“Now obviously any code which conferred upon an individual or upon a group extraordinary privileges without also putting on him extraordinary responsibility, would be unfair and bad. Therefore, the superman is held to have committed a crime every time he errs in judgment…”

Tom repeated a phrase from the beginning, “… exempted from the ordinary laws which govern ordinary men…” I read that part over: “In formulating a superman, he is, according to the superior qualities inherent in him, exempted…”

“These dirty perverts think they can do any damn thing they want,” Tom said.

I was trying to recall things from Nietzsche, but then I realized that it really didn’t matter what Nietzsche had said or meant. What mattered was the meaning expressed here by Judd himself – he and Artie were playing some kind of game, a superman game, and these were their rules. If Judd and Artie were “exempted from the ordinary laws which govern ordinary men”, then what would stop them from murder?

It was as though two dense curtains had shrouded the possibility of seeing these rich, clever boys as perpetrators of the crime. The outer curtain was the negative one, the one that excluded them from the action, a curtain of “why they would not”. For all the fears of punishment, all the laws of man provided a “why not”. And this curtain seemed now to be lifting. If they really believed in this idea of being superior to ordinary law, then there was no “why not” for them. The inner curtain was the “why?” and was still impenetrable, though the sexual motive provided a rent in it.

Yet their superman idea was hard to grasp because I had seen them in everyday life. It was hard to believe that within their very appearance of living under the same rules as the rest of us, they had their own contrary rules. It was hard to take their own words and believe them, just as it was to be hard, only a decade later in our lives, to believe that an entire nation could seriously subscribe to this superman code.

What I had sensed emotionally, intuitively, the night before, from Ruth, I was now trying to justify by fact and by reasoning, and the effort seemed heavy, like trying to provide a mathematical formulation for an answer you had already glimpsed.

In Horn’s office, too, they were puzzling over the letters. Horn was no reader of Nietzsche. He tended to brush aside the superman letter as show-off kid stuff; you never could hang anybody with that.

Perhaps he was right. We were to see the philosophy for a time as an explanation – it was even offered as a kind of excuse. But could it ever have been a cause?

The first letter, Horn said, was only a lot of wild talk about some silly quarrel. Except for the perversion business. But even that had to be taken up carefully. In a roundabout way, Padua might try to find out if these fellows had anything to do with young boys. One thing was sure after these letters: you couldn’t let these two fellows go so soon.

Padua and Czewicki had a short discussion of their own. Padua had always meant to read Nietzsche, but never found the time; perhaps Nietzsche could have helped him trip these wiseacres. Czewicki wasn’t so sure. He had read Ecce Homo in a Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Book. It didn’t tell you you could go out and murder anybody.

But the strange letters, published in the papers, even with the key words omitted, had raised an active apprehension in one other person who was to enter the case. Edgar Feldscher was a cousin of Randolph Straus, Artie’s father. A lawyer, engaged with his brother Ferdinand Feldscher in corporation work for various members of the family, Edgar Feldscher had interests outside the law. He was something of an aesthete, a bachelor in his early forties who went often to Europe. He read a great deal, and was fond of Havelock Ellis and D. H. Lawrence. He was also acquainted with the works of Freud, and when people made jokes about suppressed desires or the inferiority complex, Edgar Feldscher was apt to start lecturing on the serious meaning of the terms.

Edgar Feldscher telephoned Artie’s father. He was a little disturbed, he said. Of course he knew the boys had been close to each other for several years. But if stuff like this was going to be dragged through the papers, it might prove harmful to them and to the families. Besides, who could tell what might turn up? It might be time, he suggested, to get Artie, at least, out of the hands of the State’s Attorney.

“The harm’s already been done,” Randolph Straus said wearily. Every reporter in town knew what the unprinted word was in that letter. In a way, he almost wished the police would give Artie a good pushing around, to teach him not to play detective and get himself into this kind of a mess. After all, what did Artie know about the Kessler murder? To go in now and demand his release might only make things worse, give the papers a story about the family trying to use influence.

“Yes, there’s something to that,” Edgar Feldscher agreed. The feeling of apprehension was deepening in him, but he couldn’t find it in himself to utter the real question. No, it was impossible that the boys had done it…

At the university, I tried to find Willie Weiss. For it was he who had been involved in Judd’s wild letter to Artie. And wasn’t it Weiss who had lunched with Judd and Artie on the day of the kidnapping? Perhaps he would tell me what kind of a secret it was, of Artie’s, that Judd was supposed to have betrayed. And also, Willie Weiss might remember whether Judd was wearing his glasses during lunch that Wednesday.

It was hard to find anyone that afternoon – people were going away for Memorial Day. The frat was almost empty. I thought of two fellows I had seen coming out of that law exam with Judd Steiner – Harry Bass and Milt Lewis. Bass had already gone home to the North Shore, but Milt Lewis, one of the brothers said, might still be on the tennis court.

Starting for the court, I ran into our chapter president, Raphael Goetz. God, he said, he was glad about only one thing in this mess – that Judd Steiner had never been let into the frat. It was bad enough with Artie, but if Judd had ever got into the Alpha Beta! The papers would make out we were all a bunch of perverts. Oh, he’d been getting funny questions all morning, from police, from reporters.

Well, I said, he knew he could trust me to handle anything he told me, in a way that would protect the frat as much as possible. But whatever was known about the fellows would have to come out.

Raphael was a huge fellow, a halfback on varsity, a good student, and one of those men who endow any meeting with an atmosphere of earnest good will. So now, putting his arm around my shoulders, he said, “Have they really got something on them?”

I showed hit the story containing Judd’s letter. He already knew the omitted word. “That all happened when they were up in Michigan,” he said. And Goetz told me about the Morty Kornhauser incident. “He caught them at it, and they tried to take him out in a canoe and drown him.” We stopped. We stood facing each other, feeling gravely that the fate of others might be in our hands. “Morty even tried to get Artie thrown out of the frat.” But all the fellows thought it was Judd who was to blame. “Hell, you know Artie – he’ll try anything just for the hell of it. He’s happy-go-lucky, but Judd, there’s something that gives you the shivers about him.”

We talked more. About Artie’s being such a drinker, about his betting high stakes at cards, all that stuff, but you still couldn’t say he was capable of murder. He was just a loose character. Being such a prodigy, he’d been pampered since he was a kid, and with all that dough in the family, naturally the guy was spoiled. But you couldn’t say he was a pervert – why, hell, Artie was playing half the girls on campus.