Compulsion

by Meyer Levin

  Judd felt slightly piqued that Artie had not come over, first thing in the morning, to share all this with him. “Mums was in a stew this morning,” Artie said. “She was even worried if she should send dear little Billums off to school!”

  They had by now reached Judd’s house, an ornate, gabled mansion on Greenwood Street. But instead of stopping, Judd drove on a block to where they had last night, after the deed, parked the rented Willys.

  “Every mamma with a brat in Twain is a-twitter.” Artie laughed.

  But this disturbed Judd. Surely all the worried mothers would be telephoning the Kesslers. “They’ll keep the phone line busy,” he pointed out.

  It was a detail they had only partly foreseen. For to carry out their carefully timed ransom schedule, the Kessler line had to be open for their call. Indeed, their special-delivery letter had instructed Charles Kessler to keep his line unused.

  “Ishkabibble,” said Artie.

  It was an expression Judd hated. He had wanted this to be a perfect day between them. Sometimes – even in a big thing like this – Artie could suddenly act as if he didn’t care a damn.

  But as Judd pulled behind the Willys, Artie glanced up and down the street in his professional way. He was in the game again.

  They approached the rented car. It stood in front of a nondescript apartment house, for this block was already outside the exclusive Hyde Park area of mansions. How anonymous, how perfectly innocent the car looked! Gratification arose in Judd at the correctness of their planning. The rented car, the fake identities, were masterful ideas. And just as this car, this shell of metal that contained their deed of yesterday, had been left a totally unaltered entity by the deed, so was the deed meaningless within themselves.

  “You want to drive, Mr. Singer?” Judd used the alias, giving Artie a you-first-my-dear-Gaston bow while opening the door. But as he took hold of the door handle, Judd noticed a few small, dark blotches. No, they were surely from something else. But suppose on the wildest chance the car were discovered and under chemical analysis the spots proved…? Last night, in the dark, the washing they had given the automobile, using Artie’s garden hose, had been altogether hasty.

  Conquering the sickening repugnance that blood always raised in him, Judd looked into the rear of the car. There were stains on the floor.

  “Aw, it could be any kind of crap. Every car is dirty,” Artie said.

  “They’re brownish.” Judd felt suddenly depressed.

  “All right, we’ll wash it out!” Artie jumped behind the wheel, heading for Judd’s driveway. Judd hesitated; but it was the noon hour, and Emil would be upstairs at lunch. Anyway, what he did was none of the chauffeur’s business.

  Artie pulled the Willys up to the garage entrance. Judd glanced at the house. Huge, silent, with most of the shades drawn, the way his father insisted since his mother had died, it had an unoccupied air.

  Artie had seized a pail and was running water into it. The maid came out of the house to ask if Cook should fix lunch for the two of them.

  Judd felt spied on. “We’re busy,” he said, keeping his voice polite. “Thanks, but never mind. We’ll pick up a sandwich downtown.”

  “I’ll just put some cold chicken on the table.” And she gave him that devoted smile of a female who knows better than men what men want.

  Artie sloshed the pail of water on to the rear floorboards. Taking a rag, Judd began to rub the spots around the door handle. How could they ever have got there? The image from yesterday, the jet of blood, the whole dreadful mess, intruded for an instant, but he ruled it out from his mind. It was instantly supplanted by an image of himself as a child watching a doctor with a syringe starting to take blood from his mother’s arm, and a swooning sick feeling echoed up in him. Judd ruled it all out, out from his mind. He had full control; he could master his emotions completely. He held his mind blank, like breath shut off.

  Artie was swearing – the bloody crap wouldn’t wash out – and at that moment Emil came down the garage stairs, still chewing on something. “Can I help you boys?” he said through his food.

  “No. Never mind. We’re just cleaning up a car I borrowed,” Artie said, pulling his head out of the tonneau. “Boy, some party! I guess we kind of messed it up.”

