The Bonfire of the Vanities (66 page)

Early in the morning, as the sun came up, he felt stronger. The humming and burning had ceased, and he began to wonder: Am I free of this dreadful condition? Of course, he hadn’t understood. The vast circuit was merely down for the night. The millions of accusing eyes were closed. In any event, he decided: I will be strong. What other choice did he have? He had none, other than to die again, slowly or quickly; and truly. It was in that frame of mind that he decided he would not be a prisoner in his own apartment. He would lead his life as best he could and set his jaw against the mob. He would start by taking Campbell to the bus stop, as always.

At 7:00, Tony, the doorman, called upstairs, with apologies, to say that about a half dozen reporters and photographers were camped outside, on the sidewalk and in cars. Bonita relayed the message, and Sherman squared his jaw and raised his chin and resolved to deal with them the same way you would deal with foul weather. The two of them, Sherman in his most uncompromising nailhead worsted suit from England and Campbell in her Taliaferro school uniform, got off the elevator and approached the door, and Tony said, with genuine feeling, “Good luck. They’re a rude lot.” Out on the sidewalk the first one was a very young man, babyish in appearance, and he approached with something resembling politeness and said, “Mr. McCoy, I’d like to ask you—”

Sherman took Campbell’s hand and raised his Yale chin and said, “I have no comment whatsoever. Now, if you’ll just excuse me.”

Suddenly five, six, seven of them were all around him and around Campbell, and there was no more “Mr. McCoy.”

“Sherman! One minute! Who was the woman?”

“Sherman! Hold it a second! Just one picture!”

“Hey, Sherman! Your lawyer says—”

“Hold it! Hey! Hey! What’s your name, Pretty?”

One of them was calling Campbell Pretty! Appalled and furious, he turned toward the voice.
The same one—
with the tangles of kinky hair pasted on his skull—and now two pieces of toilet paper on his cheek.

Sherman turned back to Campbell. A confused smile was on her face. The cameras! Picture-taking had always meant a happy occasion.

“What’s her name, Sherman!”

“Hi, Pretty, what’s your name?”

The filthy one with the toilet paper on his face was bending over his little girl and speaking in an unctuous avuncular voice.

“Leave her alone!” said Sherman. He could see the fear come into Campbell’s face with the sharpness of his own voice.

All at once a microphone was in front of his nose, blocking his vision.

A tall sinewy young woman with big jaws: “Henry Lamb lies near death in the hospital, and you’re walking down Park Avenue. How do you feel about Henry—”

Sherman swung his forearm up to knock the microphone out of his face. The woman began screaming:

“You big bastard!” To her colleagues: “You saw that! He hit me! The sonofabitch hit me! You saw that! You saw it! I’m having you arrested for assault, you sonofabitch!”

The pack swarmed about them, Sherman and his little girl. He reached down and put his arm around Campbell’s shoulders and tried to pull her close to him and walk quickly toward the corner at the same time.

“Come on, Sherman! Just a couple a questions and we’ll let you go!”

From behind, the woman was still bellowing and whining: “Hey, you get a picture a that? I wanna see what you got! That’s evidence! You gotta show it to me!” Then down the street: “You don’t care who you hit, do you, you racist fuck!”

Racist fuck!
The woman was white.

Campbell’s face was frozen in fear and consternation.

The light changed, and the pack followed the two of them and pigged and hived about them all the way across Park Avenue. Sherman and Campbell, hand in hand, plowed on straight ahead, and the reporters and photographers who surrounded them scampered backward and sideways and crabwise.

“Sherman!”

“Sherman!”

“Look at me, Pretty!”

The parents, nannies, and children waiting at the Taliaferro bus stop shrank back. They wanted no part of the disgusting eruption they saw coming toward them, this noisy swarm of shame, guilt, humiliation, and torment. On the other hand, they also didn’t want their little ones to miss the bus, which was approaching. So they shuddered and retreated a few feet into a clump, as if blown together by the wind. For a moment Sherman thought someone might step in to help, not so much for his sake as for Campbell’s, but he was mistaken. Some stared, as if they didn’t know who he was. Others averted their eyes. Sherman scanned their faces. The lovely little Mrs. Lueger! She had both hands on the shoulders of her little girl, who stared with big, fascinated eyes. Mrs. Lueger looked at him as if he were a vagrant from the Sixty-seventh Street Armory.

