“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.

Emil didn’t say anything in front of them. But he carried the Examiner upstairs to his apartment over the garage, and he discussed the story with his wife. Of course Judd couldn’t have been connected with the crime, but correct is correct. Now, a week ago Wednesday -

She joined his thought at once. “That was my dentist day. Remember, I spoke to you downstairs. Judd was with you.”

They remembered well, because Emil had told her a thousand times never to interrupt when he was talking to one of the Steiners.

“But I needed the dentist money.”

Then Emil came out with what bothered him. Just then, young Steiner had been telling him the brakes of the Stutz needed adjustment. “He left his Stutz in the garage. He didn’t have it out at all that day.”

“Well, he went with that Artie Straus chasing girls. They must have had some other car.”

“Yes, but here he told the police he was in his Stutz. And at first Artie wouldn’t even admit he was with him.”

“It’s none of our business.”

Another thing: Artie and Judd, the next day – that was Thursday, about noon – had come around the driveway with a Willys. They had been washing it. He had offered to help clean the Willys – there were some dark spots in the rear, wine spots they said – and Artie had refused his help, saying they were all through anyway.

“Well, that would explain it,” she said. “They borrowed some other car.”

Yet Emil kept puzzling. By nightfall he felt it was his duty to mention the matter to the police.

“You want to make a fool of yourself?” his wife argued. “These people are good to us…”

By evening, after the boys had been held more than twenty-four hours, each family was assembled. At the Steiners, there were Judd’s aunt and uncle, his brother, his father. Max was for sending down a lawyer and getting the kid out, before any more dirty stuff, like that letter, was spilled.

Judd’s father was rather silent. He had a way of being present in a discussion without speaking, except to make summaries – not exactly decisions, but summaries that left only one possible decision.

But Aunt Bertha was indignant. The boy had spent the night in jail. What was he getting to eat? Had he had a chance even to change his clothes?

“We can see that he is well treated,” his father said. “But when the authorities are satisfied the boys don’t know anything, they will let them go.”

At the Straus mansion, Artie’s uncle Gerald was taking charge. He was older than Artie’s father, and was the most decisive character among the Straus brothers – a businessman who operated in spectacular flashes.

Arriving with Edgar Feldscher, he demanded action. “What’s Horn holding him for? Is he arrested? If not, let’s get him out.” Feldscher counselled going easy. After all, if Horn started to dig behind that letter… The men’s voices dropped, as though a shade were drawn between them and the women.

Finally, after phoning back and forth between the two families, the Steiner men came to the Strauses. The two brothers, Max and James, went aside. It was Max who said, “We’ve got to look at the thing realistically. We have to consider all the possibilities, even the worst.”

For an instant, their eyes admitted it to each other. They were of about the same age. To each, the brother was still “the kid”, some seven years younger. Max tried now to make a practical suggestion. Maybe the simplest thing would even be, since the boys couldn’t produce those two girls they had picked up – it shouldn’t be impossible to dig up a couple of girls.