  “What are you using, only plain water?” Emil asked, coming close and looking. “You could use some Gold Dust.”

  “It’s wine spots. We spilled some Dago red,” Artie said, laughing.

  Emil turned to fetch a box of Gold Dust. “Let me do it for you.”

  “No, this is good enough,” Judd said. “It’s nothing. Don’t let us interrupt your lunch.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Emil. But finally the stupid Swede seemed to get the idea; he started back upstairs. Yet he paused to ask if Judd’s Stutz was running all right today, if the squeak that Judd had complained about when he left it in the garage yesterday was gone. “I put a little oil on the brake,” Emil said. “Not too much.”

  “It’s fine now – fine, thanks,” Judd said. And to Artie: “Let’s go.”

  Artie took the wheel and backed out with a roar. “Christ, you never could back a car! Watch out!” Judd complained.

  They drove to Vincennes. The corner they had selected for the first message relay was a large vacant lot at 39th and Vincennes. At the curb stood one of Chicago ’s metal refuse boxes, about the size of a hope chest, painted dark green. On one side, stencilled in white, were the words, HELP KEEP THE CITY CLEAN.

  They got out. Judd drew the letter from his pocket. There were few people on the street, and anyone observing them might think they were only throwing some junk into the box.

  Judd lifted the lid. He had brought along a small roll of gummed stationery tape, and now he tried to tape the letter to the underside of the lid. The tape didn’t stick. “Hold the damn lid!” he snapped at Artie.

  “That junk will never hold,” Artie criticized. “Jesus, I can’t leave a single thing to you! Where’s the adhesive, that roll of adhesive!”

  It was a roll Judd had taken from the bathroom yesterday, to wind around the chisel blade, the way Artie said, so the wooden end could be used as a club. “You told me to use the whole roll, to make it thick.”

  “You stink!”

  “We’ve got time to drive over and buy some.”

  “Hell with it!” Artie cried. He let the lid drop, nearly catching Judd’s hand. He snatched the envelope from Judd. “We’ll leave out this stop.”

  “Then how’ll he know where to go next?” Judd objected.

  “When we phone him at home,” Artie snapped, “instead of sending him to this box we send him straight to Hartmann’s Drugstore for the next instruction. That’s all this crappy letter tells him to do anyway.”

  “We can’t make any last-minute changes – everything will get all balled up!” Judd felt suddenly panicky. The spots on the car had been dismaying. Now he was becoming depressed.

  This Help Keep the City Clean box had seemed to give the entire adventure the proper sardonic flavour, this garbage box of life. The idea had been his own contribution, too. It had come to him a few months ago during one of their sessions. How to make the ransom collection foolproof had been the problem.

  Artie, half tight, had got off the subject, telling about some asinine frat party with a new stunt, a “treasure hunt” in which kids were sent all over town to the craziest places, and in each place they picked up a clue to where they had to go next.

  Suddenly Judd had seen it. An actual treasure hunt in reverse! The father chasing from one place to another for his instructions to deliver the ransom! And in the same instant, as the idea itself came to him, Judd had visualized the refuse box. First stop! A portly man, he had imagined him, because during that time they had figured Danny Richman as the victim, and Danny’s father – that stuffed shirt, who never opened his mouth except to make a speech full of noble precepts, Polonius in person, even worse than Judd’s own old man, if possible – Danny’s father
was it!

  Artie had loved the idea. They could just see Richman pére waddling toward the Help Keep the City Clean box, bending his carcass, pulling up the lid, putting on his pince-nez to read the instructions!

  Artie had been wonderful that night, planning all sorts of mad surprises for the father. “Hey, how about he pulls up the lid – we have a jack-in-the-box, a great big jock that jumps up at him!”

  Judd improved on it. They could rig up a spring, so that when the box was opened it squeezed a bulb and-right in the face! – a fountain!

