The first feeling you get upon entering a prison in chains is one of regret, not for doing what you did, but for the now obvious error in the doing. The second feeling, as the first door closes behind you, is the presence of an order higher than your own. Initially, as you stand inside the first door looking back, that sense of helplessness seems to have its teeth only in the outer layer of your skin and you still harbor the fantasy of bolting back through that door toward freedom as soon as it opens, like a lucky rabbit escaping the jaws of the higher fox. But as you are led farther and farther inside the thing, past a second, third, then a fourth and a fifth door, some primordial instinct of self-preservation alerts you to the fact that your chances of escape are halved and then halved again with each door latching closed behind you. And when you are led to the last and smallest room, the guards close that last door and take your last reserve of hope with them. You inevitably find resignation waiting for you--no, longing for you--on the simple steel bunk. I sat as a supplicant and wondered why I had not struggled, and how I had been led here so easily.

That first taste, though initially bitter, would itself eventually become the fixation of fantasy as my condition of confinement became more barbarous and inhumane with each successive stop, first in Italy, then back to Tunisia.

The fifteen-minute meeting in a side room of the Tunis city jail that passed for my trial proved to be nothing more than a parade of gesticulating accusations in Arabic, a comparison of my bruised and swollen face with that in the photographs, and a sentence, translated into English. Twenty-five years, no parole. I later discovered I had been tried on the same day, in absentia, in Rome, and had been given a twenty-five-year sentence there as well, 'to run consecutively' the letter said, 'for my refusal to cooperate in the recovery of the Vermeer.' By that time it didn't matter, they would never find the painting and I had already found my resolve, or so I thought.

The next morning, after a sleepless night filled with the wails of other men being interrogated, I was led onto an old, rust-colored bus with steel plates welded over the windows so that the other five passengers and I had no view save that of the stoic, machine gun carrying soldiers. I braced myself as best I could with cuffed hands as the bus pitched and bucked over the crude Tunisian road. By midday, the heat had robbed the oxygen from the sealed vehicle and I concentrated on microscopic particles of dust as they filtered up from the road and danced in the narrow shafts of light penetrating through what looked like bullet holes in the roof.