The Bonfire of the Vanities (38 page)

The torrent of syllables was like a bad smell.

“What kind of firm is that?”

“Oh, they have a general practice, but they’re best known for their work in criminal law.”

“
Crim
inal law?”

Freddy smiled faintly. “Don’t worry. Criminal lawyers help people who aren’t criminals, too. We’ve used this fellow before. His name is Thomas Killian. He’s very bright. He’s about your age. He went to Yale, as a matter of fact, or at least he went to the law school. He’s the only Irishman who ever graduated from the Yale Law School, and he’s the only graduate of the Yale Law School who ever practiced criminal law. I’m exaggerating, of course.”

Sherman sank back into the chair again and tried to let the term
criminal law
sink in. Seeing that he was once more The Lawyer with the upper hand, Freddy took out the silver-and-ivory case, eased a Senior Service from under the silver clip, tamped it, lit up, and inhaled with profound satisfaction.

“I want to see what he thinks,” said Freddy, “particularly since, judging by this newspaper story, this case is taking on political overtones. Tommy Killian can give us a much better reading on that than I can.”

“Dershkin, Something & Schloffel?”

“Dershkin, Bellavita, Fishbein & Schlossel,” said Freddy. “Three Jews and an Italian, and Tommy Killian is an Irishman. Let me tell you something, Sherman. The practice of law gets very specialized in New York. It’s as if there are a lot of little
…clans
…of
trolls…
I’ll give you an example. If I was being sued in an automobile negligence case, I wouldn’t want anybody at Dunning Sponget representing me. I’d go to one of these lawyers on lower Broadway who don’t do anything else. They’re the absolute bottom of the barrel of the legal profession. They’re all Bellavitas and Schlossels. They’re crude, coarse, sleazy, unappetizing—you can’t even imagine what they’re like. But that’s who I’d go to. They know all the judges, all the clerks, the other lawyers—they know how to make the deals. If somebody named Bradshaw or Farnsworth showed up from Dunning Sponget & Leach, they’d freeze him out. They’d sabotage him. It’s the same way with criminal law. The criminal lawyers aren’t exactly the
bout en train
, either, but in certain cases you’ve got to use them. Given that situation, Tommy Killian is a very good choice.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Sherman. Of all the things Freddy had said, only the words
criminal law
had stuck.

“Don’t look so gloomy, Sherman!”

Criminal law.

When he returned to the bond trading floor at Pierce & Pierce, the sales assistant, Muriel, gave him a dour look.

“Where were you, Sherman? I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“I was—” He started to repeat the lie, with improvements, but the look on her face told him it would only make things worse. “Okay, what’s wrong?”

“An issue came in just after you left, 200 million Fidelity Mutuals. So I called over to Polsek and Fragner, but you weren’t there, and they said they weren’t even expecting you. Arnold’s not happy, Sherman. He wants to see you.”

“I’ll go see him.” He turned away and started toward the desk.

“Wait a second,” said Muriel. “This fellow in Paris has been trying to get you, too. He’s called about four times. Mr. Levy. Said you were supposed to call him back. Said to tell you ninety-three is it. ‘Final,’ he said. He said you’d know what he meant.”

Kramer and the two detectives, Martin and Goldberg, arrived at the Edgar Allan Poe Towers in an unmarked Dodge sedan about 4:15. The demonstration was scheduled for five o’clock. The housing project had been designed during the Green Grass era of slum eradication. The idea had been to build apartment towers upon a grassy landscape where the young might gambol and the old might sit beneath shade trees, along sinuous footpaths. In fact, the gamboling youth broke off, cut down, or uprooted the shade-tree seedlings during the first month, and any old person fool enough to sit along the sinuous footpaths was in for the same treatment. The project was now a huge cluster of grimy brick towers set on a slab of cinders and stomped dirt. With the green wooden slats long gone, the concrete supports of the benches looked like ancient ruins. The ebb and flow of the city, caused by the tides of human labor, didn’t cause a ripple at the Edgar Allan Poe Towers, where the unemployment rate was at least 75 percent. The place was no livelier at 4:15
P.M.
than it was at noon. Kramer couldn’t spy a soul, except for a small pack of male teenagers scurrying past the graffiti at the base of the buildings. The graffiti looked halfhearted. The grimy brick, with all its mortar gulleys, depressed even the spray-can juvies.