  But even as Artie had gone on, with more and more ghoulish ideas, another image had crowded into Judd’s mind. He had seen the box as the place for the body itself. He had no thought of it as something dead. He had merely visualized the shape, curled up, fitting inside snugly. Of course he had dismissed the image as impractical. In a street box like this, nothing could remain hidden for more than a few hours; someone would come along and open the lid. And afterwards, Judd had thought of the real place, the perfect receptacle for the body. Nevertheless, more than once the image had returned, the curled boy in the box.

  “C’mon!” Artie was already in the car. He was tearing up the letter that should have been in the box, letting bits of it fall to the street.

  “Hey! For crissake!” Judd grabbed for his arm. Artie started the car with a jolt and let the bits of paper flutter out a few at a time from his hand, laughing goadingly.

  He drove to the main I.C. station at Twelfth Street. There the other letter, containing their final instructions, had to be placed in a certain spot on a certain train.

  THAT MORNING I may have passed Artie as he lolled in Sleepy Hollow with his little harem of co-eds. I may even have waved to him and smiled at Myra Seligman, may have wanted to linger on the chance of getting better acquainted with her, even though I had a girl, my Ruth.

  I see myself as I was in those days – eighteen, a sort of prodigy, my long wrists protruding from my coat sleeves, always charging across the campus with a rushing stride, as if I were afraid I’d miss something, and with my Modern Library pocket edition of Schopenhauer banging against my side as I rushed along.

  I was eighteen and I was already graduating, having taken summer courses to get through ahead of time. For I had a terrible anxiety about life. I had to enter life quickly, to find out how I would make out. Already I was a part-time reporter on the Globe; besides covering campus news I would rush downtown afternoons and wait around the city room for an assignment.

  On graduating, I would work full time on the Globe. I would test myself against the real world. And I would try to write, too.

  That day I had a little feature story. I remember that it was about a laboratory mouse that had become a pet, too precious to kill. And when I telephoned, the city editor said, as he said only rarely, “Can you come in and write it?”

  I skipped my ten-o’clock class, half running the five blocks to the I.C. station, hoping that people I knew would see me rushing downtown with a story.

  I was lucky. A train pulled in as I reached the ramp, and I was in the office in twenty minutes. I used a typewriter at the back of the large newsroom, near the windows from which you could almost touch the El tracks. I carried the story up to the desk myself, and as I hovered there for an instant, the city editor, Reese, glanced up and said, “Going back south?” And without waiting for a reply he circled a City News report on his desk. “Drowned kid. Take a look at him.”

  In Chicago the papers jointly used the City News Agency to cover routine sources like neighbourhood police stations.

  This item was from the South Chicago police station. An unidentified boy, about twelve, wearing glasses, had been found drowned in the Hegewisch swamp at the edge of the city.

  I saw my feature piece already, a tender, human little story about a city kid who had tried too soon in the season to go swimming and had caught a cramp in the cold water.

  “Better check with Daly,” said Reese. He blinked up at me with the ragged, sour little smile he had. “He’s on a kidnapping. They say it can’t be the same kid, but you better take a look.”

  Tom Daly was to me a “real” reporter; he always knew whom to call, where to go. More, Tom had a brother on the police detective force; thus Tom Daly belonged to that inner world I then thought of as “they” – the people who were really a part of the operation of things.

  I spotted Daly in one of the phone booths that lined the wall. He had a leg sprawled through the partly open door, and kept tapping his toe as he worked on the difficult phone call. I heard a man’s voice, a thread of it escaping from Tom’s receiver, “No, no, a drowned boy – how could it be Paulie? We have just heard from… those people. We are sure our own boy is safe.”

  Tom cut in. What had he heard? How had he heard?

  “Please don’t put anything in the paper as yet. Please, you understand? Your editor gave us his word of honour – your chief, Mr. Reese. In a few hours we hope it will be all over. We will give you the full story the moment our boy is returned to our hands.” The voice was not exactly pleading; it retained a reminder of authority. A rich man, a millionaire. A self-made man who could control himself and deal with a dreadful emergency. Tom promised co-operation.

