The Bonfire of the Vanities (70 page)

Sherman McCoy:
We The Jury
Want
You!

Then there was a crude approximation of a finger pointing straight at you, as in the old
UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU
posters. They seemed to be holding it at an angle, just so he could read it from up here. He fled the library and sat in the rear part of the living room in an armchair, one of Judy’s beloved Louis-Something bergères, or was it a fauteuil? Killian was pacing up and down, still crowing about the article in the
Daily News
, apparently to buck up his spirits, but Sherman was no longer listening. He could hear the deep ugly voice of one of the bodyguards, who was in the library answering the telephone. “Stick it up your face.” Every time one of the threats came in over the telephone, the bodyguard, a small swarthy man named Occhioni, said, “Stick it up your face.” The way he said it, it sounded worse than any of the classic vulgarities. How had they gotten his private number? Probably from the press—in the open cavity. They were here on Park Avenue
at the door below
. They were coming in over the telephone. How long before they
burst in
, into the entry gallery, and came screaming across that solemn green marble floor! The other bodyguard, McCarthy, was in the entry gallery, sitting in one of Judy’s beloved Thomas Hope armchairs, and what good would he be? Sherman sat back, his eyes cast downward, fixed upon the slender legs of a Sheraton Pembroke table, a hellishly expensive thing Judy had found in one of those antique shops on Fifty-seventh Street…hellishly expensive…hellishly…Mr. Occhioni, who said “Stick it up your face” to everyone who called threatening his life…$200 per eight-hour shift…another $200 for the impassive Mr. McCarthy…double that for the two bodyguards at his parents’ house on East Seventy-third, where Judy, Campbell, Bonita, and Miss Lyons were…$800 per eight-hour shift…all former New York City policemen from some agency Killian knew about…$2,400 a day…hemorrhaging money…McCOY!…McCOY!…a tremendous roar from the street below…And presently he wasn’t thinking about the Pembroke table or the bodyguards anymore…He was staring catatonically and wondering about the barrel. How big was it? He had used it so many times, most recently on the Leash Club hunt last fall, but he couldn’t remember how big it was! It was big, being a double-barrel 12-gauge. Was it too big to get in his mouth? No, it couldn’t be
that
big, but what would it feel like? What would it feel like, touching the roof of his mouth? What would it
taste
like? Would he have trouble breathing long enough to…to…How would he pull the trigger? Let’s see, he’d hold the barrel steady in his mouth with one hand, his left hand—but how long was the barrel? It was long…Could he reach the trigger with his right hand? Maybe not! His toe…He’d read somewhere about someone who took off his shoe and pressed the trigger with his toe…Where would he do it? The gun was at the house on Long Island…assuming he could get to Long Island, get out of this building, escape from besieged Park Avenue, get away alive from…
WE THE JURY
…The flower bed out beyond the tool house…Judy always called it the cutting bed…He’d sit down out there…If it made a mess, it wouldn’t matter
…Suppose Campbell was the one who found him!…
The thought didn’t reduce him to tears the way he thought it might
…hoped
it might…She wouldn’t be finding her father…He wasn’t her father anymore…wasn’t anything anyone had ever known as Sherman McCoy…He was only a cavity fast filling with hot vile hate…

The telephone rang in the library. Sherman braced.
Stick it up your face?
But all he heard was the rumble of Occhioni’s normal voice. Presently the little man stuck his head into the living room and said, “Hey, Mr. McCoy, it’s somebody named Sally Rawthrote. You wanna talk to her or not?”

Sally Rawthrote?
She was the woman he had sat next to at the Bavardages’, the woman who had lost interest in him immediately and then froze him out for the rest of the dinner. Why would she want to talk to him now? Why should he want to talk to her at all? He didn’t, but a tiny spark of curiosity was lit within the cavity, and he stood up and looked at Killian and shrugged and went into the library and sat at his desk and picked up the telephone.

“Hello?”

“Sherman! Sally Rawthrote:”
Sherman
. Oldest friend in the world. “I hope this isn’t a bad time?”

A
bad time?
From below a tremendous roar welled up, and the bullhorn screamed and bellowed, and he heard his name. McCOY!…McCOY!

“Well, of course it’s a bad time,” said Sally Rawthrote. “What am I saying? But I just thought I’d take a chance and call and see if there’s any way I might help.”

