The Bonfire of the Vanities (76 page)

“And this church,” said the Mayor, “something about Landmarks?”

“Right,” said Sheldon. “The bishop wants to sell St. Timothy’s to a developer, on the grounds that the membership is declining and the church is losing a lot of money, which is true. But the community groups are putting a lot of pressure on the Landmarks Commission to landmark it so that nobody can alter the building even if they buy it.”

“Is this guy honest?” asked the Mayor. “Who gets the money if they sell the church?”

“I never heard he wasn’t honest,” said Sheldon. “He’s a learned gentleman of the cloth. He went to Harvard. He could still be greedy, I suppose, but I have no reason to think he is.”

“Unnh-hunh.” The Mayor suddenly had an idea. “Well, send him in.”

Bishop Warren Bottomley turned out to be one of those well-educated, urbane black people who immediately create the Halo Effect in the eyes of white people who hadn’t known what to expect. For a moment or two the Mayor was even intimidated, so dynamic was Bishop Bottomley. He was handsome, slender, about forty-five, athletic in build. He had a ready smile, a glittering eye, a firm handshake, and he wore a clerical outfit that was similar to a Catholic priest’s but had an expensive look. And he was tall, much taller than the Mayor, who was touchy about his small size. Once they sat down, the Mayor got his perspective back and thought about his idea. Yes, Bishop Warren Bottomley would be perfection itself.

After a few well-delivered pleasantries about the Mayor’s illustrious political career, the bishop began laying out the financial plight of St. Timothy’s.

“Of course, I can understand the concerns of the people of the community,” said the bishop. “They don’t want to see a larger building or a different sort of building.”

No black accent at all, thought the Mayor. He seemed to run into black people with no accent all the time now. The fact that he noticed it made him feel mildly guilty, but he noticed it all the same.

“But very few of these people are members of St. Timothy’s Church,” the bishop continued, “which of course is precisely the problem. There are fewer than seventy-five regular members in a very large building, which incidentally has no architectural distinction. The architect was a man named Samuel D. Wiggins, a contemporary of Cass Gilbert who has left not a single footprint in the sands of architectural history, so far as I can determine.”

This casual reference intimidated the Mayor still further. Art and architecture were not his strong suits.

“Frankly, St. Timothy’s Church is no longer serving its community, Mr. Mayor, because it is no longer in a position to do so, and we feel it would be of far greater benefit, not only to the Episcopal Church and its more vital manifestations in our city, but to the city itself—since a large taxable entity could be erected on that site, and even the community would benefit, indirectly, in the sense that the whole city would gain through the increase in tax revenues. That’s why we would like to sell the present structure, and we request your consideration…so that the building will not be landmarked, as the Landmarks Commission wants to do.”

Thank God! The Mayor was relieved to see that the bishop had gotten tangled up in his grammar and had left an incomplete sentence in the road behind him. Without saying a word, the Mayor smiled at the bishop and put his finger beside his nose, like Santa Claus in “The Night before Christmas.” Then he pointed his finger straight up in the air, as if to say “Hark!” or “Watch this!” He beamed at the bishop and pushed a button on the intercom box on the credenza by his desk and said, “Get me the Landmarks Commissioner.” Presently, there was a low
beep-beep
sound, and the Mayor picked up his telephone.

“Mort?…You know St. Timothy’s Church?…Right. Exactly…Mort—
LAY OFF
!”

The Mayor hung up and leaned back in his chair and smiled once more at the bishop.

“You mean—that’s it?” The bishop seemed genuinely startled and delighted. “That’s…the commission…they won’t…”

The Mayor nodded and smiled.

“Mr. Mayor, I scarcely know how to thank you. Believe me—I’ve been told you have a way of getting things done, but—well! I’m very grateful! And I can assure you that I will see to it that everyone in the diocese and all of our friends are aware of what a great service you have done for us. Yes indeed, I will!”

“That’s not necessary, Bishop,” said the Mayor. “There’s no need to regard it as a favor or even as a service. The facts you so ably presented to me were very persuasive, and I think the entire city is going to benefit. I’m happy to do something for yoooou that’s good for yoooou and for the city of New York.”

