The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  The Yanks. Dear God.

  Only the problem of dinner remained to be solved. Dinner at Leicester’s, even without wine, was at least forty dollars per person. Fallow headed for the coin telephone on the corner. There was this Bob Bowles, the American magazine editor…It should work out…The skinny woman he lived with, Mona something, was very nearly unbearable, even when she wasn’t talking. But everything in life had its price, didn’t it?

  He entered the booth and dropped a quarter in the slot. With luck he would be back inside of Leicester’s within the hour, eating his favorite dish, the chicken paillard, which tasted especially good with red wine. He liked Vieux Galouches, a French wine that came in a bottle with an eccentric neck, the best.

  8. The Case

  Martin, the Irish detective, was at the wheel, and his partner, Goldberg, the Jewish detective, was in the passenger seat, and Kramer was in the back seat, sitting at just the right angle, it so happened, to see the speedometer. They were driving down the Major Deegan Expressway at a good Irish sixty-five miles an hour, heading for Harlem.

  Martin’s being Irish was very much on Kramer’s mind at this moment. He had just figured out where he had first seen the man. It was soon after he joined the Homicide Bureau. He had been sent out to East 152nd Street, where a man had been shot to death in the back of an automobile. The automobile was a Cadillac Sedan DeVille. One of the rear doors was open, and there was a detective standing by it, a little fellow, no more than 150 pounds, with a thin neck, a skinny, slightly lopsided face, and the eyes of a Doberman pinscher. Detective Martin. Detective Martin gestured toward the open door with a sweep of his hand, like a headwaiter. Kramer looked in, and what he saw was horrible beyond anything the phrase “shot to death in the back of an automobile” had even begun to suggest to him. The victim was a fat man in a loud, checked jacket. He was sitting on the back seat with his hands on his legs, just above his knees, as if he were about to hitch up his pants to keep them from being stretched by his kneecaps. He appeared to be wearing a bright scarlet bib. Two-thirds of his head was gone. The rear window of the Cadillac looked as if someone had thrown a pizza up against it. The red bib was arterial blood, which had pumped out of the stalk of his head like a fountain. Kramer backed out of the car. “Shit!” he said. “Did you see that? How did they—I mean, shit!—it’s all over the car!” To which Martin had said, “Yeah, musta ruined his whole fucking day.” At first Kramer had taken this as a rebuke for his becoming unglued by the sight, but later he figured Martin wouldn’t have had it any other way. What was the fun of introducing people to vintage Bronx mayhem if they didn’t become unglued? After that, Kramer made a point of being as Irish as they come at the crime scenes.

  Martin’s partner, Goldberg, was twice his size, a real side of beef, with thick curly hair, a mustache that drooped slightly at the corners of the mouth, and a fat neck. There were Irishmen named Martin and Jews named Martin. There were Germans named Kramer and Jews named Kramer. But every Goldberg in the history of the world was a Jew, with the possible exception of this one. By now, being Martin’s partner, he had probably turned Irish, too.

  Martin, in the driver’s seat, turned his head slightly to talk to Kramer in the back seat. “I can’t believe I’m actually driving to Harlem to listen to this asshole. If it was a wiretap, that I could believe. How the hell did he get to Weiss?”

  “I don’t know,” said Kramer. He said it wearily, just to show that he was a good knockabout fellow who realized this mission was a jerk-off. In fact, he was still sailing on the verdict that had come in last night. Herbert 92X had gone down. Shelly Thomas had popped up, glorious as the sun. “Apparently Bacon called Joseph Leonard. You know Leonard? The black assemblyman?”

  Kramer’s radar told him that black was too delicate, too refined, too trendy-liberal a designation for a conversation with Martin and Goldberg, but he didn’t want to try out anything else.

  “Yeah, I know him,” said Martin. “He’s a piece a work, too.”

  “Well, I’m only guessing,” said Kramer, “but Weiss has an election coming up in November, and if Leonard wants a favor, Weiss’ll do him a favor. He thinks he needs black support. This Puerto Rican, Santiago, is running against him in the primary.”

