Camacho; you gotta be in fantastic shape. The training—at one point you have to jump from the top of a six-story building onto a mattress. I’m not kidding… a mattress. If you can’t make yourself do it, you don’t make it onto the SWAT Team. You got to be young to do it without getting hurt, but that’s only part of it. As you get older, you begin to value your hide a lot more. I’ve seen it a hundred times in police work. You’re older, you’ve got a higher rank, you’re getting higher pay, you’ve got ambition itching under your skin. Every instinct you got is telling you, ‘You’re too valuable now, you’ve worked too hard to get there, your future is so damned bright. How could you possibly risk it all by doing a damn fool thing like that, jumping from six stories up… onto a fucking mattress?’ ” The Chief could see that he had their rapt attention, Dionisio Cruz’s, the flack Portuondo’s, and the little bald city manager’s. They were staring at him with the nice big unsophisticated eyes of boys. “Yeah… looking down on the mattress from the top of that six-story building—the damn thing looks about the size of a playing card, and that flat, too. If an older man is there on the roof and looking down like that, he starts thinking about some… first things, as they say in church.” Oh, yeah! Now he had all three of the Cubans mesmerized. Now for the coup de grâce. “Every year when the SWAT candidates get to that part of the training… I make the jump myself. I want these kids to feel like, ‘Jesus Christ, if the Chief does it, and I put my toes on the edge of the roof… and there’s no way I can make my legs go into the jump mode… then I’ll be branded as a pathetic little pussy the rest of my life.’ I want those guys to refuse to fail.”
For a moment none of the Cubans said a word. But the Mayor couldn’t contain his emotions any longer. “Fuckin’ A!” he cried. “That’s it! If Officer Camacho likes action so goddamned much—take him right up on top of the building and show him the mattress!”
The Chief chuckled somewhere deep inside. ::::::Gotcha.::::::
But all of a sudden ::::::Aw, shit!:::::: he just thought of something, a big something… and he had to go and turn the Mayor and the yes-men into bug-eyed little boys with ninety seconds of SWAT Team lore, starring himself… He lowered his head and rocked it from this side to that side to this side to that side, slowly, and muttered out loud, “Damn!” Then he looked at the three of them and compressed his lips so tightly the flesh ballooned out above them and below them. “The kid would be perfect for the SWAT Team, but we can’t do it. We can’t just move somebody onto the SWAT Team for political reasons. They’d spot that right away. Every cop knows who Nestor Camacho is, or they do now. We’ve got forty-one cops on a waiting list for the SWAT Team right now. They’ve all volunteered… and talk about competition! Nobody can mess around with SWAT Team recruitment, not even the Chief.”
“Forty-one cops want to do this?” said the Mayor. “Forty-one cops can’t wait to jump from six stories and land on a mattress to qualify to go get shot at?”
The Chief started tapping the side of his forehead in the pantomime that says, “That’s using your head.” “You answered it yourself, Dio! ‘Can’t wait to get shot at’! There you have it! There’s a certain kind of cop who came to play. You know what I’m saying?”
The Mayor looked away glumly for a moment. “Well… I don’t care where you put Officer Camacho, as long as you get him off the goddamned water. Okay? But wherever you—what’s the word you like?—lateral transfer?—wherever you lateral transfer this TV acrobat a yours, he’s gotta do that thing. That’s gotta be one a the conditions.”
“What thing?” said the Chief.
“That thing with the mattress. If he likes action so goddamned much and has to go around breaking my balls, then you gotta take him right on up to the roof—and show him the mattress!”
The next afternoon Nestor iPhoned John Smith. “John,” he said, “you game for a cup of coffee? I got something to show you.”
“What?”
“I don’t wanna just tell you. I want to show it to you,