“Thank you. I appreciate it in this terrible thing. But this other boy you speak of – 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 co-operate, 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.”

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 kidnapping – “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 kidnapped 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 kidnapping. On the city editor’s desk the two items came together, belonging to the clichés of daily headlines – kidnapping, 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.

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 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 Parlour,” 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.

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.

I noted, rather with pride, that no feeling arose in me. Was this because of my rôle 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.

“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.

“Any other reporters been here?” I asked.

“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?”

“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, 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.

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

“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 afterwards 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.

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.