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 ground was too cold and hard to bury them? And maybe you’ve forgotten how the Blues used to get us shoveling lime in the wind. The way it used to make your nose bleed all day. Why, this place is the Hotel Adlon next to Camp Eleven.”