I realise a column that begins on the floor of the Palace Chop House and Tavern in Newark, New Jersey, and ends in a hospital bed in Kuwait is an odd one, but important literary matters took place in those places, so bear with me.

The lives of three men came to an abrupt end on the Palace floor, in what all the best pulp magazines unfailingly call a hail of bullets, and the life of a fourth began to come to an end. Lulu Rosenkrantz and Abe Landau were armed bodyguards, and so the first to die. Otto Biederman, better known as Abbadabba Berman, was next. (He was a mathematical genius, a good man to have on your side in the numbers racket and in almost any enterprise involving odds. Coincidentally, he was the man upon whom Damon Runyon based the kindly horseplayer, Regret, in his screenplay, 'Little Miss Marker'.)

The man the gunmen were looking for was in the men's room - not that it did him any good. He was a gangster called Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz, and a council of Mafia dons had decided that he had to go.

He was shot once, with a rusty .45 calibre bullet that hit him in the left side of his body, just below the chest. It didn't kill him, but it did cause peritonitis. This was 1935, before sulfa or penicillin, so it was just a matter of time before he died the kind of death you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.

In the hospital, the police tried to interrogate Dutch Schultz, and made a record of what he said. It was a pretty odd interrogation. Schultz was full of morphine and fever, more or less delirious throughout. Most of the 2,000 words a police stenographer took down reads more or less like this:

"Sure, it is no use to stage a riot. The sidewalk was in trouble and the bears were in trouble and I broke it up. Please. Oh, mamma! No knock to her, she didn't know. Look, that is it. She let her go the opposite. Oh, tell me. Please, put me in that room, please keep him in control. My gilt-edged stuff and those dirty rats have tuned in. Please, Mother...Mother, please."

That's not exactly a work of heart-breaking genius. But then, out of the blue, he said this:

"A boy has never wept - nor dashed a thousand kim."

In the mouth of a poet, or an actor, those evocative words would be striking enough, but coming from a gun-toting, cigar-chomping, fat, middle-aged hoodlum, they are just extraordinary. They earned him a place in literary history, though I suspect he was so far gone, by the time he was interviewed, that the Pope himself could have appeared at his bedside and declared him a saint, and he wouldn't have noticed. He died a few hours later.

Among the writers inspired by what he said was one of the best the 20th Century produced, William S Burroughs, who wrote a screenplay called The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. As far as I know, it was never turned into a movie. I'm not entirely sure that Burroughs ever meant it to be, and I somehow don't see it inspiring those Hollywood money men who carry their brains in their pockets. But it should be - it really is a work of heart-breaking genius.

But that's enough of Dutch Schultz and his bodyguards, they've played their part. Now to Kuwait half a century later, to the hospital bed of an Iraqi soldier called Dakel Abbas, where another 2,000 words were recorded, this time by a journalist, the incomparable Oriana Fallaci.

Although she lives now for most of the time in New York, Ms Fallaci is an Italian, Florentine by birth. Her father was a leader in the anti-Fascist resistance during the Second World War. She smuggled explosives for him.

Still a teenager, she started in journalism at a newspaper in Florence and, at 21, was writing for a leading Italian magazine, 'Europeo'. She covered Hollywood, interviewing many of the leading lights of the day. But she also covered wars and uprisings - from Hungary in 1956, to Vietnam, to upheavals in Latin America in the 1970s to the first Gulf War in 1991. In Mexico City in 1968, covering a massacre of students there, she was seriously wounded.

She is especially well known for her interviews - with Golda Meir, for example, with Yasser Arafat, with Ali Bhutto, with Nguyen Van Thieu, with Archbishop Makarios. Fourteen of the best were published as 'Interview with History', by Houghton Mifflin in 1976.

Her interview style is pretty formidable. She is not a great believer in the need for objectivity, she has a very substantial intellect and, afraid of no one, she debates and challenges her subjects.

A now-famous encounter with Henry Kissinger began badly because she felt he had been rude to her. She pushed back, hard.

"Let's talk about war, Dr. Kissinger. You're not a pacifist, are you?"

"And what do you have to say about the war in Vietnam, Dr Kissinger? You've never been against the war in Vietnam, it seems to me."

"But don't you find, Dr. Kissinger, that it's been a useless war?"

"Power is always alluring. Dr. Kissinger, to what degree does power fascinate you? Try to be frank."

In between those questions, he dodged and he wove. Perhaps in desperation, he said this:"The main point…Well, yes, I'll tell you. What do I care? The main point arises from the fact that I've always acted alone. Americans like that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol, since he doesn't shoot. He acts, that's all, by being in the right place at the right time."

Sensational!

About her interview with Mr. Arafat, Oriana Fallaci recalled that he arrived accompanied by a bodyguard.

