The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

“Not that we know of,” said Killian, “but we intend to find out a whole lot more about the sonofabitch. Prison inmates are notorious for what they’ll testify to—and this is Weiss’s whole fucking case! This is what he brought you in on!”

  Killian shook his head, with apparent disgust, and kept shaking it. Sherman found himself genuinely grateful. It was the first hint of heartfelt absolution anyone had offered.

  “All right, so that’s one thing,” said Killian. Then to Ed: “Now tell him about Mrs. Ruskin.”

  Sherman looked up at Quigley, and Quigley said, “She’s gone to Italy. I traced her as far as a house she rented on Lake Como. It’s some kinda resort in Lombardy.”

  “That’s right,” said Sherman. “She’d just come back from there the night all this happened.”

  “Yeah, well, a couple a days ago,” said Quigley, “she left there in a car with some young guy named Filippo. That’s all I know, ‘Filippo.’ You got any idea who that might be? Early or mid-twenties, slender, medium height. Lotta hair. Punk clothes. Nice-looking kid, or so my man told me.”

  Sherman sighed. “It’s some artist she knows. Filippo Charazza or Charizzi.”

  “You know of any other place in Italy she might go?”

  Sherman shook his head. “How did you find out all this?”

  Quigley looked at Killian, and Killian said, “Tell him.”

  “Wasn’t too hard,” said Quigley. Proud to be onstage, he couldn’t resist a smile. “Most a these people have Globexpress. You know, the credit card. There’s a woman—a person I deal with in the accounting office on Duane Street. They got a computer network feeds in from all over the world. I give her a hundred dollars per item. Not too bad for five minutes’ work. Sure enough, this Maria Ruskin has two charges three days ago in stores in this town, Como. Clothing stores. So I call up a guy we use in Rome, and he calls up one of the stores and says he’s from Globexpress and gives them her account number and says they need to send her a telegram for ‘account clarification.’ They don’t give a shit. They give him the address where they delivered the merchandise, and he goes down to Como and checks it all.” Quigley shrugged, as if to say, “Piece a cake for a guy like me.”

  Noting that Sherman was properly impressed, Killian said, “So now we got a line on both our players. We know who their witness is, and we’ll find your friend Mrs. Ruskin. And we’ll get her back here, even if Ed has to bring her back in a box with air holes in it. Don’t look shocked. I know you give her the benefit of the doubt, but by objective standards she does not exactly qualify as your friend. You’re in the biggest jam of your life, and she’s your way out, and she’s off in Italy with a nice-looking fellow named Filippo. Ayyyyyyyyy, whaddaya whaddaya?”

  Sherman smiled in spite of himself. His vanity was such, however, that he immediately assumed that there was an innocuous explanation.

  After Quigley had left, Killian said: “Ed Quigley is the best. There is no better private investigator in the business. He…will…do…anything. He’s your basic hardcore New York Hell’s Kitchen Irishman. The kids Ed ran with all became hoodlums or cops. The ones that became cops were the ones that the Church got a hook into, the ones that cooked a little bit from guilt. But they all like the same things. They all like to butt heads and loosen people’s teeth. The only difference is, if you are a cop, you can do it legally with the priest nodding over you and looking the other way at the same time. Ed was a hell of a cop. He was a fucking reign of terror.”

  “How did he get this picture?” Sherman was looking at the Xeroxed page. “Was that one of your…‘contracts’?”

  “A thing like this? Oooooh. Fuhgedaboudit. Getting this information—with a mug shot?—this is so far out of bounds—I mean, this goes beyond the Favor Bank. I don’t ask, but unless I miss my guess, this is the Favor Bank plus the real bank, like your basic negotiable assets. Fuhgedaboudit. I mean it. For God’s sake, don’t mention it. Don’t even think about it again.”

  Sherman sat back in his chair and looked at Killian. He had come in here to fire him—and now he wasn’t so sure.

