by Tom Wolfe
And there, indeed, he was.
The videocassette had just reached the part in the Channel 1 broadcast from last night in which the artist’s drawing showed the scene in the courtroom. The sound was on low, but Kramer could hear the voice of the announcer, Robert Corso, as if he were right inside his skull: “Assistant District Attorney Lawrence Kramer thrust the petition toward Judge Samuel Auerbach and said, ‘Your Honor, the people of the Bronx…’ ” In the drawing, the top of his head was absolutely bald, which was unrealistic and unfair, because he was not bald, he was only balding. Nevertheless, there he was. It was not one of Those People We See on TV. It was himself, and if there was ever a powerful warrior for Justice, it was himself on that screen. His neck, his shoulders, his chest, his arms—they were huge, as if he were heaving the 16-pound shot in the Olympics instead of waving a few pieces of paper at Sammy Auerbach. True, one reason he looked so big was that the drawing was a little out of proportion, but that was probably the way the artist had seen him: Larger Than Life. The artist…What a juicy Italian girl she had been…Lips like nectarines…Nice breasts underneath a shiny silky jersey…Lucy Dellafloria, her name was…If there hadn’t been such commotion and confusion, it would have been the easiest thing in the world. After all, she had sat there in the courtroom concentrating on him, at center stage, absorbed in the look of him, in the passion of his presentation, the confidence of his performance on the field of battle. She had been absorbed as an artist and as a woman…with full Italian Dirty Girl lips…in himself.
All too soon, just like that, the drawing was gone and Weiss was on the screen with a whole forest of microphones sticking up at him. The microphones had been on little metal stands on his desk, for the press conference he gave right after the arraignment. He had given another one this morning. Weiss knew exactly how to keep the focus on himself. Oh yes. The average TV watcher would assume that the show was all Abe Weiss’s and that the assistant district attorney who presented the case in the courtroom, this Larry Kramer, was merely the instrument of Abe Weiss’s gravel-voiced strategic brilliance. Weiss hadn’t actually worked on his feet in a courtroom the whole time he had been in office, which was almost four years. But Kramer didn’t resent that; or not very much. That was the given. That was the way it worked. It was thus in every district attorney’s office, not just Weiss’s. No, on this particular morning Captain Ahab was okay with Kramer. The TV news and the newspapers had featured the name Lawrence Kramer many times, and she, luscious Lucy Dellafloria, sexy Lucy Delicate Flower, had done his portrait and captured the mighty Kramer form. No, it was fine. And Weiss had just gone to the trouble of pointing that out to him, by playing the videocassette. The implicit message was: “All right, I make myself the star, because I run this office and I am the one who has to face reelection. But see, I don’t leave you out. You get the second billing.”
So the two of them watched the rest of the Channel 1 coverage on the television set on the paneled wall. There was Thomas Killian standing outside the Criminal Courts Building with the microphones held up at his face.
“Look at those fucking clothes,” muttered Weiss. “Looks fucking ridiculous.” What crossed Kramer’s mind was how much such clothes must cost.
Killian was going on about how this was a “circus arrest” and a “circus arraignment.” He appeared to be extremely angry.
“We reached an agreement with the district attorney yesterday that Mr. McCoy would present himself for arraignment here in the Bronx, peacefully, voluntarily, this morning, and the district attorney chose to violate that agreement and bring Mr. McCoy in like a violent felon, like an animal—and for what? For your cameras and for votes.”
“Gedoudahere,” Weiss said to the screen.
Killian was saying, “Mr. McCoy not only denies these charges, but he is eager for the facts in this case to come out, and when they come out, you will see that the scenario that is being contrived for this case is utterly without foundation.”
“Blah blah blah,” Weiss said to the screen.
The camera moved to a figure standing just behind Killian. It was McCoy. His tie was loose and pulled to one side. His shirt and jacket were rumpled. His hair was matted. He looked half drowned. His eyes rolled up, toward the sky. He didn’t look all there.
Now Robert Corso’s face was on the screen, and he was talking about McCoy, McCoy, McCoy. It was no longer the Lamb case. It was the McCoy case. The big Wall Street Wasp with the aristocratic profile had given the case some sex appeal. The press couldn’t get enough of it.