“You certainly have! And I’m most appreciative.”

“Now, in the same spirit,” said the Mayor, adopting his best school-teacherly tone, which had served him so well so often, “I want yo-o-o-ou to do something for me-e-e-e…that is
like
wise good for yo-o-o-ou and for the city of New York.”

The Mayor cocked his head and smiled more broadly than ever. He looked like a robin eyeing a worm.

“Bishop, I want you to serve on a special blue-ribbon commission on crime in New York that I will be forming shortly. I’d like to announce your appointment the same time that I announce the formation of the commission. I don’t have to tell you what a crucial issue this is, and one of our biggest problems is all the racial overtones, all the perceptions and misperceptions about who commits crimes and how our police officers deal with crimes. There’s not a more important service you could render the city of New York at this time than to serve on this commission. How about it?”

The Mayor could see the dismay in the bishop’s face immediately.

“I feel highly flattered, Mr. Mayor,” said the bishop. He didn’t look highly flattered, however. No more smiles. “And I agree with you, of course. But I must explain to you that insofar as my activities as bishop of this diocese interact with the public or, let me say, the official sector, my hands are somewhat tied, and…”

But his hands were not tied at this moment. He began twisting them as if trying to open a jar of pickled peaches, as he attempted to explain to the Mayor the structure of the Episcopal Church and the theology underlying the structure and the teleology of the theology and what could or could not be rendered unto Caesar.

The Mayor tuned out after ten or twelve seconds but let the bishop ramble on, taking a bitter pleasure in the man’s distress. Oh, it was quite clear. The bastard was filling the air with bullshit to cover up the fact that no Rising Black Leader such as himself could afford to affiliate with the Mayor in any way, not even to the extent of serving on a fucking commission on fucking crime. And it had been such a brilliant idea! A biracial commission on crime, with a half dozen good-looking dynamic black leaders such as the bishop. Bishop Warren Bottomley would resonate with the heartbeats of every decent black person in New York, the very constituency the Mayor had to have if he was to win in November. And this smooth Harvard-educated snake was already wiggling out of his grasp! Long before the bishop had completed his exegeses and apologies, the Mayor had abandoned the idea of a special blue-ribbon commission on crime in New York City.

“I’m truly sorry,” said the bishop, “but church policy leaves me no choice.”

“Oh, I understand,” said the Mayor. “What you can’t do, you can’t do. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather see serve on the commission, but I understand your situation completely.”

“I’m doubly sorry, Mr. Mayor, in view of what you’ve just done for our church.” The bishop was wondering if the deal was still on.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said the Mayor. “Don’t worry about that at all. As I said, I didn’t do it for you, and I didn’t do it for your church. I did it because I think it’s in the best interests of the city. It’s as simple as that.”

“Well, I
am
grateful, nonetheless,” said the bishop, getting up, “and you can be sure that the entire diocese will be grateful. I’ll see to that.”

“That’s not necessary,” said the Mayor. “Every now and then it’s nice to come across a proposition that has an irresistible logic all its own.”

The Mayor gave the bishop his broadest smile and looked him squarely in the face and shook his hand and kept smiling until the bishop left the room. When the Mayor returned to his desk, he pressed a button and said, “Get me the Landmarks Commissioner.”

Presently there was a low
beep-beep
, and the Mayor picked up his telephone and said, “Mort? You know that church, St. Timothy’s?…Right…
LANDMARK THE SON OF A BITCH
!”

“Listen, Sherman. Do you think she honestly cares whether you’re a gentleman or anything else at this point? Do you think she’s gonna voluntarily jeopardize her interests to help you out? She don’t even tawk to you, f’r Chrissake.”

“I don’t know.”

“I
do
know. You don’t get the picture yet? She
married
Ruskin, f’r Chrissake, and whaddaya think she felt for him? I bet she studied the actuarial tables. Awright? I bet you she actually studied the fucking actuarial tables.”

“You may be right. But that doesn’t excuse anything I do. This is a
funeral
we’re talking about, her husband’s
funeral
!”