  As if reading his mind, Killian said: “Let me explain something to you. It’s not that Abe Weiss doesn’t care about justice.” Doesn’t. He had used the correct third person singular. What exalted notion, wondered Sherman, had wandered into his head? “He probably does. But this case has nothing to do with justice. This is a war. This is Abe Weiss running for reelection, and that job is his fucking life, and when the press gets as hot for a case as they are about this one, he don’t know from justice. He’s gonna do any goddamned thing he has to do. I don’t mean to frighten you, but that’s what’s going on, a war. I can’t just construct a defense for you, I got to wage a campaign. I don’t think he’d put a tap on your telephone, but he has that power and he’s perfectly capable of doing it. So if I were you, I wouldn’t say anything of substance about this case over the telephone. In fact, don’t say anything at all about it on the telephone. That way you don’t have to worry about what’s important and what isn’t.”

  Sherman nodded to show he understood.

  “Now I’m gonna be very direct with you, Sherman. This thing is gonna cost a lot of money. You know what Quigley’s man in Lombardy costs? Two thousand dollars a week, and that’s just one phase of what we got to do. I’m gonna ask you for a big retainer, right up front. This is exclusive of trial work, which I still hope will not be necessary.”

  “How much?”

  “Seventy-five thousand.”

  “Seventy-five thousand?”

  “Sherman, what can I tell you? The lawr is like anything else. Awright? Yuh gedwudja pay for.”

  “But, good Lord. Seventy-five thousand.”

  “You force me to be immodest. We are the best. And I’ll fight for you. I love a fight. I’m as Irish as Quigley.”

  So Sherman, he who came to fire his lawyer, wrote out a check for seventy-five thousand dollars.

  He handed it to Killian. “You’ll have to give me some time to get that much money into my account.”

  “That’s fair enough. What’s today? Wednesday? I won’t deposit this until Friday morning.”

  The menu had little black-and-white ads across the bottom, little rectangles with old-fashioned borders and highly stylized logos for things like Nehi chocolate drink and Captain Henry’s Canned Herring Roe and Café du Monde Dark Roast Coffee with Chicory and Indian Chief Balloon Tire bicycles and Edgeworth Pipe Tobacco and 666 Cold & Cough Medicine. The ads were sheer decoration, mementos of the old two-lane hardtop days in Louisiana bayou country. A sixth sense made Kramer flinch. This faux—Down Home shit was as expensive as the faux—Bohemian Casual shit. He didn’t even want to think what this was all going to come to, maybe fifty goddamned dollars. But there was no turning back now, was there? Shelly was sitting right across from him in the booth watching his every gesture and expression, and he had spent the past hour and a half projecting the image of a man who takes charge and is in control, and it was he, the manly bon vivant, who had suggested that they proceed forthwith to dessert and coffee. Besides, he felt an acute need for ice cream. His mouth and his gullet were on fire. The Café Alexandria didn’t seem to have a single item on any course that wasn’t a conflagration. The Creole Gumbo with Bayou Sand—he thought the word sand must be a metaphor for some gritty condiment, some ground-up root or something, but there was actual sand in the goddamned soup, apparently drenched in Tabasco. The Cornbread Cayenne—it was like bread with fire ants in it. The Catfish Fillet with Scorched Okra on a Bed of Yellow Rice with Apple Butter and Chinese Mustard Sauce—the Chinese mustard raised a red flag, but he had to order the catfish because it was the only semi-inexpensive entree on the menu, $10.50. And Andruitti had said it was an inexpensive little Creole restaurant on Beach Street, “really terrific.” Beach Street was a crummy enough street to have a cheap restaurant, and so he had believed him.

  But Shelly kept saying how wonderful it was. She was glowing, a divine radiance with brown
lipstick, although he wasn’t entirely sure whether it was love, Autumn in the Berkshires makeup, or a fire in the belly he was looking at.

  Ice cream, ice cream, ice cream…He scanned the swampfire prose of the menu, and through the caloric waves he spotted a single ice-cream dish: Hand-Churned Vanilla Ice Cream Topped with Walnut Chili Chutney. Chili? Well, he would scrape the topping to one side and stick to the ice cream. He didn’t have the nerve to ask the trendy waitress with all the honey curls to leave the topping off. He didn’t want to look like an unadventurous wimp in front of Shelly.

  Shelly ordered the Key Lime Tart with Relleno Pastry, and they both ordered the Fresh Ground New Orleans Coffee with Chicory, even though something told him the chicory meant more grief for his sizzling innards.