Weiss’s desk was covered with newspapers. He still had yesterday afternoon’s City Light right up on top. In enormous letters the front page said:
Wall Street
Socialite
Nabbed In
Hit-And-Run
The words were banked up against a tall narrow picture of McCoy, soaking wet, with his hands in front of him and his suit jacket folded over his hands, obviously to hide his handcuffs. He had his big handsome chin up, and a ferocious scowl beamed straight down his nose at the camera. He looked as if he was saying, “Yeah, and what of it?” Even the Times had the case on the front page this morning, but it was The City Light that was really going wild. The headline this morning said:
Seek
“Foxy”
Brunette
Mystery
Girl
A smaller headline up above said, Team Mercedes: He Hit, She Ran. The picture was the one from the social magazine, W, the one Roland Auburn had pointed to, the one of McCoy in his tuxedo, grinning, and of his wife, looking proper and plain. The caption said, Eyewitness called McCoy’s companion younger, more “foxy,” a “hotter ticket” than his forty-year-old wife, Judy, shown here with hubby at charity bash. A line of white letters on a black bar at the bottom of the page said, Protesters Demand “Jail, Not Bail” for Wall Street Whiz. See page 3. And: Chez McCoy and Chez Lamb: A Tale of Two Cities. Pictures, pages 4 and 5. On pages 4 and 5 were pictures of McCoy’s Park Avenue spread, the ones from Architectural Digest, on one side and pictures of the Lambs’ tiny rooms in the project on the other. A long caption began: Two vastly different New Yorks collided when Wall Street investment banker Sherman McCoy’s $50,000 Mercedes-Benz sports roadster struck honor student Henry Lamb. McCoy lives in a $3 million, 14-room, two-story apartment on Park Avenue. Lamb, in a $247-a-month three-room apartment in a housing project in the South Bronx.
Weiss loved every square inch of the coverage. It had blown all this talk of “white justice” and “Johannesbronx” right out of the tub. They hadn’t managed to jack McCoy’s bail up to $250,000, but they had gone after that aggressively. Aggressively? Kramer smiled. Sammy Auerbach’s eyes had opened up like a pair of umbrellas when he had waved the petition at him. That had been just a shade outrageous, but it had gotten the point across. The Bronx D.A.’s Office was in touch with the people. And they would keep petitioning for higher bail.
No, Weiss was pleased. That was obvious. This was the first time Kramer had ever been summoned into Weiss’s office by himself, without Bernie Fitzgibbon.
Weiss pressed a button, and the television set went blank. He said to Kramer, “Did you see the way McCoy looked standing there? He looked like a fucking mess. Milt said that’s the way he looked when he came in the courtroom yesterday. He said he looked like hell. What was that all about?”
“Well,” said Kramer, “all it was was, it was raining. He got wet while he was standing in line outside of Central Booking. They made him wait in line like everybody else, which was the whole point. Not to give him special treatment.”
“All right,” said Weiss, “but f’r Chrissake, here we’re bringing Park Avenue into the courtroom, and Milt says the guy looked like he was just fished out of the river. Bernie was giving me a hard time about that, too. He didn’t want to take him through Central Booking in the first place.”
“He didn’t look all that bad, Mr. Weiss,” said Kramer.
“Make it Abe.”
Kramer nodded, but decided he would wait a decent interval before trying out his first Abe. “He didn’t look any different from anybody else who comes in from out of the pens.”
“And there’s Tommy Killian trying to raise a big stink about it, too.” He gestured toward the television sets.
Kramer thought, Well, you finally stood up on your hind legs against the two Donkeys. Bernie had been unhappy, to put it mildly, when Weiss overruled him and ordered Kramer to request that McCoy’s bail be raised from $10,000 to $250,000 after Bernie had struck a deal at $10,000 with Killian. Weiss told Bernie it was only to placate the angry residents of the community who thought McCoy would get special treatment and that he knew Auerbach wouldn’t actually set such a high bail. But to Bernie it was a breach of contract, a violation of Favor Bank regulations, of the sacred code of loyalty of one Harp to another in the criminal justice system.
