Puzzle People (9781613280126) (14 page)

She clung to him tighter. “No, don’t.”

“Come on, let’s show them how a modern ’60s couple dances.”

For a moment, she was almost tempted to do it. But after what had happened with the leaflets, she wasn’t about to take any chances, even with something as innocuous as a forbidden dance step. Nothing was worth it.

All at once, the memories of her time in prison swept over her, and she felt dizzy and sick. She fell forward into Stefan, who must have interpreted her move in a romantic way. He held her tightly as their Lipsi dance came to an ungainly end.

Elsa didn’t know this man. She should pull away, but she was too dizzy, too sick to her stomach. She stared down at the floor and saw it spinning. The room tilted, like a ship on high seas. She felt faint and nearly slid out of his grip.

At last, Stefan realized what was going on.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m sorry, so sorry. Just a dizzy spell.”

With an arm around her shoulder, Stefan directed her back to the table and helped her into her seat. Elsa felt feverish. She sucked in deep breaths and fluttered a hand in front of her face.

“I’m sorry. Did I upset you?” Stefan asked.

She put a hand on his arm. “Oh no, don’t think that. These things just come over me at times.”

“These things” came over Elsa whenever she was in closed spaces—small rooms, anything that reminded her of her prison cell. This was why she had the door taken off her apartment’s bedroom. It was the only way she could sleep in an enclosed space. It frightened her that the panic and nausea had now hit her on the open dance floor.

“Would you like me to take you home?” Stefan asked.

You would like that, wouldn’t you?
she thought.

“No, no, I’ll be fine. It’s passing.”

“Can I get you a glass of water?”

“That would be nice. Thank you.”

As Stefan scurried off on his gallant errand, Elsa took a deep breath. She was attracted to Stefan. There was no denying it. He was very good-looking, and he was probably the same age as Peter, but he didn’t come across as old as her fiancé did. Peter could be so stodgy, complaining about American music and American dances. He sounded like his father, which was probably the scariest thing of all.

After Stefan returned with the water, they talked about their classes and the teachers, and they danced some more—but not the Lipsi. The music had mercifully shifted to a fox-trot.

“Can I walk you home?” Stefan asked toward the end of the night, and this time she took him up on his offer. “I’ll get your wraps,” he said.

The night was cool but clear as they made their way out into the quiet streets past several vacant lots. In East Berlin, there were still so many empty spaces where bombed-out buildings had been razed after the war. The wind whipped a few scraps of paper across the cold ground. The emptiness increased the sadness in Elsa, the sense of loss. In one of the vacant lots stood a large propaganda sign that showed a Soviet soldier perched on top of the Reichstag waving a flag with the hammer and sickle on a field of red. “The heroes of the Soviet Army will never be forgotten,” it said.

Elsa and Stefan didn’t comment on the sign. There would probably be another one around the next corner.

“Cold?” Stefan asked.

“A little.”

He took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. Then, to Elsa’s shock, he took her right hand and warmed them with his own. “Your fingers are like ice.”

“Yes, they’re cold most of the time. But I have gloves.”

Gently, she drew back her hand and then dug into her coat pocket for her cotton gloves. But when she slipped them over her fingers, she noticed there was a piece of paper jammed into one of them. Strange. She was about to remove the glove when she realized that someone might have inserted a note into the fingers when her coat had been checked. So she left the paper in place and said nothing to Stefan. She didn’t dare.

Elsa’s apartment building was adjacent to yet another empty lot, where another old apartment had once stood before being leveled by Allied bombs. The removal of the apartment rubble exposed the side of Elsa’s apartment building, which hadn’t been designed with windows in mind; there had been no reason to include windows on the side because the neighboring building had been so close. But with that building obliterated and replaced by an empty lot, all one saw as one approached her place was a massive wall of bricks—with one lone window that somebody had added to bring in some light and break the monotony of the wall. It was an odd sight—one window in a sea of brick. The window was lit up like a large peephole, and the drapes were open.

To Elsa’s relief, Stefan was the perfect gentleman, leaving her at the door with a polite peck on the cheek. Then she rushed inside her building and hurried up the stairs. Once inside her room, she dug into her glove and fished out the note.

