The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “Ummmm. Well, next time don’t make these commitments without running them by me.”

  Bernie just looked at him and gave him a tiny smile that as much as said, once more, “Oongots.”

  20. Calls from Above

  Gene Lopwitz didn’t receive visitors at his desk. He sat them down in a cluster of huge English Chippendale wing chairs and Irish Chippendale side tables in front of the fireplace. The Chippendale cluster, like the other clusters of furniture in the vast space, was the brainchild of Ronald Vine, the decorator. But the fireplace was Lopwitz’s. The fireplace worked. The bond trading room stewards, who were like aged bank guards, could actually build a log fire in it—a fact that had provided several weeks of sniggers for in-house cynics such as Rawlie Thorpe.

  Being a modern office tower, the building had no chimney flues. But Lopwitz, after a year of stupendous success, was determined to have a working fireplace with a carved wood mantelpiece in his office. And why? Because Lord Upland, owner of the London Daily Courier, had one. The austere peer had given a lunch for Lopwitz in his suite of offices in a grand old brick building on Fleet Street in hopes of having him flog a lot of “creatively structured” Daily Courier stock to the Yanks. Lopwitz had never forgotten how a butler had come in from time to time to put a log on the warm and toasty pungent fire in the fireplace. It was so…how should one say it?…so baronial, it was. Lopwitz had felt like a fortunate little boy who had been invited to the home of a great man.

  Home. That was the ticket. The British, with that ever sure class instinct of theirs, realized that if a man was at the top in business, he should not have the standard business office, which made one look like an interchangeable part in a large mechanism. No, one should have an office that looked like the home of a nobleman, as much as to declare: “I, personally, am the lord, creator, and master of this great organization.” Lopwitz had ended up in a terrific fight with the tower’s owners and the management company that ran it for them and the city’s Building Department and Fire Department, and the construction of the flues and vents had cost $350,000, but he had finally had his way, and Sherman McCoy now stared reflectively into the mouth of that baronial hearth, fifty floors above Wall Street, off the bond trading floor of Pierce & Pierce. There was no fire in the fireplace, however. There had been none for a long time.

  Sherman could feel an electrical trill of tachycardia in his chest. Both of them, Lopwitz and himself, were sitting in the wingback Chippendale monsters. Lopwitz wasn’t very good at small talk on even the happiest occasions, and this little meeting was going to be grim. The fireplace…the chiggers…Christ…Well, anything was better than looking like a beaten dog. So Sherman straightened himself up in the chair, lifted his great chin, and even managed to look slightly down his nose at the lord and master of this mighty organization.

  “Sherman,” said Gene Lopwitz, “I’m not gonna beat around the bush with you. I got too much respect for you to do that.”

  The electrical trill in his chest! Sherman’s mind raced along with his heart, and he found himself wondering, quite idly, whether or not Lopwitz knew where the phrase “beat around the bush” came from. Probably not.

  “I had a long talk with Arnold on Friday,” Lopwitz was saying. “Now, what I’m gonna say to you—I want to make one thing clear, it’s not the money, or it’s not any money that was lost—that’s not the issue here.” This expedition out onto the psychological terrain threw Lopwitz’s already sunken cheeks into perplexed creases. He was a jogging zealot (5 A.M. breed). He had the gaunt and haunted athletic look of those who stare daily down the bony gullet of the great god Aerobics.

  Now he was into the business of Oscar Suder and the United Fragrance bonds, and Sherman knew he should pay close attention. United Fragrance bonds…Oscar Suder…and he thought of The City Light. What did it mean, “close to a major break in the Henry Lamb Case”? The story, by this same Fallow, was bafflingly vague, except to say that the “break” had been triggered by The City Light story about the possible license plate numbers. Triggered! That was the word they used! Somehow that word had set off the tachycardia as he sat hidden in the toilet booth. None of the other newspapers carried any such story.

  Now Lopwitz was going on about the business of his being AWOL the day the big bond issue came in. Sherman could see Freddy Button’s foppish hands fluttering about the cigarette case. Gene Lopwitz’s lips were moving. The telephone on the Irish Chippendale table beside Lopwitz’s wing chair rang with a discreet murmuring burble. Lopwitz picked it up and said, “Yeah?…Okay, good. Is he on the line yet?”

