The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  Vogel had managed to find a waiter and order some beer. He also asked for some chopsticks. The Huan Li was so frankly commercial and unconcerned about authenticity, they set the tables with ordinary hotel silverware. How very American it was to assume that these unsmiling Chinese would be pleased if one showed a preference for their native implements…How very American it was to feel somehow guilty unless one struggled over rice noodles and lumps of meat with things that looked like enlarged knitting needles. While chasing some sort of slippery little dumpling around a bowl, Vogel said to Fallow, “Well, Pete, tell the truth. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you this was gonna be a great story?”

  That wasn’t what Fallow wanted to hear. He didn’t want to hear that the story, the Lamb case itself, was great. So he only nodded.

  Vogel must have picked up this brain wave, because then he said: “You’ve really started something. You’ve got this whole town talking. The stuff you’ve written—it’s dynamite, Pete, dynamite.”

  Suitably flattered, Fallow now suffered a spasm of gratitude. “I must admit I was skeptical the first time we spoke. But you were correct.” He lifted his glass of beer as if making a toast.

  Vogel lowered his chin practically into the bowl in order to gobble up the dumpling before it squirted out from between the tips of the chopsticks. “And the great thing, Pete, is that this isn’t just one of those passing sensations. This thing gets down to the very structure of the city itself, the class structure, the racial structure, the way the system is put together. That’s why it means so much to Reverend Bacon. He’s really grateful for what you’ve done.”

  Fallow resented these reminders of Bacon’s proprietary interest in the story. Like most journalists who have been handed a story, Fallow was eager to persuade himself that he had discovered and breathed life into this clay himself.

  “He was telling me,” Vogel continued, “he was saying how he was amazed—you’re from England, Pete, but you come here and you put your finger right on the central issue, which is how much is a human life worth. Is a black life worth less than a white life? That’s what makes this thing important.”

  Fallow floated in the syrup for a while and then began to wonder where this disquisition was leading.

  “But there’s one aspect of this thing it seems to me you might hit a little harder, and I was talking to Reverend Bacon about this.”

  “Oh?” said Fallow. “What’s that?”

  “The hospital, Pete. So far the hospital has gotten off kind of easy, considering. They say they’re ‘investigating’ how this kid could come in with a subdural concussion and just get treated for a broken wrist, but you know what they’re gonna do. They’re gonna try to waffle out of it.”

  “That may very well be,” said Fallow, “but they maintain that Lamb never told them he’d been struck by a car.”

  “The kid was probably already half out of his head, Pete! That’s precisely what they shoulda detected—his general condition! That’s what I mean about a black life and a white life. No, I think it’s time to come down hard on the hospital. And this is a good time to do it. The story has died down a little bit, because the cops haven’t found the car and the driver.”

  Fallow said nothing. He resented being steered like this. Then he said, “I’ll think it over. It seems to me they’ve made a rather complete statement, but I’ll think it over.”

  Vogel said, “Well, now, Pete, I wanna be completely open with you. Bacon has already been in touch with Channel 1 about this angle, but you’ve been our—our main man, as the saying goes, and we’d like to see you stay out in the lead on this story.”

  Your main man! What an odious presumption! But he hesitated to let Vogel know how offensive it was. He said, “What is this cozy connection between Bacon and Channel 1?”

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “He gave them an exclusive on the first demonstration.”

  “Well—that’s true, Pete. I’m gonna be completely open with you. How did you know about that?”

  “Their whatever you call it, anchorman, told me. Corso.”

  “Ah. Well, the thing is, you gotta work that way. TV news is all PR. Every day the TV news operations wait for PR people to submit menus of things they can film, and then they choose a few. The trick is to know how to appeal to them. They’re not very enterprising. They feel a lot better if they’ve seen something in print first.”

  “In The City Light, just to cite a possible example,” said Fallow.

  “Well—that’s true. I’m gonna be completely out front with you, Pete. You’re a real journalist. When these TV channels see a real journalist on to something, they hop to it.”

