The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  Fallow closed his eyes. He saw the snout of the beast, lit up by soft bistro lights. Then the icy chill. He opened his eyes. Vogel was staring at him with his cheery old pink nanny’s grin. This ridiculous country.

  “Look, Pete, the worst you’ll get out of this is a good human-interest story. And if things break right, you’ll be on to something big. I can get you an interview with Annie Lamb. I can get you an interview with Reverend Bacon. I can take you right into the intensive-care unit, where the kid is. I mean, he’s in a coma, but you can see him.”

  Fallow tried to conceive of transferring the mercury egg and his bilious innards to the Bronx. He could scarcely imagine surviving the trip. From his viewpoint the Bronx was like the Arctic. It was somewhere to the north, and people didn’t go there.

  “I don’t know, Al. My specialty is supposed to be the high life.” He attempted a smile.

  “Supposed to be, Peter, supposed to be. They won’t fire you if you come in with a hell of a good story from the low life.”

  The word fire was what did it. He closed his eyes. The snout was not there. Instead, he saw the Dead Mouse’s face. He could see the Mouse looking toward his cubicle in the city room at this moment and finding it empty. Fear suffused his every cell, and he put his napkin to his forehead.

  “Do you mind if I ask you something, Al?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What’s your interest in all this?”

  “None, if you’re talking about material interest. Reverend Bacon called me and asked my advice, and I told him I’d try to help him out, that’s all. I like him. I like what he’s trying to do. I like the way he shakes up this fucking city. I’m on his side. I told him he should try to get this thing into the newspapers before he has the protest demonstration. That way he’s gonna get more television coverage and everything else. I’m telling you the plain truth now. I thought of you because I figured maybe you could use an opportunity like this. This could be to your advantage and to the advantage of a lot of decent people who never get a fucking break in this city.”

  Fallow shuddered. Just what had Vogel heard about his situation? He didn’t really want to know. He knew he was being used. At the same time, here was a piece of meat to throw to the Mouse.

  “Well, maybe you’re right.”

  “I know I’m right, Pete. This is gonna be a big story one way or the other. You might as well be the one to break it.”

  “You can take me to see these people?”

  “Oh, sure. Don’t worry about that. The only thing is, you can’t sit on the story. Bacon is ready to go.”

  “Ummmm. Let me take down some of these names.” Fallow reached into the side pocket of his jacket. Christ, he hadn’t even picked up a notebook or a piece of paper before he left. From out of the pocket he brought a notice from Con Edison warning him that his gas and electricity were about to be cut off. He couldn’t even write on it. It had print on both sides. Vogel watched all this and, without comment, produced a memorandum pad and handed it to him. Then he handed him a silver ballpoint pen. He repeated the names and details.

  “I tell you what,” said Fallow. “I’m going to call the city desk straightaway.”

  He got up and caromed off a chair at the next table, where an old woman in a Chanel-style suit was trying to lift a spoonful of sorrel soup to her mouth. She glared at him.

  “Whaddaya want to eat?” said Vogel. “I’ll order for you.”

  “Nothing. A bowl of tomato soup. Some chicken paillard.”

  “Some wine?”

  “No. Well. Just a glass.”

  The coin telephone was in a vestibule across from the hatcheck room, where a pretty girl sat on a high stool reading a book. Her eyes peeked out from a sinister black ellipse carefully drawn around her eyelids. Fallow rang up Frank de Pietro, the city editor of The City Light. De Pietro was one of the few Americans in an important editorial position on the newspaper. They needed someone from New York as city editor. The other Englishmen who worked there, like Fallow himself, were acquainted with a single stretch of Manhattan from the trendy restaurants in TriBeCa on the south to the trendy restaurants in Yorkville, near Eighty-sixth Street, on the north. The rest of New York might as well have been Damascus.

  “Yeah?” The voice of Frank de Pietro. His enthusiasm over having a call from Peter Fallow at a busy time of the day was imperceptible.

  “Frank,” said Fallow, “are you familiar with a place called the Edgar Allan Poe projects?”

  “Yeah. Are you?”

