He didn’t do anything wrong. Everything was done by the book, in the routine way… except for one thing.”
“Which is…?” said the Mayor.
“Officer Camacho risked his life to save this guy. He did a hell of a thing, when you think about it.”
“Yeah,” said the Mayor, “but the guy wouldn’t a needed saving if the officer hadn’t a tried to grab him.”
“Even if you believe that, he did a hell of a thing all the same. He locked his legs around the guy seventy feet up in the air and carried him all the way down to the water, swinging hand over hand down the jib sail cable. You know—you won’t like this, but we’re gonna have to give Officer Camacho a medal of valor.”
“What!?”
“Everybody knows he risked his life to save a man. The whole city saw it. His fellow cops all admire him, no matter who they are. They all think of him as really brave, except that they’d never say it—that’s taboo. But if he doesn’t get the medal, it stinks of politics right away.”
“Jesus Christ!” said the Mayor. “Where you gonna do this? In the main auditorium at the Freedom Tower?”
“No… it can be done quietly.”
The communications director, Portuondo, spoke up. “The way you do it is, you put out a press release the day after the ceremony with all kinds of announcements, commendations, traffic flow decisions, whatever, and you list Officer Camacho’s award about eighth down the line. It’s done all the time.”
“Okay, but we still gotta make the guy invisible. How do we do that if you can’t make him a beat cop?”
“All you can do is give him a lateral transfer,” said the Chief, “to another special unit. There’s the Marine Patrol, which he’s in now, there’s the CST—Crime Suppression Team—the SWAT Team, the—”
“Hey!” said the Mayor. “How about the Mounted Police! You never see those guys except in the park. Put him on a goddamned horse!”
“I don’t think so,” said the Chief. “That’s known as a lateral transfer with a dip. That would be pretty obvious in a case like this… putting him on a horse in a park.”
“You got a better idea?” said the Mayor.
“Yeah,” said the Chief. “The SWAT Team. It’s the most macho of them all, because you’re always marching into a line of fire. You do battle. The guys are mostly young, like Officer