Compulsion

by Meyer Levin

  Steger mentioned a book he had been reading last night, talking so insistently that it seemed, when the police car pulled up, that he had by some compulsion drawn the whole thing upon himself. We all saw the car halting directly in front of the door. A silence fell. Two of the plain-clothes men I had seen at the Kessler house now entered the school.

  The sprightly young woman spoke to them. “But, officers, police were here this morning. We’ve all been questioned, we’ve told all we know.”

  One of the detectives looked at his notebook. “There a teacher named Wakeman here?” Wakeman had gone home. The detective went on, “Anybody named Steger?”

  “That’s me,” said Steger softly. “Paulie was in my English class. But I’ve already-”

  “We’ve got instructions to take you along, Mr. Steger.”

  There was a gasp again, in the group, and a half gesture from one or two of them, as to intervene, to explain. And then the falling back, the not looking at Steger.

  What Steger would have to go through, in the coming weeks, I suppose can be called an inevitable by-product.

  The teachers were suddenly quiet. I started back to the Kessler house.

  Leaving Artie waiting in the Stutz, which they had picked up on their way downtown, Judd drove the rented Willys into the garage of the Driv-Ur-Self. He got out of the car and stood leaning against its door while the manager walked around the vehicle, glancing at the fenders.

  Judd looked away from the car; he would not let himself think of the spots on the rear floorboard. The manager would never inspect the rear. If he did, Judd was prepared to make the remark about the spilled wine, to hint about laying a broad back there – boys will be boys, what’s a car for, ha ha.

  But the nausea invaded him again. It pulsed up in him like a pulsing flow of blood. Blood on the ground, blood when his fingers touched his forehead, and he was shrieking… wrestling on the lawn with his big brother Max, his forehead cut on a stone, and Max at first concerned and then getting sore… “Stop crying. Stop bawling. That’s enough! Boys don’t cry. What the hell are you, a girl? A girl?” And his own shrieking – “I’m not a girl! I’m not a girl” – while Max taunted, Max laughed… Max laughing at him, Max making fun of him, his big brother Max, he couldn’t stand it; it was worse than the pain, the bleeding. Then he had known he had to hide everything inside himself, hide from Max. Keep Max outside himself, keep everybody outside himself – they could hurt too much. A man didn’t let anything hurt. And he was no girl. He was no girl to cry at blood. And his mother had come out of the house and folded his face in her skirts. A girl. A girl.

  Judd shut it off. To fill the mental void came the image from yesterday. He had not counted on the blood. In all the months of planning, he had seen the thing as perfectly clean. They had even talked of it as neat, clean, talked of using the ether. And he had taken along the ether, yesterday morning, as if for his bird collecting, taken two whole cans, enough for a thousand birds. And put the two small cans into the side pocket of this car… Judd’s mind leaped back to the immediate scene – the cans! Had he forgotten them there, since they hadn’t been used? No, he knew for certain he had taken them out and placed them back on the shelf in his room. Late last night. Yet it was all Judd could do now to restrain himself from opening the door and checking.

  At least, he noted, this sudden scare had ended his nausea… And why hadn’t they used the ether? To put the boy cleanly to sleep, and in his sleep to do as planned – in his deep sleep to slip the rope around his throat, Artie and he each holding an end of it – to pull, with equal force, equal participation, forever linked in that way, he and Artie. Instead, it had all happened so quickly once the kid was in the car. It had happened while Judd had still been feeling that perhaps the whole final deed would not take place at all… Could Artie have sensed this last hesitation in him, and jumped the deed the way you ought sometimes to jump a girl before she can gather her resistance?

  The rental man was putting his head inside to check the mileage. So outside nothing showed. They had washed it well enough. But it was a damn stupid thing. That damn stupid Emil had to come along offering the Gold Dust. It was a damn stupid thing to have taken the car into the driveway to wash. For that, Judd blamed himself. Last night’s washing should have been enough without the second going-over in the morning. Modern version of Lady Macbeth… out, out, damned spot!

