Field Gray

by Philip Kerr

  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

  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 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.

  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, and 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 U.S. 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 northeast coast, there was nowhere else for our solitary wagon train to go but west. 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 was about forty feet high with three stories. It was old and rather 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 who fitted me with a new set of cuffs and, tugging them, led the way into a keyhole-shaped courtyard where at least a 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 smelled 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 Williams looked better off than that. They still had the look of resistance and escape in their eyes. No pleni in a Soviet labor 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 shit hole. 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 Williams is a disciplinary barracks for the First United States Army. Named after the commandant of the U.S. 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.

  4

  NEW YORK, 1954

  Castle Williams 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 U.S. 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 anymore. 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 Williams. Sometimes I could see yachts sailing up and down the bay like so much seagoing 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 a 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 of which he wasn’t proud. 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 day, 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 shoveling 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 gray 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.

  “Fucking Nazi,” said one.

  I said nothing.

  “What’s the matter, you Nazi bastard? Lost your tongue?”

  I shook my head. “German,” I said
. “But never a Nazi.”

  “No difference,” said the other. “Not in my book.”

  “Besides,” said the first one. “You were SS. And that makes you worse than a Nazi murderer. That makes you someone who enjoyed it.”

  I couldn’t argue with him about that. What would have been the point? They’d already made up their minds about me: John Wilkes Booth would have received a more sympathetic hearing than I was likely to get from these two. But after weeks of solitary, I had an itch to talk a little:

  “What are you? FBI?”

  The first man nodded. “That’s right.”

  “A lot of SS were cops just like you,” I said. “I was a detective when the war started. I didn’t have much choice in the matter.”

  “I’m nothing like you, pal,” said the second agent. “Nothing. You hear me?” He poked me on the shoulder with his forefinger for good measure, and it felt like someone drilling for oil. “You remember that when you fly home to your mass-murdering pals. No American ever killed any Jews, mister.”

  “What about the Rosenbergs?” I said.

  “A Nazi with a sense of humor. How about that, Bill?”

  “He’s going to need that when he gets back to Germany, Mitch.”

  “The Rosenbergs. That’s very funny. It’s just a pity we can’t fry you, Gunther, the way we fried those two.”

  “They had lawyers and a fair trial. And I happen to know that the judge and the prosecutor were Jews themselves. Just for your information, kraut.”

  “That is reassuring,” I said. “However, I might feel more reassured if I’d ever seen a lawyer myself. I believe it’s not uncommon for someone in this country to have to appear before a court when there’s a move to have him deported. Especially when it seems possible I might be facing a trial in Germany. I had the strange idea that civil liberties actually meant something in America.”