I nodded. “Here’s one for you. Penguins live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere. Is that plain enough?”
I pushed the chair back on two legs, which was my first mistake, and smiled, which was my second. The Navy captain was surprisingly quick on his feet. One moment he was staring at me like I was a snake in a bassinet, the next he was yelling as if he’d hammered his own thumb, and before I could wipe the smile from my face, he’d done it for me, kicking the chair away and then grabbing the lapels of my jacket and lifting my head off the floor only so that he could punch it back down again.
The other two each caught one of his arms and tried to pull him off, but that left his legs free to stamp on my face like someone trying to put out a fire. Not that this hurt. He had a right as big as a medicine ball, and I wasn’t feeling anything very much since it had connected with my chin. Humming like an electric eel, I lay there waiting for him to stop so that I could show him who was really in charge of the interrogation. By the time they got a ring in his pointy nose and hauled him off, I was just about ready for my next wisecrack. I might have made it, too, but for the blood that was pouring out of my nose.
When I was absolutely sure no one was about to knock me down again, I got off the floor and told myself that when they hit me again it would be because I had truly earned a beating and that it would have been worth it.
“Being a cop,” I said, “is a lot like looking for something interesting to read in the newspaper. By the time you’ve found it, you can bet there’s a lot that’s rubbed off on your fingers. Before the war, the last war, I was a cop in Germany. An honest cop, too, although I guess that won’t mean much to apes like you. Plainclothes. A detective. But when we invaded Poland and Russia they put us in gray uniforms. Not green, not black, not brown, gray. Field Gray, they called it. The thing about gray is you can roll around in the dirt all day and still look smart enough to return a general’s salute. That’s one reason we wore it. Another reason we wore gray was maybe so that we could do what we did and still think we had standards—so that we could manage to look ourselves in the eye when we got up in the morning. That was the theory. I know, stupid, wasn’t it? But no Nazi was ever so stupid as to ask us to wear a white uniform. You know why? Because a white uniform is hard to keep clean, isn’t it? I mean, I admire your courage wearing white. Because let’s face it, gentlemen, white shows everything. Especially blood. And the way you conduct yourselves? That’s a big disadvantage.”
Instinctively, each man looked down at the blank canvas that was his immaculate white uniform, as if checking his zipper; and that was when I collected a nose full of blood in my fingers and let them have it, like Jackson Pollock. You could say I wanted to express my feelings rather than just illustrate them; and that my crude technique of flinging my own blood through the air at them was simply a means of arriving at a statement. Either way, they seemed to understand exactly what I was trying to say. And when they finished working me over and tossed me in a cell, I had the small satisfaction of knowing that, at last, I was truly modern. I don’t know if their blood-spattered white uniforms were art or not. But I know what I like.
3
The drunk tank at Gitmo was a large wooden hut located on the beach, but for anyone who wasn’t drunk when he was locked up in there it was actually positioned somewhere between the first and second circles of hell. It was certainly hot enough.
I’d been imprisoned before. I’d been a Soviet POW and that was not so good. But Gitmo was almost as bad. The three things that made the drunk tank nearly unendurable were the mosquitoes and the drunks—and the fact that I was ten years older now. Being ten years older is always bad. The mosquitoes were worse—the naval base was not much more than a swamp—but they were not as bad as the drunks. You can stand being locked up almost anywhere so long as you manage to establish some sort of a routine. But there was no routine at Gitmo, unless you could count the routine that was the regular dusk-to-dawn turnover of loudly intoxicated American sailors. Nearly all of them arrived in their underwear. Some were violent; some wanted to make friends with me; some tried to kick me around the cell; some wanted to sing; some wanted to cry; some wanted to batter the walls down with their skulls; nearly all of them were incontinent or threw up, and sometimes they threw up on me.
In the beginning I had the quaint idea that I was locked up there because there was nowhere else to lock me up; but after a couple of weeks, I started to believe that there was some other purpose to my being kept there. I tried speaking to the guards and on several occasions asked them by what jurisdiction I was being held there, but it was no good. The guards just treated me like every other prisoner, which would have been fine if every other prisoner hadn’t been covered in beer and blood and vomit. Most of the time these other prisoners were released in the late afternoon, by which time they’d slept it off, and for a few hours at least I managed to forget the humidity and the hundred-degree heat and the stink of human feces and to get some sleep—only to be awakened for “chow” or by someone washing out the tank with a fire hose or, worst of all, by a banana rat, if rats these truly were: At thirty inches long and weighing as many pounds, these rats were rodent stars who belonged in a Nazi propaganda movie or a Robert Browning poem.
At the beginning of the third week, a petty officer from the masters-at-arms office fetched me from the tank, accompanied me to a bathroom where I could shower and shave, and returned my own clothes.
“You’re being transferred today,” he told me. “To Castle Williams.”
“Where’s that?”
“New York City.”
“New York City? Why?”
He shrugged. “Search me.”
“What kind of place is it, this Castle Williams?”
“A U.S. military prison. Looks like you’re the Army’s meat now, not the Navy’s.”
He gave me a cigarette, probably just to shut me up, and it worked. There was a filter on it that was supposed to save my throat, and I guess it did at that, since I spent as much time looking at the cigarette as I did actually smoking it. I’d smoked most of my life. For a while I’d been more or less addicted to tobacco, but it was hard to see anyone becoming addicted to something quite so tasteless as a filter cigarette. It was like eating a hot dog after fifty years of bratwurst.
The petty officer took me to another hut with a bed, a chair, and a table and locked me in. There was even an open window. The window had bars on it, but I didn’t mind that, and for a while I stood on the chair and breathed some fresher air than I was used to and looked at the ocean. It was a deep shade of blue. But I was feeling bluer. A U.S. military prison in New York felt a lot more serious than the drunk tank in Gitmo. And it wasn’t very long before I had formed the opinion that the Navy must have spoken about me to the police in Havana; and that the police had been in contact with Lieutenant Quevedo of Cuban military intelligence—the SIM; and that the SIM lieutenant had told the Americans my real name and background. If I was lucky, I might get to tell someone in the FBI everything I knew about Meyer Lansky and the mob in Havana and save myself a trip back to Germany and, very likely, a trial for murder. The Federal Republic of Germany had abolished the death penalty for murder in 1949, but I couldn’t answer for the Americans. The Amis had hanged four Nazi war criminals in Landsberg as recently as 1951. Then again, maybe they would deport me back to Vienna, where I’d been framed for the murders of two women. That was an even more uncomfortable prospect. The Austrians, being Austrians, retained the death penalty for murder.