Martin slowed the car down to a crawl. They were on the main drag, out in front of Building A, where the demonstration was supposed to be held. The block was empty, except for a gangling teenager out in the middle of the street working on the wheel of a car. The car, a red Camaro, was nosed into a parking space along the curb. The rear end stuck out into the street. The boy wore black jeans, a black T-shirt, and striped sneakers. He was sitting on his haunches with a lug wrench in his hands.

Martin stopped the car barely ten feet from him and shut off the engine. The boy, still on his haunches, stared at the Dodge. Martin and Goldberg were in the front seat, and Kramer was in the back. Martin and Goldberg just sat there, looking straight ahead. Kramer couldn’t imagine what they were doing. Then Martin got out. He was wearing a tan windbreaker, a polo shirt, and a pair of cheap-looking gray pants. He walked over to the boy and stood over him and said, “Whaddaya doing?” He didn’t say it nicely, either.

Baffled, the boy said, “Nothing. Fixing a hubcap.”

“
Fix
ing a hubcap?” asked Martin, his voice sopping with insinuation.

“Yehhhhhhh…”

“You always park like this, out inna middle a the fucking street?”

The boy stood up. He was well over six feet tall. He had long muscular arms and powerful hands, one of which was holding the lug wrench. His mouth open, he stared down at Martin, who suddenly looked like a dwarf. Martin’s narrow shoulders seemed nonexistent under the windbreaker. He wore no badge or any other police insignia. Kramer couldn’t believe what he was watching. Here they were in the South Bronx, thirty minutes away from a demonstration protesting the shortcomings of White Justice, and Martin throws down the gauntlet to a black youth twice his size with a lug wrench in his hand.

Martin cocked his head to one side and stared into the boy’s incredulous face without so much as a blink. The boy apparently found it exceedingly strange, too, because he didn’t move or say anything, either. Now he glanced at the Dodge and found himself staring into the big meaty face of Goldberg, with its slits for eyes and its drooping black mustache. Then he looked at Martin again and put on a brave and angry face.

“Just fixing a hubcap, champ. Got nothing to do with you.”

Before he got to the word
you
, he was already moving away from Martin with what was supposed to pass for a saunter. He opened the door of the Camaro and tossed the wrench in the back seat and sauntered around to the driver’s side and got in and started up the car and maneuvered it out of the parking place and headed off. The Camaro gave a great throaty roar. Martin returned to the Dodge and got behind the wheel.

“I’m putting you in for a community relations commendation, Marty,” said Goldberg.

“Kid’s lucky I didn’t run a check,” said Martin. “Besides, that’s the only parking place on the fucking block.”

And they wonder why people hate them in the ghetto, thought Kramer. Yet in that very moment he marveled
…marveled
! He, Kramer, was big enough and strong enough to have fought the boy with the wrench, and conceivably he might have beaten him. But he would have
had to do that
. If he had confronted the boy, it would have reached the fighting stage immediately. But Martin knew from the beginning that it wouldn’t. He knew that something in his eyes would make the boy sense Irish Cop Who Don’t Back Off. Of course, it didn’t hurt to have Goldberg sitting there looking like the Original Cruel Thug, and it didn’t hurt to have a .38 under your jacket. Nevertheless, Kramer knew he couldn’t have done what this outrageous little featherweight champion of the breed had done, and for the five hundredth time in his career as an assistant district attorney in the Bronx he paid silent homage to that most mysterious and coveted of male attributes, Irish machismo.

Martin parked the Dodge in the space the boy had vacated, and the three of them sat back and waited.

“Bullshit reigns,” said Martin.

“Hey, Marty,” said Kramer, proud to be on a first-name basis with this paragon, “you guys find out who gave that printout to
The City Light?
”

Without turning around, Martin said, “One a da
brothers
,” giving an Irish rendition of a black accent. He turned his head slightly and twisted his lips to indicate it was about what you would expect and that there was nothing to be done about it.

“You gonna check out all 124 cars or whatever it is?”

“Yeah. Weiss has been on the C.O.’s case all day.”

“How long will it take?”

“Three or four days. He’s assigned six men. Bullshit reigns.”

Goldberg turned around and said to Kramer: “What’s with Weiss? Does he really believe this shit he reads in the newspapers or what?”

