The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  Freddy must have sensed his irritation, because he broke off his story and said, “Well—you said something happened with you and your car.”

  “Unfortunately, you can read about it, Freddy.” Sherman opened his attaché case and took out the Pierce & Pierce interoffice envelope and withdrew the copy of The City Light and folded it back to page 3 and handed it across the desk. “The piece at the bottom of the page.”

  Freddy took the newspaper with his left hand, and with his right he put the cigarette out in a Lalique ashtray with a lion’s head sculpted on the rim. He reached toward a white silk handkerchief that debouched carelessly, voluptuously, from the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Then he put the newspaper down and put the glasses on with both hands. From his inside breast pocket he took out a silver-and-ivory cigarette case, opened it, and removed a cigarette from under a silver clip. He tamped it on the outside of the case, lit it with a slender fluted silver lighter, then picked up the newspaper and commenced reading; or reading and smoking. With his eyes fixed on the newspaper, he brought the cigarette to his lips in the candle position, between his thumb and forefinger, took a deep drag, twirled his fingers and—bingo!—the cigarette popped out between the knuckles of his forefinger and middle finger. Sherman was amazed. How had he done it? Then he was furious. He turns into a tobacco acrobat—in the middle of my crisis!

  Freddy finished the article and laid the cigarette in the Lalique ashtray with great care and took off his glasses and tucked them back beneath the lustrous silk handkerchief and picked up the cigarette again and took another profound drag on it.

  Sherman, spitting the words out: “That’s my car you just read about.”

  The anger in his voice startled Freddy. Gingerly, as if tiptoeing, he said: “You have a Mercedes with a license number that starts with R? R-something?”

  “Exactly.” With a hiss.

  Freddy, befuddled: “Well…why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  Not until Freddy said those words did Sherman realize that…he was dying to! He was dying to confess—to someone! Anyone! Even this nicotine Turnvereiner, this homosexual fop who was a partner of his father! He had never looked at Freddy with such clarity before. He could see him. Freddy was the sort of willowy wand of charm into whose office a Wall Street firm of the Dunning Sponget magnitude shunted all the widows and legacies, such as himself, who were presumed to have more money than problems. Yet he was the only confessor available.

  “I have a friend named Maria Ruskin,” he said. “She’s the wife of a man named Arthur Ruskin, who’s made a lot of money doing God knows what.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” said Freddy, nodding.

  “I’ve—” Sherman stopped. He didn’t know quite how to word it. “I’ve been seeing a bit of Mrs. Ruskin.” He pursed his lips and stared at Freddy. The unspoken message was “Yes; precisely; it’s the usual sordid case of cheap lust.”

  Freddy nodded.

  Sherman hesitated again, then plunged on into the details of the automobile ride into the Bronx. He studied Freddy’s face for signs of disapproval or—worse!—enjoyment! He detected nothing but a friendly concern punctuated by smoke rings. Sherman no longer resented him, however. Such relief! The vile poison was gushing out! My confessor!

  As he told his tale, he was aware of something else: an irrational joy. He was the main character in an exciting story. All over again he took pride—stupid pride!—in having fought in the jungle and triumphed. He was on stage. He was the star! Freddy’s expression had progressed from friendly and concerned…to entranced…

  “And so here I am,” Sherman said, finally. “I can’t figure out what to do. I wish I’d gone straight to the police when it happened.”

  Freddy leaned back in his chair and looked away and took a drag on his cigarette, then turned back and gave Sherman a reassuring smile.

  “Well, from what you’ve told me, you’re not responsible for the injury to the young man.” As he spoke, inhaled smoke came out of his mouth in faint jets. Sherman hadn’t seen anyone do that for years. “You may have some obligation, as the owner of the vehicle, to report the incident, and there may be the question of leaving the scene of the accident. I’d have to look up the statute. I suppose they could develop an assault charge, for throwing the tire, but I don’t think it would hold up, since you clearly had reason to believe your life was in danger. In fact, this really isn’t as unusual a circumstance as you might think. Do you know Clinton Danforth?”