  What was the use of taking all the trouble to establish a fake identity, with hotel registrations and all that stuff, so as to rent a car and not use your own car, and then the next thing you do is let some dumb Swede chauffeur see you with it and tie you up with the strange car?

  The only safety was, the question must never arise. For right now this car was being returned to anonymity; tomorrow it would be out in someone else’s hands.

  “Fifty-three miles, Mr. Singer,” the rental man said. “Want to check it?”

  Judd smiled, feeling refreshed. How natural the name sounded! This part-the carefully established false identity, the car – it was all his idea and it had worked perfectly. Artie would have to give him credit for that much. “What about the gas I bought?” Judd said. “I filled up the tank.” And he wished Artie had come in with him to savour this moment, to observe his complete self-possession. It was all there, the evidence of their deed was registered in the atoms of the vehicle, this inanimate object had experienced what they had experienced – the man had it standing before him as Judd stood; yet he could tell nothing, from either.

  “Did you get a slip for the gas?”

  “No, I didn’t bother, but you can see it’s practically full.” He had filled it at home from the pump in the driveway just before they had started out to find the victim; at least Emil hadn’t walked in on that.

  With an air of creating good will in a customer, the man agreed to allow for a couple of gallons. “Call on us again,” he said, his upper lip folding back over his toothbrush moustache in a smile.

  “I will,” said Judd, wishing Artie could hear that one.

  “What took you so long?” Artie demanded before Judd could climb into the roadster.

  “I made him give me an allowance for the gas.”

  Instead of laughing, Artie snapped, “The longer you gab the better he knows you, you sucker.” Judd was getting in from the driver’s side, making Artie push over. And in that instant, in Artie’s anger, Judd suddenly felt the failure of the entire venture. It came over him blackly, fully – a grief, an anguish that nearly brought tears.

  It was all closed now. They had turned in the car. The whole thing was a failure. The killing itself had been wasted. Even if the killing had been a necessary waste, an experiment, there remained the death of the thing itself. The whole thing had represented a plan, an entity, perhaps a poetic unity, a flower of evil, a union between Artie and himself. And it was dead.

  What had killed it? What was it really that had gone wrong?

  Judd pulled away from the curb, but Artie, in the midst of lighting a cigarette, made a motion for him to stop, and jumped out to a news-stand – a new headline had caught his eye: MILLIONAIRE BOY SLAIN. Artie stood there on the pavement, reading. Judd honked. Still reading, Artie got into the car.

  “How did they find out who he was?” Judd asked.

  “Some stupid sonofabitch reporter went out there-”

  Judd parked part way up the block and leaned over to read with Artie. His eye skipped down the column, and together they saw the line about the glasses: “Desperately awaiting word from the kidnappers, the Kessler family at first refused to believe that the boy found dead in the culvert was Paulie, because the police reported that the dead boy wore glasses. Then it was learned that the glasses had been picked up in the weeds, and placed on the boy by his finders. The glasses, police now believe, were dropped by the murderer, and should prove a valuable clue.

  Artie turned his face full on Judd. His cheek was twitching, high up under his eye. “You bastard sonofabitch, you had to go and spoi
l it.”

  Automatically, Judd’s hand had gone to his breast pocket, though he already knew that it was so: this was the flaw. And a curious thrill went all through him, the first complete thrill of the entire experience. It was not the dark thrill he had imagined he might feel at the height of the deed itself, as at a black mass, nor was it the elative thrill he might have felt had the package been tossed from the train. It was a thrill as from some other being within himself; it was a gloating.

  He told himself that it was a thrill to the challenge that now existed, the challenge to outwit pursuers, even when they possessed a clue.

  But why had the glasses been in his coat pocket at all? He speculated on causation. He had scarcely used the glasses during the past few months, not even for studying. It must have been weeks ago that he had stuck them in this coat pocket, and, hardly wearing this suit, he had forgotten they were there. Then what had made him choose this suit yesterday?

