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