Kramer could see a cloud passing in front of Weiss’s face, and then Weiss said, “Well, let Tommy squawk. You can drive yourself crazy if you try to please everybody. I had to make a decision and I made a decision. Bernie likes Tommy, and that’s okay. I like Tommy myself. But Bernie wants to give him the goddamned store! The promises he made Tommy, McCoy was gonna come traipsing through here like Prince Charles. How long was McCoy in the pens?”
“Oh, about four hours.”
“Well, hell, that’s about normal, isn’t it?”
“About. I’ve seen defendants get shuttled from one precinct lockup to another and then to Central Booking and then to Rikers Island and then back to Central Booking, and then they get arraigned. They get arrested on a Friday evening, they can spend the whole weekend bouncing around. Then you’re looking at somebody who’s a mess. McCoy didn’t even have to start off in a precinct house and get bused over to Central Booking.”
“Well then, I don’t know what all this goddamned bellyaching is. Did anything happen to him in the pens? What’s the big deal?”
“Nothing happened. The computer went down, I think. So there was a delay. But that happens all the time, too. That’s normal.”
“You wanna know what I think? I think Bernie, without knowing it—don’t get me wrong, I like Bernie and I respect Bernie—but I think, without knowing it, he really does think someone like McCoy should get special treatment, because he’s white and because he’s well known. Now, this is a subtle thing. Bernie’s Irish, just like Tommy’s Irish, and the Irish have a certain amount of what the English call deference built into them, and they don’t even know it. They’re impressed by these Waspy guys, like McCoy, even though consciously they may act and think like they’re members of the IRA. It’s not really important, but a guy like Bernie’s got this deference thing to deal with, this unconscious Irish thing, and he doesn’t even know about it. But we don’t represent the Wasps, Larry. I wonder if there’s even a Wasp living in the Bronx. There must be one in Riverdale somewhere.”
Kramer chuckled.
“No, I’m serious,” said Weiss. “This is the Bronx. This is the Laboratory of Human Relations. That’s what I call it, the Laboratory of Human Relations.”
That was true; he called it the Laboratory of Human Relations. He called it that every day, as if oblivious of the fact that everyone who had ever been in his office had heard him say it before. But Kramer was in the mood to forgive Weiss’s fatuous side. More than forgive…to understand…and appreciate the essential truth that underlay his buffoon’s way of putting things. Weiss was right. You couldn’t run the criminal justice system in the Bronx and pretend you were in some kind of displaced Manhattan.
“Come here,” said Weiss. He got up from his great chair and walked over to the window behind him and beckoned to Kramer. From up here on the sixth floor, at the top of the hill, the view was grand. They were up high enough so that all sordid details receded and the Bronx’s lovely rolling topology took over. They looked out over Yankee Stadium and John Mullaly Park, which from up here actually looked green and sylvan. In the distance, straight ahead, across the Harlem River, was the skyline of upper Manhattan, up where Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center was, and from here it looked pastoral, like one of those old landscape paintings in which they put some fuzzy trees in the background and some soft gray clouds.
Weiss said, “Look down there on those streets, Larry. Whaddaya see? Whodaya see?”
All that Kramer could see, in fact, were some tiny figures walking along 161st Street and Walton Avenue. They were so far below they were like insects.