  Fallow didn’t know which was more unpleasant, this Yank habit of saying yeah for yes, or the incredulity in the man’s voice. Nevertheless, he plowed on, telling Albert Vogel’s story with embellishments, where needed, and with no mention of Albert Vogel. He left the impression that he had already been in touch with Reverend Bacon and the victim’s mother, and that his imminent appearance in the Bronx was awaited by one and all. De Pietro told him to go ahead and check it out. This he did with no particular enthusiasm, either. And yet Fallow felt his heart fill with a quite unexpected joy.

  When he returned to the table, Vogel said, “Hey, how’d it go? Your soup’s getting cold.” The words barely made it out of his mouth, which was crammed full of food.

  A large bowl of tomato soup and a glass of white wine were at Fallow’s place. Vogel was busy working on a hideous-looking joint of veal.

  “They like it, hunh?”

  “Ummmmmm.” Well, they don’t despise it, thought Fallow. His nausea began withdrawing. The yolk grew smaller. A crisp exhilaration, not unlike that of an athlete entering the fray, stole into his nervous system. He felt…almost clean. It was the emotion, never commented upon by the poets, enjoyed by those who feel that, for once, they are earning their pay.

  It was Kramer’s turn to wear the beeper on his waistband for twelve hours. In the Homicide Bureau of the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, somebody, some assistant district attorney, was on call at all times. The purpose was to have someone to go to crime scenes immediately, to interview witnesses before they vanished or lost the urge to talk about the mayhem. For those twelve hours an assistant D.A. was likely to get stuck with every piece a shit in the Bronx that involved a homicide, and it was a classic Bronx piece a shit that had brought Kramer here to this precinct house. A black detective sergeant named Gordon was standing near the booking desk giving him the details.

  “They call the guy Pimp,” said Gordon, “but he’s not a pimp. He’s a gambler, mainly, and he probably does some dealing in drugs, but he dresses like a pimp. You’ll see him in a minute. He’s back there in the locker room wearing some kind of trick suit with a double-breasted vest.” Gordon shook his head. “He’s sitting on the edge of a chair eating ribs, holding them like this”—he leaned forward and raised his hand in a dainty gesture—“so the sauce won’t get on the suit. He had about forty suits, and when he tells you about those fucking suits, you’ll think it was his fucking child that’s missing.”

  The whole thing had happened because someone had stolen the forty suits. Oh, this was a real piece a shit. Waves and waves of childishness and pointless violence, and Kramer hadn’t even heard the whole story yet.

  The main room of the precinct was saturated with the dank and oddly sweet smell of rotting wood, caused by decades of steam radiators leaking onto the floors. Most of the floor had been replaced with concrete. The walls were painted Government Work Green except for an old battered tongue-and-groove wainscoting, three feet high, around the bottom. The building had thick walls and high ceilings, now overgrown with trays of fluorescent lights. Across the way Kramer could see the backs of the two patrolmen. Their hips were enormous with weaponry and paraphernalia, including flashlights, summons books, walkie-talkies, and handcuffs. One of them kept lifting his hands in explanatory gestures to two women and a man, local residents, whose faces said they didn’t believe a word of it.

  Gordon was telling Kramer: “So he’s in this apartment, and there’s four guys in the
re, and one of them is this André Potts, who he figures knows who took the suits, only André says he don’t know nothing from nothing, and they’re going back and forth, and finally André’s had enough of this, and he gets up and walks out of the room. And so what would you do if some disrespectful sucker got up and turned his back on you while you’re inquiring about your fucking forty suits? You’d shoot him in the back, right? So that’s what Pimp did. He shot Mr. André Potts in the back three times with a .38.”

  “You got witnesses?” asked Kramer.

  “Oh, we got ‘em stacked up.”

  At that moment the beeper went off on Kramer’s waistband.

  “Can I use your phone?”

  Gordon motioned toward an open door that led into the Detective Bureau, which was an office off the main room. Inside were three dismal Government Work Gray metal desks. At each desk sat a black man in his thirties or forties. Each had on Bronx street garb a bit too funky to be true. Kramer thought of how unusual it was to come across an entire bureau made up of black detectives. The one at the desk nearest the door wore a black thermal vest and a sleeveless black T-shirt that showed off his powerful arms.

  Kramer reached toward the telephone on his desk and said, “Use your phone?”