She sank into a chair. It was what she thought. The note carried information from Peter. She had been expecting someone to make contact with her, and she had hoped the word would come directly from Peter. But she didn’t think this note had been written by him; it didn’t look like his handwriting. The message said that although the sewer route was closed, Peter was still going to get her out. She had to be patient.

After burning the note in an ashtray, she sat on the edge of her bed for the longest time, fearing the worst, fearing another knock on her door. It took her two hours to fall asleep that night—even with her door off its hinges.

18

Berlin
June 2003

Annie was running a half hour late for work. She hurried from the S-Bahn station, and even jaywalked at a couple of corners, something that just wasn’t done in Berlin. But as she rounded the corner of Dorotheenstrasse at full tilt, she pulled up short, suddenly finding herself face-to-face with a mob. She stood there, surveying the chaos in disbelief.

The crowd down the street appeared to be congregating directly outside their office building, along with a large police presence. Could it be that people were protesting the work they were doing on the files? Germany was home to many former Stasi officers, who were immune to the threat of prosecution in the interests of reconciliation. But many of them claimed they were still being unfairly demonized and strongly opposed the opening of Stasi files. Could this have anything to do with them?

It took less than ten seconds for Annie to realize that these people looked more like gawkers than protestors. There were no chants, no signs—just a sense of curiosity. Then she saw the crime scene tape, snapping in a brisk wind. Her eyes also took in an ambulance, and as it pulled away from the scene, the two-tone, hi-lo siren began to wail. Someone had been injured. Or worse.

Kurt? Oh God, please no.

Annie ran toward the crowd, her heart racing even faster than her legs. She hated the sound of ambulances.

She was upside down in the crumpled can of a car. There was glass everywhere and the smell of gasoline in the air, volatile and dangerous; and a knife-sharp strip of blue metal snaked out in front of her, only inches from her face. The airbag had gone off. She remembered that much. She remembered being hit by the billowing blast of white nylon, coming out at her like some alien plant blossoming from the dashboard at two hundred miles per hour, all in less than a quarter of a second. She remembered the scream of twisting metal—and the sirens. This was not the hi-lo siren of European emergency vehicles but an American siren. She remembered the numbness in her legs, the dizziness, the emergency workers swarming the vehicle—and her husband, Jack, lying motionless.

Annie tried to push through the outer edge of the crowd, but the onlookers didn’t give way. She couldn’t get close to the front. Police told people to step back, gently shepherding them farther away from the scene.

“Let me through! I work here!”

No one listened. The backpedaling crowd nearly knocked her on her butt.

Retreating, Annie decided to swoop around from another angle. And as she hurried around to the other side of the scene, she spotted Frau Holtzmann sitting on the steps of an adjacent office building. A policewoman draped a blanket over her shoulders, and she broke down crying, her mascara a mess. She was shaking, as if she had just been pulled out of a frigid river.

“What happened?” Annie asked, but Frau Holtzmann didn’t look up to meet her eyes. She was in shock.

“I must ask you to step away,” said the policewoman.

“But I work here.”

Annie sat down next to Frau Holtzmann and put an arm around her shoulder. Frau Holtzmann buried her head on Annie’s shoulder and sobbed. Annie still had no idea what had happened.

“Annie!”

Kurt emerged from the crowd with a policeman at his side.

Annie looked up, her arm still around Frau Holtzmann. “I don’t understand. What’s happened?”

“It’s Frau Kortig.”

“What do you mean?”

Kurt crouched down and put a hand on Annie’s arm. “Frau Kortig is dead.”

“What? Dead?”

Annie’s voice came over the headphones, which fizzed with static but still provided a clear channel. A large bald-headed man sat at a small table in a small room with large headphones clamped on his head like earmuffs. He overwhelmed the desk to such an extent that it almost looked as though he was trying to squeeze behind a child’s desk. He scribbled notes and crunched down on a lettuce-and-ham sandwich as he listened to Annie and Kurt.

“But how did it happen?” the eavesdropper heard Annie say.

“We don’t know all the details yet,” said Kurt. “The police are looking into it.”

