It was a Martin. It was like every Martin. It was like those Martini machine guns we used on the Italian front that never jammed, and once we were asked to kill Germans with another kind of machine gun, and we wouldn't, and they overran our position, and that is how I ended up spending the rest of the war in Munich. It sat in the window that winter, that cold winter when the snow crunched underfoot, and women wore short fur coats tight around the waist, and we sat and drank Amaretto and hot milk in the Piazza and thought about the Martin we could not buy. It was good, but it was not as good as it would have been with the Martin. And Mick said that it was like a Marlin he had once almost caught, though playing a Marlin used only one string, and we bought him a drink on the strength of that joke, and we were laughing as we had laughed in the early dawn before taking the bridge from the Fascists, and then the Duchess walked in with the Martin under her arm and she came and put it on the table, and she stood up and looked at me and said: "Oh, Jake, we could have had such fun, you and I, here is a guitar instead to play with," and she turned and walked out. And while it was a Martin, and it was fine, very fine, it was not the same.