And it was indeed so that the world seemed to envisage the remainder of their existence. As the press wires compiled reactions to the sentence, we read the New York Times editorial declaring that prison for them should truly mean “the oubliette”, that it should be “a life extinguishment virtually as complete as death”.

An Indianapolis paper declared that the judge had spoken truly when he pictured a lifetime in jail as worse punishment than execution. But could they not sometime get out? This seemed a pervasive fear. Legal experts gave interviews showing that they might be paroled in fifty years, even in twenty years. The Chicago Tribune editorialized that despite the judge’s advice against parole no one could tell what would happen. And while grudgingly accepting the sentence, the Tribune declared that it was more than anything a sentence against capital punishment, for if these two did not deserve to hang, then anyone hanged thereafter in the state of Illinois would be hanged unjustly.

Yet for all the rumblings, the act of disposition seemed indeed to have ended the case. Crank letters and threatening calls rapidly fell off. The court had spoken, and the case was decided. And in a few days, we had not a line about Steiner and Straus in the paper. We ran only a Sunday article by an eminent law professor pointing out that the elaborate psychiatric evidence introduced into the case would prove a landmark in medical jurisprudence.

A FEW DAYS after the verdict I made up my mind at last to call Ruth. Only then I learned that she had gone East, that she had transferred to Smith College.

For the next few months I stayed on the paper in Chicago. I began an affair with a girl reporter on the News, an “emancipated woman”. Those were the beginning days of the gang wars, and I became an expert on them – always the speeding car, the fusillade, the riddled body or bodies; then the gangster funeral, and the box-score tally, and rarely an arrest, almost never a conviction; it was just people shooting it out on the streets, it was the same as when kids did it. Bang, you’re dead.

There came the question of accepting the prize for helping to capture Steiner and Straus. Ten thousand dollars was to be divided between the Pole who had found the glasses and the detective who had traced them, and several others. And Tom and I were to have a thousand dollars each.

If I refused, I would be implying that Tom was wrong in accepting. There was not a reason in the world for refusing. Afterward, Tom and I got ritually drunk at Louie’s. I said I would go to Europe and write.

I even had it in mind, when I went East, to stop at Smith College. And so I wrote to Ruth. Her reply was cordial but cool. She congratulated me on my reward “since it would help me further my writing ambitions”.

I tried in a letter to explain myself, and she wrote back that the whole experience was perhaps too strong as yet for both of us, that perhaps when I came back from Europe, we could renew our friendship.

The first person I looked up in Paris was Myra; she had gone abroad immediately after the trial. Myra was thinner, but more attractive than ever; her eyes were huge, her hair was sleek, and she was already the ultra-habitué of the Dôme, nodding and waving to everybody and telling me who everybody was – Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and the editor of transition, in which she hoped to get her poems published.

We kept on drinking Pernod, then she was showing me the real Paris. We kissed along the quays, and it must have been nearly dawn when as a matter of course we went up to my hotel room – and she was pouring out talk by then: she wanted me to take her, it was “the only way to find out”. But when we tried, she became rigid, clenched, her body vibrating with her effort to break through her rigidity, and finally she said in a small voice that it was always like that – she hoped I would forgive her for trying to use me but…

For some time after that, we met at cafés and talked and talked. Myra was always seen with the newest young male arrivals, holding hands on the street, going off intimately with them somewhere.

After a few months in Paris, trying to write, I became restless. I would drop in at the Chicago Globe’s offices to look at the paper, and soon I was working full time. I seemed always involved in a serious affair or in an important story.

I went to Italy, I went to Germany. Something of the great malaise, the gathering sickness of Europe, began to be felt, and it was as though I had already known it; the taste of it was quite familiar to me from Chicago. Everything was as though expected. So the years passed.

Then came the troubles in Vienna, the brief abortive revolution when the socialists barricaded themselves in their model apartment houses. They were shot out in a few days. With other “experts”, I predicted great upheavals. With the socialists out of the way, what could stop the paranoiac Hitler from gobbling up Austria?

I was done with the story, and lingering in the depressing aftermath of the shootings, when I got a call, one morning, in my hotel. “Herr Doctor Weiss,” the clerk announced. It was Willie.

I found him waiting in the lobby, gnomish as ever, his head cocked to one side as he looked at me through narrowed eyes. There was the same knowing, ironic smile on his closed lips.

What was he doing in Vienna?

He seemed surprised that I asked. Where else would he be for his post-graduate work but in the home city of the Old Man?

“Let’s walk,” he said, explaining that he allowed himself an hour’s walk every morning.

Willie set off at a brisk gait, setting the pace for his rapid questioning. First, he pumped me dry on my opinions about the uprising. Then, quite brusquely, Willie demanded what news I had of the boys in jail. Had they succumbed to prison routine? Or was Judd, at least, finding it possible to keep up some creative, mental life?

Here I disappointed him. I was completely out of touch. I recalled only a story Tom Daly had brought to me after the trial: it seemed that Artie’s denial of the “gland robbery”, at least, was somewhat substantiated by a tale current among the South Side police. The taxi driver had really been mutilated, it was said, by the brother of a girl he had raped. But that still left a good deal of mystery about Artie’s other crimes.

The boys should have been studied further, Willie declared. Had I heard of the recent death of Dr. McNarry?

I hadn’t. Indeed, it took me an instant to think myself back into the trial, to place him as the head of the psychiatric defence.

What a fitting thing it would have been, Willie said, if the three families had gone through with McNarry’s idea. Maybe the idea still could be revived, right now, as a memorial to McNarry, one of the first psychiatrists in America open-minded enough to accept Freud.

But what idea of McNarry’s was he talking about? I asked.

Why, hadn’t I known? Just after the trial Dr. McNarry had suggested a wonderful idea to all three families – the Kesslers, the Strauses, the Steiners. After all, they were linked in the tragedy; each had lost a son.

Dr. McNarry had proposed that the three bereaved millionaire families set up a joint fund for the study of mental diseases. “A great research centre in Chicago.”

“He proposed it to all three families?” I asked.

“I think it came fairly close, at that. Paulie Kessler’s father saw it. You know, that little man had a great deal to him.” And Artie’s mother had been most eager for the plan. “I suppose it would have relieved poor Mrs. Straus of some of her guilt feeling to have her tragedy acknowledged in that way.”

But real opposition, Willie said, had come from Randolph Straus, who could not bring himself to have his son’s crime thus perpetuated.