Their captors seemed unsure of what to do with them. In the evenings, they would enter with bayonets and wiggle their blades at the Americans’ noses, yelling in a foreign language, waiting for answers. It was never productive.

There were only four of them, near as Eddie could tell and the Captain guessed that they, too, had drifted away from a larger unit and were, as often happens in real war, making it up day by day. Their faces were gaunt and bony with dark nubs of hair. One looked too young to be a soldier. Another had the most crooked teeth Eddie had ever seen. The Captain called them Crazy One, Crazy Two, Crazy Three, and Crazy Four.

“We don’t want to know their names,” he said. “And we don’t want them knowing ours.”

Men adapt to captivity, some better than others. Morton, a skinny, chattering youth from Chicago, would fidget whenever he heard noises from outside, rubbing his chin and mumbling, “Oh, damn, oh damn, oh damn …” until the others told him to shut up. Smitty, a fireman’s son from Brooklyn, was quiet most of the time, but he often seemed to be swallowing something, his Adam’s apple loping up and down; Eddie later learned he was chewing on his tongue. Rabozzo, the young redheaded kid from Portland, Oregon, kept a poker face during the waking hours, but at night he often woke up screaming, “Not me! Not me!”

Eddie mostly seethed. He clenched a fist and slapped it into his palm, hours on end, knuckles to skin, like the anxious baseball player he had been in his youth. At night, he dreamed he was back at the pier, on the Derby Horse carousel, where five customers raced in circles until the bell rang. He was racing his buddies, or his brother, or Marguerite. But then the dream turned, and the four Crazies were on the adjacent ponies, poking at him, sneering.

Years of waiting at the pier—for a ride to finish, for the waves to pull back, for his father to speak to him—had trained Eddie in the art of patience. But he wanted out, and he wanted revenge. He ground his jaws and he slapped his palm and he thought about all the fights he’d been in back in his old neighborhood, the time he’d sent two kids to the hospital with a garbage can lid. He pictured what he’d do to these guards if they didn’t have guns.

Then one morning, the prisoners were awakened by screaming and flashing bayonets and the four Crazies had them up and bound and led down into a shaft. There was no light. The ground was cold. There were picks and shovels and metal buckets.

“It’s a goddamn coal mine,” Morton said.

From that day forward, Eddie and the others were forced to strip coal from the walls to help the enemy’s war effort. Some shoveled, some scraped, some carried pieces of slate and built triangles to hold up the ceiling. There were other prisoners there, too, foreigners who didn’t know English and who looked at Eddie with hollow eyes. Speaking was prohibited. One cup of water was given every few hours. The prisoners’ faces, by the end of the day, were hopelessly black, and their necks and shoulders throbbed from leaning over.

For the first few months of this captivity, Eddie went to sleep with Marguerite’s picture in his helmet propped up in front of him. He wasn’t much for praying, but he prayed just the same, making up the words and keeping count each night, saying, “Lord, I’ll give you these six days if you give me six days with her… I’ll give you these nine days if I get nine days with her… I’ll give you these sixteen days if I get sixteen days with her…”

Then, during the fourth month, something happened. Rabozzo developed an ugly skin rash and severe diarrhea. He couldn’t eat a thing. At night, he sweated through his filthy clothes until they were soaking wet. He soiled himself. There were no clean clothes to give him so he slept naked on the burlap, and the Captain placed his sack over him like a blanket.

The next day, down in the mine, Rabozzo could barely stand. The four Crazies showed no pity. When he slowed, they poked him with sticks to keep him scraping.

“Leave him be,” Eddie growled.

Crazy Two, the most brutal of their captors, slammed Eddie with a bayonet butt. He went down, a shot of pain spreading between his shoulder blades. Rabozzo scraped a few more pieces of coal, then collapsed. Crazy Two screamed at him to get up.

“He’s sick!” Eddie yelled, struggling to his feet.

Crazy Two slammed him down again.

“Shut up, Eddie,” Morton whispered. “For your own good.”

Crazy Two leaned over Rabozzo. He pulled back his eyelids. Rabozzo moaned. Crazy Two made an exaggerated smile and cooed, as if dealing with a baby. He went, “Ahh,” and laughed. He laughed looking at all of them, making eye contact, making sure they were watching him. Then he pulled out his pistol, rammed it into Rabozzo’s ear, and shot him in the head.

Eddie felt his body rip in half. His eyes blurred and his brain went numb. The echo of the gunshot hung in the mine as Rabozzo’s face soaked into a spreading puddle of blood. Morton put his hands over his mouth. The Captain looked down. Nobody moved.

Crazy Two kicked black dirt over the body, then glared at Eddie and spat at his feet. He yelled something at Crazy Three and Crazy Four, both of whom seemed as stunned as the prisoners. For a moment, Crazy Three shook his head and mumbled, as if saying a prayer, his eyelids lowered and his lips moving furiously. But Crazy Two waved the gun and yelled again and Crazy Three and Crazy Four slowly lifted Rabozzo’s body by its feet and dragged it along the mine floor, leaving a trail of wet blood, which, in the darkness, looked like spilt oil. They dropped him against a wall, next to a pickax.

After that, Eddie stopped praying. He stopped counting days. He and the Captain spoke only of escaping before they all met the same fate. The Captain figured the enemy war effort was desperate, that was why they needed every half-dead prisoner to scrape coal. Each day in the mine there were fewer and fewer bodies. At night, Eddie heard bombing; it seemed to be getting closer. If things got too bad, the Captain figured, their captors would bail out, destroy everything. He had seen ditches dug beyond the prisoner barracks and large oil barrels positioned up the steep hill.

“The oil’s for burning the evidence,” the Captain whispered. “They’re digging our graves.”

Three weeks later, under a hazy-mooned sky, Crazy Three was inside the barracks, standing guard. He had two large rocks, almost the size of bricks, which, in his boredom, he tried to juggle. He kept dropping them, picking them up, tossing them high, and dropping them again. Eddie, covered in black ash, looked up, annoyed at the thudding noise. He’d been trying to sleep. But now he lifted himself slowly. His vision cleared. He felt his nerves pricking to life.

“Captain …” he whispered. “You ready to move?”

The Captain raised his head. “What’re you thinking?”

“Them rocks.” Eddie nodded toward the guard.

“What about ‘em?” the Captain said.

“I can juggle,” Eddie whispered.

The Captain squinted. “What?”

But Eddie was already yelling at the guard, “Hey! Yo! You’re doing it wrong!”

He made a circular motion with his palms. “This way! You do it this way! Gimme!”

He held out his hands. “I can juggle. Gimme.”

Crazy Three looked at him cautiously. Of all the guards, Eddie felt, he had his best chance with this one. Crazy Three had occasionally sneaked the prisoners pieces of bread and tossed them through the small hut hole that served as a window. Eddie made the circular motion again and smiled. Crazy Three approached, stopped, went back for his bayonet, then walked the two rocks over to Eddie.

“Like this,” Eddie said, and he began to juggle effortlessly. He had learned when he was seven years old, from an Italian sideshow man who juggled six plates at once. Eddie had spent countless hours practicing on the boardwalk—pebbles, rubber balls, whatever he could find. It was no big deal. Most pier kids could juggle.