The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “I know that, Bernie. I just wanna bring the guy in. Then we can relax and do the thing right.”

  “Abe!…Jesus Christ! Never mind the legal side of it for a minute. You’re gonna put a picture of a Wall Street investment banker and a buncha other white guys on the kid’s bedside table while he’s fucking dying? Suppose he comes to—and he looks at the fucking table—and here’s half a dozen middle-aged white men in suits and ties staring at him! The fucking kid’s gonna stroke out for sure! He’s gonna say, ‘Holy shit!’ and give up the fucking ghost! I mean, have a fucking heart, Abe!”

  Weiss let out a great sigh and seemed to deflate before Kramer’s eyes. “Yeah. You’re right. It’s too wild.”

  Fitzgibbon cut a glance at Kramer.

  Kramer didn’t bat an eye. He didn’t want to cast so much as a twitch of aspersion upon the wisdom of the District Attorney of Bronx County. Captain Ahab was obsessed with the Lamb case, and he, Kramer, still had the case in his hands. He still had a shot at that much-prized, ever-elusive, and, in the Bronx, very nearly mythical creature, the Great White Defendant.

  On Fridays the Taliaferro School discharged its students at 12:30 P.M. This was solely because so many of the girls came from families with weekend places in the country who wanted to get out of the city by 2:00 P.M., before the Friday-afternoon rush hour. So, as usual, Judy was going to drive out to Long Island with Campbell, Bonita, and Miss Lyons, the nanny, in the Mercury station wagon. As usual, Sherman would drive out in the Mercedes roadster that evening or the next morning, depending on how late he had to stay at Pierce & Pierce. Very convenient this arrangement had proved to be over the past few months. A leisurely visit with Maria in her little hideaway had become a regular Friday-night custom.

  All morning, from his desk at Pierce & Pierce, he tried to reach Maria by telephone, at her apartment on Fifth Avenue and at the hideaway. No one answered at the hideaway. At the apartment a maid professed to know nothing of her whereabouts, not even what state or nation she was in. Finally he became desperate enough to leave his name and telephone number. She didn’t call back.

  She was avoiding him! At the Bavardages’ she had told him to call her last night. He had called repeatedly; no answer at all. She was cutting off all contact! But for precisely what reason? Fear? She wasn’t the fearful type…The crucial fact that would save him: she was driving…But if she vanished! That was crazy. She couldn’t vanish. Italy! She could vanish in Italy! Awww…that was preposterous. He held his breath and opened his mouth. He could actually hear his heart beating…tch, tch, tch, tch…under his sternum. His eyes slid right off the computer terminals. Couldn’t just sit here; he had to do something. The hell of it was, there was only one person he could turn to for advice, and that was someone he scarcely even knew, Killian.

  About noon he called Killian. The receptionist said he was in court. Twenty minutes later Killian called from a noisy pay telephone and said he would meet him at one o’clock in the main lobby of the Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street.

  On the way out, Sherman told Muriel a mere half lie. He said he was going to see a lawyer named Thomas Killian, and he gave her Killian’s telephone number. The half lie was in the offhand way he said it, which implied that Thomas Killian, Esq., was involved in Pierce & Pierce business.

  On this balmy day in June, 100 Centre Street was an easy walk uptown from Wall Street. In all the years he had lived in New York and worked downtown, Sherman had never noticed the Criminal Courts Building, even though it was one of the biggest and grandest buildings in the City Hall area. An architect named Harvey Wiley Corbett had designed it in the Moderne style, which was now called Art Deco. Corbett, once so famous, had been forgotten except by a handful of architectural historians; likewise, the excitement over the Criminal Courts Building when it was completed in 1933. The patterns of stone and brass and glass at the entrance were still impressive, but when Sherman reached the great lobby within, something put him on red alert. He could not have told you what. In fact, it was the dark faces, the sneakers and the warm-up jackets and the Pimp Rolls. To him it was like the Port Authority bus terminal. It was an alien terrain. Throughout the vast space, which had the soaring ceilings of an old-fashioned railroad station, were huddles of dark people, and their voices created a great nervous rumble, and around the edges of the dark people walked white men in cheap suits or sport jackets, watching them like wolves monitoring the sheep. More dark people, young men, walked through the lobby in twos and threes with a disconcerting pumping gait. Off to one side, in the gloom, a half dozen figures, black and white, leaned into a row of public telephones. On the other side, elevators swallowed up and disgorged more dark people, and the huddles of dark people broke up, and others formed, and the nervous rumble rose and fell and rose and fell, and the sneakers squeaked on the marble floors.