  Fallow sat back and took a leisurely draught of beer in the doldrum gloaming of the Huan Li. Yes, his next coup would be a story exposing television news for what it really was. But for now he would forget that. The way the television news people came running in his footsteps on the Lamb case—nothing had ever made him look quite so good.

  Within a few minutes he had worked it out in his mind that a story on the hospital’s negligence was nothing more than the natural next step. He would have thought of that on his own, inevitably, with or without this ridiculous Yank and his chubby face, pinky-winky as could be.

  Today’s sandwiches came to Jimmy Caughey, Ray Andriutti, and Larry Kramer from the State of New York, courtesy of the Willie Francisco case. It had taken Judge Meldnick a mere four days to ask around and find out what his opinion was of Willie’s petition for a mistrial, and this morning he had given it. He declared a mistrial, based on the fat old Irish juror McGuigan’s attack of the doubts. But since the day had begun with the trial technically still in progress, Bernie Fitzgibbon’s secretary, Gloria, was entitled duly to order the sandwiches.

  Ray was once more lunging across his desk eating a super-sub and drinking his vat of yellow coffee. Kramer was eating a roast beef that tasted like chemicals. Jimmy was scarcely touching his. He was still moaning over the disintegration of such an easy one. He had an outstanding record. The Homicide Bureau kept actual standings, like baseball standings, showing how many guilty pleas and guilty verdicts each assistant district attorney had scored, and Jimmy Caughey hadn’t lost a case in two years. His anger had now developed into an intense hatred of Willie Francisco and the vileness of his deed, which to Andriutti and Kramer sounded like just another piece a shit. It was strange to see Jimmy in this state. Ordinarily he had the black Irish coolness of Fitzgibbon himself.

  “I’ve seen this happen before,” he said. “You put these germs on trial, and they think they’re stars. You see Willie in there jumping up and down and yelling ‘Mistrial’?”

  Kramer nodded yes.

  “Now he’s a legal expert. In fact, he’s one a the stupidest fucks ever went on trial in Bronx County. I told Bietelberg two days ago that if Meldnick declared a mistrial—and I mean, he had to declare a mistrial—we were willing to make a deal. We’d reduce the charge from murder two to manslaughter one, just to avoid another trial. But no. He’s too shrewd for that, Willie is. He takes this as an admission of defeat. He thinks he has a power over juries or something. On retrial he’s gonna go down like a fucking stone. Twelve and a half to twenty-five he’s gonna get himself, instead of three to six or four to eight.”

  Ray Andriutti gave up whaling down his super-sub long enough to say, “Maybe he’s smart, Jimmy. If he takes a plea, he’s going to jail for sure. With a fucking Bronx jury, it’s a roll of the dice every time. You hear what happened yesterday?”

  “What.”

  “This doctor from out in Montauk?”

  “No.”

  “This doctor, I mean he’s some local doctor out in Montauk, probably never laid eyes on the Bronx before. He has a patient with some esoteric tropical disease. The guy’s very sick, and the hospital out there don’t think they can handle it, but there’s this hospital in Westchester with some kind of special unit for this stuff. So the doctor arranges for an ambulance for the guy and
gets on the ambulance with him and rides all the way to Westchester with the guy, and the guy dies in the emergency room in Westchester. So the family brings suit against the doctor for malpractice. But where do they bring suit? In Montauk? Westchester? No way. The Bronx.”

  “How can they bring suit here?” asked Kramer.

  “The fucking ambulance had to go up the Major Deegan to get to Westchester. So their lawyer comes up with the theory that the malpractice occurs in the Bronx, and that’s where they had the trial. Eight million dollars they were awarded. The jury came in yesterday. Now there’s a lawyer who knows his geography.”

  “Aw hell,” said Jimmy Caughey, “I bet you every negligence lawyer in America knows about the Bronx. In a civil case a Bronx jury is a vehicle for redistributing the wealth.”