  “Hey, what the fuck, man!”

  Kramer pulled his hand back.

  “How long I gotta sit here chained up like a fucking animal?”

  With that, the man raised his powerful left arm with a terrific clattering. There was a manacle on his wrist, and from the manacle a chain. The other end of the chain was manacled to the leg of the desk. Now the other two, at the other desks, had their arms up in the air, clattering and yammering. All three of them were chained to the desks.

  “All I did was see the motherfucker whack that sucker, and he was the motherfucker that whacked that sucker, and I’m the one you got chained up like a fucking animal, and that motherfucker”—another terrific clatter as he gestured toward a room in the rear with his left hand—“he’s sitting back there watching fucking TV and eating ribs.”

  Kramer looked to the back of the room, and sure enough, back there in a locker room was a figure sitting on the edge of a chair lit by the hectic flush of the television set and eating a length of barbecued rib of pork. And he was indeed leaning forward daintily. The sleeve of his jacket was tailored to show a lot of white cuff and gleaming cuff link.

  Now all three were yammering. Fucking ribs…fucking chains!…fucking TV!

  But of course! The witnesses. Once Kramer realized that, everything, chains and all, fell into place.

  “Yeah, okay, okay,” he said to the man in an impatient fashion, “I’ll take care a you in a minute. I gotta make a phone call.”

  Fucking ribs!…shee-uh!…fucking chains!

  Kramer called the office, and Gloria, Bernie Fitzgibbon’s secretary, said Milt Lubell wanted to talk to him. Lubell was Abe Weiss’s press secretary. Kramer barely knew Lubell; he couldn’t remember talking to him more than four or five times. Gloria gave him Lubell’s number.

  Milt Lubell had worked on the old New York Mirror back when Walter Winchell still had his column. He had known the great man ever so slightly and had carried his breathless snap-brim way of talking onward into the last days of the twentieth century.

  “Kramer,” he said, “Kramer, Kramer, lemme see, Kramer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I got it. The case of Henry Lamb. Likely to die. What’s it amount to?”

  “It’s a piece a shit,” said Kramer.

  “Well, I got a query from The City Light, some Brit named Fallow. Guy’s got this accent. I thought I was listening to Channel 13. Anyway, he’s reading me a statement from Reverend Bacon about the case of Henry Lamb. That’s all I need. The words of Reverend Reginald Bacon in a British accent. You know Bacon?”

  “Yeah,” said Kramer. “I interviewed Henry Lamb’s mother in Bacon’s office.”

  “This guy has something from her, too, but mainly it’s Bacon. Lemme see, lemme see, lemme see. It says, uh…blah blah blah, blah blah blah…human life in the Bronx…malfeasance…white middle class…blah blah blah…nuclear magnetic resonance…Goes on about the nuclear magnetic resonance. There’s maybe two a the fucking machines in the whole country, I think…blah blah blah…Lemme see, here it is. He accuses the district attorney of dragging his feet. We won’t go to the trouble of proceeding with the case because the kid is a black youth from the Poe projects and it’s too much trouble.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Well, I know that, and you know that, but I gotta call this Brit back and tell him something.”

  A tremendous clatter. “How long I gotta sit here in these chains, man!” The man with the big arms was erupting again. “This is against the law!”

  “Hey!” said Kramer, genuinely annoyed. “You wanna get outta here, you’ll knock it off. I can’t fucking hear myself talk.” Then to Lubell: “Sorry, I’m over at the precinct.” He wrapped his hand around his mouth and the mouthpiece of the telephone and said in a low voice: “They got three homicide witnesses over here chained to the fucking desk legs in the Detective Bureau, and they’re going bananas.” He enjoyed the low-level macho jolt of trotting out this little war story for Lubell, even though he didn’t even know the man.

  “The desk legs!” said Lubell, with an appreciative note. “Jesus Christ, that I never heard of.”