  “Thank you. I appreciate it in this terrible thing. But this other boy you speak of – he cannot be our boy. Our boy is safe. We have a message. Besides, this boy you say has glasses. Paulie does not wear glasses.”

  Still trying to keep the father on the line, Tom Daly protested that although the Globe would co-operate, we might be of real help if we were meanwhile trusted with the fullest details. Glancing up at me, he said into the phone, “Mr. Kessler, we are sending a reporter out to look at the poor kid that was drowned out there in South Chicago, and if we could have a picture of your son to go by… Yes, I know you said he doesn’t wear glasses, but there might always be a mistake.”

  Tom had a round, pinkish face, the kind that is typed as good-natured Irish. Now he was evading telling where he got wind of the kidnapping – “of course we have our exclusive sources of information” – and he was trying to find out how the mother was taking it. Then with a final offer of our help, he hung up. Without emerging from the booth, Tom told me all that was known. Charles Kessler was a South Side millionaire. Last night his boy, Paulie, had not come home from school. They had searched for him. About ten o’clock someone had phoned the Kesslers to say that the boy was kidnapped and that there would be instructions in the morning. This morning a special-delivery letter had come demanding ten thousand dollars. The police were being kept out of it. Only the Detective Bureau had been notified, by the family lawyer, ex-Judge Wagner. Kessler seemed sure his boy was safe. “Still, you’d better take a look,” Tom said.

  “How will I know if it’s he?” I asked. Tom shrugged.

  I was to call him back, with a description.

  So the story began, with a routine police-blotter report about a drowned boy in the Hegewisch swamp, and with an inside tip on a kidnapping. On the city editor’s desk the two items came together, belonging to the clichés of daily headlines – kidnapping, ransom, unidentified body.

  And hurrying back to the I.C. I saw myself, a Red Grange of the press, open-running through Loop traffic. Would other reporters be there? Were some there already? I became tense with the dreadful fear of being scooped that permeated newspaper work, I think more then than now.

  We passed the University, came to the edge of the city where Chicago dissolved away into marshes and ponds, interspersed with oil tanks and steel mills.

  The police station was in an area of small shops with side streets of frame houses inhabited by Polish mill workers. There was grit in the air; I could see a few licks of flame coming out of the smokestacks that rose off toward Gary – pinkish, daylight flame.

  Inside the station, one glance reassured me there were no other reporters. I assumed the casual air of the knowing newsman. “Say, Sarge, I’m from the Globe. You got the kid they found
drowned in Hegewisch?”

  The policeman looked at me for a moment without answering.

  “I’m looking for the kid-”

  “Swaboda’s Undertaking Parlour,” he said, and gave me the address. It was nearby, an ordinary store with a large rubber plant in the window. Inside, there was the roll-top desk, the leather chair, the oleo of Christ on the wall. And not a soul.

  I opened the rear door. A cement-floored room, smelling like a garage. Nobody. A zinc table, covered.

  There was scarcely a bump under the cloth. A child has little bulk.

  I approached, and, with a sense of being a brazen newspaperman, drew back the cloth. For the truth is that until that moment I had never looked at a dead human being.

  I noted, rather with pride, that no feeling arose in me. Was this because of my rôle of observer, I asked myself, or was it because life had so little value in the modern world? We had shootings in the streets; we rather boasted of Chicago as a symbol of violence. And I thought of the 1918 war, when I had been a kid, and every day the headlines of the dead; the numbers had had no meaning.

  The face of the child had no expression, unless it was that curious little look of self-satisfaction that children have in sleep. It was a full, soft face; the brown hair was neatly cut, and the skin showed, I thought, a texture of expensive breeding. I drew the cover farther down to find out one thing immediately. A Jewish boy. Surely Paulie Kessler?

  I experienced the irrational, almost shameful sense of triumph that comes to newsmen who discover disaster.

  “Say, you!”