The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  Pretty soon Kramer could hear people walking down the hall outside. He opened the door, and there were Martin and Goldberg and, between them, a powerfully built young black man in a turtleneck jersey with his hands behind his back. Bringing up the rear was a short, chunky black man in a pale gray suit. That would be Cecil Hayden.

  Even with his hands behind his back Roland Auburn managed to do the Pimp Roll. He was no more than five feet seven or eight, but very muscular. His pectorals, deltoids, and trapezii bulged with mass and sharp definition. Kramer, the atrophied one, felt a jolt of envy. To say that the fellow was aware of his terrific build was putting it mildly. The turtleneck jersey fit him like a skin. He had a gold chain around his neck. He wore tight black pants and white Reebok sneakers that looked as if they had just come out of the box. His brown face was square, hard, and impassive. He had short hair and a narrow mustache lining his upper lip.

  Kramer wondered why Martin had cuffed his hands behind his back. It was more humiliating than having them cuffed in front. It made a man feel more helpless and vulnerable. He could feel the danger of falling. He would fall like a tree, without being able to protect his head. Since they wanted Roland Auburn’s cooperation, Kramer thought Martin would have taken the man on the easy route—or did he think there was actually some danger of this bulked-up rock making a run for it? Or was the Martin way invariably the hard way?

  The entourage came crowding into the little office. The introductions were an awkward shuffle. Torres, as the assistant district attorney in charge of the prisoner’s drug case, knew Cecil Hayden, but he didn’t know Martin, Goldberg, or the prisoner. Hayden didn’t know Kramer, and Kramer didn’t know the prisoner, and what should they call the prisoner, anyway? His real status was that of punk arrested on a drug charge, but at this moment, technically, he was a citizen who had come forth to assist the authorities in a felony investigation. Martin solved the nomenclature problem by referring to Roland Auburn frequently and in a bored manner as “Roland.”

  “Okay, Roland, let’s see. Where we gonna put you?”

  He looked around the office with its clutter of dilapidated furniture. Calling a prisoner by his first name was a standard way of removing any pretensions of dignity and social insulation he might still be clinging to. Martin was going to put the carcass of Roland Auburn wherever he felt like. He paused, stared at Kramer, then cast a dubious glance toward Torres’s son. It was clear that he didn’t think he should be in the room. The boy was no longer reading his book. He was slouched back in the chair with his head hung low, staring. He had shrunk. There was nothing left but an enormous pair of eyes staring at Roland Auburn.

  For everybody else in the room, perhaps even Auburn himself, this was just a routine procedure, a black defendant being brought into an assistant district attorney’s office for a negotiation, a little round of plea bargaining. But this sad, sensitive, bookish little boy would never forget what he was now looking at, a black man with his hands shackled behind his back in his daddy’s office building on a sunny Saturday before the Mets’ game.

  Kramer said to Torres, “Dan, I think maybe we’re gonna need that chair.” He looked toward Torres’s son. “Maybe he’d like to sit in there, in Bernie Fitzgibbon’s office. There’s nobody in there.”

  “Yeah, Ollie,” said Torres, “whyn’t you go in there until we get through.” Kramer wondered if Torres had really named his son Oliver. Oliver Torres.

  Without a word the boy stood up and gathered his book and his baseball glove and headed for the other door, to Bernie Fitzgibbon’s office, but he couldn’t resist one last look at the manacled black man. Roland Auburn stared back at him with no expression at all. He was closer to the boy’s age than to Kramer’s. For all of his muscles, he wasn’t much more than a boy himself.

  “Okay, Roland,” said Martin, “I’m gonna take these offa you, and you’re gonna sit’n’at chair there and be a good fellow, right?”

  Roland Auburn said nothing, just turned his back slightly to present Martin his shackled hands so he could unlock the handcuffs.

  “Ayyyyyy, don’t worry, Marty,” said Cecil Hayden, “my client’s here because he wants to walk out of this place, without looking over his shoulder.”