"But what a bodyguard. The most gorgeous piece of male flesh I had ever seen. Tall, slender, elegant: the type who wears camouflage coveralls as though they were black tie and tails, with the chiselled features of a Western lady-killer. Perhaps because he was blond and with blue eyes, I had the spontaneous thought that the handsome bodyguard was a Westerner, even a German. And perhaps because Arafat brought him along with such tender pride, I had the still more spontaneous thought that he was something more than a bodyguard. A very loving friend, let's say."

Lately, Ms Fallaci has written about European anti-Semitism and about the need to wage war on terrorism. "There are moments in Life," she wrote on the back of her most recent book, 'The Rage and the Pride' (Rizzoli, 2002), "when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape."

You'll get the flavour of her wonderful outrage from four recent articles which are at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=1079.

But to Dakel Abbas. Ms Fallaci found him in a hospital, and became interested because unlike the other patients, he stared at her insistently. She said he looked like a survivor from a concentration camp. The doctors didn't know whether he would recover.

He said: "Listen to me, I beg you. Don't go. I am so alone. Besides, when I talk I feel less pain. Listen to me and look what they have done to me. Twelve shots, twelve. One at the right shoulder, one at the left shoulder. One at the right arm, one at the left arm. One at the right hand, one at the left hand. One at the right hip, one at the left hip. One at the right leg, one at the left leg. One at the right foot, one at the left foot. Yet Abdul was waving the white flag, he really was. He had taken off his white underpants, he had fixed them to a stick, and while waving them he screamed: 'Don't shoot, don't shoot! We surrender!' Abdul the Kurd, I mean. My pal, the guy who disobeyed orders and wore white underpants. In the Iraqi Army we cannot wear white underpants. It's forbidden like wearing white vests or white socks or white handkerchiefs. Do you know why? Because with white underpants and white vests and white socks and white handkerchiefs soldiers can make white flags and surrender. Yet Abdul never took off his white underpants. Never. Not even to wash them. If an officer confiscated them, goodbye white flag. But those wicked guys shot us all the same. The guys with the red armband, I mean. The guys of the Kuwaiti Resistance…Ya'Allah, Ya'Allah, who ever heard of a Kuwaiti resistance? And who ever imagined that they would be so nasty? After piercing me with ten shots they also beat me. And while beating me they yelled: 'You raper, you thief!' Useless to answer: 'No, no, I did not rape anybody! I did not steal anything!' Well…once I did. I was so hungry. For weeks the army had been feeding us only with two slices of bread in the morning and two slices of bread in the evening. Nothing else but water, and when I saw that Kuwaiti woman with the bag full of eggs and cheese and bananas I didn't control myself. I stretched my hand and said: 'Give it to me.' Thus, she gave it to me. At once, without a word. I mean, I did what soldiers do."

If you want to read the whole thing, go to http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003267

In brief, he told a story of being ordered off his farm to serve in the Iraqi army, and of being a part of the Kuwaiti invasion force. The Kuwaitis hated them. Dakel Abbas tried to give a child a sweet, and the child ran from him, in tears.

When American troops arrived in Kuwait, there was panic and disorganisation among the Iraqis. Dakel and his friends made up their minds to run away. First, they tried to get across the border into Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis opened fire, killing six of them. They tried to get a taxi driver to take them to Iraq, but he drove off with all their money.

"The rest," said Dakel Abbas, "is tragedy. Sorrow, fear, tragedy. Because blind with rage and frustration we threw the Kalashnikovs and the ammunition away. We started again to walk and at dawn we reached the frontier with Iraq. Well, not really the frontier. Between us and the frontier there were two or three hundred yards. Yet for me it was already Iraq. I felt as if I was already in my village with my wife and my cucumbers, my onions, my eggplants. In fact I did not see the red-armband guys. I did not hear their bawling 'Stop! Don't move or we shoot!' I only heard Abdul who said, 'Boys, the moment has come for me to wave my white flag.' Then he took off his trousers, took off his underpants. He put on the trousers again, he secured the underpants to a stick, he made a white flag. He waved it, he screamed: 'Don't shoot, don't shoot, we surrender!' And, while he was waving it, none of us noticed that it did not look like a white flag. That the never-washed white underpants had become very dirty and were no longer white. They were black. So the flag he was waving was not a white flag. It was a black flag. And they shot. They pierced me this way, and they killed Abdul. They killed him, yes. And I cannot go home. If I go, the chief of my village tells Saddam that I have thrown away the Kalashnikov, the ammunition. And Saddam executes me. Please ask the Americans not to send me home. Please explain to the Americans that if they do I am a dead man. Please! I beg you, please…"

Still need to know what Dutch Shultz's words meant?

gshorto@ibl.bm