The Bonfire of the Vanities (13 page)

“Sherm!”

He stopped. Dan was standing beside the Mercedes with his hands on his chubby hips. He had hips like an old woman’s.

“You know your coat is ripped?”

The block of ice, his Yale chin jutting out, said nothing.

“Right there,” said Dan with considerable satisfaction. “You can see the lining. How’d you do that?”

Sherman could hear it
—thok—
and he could feel the rear end of the car fishtailing, and the tall skinny boy was no longer standing there.
Not a word about that—
and yet he had a terrific urge to tell this odious little man. Now that he had been through the wall of fire and survived, he was experiencing one of man’s keenest but least understood drives: information compulsion. He wanted to tell his war story.

But caution triumphed, caution bolstered by snobbery. He probably should talk to no one about what had happened; and to this man least of all.

“I have no idea,” he said.

“You didn’t notice it?”

The frosty snowman with the Yale chin, Mr. Sherman McCoy, motioned toward the Mercedes. “I won’t be taking it out again until the weekend.” Then he did an about-face and left.

As he reached the sidewalk, a puff of wind swept the street. He could feel how damp his shirt was. His pants were still damp behind the knees. His ripped jacket was draped over the crook of his arm. His hair felt like a bird’s nest. He was a mess. His heart was beating a little too fast.
I have something to hide
. But what was he worrying about? He wasn’t driving the car when it happened—if it happened. Right!
If
it happened. He hadn’t
seen
the boy get hit, and she hadn’t, either, and besides, it was in the heat of a fight for their very lives—and she was driving, in any case. If she didn’t want to report it, that was her business.

He stopped and took a breath and looked around. Yes; White Manhattan, the sanctuary of the East Seventies. Across the street a doorman stood under the canopy of an apartment house, smoking a cigarette. A boy in a dark business suit and a pretty girl in a white dress were strolling toward him. The fellow was talking to her a mile a minute. So young, and dressed like an old man in a Brooks Brothers or Chipp or J. Press suit, just the way he had looked when he first went to work at Pierce & Pierce.

All at once a wonderful feeling swept over Sherman. For Christ’s sake, what was he worried about? He stood there on the sidewalk, stock-still, with his chin up and big grin on his face. The boy and girl probably thought he was a lunatic. In fact—he was a man. Tonight, with nothing but his hands and his nerve he had fought the elemental enemy, the hunter, the predator, and he had prevailed. He had fought his way out of an ambush on the nightmare terrain, and he had prevailed. He had saved a woman. The time had come to act like a man, and he had acted and prevailed. He was not merely a Master of the Universe; he was more; he was a man. Grinning and humming, “Show me but ten who are stouthearted men,” the stouthearted man, still damp from the fray, walked the two blocks to his duplex apartment overlooking the street of dreams.

On the mezzanine of the sixth floor of the Bronx County Building, near the elevators, was a wide entryway framed in two or three tons of mahogany and marble and blocked by a counter and a gate. Behind the counter sat a guard with a .38-caliber revolver in a holster on his hip. The guard served as a receptionist. The revolver, which looked big enough to stop a florist’s van, was supposed to serve as a deterrent to the random berserk vengeful felons of the Bronx.

Over this entryway were some large Roman-style capital letters that had been fabricated in brass at considerable expense to the taxpayers of New York and cemented to the marble facing with epoxy glue. Once a week a handyman got up on a ladder and rubbed Simichrome polish across the letters, so that the legend
RICHARD A. WEISS, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, BRONX COUNTY
blazed away more brightly than anything the building’s architects, Joseph H. Freedlander and Max Hausle, had the nerve to put even on the outside of the building in its golden dawn half a century ago.

