The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  And waited. At first, Fallow’s expense account, which was far larger than any other City Light writer’s (not counting the rare foreign assignment), caused no concern. After all, to penetrate the high life one had to live it, to some extent. The staggering lunch bills, dinner bills, and bar bills were followed by amusing reports of the swath Mr. Peter Fallow was cutting as a jolly Brit giant in fashionable low dives. After a while they were not amusing anymore. No great coup in the chronicling of the high life was forthcoming from this particular soldier of fortune. More than once, Fallow had turned in stories only to find them reduced to unsigned column items the following day. Steiner had called him in for several progress reports. These chats had become chillier and chillier. His pride wounded, Fallow had begun entertaining his colleagues by referring to Steiner, the renowned “Dread Brit,” as the Dead Mouse. Everyone seemed to enjoy this enormously. After all, Steiner did have a long pointed nose like a mouse and no chin and a crumpled little mouth and large ears and tiny hands and feet and eyes in which the light seemed to have gone out and a tired little voice. Recently, however, Steiner had become downright cold and abrupt, and Fallow began to wonder if in fact he somehow had learned of the Dead Mouse crack.

  He looked up…there was Steiner, six feet away in the doorway to the cubicle, looking straight at him, one hand resting on a modular wall.

  “Nice of you to pay us a visit, Fallow.”

  Fallow! It was the most contemptuous sort of school-proctor stuff! Fallow was speechless.

  “Well,” said Steiner, “what do you have for me?”

  Fallow opened his mouth. He ransacked his poisoned brain in search of the facile conversation for which he was renowned and came up gasping and sputtering.

  “Well!—you’ll remember—the Lacey Putney estate—I mentioned that—if I’m not mistaken—they’ve tried to give us a very hard time at the Surrogate’s Court, the—the—” Damn! Was it stenographers or something about reporters? What had Goldman said? “Well!—I hardly—but I’ve really got the whole thing now! It’s just a matter of—I can tell you—this is really going to break open…”

  Steiner didn’t even wait for him to finish.

  “I sincerely hope so, Fallow,” he said quite ominously. “I sincerely hope so.”

  Then he left and plunged back into his beloved tabloid city room.

  Fallow sank down into his chair. He managed to wait almost a full minute before he got up and disappeared into his raincoat.

  Albert Teskowitz was not what Kramer or any other prosecutor would call a threat when it came to swaying a jury with the magic of his summations. Emotional crescendos were beyond him, and even what rhetorical momentum he could manage was quickly undercut by his appearance. His posture was so bad that every woman on a jury, or every good mother, in any case, was aching to cry out, “Hold your shoulders back!” As for his delivery, it wasn’t that he didn’t prepare his summations, it was that he obviously prepared them on a yellow legal pad, which lay on top of the defense table.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant has three children, ages six, seven, and nine,” Teskowitz was saying, “and they are in the courtroom at this moment, awaiting the outcome of this trial.” Teskowitz avoided calling his client by name. If he could have said Herbert Cantrell, Mr. Cantrell, or even Herbert, it would have been all right, but Herbert wouldn’t put up even with Herbert. “My name is not Herbert,” he told Teskowitz when he first took the case. “I am not your limo driver. My name is Herbert 92X.”

  “It was not some criminal sitting in the Doubleheader Grill that afternoon,” Teskowitz continued, “but a workingman with a job and a family.” He hesitated and turned his face upward with the far, far, far-off expression of someone about to have an epileptic seizure. “A job and a family,” he repeated dreamily, a thousand miles away. Then he turned on his heels and went to the defense table and bent his already stooped torso at the waist and stared at his yellow legal pad with his head cocked to one side, like a bird eyeing a wormhole. He held that pose for what seemed like an eternity and then walked back to the jury box and said, “He was not an aggressor. He was not attempting to settle a score or make a score or get even with anybody. He was a workingman with a job and a family who was concerned with only one thing, and that he had every right to, which was his life was in danger.” The little lawyer’s eyes opened up like a time exposure again, and he did an about-face and walked back to the defense table and stared at the yellow pad some more. Bent over the way he was, he had a silhouette like a slop-sink spigot…A slop-sink spigot…a dog with the chuck horrors…Rogue images began to seep into the jurors’ minds. They began to be aware of things such as the film of dust on the huge courtroom windows and the way the dying afternoon sun lit up the dust, as if it were that kind of plastic they make toys out of, the kind that picks up light, and every housekeeper on the jury, even the bad ones, wondered why somebody didn’t wash those windows. They wondered about many things and about almost anything other than what Albert Teskowitz was saying about Herbert 92X, and above all they wondered about the yellow legal pad, which seemed to have Teskowitz’s poor bent scrawny neck on a leash.