  A Bronx jury…And all at once Kramer was no longer thinking of the same cluster of dark faces that Ray and Jimmy were thinking of…He was thinking of those perfect smiling teeth and those sweet full lips glistening with brown lipstick and those shining eyes across a little table in the very heart of…the Life…which existed only in Manhattan…Jesus…He was broke after he paid the bill at Muldowny’s…but when he hailed her a cab out in front of the place and he held out his hand to thank her and say goodbye, she let her hand stay in his, and he increased the pressure, and she squeezed back, and they stayed that way, looking into each other’s eyes, and—God!—that moment was sweeter, sexier, more full of—goddamn it!—love, genuine love, the love that just hits you and…fills up your heart…than any of those slam-bang first-date scores he used to pride himself on when he was out prowling like a goddamned cat…No, he would forgive Bronx juries a lot. A Bronx jury had brought into his life the woman he had been destined to meet all along…Love, Destiny, How Full My Heart…Let others shrink from the meaning of those terms…Ray whaling down his super-sub, Jimmy grousing morosely about Willie Francisco and Lester McGuigan…Larry Kramer existed on a more spiritual plane…

  Ray’s telephone rang. He picked it up and said, “Homicide…Unnh-hunnh…Bernie’s not here…The Lamb case? Kramer…Larry.” Ray looked at Kramer and pulled a face. “He’s right here. You wanna speak to him?…Okay, just a second.” He covered the mouthpiece and said, “It’s a guy from Legal Aid named Cecil Hayden.”

  Kramer got up from his desk and walked over to Andriutti’s and took the telephone. “Kramer.”

  “Larry, this is Cecil Hayden over at Legal Aid.” A breezy voice this Cecil Hayden had. “You’re handling the Henry Lamb case. Right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Larry, I think the time has come to play Let’s Make a Deal.” Very breezy.

  “What kinda deal?”

  “I represent an individual named Roland Auburn, who was indicted two days ago by a grand jury on a charge of criminal possession and sale of drugs. Weiss put out a press release describing him as the Crack King of Evergreen Avenue. My client was immensely flattered. If you ever saw Evergreen Avenue, you’d ask why. The King is unable to make ten thousand dollars bail and is currently on Rikers Island.”

  “Yeah, well, what’s he got to do with the Lamb case?”

  “He says he was with Henry Lamb when he was hit by the car. He took him to the hospital. He can give you a description of the driver. He wants to make a deal.”

  18. Shuhmun

  Daniel Torres, the fat assistant district attorney from the Supreme Court Bureau, arrived at Kramer’s office with his ten-year-old son in tow and a ditch down the middle of his forehead. He was furious, in a soft fat way, about having to show up at the island fortress on a Saturday morning. He looked even more of a blob than he had the last time Kramer had seen him, which had been in Kovitsky’s courtroom. He wore a plaid sport shirt, a jacket that didn’t have a prayer of closing around his great soft belly, and a pair of slacks from the Linebacker Shop, for the stocky man, in Fresh Meadow that made his underbelly protrude beneath his belt like South America. A glandular case, thought Kramer. His son, on the other hand, was slender and dark with fine features, the shy and sensitive type, by the looks of him. He was carrying a paperback book and a baseball glove. After a quick, bored inspection of the office, he sat in Jimmy Caughey’s chair and began reading the book.

  Torres said, “Wouldn’t you know the Yankees’d be on the road”—he motioned toward Yankee Stadium, just down the hill, with his head—“on the Saturday”—Saddy—“I gotta come over here? This is my weekend with…” Now he motioned his head toward his son. “…and I promised him I’d take him to the ball game, and I promised my ex-wife I’d go to Kiel’s on Springfield Boulevard and get some shrubs and take them to the house, and how I’m gonna get from here over to Springfield Boulevard and then over to Maspeth and then back to Shea in time for the game, I don’t know. Don’t even ask me why I said I’d take the shrubs over to the house.” He shook his head.

  Kramer felt embarrassed for the boy, who appeared to be deep into the book. The title was Woman in the Dunes. As best as Kramer could make out from the cover, the author’s name was Kobo Abé. Feeling curious and sympathetic, he walked over to the boy and said in the warmest Dutch-uncle manner possible, “Whaddaya reading?”