“That’s all he believes,” said Kramer. “And anything with a racial angle drives him crazy. Like I told you, he’s up for reelection.”

“Yeah, but what makes him think we’re gonna find witnesses at this demonstration, which is
pure
bullshit?”

“I don’t know. But that’s what he told Bernie.”

Goldberg shook his head. “We don’t even have a location where the goddamned thing happened. You realize that? Marty and me been up and down Bruckner Boulevard and I’ll be goddamned if we can establish where it happened. That’s another thing the kid forgot to tell his mother when he came up with the bullshit license plate, where it’s fucking supposeda’ve happened.”

“Speaking of that,” said Kramer, “how would a kid in the Poe project even know what a Mercedes looks like?”

“Oh, they know that,” said Martin, without turning his head. “The pimps and wiseguys drive the Mercedes.”

“Yeah,” said Goldberg. “They won’t look at a Cadillac anymore. You see these kids with these things, these hood ornaments from the Mercedes, hanging around their necks.”

“If a kid up here wants to think up a bullshit car for a bullshit story,” said Martin, “the Mercedes is the first one he’s gonna think of. Bernie knows that.”

“Well, Weiss is all over Bernie’s case, too,” said Kramer. He looked around some more. The huge project was so quiet it was eerie. “You sure this is the right place, Marty? There’s nobody here.”

“Don’t worry,” said Martin. “They’ll be here. Bullshit reigns.”

Pretty soon a bronze-colored passenger van pulled into the block and stopped up ahead of them. About a dozen men got out. All of them were black. Most of them wore blue work shirts and dungarees. They appeared to be in their twenties or early thirties. One of them stood out because he was so tall. He had an angular profile and a large Adam’s apple and wore a gold ring in one ear. He said something to the others, and they began pulling lengths of lumber out of the van. These turned out to be the shafts of picket signs. They stacked the signs on the sidewalk. Half the men leaned up against the van and began talking and smoking cigarettes.

“I’ve seen that tall asshole somewhere,” said Martin.

“I think I seen him, too,” said Goldberg. “Oh, shit, yes. He’s one a Bacon’s assholes, the one they call Buck. He was at that thing on Gun Hill Road.”

Martin sat up straight. “You’re right, Davey. That’s the same asshole.” He stared across the street at the man. “I’d really love to…” He spoke in a dreamy fashion. “Please, you asshole, please just do one stupid thing, you asshole…I’m getting out.”

Martin got out of the Dodge and stood on the sidewalk and very ostentatiously began rolling his shoulders and arms about, like a prizefighter loosening up. Then Goldberg got out. So Kramer got out, too. The demonstrators across the street began staring at them.

Now one of them, a powerfully built young man in a blue work shirt and blue jeans, came walking across the street with a cool Pimp Roll and approached Martin.

“Yo!” he said. “You from the TV?”

Martin put his chin down and shook his head no, very slowly, in a way that was pure menace.

The black man measured him with his eyes and said, “Then where you from, Jack?”

“Jump City, Agnes,” said Martin.

The young man tried a scowl, and then he tried a smile, and he got nothing with either one but a face full of Irish contempt. He turned around and walked back across the street and said something to the others, and the one named Buck stared at Martin. Martin stared back with a pair of Shamrock lasers. Buck turned his head and gathered four or five of the others around him in a huddle. From time to time they stole glances at Martin.

This Mexican standoff had been going on for a few minutes when another van arrived. Some young white people got out, seven men and three women. They looked like college students, with the exception of one woman with long wavy gray-blond hair.

“Yo, Buck!” she sang out. She went up to the tall man with the gold earring and held out both her hands and smiled broadly. He took her hands, although not all that enthusiastically, and said, “Hey, how you doing, Reva?” The woman pulled him toward her and kissed him on one cheek and then on the other.

“Oh, give me a fucking break,” said Goldberg. “That skank.”

“You know her?” asked Kramer.

“Know who she is. She’s a fucking Communist.”

Then the white woman, Reva, turned around and said something, and a white man and a white woman went back to the van and hauled out more placards.

Presently a third van arrived. Nine or ten more white people got out, male and female, most of them young. They hauled a big roll of cloth out of the van and unfurled it. It was a banner. Kramer could make out the words
GAY FIST STRIKE FORCE AGAINST RACISM
.

