Читать книгу Compulsion - Meyer Levin - Страница 16

I WAS WAITING ON the sidewalk when the Pierce-Arrow drove up to the mortuary. “He’s in here, Mr. Kessler.” Jonas Kessler, taking off his derby hat, followed me into the rear of the shop.

“That’s Paulie!” he cried instantly. And from him came a harsh, gasping wail of grief piercing through, as from archaic times.

Two policemen had come. They stood with Swaboda, their faces fixed in respect. “Oh, this is dastardly,” the uncle kept saying, and I noted that people in a crisis seem to use words they have read somewhere. “Dastardly! They murdered him, and now they are trying to collect a ransom. My brother is waiting with the money in his hand for them to call.” He approached the body, raised his arm to touch it, but let his arm drop. “I have to telephone. No time must be lost.”

We led him to the desk, but for a moment he did not have the heart to pick up the phone. “I have children of my own. Paulie was like one of my own,” he remarked. I offered to make the call. “No time must be lost,” Jonas Kessler repeated, and still sat motionless. “They said the boy is safe. How can they . . . Oh, this is dastardly.”

At the Kessler house, the doorbell rang. A Yellow Cab driver stood there. Kessler picked up the cigar box full of money and started toward the door. But the address, the address! A drugstore on 63rd Street?

“Did they tell you the address?” he asked the driver.

The cabby was bewildered. “Didn’t you call, mister?”

“The address to go to, on 63rd Street—?”

And at that moment, the telephone rang again. Kessler hurried back into the house. Perhaps it was the kidnaper calling once more, a miracle from God.

Judge Wagner handed him the phone. “It’s your brother.”

“Charles, this is Jonas. I have to tell you. Charles, they were right. It is Paulie.”

Kessler’s face remained rigid. Automatically, tonelessly, he asked if his boy had suffered.

It always seemed to me a telling part of this tragedy that the victims were somehow external to it. The boy himself, since we came to know him only in death, never existed for us. The father we saw a good deal of, as he gave himself entirely to the case, and yet he was an utterly enclosed man. The mother we only glimpsed, once or twice. We never learned much about her, except that she was some fifteen years younger than her husband and that she suffered a nervous collapse. One of the sob-sisters wrote that Paulie’s mother would not believe the boy was dead, and for months kept imagining that he was coming home from school.

In a sense, this impersonality of the victims seemed fitting; in the world as I was to come to know it, the victims mattered very little. The Kessler murder was the first to show us how the victim can be chosen at random.