  Having placed the dessert and coffee order with a firm voice and manly resolve, he put his forearms on the edge of the table and leaned forward and poured his eyes back into Shelly’s, to give her a refill of crime intoxication as well as the last of the bottle of Crockett Sump White Zinfandel wine that was setting him back twelve dollars. That was the next-to-cheapest wine on the wine list. He didn’t have the courage to order the cheapest, which was a Chablis for $9.50. Only inexperienced wet smacks ordered Chablis.

  “I wish I could take you along and just have you listen to this fellow, this Roland Auburn. I’ve interviewed him three times now. At first he seems so tough, so hard, so…you know…menacing. He’s a rock, with these dead eyes, the kind of teenager that’s in everybody’s nightmare about a dark street in New York. But if you just listen to him for five minutes—just listen—you start to hear something else. You hear pain. He’s a boy, for God’s sake. He’s frightened. These boys grow up in the ghetto without anybody ever caring about them, really. They’re terrified. They erect this wall of machismo, thinking it’s gonna protect them from harm, when in fact they’re ready at any moment to be destroyed. That’s what they expect: they’re gonna be destroyed. No, I’m not worried about Roland in front of a jury. What I’ll do is, I’ll lead him through some innocuous questions about his background for the first minute and a half or two minutes, and then he’ll start shedding this tough-guy outer skin of his, without even knowing it, and they will believe him. He won’t come across as a hardened criminal or a hardened anything. He’ll come across as a frightened boy who’s yearning for just a little bit of decency and just a little bit of beauty in his life, because that is precisely what he is. I wish I could think of some way to get the jury to see the drawings and collages he does. Shelly, he’s brilliant. Brilliant! Well, there’s no way that’s gonna happen, I suppose. It’s gonna be tricky enough just to make sure I lead the real Roland Auburn out of his hard shell. It’s gonna be like getting a snail outta one a those shells that goes in a spiral.”

  Kramer twirled his finger in a spiral and laughed at his own simile. Shelly’s shiny lips smiled appreciatively. They glistened. She glistened.

  “Oh, I’d love to attend the trial,” she said. “When will it be?”

  “We don’t know yet.” (Me and the D.A., who happen to be very tight with one another.) “We won’t even take it before the grand jury until next week. We could go to trial in two months or six months. It’s hard to say in a case that’s gotten as much publicity as this one has. When the media go crazy over something, it complicates things.” He shook his head, as if to say, “You just have to learn to put up with it.”

  Shelly fairly beamed. “Larry, when I got home and turned on the television last night, and there you were, that drawing of you—I just started laughing, like a child. I said, ‘Larry!’ I said it right out loud, as if you’d just stepped into the room. I couldn’t get over it.”

  “It kind of bowled me over, too, to tell you the truth.”

  “I’d give anything to come to the trial. Could I?”

  “Sure.”

  “I promise I won’t do anything silly.”

  Kramer felt a tingle. He knew this was the moment. He moved his hands forward and slid the tips of his fingers under the tips of hers without looking at them. She didn’t look down, either, and she didn’t pull back. She kept looking into his eyes and pressed the tips of his fingers with hers.

  “I don’t care if you do something silly,” he said. His voice surprised him. It was so hoarse and bashful.

  Outside, with practically all his cash left behind in the Colorfully Antiquated non-electric cash register of the Café Alexandria, he took her hand and entwined his thick Pumping Iron fingers among her slender tender fingers, and they began walking along in the decrepit darkness of Beach Street.

  “You know, Shelly, you can’t imagine what it means to me to have you to talk to about all this. The fellows in my office—you try to get down to the heart of anything with them and they think you’re turning soft. And God help you if you turn soft. And my wife—I don’t know, she just don’t—doesn’t want to hear it anymore, no matter what. By now she just thinks she’s married to this guy who has this grim task to perform, sending a lot of pathetic people off to jail. But this case is not pathetic. You know what this case is? It’s a signal, a very important signal to the people of this city who think they’re not part of the social contract. You know? It’s about a man who thinks that his exalted station in life relieves him of the obligation to treat the life of someone at the bottom of the scale the way he would treat somebody like himself. I don’t doubt for a minute that if he had run down anybody even remotely like himself, McCoy would have done the right thing. He’s probably what we all know of as ‘a decent sort.’ That’s what makes it fascinating. He’s not an evil person at all—but he did an evil thing. Do you follow me?”