  The boy looked up like a deer caught in a pair of high beams. “It’s a story,” he said. Or that was what his lips said. His eyes said, “Please, please, let me return to the sanctuary of my book.”

  Kramer detected that, but he felt obliged to round out his hospitality.

  “What’s it about?”

  “Japan.” Pleading.

  “Japan? What about Japan?”

  “It’s about a man who gets trapped in some sand dunes.” A very soft voice, pleading, pleading, pleading.

  Judging by its abstract cover and dense print, this was not a child’s book. Kramer, student of the human heart, got an impression of a bright, withdrawn boy, the product of Torres’s Jewish half, who probably looked like his mother and was already estranged from his father. For an instant he thought of his own little son. He tried to imagine having to drag him over here to Gibraltar some Saturday nine or ten years from now. It depressed him profoundly.

  “Well, whaddaya know about Mr. Auburn, Danny?” he asked Torres. “What’s this Crack King of Evergreen Avenue business?”

  “It’s a piece a—” Torres stopped short for the boy’s sake. “It’s a joke, is what it is. Auburn’s—you know, just the usual kid from off the block. This is his third drug arrest. The detective who arrested him called him the Crack King of Evergreen Avenue. He was being sarcastic. Evergreen Avenue is about five blocks long. I don’t even know how Weiss got hold of it. When I saw that press release, I about—I couldn’t believe it. Thank God, nobody paid any attention to it.” Torres looked at his watch. “When are they gonna get here?”

  “They should be here pretty soon,” said Kramer. “Everything’s slower over at Rikers Island on Saturday. How did they happen to catch him?”

  “Well, that’s a screwy thing,” said Torres. “They really caught him twice, but this kid has very big—a lotta nerve, or else he’s very stupid, I don’t know which. About a month ago this undercover cop made a purchase from Auburn and another kid and announced they were under arrest, and so forth, and Auburn told him, ‘If you want me, mother—you’re gonna have to shoot me,’ and he started running. I talked to the cop, Officer Iannucci. He said if the kid hadn’t been black, in a black neighborhood, he would’ve shot him or shot at him, anyhow. A week ago he brought him in, the same cop.”

  “What’s he looking at if he’s convicted of a sale?”

  “Two to four, maybe.”

  “You know anything about his lawyer, this Hayden?”

  “Yeah. He’s a black guy.”

  “Really?” Kramer started to say, “He didn’t sound black,” but thought better of it. “You don’t see too many black guys in Legal Aid.”

  “That’s not true. There’s quite a few. A lot of them need the job. You know, these young black lawyers have a rough time. The law schools gr
aduate them, but there aren’t any slots. Downtown—it’s pathetic. They’re always talking about it, but they don’t hire black lawyers, that’s the truth of the matter. So they go into Legal Aid or the 18b pool. Some a them scuffle along with a rinky-dink criminal practice. But the big-time black wiseguys, the drug dealers, they don’t want a black lawyer representing them. The small-timers don’t, either. One time I was in the pens, and this black lawyer from the 18b comes in looking for the client he’s been assigned, and he starts yelling out his name. You know the way they yell out the names in the pens. Anyway, the guy he’s been assigned is black, and he comes walking over to the bars, and he looks this guy in the eye and he says, ‘Get lost, mother—I want a Jew.’ I swear! He says, ‘Get lost, mother—I want a Jew.’ Hayden seems pretty sharp, but I haven’t seen a lot of him.”

  Torres looked at his watch again, and then he looked at the floor in the corner. In no time his thoughts were somewhere out of the room and out of Gibraltar. Kiel’s nursery? The Mets? His ex-marriage? His son was off in Japan with the man trapped in the dunes. Only Kramer was right there in the room. He was keyed up. He was aware of the stillness of the island fortress on this sunny Saturday in June. If only this character, Auburn, turned out to be the real goods, if only he wasn’t too much of the usual mindless player, trying to get some stupid game over on everybody, trying to trim the world, bawling into the void from behind the wire mesh…