by Tom Wolfe
The telephone rang in the library. Sherman braced. Stick it up your face? But all he heard was the rumble of Occhioni’s normal voice. Presently the little man stuck his head into the living room and said, “Hey, Mr. McCoy, it’s somebody named Sally Rawthrote. You wanna talk to her or not?”
Sally Rawthrote? She was the woman he had sat next to at the Bavardages’, the woman who had lost interest in him immediately and then froze him out for the rest of the dinner. Why would she want to talk to him now? Why should he want to talk to her at all? He didn’t, but a tiny spark of curiosity was lit within the cavity, and he stood up and looked at Killian and shrugged and went into the library and sat at his desk and picked up the telephone.
“Hello?”
“Sherman! Sally Rawthrote:” Sherman. Oldest friend in the world. “I hope this isn’t a bad time?”
A bad time? From below a tremendous roar welled up, and the bullhorn screamed and bellowed, and he heard his name. McCOY!…McCOY!
“Well, of course it’s a bad time,” said Sally Rawthrote. “What am I saying? But I just thought I’d take a chance and call and see if there’s any way I might help.”
Help? As she spoke, her face came back to him, that dreadful tense nearsighted face that focused about four and a half inches from the bridge of your nose.
“Well, thank you,” said Sherman.
“You know, I live just a few blocks down from you. Same side of the street.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I’m on the northwest corner. If you’re going to live on Park, I think there’s nothing quite like the northwest corner. You get so much sun! Of course, where you are is nice, too. Your building’s got some of the most beautiful apartments in New York. I haven’t been in yours since the McLeods had it. They had it before the Kittredges. Anyway, from my bedroom, which is on the corner, I can look right down Park to where you are. I’m looking down there right now, and that mob—it’s absolutely outrageous! I feel so badly for you and Judy—I just had to call and see if there’s anything I can do. I hope I’m not being out of place?”
“No, you’re very kind. By the way, how did you get my number?”
“I called Inez Bavardage. Was that all right?”
“To tell you the truth, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference at this point, Mrs. Rawthrote.”
“Sally.”
“Anyway, thank you.”
“As I say, if I can be of any help, let me know. With the apartment, is what I mean.”
“With the apartment?”
Another rumble…a roar…MCCOY! MCCOY!
“If you should decide you want to do anything with the apartment. I’m with Benning Sturtevant, as you probably know, and I know that often in situations like this people sometimes find it advantageous to become as liquid as they can. Hah hah, I could stand a bit of that myself! Anyway, it’s a consideration, and I assure you—assure you—I can get you three and a half for your apartment. Just like that. I can guarantee it.”
The woman’s gall was astounding. It was beyond good and bad form, beyond…taste…It was astounding. It made Sherman smile, and he didn’t think he could smile.
“Well, well, well, well, Sally. I do admire foresightedness. You looked out your northwest window and you saw an apartment for sale.”
“Not at all! I just thought—”
“Well, you’re just one step too late, Sally. You’ll have to talk to a man named Albert Vogel.”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s the lawyer for Henry Lamb. He’s filed a hundred-million-dollar lawsuit against me, and I’m not sure if I’m free to sell a rug at this point. Well, maybe I could sell a rug. You want to sell a rug for me?”
“Hah hah, no. Rugs I don’t know anything about. I don’t see how they can freeze your assets. That seems totally unfair. I mean, you were the victim, after all, weren’t you? I read the story in the Daily News today. Ordinarily I only read Bess Hill and Bill Hatcher, but I was turning the pages—and there was your picture. I said, ‘My God, it’s Sherman!’ So I read the story—and you were only avoiding a robbery attempt. It’s so unfair!” She chattered on. She was fireproof. She couldn’t be mocked.
After hanging up, Sherman returned to the living room.
Killian said, “Who was that?”
Sherman said, “A real-estate broker I met at dinner. She wanted to sell my apartment for me.”
“She say how much she could get you?”
“Three and a half million dollars.”
“Well, let’s see,” said Killian. “If she gets her 6 percent commission, that’s…ummmm…$210,000. That’s worth sounding stone-cold opportunistic over, I guess. But I’ll say one thing for her.”
“What’s that?”
“She made you smile. So she ain’t all bad.”
Another roar, the loudest yet…MCCOY!…MCCOY!…The two of them stood in the middle of the living room and listened for a moment.
“Jesus, Tommy,” said Sherman. It was the first time he had called him by his first name, but he didn’t stop to think about that. “I can’t believe I’m standing here and all this is happening. I’m holed up in my apartment and Park Avenue is occupied by a mob waiting to kill me. Kill me!”
“Awwwwww, f’r Chrissake, that’s the last thing they wanna do. You ain’t worth a goddamned thing to Bacon dead, and he thinks you’re gonna be worth a lot to him alive.”
“To Bacon? What does he get out of it?”
“Millions is what he thinks he’s gonna get out of it. I can’t prove it, but I say this whole thing is over the civil suits.”