  Unaccountably, Lopwitz now beamed at Sherman and said, “Only take a second. I gave Bobby Shaflett a lift on the plane so he could keep a date in Vancouver. They’re up over Wisconsin or South Dakota or some goddamned place.”

  Lopwitz now lowered his eyes and sank back in the wing chair and beamed in anticipation of talking to the famous Golden Hillbilly whose famous buttery bulk and tenor voice were now encased in Lopwitz’s own eight-seat jet aircraft with Rolls-Royce engines. Strictly speaking, it was Pierce & Pierce’s, but to all practical purposes, it was his, personally, baronially. Lopwitz lowered his head, and great animation came over his face, and he said: “Bobby? Bobby? Can you hear me?…What’s that? How’s it going?…They treating you all right up there?…What?…Hello? Hello?…Bobby? You still there? Hello? Can you hear me? Bobby?”

  Still holding the telephone, Lopwitz looked at Sherman with a scowl, as if he had just done something far worse than get suckered on the United Fragrance deal or go absent without leave. “Shit,” he said. “Lost the connection.” He clicked the receiver. “Miss Bayles?…Lost the connection. See if you can get the plane again.”

  He hung up and looked miserable. He had lost the opportunity to have the great artist, the great ball of fat and fame, pay him his thanks and, thereby, homage to the Lopwitz eminence from the skies forty thousand feet over the American heartland.

  “Okay, where were we?” asked Lopwitz, looking as angry as Sherman had ever seen him. “Oh yeah, the Giscard.” Lopwitz began shaking his head, as if something truly dreadful had happened, and Sherman braced, because the debacle of the gold-backed bonds was the worst of it. In the next instant, however, Sherman had the eerie feeling that Lopwitz was really shaking his head over the broken telephone connection.

  The telephone rang again. Lopwitz pounced on it. “Yeah?…You got the plane?…What?…Well, all right, put him through.”

  This time Lopwitz looked at Sherman and shook his head with frustration and bewilderment, as if Sherman was his understanding friend. “It’s Ronald Vine. He’s calling from England. He’s out in Wiltshire. He’s found some linenfold paneling for me. They’re six hours ahead of us there, so I gotta take it.”

  His voice asked for understanding and forgiveness. Linenfold paneling? Sherman could only stare. But apparently fearful that he might say something at such a critical juncture, Lopwitz held up one finger and closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Ronald? Where you calling from?…That’s what I thought…No, I know it very well…Whaddaya mean, they won’t sell it to you?”

  Lopwitz fell into a deep discussion with the decorator, Ronald Vine, about some impediment to the purchase of the linenfold paneling in Wiltshire. Sherman looked at the fireplace again…The chiggers…Lopwitz had used the fireplace for just about two months and then never again. One day, while sitting at his desk, he had suffered an intense itching and burning sensation on the underside of his left buttock. Fiery red blisters he had…Chigger bites…The only plausible deduction was that somehow chiggers had found their way to the fiftieth floor, to the mighty bond trading floor of Pierce & Pierce, in a load of firewood for the hearth and had bitten the baron on the bottom. On the brass andirons at this moment was a stack of carefully chosen New Hampshire hardwood logs, sculpturally perfect, perfectly clean, utterly antiseptic, buggered with enough insecticide to empty a banana grove of everything that moves, permanently installed, never
to be lit.

  Lopwitz’s voice rose. “Whaddaya mean they won’t sell it to ‘trade’?…Yeah, I know they said it to you, but they know you’re getting it for me. What are they talking about, ‘trade’?…Unnh-hnnh…Yeah, well, you tell ’em I got a word for them. Trayf…Let ’em figure it out for themselves. If I’m ‘trade,’ they’re trayf…What’s it mean? It means, like, ‘not kosher,’ only it’s worse than that. In plain English I guess the word is shit. There’s an old saying, ‘If you look close enough, everything is trayf,’ and that goes for these moth-eaten aristocrats, too, Ronald. Tell ’em to take their linenfold panels and shove ’em.”

  Lopwitz hung up and looked at Sherman with great irritation.