  And when could the spectacles have dropped out? Had it happened when he was bending over, in the back of the car, the glasses dropping into the lap robe half wrapped around the boy? Judd saw again the boy entering the car, the quick blows, the suffocation – that part of it already done, so hastily, so irretrievably done before you could decide finally whether or not to do it. Then driving through the Midway, past the university, through the park, south to the edge of the city, then stopping at a hot-dog stand, leaving him in back there while they ate the franks, then cruising, then parking on the little side road back of a cemetery, waiting for darkness. And both climbing into the back seat, and Artie’s high-pitched, “Let’s see.”

  Like kids in a dark closet, to do the most awful imaginable forbidden things. Huddling down. Had the glasses fallen out then, on to the robe? Artie beginning to undress the body, pulling off the knee pants. And Judd in himself wondering at himself, now that the opportunity had come to test the farthest human experience, dispassionately, as in a laboratory. Remembering the untried experiences from the list in Aretino’s Dialogues. Artie’s saying, almost petulantly, “He’s dead all right. Getting stiff.” Then all at once, tumultuously, himself losing interest… Now Judd shut off the dark image. The glasses, only the glasses – were they glinting there, fallen on the robe?

  Pulling out of that cemetery lane, dark enough then, and driving down Avenue F… the turn, the ruts onto the wasteland, the spot where he always parked and left the car, going birding. Lucky, lucky no love birds parked there this night; then the two of them removing the long bundle wrapped in the lap robe, lugging it all the way across the weed-grown wasteland… Artie stubbing his toe, stumbling and swearing and letting down his end, the bundle dragging on the ground. Stopping to rest, Artie complaining, “Why the hell so far? Why not an easier place?” But no, this had to be the place – and stooping to pick up the bundle again, was that the moment when the glasses had fallen out? No, they were found too near the culvert. That weird and exhilarated march, the sky rim reddish from the Gary chimneys, the clumsy burdened feeling of endlessness, weighed down awkwardly with the bundle on one side, and under the other arm the boots he was carrying, and the container of hydrochloric in his pocket bumping his hip… Why labour so? Only for something that had to be done, had to be done!

  And all the time trying to quiet Artie, to shut up Artie in his high mood making his jokes, waving his flask- “We come not to bury Paulie but to baptize-”

  “Shut up! There’s some bastard railway switchman got a shack up the track. He’ll hear you.”

  “Invite him! Let’s give him a drink of that old acid! You sure you got the ass-it?”

  “I’ve got it, right in my pocket.”

  Then coming to the edge of the pond, putting down the long bundle. And there it must have happened… Judd saw himself there, sitting for a moment on the slope of the low railway embankment, bending to take off his shoes and pull on the boots – his brother Max’s fishing boots, taken from Max’s closet. You’re in it with me, Max, you sonofabitch, big man Max. Who’s a sissy now! And before him, the dark flat water, going into the dark hole, the culvert. Then, heated from the long exertion, and knowing he had yet to lift the body and carry it into the water, Judd rose to remove his coat. He placed the coat carefully folded upon the grass, beside his shoes.

  The remainder of the scene flashed through his mind now, accelerated, for he still found it distasteful to review. First, Artie unrolling the lap robe. The lower part of the body, bare except for the knee-length stockings, appearing grotesque under the low-held beam of Artie’s flashlight, looking like those manikins you sometimes see half undressed in store windows… No! the glasses would have glinted then, under Artie’s light. No! Now Judd felt sure; he could sense the glasses lying there still folded in the breast pocket of his folded coat.

  “Cold stiff,” Artie said. “Help me with his goddam clothes.”

  “Rigor mortis,” Judd repeated, kneeling. They both worked to finish the undressing.

  Artie joked – the punk was like some broad that goes rigid and won’t let you get her clothes off. He kept up the stream of jokes the way he had in the car, handling the body so casually, the way he had in the back of the Willys. Then the nude body lay there, a pale streak on the lap robe, and Judd knew his part had come. He rose and got the can of hydrochloric. Was it then? Not then; he had not disturbed the folded jacket.

