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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