The Bonfire of the Vanities (59 page)

“I’ll show you what shape,” said Goldberg, extending the middle finger of his right hand. Then he twisted around toward Sherman again: “Anyway, she really liked that book, and she’s only in high school. She says she wants to work on Wall Street when she finishes college. Or that’s this week’s plan, anyway.”

This one, Goldberg, also! The same appalling malapert slavemaster friendliness! Now he was supposed to
like
the two of them! Now that the game was over, and he had lost, and he belonged to them, he should hold nothing against them. He should admire them. They had their hooks in a Wall Street investment banker, and what was he now? Their catch! Their quarry! Their prize pet! In an Oldsmobile Cutlass!
The brutes
from the outer boroughs—the sort of people you saw heading on Fifty-eighth Street or Fifty-ninth Street toward the Queensboro Bridge—fat young men with drooping mustaches, like Goldberg…and now he belonged to them.

At Ninety-third Street, a doorman was helping an old woman out the door and onto the sidewalk. She wore a caracal overcoat. It was the sort of very formal black fur coat you never saw anymore. A long happy insulated life on Park Avenue! Heartlessly, Park Avenue,
le tout New York
, would go on living its everyday life.

“All right,” Killian said to Martin, “let’s get it straight exactly what we’re gonna do here. We’re going in the 161st Street entrance, right? And then we go downstairs from there, and the Angel takes Sherman—Mr. McCoy—straight into fingerprinting. The Angel’s still there?”

“Yeah,” said Martin, “he’s still there, but we gotta go in around the side, through the outside door to Central Booking.”

“What for?”

“That’s my orders. The zone captain’s gonna be there, and the press is gonna be there.”

“The
press
!”

“That’s right. And we gotta have cuffs on him by the time we get there.”

“Are you shitting me? I talked to Bernie last night. He gave me his word. There’s gonna be no bullshit.”

“I don’t know about Bernie. This is Abe Weiss. This is the way Weiss wants it, and I got my orders straight from the zone captain. This arrest is supposed to be by the book. You’re getting a break as it is. You know what they were talking about, don’t you? They wanted to bring the fucking press to his apartment and cuff him there.”

Killian glowered at Martin. “Who toldja to do this?”

“Captain Crowther.”

“When?”

“Last night. He called me at home. Listen, you know Weiss. What can I tell ya?”

“This…is…not…right,” said Killian. “I had Bernie’s word. This…is…very…wrong. You don’t pull this kinda thing. This…is…not…right.”

Both Martin and Goldberg turned around and looked at him.

“I’m not gonna forget this,” said Killian, “and I’m not happy.”

“Ayyyyy…whaddaya whaddaya,” said Martin. “Don’t blame it on us, because it’s all the same to us one way or the other. Your beef is with Weiss.”

They were now out on the FDR Drive, heading north toward the Bronx. It had begun to rain. The morning traffic was already backing up on the other side of the railing that divided the expressway, but there was nothing holding them back on this side of the road. They approached a footbridge that arched over the river from the Manhattan side to an island out in the middle. The trestle had been painted a hot heliotrope purple in a burst of euphoria in the 1970s. The false hopefulness of it depressed Sherman profoundly.

I’m going to jail!

Goldberg craned around again. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry, but I gotta put on the cuffs. I can’t be fucking around with ’em when we get there.”

“This is pure bullshit,” said Killian. “I hope you know that.”

“It’s the lawwwr!” said Goldberg plaintively. He put an
r
on the end of
law
. “If you bring somebody in on a felony, you’re supposed to put on the cuffs. I’ll grant you there’s times I ain’t done that, but the fucking zone captain is gonna be there.”

Goldberg held up his right hand. He held a pair of handcuffs. “Give me your wrists,” he said to Sherman. “We can get this over with.”

Sherman looked at Killian. The muscles in Killian’s jaws were bunched up. “Yeah, go ahead!” he said to Sherman with the sort of high-pitched emphasis that insinuates, “Someone is gonna
pay
for this!”

Martin said, “I tell you what. Why don’t you take your jacket off. He’ll cuff you in front instead of in back, and you can hold the jacket over your wrists, and you won’t even be able to see the fucking cuffs.”