The eavesdropper closed his small spiral-bound notebook and rubbed his eyes. Then he let out a groan and leaned over, digging around in his desk drawer for a fresh notebook. His other notebook was already full.

19

West Berlin
April 1962

Peter shoveled from a sitting position. He jammed the spade into the dirt wall in front of him and stomped on the shovel with his foot, forcing the blade into the soil to claw away at another segment of earth. With the sewer route closed, Elsa’s escape would have to wait for the construction of a tunnel. So, to do his part to speed the process, Peter had volunteered to become a worker ant, digging a tunnel from West to East. Crouching just behind him was Katarina, lugging loads of dirt back down the tunnel in a small wheeled cart.

It was cramped. The tunnel was only three feet high and about two feet wide. If the ceiling caved in, Peter didn’t see how they could possibly survive.

Once he had a decent-sized mound of dirt piled in front of him, he used a short-handled shovel to scoop the soil beneath his legs, like a dog digging in pursuit of a bone. His body was in a perpetual crouch, and his neck ached from the incessant ducking; he had already banged his head on the wooden support beams a half dozen times. He paused to catch his breath and rub his knotted neck.

“Here. Let me,” came Katarina’s voice from behind.

He felt her hands settle on the back of his neck, and she began to knead his muscles.

They had decided to step back from the precipice of their relationship in the weeks following the dance where they had kissed. Peter had made a vow to bring Elsa to the West, and he couldn’t very well do it while starting something up with Katarina. He had sent word about the escape plans to Elsa through runners to East Berlin, and he would keep his word.

Katarina had said she felt the same way about Stefan, but that was before she had heard reports that her boyfriend had become an IM, an unofficial collaborator. A Stasi stooge. Peter wasn’t sure where that left her, and he wondered if her hands gently massaging his neck was her way of sending a new message.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Where’s it hurt the most?”

“Right about here.”

He reached around and moved her hand to the tender spot. For just a moment, he kept his hand on hers before pulling it away. He liked the touch of her hand, even though it was caked with dried dirt. Elsa would never sully her hands with earth.

“That’s good,” he said. “You found the spot.”

“You need a break from shoveling? I can take over.”

“No need. I’m fine.”

With her hands on his shoulders, he was
quite
fine. She switched to both hands, one on each shoulder, with her two thumbs doing the work, kneading his neck. She leaned in so close that he felt her warm breath on his neck. The smell of her perfume penetrated the moist smell of earth.

“How’s that feel?” she asked.

“Perfect.”

She switched to one hand, squeezing the skin of his neck, working away the tension and sending a shiver down his back. Then she placed both hands gently on his neck and ran them across his shoulders again and again, tenderly.

“More?”

“More.”

“But we have work to do.”

“Eventually. Not now.”

Peter closed his eyes, heightening his sense of touch and savoring the contact. Katarina continued to work his muscles, using both hands and occasionally concentrating one hand in a narrow region of his neck.

“I think I’m spoiling you,” she said. “We should get back to tunneling.”

“It can wait.”

He touched her right hand, which rested on his shoulder. Then she leaned over and gave him a hug from behind, wrapping her arms around him completely and holding the position and saying nothing. Her head rested on his shoulder.

“This is even better,” he said.

“Tension gone?”

“Not yet. Maybe another fifteen minutes of this?”

She pulled away and smacked him gently in the back of the head. “I think you’re just using me. I’m finished.”

He pretended to wince and rubbed the spot where she smacked him. “I think you just undid all of your work. You’ll need to start over.”

“Keep dreaming.”

Smiling to himself, Peter picked up the spade and jammed it into the black wall of dirt directly ahead of him. Clumps of soil cascaded to the tunnel floor. He had grown even closer to Katarina over the past few weeks, which was bound to happen when two people spent so much time together. They were part of a group of a dozen West Berlin students living, eating, and sleeping in this abandoned factory just beside the Wall. The factory owner had given them permission to use the building, but they tried to limit their comings and goings as much as possible. They knew that East Berlin guards were looking for suspicious traffic in and out of buildings on the western side.