  “I guess. The only thing I don’t understand is why Henry Lamb didn’t say anything about being hit by a car when he went to the hospital. And now that you’ve told me about your witness, Roland—there hasn’t been anything in the papers about him, has there?”

  “No, and we won’t release anything about him for a while. What I’ve told you is just between us.”

  “Well, anyway, now it turns out Roland didn’t say anything about his friend being hit by a car for almost two weeks after it happened. Isn’t that a little odd?”

  “What’s odd about it! My God, Shelly, Lamb was suffering from a fatal head injury, or it’s probably fatal, and Roland knew he’d be arrested for a major felony if he talked to the cops! I wouldn’t call it odd.”

  Miss Shelly Thomas decided to back out of that avenue. “Odd isn’t what I really meant. I guess I meant—I don’t envy you, the kind of preparation and research you must have to do to get ready for one of these cases.”

  “Hah! If I got paid overtime for all the hours I’m gonna have to put into this one—well, I could move to Park Avenue myself. But you know what? That doesn’t matter to me. It really doesn’t. All I care about is, whatever kind of life I lead, I want to be able to look back and say, ‘I made a difference.’ This case is so important, on every conceivable level, not just in terms of my career. It’s just a…I don’t know how to say it…a whole new chapter. I want to make a difference, Shelly.”

  He stopped and, still holding her hand, put it behind her waist and then pulled her to him. She was looking up at him, radiantly. Their lips met. He peeked just once, to see if she was keeping her eyes closed. She was.

  Kramer could feel her lower abdomen pressed against his. Was that the knob of her mons veneris? It had come along this far, this fast, so sweetly, so beautifully—and damn! No place to take her!

  Imagine! Him! The budding star of the McCoy case—and no place—no place at all!—in the very Babylon of the twentieth century!—to take a lovely willing girl with brown lipstick. He wondered what was going through her mind at this moment.

  In fact, she was thinking about the way men are in New York. Every time you go out with one, you have to sit there and listen to two or three hours of My Career first.

  It was a triumphant Peter Fallow who entered Leicester’s that evening. Everyone at the Ta
ble, and scores more among those who packed that noisy bistro, even those who turned up their noses at The City Light, knew that it was he who had broken the McCoy case. Even St. John and Billy, who were seldom serious about anything other than one another’s infidelities, offered congratulations with apparent sincerity. Sampson Reith, the London Daily Courier’s political correspondent, who was out here for a few days, happened by the Table and told of his lunch with Irwin Gubner, deputy managing editor of The New York Times, who lamented that The City Light had the story practically to itself, which of course meant Peter Fallow, keeper and tender. Alex Britt-Withers sent over a vodka Southside, on the house, and it tasted so good Fallow ordered another. The tidal wave of approval was so great that Caroline smiled the first smile he’d had from her in a very long time. The only sour note was Nick Stopping. His approval was decidedly soft-spoken and halfhearted. Then Fallow realized that Nick, the Marxist-Leninist, the Oxford Sparticist, the Rousseau of the Third World, was no doubt consumed with jealousy. This was his sort of story, not this shallow comedian Fallow’s—Fallow could now regard Nick’s opinion of him with magnanimous amusement—and yet here was Fallow at the forefront, riding the freight train of History, while he, Stopping, was writing yet another piece for House & Garden on the latest Mrs. Posh’s villa in Hobe Sound, or wherever.

  Well, speaking of posh, Rachel Lampwick did twit him quite a bit about using that word so much. “Peter, I do think you might be a bit more gallant”—she pronounced it the French way—“toward this Mrs. McCoy, don’t you? I mean, you do go on about the posh Mr. McCoy and his posh auto and his posh flat and his posh job and his posh daddy and his posh girlfriend—or what did you call her?—‘foxy’?—I rather like that—and poor Mrs. McCoy is just his ‘forty-year-old wife,’ which of course means very plain, doesn’t it? Not very gallant, Peter.”

  But obviously Rachel had been devouring every word he wrote. So he felt nothing but a victor’s warmth toward her and one and all.