“But Henry Lamb is the one who’s suing. Or his mother, I guess it is, in his behalf. How does Bacon get anything out of it?”
“All right.” Awright. “Who is the lawyer representing Henry Lamb? Albert Vogel. And how does Henry Lamb’s mother get to Albert Vogel? Because she admired his brilliant defense of the Utica Four and the Waxahachie Eight in 1969? Fuhgedaboudit. Bacon steers her to Vogel, because the two a them are tight. Whatever the Lambs get in a lawsuit, Vogel gets at least a third a that, and you can be sure he splits that with Bacon, or he’s gonna have a mob coming after him that means business. One thing in this world I know from A to Z, and that’s lawyers and where their money comes from and where it goes.”
“But Bacon had his campaign going about Henry Lamb before he even knew I was involved.”
“Oh, at the beginning they were just going after the hospital, on the grounds of malpractice. They were gonna sue the city. If Bacon could get it built up into a big deal in the press, then a jury might give ’em what they wanted. A jury in a civil case…with a racial angle? They had a good shot.”
“So the same goes for me,” said Sherman.
“I won’t try to kid you. That’s very true. But if you beat the felony case, then there’s no civil case.”
“And if I don’t win the felony case, I won’t care about the civil case,” said Sherman, looking very glum.
“Well, you gotta admit one thing,” said Killian in a cheer-up voice, “this thing has made you a giant on Wall Street. One freakin’ giant, bro. Juh see what Flannagan called you in the Daily News? ‘Pierce & Pierce’s fabled chief bond salesman.’ Fabled. A legend in your own time. You’re the son of ‘the aristocratic John Campbell McCoy,’ former head of Dunning Sponget & Leach. You’re the fabled investment banking genius aristocrat. Bacon probably thinks you got half the money in the world.”
“If you want to know the truth,” said Sherman, “I don’t even know where I’m gonna get the money to pay…” He motioned toward the library, where Occhioni was. “This civil suit mentions everything. They’re even after the quarterly share of profits I was supposed to get at the end of this month. I can’t imagine how they knew about it. They even referred to it by the in-company name, which is the ‘Pie B.’ They’d have to know someone at Pierce & Pierce.”
“Pierce & Pierce’ll look after you, won’t they?”
“Hah. I don’t ex
ist at Pierce & Pierce anymore. There’s no such thing as loyalty on Wall Street. Maybe there once was—my father always talked as if there was—but there isn’t now. I’ve gotten one telephone call from Pierce & Pierce, and that wasn’t from Lopwitz. It was from Arnold Parch. He wanted to know if there was anything they could do, and then he couldn’t get off the telephone fast enough, for fear I’d think of something. Although I don’t know why I single out Pierce & Pierce. Our own friends have all been the same way. My wife can’t even make play dates for our daughter. She’s six years old…”
He stopped. He suddenly felt uncomfortable parading his personal woes before Killian. Goddamned Garland Reed and his wife! They wouldn’t even let Campbell come play with MacKenzie! Some utterly lame excuse…Garland hadn’t even called once, and he’d known him all his life. At least Rawlie had had the guts to call. He’d called three times. He’d probably even have the guts to come see him…if WE THE JURY ever vacated Park Avenue…Maybe he would…
“It’s damned sobering, how fast it goes when it goes,” he said to Killian. He didn’t want to say this much, but he couldn’t help himself. “All these ties you have, all these people you went to school with and to college, the people who are in your clubs, the people you go out to dinner with—it’s all a thread, Tommy, all these ties that make up your life, and when it breaks…that’s it!…That’s it…I feel so sorry for my daughter, my little girl. She’ll mourn me, she’ll mourn her daddy, the daddy she remembers, without knowing he’s already dead.”
“What the hell you talking about?” said Killian.
“You’ve never been through anything like this. I don’t doubt you’ve seen a lot of it, but you’ve never been through it. I can’t explain the feeling. All I can tell you is that I’m already dead, or the Sherman McCoy of the McCoy family and Yale and Park Avenue and Wall Street is dead. Your self—I don’t know how to explain it, but if, God forbid, anything like this ever happens to you, you’ll know what I mean. Your self…is other people, all the people you’re tied to, and it’s only a thread.”
“Ayyyyy, Sherman,” said Killian. “Gimme a break. It don’t do any good to philosophize in the middle of a war.”
“Some war.”
“F’r Chrissake, whaddaya whaddaya? This story in the Daily News is very important for you. Weiss must be going crazy. We’ve blown the cover on this lowlife smokehead he’s got for a witness. Auburn. Now we’ve got another theory out there for the whole business. Now there’s a basis for people to support you. We’ve gotten across the idea that you were the intended victim of a setup, a robbery. That changes the whole picture for you, and we haven’t compromised you in the slightest.”
“It’s too late.”
“Whaddaya mean, too late? Give it a little time, f’r Chrissake. This guy Flannagan at the News will play as long as we wanna play. The Brit, Fallow, at The City Light, been beating his brains out with this story. So he’ll take whatever I give him. This fucking story he just wrote couldn’ta come out any better if I dictated it to him. He not only identifies Auburn, he uses the mug shot Quigley got!” Killian was hugely delighted. “And he got in the fact that two weeks ago Weiss was calling Auburn the Crack King of Evergreen Avenue.”
