The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  Very much the shepherd, Reverend Bacon pulled up an armchair for her. Instead of returning to his big swivel chair, he sat on the edge of the desk with an athletic casualness.

  Reverend Bacon said to Mrs. Lamb, “I was talking to Mr. Kramer here, and the parking tickets, they’re taken care of.” He looked at Kramer.

  “Well, the warrant’s been quashed,” said Kramer. “There’s no more warrant. Now there’s just the tickets, and as far as we’re concerned, we’re not interested in the tickets, anyway.”

  Reverend Bacon looked at Mrs. Lamb and smiled and nodded his head a few times, as if to say, “Reverend Bacon delivers.” She just looked at him and pursed her lips.

  “Well, Mrs. Lamb,” said Kramer, “Reverend Bacon tells us you have some information for us about what happened to your son.”

  Mrs. Lamb looked at Reverend Bacon. He nodded yes and said, “Go ahead. Tell Mr. Kramer what you told me.”

  She said, “My son was hit by a car, and the car didn’t stop. It was a hit-and-run. But he got the license number, or he got part of it.”

  Her voice was businesslike.

  “Wait a minute, Mrs. Lamb,” said Kramer. “If you don’t mind, start at the beginning. When did you first learn about this? When did you first know your son had been injured?”

  “When he came home from the hospital with his wrist in this—uh—I don’t know what you call it.”

  “A cast?”

  “No, it wasn’t a cast. It was more like a splint, only it looked like a big canvas glove.”

  “Well, anyway, he came home from the hospital with this wrist injury. When was that?”

  “That was…three nights ago.”

  “What did he say had happened?”

  “He didn’t say much. He was in a lot of pain, and he wanted to go to bed. He said something about a car, but I thought he was riding in a car and they had an accident. Like I say, he didn’t want to talk. I think they gave him something at the hospital, for the pain. He just wanted to go to bed. So I told him to go to bed.”

  “Did he say who he was with when it happened?”

  “No. He wasn’t with anybody. He was by himself.”

  “Then he wasn’t in a car.”

  “No, he was walking.”

  “All right, go ahead. What happened next?”

  “The next morning he felt real bad. He tried to lift his head, and he nearly passed out. He felt so bad I didn’t go to work. I called in—I stayed home. That was when he told me a car hit him.”

  “How did he say it happened?”

  “He was walking across Bruckner Boulevard, and this car hit him, and he fell on his wrist, and he must have hit his head, too, because he has a terrible concussion.” At this point her composure broke. She closed her eyes, and they were full of tears when she opened them.

  Kramer waited a moment. “Where on Bruckner Boulevard was this?”

  “I don’t know. When he tried to talk, it was too painful for him. He’d open his eyes and shut his eyes. He couldn’t even sit up.”

  “But he was by himself, you said. What was he doing on Bruckner Boulevard?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a takeout place up there, at 161st Street, the Texas Fried Chicken, and Henry, he likes these things they have there, the chicken nuggets, and so maybe he was going there, but I don’t know.”

  “Where did the car hit him? Where on his body?”

  “I don’t know that, either. The hospital, maybe they can tell you that.”

  Reverend Bacon broke in: “The hospital, they fell down on the job. They didn’t X-ray that young man’s head. They didn’t give him the CAT scan or the nuclear magnetic resonance or any of those other things. That young man comes in with a very serious injury to his head, and they treat his wrist and send him home.”

  “Well,” said Kramer, “apparently they didn’t know he’d been hit by a car.” He turned to Martin. “ ’S’at right?”

  “The emergency-room report don’t mention an automobile,” said Martin.

  “The boy had a serious injury to his head!” said Reverend Bacon. “He probably didn’t know half of what he was saying. They’re supposed to figure out those things.”

  “Well, let’s don’t get sidetracked on that,” said Kramer.

  “He got part of the license plate,” said Mrs. Lamb.

  “What’d he tell you?”

  “He said it started with R. That was the first letter. The second letter was E or F or P or B or some letter like that. That was what it looked like.”

  “What state? New York?”

  “What state? I don’t know. I guess New York. He didn’t say it was something else. And he told me the make.”

  “What was it?”

  “A Mercedes.”

  “I see. What color?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

  “Four-door? Two-door?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he say what the driver looked like?”

  “He said there was a man and a woman in the car.”

  “A man was driving?”

  “I guess so. I don’t know.”

  “Any description of the man or the woman?”

  “They were white.”

  “He said they were white? Anything else?”

  “No, he just said they were white.”

  “That’s all? He didn’t say anything else about them or about the car?”

