Читать книгу Compulsion - Meyer Levin - Страница 14

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.

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 Parlor,” 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.

My scoop anxiety had faded; no other paper had bothered to send a reporter this far out. Conversely, the feeling of being on the verge of something big was now strong in me.

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.

A newspaperman had to take death casually. I noted, rather with pride, that no feeling arose in me. Was this because of my role 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. I felt an impulse to sweep the body away with me, sequester my scoop.

“Say, you!”

I jumped. Another reporter?

There stood a paunchy man in a brown suit. Hastily I asked, “You the undertaker? I’m from the Globe. The door was open so I . . . The cops said you had the boy here.”

Mr. Swaboda advanced, frowning, but not antagonistic. He was sucking at a tooth.

“Any other reporters been here?” I asked. “Any calls from the newspapers?”

“Oh. You are from the newspapers.”

“Did anybody identify this boy? Do you know who he is?”

He shook his head. “Maybe you know? In the papers?”

“They sent me out to see,” I said. “All we got is a report of a drowned boy.”

Again Swaboda shook his head. A glint of clever knowingness came into his eyes. “He is not drowned.” He pointed to the boy’s scalp, moving closer. “Even the police officer don’t see this. I am the one to show them.” Brushing back a lock of hair, the undertaker disclosed two small cuts above the forehead, clotted over, like sores.

The scarehead flashed into my mind—ABDUCTED, MURDERED. MILLIONAIRE’S SON! And this time, surely, there was a sense of exultation in me.

“Can I use your phone? I’ve got to phone my paper.”

“Help yourself.” He followed me to the roll-top desk. “You know who is this boy’s family?”

He might give away my story. I should have gone outside to phone. While hesitating, I noticed a pair of glasses on the desk, tortoise-shell. I picked them up. “They said he was wearing glasses. Are these the ones?”

The undertaker took the glasses from me and smiled again. “These are not his glasses.” He carried them into the back room; I followed. Swaboda placed the glasses on the boy and turned to me triumphantly. I could see that the glasses were a poor fit; the earpieces were too long. “Police put these glasses on him,” he said. “I take them off.”

I hurried back to the phone and got Tom Daly. “It’s him!” I said.

“He’s been identified?”

“No, but looking at the body, I got a hunch.”

His voice dropped. “Look, kid, tell me now, just tell me what you know for sure.”

“For one thing, he’s a Jewish kid,” I said. “Anyway, he’s circumcised.”

I could feel, in his instant hesitation, the stoppage people always had before things Jewish. He was weighing, then crediting me with somehow knowing.

“What about the kid’s glasses? Kessler said his boy didn’t wear any.”

“They’re not his. They don’t fit him. Listen. They must be the murderer’s. He must have dropped them. Listen. He’s got bruises on his head—”

“Wait, wait!” I heard him yelling my news to Reese. Then: “Stay there. I’ll call the Kesslers to come and identify him.”

It was even said afterward that but for my going out there just then, the murderers might never have been caught. It’s not a question of credit; indeed it has always bothered me that I received a kind of notoriety, a kind of advantage out of the case. Obviously what I did that morning was only an errand, and if I hadn’t gone there, the identification would have been made in some other way, perhaps a day later. True, the ransom money might in the meantime have been paid, but the money was quite an insignificant item in the overwhelming puzzle of human behavior that was to be uncovered.

In any case, the journalistic credit should have gone, not to me, but to Reese for connecting the two items on his desk. And the discovery goes back after all to the steelworker who walked across the wasteland and happened to see a flash of white in some weeds—the boy’s foot.

There was much moralizing to come; providence was mentioned. I believe I have grown beyond the cynical pose of the twenties; I would not argue today that all existence is the random result of blind motion.

It did happen that Peter Wrotzlaw, a steel-mill worker who usually went to his job by another path, deviated that one morning to pick up his watch from a repairman. He cut across the Hegewisch wasteland. At 118th Street there was a marshy area, a pond, with the water draining through a culvert under a railway embankment. Wrotzlaw mounted this embankment to cross the pond, and then he noticed the flash of white at the opening of the drainpipe.

It was even said to be providential that Wrotzlaw had once lived on a farm, for in a submerged way his nature sense knew something strange was there, neither animal nor fish. He climbed down and, parting the weeds, recognized a boy’s foot. Bending low, he made out the whole body, crammed into the cement pipe.

Just then, up on the tracks, a handcar appeared. Wrotzlaw shouted. The two railway workers stopped their car and came down. One spoke Polish.

“Here, look!” Wrotzlaw explained. “Just this minute, I saw something white. I found this!”

The railwaymen were wearing boots. The Polish one stepped into the water; it came just to his knees. He took hold and pulled out the body of the boy; he carried it to the water’s edge and put it down, the face turned to the gray, misty morning sky. “Is drowned. Poor kiddo.”

How could the boy have got into the culvert? Maybe foolish kids, trying to play a game, crawl through the pipe. And this one got stuck and drowned.

A kid of someone. A pity. “You ever seen him around here?”

The two railroad men lifted the body to carry it up to their handcar. But then they asked, “Where are his clothes?”

Wrotzlaw searched in the weeds. “Hey!” He picked up the pair of glasses, glinting there, and placed them on the boy. He searched farther along the downtrodden grass. “Stocking.”

He held it up, a knee-pants stocking, a good one, new, not like the black cotton stockings of the neighborhood kids, with mended holes at the knees.