  “All right, Sherman, let’s get down to cases.” He sounded as if Sherman had been stalling, arguing, evading, double-talking him, and otherwise trying to drive him crazy. “I can’t figure out what happened with the Giscard…Lemme ask you something.” He cocked his head and put on the look that says, “I’m a shrewd observer of human nature.”

  “I’m not prying,” he said, “but I want you to tell me anyway. You having trouble at home or something?”

  For a moment Sherman entertained the notion of appealing, man-to-man, for pity and revealing just an inch or two of his infidelity. But a sixth sense told him that “problems at home” would only arouse Lopwitz’s contempt and his appetite for gossip, which seemed to be considerable. So he shook his head and smiled slightly, to indicate that the question didn’t even trouble him, and said, “No, not at all.”

  “Well, do you need a vacation or something?”

  Sherman didn’t know what to say to that. But his spirits rose. At least it didn’t sound as if Lopwitz was about to fire him. In fact, he didn’t have to say anything, because the telephone rang again. Lopwitz picked up the receiver, although not so rapidly this time.

  “Yeah?…What’s that, Miss Bayles?…Sherman?” A big sigh. “Well, he’s right here.”

  Lopwitz looked at Sherman quizzically. “Seems to be for you.” He held out the receiver.

  Very odd. Sherman got up, took the receiver, and stood beside Lopwitz’s chair. “Hello?”

  “Mr. McCoy?” It was Miss Bayles, Lopwitz’s secretary. “There’s a Mr. Killian on the line. He says it’s ‘imperative’ that he speak to you. Do you want to speak to him?”

  Sherman felt a thud of palpitation in his chest. Then his heart kicked off into a steady, galloping tachycardia. “Yes. Thank you.”

  A voice said, “Sherman?” It was Killian. He had never called him by his first name before. “I had to get hold of you.” Hadda gedoldya.

  “I’m in Mr. Lopwitz’s office,” said Sherman, in a formal voice.

  “I know that,” said Killian. “But I had to make sure you didn’t leave the building or something before I godoldya. I just got a call from Bernie Fitzgibbon. They claim they got a witness who can—make the people who were at the scene. You follow me?”

  “Make?”

  “Identify ’em.”

  “I see…Let me call you when I get back to my desk.” Composed.

  “Okay, I’m in my office, but I got to head to court. So make it quick. There’s one very important thing you got to know. They’re gonna want to see you, officially, tomorrow. Officially, okay? So you call me back immediately.” The way Killian said “officially,” Sherman could tell it was a code expression, in case someone in Lopwitz’s office had access to the conversation.

  “All right,” he said. Composed. “Thank you.” He put the receiver back on the cradle on the Irish Chippendale table and sat back down in the wing chair in a daze.

  Lopwitz continued as if the call had never taken place. “As I told you, Sherman, the question is not that you lost money for Pierce & Pierce. That’s not what I’m saying. The Giscard was your idea. It was a great strategy, and you thought of it. But I mean, f’r Chrissake, you worked on it for four months, and you’re our number one bond salesman out there. So it isn’t the money you lost for us, it’s that here you are, you’re a guy who’s supposed to function the best out there, and now we got a situation where we got a whole string of these things that I’ve been talking to you about—”

  Lopwitz stopped talking and stared with astonishment as Sherman, without a word, stood up in front of him. Sherman knew what he was doing, but at the same time he seemed to have no control over it. He couldn’t just stand up and walk out on Gene Lopwitz in the middle of a crucial talk about his performance at Pierce & Pierce, and yet he couldn’t sit there another second.

  “Gene,” he said, “you’ll have to excuse me. I have to leave.” He could hear his own voice as if he were hearing it from outside. “I’m really sorry, but I have to.”

  Lopwitz remained seated and looked at him as if he’d gone crazy.

  “That call,” said Sherman. “I’m sorry.”

  He started walking out of the office. In his peripheral vision he was aware of Lopwitz following him with his eyes.

  Out on the floor of the bond trading room, the morning madness had reached its peak. As he headed toward his desk, Sherman felt as if he were swimming through a delirium.

  “…October ninety-twos at the buck…”

  “…I said we strip the fuckers!”