  Goldberg snorted. “I love the word they use, support. Like they think there’s some organization out there. That’s a fucking laugh. In the Bronx they couldn’t organize a cup a coffee. Bedford-Stuyvesant, the same thing. I’ve worked the Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Harlem. In Harlem they’re more sophisticated. In Harlem if you bring some asshole in and you tell him, ‘Look, there’s two ways we can do this, the easy way and the hard way, it’s up to you,’ at least they know what you’re talking about. In the Bronx or Bed-Stuy, fuhgedaboudit. Bed-Stuy’s the worst. In Bed-Stuy you just might as well start rolling in the dirt from the git-go. Right, Marty?”

  “Yeah,” said Martin, without enthusiasm. Goldberg had used no designation at all, other than they. Martin didn’t seem to want to get into a discussion of cop philosophy in the first place. “So Bacon calls Leonard, and Leonard calls Weiss,” said Martin. “And then what?”

  “This kid Lamb, his mother works for Bacon, or she used to work for Bacon,” said Kramer. “She claims she has some information about what happened to her son, but she has a whole buncha parking tickets, and there’s a scofflaw warrant out for her, and she’s afraid to go to the police. So the deal is, Weiss quashes the warrant and works out a schedule whereby she can pay off the tickets, and she gives us the information, but it has to be in Bacon’s presence.”

  “And Weiss agrees to this.”

  “Yep.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “Well, you know Weiss,” said Kramer. “All he cares about is, he’s Jewish and he’s running for reelection in a county that’s 70 percent black and Puerto Rican.”

  Goldberg said, “You ever run into Bacon before?”

  “No.”

  “You better take off your watch before you go in there. Fucking guy don’t lift a finger except to steal.”

  Martin said, “I was thinking about that, Davey. I can’t see where’s there’s any money in this thing, but you can bet it’s there somewhere.” Then to Kramer: “You ever hear a the Open Gates Employment Coalition?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s one a Bacon’s operations. You know how they turn up at restaurants demanding jobs for minorities? You shoulda been at that fucking brawl up on Gun Hill Road. There wasn’t a fucking white face working up there. So I don’t know what kinda minorities they’re talking about, unless a buncha bongos carrying lengths a pipe, you call that a minority.”

  Kramer wondered whether or not bongos could be interpreted as a racial epithet. He didn’t want to be that Irish. “Well then, what’s in it for them?”

  “Money,” said Martin. “If the manager said, ‘Oh yeah, we need some extra hands, you can all have jobs,’ they’d look at him like he had bugs on his eyeballs. They just take money to stay away. It’s the same way with the Third World Anti-Defamation League. They’re the ones that go downtown to Broadway and raise hell. That’s one a Bacon’s operations, too. He’s a sweetheart.”

  “But the Open Gates Employment Coalition,” said Kramer, “they actually get in fights.”

  “Pitched fucking battles,” said Goldberg.

  “If it’s a scam, why would they do that? They could get killed.”

  “You have to see ’em,” said Martin. “Those crazy fucks’ll go brawling all day for nothing. So why wouldn’t they do it if somebody pays ’em a few dollars?”

  “Remember that one that swung on you with the pipe, Marty?”

  “Remember him? I saw him in my fucking sleep. A big tall asshole with a gold earring hanging off his head, like this.” Martin made a big O with his thumb and forefinger and put it under his right ear.

  Kramer didn’t know how much of this to believe. He had once read an article in The Village Voice describing Bacon as a “street soci
alist,” a black political activist who had arrived at his own theories about the shackles of capitalism and the strategies required to give black people their due. Kramer had no interest in left-wing politics, and neither did his father. Yet in their house, when he was growing up, the word socialist had religious overtones. It was like Zealot and Masada. There was something Jewish about it. No matter how wrongheaded a socialist might be, no matter how cruel and vindictive, he possessed somewhere in his soul a spark of the light of God, of Yahweh. Maybe Bacon’s operation was extortion, and maybe it wasn’t. Looked at one way, the entire history of the labor movement was extortion. What was a strike but extortion backed up by real or implied threat of violence? The labor movement had a religious aura in Kramer’s house, too. The unions were a Masada uprising against the worst of the goyim. His father was a would-be capitalist, a servant of capitalists in actual fact, who had never belonged to a labor union in his life and felt infinitely superior to those who did. Yet one night Senator Barry Goldwater had been on TV promoting a right-to-work bill, and his father had started growling and cursing in a way that would have made Joe Hill and the Wobblies look like labor mediators. Yes, the labor movement was truly religious, like Judaism itself. It was one of those things you believed in for all mankind and didn’t care about for a second in your own life. It was funny about religion…His father wrapped it around himself like a cape…This guy Bacon wrapped it around himself…Herbert wrapped it around himself…Herbert…All at once Kramer saw a way to talk about his triumph.

