“Yes. Please. Please. I’m sorry.” I was begging and my mouth was bleeding, and my teeth were sharp, broken things. I put my hand to my face, to try to keep my cheek in one piece, I could feel it flapping open; I might have been going into shock, it was like I wasn’t really there. I was detached and drifting away, passive and submissive. I had always wondered how so many Jews could be killed in Germany, but now I knew why they would get on their knees and be shot into their own open graves.

Then there was a spark of life in my mind, what I thought was a solution, and I said, “I went to his apartment. There was a lot of musical equipment in his bedroom. You could sell it and probably make some of your money back. I’ll help you, I promise. That’s probably where a lot of the money went.”

My words were all mangled and came out sibilant because of my teeth, and the old man looked at me like I was crazy. Then he handed the gun to G and muttered something in Spanish, and I couldn’t have possibly seen it, but I felt like I did, some kind of Darwin thing where an animal, a human animal like me, can see things it shouldn’t. So I saw G swinging the gun down at the back of my head and then my head and eyes were filled with a red-orange color and there was a burning pain at the base of my neck, my spine itself was in an agony it had never felt before, and then there was blackness, like a sudden, violent suffocation.

When I came to I thought I was in a dark metal box, I couldn’t really see anything, and there was something soft next to my face. I reached across myself and ran my hand over the soft thing and my eyes adjusted to the minimal light and I saw that I was touching Lisa Weiss’s leg. She was still taped up and she had passed out. We were moving, and I realized I was lying in the back of what must have been the van I had seen in the garage. There were a few cases of Poland Spring water and there were two frosted-over windows on the back doors and they let in just enough milky light for me to make things out. It was a closed-off compartment, and whoever was driving the van was on the other side of the aluminum-sheet wall behind me. I touched my face. It was dried and swollen, but there was a long hole, a groove I could put my finger in. I felt horrified and I sat up. I ran my tongue over my jagged teeth and I looked at my watch. It was almost nine p.m.; I had been out for hours. I reached behind my head and felt a swelling back there that was the size of a tennis ball. I shook Lisa but she didn’t wake up.