Field Gray by Philip Kerr Read Free Book Online

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
    C astle 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