The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  Sir Gerald Steiner, formerly the Dead Mouse, was heading his way with his coat off and a pair of bright red felt suspenders over his striped shirt and a smile on his face, a charming smile, an ingratiating smile, instead of that malevolent wolf-eyed look of a few weeks back. The canteen of vodka was still hidden in the pocket of the raincoat, which still hung on the plastic coatrack in the corner. He could probably take it out and knock back a fiery jolt right in front of the Mouse, and what would come of it? Nothing but a knowing would-be-comradely Mouse smile, if he knew his Mouse.

  “Peter!” said Steiner. Peter; no more school proctor’s Fallow. “Want to see something to brighten your day?”

  Steiner slapped the photograph down on Fallow’s desk. It showed Sherman McCoy with a terrific scowl on his face giving a backhand swat to the face of a tall woman who was holding some sort of wand, which on close inspection turned out to be a microphone. With his other hand he clutched the hand of a little girl in a school uniform. The little girl looked into the camera in a quizzical daze. In the background was the marquee of an apartment house and a doorman.

  Steiner was chuckling. “The woman—dreadful woman, by the way, from some radio station—rings up five times an hour. Says she’s going to have McCoy arrested for assault. She wants the picture. She’ll have the picture, all right. It’s on page 1 of the next edition.”

  Fallow picked up the picture and studied it. “Hmmm. Pretty little girl. Must be difficult having a father who keeps hitting minorities, black boys, women. Have you ever noticed the way the Yanks refer to women as a minority?”

  “The poor mother tongue,” said Steiner.

  “Marvelous picture,” said Fallow, quite sincerely. “Who took it?”

  “Silverstein. That chap does have sand. He does, indeed.”

  “Silverstein’s on the death watch?” asked Fallow.

  “Oh yes,” said Steiner. “He loves that sort of thing. You know, Peter”—Peter—“I have respect, perhaps an inverted respect, but a true respect, for chaps like Silverstein. They’re the farmers of journalism. They love the good rich soil itself, for itself, not for the pay—they like to plunge their hands into the dirt.” Steiner paused, puzzled. He was always nonplussed by his own plays on words.

  Oh, how Sir Gerald, baby boy of Old Steiner, would love to be able to wallow in that filth with such Dionysian abandon!—like a chap with sand! His eyes brimmed with a warm emotion: love, perhaps, or nostalgia for the mud.

  “The Laughing Vandals,” said Steiner, smiling broadly and shaking his head, apropos of the renowned exploits of the sandy photographer. That in turn led him to a broader source of satisfaction.

  “I want to tell you something, Peter. I don’t know whether you fully appreciate it or not, but you’ve broken a very important story with this Lamb and McCoy business. Oh, it’s sensational, but it’s much more than that. It’s a morality play. Think of that for a moment. A morality play. You mentioned minorities. I realize you were joking, but we’re already hearing from these minorities, from these black organizations and whatnot, the very organizations that have been spreading rumors that we are racist and all the usual sort of rubbish, and now they’re congratulating us and looking to us as a sort of…beacon. That’s quite a turnabout in a short time. These Third World Anti-Defamation League people, the very people who were so incensed over the Laughing Vandals, they’ve just sent me the most glowing testimonial. We’re the bloody standard-bearers of liberalism and civil rights now! They think you’re a genius, by the way. This man, Reverend Bacon, as they call him, seems to run it. He’d give you the Nobel Prize, if it was up to him. I should have Brian show you the letter.”

  Fallow said nothing. The idiots might be a bit more subtle about it.

  “What I’m trying to get across, Peter, is that this is a very significant step in the progress of the newspaper. Our readers don’t care about respectability one way or the other. But the advertisers do. I’ve already set Brian to work on seeing if perhaps we can’t get some of these black groups to render their new opinion of The City Light formal in some fashion, through citations or awards or—I don’t know, but Brian will know how to go about it. I hope you’ll be able to take time out to take part in whatever he comes up with. But we’ll see how that works out.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” said Fallow. “Of course. I know how strongly these people feel. Did you know that the judge who refused to increase McCoy’s bond yesterday has received death threats?”