“They’re all black and Puerto Rican,” said Weiss. “You don’t even see any old Jews walking around down there anymore or any Italians, either, and this is the civic center of the Bronx. This is like Montague Street in Brooklyn or City Hall Plaza in Manhattan. In the summertime the Jews used to sit out on the sidewalk at night right over there on the Grand Concourse and just watch the cars go by. You couldn’t get Charles Bronson to sit out there now. This is the modern era, and nobody understands it yet. When I was a kid, the Irish ran the Bronx. They ran it for a long time. You remember Charlie Buckley? Charlie Buckley, the congressman? No, you’re too young. Charlie Buckley, the Boss of the Bronx, as Irish as they come. Up to about thirty years ago Charlie Buckley was still running the Bronx. And now they’re finished, and so who runs it? Jews and Italians. But for how long? There’s none down there on the street, and so how long are they gonna be up here in this building? But that’s the Bronx, the Laboratory of Human Relations. That’s what I call it, the Laboratory of Human Relations. Those are poor people you’re looking at down there, Larry, and poverty breeds crime, and the crime in this borough—well, I don’t have to tell you. Part of me’s an idealist. I want to deal with every case on an individual basis and every person one by one. But with the caseload we got? Ayyyyyyyyyyyyy…The other part of me knows that what we’re really doing, we’re like a little band of cowboys running a herd. With a herd the best you can hope for is to keep the herd as a whole”—he made a great round gesture with his hands—“under control and hope you don’t lose too many along the way. Oh, the day will come, and maybe pretty soon, when those people down there will have their own leaders and their own organizations, and they’ll be the Bronx Democratic Party and everything else, and we won’t be in this building any longer. But right now they need us, and we have to do the right thing by them. We have to let them know that we’re not removed from them and that they’re just as much a part of New York as we are. We have to send them the right signals. We have to let them know that maybe we come down hard on them when they get out of line, but it’s not because they’re black or Hispanic or poor. We got to let them know justice really is blind. We got to let them know if you’re white and rich, it works out the same way. That’s a very important signal. It’s more important than any specific point or technicality of the law. That is what this office is all about, Larry. We’re not here to handle cases. We’re here to create hope. That’s what Bernie doesn’t understand.” The doesn’t, in preference to the Irish don’t, signaled the elevation of the D.A.’s thoughts at this moment. “Bernie is still playing Irish politics,” said Weiss, “the same way Charlie Buckley used to play it, and that’s finished. It’s all over. This is the modern era in the Laboratory of Human Relations, and we have a sworn duty to represent those people you’re looking at down there.”
Kramer peered down diligently at the insects. As for Weiss, the loftiness of his sentiments had filled his voice and his face with emotion. He gave Kramer a sincere look and a tired smile, the sort of look that says, “That’s what life is all about, once the petty considerations have been swept away.”
“I never thought about it that way before, Abe,” said Kramer, “but you’re absolutely right.” It seemed like a good moment for the first Abe.
“I was worried about this McCoy case at the beginning,” said Weiss. “It looked like Bacon and those people were forcing the issue, and all we were doing was reacting. But that’s okay. It turned out to be a good thing.
How do we treat some hotshot from Park Avenue? Like anybody else, that’s how! He gets arrested, he gets the cuffs, he gets booked, he gets fingerprinted, he waits in the pens, just like anybody down there on those streets! Now, I think that sends a helluva good signal. It lets those people know we represent them and they’re a part a New York City.”
Weiss gazed down upon 161st Street like a shepherd upon his flock. Kramer was glad no one but himself was witnessing this. If more than one witness had been on hand, then cynicism would have reigned. You wouldn’t have been able to think about anything other than the fact that Abe Weiss had an election coming up in five months, and 70 percent of the inhabitants of the Bronx were black and Latin. But since there was, in fact, no other witness, Kramer could get to the heart of the matter, which was that the manic creature before him, Captain Ahab, was right.
“You did a great job yesterday, Larry,” said Weiss, “and I want you to keep pouring it on. Doesn’t it make you feel good to use your talents for something that means something? Christ, you know what I make.” That Kramer did. It was $82,000 a year. “A dozen times I coulda taken a fork in the road and gone out and made three times, five times that in private practice. But for what? You only pass this way once, Larry. Whaddaya wanna be remembered for? That you had a fucking mansion in Riverdale or Greenwich or Locust Valley? Or that you made a difference? I feel sorry for Tommy Killian. He was a good assistant D.A., but Tommy wanted to make some money, and so now he’s out making some money, but how? He’s holding the hands and wiping the noses of a buncha wise guys, psychotics, and dopers. A guy like McCoy makes him look good. He hasn’t seen a guy like that in all the years he’s been outta here. No, I’d rather run the Laboratory of Human Relations. That’s the way I think of it. I’d rather make a difference.”