  Kramer couldn’t believe it. Hayden was already calling the Irish Doberman by his nickname, Marty, and he had just met him. Hayden was one of those bouncy little fellows whose breeze is so warm and confident you’d have to be in a very bad mood to take offense. He was pulling off the difficult trick of showing his client he was sticking up for his rights and dignity without angering the Irish Cop contingent.

  Roland Auburn sat down and started to rub his wrists but then stopped. He didn’t want to give Martin and Goldberg the satisfaction of knowing the handcuffs had hurt. Goldberg had walked around behind the chair and was settling his hulk onto the edge of Ray Andriutti’s desk. He had a notebook and a ballpoint pen, for taking notes on the interview. Martin moved around to the other side of Jimmy Caughey’s desk and sat on the edge over there. The prisoner was now between the two of them and would have to turn to see either one of them head on. Torres sat down in Ray Andriutti’s chair, Hayden sat down in Kramer’s, and Kramer, who was running the show, remained standing. Roland Auburn was now sitting back in Jimmy Caughey’s chair with his knees akimbo and his forearms on the armrests, cracking his knuckles, looking straight at Kramer. His face was a mask. He didn’t even blink. Kramer thought of the phrase that kept turning up in the probation reports on these young black male defendants: “lacking in affect.” Apparently that meant they were deficient in ordinary feelings. They didn’t feel guilt, shame, remorse, fear, or sympathy for others. But whenever it fell to Kramer’s lot to talk to these people, he had the feeling it was something else. They pulled down a curtain. They shut him off from what was behind the unblinking surface of their eyes. They didn’t let him see so much as an eighth of an inch of what they thought of him and the Power and their own lives. He had wondered before and he wondered now: Who are these people? (These people, whose fates I determine every day…)

  Kramer looked at Hayden and said, “Counselor…” Counselor. He didn’t know quite what to call the man. Hayden had called him “Larry” on the telephone, from the word go, but he hadn’t called him anything in this room, and Kramer didn’t want to call him “Cecil,” for fear of appearing either too chummy or disrespectful in front of Roland. “Counselor, you’ve explained to your client what we’re doing here, right?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Hayden. “He understands.”

  Now Kramer looked at Roland. “Mr. Auburn…” Mr. Auburn. Kramer figured Martin and Goldberg would forgive him. The usual procedure, when an assistant D.A. was questioning a defendant, was to start off with the respectful Mister, just to set things up, and then switch to the first name after things got going. “Mr. Auburn, I think you already know Mr. Torres here. He’s the assistant district attorney handling the case you’ve been arrested and indicted on, the sale charge. Okay? And I’m handling the Henry Lamb case. Now, we can’t promise you anything, but if you help us, then we’ll help you. It’s as simple as that. But you gotta be truthful. You gotta be completely truthful. Otherwise, you’re just jerking everybody around, and it’s not gonna be good for you. You understand?”

  Roland looked at his lawyer, Cecil Hayden, and Hayden just nodded yes, as if to say, “Don’t worry, it’s okay.”

  Roland turned back and looked at Kramer and said, very deadpan: “Unh-hunh.”

  “Okay,” said Kramer. “What I’m interested in is what happened to Henry Lamb the night he was hurt. I want you to tell me what you know.”

  Still slouched back in Jimmy Caughey’s chair, Roland said, “Where you want me to start?”

  “Well…at the beginning. How’d you happen to be with Henry Lamb that night?”

  Roland said, “I was standing on the sidewalk, fixing to go down to 161st Street, down to the takeout, the Texas Fried Chicken, and I see Henry walking by.” He stopped. />
  Kramer said, “Okay, and then what?”

  “I say to him, ‘Henry, where you going?’ And he say, ‘I’m going to the takeout,’ and I say, ‘That’s where I’m going.’ So we start walking down to the takeout.”

  “Walking down what street?”

  “Bruckner Boulevard.”

  “Is Henry a good friend of yours?”

  For the first time Roland showed an emotion. He seemed faintly amused. A little smile twisted one corner of his mouth, and he lowered his eyes, as if an embarrassing topic had come up. “Naw, I just know him. We live in the same project.”

