The Bonfire of the Vanities (32 page)
Read The Bonfire of the Vanities Online
Authors: Tom Wolfe
“Well, not all, but I bet 60 percent. You ought to sit in on the pleabargaining sessions some morning up on the Grand Concourse. One of the ways you justify a plea bargain is, the judge asks the defendant if he has a job, and if he does, that’s supposed to show he has roots in the community, and so on. So the judge’ll ask these kids if they have a job, and I mean these kids are being held for armed robbery, muggings, assaults, manslaughter, attempted murder, you name it, and every one of them, if they have any job at all, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, security guard.’ I mean, who do you think takes these jobs? They pay minimum wage, they’re boring, and when they’re not boring, they’re unpleasant.”
“Maybe they’re good at it,” said Greg. “They like to mix it up. They know how to handle weapons.”
Rhoda and Susan laughed. Such a wit, such a wit.
Mary Lou didn’t laugh. She kept looking at Kramer.
“No doubt they do,” he said. He didn’t want to lose control of the conversation and those big-breasted blue eyes. “Everybody in the Bronx carries weapons. Let me tell you about a case I just finished.” Ahhhhhhh! This was his chance to tell about the triumph of the People over that desperado Herbert 92X, and he plunged into the story with relish. But from the first Greg caused problems. As soon as he heard the name Herbert 92X, he butted in with some story he had done on prisons for
The Village Voice
.
“If it weren’t for the Muslims, the prisons in this city would
really
be out of control.”
That was bullshit, but Kramer didn’t want the discussion to get onto the Muslims and Greg’s goddamned story. So he said, “Herbert’s not really a Muslim. I mean, Muslims don’t go to bars.”
It was slow going. Greg knew it all. He knew all about Muslims, prisons, crime, street life in the billion-footed city. He began to turn the story against Kramer. Why were they so anxious to prosecute a man who had done nothing but follow the natural instinct to protect your own life?
“But he
killed
a man, Greg!—with an unlicensed gun that he carried every day, as a routine thing.”
“Yeah, but look at the job he had! It’s obviously a dangerous occupation. You said yourself everybody carries weapons up there.”
“Look at his
job?
Okay, let’s look at it. He works for a goddamned
boot
legger!”
“Whaddaya want him to do, work for IBM?”
“You talk like that’s out of the question. I bet IBM has plenty of programs for minorities, but Herbert wouldn’t want one a their jobs if they gave it to him. Herbert is a player. He’s a hustler who tries to cover himself with this religious mantle, and he just goes on being childish, egocentric, irresponsible, shiftless—”
Suddenly it dawned on Kramer that they were all looking at him in a funny way, all of them. Rhoda…Mary Lou…They were giving him the look you give someone who turns out to be a covert reactionary. He was too far gone in this criminal-justice scam…He was humming with the System’s reactionary overtones…This was like one of the bull sessions the gang used to have when they were all back at N.Y.U., except that now they were in their early thirties and they were looking at him as if he had become something awful. And he knew in an instant there was no way he could explain to them what he had seen over the past six years. They wouldn’t understand, least of all Greg, who was taking his triumph over Herbert 92X and stuffing it down his throat.
It was going so badly that Rhoda felt compelled to come to the rescue.
“You don’t understand, Greg,” she said. “You have no idea, the caseload Larry has. There are seven thousand criminal indictments every year in the Bronx, and they only have the capacity”—the kehpehsity—“for five hundred trials. There’s no way they can study every aspect of every case and take all these different things into consideration.”
“I can just imagine somebody trying to tell that to this fellow Herbert 92X.”
Kramer looked up at the ceiling of the Haiphong Harbor. It had been painted matte black, along with all sorts of ducts, pipes, and lighting fixtures. Looked like intestines. His own wife. Her idea of coming to his defense was to say, “Larry’s got so many colored people to put away, he hasn’t got time to treat them as individuals. So you mustn’t be hard on him.” He had broken his hump on the Herbert 92X case, handled it brilliantly, looked Herbert himself right in the eye, avenged the father of five, Nestor Cabrillo—and what did he get for it? Now he had to defend
himself
against a bunch of intellectual trendies in a trendy bistro in trendy fucking SoHo.
He scanned the table. Even Mary Lou was giving him the fishy look. The big beautiful whitebread airhead had become as trendy as the rest of them.
Well, there was one person who understood the Herbert 92X case, who understood how brilliant he had been, who understood the righteousness of the justice he had wrought, and she made Mary Lou Jugs look like…like…nothing.
For a moment he caught Mary Lou’s eyes again, but the light had gone out.