  “Death threats! You’re not serious.” The Mouse twitched with the horrible excitement of it.

  “It’s true. And he’s taking it quite seriously, too.”

  “Great God,” said Steiner. “This is an amazing country.”

  Fallow perceived this as a fortunate moment in which to suggest to Sir Gerald a significant step of another sort: a thousand-dollar advance, which in turn might suggest to the eminent Mouse a rise in pay as well.

  And he was correct on both counts. As soon as the new blazer was ready, he was going to burn this one; with pleasure.

  Scarcely a minute after Steiner had left, Fallow’s telephone rang. It was Albert Vogel.

  “Hey, Pete! Howaya? Things are poppin’, things are poppin’, things are poppin’. Pete, you got to do me a favor. You got to give me McCoy’s telephone number. It’s unlisted.”

  Without knowing precisely why, Fallow found this a startling notion. “Why would you want his telephone number, Al?”

  “Well, the thing is, Pete, I’ve been retained by Annie Lamb, who wants to file a civil suit in behalf of her son. Two suits, actually: one against the hospital, for gross negligence, and one against McCoy.”

  “And you want his home telephone number? What for?”

  “What for? We might have to negotiate.”

  “I don’t see why you don’t call his barrister.”

  “Jesus Christ, Pete.” Vogel’s voice turned angry. “I didn’t call you up for legal advice. All I want’s a fucking telephone number. You got his number or not?”

  Fallow’s better judgment told him to say no. But his vanity wouldn’t allow him to tell Vogel that I, Fallow, proprietor of the McCoy case, had been unable to procure the McCoy telephone number.

  “All right, Al. I propose a barter. You give me the particulars of the civil suits and a one-day head start with the story, and I’ll give you the telephone number.”

  “Look, Pete, I wanna call a press conference about the suits. All I’m asking you for is a lousy telephone number.”

  “You can still call a press conference. You’ll get a larger audience after I write the story.”

  A pause. “Okay, Pete.” Vogel chuckled, but not very heartily. “I think I created a monster when I put you onto Henry Lamb. Who do you think you are, Lincoln Steffens?”

  “Lincoln who?”

  “Never mind. It wouldn’t interest you. Okay, you can have the fucking story. Aren’t you getting tired of all these exclusives? So gimme the number.”

  And so he did.

  When one got right down to it, what difference would it make whether he had the number or not?

  24. The Informants

  The dreadful orange carpet blazed away. Right next to the Formica couch he was slouched upon, it had come loose from the floor where it abutted the wall, and the crinkly metallic fibers frayed out. Sherman stared at the itchy sleaze of it as a way of averting his eyes from the sinister figures on the couch opposite him. He was afraid they would be staring at him and would know who he was. The fact that Killian would make him wait like this sealed it, nailed down the correctness of what he was about to do. This would be his last visit to this place, his last descent into the vulgarity of Favor Banks, contracts, lower-crust fops, and cheap gutter philosophies.

  But soon curiosity got the better of him, and he looked at their feet…Two men…One had on a dainty little pair of slip-on shoes with decorative gold chains running across the top. The other wore a pair of snow-white Reebok sneakers. The shoes shuffled a bit
as the two men’s tails slid down the couch and they pushed themselves back up with their legs and then slid down again and pushed back and slid down and pushed back. Sherman slid down and pushed back. They slid down and pushed back. Sherman slid down and pushed back. Everything about the place, even the obscene downslope of the couches, proclaimed tastelessness, shiftlessness, vulgarity, and, at bottom, sheer ignorance. The two men were talking in what Sherman took to be Spanish. “Oy el meemo,” one of them kept saying, “Oy el meemo.” He let his eyes creep up as far as their midsections. Both had on knit shirts and leather jackets; more Leather People. “Oy el meemo.” He took the big chance: their faces. Immediately he cast his eyes down again. They were staring right at him! Such cruel looks! Both appeared to be in their early thirties. They had thick black hair coiffed and trimmed, just so, in vulgar but probably expensive hairdos. Both had their hair parted down the center and teased in such a way that the hair seemed to be gushing up in neat black ceremonial fountains. Such twisted expressions as they stared at him! Did they know?