  “It’s funny about these guys and religion,” he said to the two cops in the front seat. “I just got off a case, a guy called Herbert 92X.” He didn’t say, “I just won a case.” He would work that in. “This guy…”

  Martin and Goldberg probably didn’t give a damn, either. But at least they would…comprehend…

  He remained an animated raconteur all the way to Harlem.

  Not a soul was in Reverend Bacon’s great parlor office when the secretary led Kramer, Martin, and Goldberg in. Most conspicuously absent was Reverend Bacon himself. His big swivel chair rose up in suspenseful emptiness behind the desk.

  The secretary showed the three of them to armchairs facing the desk, and then she left. Kramer looked out the bay window behind the swivel chair at the gloomy tree trunks in the garden. The trunks were mottled in patches of swamp yellow and rotting green. Then he looked at the ceiling coving and the plaster dental moldings and all the other architectural details that had proclaimed Millionaire eighty years ago. Martin and Goldberg were doing the same thing. Martin looked at Goldberg and twisted his lips upward on one side with the look that says, “This is a shuck.”

  A door opened, and a tall black man entered the room, looking like ten million dollars. He wore a black suit, tailored in a way that brought out the width of his shoulders and the trimness of his waist. The jacket had a two-button roll that revealed a gorgeous acre of white shirtfront. The starched collar was immaculate against the man’s dark skin. He wore a white necktie with a black crisscross pattern, the sort of necktie that Anwar Sadat used to wear. Kramer felt rumpled just looking at him.

  For an instant he debated whether or not he should rise from his chair, knowing what Martin and Goldberg would think of any gesture of respect. But he couldn’t think of any way out of it. So he stood up. Martin waited a couple of moments, but then he stood up, too, and Goldberg followed suit. They looked at each other, and both of them shrugged their lips this time. Since Kramer was up first, the man walked toward him and held out his hand and said, “Reginald Bacon.”

  Kramer shook hands and said, “Lawrence Kramer, Bronx District Attorney’s Office. Detective Martin. Detective Goldberg.”

  From the way Martin looked at Reverend Bacon’s hand with his Doberman pinscher eyes, Kramer didn’t know whether he was going to shake it or chew it. He finally shook it. He shook it for at least a fourth of a second, as if he had just picked up a chunk of creosote. Goldberg followed suit.

  “Get you gentlemen some coffee?”

  “No, thanks,” said Kramer.

  Martin gave Reverend Bacon a frozen stare and then shook his head from side to side twice, ve-ry slow-ly, successfully conveying the message “Not even if I was dying of thirst.” Goldberg, the Jewish Shamrock, followed suit.

  Reverend Bacon walked around behind the desk to his great chair, and they all sat down. He leaned back in the chair and looked at Kramer with an impassive expression for what seemed like a very long time and then said in a soft, low voice. “The district attorney explained to you Mrs. Lamb’s situation?”

  “My bureau chief did, yes.”

  “Your bureau chief?”

  “Bernie Fitzgibbon. He’s the chief of the Homicide Bureau.”

  “You’re from the Homicide Bureau?”

  “When a case is listed likely-to-die, they turn it over to the Homicide Bureau. Not always, but a lot of the time.”

  “You don’t need to tell Mrs. Lamb you’re from the Homicide Bureau.”

  “I understand,” said Kramer.

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “Where is Mrs. Lamb?”

  “She’s here. She’s coming in a minute. But I want to tell you something before she comes in here. She is very upset. Her son is dying, and she knows that, and she don’t know that…see…It’s something she knows and something she don’t want to know. You understand? And all this time, here she is, she’s in trouble over a lot of parking tickets. She says to herself, ‘I have got to be with my son, and suppose they arrest me over a lot of parking tickets’…See?”

