Nowhere by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online Page A

under his counter and brought up one of those ornate brass vintage telephones, reproductions of which are now sold in American discount stores. He barked into the mouthpiece, “Constabulary!” When the connection had been made, he said, “Hotel Bristol. One tourist has poisoned another.... Yes.” Having put away the telephone, he found an automatic pistol in the desk, brought it up, and trained it on me.
    I raised my hands, but protested vigorously. “I’m no killer, and for God’s sake will you call an ambulance!”
    The concierge rolled his eyes, and his upper lip came down. “Our hotel is not a refuge for gangsters.” From his left hand he extended the index finger and waved it before my nose.
    The police arrived promptly, two of them, on bicycles, which they trundled into the lobby. These lawmen were uniformed as if for an operetta: braided tunics, high glossy boots, caps like pots, and very small holstered pistols. They carried truncheons. The one in the lead had porcine nostrils and was about my height but much wider. Without a word he produced a pair of what proved to be handcuffs and attached ankle manacles, linked by a chain so short that when the other constable had knelt and fettered me with the lower shackles after the first had braceleted my wrists, I was necessarily a hunchback.
    I was bent (though not in the British sense), but not mute. “You can’t do this to an American national,” I blustered, hoping that they would not throw recent Iranian events in my face. “I demand to see my consul.”
    The larger policeman struck me deftly on the crazybone of my right arm, which was thereby paralyzed for many minutes. “You have no passport,” he said after a perfunctory search of my person. “You have no other papers and no money. You are a stateless vagrant, and you are a murderer. On the first charge you are sentenced to a flogging. On the second, to probable death: it would be unkind to predict another outcome to the Hunt.”
    I had to slow down the centrifuge inside my head, and choose which point to make first. “I’m not a murderer, for heaven’s sake. Flogging ? Probable death ?” Already my neck was aching from trying to look up at him. “What’s the Hunt?”
    The smaller constable spoke for the first time. He had a soft, round, bespectacled face and looked like a village schoolteacher, but so had Heinrich Himmler.
    “You will not find here the brutality of other countries,” said he. “We do not sentence murderers to prison terms, and we do not perform so-called executions. We have the Hunt. We provide the condemned homicide with a revolver.”
    I was crippled by an utter lack of belief that this was happening. “Let’s go back to the beginning, I beg of you,” I said. “A fellow American, Mr. Clyde McCoy, by accident drank an entire pint of after-shave lotion. I rushed down here to summon a doctor, since there’s no phone in the room—”
    “The Hunt,” said the pigfaced policeman, “consists of your being released with the pistol and our following your trail with the intention of killing you on sight.”
    “Just a moment, you policemen can only accuse me of a crime. You can’t serve as judge and jury too.”
    Pigface put the end of his truncheon just under my nose and raised it, to give me a hog’s snout as well. “Remember, this is Saint Sebastian, not the USA. We believe that only the policeman is capable of making these judgments, for isn’t it only he who deals with the criminals and investigates the crime? Where is the judge all this while? In bed with his mistress! And the members of the jury are going about their little bourgeois affairs in safety and comfort. How can any of these people know of criminal matters as well as, not to say better than, the law-enforcement officer? And why should Sebastianers take seriously the so-called rights of those whose profession it is to damage those who observe the law?”
    In this debate, if such it was, I was hampered by