The way he said it, it was as if the four of them were friends, all pulling together against an unkind fate. For an instant, that made Sherman feel better. He struggled out of his tweed jacket. Then he leaned forward and put his hands through the gap between the two front seats.

They were crossing a bridge…perhaps the Willis Avenue Bridge…he didn’t really know what bridge it was. All he knew was that it was a bridge, and it went across the Harlem River, away from Manhattan. Goldberg snapped the cuffs onto his wrists. Sherman sank back into the seat and looked down, and there he was, in manacles.

The rain was coming down harder. They reached the other end of the bridge. Well, here it was, the Bronx. It was like an old and decrepit part of Providence, Rhode Island. There were some massive but low buildings, grimy and moldering, and broad weary black streets running up and down slopes. Martin drove down a ramp and onto another expressway.

Sherman reached around to his right to retrieve his jacket and put it over the handcuffs. When he realized that he had to move both hands in order to pick up the coat, and when the effort caused the manacles to cut into his wrists, a flood of humiliation…and
shame
!…swept over him. This was himself, the very self who existed in a unique and sacrosanct and impenetrable crucible at the center of his mind, who was now in manacles…in the Bronx…Surely this was a hallucination, a nightmare, a trick of the mind, and he would pull back a translucent layer…and…The rain came down harder, the windshield wipers were sweeping back and forth in front of the two policemen.

With the handcuffs on, he couldn’t drape the jacket over his wrists. It kept balling up. So Killian helped him. There were three or four Styrofoam peanuts on the jacket. There were two more on his pant leg. He couldn’t possibly get to them with his fingers. Perhaps Killian…But what did it matter?

Up ahead, to the right…Yankee Stadium!…An anchor! Something to hold on to! He had been to Yankee Stadium! For World Series games, nothing more…Nevertheless, he had been there! It was part of a sane and decent world! It was not this…Congo!

The car went down a ramp, leaving the expressway. The road went around the base of the huge bowl of the stadium. It wasn’t forty feet away. There was a fat man with white hair wearing a New York Yankees warm-up jacket standing outside what looked like a little office door. Sherman had been to the World Series with Gordon Schoenburg, whose company had box seats for the season, and Gordon had served a picnic supper between the fifth and sixth innings from one of those wicker picnic baskets with all the compartments and stainless-steel utensils, and he had served sourdough bread and pâté and caviar to everybody, which had infuriated some drunks, who saw it from the walkway behind and started saying some very abusive things and repeating a word they heard Gordon say. The word was
really
, which they repeated over and over as
rilly
. “Oh, rilly?” they said. “Oh, rilly?” It was the next thing to calling Gordon a faggot, and Sherman always remembered that, even though no one spoke about it afterward. The abuse! The pointless hostility! The resentment! Martin and Goldberg! They were all Martins and Goldbergs.

Then Martin turned onto a very wide street, and they went underneath some elevated subway tracks and headed up a hill. There were mostly dark faces on the sidewalk, hurrying along in the rain. They all looked so dark and sodden. A lot of gray decrepit little shops, like the decaying downtowns of cities all across America, like Chicago’s, Akron’s, Allentown’s…The Daffyteria, the Snooker deli, Korn Luggage, the B. & G. Davidoff Travel & Cruise…

The windshield wipers swept aside sheets of rain. At the top of the hill there was an imposing limestone building that appeared to take up an entire block, the sort of monumental pile you see in the District of Columbia. Across the way, on the side of a low office building, was a prodigious sign reading,
ANGELO COLON, U.S. CONGRESS
. They went over the crest of the hill. What he saw down the slope on the other side shocked him. It was not merely decrepit and sodden but ruined, as though in some catastrophe. To the right an entire block was nothing but a great hole in the ground with cyclone fencing around it and raggedy catalpa trees sticking up here and there. At first it appeared to be a junkyard. Then he could see it was a parking lot, a vast pit for cars and trucks, apparently unpaved. Over to the left was a new building, modern in the cheap sense of the word, quite dreary-looking in the rain.

Martin stopped and waited for the traffic coming the other way, so he could turn left.

“What’s that?” Sherman asked Killian, motioning toward the building with his head.

“The Criminal Courts Building.”

“That’s where we’re going?”

