The Bonfire of the Vanities (52 page)

Vogel said, “You sure you won’t change your mind, Pete? They have a great Chinese wine here. You ever tried Chinese wine?”

“Chinese wine taste like dead mouse,” said Fallow.

“Tastes like what?”

Dead mouse…
Fallow didn’t even know why he said it. He wasn’t using that expression anymore. He wasn’t even thinking it. He was now marching shoulder to shoulder with Gerald Steiner through the world of tabloid journalism, thanks in part to Albert Vogel, although mainly thanks to his own brilliance. He was already in a mood to forget the contribution of Al Vogel to his Lamb case scoop. He resented the man, with his
Pete
this and
Pete
that, and he felt like mocking him. On the other hand, Vogel was his pipeline to Bacon and that crowd. He wouldn’t like to have to deal with them entirely on his own.

“Sometimes I prefer beer with Chinese food, Al,” said Fallow.

“Yeah…I can see that,” said Vogel. “Hey, waiter. Waiter! Christ, where are the waiters? I can’t see anything in here.”

A beer would, in fact, be fine. Beer was practically a health-food drink, like chamomile tea. His hangover today wasn’t serious at all, no more than a thick fog. No pain; just the fog. Yesterday, thanks to his enhanced status at
The City Light
, he had found the moment right to invite the sexiest of the copygirls, a big-eyed blonde named Darcy Lastrega, out to dinner. They went to Leicester’s, where he had made his peace with Britt-Withers and even with Caroline Heftshank. They had ended up at the Table with Nick Stopping and Tony and St. John and Billy Cortez and some of the others. The Table had found a perfectly willing fish in no time, a Texan named Ned Perch, who had made an astonishing amount of money at something or other and had bought a lot of old silver in England, as he kept mentioning. Fallow entertained the Table at considerable length with stories about the housing project in the Bronx, by way of acquainting everyone with his recent success. His date, Miss Darcy Lastrega, was not captivated, however. The likes of Nick Stopping and St. John immediately sized her up for what she was, a humorless little American dimwit, and nobody bothered to talk to her, and she began slumping more and more despondently into her chair. To rectify matters, every twenty or thirty minutes Fallow turned toward her and grasped her forearm and put his head close to hers and said in what was supposed to seem only a half-jesting manner: “I don’t know what’s coming over me. I must be in love. You’re not married, are you?” The first time she obliged him with a smile. The second and third times she didn’t. The fourth time she wasn’t there any longer. She had left the restaurant, and he hadn’t even noticed. Billy Cortez and St. John began laughing at him, and he took it badly. A childish little American bird—and yet it was humiliating. After no more than three or four more glasses of wine, he left Leicester’s himself without saying goodbye to anyone and went home and, presently, fell asleep.

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.”