  “No.”

  “He’s the chairman of the board of Danco. I represented him in a suit against the Triple A. The Automobile Club of New York was the actual entity, I believe. He and his wife—you’ve never seen Clinton?”

  Seen him? “No.”

  “Very proper. Looks like one of those capitalists the cartoonists used to draw, with the silk topper. Anyway, one night Clinton and his wife were driving home—” Now he was off on some story about the car of this illustrious client of his breaking down in Ozone Park, Queens. Sherman sifted the words for some little nugget of hope. Then it dawned on him that this was merely Freddy’s charm reflex at work. The essence of the social charmer was having a story, preferably with Fat Names in it, to fit every subject. In a quarter century of law practice, this was probably the only case Freddy ever handled that even touched the streets of New York.

  “…a black man with a police dog on a leash—”

  “Freddy.” Sherman, hissing again. “I don’t care about your fat friend Danforth.”

  “What?” Freddy, befuddled and shocked.

  “I haven’t got time for it. I have a problem.”

  “Oh, listen. Please. Forgive me.” Freddy spoke softly, warily; also sadly, the way you might talk to a lunatic who was heating up. “Really, I was only trying to show you—”

  “Never mind showing me. Put out that cigarette and tell me what you think.”

  Without taking his eyes off Sherman’s face, Freddy put out the cigarette in the Lalique ashtray. “All right, I’ll tell you exactly what I think.”

  “I don’t mean to be abrupt, Freddy, but Jesus Christ.”

  “I know, Sherman.”

  “Please smoke if you want to, but let’s stick to the point.”

  The hands fluttered up to indicate that smoking wasn’t important.

  “All right,” said Freddy, “here’s what I see. I think you’re in the clear on the major issue here, which is the personal injury. You might conceivably be at risk of a felony charge for leaving the scene and not notifying the police. As I say, I’ll research that. But I think that’s not too serious a proposition, assuming we can establish the sequence of events as you’ve outlined them to me.”

  “What do you mean, ‘establish’?”

  “Well, the thing that worries me about this newspaper story is that it’s so far off from the facts as you’ve given them to me.”

  “Oh, I know it!” said Sherman. “There’s no mention of the other—the other fellow, the one who first approached me. There’s not one word about the barricade or even the ramp. They’re saying it happened on Bruckner Boulevard. It didn’t happen on Bruckner Boulevard or any other boulevard. They’re making out that this boy, this…honor student…this black saint…was walking across the street, minding his own business, and some white bigot in a ‘luxury car’ comes along and runs him down and keeps going. It’s lunacy! They keep calling it a ‘luxury car,’ and all it is, is a Mercedes. Christ, a Mercedes is like a Buick used to be.”

  Freddy’s arch of the eyebrows said, “Not precisely.” But Sherman pressed on.

  “Let me ask you this, Freddy. Does the fact that”—he started to say “Maria Ruskin” but didn’t want to appear to be anxious to lay off blame—“the fact that I wasn’t driving when the boy was hit, does that put me in the clear legally?”

  “So far as the injury to the young man is concerned, it seems to me. Again, I’d want to review the statutes. But let me ask you some
thing. What is your friend Mrs. Ruskin’s version of what happened?”

  “Her version?”

  “Yes. How does she say this fellow got hit? Does she say she was driving?”

  “Does she say she was driving? She was driving.”

  “Yes, but let’s suppose she sees some possibility of a felony charge if she says she was driving.”

  Sherman was speechless for a moment. “Well, I can’t imagine she would…” Lie was the word he meant to say but didn’t, for in fact it was not utterly beyond the realm of the imagination. The notion shocked him. “Well…all I can tell you is that every time we’ve talked about it, she’s said the same thing. She’s always used the expression ‘After all, I was the one who was driving.’ When I first suggested going to the police, right after it happened, that was what she said. ‘I was the one who was driving. So it’s up to me to decide.’ I mean, I guess anything can happen, but…God almighty.”

