Meyer Levin - Compulsion

Even while they were on the stairs, they heard a light switch snap on in one of the bedrooms. Judd turned and hurried back downstairs. He tangled with something, a lamp cord; he managed to catch the lamp before it fell, but it made a noise.

“I’ll kill you!” Artie snapped. They stood stock still in the hall. On the table lay some books, a camera. Artie picked up the camera. Things had become quiet upstairs. Artie started for the stairs again, but Judd held still. “You nuts?” he hissed. Towering over him black-masked in the dim hallway, his partner gave Judd a fleeting, shuddery, delicious thrill of suffocation, of death. “Somebody’s up,” Judd muttered. Artie growled, “You stink, you punk,” and pushed him out of the door. “Christ, that’s the last time I take you anywhere!”

“There was someone awake. We’d have been caught, sure,” Judd objected.

Artie grabbed the wheel, and the car leaped away. “Take it easy,” Judd begged. What a time for a smash-up, with all the stuff on them.

Suddenly Artie let out a wonderful laugh as he toyed with his pistol. “Morty! The way he was laying there, you could have stuck a rod up his ass, he’d never wake up!”

Judd had to laugh at the picture. He reached for his flask, opened it. Artie grabbed it from his hand, took the first swig, and in that moment Judd felt young, young, crazily happy; he felt the way a guy should feel!

Artie pulled into a side road to examine the haul. One of the wallets had a twenty-dollar bill in it. “The lying sonofabitch!” Artie complained. “He brags he always carries a fifty.” Altogether, there was nearly a hundred dollars. Saturday night. They should have figured the guys would have been out spending. As for the rest of the haul, several pretty hot-looking stickpins, cuff links, a couple of good watches, along with several cheap turnips. And the typewriter, Judd reminded Artie.

“That stupid piece of junk!” Artie burst out. “If you try to sell it, that’s just the kind of swag they can trace by the numbers on it.”

“Why should I sell it?” Judd said. He could use it.

Keep it? That made Artie decide he had a share in it, too. Judd flared. “You never even wanted to take it!” They screamed at each other. Artie drove a hard bargain. He’d keep the best of the gold watches.

“Keep them all!” Judd cried bitterly. “If that’s all it means to you.”

Artie called him a stinking punk amateur. If not for his backing out, they’d have cleaned the second place, too! Hell, Judd had no right to any of the swag; the Delt house was for him and he had screwed it up. Screeching, grabbing for the stuff, they scuffled, and then suddenly Artie started laughing and Judd too.

The atmosphere remained that way between them, swaying from playfulness to brawling. Artie was finishing the flask. Judd cried, “Save me some, you sonofabitch!”

Artie started the car, pulled onto the road. “You bastard,” he said, “if we’d have cleaned out the Delts, we’d be in clover.” Suddenly Judd had fallen into silence, moody. He hadn’t wanted Artie to start the car just then. And he hated to have Artie drive his car. Artie began a kind of act. “Listen, Mac, next time we go out, you do the way Charley says, or I get me another partner.”

Judd took it up. “For crissake, Charley, if not for me, you’d have got us both pinched. I saved you from getting caught.”

“Yeah? Mac, I pulled plenty of stuff and I never got caught. You’re just so goddam green you’re scared of your own shadow.”

Judd seized the flask. There was still some left.

“You didn’t even get a kick out of it!” – Artie was getting querulous again – “that’s why you wanted to stop.”

“Well, not the same kind of kick you get,” Judd said. “To me, it’s more of a stimulant than a gratification.”

Artie might not have heard. “I think I’ll get me a goddam date for New Year’s Eve,” he said. “You’re just a wet blanket.”

Judd drew in his breath. He must remain in full control of himself now; everything depended on it. Artie was teasing, that was all. Teasing. “New Year would be a hell of a night for a haul,” he observed.

Artie gave him a sidewise glance. Maybe he’d let Mac in on some more jobs; maybe they could pull some real stuff together instead of chickenshit. Only Mac had to know who was boss.

“Well,” Judd said quietly, “Mac, if I do what you want, you’ve got to do what I want. That’s equitable.”

Artie turned his face to him, this time, and there was the Dorian smile. “You want to make that a deal?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, we could make it a kind of a deal.”

Their eyes held together, in the bargaining. Judd felt himself almost unbearably quickening.

And then, in that same instant, a blur crossed the corner of his vision, something on the road in front of them; they were going through a small town, a figure was crossing the street. Judd cried out, and jerked the wheel from Artie. The car slid around the bundled figure – some goddam drunk; the car skidded, wavered. Artie gave Judd a terrible shove with his elbow, and somehow managed to put the car under control. “You goddam stupid sonofabitch, what did you do that for?”

“You didn’t see him! You’d have run him down!”

“I saw him.”

Artie was dead serious, sober, cool.

“You could have killed him.”

“So what? Who’d have known?”

Judd was silent. His mind worked around Artie’s words. Artie could do things, say things, flashing in an instantaneous reaction understanding, that he, Judd, had to attain in several steps of thinking. It was true again – by everything his intellect accepted, Artie was right. And yet he felt as though he had made some great, shivery effort, dragging himself up to a peak, an icy peak, alongside his friend.

“How about it, Mac? You want to make the deal?” Artie said, and the teasing note was there, just an edge of it.

“If we’re agreed on the terms,” Judd managed, quietly.

“Yah. But Charley’s the boss. What he says, you do. Life or death.”

Judd nodded. Yes. In any action, one had to be the master. And the slave, a slave.

Artie accelerated. The car swayed but held on the slippery road.

But not a slave to grovel. A slave of sure reward, the golden slave, his sword protecting his master, his beloved master, of long ivory limbs.

“Only, not for kid stuff,” Judd stipulated. “I don’t have to obey if it’s crap.”

Artie laughed at his apprehensiveness. “No, this is for real stuff.”

“Any crap, Mac has a right to refuse.”

“Wait a minute, Mac. If you start refusing every time I get a hot idea, what the hell.”

They defined it. Only things that might make Judd look ridiculous could be challenged. But if once he refused to go through with a serious thing, then they’d be finished. Artie would get someone else.

“But Mac has a right to question an order,” Judd insisted.

“Okay. But Charley has the last word. If Charley says so, it’s so.”

It hung between them for a moment. “Hey, Jocko, let’s make that the signal,” Artie said. “When I say ‘Charley says so’, that means no more questioning. ‘Charley says so’, you’ve got to do it, no comeback.”

It was like handing over his life. A fluttering elation went through Judd. “Okay, Dorian,” he said. They squeezed some last drops from the flask. Judd heard something like a giggle coming out of himself, the high girlish giggle he used to have when a kid. And just then the car skidded. It whirled completely around and landed in a ditch.

Judd sat rigid for a moment, but Artie lay back, laughing. Then Judd got out and walked around the car. They had been lucky; the ditch was quite shallow. He could pull out, he felt sure.