The following day I was handcuffed and taken to an airfield, where I boarded a Douglas C-54 Skymaster with various military personnel returning home to their wives and families, and we flew north for about seven hours before we landed at Mitchell Air Force Base in Nassau County, New York. There I was handed over into the custody of the U.S. Army military police. On the main airport building was a board detailing the major units that were assigned to Mitchell AFB and a sign that read “Welcome to the United States.” It didn’t feel as if I was. Air Force handcuffs were exchanged for no-less-uncomfortable Army ones and I was shut inside a paddy wagon like a stray dog with a bad case of fleas. The wagon was windowless, but I could tell we were driving west. Having landed on America’s northeast coast, there was nowhere else for our solitary wagon train to go but west. One of the MPs was carrying a shotgun in case we ran into Red Indians or outlaws. It seemed like a wise precaution. After all, there was always the possibility that Meyer Lansky might be worried about the jam I was in; maybe even worried enough to do something about it. Lansky was thoughtful like that. He was the kind of man who always looked after his employees, one way or the other. Like all gambling men, Lansky preferred a sure thing. And there’s nothing as sure as a bullet in the head.
Ninety minutes later, the doors of the wagon opened in front of a semicircular fortress that appeared to be built on an island. The fortress was made of sandstone bricks and was about forty feet high with three stories. It was old and rather ugly and looked as if it belonged properly in old Berlin, somewhere other than New York anyway, an impression that was reinforced by the view of lower Manhattan’s much taller buildings. These stood gleaming on the opposite shore of a large expanse of water and resembled nothing so much as the walls of some modern Troy. This was my first sight of New York City, and like Tarzan I wasn’t as impressed as maybe I ought to have been. Then again, I was still wearing handcuffs.
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?”
“Governors Island, in Upper New York Bay. So don’t you get any foolish ideas about trying to escape, new shit.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, sir.”
“You don’t just smell different, new shit. You sound different, too. Where you from?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “A long way from here and a long time ago. That’s where I’m from. And I won’t be getting any visitors. At least no one I want to see.”
“No family, huh?”
“Family? I can’t even spell it.”
“Then it’s lucky for you we gave you a view of the city. In case you get lonely.”
I went to the window and looked across the bay. Behind me the door banged loudly shut like a cannon going off. I let out a sigh. New York was huge, so huge it made me feel small; so small it would have required a large microscope just to see me.
4
Castle Williams was a military barracks until 1865, when it became a detention facility for Confederate POWs, which to me made it seem like a home from home. Then, in 1903, the castle was fitted up as a model prison for the U.S. military. In 1916, they even wired it for electricity and installed central heating. All of this I was told by one of the guards, who were the only men who ever spoke to me. Only it certainly wasn’t a model prison anymore. Crumbling and overcrowded, the castle frequently stank of human excrement when the plumbing went wrong, which was all the time. It seemed that the drainage was poor, the result of the castle being built on landfill brought to the island from Manhattan. Of course, I assumed this landfill was just rock; back in Russia landfill often meant something very different.
The view from my window was the best thing about Castle Williams. Sometimes I could see yachts sailing up and down the bay like so much seagoing geometry; but for the most part it was just loud waste cargo boats sounding their foghorns that I saw, and the relentless, growing city. I had very little else to do but stare out of that window. You do a lot of staring in prison. You stare at the walls. You stare at the floor. You stare at the ceiling. You stare at the air. A nice view felt like a little bit of a luxury. When prisoners kill themselves, or each other, it’s usually because they’re short of something to do.