His mother was a Madonna, he was a Christ. And here, Willie supplied another conception that was new to me: “Remember, the church is a mother-idea, everything about the church is seductive, feminine; and the synagogue is a father-religion, harder and more austere, stemming from the patriarchs.”

And so Willie explained Judd’s conflict over being a Jew. At the time it seemed far-fetched to me, seemed perhaps a reflection of Willie’s own excessive concern with his “Jewish appearance”.

“But look,” Willie said, “Christ is born a Jew but in reality He becomes the symbol of Christianity. Isn’t this an inevitable identification for someone who is struggling with his Jewishness? Judd runs around to all the churches but hasn’t quite got the nerve to renounce his father-religion, to become a meshumed, a convert, so he nominally rejects all religion and says he’s an atheist. Wait. Look at his fixation on Artie-”

“But what’s that got to do with religion?”

Willie’s eyes gleamed. “Look at Artie, a tall blond fellow who is everything Judd wanted to be in appearance, who doesn’t look Jewish at all, a real collegiate shagetz type, and look what Judd says: ‘I identified myself with him completely.’” Now Willie lowered his voice, producing his culminating point. “I’m sure Judd never thought of this overtly. But remember, Artie’s mother is a Catholic. If Judd were Artie, he could more literally sense himself as the son of the Madonna.”

I thought it was too pat.

Actually, Willie argued, the entire subject of Jewish self-hatred was a rather new concept. He had read the basic book, available only in German. It showed how every Jew had a wish not to be burdened with the problem of being a Jew. Then came the guilt feeling for harbouring such a wish. “Haven’t you ever felt it?” he challenged me.

I could not deny that his words called up something of the sort in me. “All right. Then why should such a feeling make Judd kill Paulie Kessler?”

“Why? Self-destruction! They picked a boy, a Jewish boy, just at the age when Jews become Jews – thirteen, the bar-mitzua age.”

That was going too far. “They picked him at random, on the street-”

“Yes. That’s what they claim,” he said fanatically. “That there is no meaning, that everything is at random. Do you think that maybe, somewhere far back in their minds, it didn’t ring home that Paulie Kessler was the son of a pawnbroker, the symbol of everything that is shameful in being a Jew?” He leaned back, and grinned at me.

I wanted at first to laugh. Yet his ideas echoed and echoed. Wasn’t I, myself, ashamed? Didn’t I sometimes feel a secret rage at my father’s being a cheap Jewish cigar-maker?

Willie had fallen silent, brooding over his only partial explanation of Judd, an explanation which he was to complete for me, in an extraordinary way, years later. I turned the pages. “What about Artie?”

“It’s either obvious or a complete mystery,” he said. “Maybe he’s just a born maniac.”

“You think it could be heredity, then, after all?”

Willie didn’t believe it was entirely the fault of heredity. If these weaknesses had been detected early, perhaps the new psychiatry could have helped. But why hadn’t the faults been detected? “Ah, we don’t know a damn thing.” He had become morose.

“One thing you did guess,” I said, to restore the spark in him. “About the weapon.” I told him it was his insistence about the chisel that had led us to the tales of other taped chisels, other crimes.

Willie looked at me foggily for a moment. “For crissake, that wasn’t what I meant at all.” Though he wouldn’t be surprised if other such murders had been done. “Don’t you see what it is? The chisel? The tool itself? What it represents?”

Nowadays we would say I must have been blocked in some way, not to have understood instantly. As he made an obscene gesture with his hand, it dawned on me. It seemed at once weird, far-fetched, and obviously true. I felt stupid, too stupid to ask the next question.

He did it for me, rhetorically. But why should Artie have had to kill people with that thing? And why only men? For Artie had been against Judd’s idea to make it a girl, the report told us.

In Artie’s case, too, Willie said, it was the relationship with the father that had to be studied. The very first lines about Artie said material had been obtained from his mother, brothers, uncle. “His father still keeps absolutely shut off,” Willie observed. “Upstairs, they’ve been trying to get a show of support, you know, for the public. They finally got his mother to say something, but not the old man.”

We read, “The grandfather, a quick, alert man, was abusive to his children and beat them severely. The patient’s father has been exactly the opposite in his treatment of his children, probably as a reaction to the excessive severity of the grandfather.” Willie pointed out a passage, under Artie’s sex life. When Artie had caught gonorrhoea, “he sought advice from his older brother and his uncle, being particularly desirous of keeping a knowledge of all this from his father, whose respect he wanted to maintain”.

“Almost any kid would have done something like that,” I said.

“The patient had no sex knowledge from his parents, from his brothers, from his governess. At one time, he did secure some information from the family chauffeur…”

Then Willie found a clue. In the year Artie’s little brother was born, and Artie had begun his crime fantasies, he “had some eye trouble, and his lids would tend to stick together for a period of several weeks”. The next detail Willie pounced upon – the eye trouble had returned over a month ago, the time of the murder.

“I don’t see-”

“You don’t see! That’s just it. He didn’t want to see. To see that baby brother, or, years later, to see the crime he had done.”

Now I recalled Willie’s question in the lab: Whom did each boy mean to kill? Was it his little brother, then, for Artie? Hadn’t Artie and Judd actually discussed taking Billy as their victim?

But why? Merely jealousy of a kid brother?

It all went somehow into a sense of inadequacy, Willie argued, a sense as a child of not being wanted enough – or else why would the parents have another baby? Wasn’t Artie still undeveloped, despite his great hurry to grow up? “At eighteen, his voice is still changing”, the report read. “He is retarded in his masculine development.” He hardly needed to shave. His sexual growth was delayed. “To cover up his relative impotence, he boasted of his marks at school; although he received only moderate grades. He convinced his friends that he was quite superior to them mentally…”

Impotence? Artie, the sex braggart? But of course, that would fit. For what did we really know of his conquests? Hadn’t he always let on that Myra was his mistress? And I was certain she was a virgin.

The answer to Artie was all in there, somewhere, Willie said. The violent jealousy over his baby brother, and then the shame at being somewhat impotent – all his angers and frustrations bringing a kind of rage of impotence that was expressed the way a kid would. “I’ll show you!” With a hard tool he would knock over, kill, all those who made him feel insignificant – kill that rival kid brother who was so cute and beloved. And kill his own inadequate self.

The tool – wasn’t it the absolute symbol, the murderous weapon feared and dreamed of by every little boy, who in his fantasies about adults sees it somehow as a dreadful, powerful, killing thing?

Evasively, feeling uncomfortable, I asked about the other fantasies of Judd and Artie, the daydreams or whatever they were -

“You mean the masturbation dreams?” Willie said.

I pretended that I had myself understood them as such.

“They’re wishes. Judd wished most of all to be Artie’s slave, so he became it, and Artie wished to become a master criminal and get caught and jailed.”