Compulsion. Meyer Levin

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 afterward, 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, an image flickering in his mind.

      “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 coeds. 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. But I would have rushed on, busy, busy, picking up campus news for my morning call to the Globe.

      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, hoping to get a reaction, 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.” He handed me the item.

      In Chicago the papers jointly used the City News Agency to cover routine sources like neighborhood police stations. If a City News item looked promising, the papers would send out their own reporters for fuller stories.

      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 kidnaping. 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 honor—your chief, Mr. Reese. Please allow us this opportunity. 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 cooperation.

      “Thank you. I appreciate it in this terrible thing. But this other boy you speak of—I am sorry. A poor drowned boy. I am sorry for his parents too, but 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 cooperate, 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.”

      He listened, foot tapping, glancing up at me again. 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 kidnaping—“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 kidnaped 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 kidnaping. On the city editor’s desk the two items came together, belonging to the clichés of daily headlines—kidnaping, 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. Each time the train made a stop, I was almost pushing against the seat to get it going again.

      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 a section unknown to me, 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.

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