As Larry Kramer got off the elevator and walked toward this brassy gleam, the right side of his lips twisted subversively. The
A
stood for Abraham. Weiss was known to his friends and his political cronies and the newspaper reporters and Channels 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, and 11 and his constituents, most prominently the Jews and Italians up around Riverdale and the Pelham Parkway and Co-op City, as Abe Weiss. He hated the nickname Abe, which he had been stuck with when he was growing up in Brooklyn. A few years back he had let it be known that he preferred to be called Dick, and he had practically been laughed out of the Bronx Democratic organization. That was the last time Abe Weiss ever mentioned Dick Weiss. To Abe Weiss, being laughed out of the Bronx Democratic organization, being separated from it in any fashion whatsoever, for that matter, would have been like being thrown over the railing of a Christmas cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. So he was Richard A. Weiss only in
The New York Times
and over this doorway.

The guard buzzed Kramer through the gate, and Kramer’s running shoes squeaked on the marble floor. The guard gave them a dubious once-over. As usual, Kramer was carrying his leather shoes in an A&P shopping bag.

Beyond the entryway, the level of grandeur in the District Attorney’s Office went up and down. The office of Weiss himself was bigger and showier, thanks to its paneled walls, than the Mayor of New York’s. The bureau chiefs, for Homicide, Investigations, Major Offenses, Supreme Court, Criminal Court, and Appeals, had their share of the paneling and the leather or school-of-leather couches and the Contract Sheraton armchairs. But by the time you got down to an assistant district attorney, like Larry Kramer, you were looking at Good Enough for Government Work when it came to interior decoration.

The two assistant district attorneys who shared the office with him, Ray Andriutti and Jimmy Caughey, were sitting sprawled back in the swivel chairs. There was just enough floor space in the room for three metal desks, three swivel chairs, four filing cabinets, an old coat stand with six savage hooks sticking out from it, and a table bearing a Mr. Coffee machine and a promiscuous heap of plastic cups and spoons and a gummy collage of paper napkins and white sugar envelopes and pink saccharine envelopes stuck to a maroon plastic tray with a high sweet-smelling paste composed of spilled coffee and Cremora powder. Both Andriutti and Caughey were sitting with their legs crossed in the same fashion. The left ankle was resting on top of the right knee, as if they were such studs, they couldn’t have crossed their legs any farther if they had wanted to. This was the accepted sitting posture of Homicide, the most manly of the six bureaus of the District Attorney’s Office.

Both had their jackets off and hung with the perfect give-a-shit carelessness on the coatrack. Their shirt collars were unbuttoned, and their necktie knots were pulled down an inch or so. Andriutti was rubbing the back of his left arm with his right hand, as if it itched. In fact, he was feeling and admiring his triceps, which he pumped up at least three times a week by doing sets of French curls with dumbbells at the New York Athletic Club. Andriutti could afford to work out at the Athletic Club, instead of on a carpet between a
Dracaena fragrans
tub and a convertible couch, because he didn’t have a wife and a child to support in an $888-a-month ant colony in the West Seventies. He didn’t have to worry about his triceps and his deltoids and his lats deflating. Andriutti liked the fact that when he reached around behind one of his mighty arms with the other hand, it made the widest muscles of his back, the lats, the latissima dorsae, fan out until they practically split his shirt, and his pectorals hardened into a couple of mountains of pure muscle. Kramer and Andriutti were of the new generation, in which the terms
triceps, deltoids, latissima dorsae
, and
pectoralis major
were better known than the names of the major planets. Andriutti rubbed his triceps a hundred and twenty times a day, on the average.

Still rubbing them, Andriutti looked at Kramer as he walked in and said: “Jesus Christ, here comes the bag lady. What the hell is this fucking A&P bag, Larry? You been coming in here with this fucking bag every day this week.” Then he turned to Jimmy Caughey and said, “Looks like a fucking bag lady.”

Caughey was also a jock, but more the triathlon type, with a narrow face and a long chin. He just smiled at Kramer, as much as to say, “Well, what do you say to that?”

Kramer said, “Your arm itch, Ray?” Then he looked at Caughey and said, “Ray’s got this fucking allergy. It’s called weight lifter’s disease.” Then he turned back to Andriutti. “Itches like a sonofabitch, don’t it?”