  Now he could hear Killian’s voice. Tawk. Lawr. Awright. He consoled himself with the thought that he wouldn’t have to listen to it much longer. The Lion was right. How could he have entrusted his fate to anyone immersed in this sordid milieu? Killian appeared at the doorway from the inner hall. He had his arm around the shoulders of a pudgy and thoroughly dejected little white man who wore a pathetic suit with an especially pathetic vest that popped out in front of his belly.

  “What can I tell you, Donald?” Killian was saying. “The law’s like anything else. You get what you pay for. All right?” The lawr’s like anything else. Yuh gedwudja pay for. The little man trudged off without even looking at him. Not once had he been in Killian’s presence when the main topic of conversation had not been money—the money due Thomas Killian.

  “Ayyyyyy,” said Killian, smiling at Sherman, “I didn’t mean for you to have to wait.” He cast his eyes significantly at the retreating figure of the little man, then shrugged his eyebrows.

  As he and Sherman walked down the hallway, beneath the blazing downlighters, to Killian’s office, he said, “Now that”—his head nodded back in the general direction of the little man—“is a guy with problems. A fifty-seven-year-old assistant principal, Irish Catholic, wife and family, and he gets picked up on a charge of propositioning a seven-year-old girl. The arresting officer claims he offered her a banana and went on from there.”

  Sherman said nothing. Did this insensitive wiseguy fop, with his incessant cynicism, actually think that would make him feel better? A chill went through him. It was as if the pudgy little man’s fate were his own.

  “You check out the two guys across from you?”

  Sherman braced. Which hell were they trapped in?

  “Twenty-eight, twenty-nine years old, both of them, and they’d be on the Forbes Four Hundred list if their business published annual reports. They got that much money. They’re Cubans, but they import from Colombia. They’re Mike Bellavita’s clients.”

  Sherman’s resentment grew with each wiseguy word. Did the fop really think his breezy survey of the local scene, his detachment, his hard-boiled tone would flatter him, would make him feel superior to the detritus caught in the filthy tide that flows through here? I’m not superior, you oh-so-knowing, oh-so-ignorant fool! I’m one of them! My heart goes out to them! An old Irish child molester…two young Cuban drug dealers with their sad pompous hair—in short, he was learning for himself the truth of the saying “A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.”

  In Killian’s office, Sherman took a seat and watched the Irish fop rear back in his desk chair and roll his shoulders about under his double-breasted suit, preening. He resented him even more profoundly. Killian was in excellent spirits. Newspapers were stacked up on his desk. Team Mercedes: He Hit, She Ran. But of course! The hottest criminal case in New York was his.

  Well, he was about to lose it. How should he tell him? He wanted to just let him have it. But the words came out with some semblance of tact.

  “I hope you realize,” said Sherman, “I’m very unhappy about what happened yesterday.”

  “Ayyyyyy, who wouldn’t be? It was outrageous, even for Weiss.”

  “I don’t think you understand. I’m not talking about what I was subjected to, per se, I’m talking about the fact that you—”

  He was interrupted by the voice of the receptionist coming over the intercom on Killian’s desk: “Neil Flannagan of the Daily News on 3–0.”

  Killian leaned forward in his chair. “Tell him I’ll call him back. No, wait a minute. Tell him I’ll call him back in thirty minutes. If he’s out of the office, then he should call me back in thirty minutes.” To Sherman: “Sorry.”

  Sherman paused, looked balefully at the fop, and said, “I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about—”

  Killian broke in: “I don’t mean that we’re only gonna be talking for thirty minutes.” Tawkin. “The whole day is yours if you want it and we need it. But I wanna talk to this guy Flannagan, from the News. He’s gonna be our antidote…to the venom.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” said Sherman as flatly as possible, “but we’ve got a problem. You assured me you had your special ‘contacts’ in the Bronx District Attorney’s Office. You told me you had a ‘contract’ with this man Fitzgibbon. I seem to recall quite a dissertation on something called the ‘Favor Bank.’ Now, don’t misinterpret what I’m saying. For all I know, you may have as keen a legal mind—”

  The voice on the intercom: “Peter Fallow of The City Light on 3–0.”