  “I’m not trying to sow doubt, Sherman. I just want to make sure you know that she may be the only person who can corroborate your version of this thing—and at some risk to herself.”

  Sherman sank back in his chair. The voluptuous warrior who had fought beside him in the jungle and then, glistening, made love to him on the floor…

  “So if I go to the police now,” he said, “and I tell them what happened, and she doesn’t back me up, then I’m worse off than I am now.”

  “It’s a possibility. Look, I’m not suggesting she won’t back you up. I just want you to be aware of…where you stand.”

  “What do you think I should do, Freddy?”

  “Who have you talked to about this?”

  “No one. Just you.”

  “How about Judy?”

  “No. Least of all Judy, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Well, for the time being you shouldn’t talk to anybody about it, probably not even Judy, unless you feel compelled to. Even then, you should impress upon her the need to keep absolutely quiet about it. You’d be amazed at how the things you say can be picked up and turned against you, if someone wants to do it. I’ve seen it happen too many times.”

  Sherman doubted that, but he merely nodded.

  “In the meantime, with your permission, I’m going to talk this situation over with another lawyer I know, a fellow who works in this area all the time.”

  “Not somebody here at Dunning Sponget—”

  “No.”

  “Because I’d hate to have this thing kicking around the halls here at this goddamned place.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s another firm entirely.”

  “What firm?”

  “It’s called Dershkin, Bellavita, Fishbein & Schlossel.”

  The torrent of syllables was like a bad smell.

  “What kind of firm is that?”

  “Oh, they have a general practice, but they’re best known for their work in criminal law.”

  “Criminal law?”

  Freddy smiled faintly. “Don’t worry. Criminal lawyers help people who aren’t criminals, too. We’ve used this fellow before. His name is Thomas Killian. He’s very bright. He’s about your age. He went to Yale, as a matter of fact, or at least he went to the law school. He’s the only Irishman who ever graduated from the Yale Law School, and he’s the only graduate of the Yale Law School who ever practiced criminal law. I’m exaggerating, of course.”

  Sherman sank back into the chair again and tried to let the term criminal law sink in. Seeing that he was once more The Lawyer with the upper hand, Freddy took out the silver-and-ivory case, eased a Senior Service from under the silver clip, tamped it, lit up, and inhaled with profound satisfaction.

  “I want to see what he thinks,” said Freddy, “particularly since, judging by this newspaper story, this case is taking on political overtones. Tommy Killian can give us a much better reading on that than I can.”

  “Dershkin, Something & Schloffel?”

  “Dershkin, Bellavita, Fishbein & Schlossel,” said Freddy. “Three Jews and an Italian, and Tommy Killian is an Irishman. Let me tell you something, Sherman. The practice of law gets very specialized in New York. It’s as if there are a lot of little…clans…of trolls…I’ll give you an example. If I was being sued in an automobile negligence case, I wouldn’t want anybody at Dunning Sponget representing me. I’d go to one of these lawyers on lower Broadway who don’t do anything else. They’re the absolute bottom of the barrel of the legal profession. They’re all Bellavitas and Schlossels. They’re crude, coarse, sleazy, unappetizing—you can’t even imagine what they’re like. But that’s who I’d go to. They know all the judges, all the clerks, the other lawyers—they know how to make the deals. If somebody named Bradshaw or Farnsworth showed up from Dunning Sponget & Leach, they’d freeze him out. They’d sabotage him. It’s the same way with criminal law. The criminal lawyers aren’t exactly the bout en train, either, but in certain cases you’ve got to use them. Given that situation, Tommy Killian is a very good choice.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Sherman. Of all the things Freddy had said, only the words criminal law had stuck.

  “Don’t look so gloomy, Sherman!”

  Criminal law.

  When he returned to the bond trading floor at Pierce & Pierce, the sales assistant, Muriel, gave him a dour look.