  It wasn’t hard to pick out Killian. He was near the elevators in another of his sharpie outfits, a pale gray suit with wide chalk stripes and a shirt with a white spread collar and maroon pinstripes. He was talking to a small middle-aged white man in a warm-up jacket. As Sherman walked up, he heard Killian say, “A discount for cash? Gedoudahere, Dennis. Whaddaya whaddaya?” The little man said something. “It’s not a big thing, Dennis. Cash is all I get. Haifa my clients ain’t been introduced to checking accounts, as it is. Besides, I pay my fucking taxes. That’s one less thing to worry about.” He saw Sherman walking up, nodded, then said to the little man: “What can I tell you? It’s like I said. Get it to me by Monday. Otherwise I can’t get started.” The little man followed Killian’s eyes toward Sherman, said something in a low voice, then walked off, shaking his head.

  Killian said to Sherman, “How you doing?”

  “Fine.”

  “You ever been here before?”

  “No.”

  “The biggest law office in New York. You see those two guys over there?” He motioned toward two white men in suits and ties roaming among the huddles of dark people. “They’re lawyers. They’re looking for clients to represent.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s simple. They just walk up and say, ‘Hey, you need a lawyer?’ ”

  “Isn’t that ambulance chasing?”

  “That it is. See that guy over there?” He pointed to a short man in a loud, checked sport jacket standing in front of a bank of elevators. “His name is Miguel Escalero. They call him Mickey Elevator. He’s a lawyer. He stands there half the morning, and every time somebody who looks Hispanic and miserable walks up, he says, ‘¿Necesita usted un abogado?’ If the guys says, ‘I can’t afford a lawyer,’ he says, ‘How much you got in your pocket?’ If the guy has fifty dollars, he’s got himself a lawyer.”

  Sherman said, “What do you get for fifty dollars?”

  “He’ll walk the guy through a plea or an arraignment. If it actually involves working for the client, he don’t want to know about it. A specialist. So how you doing?”

  Sherman told him of his vain attempts to reach Maria.

  “Sounds to me like she’s got herself a lawyer,” said Killian. As he spoke, he rolled his head around with his eyes half closed, like a boxer loosening up for a fight. Sherman found this rude but said nothing.

  “And the lawyer’s telling her not to talk to me.”

  “That’s what I’d tell her if she was my client. Don’t mind me. I did a buncha wrestler’s bridges yesterday. I think I did something to my neck.”

  Sherman stared at him.

  “I used to like to run,” said Killian, “but all that pounding up and down screwed up my back. So now I go to the New York Athletic Club and lift weights. I see all these kids doing wrestler’s bridges. I guess I’m too old for wrestler’s bridges. I’m gonna try to get hold of her myself.” He stopped rolling his head.

  “How?”

  “I’ll think a something. Half a my practice consists of talking to people who are not anxious to talk.” Tawk.

  “To tell you the truth,” said S
herman, “this really surprises me. Maria—Maria’s not the cautious type. She’s an adventuress. She’s a gambler. This little Southern girl, from nowhere, who makes it to 962 Fifth Avenue…I don’t know…And this may sound naïve, but I think she genuinely…feels something for me. I think she loves me.”

  “I bet she loves 962 Fifth, too,” said Killian. “Maybe she figures it’s time to stop gambling.”

  “Perhaps,” said Sherman, “but I just can’t believe she would disappear on me. Of course, it’s only been two days.”

  “If it comes to that,” said Killian, “we have an investigator works right out of our office. Used to be a detective in Major Cases with the Police Department. But there’s no point in running up expenses unless we really need to. And I don’t think we gonna need to. Right now they got nothing. I talked to Bernie Fitzgibbon. You remember the fellow I was talking to you about, in the Homicide Bureau of the Bronx D.A.’s Office?”

  “You’ve already talked to him?”

  “Yeah. The press has put pressure on them, so they’re checking out cars. That’s all ’at’s happening. They got nothing.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “How can you be sure he’ll tell you the truth?”

  “Oh, he might not tell me everything he knows, but he’s not gonna lie to me. He’s not gonna mislead me.”

  “Why not?”

  Killian looked out over the lobby of 100 Centre Street. Then he turned back to Sherman. “You ever hear of the Favor Bank?”