Killian nodded yes and then stared straight ahead. He looked tense. Sherman could feel his heart going to town. It palpitated every now and then.

Instead of pulling up in front of the building, Martin drove down an incline to one side. There, near a mean little metal door, was a line of men and, behind them, a promiscuous huddle of people, thirty or forty of them, most of them white, all hunched over in the rain wrapped in ponchos, thermal jackets, dirty raincoats. A welfare office, thought Sherman. No, a soup kitchen. They looked like the people he had seen lined up for the soup-kitchen lunches at the church, at Madison Avenue and Seventy-first Street. But then their desperate beaten eyes all turned, as if on a command, toward the car—toward
him—
and all at once he was aware of the cameras.

The mob seemed to shake itself, like a huge filthy sprawling dog, and came bounding toward the car. Some of them were running, and he could see television cameras jouncing up and down.

“Jesus Christ,” Martin said to Goldberg. “Get out and get that door open or we’ll never even get him out of the fucking car.”

Goldberg jumped out. Immediately the shaggy sodden people were everywhere. Sherman could no longer see the building. He could only see the mob closing in on the car.

Killian said to Sherman, “Now listen. You don’t say anything. You don’t show any expression whatsoever. You don’t cover your face, you don’t hang your head. You don’t even know they’re there. You can’t win with these assholes, so don’t even try. Let me get out first.”

Bango!—somehow Killian swung both feet over Sherman’s knees and rolled over him, all in one motion. His elbows hit Sherman’s crossed hands and drove the handcuffs into his lower abdomen. Sherman’s tweed jacket was bunched up over his hands. There were five or six Styrofoam peanuts on the jacket, but there was nothing he could do about it. The door was open, and Killian was out of the car. Goldberg and Killian had their hands out toward him. Sherman swung his feet out. Killian, Goldberg, and Martin had created a pocket around the door with their bodies. The mob of reporters, photographers, and cameramen was on top of them. People were shouting. At first he thought it was a melee. They were trying to
get
him! Killian reached in under Sherman’s coat and pulled him upright by the handcuffs. Someone stuck a camera over Killian’s shoulder and into Sherman’s face. He ducked. When he looked down, he could see that five, six, seven, Christ knew how many Styrofoam peanuts were stuck to his pants legs. They were all over his coat and his pants. The rain was streaming down his forehead and his cheeks. He started to wipe his face, but then he realized he would have to raise both hands and his jacket to do it, and he didn’t want them to see his handcuffs. So the water just rolled down. He could feel it rolling down his shirt collar. Because of the handcuffs, his shoulders were slumped forward. He tried to throw his shoulders back, but all at once Goldberg yanked him forward by one elbow. He was trying to get him through the mob.

“Sherman!”

“Over here, Sherman!”

“Hey, Sherman!”

They were all yelling
Sherman!
His first name! He was
theirs
, too! The looks on their faces! Such pitiless intensity! They jammed their microphones toward him. Someone came barreling into Goldberg, knocking him back against Sherman. A camera appeared over Goldberg’s shoulder. Goldberg swung his elbow and forearm forward with tremendous force, and there was a
thumpf
, and the camera fell to the ground. Goldberg still had his other arm hooked inside Sherman’s elbow. The force of Goldberg’s punch pulled Sherman off balance. Sherman stepped to the side, and his foot landed on the leg of a man who was writhing on the ground. He was a little man with dark curly hair. Goldberg stepped on his abdomen for good measure. The man went
Ooooohahhh
.

“Hey, Sherman! Hey, shitface!”

Startled, Sherman looked to the side. It was a photographer. His camera covered half his face. The other side had a piece of white paper stuck on it.
Toilet paper
. Sherman could see the man’s lips moving. “That’s it, shitface, look right here!”

Martin was a step in front of Sherman, trying to clear a path. “Coming through! Coming through! Get outta the way!”

Killian took Sherman’s other elbow and tried to shield him from that side. But now both of his elbows were being pulled forward, and he was conscious of shambling forward, drenched, with his shoulders stooped. He couldn’t keep his head up.

“Sherman!” A woman’s voice. A microphone was in his face. “Have you ever been arrested before?”

“Hey, Sherman! How you gonna plead?”

“Sherman! Who’s the brunette?”

“Sherman! Did you mean to hit him?”