Help?
As she spoke, her face came back to him, that dreadful tense nearsighted face that focused about four and a half inches from the bridge of your nose.

“Well, thank you,” said Sherman.

“You know, I live just a few blocks down from you. Same side of the street.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I’m on the northwest corner. If you’re going to live on Park, I think there’s nothing quite like the northwest corner. You get so much
sun!
Of course, where you are is nice, too. Your building’s got some of the most beautiful apartments in New York. I haven’t been in yours since the McLeods had it. They had it before the Kittredges. Anyway, from my bedroom, which is on the corner, I can look right down Park to where you are. I’m looking down there right now, and
that
mob—it’s absolutely outrageous! I feel so badly for you and Judy—I just had to call and see if there’s anything I can do. I hope I’m not being out of place?”

“No, you’re very kind. By the way, how did you get my number?”

“I called Inez Bavardage. Was that all right?”

“To tell you the truth, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference at this point, Mrs. Rawthrote.”

“Sally.”

“Anyway, thank you.”

“As I say, if I can be of any help, let me know. With the apartment, is what I mean.”

“With the apartment?”

Another rumble…a roar…
MCCOY! MCCOY!

“If you should decide you want to do anything with the apartment. I’m with Benning Sturtevant, as you probably know, and I know that often in situations like this people sometimes find it advantageous to become as liquid as they can. Hah hah, I could stand a bit of that myself! Anyway, it’s a consideration, and I assure you
—assure
you—I can get you three and a half for your apartment. Just like that. I can guarantee it.”

The woman’s gall was astounding. It was beyond good and bad form, beyond…taste…It was astounding. It made Sherman smile, and he didn’t think he could smile.

“Well, well, well, well, Sally. I do admire foresightedness. You looked out your northwest window and you saw an apartment for sale.”

“Not at all! I just thought—”

“Well, you’re just one step too late, Sally. You’ll have to talk to a man named Albert Vogel.”

“Who’s that?”

“He’s the lawyer for Henry Lamb. He’s filed a hundred-million-dollar lawsuit against me, and I’m not sure if I’m free to sell a rug at this point. Well, maybe I could sell a rug. You want to sell a rug for me?”

“Hah hah, no. Rugs I don’t know anything about. I don’t see how they can freeze your assets. That seems totally unfair. I mean, you were the
victim
, after all, weren’t you? I read the story in the
Daily News
today. Ordinarily I only read Bess Hill and Bill Hatcher, but I was turning the pages—and there was your picture. I said, ‘My God, it’s Sherman!’ So I read the story—and you were only avoiding a robbery attempt. It’s so unfair!” She chattered on. She was fireproof. She couldn’t be mocked.

After hanging up, Sherman returned to the living room.

Killian said, “Who was that?”

Sherman said, “A real-estate broker I met at dinner. She wanted to sell my apartment for me.”

“She say how much she could get you?”

“Three and a half million dollars.”

“Well, let’s see,” said Killian. “If she gets her 6 percent commission, that’s…ummmm…$210,000. That’s worth sounding stone-cold opportunistic over, I guess. But I’ll say one thing for her.”

“What’s that?”

“She made you smile. So she ain’t all bad.”

Another roar, the loudest yet…
MCCOY!…MCCOY
!…The two of them stood in the middle of the living room and listened for a moment.

“Jesus, Tommy,” said Sherman. It was the first time he had called him by his first name, but he didn’t stop to think about that. “I can’t believe I’m standing here and all this is happening. I’m holed up in my apartment and Park Avenue is occupied by a mob waiting to kill me.
Kill
me!”

“Awwwwww, f’r Chrissake, that’s the
last
thing they wanna do. You ain’t worth a goddamned thing to Bacon dead, and he thinks you’re gonna be worth a lot to him alive.”

“To Bacon? What does he get out of it?”

“Millions is what he thinks he’s gonna get out of it. I can’t prove it, but I say this whole thing is over the civil suits.”

“But Henry Lamb is the one who’s suing. Or his mother, I guess it is, in his behalf. How does Bacon get anything out of it?”

“All right.”
Awright
. “Who is the lawyer representing Henry Lamb? Albert Vogel. And how does Henry Lamb’s mother get to Albert Vogel? Because she admired his brilliant defense of the Utica Four and the Waxahachie Eight in 1969? Fuhgedaboudit. Bacon steers her to Vogel, because the two a them are tight. Whatever the Lambs get in a lawsuit, Vogel gets at least a third a that, and you can be sure he splits that with Bacon, or he’s gonna have a mob coming after him that means business. One thing in this world I know from A to Z, and that’s lawyers and where their money comes from and where it goes.”