  “You hang around together?”

  More amusement. “Naw, Henry don’t hang around much. He don’t come out a lot.”

  “Anyway,” said Kramer, “the two of you are walking down Bruckner Boulevard on the way to the Texas Fried Chicken. Then what happened?”

  “Well, we go down to Hunts Point Avenue, and we fixing to cross the street to go over to the Texas Fried Chicken.”

  “Cross which street, Hunts Point Avenue or Bruckner Boulevard?”

  “Bruckner Boulevard.”

  “Just so we get it straight, you’re on which side of Bruckner Boulevard, the east side going over to the west side?”

  “That’s right. The east side going over to the west side. I was standing out in the street a little ways, waiting for the cars to pass by, and Henry was standing over here.” He motioned to his right. “So I can see the cars better than he can, because they be coming up from this way.” He motioned to his left. “The cars, mostly they be traveling out in the center lane, in, you know, like a line, and all of a sudden this one car, it pulls out, and it wants to pass all these other cars on the right, and I can see it’s coming too close to where I’m standing. So I jump back. But Henry, I guess he don’t see anything until he see me jump back, and then I hear this little tap, and I see Henry falling, like this.” He made a spinning motion with his forefinger.

  “Okay, what happened then?”

  “Then I hear this screech. This car, it’s putting on the brakes. The first thing I do, I go over to Henry, and he’s lying there on the street, by the sidewalk, and he’s curled up on one side, kind of hugging one arm, and I say, ‘Henry, you hurt?’ And he say, ‘I think I broke my arm.’ ”

  “Did he say he hurt his head?”

  “He told me that later. When I was squatting over him there, he kept on saying his arm hurt. And then I was taking him to the hospital, and he told me when he was falling, he put his arms out and he came down on his arm and then he kept on rolling and hit his head.”

  “All right, let’s get back to right after it happened. You’re there beside Henry Lamb in the street, and this car that hit him, it put on its brakes. Did it stop?”

  “Yeah. I can see it’s stopped up the road.”

  “How far up the road?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a hundred feet. The door opens, and this guy gets out, a white guy. And this guy, he’s looking back. He’s looking right back at me and Henry.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Well, I figured this guy, he stopped because he hit Henry and was gonna see if he could help. I figured, hey, the guy can take Henry to the hospital. So I got up, and started walking toward him, and I said, ‘Yo! Yo! We need some help!’ ”

  “And what did he do?”

  “The man looked right at me, and then the door on the other side of the car opens, and there’s this woman. She gets kind of, you know, halfway out the car, and she’s looking back, too. They both looking back at me, and I say, ‘Yo! My friend’s hurt!’ ”

  “How far from them were you by this time?”

  “Not very far. Fifteen or twenty feet.”

  “Could you see them clearly?”

  “I was looking them right in the face.”

  “What did they do?”

  “This woman, she had this look on her face. She look frightened. She say, ‘Shuhmun, look out!’ She’s talking to the guy.”

  “ ‘Shuhmun, watch out’? She said, ‘Shuhmun’?” Kramer cut a glance at Martin. Martin opened his eyes wide and forced a pocket of air up under his upper lip. Goldberg had his head down, taking notes.

  “That’s what it sound like to me.”

  “Shuhmun or Sherman?”

  “Sound like Shuhmun.”

  “Okay, what happened then?”

  “The woman, she jump back inside the car. The man, he’s back behind the car looking at me. Then the woman, she say, ‘Shuhmun, get in!’ Only now she’s sitting in the driver’s seat. And the man, he runs around to the other side, where she been sitting, and he jumps in the car and slams the door.”

  “So now they’ve switched seats. And what did you do? How far away from them were you by this time?”

  “Almost as close as I am to you.”

  “Were you angry? Did you yell at them?”

  “All’s I said was, ‘My friend’s hurt.’ ”

  “Did you make a fist? Did you make any threatening gesture?”

  “All’s I wanted was to get Henry some help. I wasn’t angry. I was scared, for Henry.”