The Paris stock exchange, the bourse, was open for trading only two hours a day, 1 to 3
P.M.
, which was 7 to 9
A.M.
, New York time. So on Monday, Sherman arrived at the bond trading room of Pierce & Pierce at 6:30. By now it was 7:30, and he was at his desk with his telephone at his left ear and his right foot up on Felix’s portable shoeshine stand.
The sound of young men baying for money on the bond market had already risen in the room, for the market was now an international affair. Across the way was the young lord of the pampas, Arguello, with his telephone at his right ear and his left hand over his left ear, talking to Tokyo in all probability. He had been in the office for at least twelve hours when Sherman arrived, working on a huge sale of U.S. Treasuries to the Japanese postal service. How this kid had ever even gotten his finger into such a deal, Sherman couldn’t imagine, but there he was. The Tokyo exchange was open from 7:30
P.M.
to 4
A.M.
, New York time. Arguello was wearing some kind of go-to-hell suspenders with pictures of Tweety Pie, the cartoon character, on them, but that was all right. He was working, and Sherman was at peace.
Felix, the shoeshine man, was humped over, stropping Sherman’s right shoe, a New & Lingwood half-brogue, with his high-shine rag. Sherman liked the way the elevation of his foot flexed his leg and sprung it out and put pressure on the inside of his thigh. It made him feel athletic. He liked the way Felix humped over, shell-backed, as if enveloping the shoe with his body and soul. He could see the top of the black man’s head, which was no more than twenty inches below his eye level. Felix had a perfectly round caramel-brown bald spot on the crown of his skull, which was odd, since the hair surrounding it was quite thick. Sherman liked this perfect round bald spot. Felix was dependable and droll, not young, resentful, and sharp.
Felix had a copy of
The City Light
on the floor beside his stand, reading it while he worked. It was open to the second page and folded over in the middle. Page 2 contained most of
The City Light
’s international news. The headline at the top said:
BABY PLUNGES 200 FEET—AND LIVES
. The dateline was Elaiochori, Greece. But that was all right. The tabloids no longer held any terrors for Sherman. Five days had now passed and there had not been a word in any of the newspapers about some dreadful incident on an expressway ramp in the Bronx. It was just as Maria had said. They had been drawn into a fight in the jungle, and they had fought and won, and the jungle did not scream about its wounded. This morning Sherman had bought only the
Times
at the little shop on Lexington. He had actually read about the Soviets and the Sri Lankans and the internecine strife at the Federal Reserve on the taxi ride downtown, instead of turning at once to Section B, Metropolitan News.
After a solid week of fear, he could now concentrate on the radium-green numbers sliding across the black screens. He could concentrate on the business at hand…the Giscard…
Bernard Levy, the Frenchman he dealt with at Traders’ Trust Co., was now in France doing a last bit of research on the Giscard before Trader T committed their $300 million and they closed the deal and had a print
…the crumbs…
Judy’s contemptuous phrase slipped into his mind and right out again…crumbs…So what?…They were crumbs of gold…He concentrated on Levy’s voice on the other end of the satellite carom:
“So look, Sherman, here’s the problem. The debt figures the government has just released have everybody on edge here. The franc is falling, and it’s bound to fall further, and at the same time, as you know, gold is falling, even though it’s for different reasons. The question is where the floor’s going to be, and…”
Sherman just let him talk. It wasn’t unusual for people to get a little squirrelly on the verge of committing a sum like $300 million. He had spoken to Bernard—he called him by his first name—almost every day for six weeks now, and he could barely remember what he looked like. My French doughnut, he thought—and immediately realized this was Rawlie Thorpe’s crack, Rawlie’s cynicism, sarcasm, pessimism, nihilism, which were all ways of saying Rawlie’s
weakness
, and so he banished
doughnut
as well as
crumbs
from his mind. This morning he was once more on the side of strength and Destiny. He was almost ready to entertain, once again, the notion of…mastery of the universe…The baying of the young titans sounded all around him—
“I’m sixteen, seventeen. What does he want to do?”
“Bid me twenty-five of the ten-year!”
“I want out!”
—and once more it was music. Felix was stropping the high-shine rag back and forth. Sherman enjoyed the pressure of the rag on his metatarsal bones. It was a tiny massage of the ego, when you got right down to it—this great strapping brown man with the bald spot in his crown down there at his feet, stropping, oblivious of the levers with which Sherman could move another nation, another continent, merely by bouncing a few words off a satellite.
“The franc is no problem,” he said to Bernard. “We can hedge that to next January or to term or both.”