“What the hell’s that?” he said.

“That’s the lesbos and the gaybos,” said Goldberg.

“What are they doing here?”

“They’re at alla these things. They must like the fresh air. They really get it on.”

“But what’s their interest in the case?”

“Don’t ask me. The unity of the oppressed, they call it. Any of these groups need bodies, they’ll show up.”

So now there were about two dozen white and a dozen black demonstrators, lolling about, chatting and assembling placards and banners.

Now a car arrived. Two men got out. One of them carried two cameras on straps around his neck and a saddlebag with the printed logo
THE CITY LIGHT
taped to it. The other was a tall man in his thirties, with a long nose and blond hair that flowed from a narrow widow’s peak. His fair complexion was splotched with red. He wore a blue blazer of an unusual and, to Kramer’s eyes, foreign cut. For no apparent reason he suddenly lurched to his left. He appeared to be in agony. He stood stock-still on the sidewalk, tucked a spiral notebook under his left arm, closed his eyes, and pressed both hands to his temples, massaged them for a long time, then opened his eyes and winced and blinked and looked all about.

Martin began to laugh. “Look at that face. Looks like a working vat a rye mash. Guy’s so hung over, he’s bleeding into his squash.”

Fallow lurched to his left again. He kept listing to port. Something was seriously wrong with his vestibular system. It was absolutely poisonous, this one, as if his brain were wrapped in membranous strings, like the strings of the membranes of an orange, and each contraction of his heart tightened the strings, and the poison was squeezed into his system. He had had throbbing headaches before, but this was a
toxic
headache, poisonous in the extreme—

Where were the crowds? Had they come to the wrong place? There seemed to be a handful of black people and about twenty white students, just standing about. A huge banner said
GAY FIST
.
Gay Fist?
He had dreaded the thought of the noise and the commotion, but now he was worried about the silence.

On the sidewalk, just ahead of him, was the same tall black man with the gold earring who had driven him and Vogel up here two days ago. Vogel. He closed his eyes. Vogel had taken him to dinner at Leicester’s last night as a kind of celebration (payment?) for the article…He had a vodka Southside…then another one
…The snout of the beast!—lit up by a radium-blue flare!…
Tony Stalk and Caroline Heftshank came over and sat down, and Fallow tried to apologize for what had happened with her young friend, Chirazzi, the artist, and Caroline gave him a strange smile and said he shouldn’t worry about that, and he had another vodka Southside, and Caroline kept drinking Frascati and shrieking to Britt-Withers in a very silly way, and finally he came over, and she unbuttoned his shirt and pulled the hair on his chest so hard he swore, and then Fallow and Caroline were in Britt-Withers’s office upstairs, where Britt-Withers had a watery-eyed bull terrier on a chain, and Caroline kept looking at Fallow with her strange smile, and he tried to unbutton her blouse, and she laughed at him and patted him on the bottom, contemptuously, but it made him feel crazy, and
—a ripple!—the beast stirred in the icy depths!—
and she curved her finger and beckoned, and he knew she was mocking him, but he walked across the office anyway, and there was a machine—something about a machine and a radium-blue flare
—thrashing! heading for the surface!—
a rubbery flap—he could almost see it now
—almost!—
and she was mocking him, but he didn’t care, and she kept pressing something, and the radium blue flared from inside, and there was a grinding hum, and she reached down and she picked it up—she showed him—he could almost see it—no holding it back
—it broke through the surface and looked at him straight down its filthy snout—
and it was like a woodblock outlined in a radium aura against a black ground, and the beast kept staring at him down its snout, and he wanted to open his eyes to drive it away, but he couldn’t, and the bull terrier started growling, and Caroline no longer looked at him, even to show her contempt, and so he touched her on the shoulder, but she was suddenly all business, and the machine kept grinding and humming and grinding and humming and flaring in radium blue, and then she had a stack of pictures in her hand, and she ran down the stairs to the restaurant, and he kept keeling to one side, and then a terrible thought came to him. He ran down the stairs, which were in a tight spiral, and that made him dizzier. On the floor of the restaurant, so many roaring faces and boiling teeth!—and Caroline Heftshank was standing near the bar showing the picture to Cecil Smallwood and Billy Cortez, and then there were pictures all over the place, and he was thrashing through the tables and the people grabbing for the pictures—