  “Well, she—she don’t have to worry about that,” said Kramer. In a room with three people who said She don’t, he couldn’t get a doesn’t out of his mouth. “The district attorney is quashing the warrant. She’s still gonna have to pay the tickets, but nobody’s gonna arrest her.”

  “I told her that, but it’s gonna help if you tell her.”

  “Oh, we’re here to help, but I thought she had something to tell us.” This was for the benefit of Martin and Goldberg, so they wouldn’t think he was being a pushover.

  Reverend Bacon paused again and stared at Kramer, then resumed, softly, as before. “That is true. She has something to tell you. But you ought to know about her and her son, Henry. Henry is…was…was…Lord, this is a tragedy. Henry is a fine young man…a fine young man, fine as you wanna meet…see…Goes to church, never been in trouble, about to graduate from high school, getting ready to go to college…a fine young man. And he already graduated from something tougher than Harvard University. He grew up in the projects, and he made it. He survived. He came out of it a fine young man. Henry Lamb is…was!…the hope!…see…the hope. And now somebody just come along and”—Whop! He slapped his hand down on the desktop—“run him down and don’t even stop.”

  Because Martin and Goldberg were there, Kramer felt the need to quench the histrionics.

  “That may well be, Reverend Bacon,” he said, “but so far we don’t have any evidence of a hit-and-run.”

  Reverend Bacon gave him his level gaze and then, for the first time, smiled. “You’re going to have all the evidence you need. You’re going to meet Henry Lamb’s mother. I know her very well…see…and you can believe what she says. She’s a member of my church. She’s a hardworking woman, a good woman…see…a good woman. She’s got a good job, down at the Municipal Building, in the Marriage Bureau. Don’t take a nickel of welfare. A good woman with a good son.” Then he pressed a button on his desk and leaned forward and said, “Miss Hadley, show Mrs. Lamb in. Oh, one more thing. Her husband, Henry’s father, was killed six years ago, shot to death, coming home one night, outside the project. Tried to resist a robber.” Reverend Bacon looked at each of the three of them, nodding the whole time.

  With this, Martin stood up and stared out the bay window. He stared so intently Kramer thought he must have spotted a burglary in progress, at the very least. Reverend Bacon looked at him, puzzled.

  “Wh
at kind of trees are they?” Martin asked.

  “Which ones, Marty?” asked Goldberg, and he stood up, too.

  “Right there,” said Martin, pointing.

  Reverend Bacon swiveled around in his chair and looked out the window himself. “Those are sycamore trees,” he said.

  “Sycamores,” said Martin, in the contemplative tone of a young naturalist in an arboriculture program. “Look at those trunks. They must go up fifty feet.”

  “Trying to reach the light,” said Reverend Bacon. “Trying to find the sun.”

  Behind Kramer a pair of huge oak doors opened, and the secretary, Miss Hadley, ushered in a trim black woman, no more than forty, perhaps younger. She wore a businesslike blue skirt and jacket and a white blouse. Her black hair was done in soft waves. She had a thin, almost delicate face and large eyes and the self-possessed look of a teacher or someone else used to meeting the public.

  Reverend Bacon stood up and walked around the desk to meet her. Kramer stood up also—and understood Martin’s and the Jewish Shamrock’s sudden interest in the arboreal species. They didn’t want to get trapped into having to stand when the woman came into the room. It had been bad enough having to get up for a hustler like Bacon. Doing it again for some woman from the projects who was part of his setup was taking this thing too far. This way they were already on their feet, studying the sycamore trees, when she came in the room.

  “Gentlemen,” said Reverend Bacon, “this is Mrs. Annie Lamb. This is the gentleman from the District Attorney’s Office in the Bronx, Mr. Kramer. And, uh—”

  “Detective Martin, and Detective Goldberg,” said Kramer. “They’re in charge of the investigation of your son’s case.”

  Mrs. Lamb didn’t step forward to shake hands and she didn’t smile. She nodded ever so slightly. She seemed to be withholding judgment on the three of them.