  “No. He could hardly talk.”

  “How did he get to the hospital?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.”

  Kramer asked Martin, “Did they say at the hospital?”

  “He was a walk-in.”

  “He couldn’ta walked from Bruckner Boulevard to Lincoln Hospital with a broken wrist.”

  “Walk-in don’t mean he walked all the way there. It just means he walked in the emergency room. He wasn’t carried in. The EMS didn’t bring him. He didn’t come in an ambulance.”

  Kramer’s mind was already jumping ahead to trial preparation. All he could see were dead ends. He paused and then shook his head and said, to no one in particular: “That don’t give us very much.”

  “Whaddaya mean?” said Bacon. For the first time there was a sharp tone in his voice. “You got the first letter on the license plate, and you got a line on the second letter, and you got the make of the car—how many Mercedeses with a license plate beginning with RE, RF, RB, or RP you think you gonna find?”

  “There’s no telling,” said Kramer. “Detective Martin and Detective Goldberg will run that down. But what we need is a witness. Without a witness there’s no case here yet.”

  “No case?” said Reverend Bacon. “You got a case and a half seems to me. You got a young man, an outstanding young man, at death’s door. You got a car and a license plate. How much case you need?”

  “Look,” said Kramer, hoping that an ultra-patient, slightly condescending tone would take care of the implied rebuke. “Let me explain something to you. Let’s assume we identify the car tomorrow. Okay? Let’s assume the car is registered in the state of New York, and there’s only one Mercedes with a license number that begins with R. Now we’ve got a car. But we got no driver.”

  “Yeah, but you can—”

  “Just because somebody owns a car doesn’t mean”—as soon as it slipped out, Kramer hoped the doesn’t would blow by undetected—“he was driving it at a particular time.”

  “But you can question that man.”

  “That’s true, and we would. But unless he says, ‘Sure, I was involved in such-and-such a hit-and-run accident,’ we’re back where we started.”

  Reverend Bacon shook his head. “I don’t see that.”

  “The problem is, we don’t have a witness. We not only don’t have anybody to tell us where this thing happened, we don’t even have anybody who can tell us he was hit by any car at all.”

  “You got Henry Lamb himself!”

  Kramer raised his hands from his lap and s
hrugged gently, so as not to overemphasize the fact that Mrs. Lamb’s son would probably never be able to bear witness to anything again.

  “You got what he told his mother. He told her himself.”

  “It gives us a lead, but it’s hearsay.”

  “It’s what he told his mother.”

  “You may accept it as the truth, and I may accept it as the truth, but it’s not admissible in a court of law.”

  “That don’t make sense to me.”

  “Well, that’s the law. But in all candor I ought to bring out something else. Apparently when he came into the emergency room three nights ago, he didn’t say anything about being hit by a car. That don’t help matters any.” Don’t. He got it right that time.

  “He had a concussion…and a broken wrist…Probably a lot of things he didn’t say.”

  “Well, was he thinking any more clearly the next morning? You could make that argument, too.”

  “Who’s making that argument?” said Reverend Bacon. “You’re making that argument?”

  “I’m not making any argument. I’m just trying to show you that without a witness there’s a lot of problems.”

  “Well, you can find the car, can’t you? You can interrogate the owner. You can check that car for evidence, can’t you?”

  “Sure,” said Kramer. “As I told you, they’re gonna run that down.” He nodded toward Martin and Goldberg. “They’ll try to find witnesses, too. But I don’t think a car would yield much evidence. If a car hit him, it must’ve grazed him. He has some bruises, but he don’t have the kind of bodily injuries you’d have from being really hit by a car.”

  “Say if a car hit him?”

  “This case is fulla ifs, Reverend Bacon. If we find a car and an owner, and if the owner says, ‘Yeah, I hit this young man the other night, and I didn’t stop, and I didn’t report it,’ then we got a case. Otherwise, we got a lot of problems.”

  “Unh-hunh,” said Reverend Bacon. “So it might be you can’t spend a whole lot a time on this case, being as it has so many problems?”

  “That’s not true. This case will get as much attention as any other case.”

  “You say be candid. Well, I’m going to be candid. Henry Lamb is not a prominent citizen, and he’s not the son of a prominent citizen, but he’s a fine young man all the same…see…He’s about to graduate from high school. He didn’t drop out. He was—he’s thinking about going to college. Never been in trouble. But he’s from the Edgar Allan Poe projects. The Edgar Allan Poe projects. He’s a young black man from the projects. Now, let’s turn this thing around for a minute. Suppose Henry Lamb was a young white man and he lived on Park Avenue, and he was about to go to Yale, and he was struck down on Park Avenue by a black man and a black woman in a…a…Pontiac Firebird instead of a Mercedes…see…And that boy told his mother what Henry Lamb told his mother. You mean to tell me you wouldn’t have a case? Instead of talking about problems, you’d be turning that information inside out and counting the stitches.”