He felt Felix tapping the bottom of his right shoe. He lifted his foot off the stand, and Felix picked it up and moved it around to the other side of his chair, and Sherman hoisted his mighty athletic left leg and put his left shoe on the metal shoeshine stirrup. Felix turned the newspaper over and folded it down the middle and put it on the floor beside the stand and began to work on the left New & Lingwood half-brogue.
“Yes, but you have to pay for a hedge,” said Bernard, “and we’ve been talking all along about operating under very blue skies, and…”
Sherman tried to imagine his doughnut, Bernard, sitting in an office in one of those dinky modern buildings the French build, with hundreds of tiny cars buzzing by and tooting their toy horns on the street down below…below…and his eye happened to drift down to the newspaper on the floor below…
The hair on his arms stood on end. At the top of the page, the third page of
The City Light
, was a headline saying:
Honor Student’s Mom:
Cops Sit On Hit’N’Run
Above it in smaller white letters on a black bar it said:
While he lies near death
. Below was another black bar saying,
A
CITY LIGHT
Exclusive
. And below that:
By Peter Fallow
. And below that, set into a column of type, was a picture, head and shoulders, of a smiling black youth, neatly dressed in a dark jacket, a white shirt, and a striped necktie. His slender delicate face was smiling.
“I think the only sensible thing is to find out where this thing bottoms out,” said Bernard.
“Well…I think you’re exaggerating the, uh…the, uh…”
That face!
“…the, uh…”
That slender delicate face, now with a shirt and tie! A young gentleman!
“…the, uh, problem.”
“I hope so,” said Bernard. “But either way, it won’t hurt to wait.”
“Wait?”
Yo! You need any help!
That frightened delicate face!
A good person!
Did Bernard say “Wait”? “I don’t get it, Bernard. Everything’s in
place!
” He hadn’t meant to sound so emphatic, so urgent, but his eyes were fastened on the words lying on the floor below.
Fighting back tears, a Bronx widow told
The City Light
yesterday how her honor-student son was run down by a speeding luxury sedan—and accused police and the Bronx District Attorney’s Office of sitting on the case.
Mrs. Annie Lamb, a clerk at the city Marriage Bureau, said her son, Henry, 18, due to graduate with honors from Colonel Jacob Ruppert High School next week, gave her part of the license number of the car—a Mercedes-Benz—before he slipped into a coma.
“But the man from the District Attorney’s Office called the information useless,” she said, on the grounds that the victim himself was the only known witness.
Doctors at Lincoln Hospital termed the coma “probably irreversible” and said Lamb’s condition was “grave.”
Lamb and his mother live in Edgar Allan Poe Towers, a Bronx housing project. Described by neighbors and teachers as “an exemplary young man,” he was slated to enter college in the fall.
The teacher of Lamb’s advanced literature and composition class at Ruppert, Zane J. Rifkind, told
The City Light
: “This is a tragic situation. Henry is among that remarkable fraction of students who are able to overcome the many obstacles that life in the South Bronx places in their paths and concentrate on their studies and their potential and their futures. One can only wonder what he might have achieved in college.”
Mrs. Lamb said her son had left their apartment early last Tuesday evening, apparently to buy food. While crossing Bruckner Boulevard, she said, he was struck by a Mercedes-Benz carrying a man and a woman, both white. The car did not stop. The neighborhood is predominantly black and Hispanic.
Lamb managed to make his way to the hospital, where he was treated for a broken wrist and released. The next morning he complained of a severe headache and dizziness. He fell unconscious in the emergency room. It was determined that he had suffered a subdural concussion.
Milton Lubell, spokesman for Bronx District Attorney Abe Weiss, said detectives and an assistant district attorney had interviewed Mrs. Lamb and that “an investigation is underway,” but that 2,500 Mercedes-Benzes are registered in New York State with license plates beginning with R, the letter provided by Mrs. Lamb. She said her son thought the second letter was E, F, B, P, or R. “Even assuming one of those is the second letter,” said Lubell, “we’re talking about almost 500 cars—
RF—Mercedes-Benz—
the data on the pages of a million newspapers—went through Sherman’s solar plexus like a tremendous vibration. His license plate began: RFH. With a horrifying hunger for the news of his own doom, he read on:
—and we have no description of a driver and no witnesses and
That was as much as he could read. Felix had folded the newspaper at that point. The rest was on the lower half of the page. His brain was on fire. He was dying to reach down and turn the newspaper over—and dying never to have to know what it would reveal. Meantime, the voice of Bernard Levy droned on from across the ocean, bouncing off an AT&T communications satellite.