Campbell, in her little burgundy uniform, trudged up the steps into the interior of the bus and then cast one last look over her shoulders. Tears streamed down her face, without a sound.

Now a pang tore through Sherman’s solar plexus. He had not yet died again. He was not yet dead for a second time; not yet. The photographer with the toilet paper on his cheek was right behind him, not eighteen inches away, with his horrible instrument screwed into his eye socket.

Grab him! Drive it into his brain! “Hey, Pretty!” you dare say to my flesh and blood—

But what was the use? For they weren’t the enemy
out there
any longer, were they? They were parasites inside his very hide. The humming and the burning began again for the day.

Fallow sauntered across the city room and let them drink in his imposing figure. He held in his midsection and straightened his back. Tomorrow he would begin a serious exercise regimen. There was no reason why he shouldn’t have a heroic physique. On the way downtown he had stopped off at Herzfeld, a haberdashery on Madison Avenue that carried European and British clothes, and he had bought a spotted navy silk-grenadine necktie. The tiny spots were embroidered in white. He had put it on right there in the store, letting the salesman get a load of his detachable collar. He was wearing his best shirt, which was from Bowring, Arundel & Co., Savile Row. It was a sincere shirt, and it was a sincere necktie. If only he could afford a new blazer, with rich belly-cut lapels that didn’t shine…Ah well, hey ho—soon enough! He stopped by the edge of the desk and picked up a
City Light
from a stack of early editions left there for the use of the staff.
SEEK “FOXY” BRUNETTE MYSTERY GIRL
. Another page 1 story by Peter Fallow. The rest of the print swam amid the foggy eye trash in front of his face. But he continued to stare at it, so as to give them all a chance to drink in the presence of…Peter Fallow…Take a look, you poor drudges, humped over your word processors, clattering away and nattering away and grousing about your “one hundred big ones.” All at once he felt so grand, he thought about what a superior gesture it would be to walk over to poor Goldman and give him his hundred dollars. Well, he’d put that in the back of his mind.

When he reached his cubicle, there were already six or seven message slips on his desk. He leafed through them, half expecting that one might be from a movie producer.

Sir Gerald Steiner, formerly the Dead Mouse, was heading his way with his coat off and a pair of bright red felt suspenders over his striped shirt and a smile on his face, a charming smile, an ingratiating smile, instead of that malevolent wolf-eyed look of a few weeks back. The canteen of vodka was still hidden in the pocket of the raincoat, which still hung on the plastic coatrack in the corner. He could probably take it out and knock back a fiery jolt right in front of the Mouse, and what would come of it? Nothing but a knowing would-be-comradely Mouse smile, if he knew his Mouse.

“Peter!” said Steiner.
Peter;
no more school proctor’s
Fallow
. “Want to see something to brighten your day?”

Steiner slapped the photograph down on Fallow’s desk. It showed Sherman McCoy with a terrific scowl on his face giving a backhand swat to the face of a tall woman who was holding some sort of wand, which on close inspection turned out to be a microphone. With his other hand he clutched the hand of a little girl in a school uniform. The little girl looked into the camera in a quizzical daze. In the background was the marquee of an apartment house and a doorman.

Steiner was chuckling. “The woman—dreadful woman, by the way, from some radio station—rings up five times an hour. Says she’s going to have McCoy arrested for assault. She wants the picture. She’ll have the picture, all right. It’s on page 1 of the next edition.”

Fallow picked up the picture and studied it. “Hmmm. Pretty little girl. Must be difficult having a father who keeps hitting minorities, black boys, women. Have you ever noticed the way the Yanks refer to women as a minority?”

“The poor mother tongue,” said Steiner.

“Marvelous picture,” said Fallow, quite sincerely. “Who took it?”

“Silverstein. That chap does have sand. He does, indeed.”

“Silverstein’s on the death watch?” asked Fallow.

“Oh yes,” said Steiner. “He loves that sort of thing. You know, Peter”
—Peter—
“I have respect, perhaps an inverted respect, but a true respect, for chaps like Silverstein. They’re the farmers of journalism. They love the good rich soil itself,
for
itself, not for the pay—they like to plunge their hands into the dirt.” Steiner paused, puzzled. He was always nonplussed by his own plays on words.