  Ahhhhh, the golden crumbs…How pointless it seemed…

  As he sat down at his desk, Arguello approached and said, “Sherman, do you know anything about 10 million Joshua Tree S&Ls?”

  Sherman waved him back, the way you would warn someone away from a fire or the edge of a cliff. He noticed his forefinger shaking as he pressed out Killian’s number on the telephone. The receptionist answered, and in his mind Sherman could see the scalding brightness of the reception area in the old building on Reade Street. In a moment Killian was on the line.

  “You someplace you can talk?” he asked. Tawk.

  “Yes. What did you mean, they want to see me officially?”

  “They wanna bring you in. It’s unethical, it’s unnecessary, it’s bullshit, but that’s what they’re gonna do.”

  “Bring me in?” Even as he said it, he had the dreadful feeling he knew what Killian meant. The question was an involuntary prayer, from his very central nervous system, that he be wrong.

  “They’re gonna place you under arrest. It’s outrageous. They should take whatever they got before a grand jury and get an indictment and then see about an arraignment. Bernie knows that, but Weiss’s gotta have a quick arrest to get the press off his back.”

  Sherman’s throat went dry with “place you under arrest.” The rest was just words.

  “Under arrest?” A croak.

  “Weiss is an animal,” said Killian, “and he’s a whore for the press.”

  “Under arrest—you can’t be serious.” Please don’t let it be true. “What can they—what are they charging me with?”

  “Reckless endangerment, leaving the scene of an accident, and failure to report.”

  “I can’t believe it.” Please make this unreal. “Reckless endangerment? But from what you said—I mean, how can they? I wasn’t even driving!”

  “Not according to their witness. Bernie said the witness picked your picture out from a set of photographs.”

  “But I wasn’t driving!”

  “I’m only telling you what Bernie told me. He says the witness also knew the color of your car and the model.”

  Sherman was aware of his own rapid breathing and the roar of the bond trading room.

  Killian said, “You there?”

  Sherman, hoarsely: “Yes…Who is this witness?”

  “That he wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Is it the other boy?”

  “He wouldn’t say.”

  “Or—Christ!—Maria?”

  “He’s not gonna tell me that.”

  “Did he say anything about a woman in the car?”

  “No. They’re gonna keep the details to themselves at this point. But look. Lemme tell you something. This is not gonna be as bad as
you think. I got a commitment from Bernie. I can bring you up there and surrender you myself. You’ll be in there and outta there. Ba-bing.”

  In and out of what? But what he said was “Surrender me?”

  “Yeah. If they wanted, they could come downtown and arrest you and take you up there in handcuffs.”

  “Up where?”

  “The Bronx. But that’s not gonna happen. I got a commitment from Bernie. And by the time they release it to the press, you’ll be outta there. You can be thankful for that.”

  The press…the Bronx…surrender…reckless endangerment…one grotesque abstraction after another. All at once he was desperate to visualize what was about to happen, to picture it, no matter what it was, rather than simply feel the horrible force closing in about him.

  Killian said, “You there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can thank Bernie Fitzgibbon. You remember what I was telling you about contracts? This is a contract, between me and Bernie.”

  “Look,” said Sherman, “I’ve got to come by and talk to you.”

  “Right now I got to go over to court I’m already”—awready—“late. But I should be through by one. Come on over around one. You probably gonna need a couple of hours anyway.”

  This time Sherman knew exactly what Killian was talking about. “Oh, God,” he said in his now husky voice, “I’ve got to talk to my wife. She doesn’t know the first thing about any of this.” He was talking as much to himself as to Killian. “And my daughter and my parents…and Lopwitz…I don’t know…I can’t tell you—this is absolutely incredible.”

  “It’s like the ground’s been cut out from under you, right? That’s the most natural thing inna world. You’re not a criminal. But it’s not gonna be as bad as you think. This don’t mean they got a case. It just means they think they got enough to make a move. So I’m gonna tell you something. Or I’m gonna tell you something I already told you, again. You’re gonna have to tell some people what’s happening, but don’t get into the details of what happened that night. Your wife—well, what you tell her, that’s between you and her, and I can’t guide you on that. But anybody else—don’t get into it. It can be used against you.”