  “…and find this defendant…not guilty.” When Teskowitz finally completed his summation, they weren’t even sure he had finished. Their eyes were pinned on the yellow legal pad. They expected it to jerk him back to the table once more. Even Herbert 92X, who hadn’t missed a beat, looked puzzled.

  Just then a low chant began in the courtroom.

  “Yo-ohhhhhhh…” It came from over here.

  “Yo-ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh…” It came from over there.

  Kaminsky, the fat officer, started it, and then Bruzzielli, the clerk, picked it up, and even Sullivan, the court reporter, who was sitting at his stenotype machine just below the brow of Kovitsky’s bench, joined in with his own low discreet version. “Yo-ohhh.”

  Without batting an eye Kovitsky tapped his gavel and declared a thirty-minute recess.

  Kramer didn’t think twice about it. It was wagon-train time at the fortress, that was all. Wagon-training was standard practice. If a trial was likely to run past sundown, then you had to wagon-train. Everybody knew that. This trial was going to have to continue past sundown, because the defense had just completed its summation, and the judge couldn’t adjourn for the night without letting the prosecution make its summation. So it was time to wagon-train.

  During a wagon-train recess, all employees who had driven to work and who had to stay on at the courthouse after dark because of the trial got up and went outside and headed for their cars in the parking lots. The judge, Kovitsky, was no exception. Today he had driven himself to work, and he went to his robing room, which was through a door to one side of the bench, where he took off his black robe and headed for the parking lot, like everybody else.

  Kramer had no car, and he couldn’t afford to pay eight or ten dollars to take a gypsy cab home. The gypsies—many of them driven by recent African immigrants, from places like Nigeria and Senegal—were the only cabs that came near the courthouse day or night, except for the taxis that brought fares from Manhattan to the Bronx County Building. The drivers switched on the OFF DUTY sign even before the brake pedal took its first bite of friction out of the drum, dropped off their fares, and then sped off. No, with a slight chill around the heart, Kramer realized that this was one of those nights when he would have to walk three blocks to the 161st Street subway station in the dark and stand there and wait on what was rated as one of the ten most dangerous subway platforms in the city, in terms of crime, and hope there was a car full enough of people so that he wouldn’t be picked off by the wolf packs like some stray calf from the herd. He figured the Nike running shoes gave him at least half a fighting chance. For a start, they were camouflage. On the subway in the Bronx, a pair of Johnston & Murphy leather business shoes labeled you as a prime target right off the bat. It was like wearing a sign around your neck saying ROB ME. The Nikes and the A&P shopping bag would at least make them th
ink twice. They might take him for a plainclothes cop on the way home. There no longer existed a plainclothes cop in the Bronx who didn’t wear sneakers. The other thing was, if the evil shit ever did rain down, with the Nikes he could at least run for it or dig in and fight. He wasn’t about to mention any of this to Andriutti and Caughey. Andriutti he didn’t really give a damn about, but Caughey’s contempt he knew he couldn’t stand. Caughey was Irish and would have sooner taken a bullet in the face than wear fucking camouflage on the subway.

  As the jurors headed back to the jury room, Kramer stared at Miss Shelly Thomas until he could feel the smoothness of her brown lipstick as she walked past, and she looked at him for an instant—with just a trace of a smile!—and he began to agonize over how she would get home, and there was nothing he could do about it, since of course he couldn’t go near her and convey any sort of message to her. Even with all this yo-ohhhhhing no one ever informed the jury or the witnesses about wagon-training, not that a juror would be allowed to go to a parking lot during a trial recess, in any case.

