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.
CHAPTER THREE: CUBA AND NEW YORK, 1954
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 can 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 forty-degree heat and the stink of human faeces, and to get some sleep; only to be awakened for 'chow' or someone washing out the tank with a fire hose or, worst of all, 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 US military prison. Looks like you're the Army's meat how. not the Navy's.'
He gave me a cigarette, probably just to shut me up, and It worked. There was a filter on it which 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 US 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.
The following day I was handcuffed and taken to an airfield where I boarded a Douglas C-54 Skymaster with various military personnel returning home to their wives and families. We flew north for about seven hours before we landed at Mitchell Air Force Base in Nassau County, New York. There I was handed over into the custody of the US Army military police. On the main airport building was a board detailing the major units that were assigned to Mitchell AFB and a sign that read Welcome to the United States. It didn't feel as if I was. Air Force handcuffs were exchanged for no less uncomfortable Army ones and I was shut inside a paddy wagon like a stray dog with a bad case of fleas. The wagon was windowless but I could tell we were driving west. Having landed on America's north-east coast there was nowhere else for our solitary wagon train to go. One of the MPs was carrying a shotgun in case we ran into Red Indians or outlaws. It seemed like a wise precaution. After all, there was always the possibility that Meyer Lansky might be worried about the jam I was in; maybe even worried enough to do something about it. Lansky was thoughtful like that. He was the kind of man who always looked after his employees, one way or the other. Like all gambling men, Lansky preferred a sure thing. And there's nothing as sure as a bullet in the head.
Ninety minutes later the doors of the wagon opened in front of a semicircular fortress that appeared to be built on an island. The fortress was made of sandstone bricks and about forty feet high with three storeys. It was old and ugly and looked as if it belonged properly in old Berlin, somewhere other than New York anyway, an impression that was reinforced by the view of lower Manhattan's much taller buildings. These stood gleaming on the opposite shore of a large expanse of water and resembled nothing so much as the walls of some modern Troy. This was my first sight of New York City and, like Tarzan. I wasn't as impressed as maybe I ought to have been. Then again I was still wearing handcuffs.
The MPs herded me up to an arched doorway, unlocked my handcuffs and delivered me into the custody of a black Army sergeant. He fitted me with a new set of cuffs and tugging them, led the way into a keyhole-shaped courtyard where at least a couple of hundred men wearing green fatigues were milling aimlessly around. A crooked brick tower higher than the castellated walls backed onto a series of concrete balconies where armed military warders watched us from behind a wide pane of wired glass. The courtyard was open to the air but it smelt of cigarettes, freshly cut timber and the unwashed bodies of convicted American soldiers who regarded my arrival with a mixture of curiosity and disdain.
It was warmer than Russia and there were no pictures of Stalin and Lenin to admire, but for a moment I felt I was back at Camp Eleven, in Voronezh. That New York City was just a mile away seemed almost unthinkable, yet I could almost hear the sizzle of hamburgers and French fries and immediately I started to feel hungry. Back in Camp Eleven we were always hungry, each day and all day; some men in prison play cards, some try to keep fit, but in Voronezh our main pastime was waiting to be fed. Not that we were ever fed with food: water soup kasha and chleb – a dark, moist, breadlike stuff that tasted of fuel oil – was what we ate. These men in Castle William looked better off than that. They still had the look of resistance and escape in their eyes. No pleni in a Soviet labour camp ever looked like that. Just to look at an MVD guard with that amount of insolence would have been to risk a beating or worse; and no one ever thought of trying to escape: there was nowhere to escape to.
The sergeant led the way into the crooked tower and up a spiral steel staircase to the second level of the fortress.
'We're gonna give you a cell all to yourself,' he said. 'Given that you're not going to be with us for very long.'
'Oh? Where am I going?'
