The MPs herded me up to an arched doorway, unlocked my handcuffs, and delivered me into the custody of a black Army sergeant who fitted me with a new set of cuffs and, tugging them, led the way into a keyhole-shaped courtyard where at least a hundred men wearing green fatigues were milling aimlessly around. A crooked brick tower higher than the castellated walls backed onto a series of concrete balconies where armed military warders watched us from behind a wide pane of wired glass. The courtyard was open to the air, but it smelled of cigarettes, freshly cut timber, and the unwashed bodies of convicted American soldiers who regarded my arrival with a mixture of curiosity and disdain.

It was warmer than Russia and there were no pictures of Stalin and Lenin to admire, but for a moment I felt I was back at Camp Eleven in Voronezh. That New York City was just a mile away seemed almost unthinkable, yet I could almost hear the sizzle of hamburgers and french fries and immediately I started to feel hungry. Back in Camp Eleven we were always hungry, each day and all day; some men in prison play cards, some try to keep fit, but in Voronezh our main pastime was waiting to be fed. Not that we were ever fed with food: water soup kasha and chleb—a dark, moist, breadlike stuff that tasted of fuel oil—was what we ate. These men in Castle Williams looked better off than that. They still had the look of resistance and escape in their eyes. No pleni in a Soviet labor camp ever looked like that. Just to look at an MVD guard with that amount of insolence would have been to risk a beating or worse; and no one ever thought of trying to escape: There was nowhere to escape to.

The sergeant led the way into the crooked tower and up a spiral steel staircase to the second level of the fortress.

“We’re gonna give you a cell all to yourself,” he said. “Given that you’re not going to be with us for very long.”

“Oh? Where am I going?”

“Best you is in solitary,” he said, ignoring my question. “Best for you, best for the men. New shit and old shit don’t mix well in this shit hole. Especially when the new shit smells different. I don’t want to know what you are, you maggot, but you ain’t Army. So you is quarantined while you’re our guest. Like you had yellow fucking fever one day and dysentery the next. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

He opened a steel door and nodded me inside.

“Would you mind telling me what this place is?”

“Castle Williams is a disciplinary barracks for the First United States Army. Named after the commandant of the U.S. Corps of Engineers who built it.”

“And the island? We are on an island, aren’t we?”