Philip Kerr - Field Grey

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?'

'Best you is in solitary,' he said, ignoring my question. 'Best for you, best for the men. New shit and old shit don't mix well in this shithole. Especially when the new shit smells different. I don't want to know what you are, you maggot, but you ain't Army. So you is quarantined while you're our guest. Like you had yellow fucking fever one day and dysentery the next. You hear me?'

'Yes, sir.'

He opened a steel door and nodded me inside.

'Would you mind telling me what this place is?'

'Castle William is a disciplinary barracks for the First United States Army. Named after the commandant of the US Corps of Engineers who built it.'

'And the island? We are on an island, aren't we?'

'Governors Island, in Upper New York Bay. So don't you get any foolish ideas about trying to escape, new shit.'

'I wouldn't dream of it, sir.'

'You don't just smell different, new shit. You sound different, too. Where you from?'

'It doesn't matter,' I said. 'A long way from here and a long time ago. That's where I'm from. And I won't be getting any visitors. At least no one I want to see.'

'No family, huh?'

'Family? I can't even spell it.'

'Then it's lucky for you we gave you a view of the city. In case you get lonely.'

I went to the window and looked across the bay. Behind me the door banged loudly shut like a cannon going off. I let out a sigh. New York was huge, so huge it made me feel small; so small it would have required a large microscope just to see me.

Castle William was a military barracks until 1865, when it became a detention facility for Confederate POWs, which, to me, made it seem like a home from home. Then in 1903 the castle was fitted up as a model prison for the US military. In 1916 they even wired it for electricity and installed central heating. All of this I was told by one of the guards, who were the only men who ever spoke to me. Only it certainly wasn't a model prison any more. Crumbling and overcrowded, the castle frequently stank of human excrement when the plumbing went wrong, which was all the time. It seemed that the drainage was poor, the result of the castle being built on landfill brought to the island from Manhattan. Of course I assumed this landfill was just rock; back in Russia landfill often meant something very different.

The view from my window was the best thing about Castle William. Sometimes I could see yachts sailing up and down the bay like so much sea-going geometry; but for the most part it was just loud waste-cargo boats sounding their foghorns that I saw, and the relentless, growing city. I had very little else to do but stare out of that window. You do a lot of staring in prison. You stare at the walls. You stare at the floor. You stare at the ceiling. You stare at the air. A nice view felt like a little bit of luxury. When prisoners kill themselves, or each other, it's usually because they're short of something to do.

I gave killing myself quite a bit of thought, because a city view will only keep you going for so long. I figured out how to do it, too. I might not have had a belt or any shoelaces but most convicts manage to hang themselves perfectly well with a cotton shirt. Almost all of the prisoners I knew who killed themselves – in Russia it was about one a week – hanged themselves using a shirt. After this, however, I decided to keep a closer eye on myself in case I did something foolish, and from time to time I would try to engage myself in conversation. But this wasn't so easy. For one thing I didn't like Bernhard Gunther very much. He was cynical and world-weary and hardly had a good word to say about anyone, least of all himself. He'd had a pretty tough war one way or the other; and done quite a few things he wasn't proud of. Lots of people feel that way, of course, but it had been no picnic for him since then either; it didn't seem to matter where he spread life's tartan rug, there was always a turd on the grass.

'I bet you had a difficult childhood, too,' I said. 'Is that why you became a cop? To get even with your father? You've never been very good with authority figures, have you? It strikes me that you'd have been a lot better off if you'd just stayed put in Havana and gone to work for Lieutenant Quevedo. Come to think of it, you'd have been a lot better off if you'd never been a cop at all. Trying to do the right thing has never really worked for you, Gunther, has it? You should have been a criminal like most of the others. That way you'd have been on the winning side a little more often.'

'Hey, I thought you were supposed to be talking me out of killing myself. If I want someone to make me despair, I could do it myself.'

'All right, all right. Look, this place isn't so bad. Three meals a clay, a room with a view and all the peace and quiet a man of your age could ever wish for. They even wash the dinner plates. Remember those rusty cans you had to eat from in Russia? And the bread thief you helped murder? Don't say that you've forgotten him. Or all the other dead comrades they had to stack like firewood because the ground was too cold and hard to bury them. And maybe you've forgotten how the Blues used to get us shovelling lime in the wind. The way it used to make your nose bleed all day. Why, this place is the Hotel Adlon next to Camp Eleven.'

'You talked me out of it. Maybe I won't kill myself. I just wish I knew what was happening.'

After all that talking I was as quiet as Hegel for a spell; maybe it was for several days, weeks probably, I don't know. I hadn't been marking time on the wall the way you were supposed to, with six marks followed by a seventh through their middle. They stopped making those calendars after the man in the iron mask complained about all the graffiti on the wall of his cell. Besides, the quickest way to do the time is to pretend it's not there. People pretend a lot when they're in jail. And just when you've managed to persuade yourself that there's something almost normal about being locked up like an animal, two strange men wearing suits and hats walk in and tell you that you're being deported to Germany: one of them puts the cuffs on you and before you know it you're on your way to the airport again.

The suits were good. The creases in their pants were almost perfect, like the bow of a big grey ship. The hats were nicely shaped and the shoes brightly polished, like their fingernails. They didn't smoke – at least not on the job – and they smelled lightly of cologne. One of them had a little gold watch chain on which he kept the key to my handcuffs. The other wore a signet ring that gleamed like a cold white burgundy. They were smooth, efficient, and probably quite tough. They had good white teeth of the kind that reminded me I probably needed to see a dentist. And they didn't like me. Not in the least. In fact, they hated me. I knew this because when they looked my way they grimaced or snarled silently or gritted their teeth and gave every sign of wanting to bite me. For much of the journey to the airport there were just the white teeth to contend with; and then, after about thirty minutes, when it seemed they could no longer restrain themselves, they started to bark.