Killian laughed. “You can call it a funeral if you want. To her it’s Christmas.”

“But to do this to a
widow
on the day of her husband’s funeral, practically on top of the corpse!”

“Awright. Let me put it to you another way. Whaddaya want, a gold star for ethics…or your own funeral?”

Killian had his elbows on the arms of his desk chair. He leaned forward and cocked his head, as if to say, “What’s that, Sherman? I don’t hear you.”

And in that instant, Sherman had a vision of
that place
and
them
. If he had to go to jail, even for a few months—let alone
years—

“This is the one time you
know
you’re gonna see her,” said Killian. “She’s
got
to turn up for the guy’s fucking funeral. She’ll face you and ten like you for the payoff at the end of that one.”

Sherman lowered his eyes and said, “Okay. I’ll do it.”

“Believe me,” said Killian, “it’s perfectly legal, and under the circumstances it’s perfectly fair. You’re not doing anything to Maria Ruskin. You’re protecting yourself. You have every right.”

Sherman looked up at Killian and nodded yes, as if he were assenting to the end of the world.

“We better get started,” said Killian, “before Quigley goes out to lunch. He does all our wiring.”

“You do that much of it?”

“I’m telling you, this is a standard procedure now. We don’t exactly advertise it, but we do it all the time. I’m gonna get Quigley.”

Killian got up and went down the corridor. Sherman’s eyes drifted over the dreadful blind interior of the little office. How inexpressibly grim! And yet here he was. This was his last redoubt. He was sitting here, of his own free will, waiting to be
wired
in order to steal, through the most indecent sort of deception, testimony from someone he had loved. He nodded, as if someone else were in the room, and that nod said, “Yes, but that’s what I’m going to do.”

Killian returned with Quigley. High on Quigley’s waistband, on the left side, was a .38-caliber revolver, in a holster, with the handle facing forward. He came in carrying some sort of attaché case. He smiled at Sherman in an abrupt businesslike fashion.

“Okay,” Quigley said to Sherman, “you’ll have to take off your shirt.”

Sherman did as he was told. The bodily vanity of the male knows no bounds. Sherman’s immediate concern was that the definition of his pectoral, abdominal, and triceps muscles stand out sufficiently for these two men to be impressed by his physique. For a moment this cut through everything else. He knew that if he extended his arms straight down as if he were simply holding them at his sides, the triceps muscles would flex.

Quigley said, “I’m gonna put the recorder in the small of your back. You’re gonna wear a jacket over there, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. That’ll be no problem then.”

Quigley got down on one knee, opened his attaché case, took out the wires and the recorder, which was about the size of a deck of cards. The microphone was a gray cylinder the size of the eraser and metal band on the top of an ordinary pencil. First he taped the recorder onto Sherman’s back. Then he taped the wire around his waist from back to front and up his abdomen to the hollow between his pectoral muscles, just above the sternum, where he taped the microphone.

“That’s good,” he said. “It’s down deep. It won’t show at all, especially if you wear a necktie.”

Sherman took that as a compliment.
Down deep…between the massive hillocks of my manly chest muscles
.

“Okay,” said Quigley, “you can put your shirt on, and we’ll test it.”

Sherman put his shirt and tie and jacket back on. Well…he was now
wired
. Cold spots of metal in the small of his back and over his sternum…He had become that loathsome animal…the…the…But
loathsome
was only a word, wasn’t it? Now that he had actually become that creature, he no longer actually
felt
even a twinge of guilt. Fear had remapped the moral geography very quickly.

“Awright,” said Killian. “Now we’re gonna go over what you’re gonna say. You’re only gonna need a couple of statements out of her, but you gotta know exactly how you’re gonna get ’em. Awright? So let’s get started.”

He motioned toward the white plastic chair, and Sherman sat down to learn the manly art of entrapment. “Not entrapment,” he said to himself. “Truth.”