  Kramer went downstairs to the Walton Avenue entrance, to stretch his legs, get some air, and watch the parade. Out on the sidewalk one group, including Kovitsky and his law clerk, Mel Herskowitz, had already formed. The court officers were with them, standing around like troop leaders. The big tub, Kaminsky, was on his tiptoes, craning around, to see if there was anybody else who wanted to come along. The parking lot favored by the courthouse regulars was just over the crest of the Grand Concourse and down the slope, on 161st Street, in an enormous dirt pit across from the Criminal Courts Building. The pit, which occupied an entire city block, had been dug as the excavation for a building project that never went up.

  The group assembled with Kaminsky in the lead and another court officer bringing up the rear. The court officers had their .38s plainly visible on their hips. The little contingent headed off bravely into Indian country. It was about 5:45. Walton Avenue was quiet. There wasn’t much of a rush hour in the Bronx. The parking spaces on Walton Avenue next to the fortress were at a 90-degree angle to the curb. Only a handful of cars remained. There were ten reserved spaces near the entrance, for Abe Weiss, Louis Mastroiani, and other supreme bearers of the Power in the Bronx. The guard at the door put Day-Glo-red plastic traffic cones in the spaces when the appointed users were away. Kramer noticed that Abe Weiss’s car was still there. There was one other, which he didn’t recognize, but the other spaces were vacant. Kramer walked back and forth on the sidewalk near the entrance with his head down and his hands in his pockets, concentrating on his summation. He was here to speak for the one principal in this case who could not speak for himself, namely, the victim, the deceased, Nestor Cabrillo, a good father and a good citizen of the Bronx. It all fell into place very easily. Brick-wall arguments wouldn’t be enough, however; not for what he had to achieve. This summation had to move her, move her to tears or awe or, at the very least, to utter inebriation from a crime-high in the Bronx, featuring a tough young assistant D.A. with a golden tongue and a fearless delivery, not to mention a hell of a powerful neck. So he walked up and down the sidewalk outside the Walton Avenue entrance to the fortress, cooking Herbert 92X’s goose and tensing his sternocleidomastoid muscles while a vision of the girl with brown lipstick danced in his head.

  Pretty soon the first of the cars arrived. Here came Kovitsky in his huge ancient white boat, the Pontiac Bonneville. He nosed into one of the reserved spaces near the door. Thwop! The huge door torqued, and he got out, an inconspicuous-looking little bald man in a very ordinary gray suit. And then here came Bruzzielli in some little Japanese sports car that he seemed about to burst out of. Then Mel Herskowitz and Sullivan, the court reporter. Then Teskowitz in a new Buick Regal. Shit, thought Kramer. Even Al Teskowitz can afford a car. Even him, an 18b lawyer, and I’m going home on the subway! Pretty soon practically every space on the Walton Avenue side of the building was filled by the regulars. The last car to pull in was Kaminsky’s own. He had given the other court officer a lift back. The two of them got out, and Kaminsky spotted Kramer and broke into a good-natured grin and sang out, “Yo-ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

  “Yo ho ho,” said Kramer.

  The wagon train. “Yo-ohhhhhhh” was the cry of John Wayne, the hero and chief scout, signaling the pioneers to move the wagons. This was Indian country and bandit country, and it was time to put the wagons in a circle for the night. Anybody who thought he was going to be able to walk two blocks from Gibraltar to the parking lot after dark in the Four-four and drive peacefully home to Mom and Buddy and Sis was playing the game of life with half a deck.

  Later in the day, Sherman got a call from Arnold Parch’s secretary saying Parch wanted to see him. Parch had the title executive vice president, but he was not the sort who very often summoned people from the trading floor into his office.