But no other clothing could be found. “Other kids maybe got scared, ran away, took everything.” Now the railway men said Wrotzlaw should come with them, to bring the body back to their railway yard. He would be late for his job, he protested, but the other Pole insisted, “You found him, you come with us.” So he climbed up. “Poor kid, he’s got drowned.”

By the freight platform, men gathered. The yard boss called the police. A patrol wagon removed the corpse. “Unknown boy, drowned” was marked on the blotter, and the body was sent to Swaboda’s.

Tom Daly called Kessler. Almost before Tom could hear it ring, the phone was picked up. “Yes? Yes?”

“This is the Globe.”

“Please. We are expecting an important message. Please don’t call this number. Please leave the line clear.”

“But our reporter believes he has identified your boy, Mr. Kessler.”

Charles Kessler had been sitting with his hand ready to the phone, waiting for the call promised in the special-delivery letter. He was a small-made man, always keeping himself neat and correct-looking. His chair was high-backed and carved, one of the ornate throne-chairs common in those days. In his solid house with his solid furniture it seemed an impossible thing that a kidnaping should have happened to him.

He had always dealt with everyone to the penny, exact. Even when he had been a pawnbroker, long years ago, he had been proud of his reputation for honesty and exactitude, ninety-five cents on the dollar. In Chicago’s wide-open days, when elaborate gambling salons had studded the downtown area, he had kept his elegant little pawn office open far into the night to accommodate the princelings of the first great Chicago meat and wheat fortunes, who would pledge their diamond studs in order to go on with a game. It was thirty years since he had gone out of the loan business into real estate, but could this crime be some long-nurtured, crazed act of revenge for a fancied wrong?

A man accustomed to dealing correctly and exactly in mortgage notes and debentures, how could he deal with a ransom letter? He wanted to deal with it precisely, not to deviate, not to take any risk. The letter lay there on the mahogany table, unfolded. It said he must keep the telephone line clear—a call would come.

The letter itself proved that the kidnaping was real and not some crazy joke, as he had hoped it might be when he had come back from searching the school building last night—he and Judge Wagner—to find his wife sitting dazed by the phone. “Someone—a man. He said, Kidnaped, instructions in the morning. He said a name. I don’t know. A name . . .”

A joke? Paulie was not a boy to play such jokes. Maybe some of his schoolmates? Or should the police be called? An alarm be sent out?

Judge Wagner, a wise man, a man with connections, said, Wait. A big alarm might prove dangerous for Paulie—if it was really a kidnaping. Then all night long they had tried on the phone to reach important people—the chief of detectives, the mayor, the state’s attorney.

And early in the morning, Kessler himself had run to the door to answer the bell. A special-delivery letter. A name, Harold Williams. No use trying to recall anyone with such a name; it was surely a fake. “But why me?” All morning long Charles Kessler kept asking this of his friend Judge Wagner, of his brother Jonas. “Why me? I never hurt anybody. Why me?” And: “Who would do such a thing? Who? To a decent honest man, to a poor innocent woman, the boy’s mother . . .”

There lay the letter. It was typewritten.

Dear Sir:

As you no doubt know by this time your son has been kidnapped. Allow us to assure you that he is at present well and safe. You need fear no physical harm for him provided you live up carefully to the following instructions, and such others as you will receive by future communications. Should you, however, disobey any of our instructions even slightly, his death will be the penalty.

1. For obvious reasons make absolutely no attempt to communicate with either the police authorities or any private agency. Should you already have communicated with the police, allow them to continue their investigation, but do not mention this letter.

2. Secure before noon today ten thousand dollars ($10,000). This money must be composed entirely of OLD BILLS of the following denominations:

$2,000.00 in twenty-dollar bills.

$8,000.00 in fifty-dollar bills.

The money must be old. Any attempt to include new or marked bills will render the entire venture futile.

3. The money should be placed in a large cigar box, or if this is impossible in a heavy cardboard box, SECURELY closed and wrapped in white paper. The wrapping paper should be sealed at all openings with sealing wax.

4. Have the money with you, prepared as directed above, and remain at home after one o’clock p.m. See that the telephone is not in use.

You will receive a future communication instructing you as to your future course.

As a final note of warning—this is a strictly commercial proposition, and we are prepared to put our threat into execution should we have reasonable grounds to believe that you have committed an infraction of the above instructions. However, should you carefully follow out our instructions to the letter, we can assure you that your son will be safely returned to you within six hours of our receipt of the money.

Yours truly,

Harold Williams

Charles Kessler had hurried to the bank the moment it opened, and he had told them to make no record of the bills; he did not want to take any chances. What was ten thousand dollars for a life, his son’s life? Then there had been no sealing wax in the house, and he had almost sent his older boy Martin out to buy the wax, but caught himself in time and sent Martin and little Adele with the chauffeur to his brother Jonas’s house. Perhaps they would be safer there. And he had run out himself for the wax.

One o’clock. Waiting for the call. Jonas with him, Judge Wagner with him. Poor Martha upstairs; the doctor had given her sedatives.

The cigar box, wrapped in white paper, sealed, on the table.

And now came this call from the newspaper, saying that Paulie was dead. How could it be possible that the boy was dead when the letter said he was safe and unharmed? It said Paulie would be delivered six hours after the money was paid. Safely, safely returned to you. How could it be . . .

Judge Wagner took the phone. He pleaded, “Please cooperate. Do not call . . .”

But the newspaperman insisted there was good reason to believe the dead boy was Paulie. It seemed to be a Jewish boy.

Then the judge said, “I see.” He took the address of the mortuary. He said that Paulie’s uncle, Jonas Kessler, would go there at once, but please, not to print anything as yet.