Andriutti let his hand drop off his triceps. “And what are these
jogging
shoes?” he said to Kramer. “Looks like those girls walking to work at Merrill Lynch. All dressed up, and they got these fucking rubber gunboats on their feet.”

“What the hell
is
in the bag?” said Caughey.

“My high heels,” said Kramer. He took off his jacket and jammed it down, give-a-shit, on a coatrack hook in the accepted fashion and pulled down his necktie and unbuttoned his shirt and sat down in his swivel chair and opened up the shopping bag and fished out his Johnston & Murphy brown leather shoes and started taking off the Nikes.

“Jimmy,” Andriutti said to Caughey, “did you know that Jewish guys—Larry, I don’t want you to take this personally—did you know that Jewish guys, even if they’re real stand-up guys, all have one faggot gene? That’s a well-known fact. They can’t stand going out in the rain without an umbrella or they have all this modern shit in their apartment or they don’t like to go hunting or they’re for the fucking nuclear freeze and affirmative action or they wear jogging shoes to work or some goddamn thing. You know?”

“Gee,” said Kramer, “I don’t know why you thought I’d take it personally.”

“Come on, Larry,” said Andriutti, “tell the truth. Deep down, don’t you wish you were Italian or Irish?”

“Yeah,” said Kramer, “that way I wouldn’t know what the fuck was going on in this fucking place.”

Caughey started laughing. “Well, don’t let Ahab see those shoes, Larry. He’ll have Jeanette issue a fucking memorandum.”

“No, he’ll call a fucking press conference,” said Andriutti.

“That’s always a safe fucking bet.”

And so another fucking day in the fucking Homicide Bureau of the Bronx Fucking District Attorney’s Office was off to a fucking start.

An assistant D.A. in Major Offenses had started calling Abe Weiss “Captain Ahab,” and now they all did. Weiss was notorious in his obsession for publicity, even among a breed, the district attorney, that was publicity-mad by nature. Unlike the great D.A.s of yore, such as Frank Hogan, Burt Roberts, or Mario Merola, Weiss never went near a courtroom. He didn’t have time. There were only so many hours in the day for him to stay in touch with Channels 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, and 11 and the New York
Daily News
, the
Post, The City Light
, and the
Times
.

Jimmy Caughey said, “I was just in seeing the captain. You shoulda—”

“You were? What for?” asked Kramer with just a shade too much curiosity and incipient envy in his voice.

“Me and Bernie,” said Caughey. “He wanted to know about the Moore case.”

“Any good?”

“Piece a shit,” said Caughey. “This fucking guy Moore, he has a big house in Riverdale, and his wife’s mother lives there with ’em, and she’s been giving him a hard time for about thirty-seven fucking years, right? So this guy, he loses his job. He’s working for one a these reinsurance companies, and he’s making $200,000 or $300,000 a year, and now he’s out a work for eight or nine months, and nobody’ll hire him, and he don’t know what the hell to do, right? So one day he’s puttering around out in the garden, and the mother-in-law comes out and says, ‘Well, water seeks its own level.’ That’s a verbatim quote. ‘Water seeks its own level. You oughta get a job as a gardener.’ So this guy, he’s out of his fucking mind, he’s so mad. He goes in and tells his wife, ‘I’ve had it with your mother. I’m gonna get my shotgun and scare her.’ So he goes up to his bedroom, where he keeps this 12-gauge shotgun, and he comes downstairs and heads for the mother-in-law, and he’s gonna scare the shit out of her, and he says, ‘Okay, Gladys,’ and he trips on the rug, and the gun goes off and kills her, and—ba-bing!—Murder Two.”

“Why was Weiss interested?”

“Well, the guy’s white, he’s got some money, he lives in a big house in Riverdale. It looks at first like maybe he’s gonna fake an accidental shooting.”

“Is that possible?”

“Naw. Fucking guy’s one a my boys. He’s your basic Irish who made good, but he’s still a Harp. He’s drowning in remorse. You’d think he’d shot his own mother, he feels so fucking guilty. Right now he’d confess to anything. Bernie could sit him in front of the video camera and clean up every homicide in the Bronx for the past five years. Naw, it’s a piece a shit, but it looked good at first.”