Harold A. Burns’s, on Madison Avenue, had been the most fashionable funeral parlor in New York for many years, but Peter Fallow had never set foot in the place before. The dark green double doors on Madison were framed by a formal set of pilasters. The vestibule within was no more than twelve by twelve feet. Yet from the moment he entered, Fallow was aware of an overpowering sensation. The light in the little space was intensely bright, so bright he didn’t even want to seek out the source, for fear it would blind him. A bald-headed man in a dark gray suit stood in the vestibule. He handed Fallow a program and said, “Please sign the register.” There was a podium, upon which was a large date book and a ballpoint pen tethered by a brass chain. Fallow added his name to the roster.

As his eyes began to adjust to the light, he became aware that there was a large doorway beyond the vestibule and that someone was staring at him. Not someone, however, but several people…not several, but…scores of them! The doorway led to a short flight of stairs. So many eyes bearing down upon him! The mourners were seated in what looked like the sanctuary of a small church, and they were all staring at him. The pews faced a stage, upon which the service would take place and in front of which rested the coffin of the recently departed. The vestibule was a second stage, off to one side, and by turning their heads the mourners could see each person who arrived. And everyone turned his head. But of course! This was Manhattan. The Upper East Side! The dear deceased, who reposeth in that box up front? Alas, the poor devil is done for, dead and gone. But the quick and the living—ah!—there you have something. They still burn with the lovely social wattage of the city! Not who leaveth, but who cometh in! Let us by all means illuminate them and measure their radiance!

They kept coming, Baron Hochswald, Nunnally Voyd, Bobby Shaflett, Red Pitt, Jackie Balch, the Bavardages, one and all, the whole bold-faced population of the gossip columns, stepping into the blazing light of the vestibule with faces so suitably grim that it made Fallow want to laugh. Solemnly they entered their names in the register. He would want to take a good look at that list of autographs before he left.

Soon the place was packed. A rustle ran through the crowd. A door to the side of the stage opened. People began to rise up in their seats to get a better look. Fallow rose to a crouch.

Well, there she was—or Fallow assumed it was she. At the head of a procession was…the Mystery Brunette, the Widow Ruskin. She was a trim woman wearing a long-sleeved black silk suit with huge shoulders and a black silk blouse and a black fez-style hat, from which issued a voluminous black veil. That outfit was going to cost the estate a few Mecca ticket receipts. With her were half a dozen people. Two of them were Ruskin’s sons by his first marriage, a pair of middle-aged men, each old enough to be Maria Ruskin’s father. There was a fortyish woman who Fallow assumed was Ruskin’s daughter by his second wife. There was an old woman, perhaps Ruskin’s sister, plus two more women and two men Fallow couldn’t figure out at all. They sat down in the front row, near the coffin.

Fallow was on the opposite side of the room from the door from which Maria Ruskin had come and through which she might disappear at the end of the service. Some rude journalistic aggressiveness might be called for. He wondered if the Widow Ruskin had hired any sort of bodyguards for the occasion.

A tall, slender, very dapper figure ascended the four or five steps to the stage in front and went to the podium. He was fashionably dressed for mourning, with his navy double-breasted suit, black tie, white shirt, and narrow-toed black shoes. Fallow looked at his program. This was apparently a man named B. Monte Griswold, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He fished a pair of half spectacles out of his breast pocket, spread some sheets of paper out before him, looked down, looked up, took off the half spectacles, paused, and said, in a rather fluty voice:

“We are here not to mourn Arthur Ruskin but to celebrate his very full…and very generous life.”

It made Fallow’s flesh crawl, this American penchant for the personal and the sentimental. The Yanks couldn’t even let the dead depart with dignity. Everyone in the hall would be in for it now. He could feel it coming, the pointless bathos, the dripping spoonfuls of soul. It was enough to drive an Englishman back into the bosom of the Church of England, wherein death and all the major junctures of life were dealt with upon the high ground of the Divine, an invariable and admirably formal eminence.

