Could we hold this till tomorrow, for our paper? We decided it was too important. We had to inform Horn.
But upstairs, the offices were empty. They had all gone out to dinner, taking the suspects with them. Nobody knew just where.
This was the famous dinner at the Red Star Inn, near Lincoln Park, an old-style eating place, renowned for its huge schnitzels, apfelkuchen, and other German specialities. If there was a moment when Artie and Judd savoured their adventure, I suppose it was at the time of this dinner. For the sense that they had sought to achieve, the sense of power and superiority in knowing what others did not know, was theirs, here, and together, in the presence of baffled authority itself.
This was the thrill, vibrating in the tension of their still undecided fate. They were so far the masters, and yet, like acrobats who might slip before getting off the wire, they were under a delicious suspense.
Until the cars drew up they could not know they would be together. It was a thought of Horn’s, to confront them in this way, and perhaps catch something in an unguarded moment of surprise and pleasure.
Horn’s own car, with Judd, pulled up first, and Judd in a worldly manner expertized about the restaurant, remarking that his family always had a German cook at home. Just then the second car drove up, and Swasey emerged with Artie. Seeing each other, the boys aluted with hand waves, Artie calling, “Hey! When did they let you out?”
“I’m joining the staff!” Judd retorted.
For the large party, two tables were put together at the end of the main room. The boys were only a few seats apart, with Padua and Horn between them. There was beer to be had at the Red Star, and a good deal of jesting took place about protection and payoff, as the State’s Attorney and his men permitted themselves to indulge.
It might, indeed, have been construed as a farewell party, a send off with no hard feelings. The boys had endured twenty-four hours of examination. Since Artie had confessed his drunken afternoon and the pickup ride, and since their stories jibed, what could they be held for?
But Horn, Padua, Czewicki, Swasey, and the squad of detectives might also have been exulting inwardly. For newspapers had been kept from the boys. They did not know that Judd’s intimate letter had become public. They did not know that they were being looked at with the peculiar contemptuous mirthfulness of bull-showy men for a pair of perverts. No one actually had said, “Watch the fun,” but holding that knowledge key was like having a special pair of glasses through which you could see the punks, nude.
Only you couldn’t see anything. These rich kids had smooth manners that carried them through. Judd was perhaps a bit jumpy, hardly taking his eyes off Artie, but if you didn’t know about that letter, you could put it down to apprehensiveness rather than passion.
Judd was giving his order to the waiter in German, with minute instructions about the seasoning, and all listened, admiringly. Czewicki asked how many languages was it that Judd knew, and Judd replied fourteen, although a few were really only dialects.
“You must be a superman,” Padua remarked, and Judd quietly responded, that wouldn’t exactly be the qualification, according to Nietzsche.
Padua had got in a few hours at the library, reading up on Nietzsche. After all, he said, wasn’t the superman definable as someone with extraordinary abilities? No, Judd said, a superman had to be extraordinary in every way.
Well, how was a superman recognized? Did Judd know any supermen? Was Napoleon a superman?
No, Judd replied. Napoleon had been defeated, and that in itself automatically eliminated him, because a superman could never be defeated.
“You mean, he never makes mistakes?” Padua said.
Judd was apparently too eager to expound his views to catch the echoing word. A superman was really an ideal, he said – what Nietzsche meant was a man who was more than man. In fact you couldn’t precisely translate the word Übermensch – you had to read Nietzsche in the original to understand the concept.
But, Padua persisted, couldn’t a person strive to be a superman, to act like one?
The rest of the men had fallen silent, watching the duel. Yes, Judd conceded, people could strive to exceed themselves, to live by a greater measure of life, the measure of the Übermensch.
Well, for such people, Padua probed, what happened to the laws? If the law said you could drive fifty miles an hour but you wanted to be an Übermensch and drive a hundred miles an hour, who was to decide? Did the ordinary laws of ordinary people apply to the superman or were supermen exempt?
Smilingly, Artie backed up Judd’s explanation. Naturally, a superman would have to live by his own laws – all the great men of the world had made their own laws. Alexander the Great, and Caligula, and Napoleon too had made new laws.
Judd had suddenly grown quiet; he was studying Padua.
But those people were all rulers, Padua argued. They were trying to make new sets of laws for all men to follow. But a superman who was not a ruler, just a citizen – he would still have a law unto himself that would permit him to do anything he wanted, even things that were crimes for other people. Wasn’t that the idea?
“Sure,” Artie began. But Judd cut in; the trap had become too obvious. The Nietzschean idea was only an abstraction, Judd said. You couldn’t apply it in practice because what Nietzsche meant was really for all men to strive to free their spirits, to become greater than they were. First, there had to come naturally gifted individuals, and they might stimulate ordinary men, but eventually there would have to be a society of supermen, a whole nation to try to live by that idea.
“I guess we haven’t got there yet,” Horn said.
The food came then, on huge thick platters. Padua and Judd were staring at each other, smiling as at the end of a round with no one hurt.
After a while, Padua made another try. He remarked about Judd and Artie having gone to the University of Michigan together. They’d really been pretty close friends for several years, then?
Sure, Artie said. He had superintended Judd’s loss of virginity; and he went on to tell about whorehouse escapades in Detroit. Czewicki suddenly made a remark about Oscar Wilde. “You know he was married and had two children. I never realized you could have it both ways.”
Judd coolly informed him that among the Greeks it was quite the custom for married men to maintain their favourite boys.
Horn declared he had learned all he wanted to know about perverts going through the dragnet in this investigation. Artie brightly recalled – hadn’t a member of the police force been caught up in the net, a respectable married man?
Anyway, said Swasey, it was pretty soft for a couple of college boys to have their own car, to run around chasing gash.
There was clinical talk about pick-up techniques. And then: “Now, about those girls the other night, you mean they really didn’t come across?” And Peterson offered advice on how to make them come across.
From McNamara came a throaty gurgle. “Anyway, if they don’t, you can always help each other out.”
Artie laughed with the rest of the crowd. Judd, after an instant, laughed as though he had just caught on.
There was a lull in the conversation. Someone asked for more beer.
It was said that if not for our typewriter evidence, the boys might, that evening, have been released. One other bit of evidence was to come that night, but it was tenuous, and I suppose, had the boys been released, the chauffeur would never even have offered his story.
But Emil had been troubled ever since he had read Judd’s alibi in the morning papers. Judd claimed to have been riding in his car all that afternoon and evening. Emil thought about the matter, driving home after taking Mr. Steiner down to his office. In the kitchen, Emil found the three servants, indignant over what was in the papers, and angry because the police had pawed through the house.