“What difference does that make?”
“It don’t look good. If you got a guy in jail on a major felony and he suddenly comes forward to give evidence in return for dropping the charge or knocking it down, it don’t look good. It don’t look good to a jury, and it don’t look good to the press. If he’s in on a misdemeanor or an E felony or something, it don’t make so much difference, because the presumption is, it don’t matter that much to him, the time he’s facing.”
Sherman said, “One thing I’ve always wondered about, Tommy. Why did Auburn, when he made up his story—why did he have me driving the car? Why not Maria, who was actually driving the car when Lamb got hit? What difference did it make to Auburn?”
“He had to do it that way. He didn’t know what witnesses might have seen your car just before Lamb got hit and just after he got hit, and he has to have some explanation for why you were driving up to the point where the thing happened and she was the one who drove away from there. If he says you stopped, and then you and her changed places and she drove off and hit Lamb, then the logical question is ‘Why did they stop?’ and the logical answer is ‘Because some lowlife like Roland Auburn put up a barricade and tried to take them off.’ ”
“What’s his name?—Flannagan—doesn’t get into any of that.”
“That’s right. You’ll notice I didn’t give him anything about a woman being in the car one way or the other. When the time comes, we want Maria on our side. You’ll also notice that Flannagan wrote the whole fucking story without even making any big deal about the ‘mystery woman.’”
“Very obliging fellow. Why is that?”
“Oh, I know the guy. He’s another Donkey, same as me, just trying to make his way in America. He makes his deposits in the Favor Bank. America is a wonderful country.”
For a moment Sherman’s spirits rose a calibration or two, but then they sank lower than ever. It was Killian’s obvious elation that did it. Killian was crowing over his strategic genius in “the war.” He had conducted a successful sortie of some kind. To Killian this was a game. If he won, terrific. If he lost…well, on to the next war. For him, Sherman, there was nothing to be won. He had already lost almost everything, irretrievably. At best, he could only keep from losing all.
The telephone rang in the library. Sherman braced once more, but soon Occhioni was at the doorway again.
“It’s some guy named Pollard Browning, Mr. McCoy.”
“Who’s he?” asked Killian.
“He lives here in the building. He’s the president of the co-op board.”
He went into the library and picked up the telephone. From the street below, another roar, more bellowing on the bullhorn…McCOY!…McCOY!…No doubt it was just as audible chez Browning. He could imagine what Pollard thought.
But his voice was friendly enough. “How you bearing up, Sherman?”
“Oh, all right, Pollard, I suppose.”
“I’d like to drop up and see you, if that wouldn’t be too much of an imposition.”
“You’re home?” asked Sherman.
“Just got here. It wasn’t easy, getting into the building, but I made it. Would that be all right?”
“Sure. Come on up.”
“I’ll just walk on up the fire stairs, if that’s okay. Eddie’s got his hands full down at the front door. I don’t know if he can even hear the buzzer.”
“I’ll meet you back there.”
He told Killian he was going back to the kitchen to let Browning in.
“Ayyyy,” said Killian. “See? They haven’t forgotten you.”
“We’ll see,” said Sherman. “You’re about to meet Wall Street in its pure form.”
Back in the big silent kitchen, with the door open, Sherman could hear Pollard clanging up the metal treads of the fire stairs. Soon he came into view, puffing, from his climb of all of two flights, but impeccable. Pollard was the sort of plump forty-year-old who looks tonier than any athlete the same age. His smooth jowls welled up from out of a white shirt of a lustrous Sea Island cotton. A beautifully made gray worsted suit lay upon every square inch of his buttery body without a ripple. He wore a navy tie with the Yacht Club insignia and a pair of black shoes so well cut they made his feet look tiny. He was as sleek as a beaver.
Sherman led him out of the kitchen and into the entry gallery, where the Irishman, McCarthy, sat in the Thomas Hope chair. The door to the library was open and Occhioni was plainly visible in there.
“Bodyguards,” Sherman felt compelled to say to Pollard, in a low voice. “I bet you never thought you’d know anybody who had bodyguards.”
“One of my clients—you know Cleve Joyner of United Carborundum?”
“I don’t know him.”
“He’s had bodyguards for six or se
ven years now. Go with him everywhere.”
In the living room, Pollard gave Killian’s fancy clothes a quick once-over, and a pained, pinched look came over his face. Pollard said, “How do you do?” which came out as “Howja do?” and Killian said, “How are you?” which came out as “Hehwaya?” Pollard’s nostrils twitched slightly, the same way Sherman’s father’s had when he mentioned the name Dershkin, Bellavita, Fishbein & Schlossel.
Sherman and Pollard sat down in one of the clusters of furniture Judy had arranged in order to fill up the vast room. Killian went off into the library to talk to Occhioni.