  “Anyway,” said Kramer, “where was I? Okay, we got a Mercedes-Benz with a license plate beginning with R. For a start, we don’t even know if we’re talking about a New York State license plate. Okay? That’s for a start. But let’s suppose we are. There’s 2,500 Mercedes registered in New York State with license plates starting with R. Okay, now, the second letter supposedly looks like an E or an F, or maybe a P or a B or an R, some letter with a vertical on the left and some horizontals going off of it. Suppose we go with that. We’re still talking about almost five hundred cars. So whaddaya do? Go after five hundred cars? If you have a witness who can tell you the boy was hit by such a car, maybe you do. But there’s no witness, except for the kid, and he’s in a coma and isn’t coming out. We got no information about a driver. All we have is two people in a car, two white people, a man and a woman, and on top of that the kid’s story don’t add up in the first place.”

  “Well, whadda I say? The investigation is continuing?”

  “Yeah. The investigation is continuing. But unless Martin finds a witness, there’s no case here. Even if the kid was hit by a car, it probably wasn’t the kind of collision that would yield forensic evidence from the car, because the kid don’t have the bodily injuries that are consistent with such a collision—I mean, f’r Chrissake, there are so many fucking ifs in this cockamamie story. If you ask me, it’s a piece a shit. The kid seems like a decent sort, and so does his mother, but between you and me, I think he got in some kind of scrape and made up this bullshit story to tell his mother.”

  “Well then, why would he dream up part of a license plate? Why wouldn’t he say he didn’t get the number?”

  “How do I know? Why does anybody do anything that they do in this county? You think this guy, this reporter, is actually gonna write something?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just gonna say that naturally we’re following the thing closely.”

  “Anybody else called you about it?”

  “Naw. It sounds like Bacon reached this guy some way.”

  “What does Bacon get out of it?”

  “Oh, this is one of the hobby horses he rides. The double standard, white justice, blah blah blah. He’s always out to embarrass the Mayor.”

  “Well,” said Kramer, “if he can make something out of this piece a shit, then he’s a magician.”

  By the time Kramer hung up, the three shackled witnesses were clattering and complaining again. With a heavy heart he realized he was actually going to have to sit down and talk to these three germs and get something coherent out of them about a man named Pimp who shot a man who knew a man who may or
may not have known the whereabouts of forty suits. His entire Friday night was going to get shot in the ass, and he would have to shoot dice with Fate and ride the subway back down to Manhattan. He looked back into the locker room once more. That very vision himself, that Gentleman’s Quarterly cover boy, the man named Pimp, was still back there, eating ribs and hugely enjoying something on the TV, which lit up his face in tones of first-degree-burn pink and cobalt-therapy blue.

  Kramer stepped outside the Detective Bureau and said to Gordon: “Your witnesses are getting kinda restless in there. That one guy wants to wrap his chain around my throat.”

  “I had to put the chain on him.”

  “I know that. But lemme ask you something. This fellow Pimp, he’s just sitting back there eating ribs. He’s not chained to anything.”

  “Oh, I’m not worried about Pimp. He’s not going anywhere. He’s cooling out. He’s contented. This crummy neighborhood is all he knows. I bet he don’t know New York is on the Atlantic Ocean. He’s a home boy. No, he’s not going anywhere. He’s only the perpetrator. But a witness—hey, baby, if I didn’t put the chain on the witness, you wouldn’t have no-o-o-o-o-body to interview. You’d never see his ass again. A fucking witness’ll cut out for Santo Domingo faster’n you can say off-peak fare.”

  Kramer headed back to the Detective Bureau to do his duty and interview the three irate citizens in chains and try to find some order in this latest piece a shit.

  Since The City Light published no Sunday newspaper, there was only a skeleton crew in the city room on Saturday afternoons. Most of them were wire-copy editors, scavenging through the material that continued to come stuttering and shuddering out of the Associated Press and United Press International machines for items that might be of use for Monday’s edition. There were three reporters in the city room, plus one down at Manhattan Central Police Headquarters, in case there occurred some catastrophe or piece of mayhem so gory that The City Light’s readers would still want to lap it up on Monday. There was a lone assistant city editor, who spent most of the afternoon on the telephone, making sales calls on the City Light’s WATS line, for a sideline of his, which was selling college fraternity jewelry, wholesale, to fraternity house managers, who sold the stuff, the tie tacks and rings and pledge pins and whatnot, to the brothers at retail and kept the difference for themselves. The boredom and lassitude of these sentinels of the press could scarcely be exaggerated.