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.