  “Get his number. Tell him I’ll call him back.” To Sherman: “Speak of the venom. The head snake checks in.”

  Sherman’s heart shuddered in palpitation, then recovered.

  “Go ahead. You were saying.”

  “I’m not doubting your legal judgment, but you made these assurances to me, and naïvely I went ahead and…” He paused to choose the correct word.

  Killian jumped in: “You were double-crossed, Sherman. I was double-crossed. Bernie Fitzgibbon was double-crossed. What Weiss did was unconscionable. You do…not…do…what he did. You do not do it.”

  “Nevertheless, he did it, and after you told me—”

  “I know what it was like. It was like being thrown in a cesspool. But Bernie was not totally unsuccessful. Weiss wanted to do worse. You gotta understand that. The sonofabitch wanted to arrest you in your home! He wanted a Park Avenue arrest! He’s crazy, crazy, crazy! And you know what he woulda done if he had his way? He woulda had the cops put handcuffs on you in your own home, then take you to a precinct house and let you get a whiff of the pens there for a while and then they put you in a van with wire mesh over the windows, with a buncha these animals, and then take you to Central Booking and let you go through what you went through. That’s what he wanted.”

  “Nevertheless—”

  “Mr. Killian, Irv Stone of Channel 1 on 3–2. This is the third time he’s called.”

  “Get his number and tell him I’ll call him back.” To Sherman: “Today I gotta talk to these people even though I got nothing to tell them. Just to keep the lines open. Tomorrow we start to turn things around.”

  “Turn things around,” said Sherman in what was meant as bitter irony. The fop didn’t notice. The fop’s excitement over such attention from the press was written all over his face. Out of my ignominy, his own cheap glory.

  So he tried it again. “Turn things around, all right,” he said.

  Killian smiled. “Mr. McCoy, I do believe you doubt me. Well, I got news for you. In fact, I got a lotta news for you.” He pressed the intercom button. “Hey, Nina. Ask Quigley to come in here. Tell him Mr. McCoy is here.” To Sherman: “Ed Quigley is our investigator, the guy I told you about, the guy who used to be in Major Cases.”

  A tall bald man appeared in the doorway. It was the same man Sherman had seen in the blazing reception room on his first visit. He carried a revolver in
a holster high on his left hip. He wore a white shirt but no tie. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing a pair of huge wrists and hands. His left hand held a manila envelope. He was the sort of tall angular raw-boned man who looks more powerful and menacing at fifty than he did at twenty-five. His shoulders were wide but had a degenerate slouch. His eyes seemed to have sunk deep into the occipital craters.

  “Ed,” said Killian, “this is Mr. McCoy.”

  Sherman nodded morosely.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said the man. He gave Sherman the same dead smile he had given him the first time.

  Killian said, “You got the picture?”

  Quigley took a piece of paper out of the envelope and handed it to Killian, and Killian handed it to Sherman.

  “This is a Xerox, but it took—I’m not even gonna tell you what it took to get this picture. You recognize him?”

  A profile and a head-on picture of a black man, with numbers. Square features, a powerful neck.

  Sherman sighed. “It looks like him. The other boy, the big one, the one who said, ‘Yo! Need some help?’ ”

  “He’s a lowlife named Roland Auburn. Lives in the Poe projects. Right now he’s on Rikers Island awaiting disposition of his fourth drug indictment. Obviously he’s cutting a deal with the D.A. in return for testimony against you.”

  “And lying.”

  “That does not in any way violate the principles that have governed Mr. Roland Auburn’s life thus far,” said Killian.

  “How did you find this out?”

  Killian smiled and gestured toward Quigley. “Ed has many friends among our men in blue, and many of our finest owe him favors.”

  Quigley merely pursed his lips slightly.

  Sherman said, “Has he ever been arrested for robbery—or the sort of thing he tried to pull on me?”

  “You mean highway robbery?” Killian chuckled at what he had just said. “I never thoughta that before. That’s what it is, highway robbery. Right, Ed?”

  “I guess so.”