Ruskin’s eulogizers were every bit as witless and tasteless as Fallow had imagined they would be. The first was a United States senator from New York, Sidney Greenspan, whose accent was exceptionally vulgar, even by American standards. He stressed Arthur Ruskin’s generosity toward the United Jewish Appeal, an unfortunate note in view of the just-revealed fact that his financial empire was founded upon the ferrying of Muslims to Mecca. The senator was followed by one of Ruskin’s partners, Raymond Radosz. He started off pleasantly enough with an anecdote about a period when the two of them were close to bankruptcy, but then trailed off on an embarrassing tangent about the glories of their holding company, Rayart Equities, which would keep Artie’s—he called him Artie—Artie’s spirit alive, so long as loans floated and debentures were convertible. Then came a jazz pianist, “Arthur’s favorite,” named Manny Leerman, to play a medley of “Arthur’s favorite songs.” Manny Leerman was a fat red-haired man who wore a robin’s-egg-blue double-breasted suit, which he laboriously unbuttoned after sitting down at the piano, so that the collar of the suit wouldn’t ride up above his shirt collar. Arthur’s favorite songs turned out to be “September in the Rain,” “The Day Isn’t Long Enough (When I’m with You),” and “The Flight of the Bumblebee.” This last the florid little pianist played in a rousing but not flawless manner. He wound up his performance by spinning around 180 degrees on the piano stool, before it dawned on him that this was not a club date and he was not supposed to take a bow. He buttoned up his double-breasted jacket before he left the stage.

Then came the main speaker, Hubert Birnley, the movie actor, who had decided that what was needed was the light touch and the human side of Arthur the great financier and ferry captain to the Arab world. He became mired in an anecdote that hinged largely upon one’s comprehension of the problems people have with swimming-pool-filtration systems in Palm Springs, California. He left the stage dabbing a handkerchief at the corners of his eyes.

Last on the program was Cantor Myron Branoskowitz, of Congregation Schlomoch’om, Bayside, Queens. He was a huge young man, a three-hundred-pounder, who began singing in Hebrew in a strong clear tenor voice. His lamentations began to swell in volume. They were unending and irrepressible. His voice took on throbs and vibratos. If there was a choice between ending a phrase in a high octave or a low one, he invariably went high, like an opera singer in concert, indulging his virtuosity. He put tears into his voice that would have embarrassed the worst hambone Pagliacci. At first the mourners were impressed. Then they were startled as the voice grew in volume. Then they became concerned as the young man appeared to swell like a frog. And now they were beginning to look at one another, each wondering if his neighbor was thinking the same thing: “This kid is out to lunch.” The voice rose, rose, then peaked with a note just this side of a yodel before plunging to a lower range with a teary cascade of vibrato and coming to an abrupt halt.

The service was over. The audience paused, but Fallow did not. He slipped out into the aisle and, crouching slightly, began hurrying down toward the front. He was ten or twelve rows from the front when a figure ahead of him did the same thing.

It was a man wearing a navy-blue suit, a snap-brim hat, and dark glasses. Fallow caught only the briefest glimpse of the side of his head…the chin…It was Sherman McCoy. He had no doubt worn the hat and the glasses in order to enter the funeral home without being recognized. He rounded the bend at the first pew and fell in behind the family’s little entourage. Fallow did the same. Now he could get a glimpse of the profile. It was McCoy all right.

The crowd was already in the hubbub of departing a funeral service and letting off the steam of thirty or forty minutes of obligatory respectfulness toward a rich man who, while alive, had not been particularly warm or likable. A funeral-parlor functionary was holding open the little side door for the Widow Ruskin. McCoy stayed close on the heels of a tall man who was in fact, as Fallow could now see, Monte Griswold, the master of ceremonies. The eulogizers were joining the family backstage. McCoy and Fallow were merely part of a mournful troop of dark blue suits and black dresses. Fallow folded his arms over his chest to hide the brass buttons on his blazer, for fear they would look out of place.

There was no problem. The funeral-home doorman was intent only on herding inside everyone who was going inside. The little door led to a short flight of stairs, at the top of which was a suite of rooms, like a little apartment. Everyone gathered in a small reception room decorated with balloon shades and panels of fabric framed in gilded wood, in the nineteenth-century French manner. Everyone was paying his condolences to the widow, who could scarcely be seen behind the wall of blue suits. McCoy hung about the edges, still wearing his dark glasses. Fallow stayed behind McCoy.