  “The Favor Bank? No.”

  “Well, everything in this building, everything in the criminal justice system in New York”—New Yawk—“operates on favors. Everybody does favors for everybody else. Every chance they get, they make deposits in the Favor Bank. One time when I was just starting out as an assistant D.A., I was trying a case, and I was up against this lawyer, an older guy, and he was just tying me up in knots. The guy was Jewish. I didn’t know how to handle him. So I talked it over with my supervisor, who was a Harp, like me. The next thing I know, he’s taking me in to see the judge, in his chambers. The judge was a Harp, too, an old guy with white hair. I’ll never forget it. We walk in, and he’s standing beside his desk playing with one of these indoor putting sets. You hit the golf ball along the carpet, and instead of a hole there’s this cup with a rim on it that slopes down. He don’t”—don’t—“even look up. He’s lining up this putt. My bureau chief leaves the room, and I’m standing there, and the judge says, ‘Tommy…’ He’s still looking at the golf ball. Tommy, he calls me, and I never laid eyes on him except in the courtroom. ‘Tommy,’ he says, ‘you seem like a good lad. I understand there’s a certain Jew bastard been giving you a very hard time.’ I’m fucking astounded. This is so irregular—you know, fuhgedaboudit. I can’t even think a what to say. Then he says, ‘I wouldn’t worry about it anymore, Tommy.’ He still don’t look up. So I just said, ‘Thank you, Judge,’ and left the room. After that, it’s the judge who’s tying up this lawyer in knots. When I say ‘Objection,’ I can’t get to the second syllable before he says ‘Sustained.’ All of a sudden I look like a genius. Now this was a pure deposit in the Favor Bank. There was absolutely nothing I could do for that judge—not then. A deposit in the Favor Bank is not quid pro quo. It’s saving up for a rainy day. In criminal law there’s a lotta gray areas, and you gotta operate in ‘em, but if you make a mistake, you can be in a whole lotta trouble, and you’re gonna need a whole lotta help in a hurry, I mean, look at these guys.” He gestured toward the lawyers prowling among the people in the lobby and then toward Mickey Elevator. “They could be arrested. Without the Favor Bank, they’d be finished. But if you’ve been making your regular deposits in the Favor Bank, then you’re in a position to make contracts. That’s what they call big favors, contracts. You have to make good on contracts.”

  “You have to? Why?”

  “Because everybody in the courthouse believes in a saying: ‘What goes around comes around.’ That means if you don’t take care a me today, I won’t take care a you tomorrow. When you got basically no confidence in your own abilities, that’s a frightening idea.”

  “So you asked your friend Fitzgibbon for a contract? Is that the expression?”

  “No, what I got from him was just an everyday favor, just your standard protocol. There’s nothing to waste a contract on yet. My strategy is, things shouldn’t reach that point. Right now, it seems to me, the loose cannon is your friend Mrs. Ruskin.”

  “I still think she’ll get in touch with me.”

  “If she does, I tell you what you do. Set up a meeting with her and then call me. I’m never away from my telephone for more than an hour, not even on weekends. I think you ought to go wired.”

  “Wired?” Sherman sensed what he meant—and was appalled.

  “Yeah. You ought to wear a recording device.”

  “A recording device?” Beyond Killian’s shoulder Sherman became aware once more of the vast and bilious gloom of the lobby, of the dark shambling forms leaning into the telephone shells, wandering this way and that with their huge sneakers and curious rolling gaits, huddling together in their miserable tête-à-têtes, of Mickey Elevator cruising along the edges of this raggedy and miserable herd.

  “Nothing to it,” said Killian, apparently thinking that Sherman’s concern was technological. “We tape the recorder to the small of your back. The microphone goes under your shirt. It’s no bigger than the last joint of your little finger.”

  “Look, Mr. Killian—”

  “Call me Tommy. Everybody else does.”

  Sherman paused and looked at the thin Irish face rising up from out of a British spread collar. All at once he felt as if he were on another planet. He would call him neither Mr. Killian nor Tommy.

  “I’m worried about all this,” he said, “but I’m not so worried that I would make a surreptitious recording of a conversation with someone I feel close to. So let’s just forget about that.”

  “It’s perfectly legal in the State of New York,” said Killian, “and it’s done all the time. You have every right to record your own conversations. You can do it on the telephone, you can do it in person.”