  Martin came rumbling to life. “We’d do the same thing we’re doing right now. We been trying to find Mrs. Lamb here for two days. When did we find out about a license number? You heard it. I’ve worked Park Avenue and I’ve worked Bruckner Boulevard. It don’t make any difference.”

  Martin’s voice was so calm and definite, and his stare was so implacable, so mule-like, so stone Irish, it seemed to jolt Reverend Bacon for a moment. He tried to outstare the little Irishman, without success. Then he smiled slightly and said, “You can tell me that, because I’m a minister, and I want to believe that justice is blind…see…I want to believe it. But you best not be going out on the streets of Harlem and the Bronx trying to tell people that. You best not be informing them about these blessings, because they already know the truth. They discover it the hard way.”

  “I’m on the streets of the Bronx every day,” said Martin, “and I’ll tell anybody who wants to know.”

  “Unh-hunh,” said Reverend Bacon. “We have an organization, All People’s Solidarity. We survey the communities, and the people come to us, and I can tell you that the people are not getting your message. They are getting another message.”

  “I been in one a your surveys,” said Martin.

  “You been in what?”

  “One a your surveys. Up on Gun Hill Road.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It was on the streets of the Bronx,” said Martin.

  “Anyway,” said Kramer, looking at Mrs. Lamb, “thank you for your information. And I hope you’ll have some good news about your son. We’ll check out that license number. In the meantime, if you hear about anyone who was with your son the other night, or saw anything, you let us know, okay?”

  “Unh-hunh,” she said, striking the same dubious note as she had at the outset. “Thank you.”

  Martin was still staring at Reverend Bacon with his Doberman pinscher eyes. So Kramer turned to Goldberg and said, “You have a card you can give Mrs. Lamb, with a telephone number?”

  Goldberg fished around in an inside pocket and handed her a card. She took it without looking at it.

  Reverend Bacon stood up. “You don’t have to give me your card,” he said to Goldberg. “I know you…see…I’m going to call you. I’m going to be on your case. I want to see something done. All People’s Solidarity wants to see something done. And something will be done…see…So one thing you can count on: you will hear from me.”

  “Anytime,” said Martin. “Anytime you like.”

  His lips were parted ever so slightly, with the suggestion of a smile at the corners. It reminded Kramer of the expression, the Smirking Fang, that boys wore at the beginning of a playground brawl.

  Kramer started walking out, saying his goodbyes over his shoulder as he went, hoping that would coax Battling Martin and the Jewish Shamrock out of the room.

  On the drive back up to the fortress, Martin said, “Christ, now I know why they send you guys to law school, Kramer. So you can learn how to keep a straight face.” He said it good-naturedly, however.

  “Well, hell, Marty,” said Kramer, figuring that, having been a fellow soldier with him in the bullshit skirmish at Reverend Bacon’s, he could go on a nickname basis with the dauntless little Irish Donkey, “the kid’s mother was sitting right there. Besides, maybe the license number will turn up something.”

  “You wanna bet on it?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “My ass, it’s a possibility. You get hit by a fucking car, and you go to the hospital and you don’t happen to mention that to them? And then you go home and you don’t happen to mention it to your mother? And the next morning you’re not feeling so hot, so you say, ‘Oh, by the way, I got hit by a car’? Gedoudahere. That poor bastard took a beating, but it wasn’t from anything he wanted to tell anybody about.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt that. See if there’s a sheet on him, will you?”

  “You know,” said Goldberg, “I feel sorry for those people. They sit there saying the kid don’t have a record, like that’s a real fucking accomplishment. And in the projects, that’s what it is. Just not having a record! That’s something special. I feel sorry for her.”

  And a little of the Jew oozes out of the Jewish Shamrock, thought Kramer.

  But then Martin took up the refrain. “A woman like that, she shouldn’t even be living in the project, f’r Chrissake. She was all right. She was straight. Now I remember that case when her husband got killed. The guy was a working stiff who had heart. Stood up to some lowlife, and the fucking guy shot him right in the mouth. She works, don’t take welfare, sends the kid to church, keeps him in school—she’s all right. No telling what the kid got himself involved in, but she’s all right. Halfa these people, you know, something happens, and you talk to them, and they spend so much time blaming the fucking world for what happened, you can’t halfway find out what the fuck happened in the first place. But this one, she was straight. Too
bad she’s stuck in the fucking project, but you know”—he looked at Kramer when he said this—“there’s a lotta decent people in the projects, people that show up for work.”