  And Artie had moved the body off the robe, to the water’s edge, and Judd stood over it, raising the can of hydrochloric, so well forethought – acid to dissolve all evidence of mortality. Then he was pouring the stream from the can – “I hereby baptize and consecrate nothing to nothing” – and with his high giggle, watching the stream, silvery, upon the face. To obliterate, all, all! A thought, an urge, a dark wing beating far back in his mind, so they never might recognize, never might identify, but it was more than that, it was all, all faces, and no face. It was as though he himself were being obliterated so he could never be caught. And then there was a sure impulse, a thing to do so no one could ever ever know who, what it was. And he turned the stream downward, giggling, giggling – he was a kid again playing in the sand, holding a can of water over a body of sand, the sand dissolving away to nothing – so now the stream upon the penis… dissolve, dissolve and be no more! And Artie laughed with him, and it was right, right! There was a great lifting within him, Judd thought, because now the deed was done, the whole terrible superhuman god-devil deed was done. They had achieved! But it was a feeling that continued, even stronger, more obscure, a lifting feeling within him, as though something utterly wrong had been corrected, put back right.

  Then wading in Max’s boots into the water, seizing the body, feeling it cold as the touch of the water. And the whole thing had become easy. Shoving the object into the culvert, the non-being, face and sex soon dissolving, how neatly it fitted, as he had estimated it would, fitting perfectly in the perfect place. And then retreating to get cleanly out of there.

  Had he then picked up the coat?

  And the precise image of that moment came before Judd. Artie’s form, looming out of the dark, Artie breathlessly offering him his coat and shoes, the coat snatched up in a tangle any old way, the disorderly way Artie handled things, upside down.

  That was how it had happened. That had been the moment. Judd could virtually sense the glasses sliding from the upside-down pocket, among the weeds.

  “I’m sorry to have to contradict you,” he said now to Artie, “but I believe the slip-up was yours. It was you who picked up my jacket and brought it to me. That’s when the glasses must have dropped out. But I accept my share of the error in failing to notice-”

  “Me!” Artie turned on him, raging. “Trying to shove it off on me! You and your buggering sure-shot hiding place! You and your damned eyeglasses-”

  “Take it easy,” Judd said. He felt cool, controlled, exhilarated.

  If the whole thing had gone off without a slip-up, it would have been perfection of a kind: a deed conceived and planned and carrie
d out, like some intricate construction – a matchstick palace with even the last piece fitting perfectly into place.

  But the glasses were an error, an error tearing down Artie and himself from their superhuman state as beings who could achieve an act of perfection. And in some centre of his self, Judd rejoiced that they were united in this error, united in their imperfect action; he rejoiced that Artie had committed his part of the flaw.

  Now their action permitted a different kind of triumph, for they must try to retrieve their error and still emerge superior. And in their error they were united even more firmly than by a perfect deed. For had the adventure succeeded, they would have divided the ransom and been done. He would have gone on, in two weeks, to Europe.

  Perhaps now he would never go. Even in this dread anticipation of being caught, Judd felt a subterranean satisfaction; he and Artie were entwined in what was still to come.

  “By the law of probabilities,” he said to Artie, “there is one chance in a million that they can trace the glasses.”

  “To hell with all that,” said Artie.

  But something perverse in Judd made him see the spectacles already traced. They had to be traced – he had to be confronted with them – for the next part of the action to occur, the infinite ordeal through which he would redeem his error, prove himself a truly superior being. The ordeal in which, by facing down all accusation, he would save Artie, too.

  To Artie he said, “They’re just the most ordinary reading glasses. The chance that their ownership can be identified is infinitesimal. But even if it should be, that still doesn’t prove anything. I could have dropped my glasses any day I was out there birding. I was even out there with my class in the same spot last week. In fact, I can use my bird class as witnesses!” There was a Machiavellian touch that Artie should appreciate.

  Judd saw himself standing before some powerful man – a heavy moustache, an authority – but he remained unflustered, controlled, saying, “A mere coincidence,” as he accepted the spectacles back into his hand and placed them back in this same coat pocket. For no matter who they were, the authorities would know they had to accept the word of Judah Steiner, Jr.