  Parch’s office was, naturally, smaller than Lopwitz’s, but it had the same terrific view to the west, out over the Hudson River and New Jersey. In contrast to Lopwitz’s office, with its antiques, Parch’s was done with modern furniture and large modern paintings of the sort that Maria and her husband liked.

  Parch, who was a great smiler, smiled and motioned to a gray upholstered chair that was so sleek and close to the floor it looked like a submarine surfacing. Sherman sank down until he had the sensation of being below floor level. Parch sat down in an identical chair across from him. Sherman was conscious mainly of legs, his and Parch’s. In Sherman’s line of vision, Parch’s chin barely cleared the tops of his knees.

  “Sherman,” said the smiling face behind the kneecaps, “I just received a call from Oscar Suder in Columbus, Ohio, and he is really pissed off about these United Fragrance bonds.”

  Sherman was astounded. He wanted to lift his head up higher, but he couldn’t. “He is? And he called you? What did he say?”

  “He said you called him and sold him three million bonds at 102. He also said you told him to buy them fast, because they were heading up. This morning they’re down to 100.”

  “Par! I don’t believe it!”

  “Well, it’s a fact, and they’re going lower, if they’re going anywhere. Standard & Poor’s just knocked them down from double A to triple B.”

  “I don’t…believe it, Arnold! I saw them go from 103 to 102.5 day before yesterday, and I checked with Research, and everything was okay. Then yesterday they went down to 102, then 101 7/8, and then they came back up to 102. So I figured other traders were spotting it, and that’s when I called Oscar. They were heading back up. It was a damned good bargain at 102. Oscar had been looking for something over 9, and here was 9.75, almost 10, double A.”

  “But did you check with Research yesterday, before you got them for Oscar?”

  “No, but they went up another eighth after I bought them. They were going up. I’m bowled over by all this. Par! It’s unbelievable.”

  “Well, golly, Sherman,” said Parch, who was no longer smiling, “can’t you see what was happening? Somebody at Salomon was painting you a picture. They were loaded with U Frags, and they knew the S&P report was on the way, and so they painted a picture. They lowered the price two days ago, looking for nibbles. Then they brought it back up to make it look like there was some trading going on. Then they lowered it again yesterday and they pulled it up. Then when they got your nibble—quite a nice little nibble—they raised the price again, to see if you’d nibble again at 102 1/8. You and Solly were the whole market, Sherman! Nobody else was touching it. They painted you a picture. Now Oscar’s out $60,000 and he’s got three million triple B’s he doesn’t want.”

  A terrible clear light. Of course it was true. He had let himself be suckered in the most amateurish fashion. And Oscar Suder, of all people! Oscar, whom he was counting on as part of the Giscard package…only $10 million out of $600 million, but that was $10 million he’d have to find somewhere else…

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Sherman. “You’re absolutely right. I goofed.” He rea
lized goofed sounded as if he were letting himself off easy. “It was a stupid blunder, Arnold. I should’ve seen it coming.” He shook his head. “Boy. Oscar, of all people. I wonder if I should call him myself?”

  “I wouldn’t just yet. He’s really pissed off. He wanted to know if you or anybody else here knew the S&P report was coming. I said no, because I knew you wouldn’t pull anything on Oscar. But in fact Research did know about it. You should’ve checked with ’em, Sherman. After all, three million bonds…”

  Parch smiled the smile of no-hard-feelings. He obviously didn’t like sessions like this himself. “It’s okay. It happens; it happens. But you’re our number one man out there, Sherman.” He lifted his eyebrows and kept them way up on his forehead, as if to say, “You get the picture?”

  He hauled himself up from out of his chair. Likewise, Sherman. With considerable embarrassment Parch extended his hand, and Sherman shook it.

  “Okay, go get ’em,” Parch said with a large but flat smile.

  The distance from where Kramer stood at the prosecution table to where Herbert 92X sat at the defense table was no more than twenty feet to begin with. Kramer took a couple of steps closer, narrowing the gap until everybody in the courtroom could tell that something odd was taking place without being able to tell exactly what. He had reached the part where it was time to demolish whatever pity for Herbert that Teskowitz might have managed to create.