  Goldberg nodded sagely and said, “You’d never know it now, but that’s what the fucking places were built for, working people. That was the whole idea, low-cost housing for working people. And now you find somebody in’eh who goes to work and tries to do the right thing, it breaks your fucking heart.”

  Then it dawned on Kramer. The cops weren’t all that much different from the assistant D.A.s. It was the muck factor. The cops got tired of packing blacks and Latins off to jail all day, too. It was even worse for them, because they had to dive deeper into the muck to do it. The only thing that made it constructive was the idea that they were doing it for somebody—for the decent people. So they opened their eyes, and now they were attuned to all the good people with colored skin…who rose to the top…during all this relentless stirring of the muck…

  You couldn’t exactly call it enlightenment, thought Kramer, but it was a fucking start.

  9. Some Brit Named Fallow

  This time the explosion of the telephone threw his heart into tachycardia, and each contraction forced the blood through his head with such pressure—a stroke!—he was going to have a stroke!—lying here alone in his high-rise American hovel!—a stroke! The panic roused the beast. The beast came straight to the surface and showed its snout.

  Fallow opened one eye and saw the telephone lying in a brown Streptolon nest. He was dizzy, and he hadn’t even lifted his head. Great curds of eye trash swam in front of his face. The pounding blood was breaking up the mercury yolk into curds, and the curds were coming out of his eye. The telephone exploded again. He closed his eye. The snout of the beast was right behind his eyelid. That pedophile business—

  And last night had started off as such an ordinary evening!

  Having less than forty dollars to get him through the next three days, he had done the usual. He had called up a Yank. He had called up Gil Archer, the literary agent, who was married to a woman whose name Fallow could never remember. He had suggested that they meet for dinner at Leicester’s, leaving the impression he would be bringing a girl along himself. Archer arrived with his wife, whereas he arrived alone. Naturally, under the circumstances, Archer, ever the bland polite Yank, picked up the bill. Such a quiet evening; such an early evening; such a routine evening for an Englishman in New York, a dull dinner paid for by a Yank; he really was thinking about getting up and going home. And then Caroline Heftshank and this artist friend of hers, an Italian, Filippo Chirazzi, came in, and they stopped by the table and sat down, and Archer asked them if they would like something to drink, and he said why didn’t they get another bottle of wine, and so Archer ordered another bottle of wine, and they drank that, and then they drank another one and another one, and now Leicester’s was packed and roaring with all the usual faces, and Alex Britt-Withers sent over one of his waiters to offer a round of drinks on the house, which made Archer feel socially successful, recognized-by-the-owner sort of thing—the Yanks were very keen on that—and Caroline Heftshank kept hugging her handsome young Italian, Chirazzi, who was posing with his pretty profile up in the air, as if one were to feel privileged just to be breathing the same air as himself. St. John came over from another table to admire young Signor Chirazzi, much to Billy Cortez’s displeasure, and Signor Chirazzi told St. John it was necessary for a painter to paint with “the eyes of a child,” and St. John said that he himself tried to view the world with the eyes of a child, to which Billy Cortez said, “He said child, St. John, not pedophile.” Signor Chirazzi posed some more, with his long neck and Valentino nose rising up from out of a ridiculous electric-blue Punk shirt with a three-quarter-inch collar and a pink glitter necktie, and so Fallow said it was more postmodern for a painter to have the eyes of a pedophile than the eyes of a child, and what did Signor Chirazzi think? Caroline, who was quite drunk, told him not to be stupid, said it quite sharply, and Fallow reared back, meaning only to strike a pose mocking the young painter, but lost his balance and fell on the floor. Much laughter. When he got up, he was dizzy, and he held on to Caroline, just to steady himself, but young Signor Chirazzi took offense, from the depths of his Italian manly honor, and tried to shove Fallow, and both Fallow and Caroline now went down, and Chirazzi tried to jump on Fallow, and St. John, for whatever reason, now jumped on the pretty Italian, and Billy Cortez was screaming, and Fallow struggled up, carrying an enormous weight, and Britt-Withers was over him, yelling, “For God’s sake!” and then a whole bunch of people were on top of him, and they all went crashing out the front door onto the sidewalk on Lexington Avenue—P