  “Okay, then what happened?”

  “I ran around to the front of the car.”

  “Which side?”

  “Which side? The right side, where the guy was. I was looking right through the windshield at them. I’m saying, ‘Yo! My friend’s hurt!’ I’m in the front of the car, looking back down the street, and there’s Henry. He’s right behind the car. He be walking up, kind of in a daze, you know, holding his arm like this.” Roland held his left forearm with his right hand and let his left hand dangle, as if it were afflicted. “So that means, this guy, he could see Henry coming the whole time, holding his arm like this. Ain’t no way he don’t know Henry was hurt. I’m looking at Henry, and the next thing I know, the woman, she guns the motor and she cuts outta there, laying down rubber. She cuts outta there so fast I can see the man’s head snap back. He’s looking right at me, and his head snaps back, and they outta there like a rocket. Come that close to me.” He brought his thumb and forefinger together. “Like to tore me up worse than Henry.”

  “You get the license number?”

  “Naw. But Henry got it. Or I guess he got part of it.”

  “Did he tell you what it was?”

  “Naw. I guess he told his mother. I saw that on television.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “It was a Mercedes.”

  “What color?”

  “Black.”

  “What model?”

  “I don’t know what model.”

  “How many doors?”

  “Two. It was, like, you know, built low. It was a sporty car.”

  Kramer looked at Martin again. Once more he had on his big-eyed bingo face.

  “Would you recognize the man if you saw him again?”

  “I’d recognize him.” Roland said this with a bitter conviction that had the ring of truth.

  “What about the woman?”

  “Her, too. Wasn’t nothing but a piece a glass between me and them.”

  “What did the woman look like? How old was she?”

  “I don’t know. She was white. I don’t know how old she was.”

  “Well, was she old or young? Was she closer to twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five, or fifty-five?”

  “Twenty-five, most likely.”

  “Light hair, dark hair, red hair?”

  “Dark hair.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “I think a dress. She was all in blue. I remember because it was a real bright blue, and she had these big shoulders on the dress. I remember that.”

  “What did the man look like?”

  “He was tall. He had on a suit and a necktie.”

  “What color suit?”

  “I don’t know. It was a dark suit. That’s all I remember.”

  “How old was he? Would you say he was my age, or was he older? Or younger?”
r />   “A little older.”

  “And you’d recognize him if you saw him again.”

  “I’d recognize him.”

  “Well, Roland, I’m gonna show you some pictures, and I want you to tell me if you recognize anybody in the pictures. Okay?”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  Kramer walked over to his own desk, where Hayden was sitting, and said, “Excuse me a second,” and opened a drawer. As he did so, he looked at Hayden for a moment and nodded slightly, as if to say, “It’s working out.” From the drawer he took the set of pictures Milt Lubell had put together for Weiss. He spread the pictures out on Jimmy Caughey’s desk, in front of Roland Auburn.

  “You recognize any of these people?”

  Roland scanned the pictures, and his forefinger went straight to Sherman McCoy grinning in his tuxedo.

  “That’s him.”

  “How do you know it’s the same guy?”

  “That’s him. I recognize him. That’s his chin. The man had this big chin.”

  Kramer looked at Martin and then at Goldberg. Goldberg was smiling ever so slightly.

  “You see the woman in the picture, the woman he’s standing beside? Is that the woman who was in the car?”

  “Naw. The woman in the car was younger, and she had darker hair, and she was more…more foxy.”

  “Foxy?”

  Roland started to smile again but fought it off. “You know, more of a…hot ticket.”

  Kramer allowed himself a smile and a chuckle. It gave him a chance to let out some of the elation he was already feeling. “A hot ticket, hunh? Okay, a hot ticket. All right. So they leave the scene. What did you do then?”

  “Wasn’t much I could do. Henry was standing there holding his arm. His wrist was all bent outta shape. So I said, ‘Henry, you got to go to the hospital,’ and he say he don’t want to go to no hospital, he want to go home. So we start walking back up Bruckner Boulevard, back to the project.”