  “Where were you, Sherman? I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “I was—” He started to repeat the lie, with improvements, but the look on her face told him it would only make things worse. “Okay, what’s wrong?”

  “An issue came in just after you left, 200 million Fidelity Mutuals. So I called over to Polsek and Fragner, but you weren’t there, and they said they weren’t even expecting you. Arnold’s not happy, Sherman. He wants to see you.”

  “I’ll go see him.” He turned away and started toward the desk.

  “Wait a second,” said Muriel. “This fellow in Paris has been trying to get you, too. He’s called about four times. Mr. Levy. Said you were supposed to call him back. Said to tell you ninety-three is it. ‘Final,’ he said. He said you’d know what he meant.”

  13.The Day-Glo Eel

  Kramer and the two detectives, Martin and Goldberg, arrived at the Edgar Allan Poe Towers in an unmarked Dodge sedan about 4:15. The demonstration was scheduled for five o’clock. The housing project had been designed during the Green Grass era of slum eradication. The idea had been to build apartment towers upon a grassy landscape where the young might gambol and the old might sit beneath shade trees, along sinuous footpaths. In fact, the gamboling youth broke off, cut down, or uprooted the shade-tree seedlings during the first month, and any old person fool enough to sit along the sinuous footpaths was in for the same treatment. The project was now a huge cluster of grimy brick towers set on a slab of cinders and stomped dirt. With the green wooden slats long gone, the concrete supports of the benches looked like ancient ruins. The ebb and flow of the city, caused by the tides of human labor, didn’t cause a ripple at the Edgar Allan Poe Towers, where the unemployment rate was at least 75 percent. The place was no livelier at 4:15 P.M. than it was at noon. Kramer couldn’t spy a soul, except for a small pack of male teenagers scurrying past the graffiti at the base of the buildings. The graffiti looked halfhearted. The grimy brick, with all its mortar gulleys, depressed even the spray-can juvies.

  Martin slowed the car down to a crawl. They were on the main drag, out in front of Building A, where the demonstration was supposed to be held. The block was empty, except for a gangling teenager out in the middle of the street working on the wheel of a car. The car, a red Camaro, was nosed into a parking space along the curb. The rear end stuck out into the street. The boy wore black jeans, a black T-shirt, and striped sneakers. He was sitting on his haunches with a lug wrench in his hands.

  Martin stopped the car barely ten feet from him and shut off the engine. The boy, still on his haunches, stared at the Dodge. Martin and Goldberg were in the front seat, and Kramer was in the back. Martin and Goldber
g just sat there, looking straight ahead. Kramer couldn’t imagine what they were doing. Then Martin got out. He was wearing a tan windbreaker, a polo shirt, and a pair of cheap-looking gray pants. He walked over to the boy and stood over him and said, “Whaddaya doing?” He didn’t say it nicely, either.

  Baffled, the boy said, “Nothing. Fixing a hubcap.”

  “Fixing a hubcap?” asked Martin, his voice sopping with insinuation.

  “Yehhhhhhh…”

  “You always park like this, out inna middle a the fucking street?”

  The boy stood up. He was well over six feet tall. He had long muscular arms and powerful hands, one of which was holding the lug wrench. His mouth open, he stared down at Martin, who suddenly looked like a dwarf. Martin’s narrow shoulders seemed nonexistent under the windbreaker. He wore no badge or any other police insignia. Kramer couldn’t believe what he was watching. Here they were in the South Bronx, thirty minutes away from a demonstration protesting the shortcomings of White Justice, and Martin throws down the gauntlet to a black youth twice his size with a lug wrench in his hand.

  Martin cocked his head to one side and stared into the boy’s incredulous face without so much as a blink. The boy apparently found it exceedingly strange, too, because he didn’t move or say anything, either. Now he glanced at the Dodge and found himself staring into the big meaty face of Goldberg, with its slits for eyes and its drooping black mustache. Then he looked at Martin again and put on a brave and angry face.