The Land Across by Gene Wolfe Page B

face was gone and there was some spray paint on the rest, but it was him. After that I saw at least two others, not painted and not torn. They did not seem important; still I wondered about them. You would have, too.
    The city was mostly dark, but I got lucky and found the district where the bars and clubs and so forth were. They call it the Mousukos. (I found that out later.) There were a lot of places I would have liked to see, only I did not have any money.
    Also I was bleeding just above my belt. It was not all that bad until my side started to stiffen up. The bullet had almost missed me clean, just not quite. After I found out I had been hit, looking around the Mousukos was not as much fun as it had been, and it had not been a whole lot of fun then. Pretty soon I was just looking for any workable place where I could hole up. There were streets that were no better than alleys, but they stunk and there were rats in them. If I had been in New York or even New Orleans—in LA or Chicago or someplace like that—I might have been able to find a car somebody had forgotten to lock. Then I would have crawled into the back and gone to sleep there, and anybody who found me would just think I had gone over my limit and chase me out. Only this was not New York or New Orleans either, or even Chicago or LA. Those people in the bars and clubs had walked to get there, or maybe ridden in one of the wagons with long benches that would take you downtown for a little change.
    I kept looking, but after a while the crowd thinned out and it started to get light. So I went up to a guy who looked pretty decent and asked the way to the park. His German was not as good as mine, but it was better than a lot of people’s and he told me.
    There would be bushes in the park is what I thought, and I could hide in them and get some sleep. After I had rested up, I might be able to find something to eat. And after that I would start looking for the American embassy.
    It seemed to me like a good plan, only I never even got started on it. A cop spotted the bloodstain on my shirt. When he found out I did not speak his language, he put cuffs on me, steel ones like Raincoat’s, and marched me off to a police station. By then I was so tired I could not walk fast for more than three or four steps. Pretty soon I would start lagging and he would hit me with his club. Cops here in the U.S. call that a baton, only it is really a club and not anything anybody would conduct an orchestra with.
    In a way it was good that we had to walk, because it gave me time to think. I decided the way to handle things was to pretend I did not understand German. Or French, either, although my French is really pretty good.
    So when we got to the station, I would talk nothing but English. They tried German on me, and a couple of languages I could not identify, maybe Polish and Russian, or Romanian and Hungarian. They were all Greek to me, and Greek might be a pretty good guess, too. How about Greek and Turkish?
    Then a guy came in and looked at my wound. He could have been a doctor, but my guess is he was an ambulance attendant or something. He gave me shots and probed it a little, then he sewed up both holes.
    When he had finished they shoved me in a cell. There were two other guys there already and no bunks, but one guy was asleep anyway, just lying on the floor. Which is what I did. The other guy was sitting in a corner and looking deep blue. He did not try to talk to me, and I did not try to talk to him, not even English.
    I went to sleep, and pretty fast.
    When I woke up it was afternoon, I think. My wound hurt again because the shots had worn off, and I had to pee. A slop jar took care of the peeing, but nothing stopped my wound from hurting. It just kept on and after a while I sort of got used to it.
    Then they marched me out and put me in a car and drove me to a big gray building that might have been a couple of miles outside the city. Pretty soon I was sitting in a real