Oh, how Sir Gerald, baby boy of Old Steiner, would love to be able to wallow in that filth with such Dionysian abandon!—like a chap with sand! His eyes brimmed with a warm emotion: love, perhaps, or nostalgia for the mud.

“The Laughing Vandals,” said Steiner, smiling broadly and shaking his head, apropos of the renowned exploits of the sandy photographer. That in turn led him to a broader source of satisfaction.

“I want to tell you something, Peter. I don’t know whether you fully appreciate it or not, but you’ve broken a very important story with this Lamb and McCoy business. Oh, it’s sensational, but it’s much more than that. It’s a morality play. Think of that for a moment. A morality play. You mentioned minorities. I realize you were joking, but we’re already hearing from these minorities, from these black organizations and whatnot, the very organizations that have been spreading rumors that we are racist and all the usual sort of rubbish, and now they’re congratulating us and looking to us as a sort of
…beacon
. That’s quite a turnabout in a short time. These Third World Anti-Defamation League people, the very people who were so incensed over the Laughing Vandals, they’ve just sent me the most
glowing
testimonial. We’re the bloody standard-bearers of liberalism and civil rights now! They think you’re a genius, by the way. This man, Reverend Bacon, as they call him, seems to run it. He’d give you the Nobel Prize, if it was up to him. I should have Brian show you the letter.”

Fallow said nothing. The idiots might be a bit more subtle about it.

“What I’m trying to get across, Peter, is that this is a very significant step in the progress of the newspaper. Our readers don’t care about respectability one way or the other. But the advertisers do. I’ve already set Brian to work on seeing if perhaps we can’t get some of these black groups to render their new opinion of
The City Light
formal in some fashion, through citations or awards or—I don’t know, but Brian will know how to go about it. I hope you’ll be able to take time out to take part in whatever he comes up with. But we’ll see how that works out.”

“Oh, absolutely,” said Fallow. “Of course. I know how strongly these people feel. Did you know that the judge who refused to increase McCoy’s bond yesterday has received death threats?”

“Death threats! You’re not serious.” The Mouse twitched with the horrible excitement of it.

“It’s true. And he’s taking it quite seriously, too.”

“Great God,” said Steiner. “This is an amazing country.”

Fallow perceived this as a fortunate moment in which to suggest to Sir Gerald a significant step of another sort: a thousand-dollar advance, which in turn might suggest to the eminent Mouse a rise in pay as well.

And he was correct on both counts. As soon as the new blazer was ready, he was going to
burn
this one; with pleasure.

Scarcely a minute after Steiner had left, Fallow’s telephone rang. It was Albert Vogel.

“Hey, Pete! Howaya? Things are poppin’, things are poppin’, things are poppin’. Pete, you got to do me a favor. You got to give me McCoy’s telephone number. It’s unlisted.”

Without knowing precisely why, Fallow found this a startling notion. “Why would you want his telephone number, Al?”

“Well, the thing is, Pete, I’ve been retained by Annie Lamb, who wants to file a civil suit in behalf of her son. Two suits, actually: one against the hospital, for gross negligence, and one against McCoy.”

“And you want his home telephone number? What for?”

“What for? We might have to negotiate.”

“I don’t see why you don’t call his barrister.”

“Jesus Christ, Pete.” Vogel’s voice turned angry. “I didn’t call you up for legal advice. All I want’s a fucking telephone number. You got his number or not?”

Fallow’s better judgment told him to say no. But his vanity wouldn’t allow him to tell Vogel that
I, Fallow
, proprietor of the McCoy case, had been unable to procure the McCoy telephone number.

“All right, Al. I propose a barter. You give me the particulars of the civil suits and a one-day head start with the story, and I’ll give you the telephone number.”

“Look, Pete, I wanna call a press conference about the suits. All I’m asking you for is a lousy telephone number.”

“You can still call a press conference. You’ll get a larger audience after I write the story.”

A pause. “Okay, Pete.” Vogel chuckled, but not very heartily. “I think I created a monster when I put you onto Henry Lamb. Who do you think you are, Lincoln Steffens?”

“Lincoln who?”

“Never mind. It wouldn’t interest you. Okay, you can have the fucking story. Aren’t you getting tired of all these exclusives? So gimme the number.”