Kramer and Andriutti contemplated this piece a shit without needing any amplification. Every assistant D.A. in the Bronx, from the youngest Italian just out of St. John’s Law School to the oldest Irish bureau chief, who would be somebody like Bernie Fitzgibbon, who was forty-two, shared Captain Ahab’s mania for the Great White Defendant. For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, “What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail.” Kramer had been raised as a liberal. In Jewish families like his, liberalism came with the Similac and the Mott’s apple juice and the Instamatic and Daddy’s grins in the evening. And even the Italians, like Ray Andriutti, and the Irish, like Jimmy Caughey, who were not exactly burdened with liberalism by their parents, couldn’t help but be affected by the mental atmosphere of the law schools, where, for one thing, there were so many Jewish faculty members. By the time you finished law school in the New York area, it was, well
…impolite!…
on the ordinary social level…to go around making jokes about the
yoms
. It wasn’t that it was morally wrong…It was that it was
in bad taste
. So it made the boys uneasy, this eternal prosecution of the blacks and Latins.

Not that they weren’t guilty. One thing Kramer had learned within two weeks as an assistant D.A. in the Bronx was that 95 percent of the defendants who got as far as the indictment stage, perhaps 98 percent, were truly guilty. The caseload was so overwhelming, you didn’t waste time trying to bring the marginal cases forward, unless the press was on your back. They hauled in guilt by the ton, those blue-and-orange vans out there on Walton Avenue. But the poor bastards behind the wire mesh barely deserved the term
criminal
, if by criminal you had in mind the romantic notion of someone who has a goal and seeks to achieve it through some desperate way outside the law. No, they were simpleminded incompetents, most of them, and they did unbelievably stupid, vile things.

Kramer looked at Andriutti and Caughey, sitting there with their mighty thighs akimbo. He felt superior to them. He was a graduate of the Columbia Law School, and they were both graduates of St. John’s, widely known as the law school for the also-rans of college academic competition. And he was Jewish. Very early in life he had picked up the knowledge that the Italians and the Irish were animals. The Italians were pigs, and the Irish were mules or goats. He couldn’t remember if his parents had actually used any such terms or not, but they got the idea across very clearly. To his parents, New York City—New York? hell, the whole U.S., the whole world!—was a drama called
The Jews Confront the Goyim
, and the
goyim
were animals. And so what was he doing here with these animals? A Jew in the Homicide Bureau was a rare thing. The Homicide Bureau was the elite corps of the District Attorney’s Office, the D.A.’s Marines, because homicide was the most serious of all crimes. An assistant D.A. in Homicide had to be able to go out on the street to the crime scenes at all hours, night and day, and be a real commando and rub shoulders with the police and know how to confront defendants and witnesses and intimidate them when the time came, and these were likely to be the lowest, grimmest, scurviest defendants and witnesses in the history of criminal justice. For fifty years, at least, maybe longer, Homicide had been an Irish enclave, although recently the Italians had made their way into it. The Irish had given Homicide their stamp. The Irish were stone courageous. Even when it was insane not to, they never stepped back. Andriutti had been right, or half right. Kramer didn’t want to be Italian, but he did want to be Irish, and so did Ray Andriutti, the dumb fuck. Yes, they were animals! The
goyim
were animals, and Kramer was proud to be among the animals, in the Homicide Bureau.

Anyway, here they were, the three of them, sitting in this Good Enough for Government Work office at $36,000 to $42,000 a year instead of down at Cravath, Swaine & Moore or some such place at $136,000 to $142,000. They had been born a million miles from Wall Street, meaning the outer boroughs, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. To their families, their going to college and becoming lawyers had been the greatest thing since Franklin D. Roosevelt. And so they sat around in the Homicide Bureau talking about this fucking thing and that fucking thing and using
don’ts
for
doesn’ts
and
naws
for
no’s
, as if they didn’t know any better.