Most of all, I could have used a drink at night just before I went to bed. Perhaps it was having to talk about and relive the summer of 1941, but while I was in Landsberg, sleep provided little respite from the cares of the world. Often I would awake in the unfocused gloom of my cell and find myself soaked in sweat, having dreamed an awful dream. And more often than not it was the same dream. Of earth shifting strangely beneath my feet, turned not by any unseen animal but by some darker, subterranean elemental force. And as I watched closely, I saw the black ground as it shifted again and the blank-eyed head and spiderlike hands of some murdered Lazarus, self-rising from its own corpse gases, appeared on the mysterious surface. Thin and white like a clay pipe, the naked creature lifted its behind, its chest, and, last of all, its skull, moving backward and unnaturally, the way a collapsed puppet might arrange its various limbs until, at last, it appeared to be kneeling in front of a cloud of smoke, which cleared suddenly as it was sucked into the muzzle of the pistol in my steady hand.

10

GERMANY, 1954

It’s one of life’s little jokes that whenever you think things can hardly get any worse they usually do.

I must have fallen asleep again, and for a moment I thought it was just another bad dream. I felt several pairs of hands upon me, turning me over onto my stomach and ripping the pajama jacket off my back; and then I was simultaneously hooded and handcuffed. As the manacles pinched my wrists painfully I cried out, and for this sound I received a punch on the head.

“Quiet,” murmured a voice—an American voice. “Or you’ll get another.”

The hands, which wore rubber gloves, hauled me onto my feet. Someone dragged down my pajama trousers and I was dragged and then marched out of my cell, along the landing, and down the stairs. We went outside briefly and crossed the yard. Doors opened and slammed behind us, and after that I quickly lost track of where I was beyond the obvious fact that I was still within the walls of Landsberg. I felt a hand push down on top of my hooded head.

“Sit down,” said a voice.

I sat, and that would have been fine except that there was no chair and I heard several loud guffaws as I lay sprawled in pain on the stone-flagged floor.

“Did you think of that one all by yourself?” I said. “Or did you get the idea from a movie?”

“I told you to shut up.” Someone kicked me in the small of my back, not so hard as to cause any damage but enough to shut me up. “Speak when spoken to.”

More hands picked me up again and dumped me onto a chair, and this time it was there.