“…talking ninety-six, if that’s what you mean by ‘in place.’ But that’s beginning to look rather pricey, because…”
Pricey? Ninety-six?
No mention of a second boy! No mention of a ramp, a barricade, an attempted robbery!
The price had always been set! How could he bring that up now?
Could it be—not a robbery attempt, after all!
He’d paid an average of ninety-four for them. Only a two-point spread! Couldn’t lower it!
This nice-looking lad dying! My car!
Must focus on it…the Giscard! Couldn’t fail, not after all this time—and the tabloid sizzled on the floor.
“Bernard…” His mouth had gone dry. “Listen…Bernard…”
“Yes?”
But perhaps if he took his foot off the shoeshine stand—
“Felix? Felix?” Felix didn’t seem to hear him. The perfect caramel-brown bald spot on the crown of his head continued to go back and forth as he worked on the New & Lingwood half-brogue.
“Felix!”
“Hello, Sherman! What did you say?” In his ear, the voice of the French doughnut, sitting on top of 300 million gold-backed bonds—in his eyes, the top of the head of a black man sitting on top of a shoeshine stand and engulfing his left foot.
“Excuse me, Bernard!…Just a moment…Felix?”
“You say Felix?”
“No, Bernard! I mean just a minute…Felix!”
Felix stopped working on the shoe and looked up.
“Sorry, Felix, I’ve got to stretch my leg a second.”
The French doughnut: “Hello, Sherman, I can’t understand you!”
Sherman took his foot off the stand and made a great show of extending it, as if it felt stiff.
“Sherman, are you there?”
“Yes! Excuse me a second, Bernard.”
As he hoped, Felix took this opportunity to turn
The City Light
over in order to read the lower half of the page. Sherman put his foot back on the stand, and Felix hunched over the shoe again, and Sherman put his head down, trying to focus on the words lying on the floor. He bent his head down so close to Felix’s that the black man looked up. Sherman pulled his head back and smiled weakly.
“Sorry!” he said.
“You say ‘Sorry’?” asked the French doughnut.
“Sorry, Bernard, I was talking to someone else.”
Felix shook his head reprovingly, then lowered it and went to work again.
“ ‘Sorry’?” repeated the French doughnut, still baffled.
“Never mind, Bernard. I was talking to someone else.” Slowly Sherman lowered his head again and fixed his eyes upon the print way down below.
—no one who can tell us what happened, not even the young man himself.”
“Sherman, are you there? Sherman—”
“Yes, Bernard. Sorry. Uh…tell me again what you were saying about price? Because, really, Bernard, we’re all set on that. We’ve been all set for
weeks
!”
“Again?”
“If you don’t mind. I was interrupted here.”
A big sigh, from Europe, by satellite. “I was saying that we’ve moved from a stable to an unstable mix here. We can no longer extrapolate from the figures we were talking about when you made your presentation…”
Sherman tried to pay attention to both things at once, but the Frenchman’s words quickly became a drizzle, a drizzle by satellite, as he devoured the print visible below the skull of the shoeshine man:
But the Rev. Reginald Bacon, chairman of the Harlem-based All People’s Solidarity, called this “the same old story. Human life, if it’s black human life or Hispanic human life, is not worth much to the power structure. If this had been a white honor student struck down on Park Avenue by a black driver, they wouldn’t be trifling with statistics and legal obstacles.”
He called the hospital’s failure to diagnose Lamb’s concussion immediately “outrageous” and demanded an investigation.
Meantime, neighbors came by Mrs. Lamb’s small, neatly kept apartment in the Poe Towers to comfort her as she reflected upon this latest development in her family’s tragic history.
“Henry’s father was killed right out there six years ago,” she told
The City Light
, pointing toward a window overlooking the project’s entry. Monroe Lamb, then 36, was shot to death by a mugger one night as he returned from his job as an air-conditioning mechanic.
“If I lose Henry, that will be the end of me, too, and nobody will care about that either,” she said. “The police never found out who killed my husband, and they don’t even want to look for who did this to Henry.”
But Rev. Bacon vowed to put pressure on the authorities until something is done: “If the power structure is telling us it doesn’t even matter what happens to our very best young people, the very hope of these mean streets, then it’s time we had a message for the power structure: ‘Your names are not engraved on tablets that came down from the mountain. There’s an election coming up, and you can be replaced.’ ”
Abe Weiss, Bronx District Attorney, faces a stiff challenge in September’s Democratic primary. State Assemblyman Robert Santiago has the backing of Bacon, Assemblyman Joseph Leonard, and other black leaders, as well as the leadership of the heavily Puerto Rican southern and central Bronx.