“But Bacon had his campaign going about Henry Lamb before he even knew I was involved.”

“Oh, at the beginning they were just going after the hospital, on the grounds of malpractice. They were gonna sue the city. If Bacon could get it built up into a big deal in the press, then a jury might give ’em what they wanted. A jury in a civil case…with a racial angle? They had a good shot.”

“So the same goes for me,” said Sherman.

“I won’t try to kid you. That’s very true. But if you beat the felony case, then there’s no civil case.”

“And if I don’t win the felony case, I won’t care about the civil case,” said Sherman, looking very glum.

“Well, you gotta admit one thing,” said Killian in a cheer-up voice, “this thing has made you a giant on Wall Street. One freakin’
giant
, bro. Juh see what Flannagan called you in the
Daily News
? ‘Pierce & Pierce’s fabled chief bond salesman.’
Fabled
. A legend in your own time. You’re the son of ‘the aristocratic John Campbell McCoy,’ former head of Dunning Sponget & Leach. You’re the fabled investment banking genius aristocrat. Bacon probably thinks you got half the money in the world.”

“If you want to know the truth,” said Sherman, “I don’t even know where I’m gonna get the money to pay…” He motioned toward the library, where Occhioni was. “This civil suit mentions
everything
. They’re even after the quarterly share of profits I was supposed to get at the end of this month. I can’t imagine how they knew about it. They even referred to it by the in-company name, which is the ‘Pie B.’ They’d have to know someone at Pierce & Pierce.”

“Pierce & Pierce’ll look after you, won’t they?”

“Hah. I don’t exist at Pierce & Pierce anymore. There’s no such thing as loyalty on Wall Street. Maybe there once was—my father always talked as if there was—but there isn’t now. I’ve gotten one telephone call from Pierce & Pierce, and that wasn’t from Lopwitz. It was from Arnold Parch. He wanted to know if there was anything they could do, and then he couldn’t get off the telephone fast enough, for fear I’d think of something. Although I don’t know why I single out Pierce & Pierce. Our own friends have all been the same way. My wife can’t even make play dates for our daughter. She’s six years old…”

He stopped. He suddenly felt uncomfortable parading his personal woes before Killian. Goddamned Garland Reed and his wife! They wouldn’t even let Campbell come play with MacKenzie! Some utterly lame excuse…Garland hadn’t even called once, and he’d known him all his life. At least Rawlie had had the guts to call. He’d called three times. He’d probably even have the guts to come see him…if
WE THE JURY
ever vacated Park Avenue…Maybe he would…

“It’s damned sobering, how fast it goes when it goes,” he said to Killian. He didn’t want to say this much, but he couldn’t help himself. “All these ties you have, all these people you went to school with and to college, the people who are in your clubs, the people you go out to dinner with—it’s all a thread, Tommy, all these ties that make up your life, and when it breaks…that’s it!…That’s it…I feel so sorry for my daughter, my little girl. She’ll mourn me, she’ll mourn her daddy, the daddy she remembers, without knowing he’s already dead.”

“What the hell you talking about?” said Killian.

“You’ve never been through anything like this. I don’t doubt you’ve seen a lot of it, but you’ve never been through it. I can’t explain the feeling. All I can tell you is that I’m already dead, or the Sherman McCoy of the McCoy family and Yale and Park Avenue and Wall Street is dead. Your
self—
I don’t know how to explain it, but if, God forbid, anything like this ever happens to you, you’ll know what I mean. Your
self…
is
other people
, all the people you’re tied to, and it’s only a thread.”

“Ayyyyy, Sherman,” said Killian. “Gimme a break. It don’t do any good to philosophize in the middle of a war.”

“Some war.”

“F’r Chrissake, whaddaya whaddaya? This story in the
Daily News
is very important for you. Weiss must be going crazy. We’ve blown the cover on this lowlife smokehead he’s got for a witness. Auburn. Now we’ve got another theory out there for the whole business. Now there’s a basis for people to support you. We’ve gotten across the idea that you were the intended victim of a setup, a robbery. That changes the whole picture for you, and we haven’t compromised you in the slightest.”