Compulsion. Meyer Levin

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      “I’m going to try another call. We’ve still got a minute before the train. Maybe the cab was late, or anything. Why should we give up just because he might be stuck in the traffic?”

      “You and your frigging bird-chasing!” Artie burst out. “You knew just the right place. Birdland! Nobody ever went near there. Nobody would even find the body!”

      That was unfair. And something in Judd still kept denying the finding. Something in him insisted it was still the right place, the only place, the place where the body had to be put. And there could be no identification! Had they not poured the acid, to obliterate identity? But beyond that, deeper, was some kind of knowledge, some kind of insistence that the body would be impossible to identify because . . . because who was it? Deep in himself something was saying nobody could ever know.

      It was a confusing, unclear thought. Judd didn’t like it, because it was unclear. He canceled it. He wrenched free of Artie to go and telephone.

      “Jesus, not from here. They might have traced the last call!”

      They hurried to the next corner, a candy store.

      As Artie stood watching the street, fearful every moment of sirens, of cops closing the block off, he saw a train pulling in on the I.C. viaduct. That was surely their train. Even if Judd connected with Charles Kessler now, it would be too late for the man to run and catch the train. The train would pull out, and no longer would there be the moment when the package would come sailing to them through the air.

      There arose in Artie then a frantic sense of deprival, a denial. No! No! It can’t have gone wrong; I want it, I want it to be! It was Judd who had screwed it up, Judd, Judd! There came an impulse to scream, to rage, to stamp his feet in a tantrum. And then he swallowed his anger; he had to be keen, cunning, the master.

      In other things before, without Judd, nothing had ever gone wrong, nobody had ever found out. And Artie was engulfed by a wave of negation, a commanding need to wipe out all that had gone wrong, to wipe out Judd. As though he could will the dissolution of Judd, will him not to exist, by a pointing finger. You’re dead! You’re gone! That’s what you get for lousing everything up! And Artie turned, staring into the store, half anticipating that Judd would have vanished out of existence by his punishing wish. But through the glass of the phone-booth door, he could see the back of his partner’s sleek, small head, dark, tilted.

      As Judd phoned, a different voice answered, not a Negro’s. “Jackson 2502.”

      Judd felt triumphant. “Mr. Kessler?” he asked.

      “Who? This is Hartmann’s Pharmacy.”

      He got the druggist to call out, “Anybody named Kessler been asking for a message?” But: “No, nobody of that name.”

      “Thank you,” Judd said. Then it was clear. Kessler had not taken the cab. In the last half hour, the body must have been identified.

      The way Artie looked at him as he emerged was murderous. “Granted that we lost out on the ransom part of it,” Judd said, still feeling his mind working concisely, clearly, in the crisis—“the fact that they may have identified the body still does not mean they can identify us.”

      Artie cursed and turned to the I.C. tracks. Judd, too, looked at the train, still standing there, as though waiting for Kessler to get aboard. Then the train pulled away. They turned back to their rented car. “Let’s just ditch it,” Artie said.

      That would be the worst thing to do, Judd pointed out. The rental man would be bound to start a hunt, and by some freak, even though they had used fake names, a trail might be found leading to them. No, they had best return it at once and check out.

      NOW THAT THE dead boy was known to be a millionaire’s son, police cars swarmed the street in front of Swaboda’s, and cab doors slammed as reporters arrived. Some looked at me with the hostility and respect owed a man for a clean beat; others disregarded me—I was just a kid who had broken this big story by some fluke. And now that the real newspapermen were here, I began to feel inadequate.

      There was Mike Prager from the Hearst afternoon paper, our direct rival. He was the inside-contact type, who would immediately take aside the most important official present and indulge in whispers. And then the Tribune’s star crime reporter arrived, a middle-aged man, or so he appeared to me then, though I suppose he was only in his thirties. Richard Lyman, like all Tribune men, seemed to take charge, not so much asking questions as demanding explanations. For a few details he had to come to me, and I gave him what I had, the spelling of the names of the men who found the body, things like that.

      It was then, as the plain-clothes men and reporters and police piled into the back room, that the pervert talk was heard. It seemed to arise of itself, as the natural, obvious explanation, and indeed I pretended that I too had thought of it at first glance. The men would look at the corpse saying, “Some goddam sonofabitch pervert,” and look again, as though a mark were there, for those who knew.

      I felt it was shamefully naive of me not to know. And yet I wonder now how much the others really knew? All were ready to use the horror-word as a stamp to explain everything, and in the rage and disgust and fear that followed and pervaded the city for months to come, and indeed attached itself permanently to the Steiner-Straus case, there was a blanketing of homosexuality with every form of depravity, and despite all the “expertizing” that was to come into the case, there was little attempt to learn from it, to understand.

      For myself the subject was vaguely covered by the word degenerate, which we used often enough in the paper. I had even been sent out one Saturday to interview a woman on the West Side whose little four-year-old girl had been attacked. For such matters, the word degenerate was used, and that explained everything. Chicago still reverberated with the horrors of the Fitzgerald case—the sex fiend who had been dragged half conscious to the gallows for attacking and killing a little girl.

      But with a boy, I was in my own mind perplexed. For in that time, among those of us who carried around the purple-morocco-bound volumes of Oscar Wilde, there was more knowingness than knowing. Love between men or love of boys scarcely seemed to suggest a physical act. I associated such love rather with purity, love of beauty, and high-mindedness. Lines from Keats, fantasies of an elderly philosopher, a Socrates, walking with his hand on the shoulder of a stripling youth, images of an elegant Oscar Wilde exchanging epigrams with an elegant young lord, seemed to make such love simply an avoidance of the clumsy, sometimes disgusting physical part of the act that took place with women.

      For at eighteen, and already a newspaper reporter in Chicago, the wicked city, I was innocent. At the frat house, I had taken part in the smut sessions, and in the gym I had taken part in the horseplay, the towel snappings aimed at the sex organs, and I could use the bugger words as freely as the rest—so freely precisely because the words had for me no meaning in experience.

      Perhaps half, perhaps more, of my classmates, I think, were as innocent as I. At the frat there were those who bragged about their prowess at the cat houses, and those who loudly acclaimed that every girl they took out “went the whole way.” There were those who solemnly warned you against catching a disease, and those, like Artie Straus, who bragged about the “dose” caught at the earliest opportunity.

      The fear of disease, and an idealistic notion of “being fair” to the girl you would one day marry, perhaps a kind of magical sense that by keeping yourself pure you would ensure her purity, had kept many of us innocent. We had handed around smutty pictures, we had read a few dirty books, we had even looked into Krafft-Ebing, but such СКАЧАТЬ