  “That’s not the point,” said Sherman. Involuntarily he thrust his Yale chin upward.

  Killian shrugged. “Okay. All I’m saying is, it’s kosher, and sometimes it’s the only way to hold people to the truth.”

  “I…” Sherman started to enunciate a great principle but was afraid Killian might take it as an insult. So he settled for: “I couldn’t do it.”

  “All right,” said Killian. “We’ll just see how things go. Try to get hold of her anyhow, and call me if you do. And I’m gonna take a shot at it myself.”

  As he left the building, Sherman noticed morose huddles of people on the steps. So many young men with stooped shoulders! So many dark faces! For an instant he could see the tall thin boy and the powerful brute. He wondered if it was entirely safe to be in the vicinity of a building that daily, hourly, brought together so many defendants in criminal cases.

  Where Albert Vogel found these places Fallow couldn’t begin to imagine. The Huan Li was as pompous and stiff-necked as the Regent’s Park. Despite the fact that they were in the East Fifties, near Madison Avenue, at the height of the lunch hour, the restaurant was nearly silent. It may or may not have been two-thirds empty. It was difficult to say, because of the darkness and the screens. The restaurant was all booths and pierced screens carved of dark wood with innumerable fishhook shapes. The darkness was such that even Vogel, barely two feet away in the booth, looked like a Rembrandt. A highlit face, a shaft of light turning his old grandmotherly head a brilliant white, a flash of shirtfront bisected by a necktie—and the rest of his form dissolved into the blackness that surrounded it. From time to time Chinese waiters and busboys materialized soundlessly in stewards’ jackets and black bow ties. Nevertheless, lunch with Vogel at the Huan Li had one great thing to recommend it. Th
e American would pay for it.

  Vogel said, “You sure you won’t change your mind, Pete? They have a great Chinese wine here. You ever tried Chinese wine?”

  “Chinese wine taste like dead mouse,” said Fallow.

  “Tastes like what?”

  Dead mouse…Fallow didn’t even know why he said it. He wasn’t using that expression anymore. He wasn’t even thinking it. He was now marching shoulder to shoulder with Gerald Steiner through the world of tabloid journalism, thanks in part to Albert Vogel, although mainly thanks to his own brilliance. He was already in a mood to forget the contribution of Al Vogel to his Lamb case scoop. He resented the man, with his Pete this and Pete that, and he felt like mocking him. On the other hand, Vogel was his pipeline to Bacon and that crowd. He wouldn’t like to have to deal with them entirely on his own.

  “Sometimes I prefer beer with Chinese food, Al,” said Fallow.

  “Yeah…I can see that,” said Vogel. “Hey, waiter. Waiter! Christ, where are the waiters? I can’t see anything in here.”

  A beer would, in fact, be fine. Beer was practically a health-food drink, like chamomile tea. His hangover today wasn’t serious at all, no more than a thick fog. No pain; just the fog. Yesterday, thanks to his enhanced status at The City Light, he had found the moment right to invite the sexiest of the copygirls, a big-eyed blonde named Darcy Lastrega, out to dinner. They went to Leicester’s, where he had made his peace with Britt-Withers and even with Caroline Heftshank. They had ended up at the Table with Nick Stopping and Tony and St. John and Billy Cortez and some of the others. The Table had found a perfectly willing fish in no time, a Texan named Ned Perch, who had made an astonishing amount of money at something or other and had bought a lot of old silver in England, as he kept mentioning. Fallow entertained the Table at considerable length with stories about the housing project in the Bronx, by way of acquainting everyone with his recent success. His date, Miss Darcy Lastrega, was not captivated, however. The likes of Nick Stopping and St. John immediately sized her up for what she was, a humorless little American dimwit, and nobody bothered to talk to her, and she began slumping more and more despondently into her chair. To rectify matters, every twenty or thirty minutes Fallow turned toward her and grasped her forearm and put his head close to hers and said in what was supposed to seem only a half-jesting manner: “I don’t know what’s coming over me. I must be in love. You’re not married, are you?” The first time she obliged him with a smile. The second and third times she didn’t. The fourth time she wasn’t there any longer. She had left the restaurant, and he hadn’t even noticed. Billy Cortez and St. John began laughing at him, and he took it badly. A childish little American bird—and yet it was humiliating. After no more than three or four more glasses of wine, he left Leicester’s himself without saying goodbye to anyone and went home and, presently, fell asleep.