The tunnel began with a small shaft, dug straight down about twelve feet deep, below the sewers. Peter found the pattern of escapes disquieting. The Kappel Group had begun its work above-ground, moving people across the border with forged passports. When the East Germans plugged that route, the West Berliners went underground, taking people out through sewers. But now that that outlet was also closed, they had gone even deeper, tunneling beneath the sewers. How much deeper could they possibly go?

After digging the vertical shaft in the basement floor of the empty factory, the tunnel went east, directly below the Wall. The tunnel sloped gently upward because that made it easier to remove soil; once their carts were loaded with dirt, they could push them back downhill with gravity on their side and then bring the soil up the vertical shaft in buckets raised by pulleys. Finally, they dumped the soil in the damp basement.

When their shift was over, Peter and Katarina made their way back west through the tunnel, crawling on hands and knees through the narrow passage, barely squeezing past the wooden supports that formed an inverted
V
all the way through. Peter hit his head again and paused to rub the pain away.

“How about you? Is your neck tight as well?” he asked when they had emerged in the basement like gophers from a hole and another crew entered the passage to take their place.

“It is. A massage would be nice.”

So Katarina found a seat on a block of concrete, and Peter went to work on the muscles in her neck. Across the basement, he spotted Wolfgang Krüger, hunched over a table and examining engineering plans. He was puffing away on a cigarette and scowling in their direction.

“Something tells me Wolfgang doesn’t care too much for us,” Peter said under his breath.

“He doesn’t care too much for
me
is what it is,” Katarina said.

“Because of Stefan?”

“Yes. Because of Stefan—and other things.”

“The fool.”

“Who? Wolfgang or Stefan?”

Peter paused, tempted to say, “Both.” But he didn’t want to insult Stefan if Katarina still had feelings for him.

“Wolfgang,” he said.

“Amen to that.”

East Berlin

Stefan had been following Elsa for the past half hour as she made her way through the crowds of Alexanderplatz in the heart of East Berlin’s Mitte borough. He had seen her make contact with the same student several times over the past few weeks, and he knew something was up. Stefan was well aware that Elsa had a fiancé in the West, and he was afraid she was planning to disappear any day now, whisked away to West Berlin. He didn’t want that to happen, but he also knew he couldn’t report her actions to his superiors. If she wound up in a Stasi prison, it would be just another way of losing her, and he couldn’t let that happen. He was her protector. He didn’t view himself as a snoop; he was her guardian angel. If somebody else had been tailing her, she would have been nabbed weeks ago, so he was keeping her safe.

Stefan figured there was only one way he could prevent her from vanishing to the West, and that was if he gave her an incentive to remain in the East. He hoped that
he
could become that incentive.

Keeping his distance, the guardian angel followed Elsa as she strolled beside one of the many eight-story concrete-box buildings positioned around the square. She made her way toward a new Exquisit store called Charmant. It didn’t surprise Stefan that Elsa would be drawn to one of the Exquisit stores. Her father was a midlevel bureaucrat in the Communist Party, but her mother came from money. Elsa had fine taste.

She disappeared into the store, but Stefan wasn’t about to follow her inside. So he drew back and crossed the street, where he found a seat at a small café. He would wait until she emerged, and then he would find a way to casually bump into her. That was what guardian angels did.

If Elsa could live her dream, she would be designing clothes, preferably in Paris. Even the bureaucrats in the German Fashion Institute understood that French design was the pinnacle. Why else would they give each Exquisit store a French name? Charmant. Yvonne. Jeannette. Chic. Pinguin.

Before the Wall had gone up, she had had no problem keeping up with the latest fashions. She simply crossed the border to West Berlin and spent her family’s marks on West German fashions and imports from Paris and New York. With that option gone, she was forced to turn to this new line of high-end clothing stores. She was only mildly impressed. The materials and the workmanship were subpar, so she gravitated toward the imports, which the store also stocked. But at least the clothing in this store was a step up from the simple, sturdy work clothes that the German Fashion Institute tried to foist on the great mass of socialist workers.

Elsa came away from the shop with a black swing dress—a bit overpriced, but what else could she do? It was the price of
hochmodisch—high
fashion.

When she plunged back outside, she put on her sunglasses for the sun was piercing. Spring was here, which was what had inspired her to indulge herself in the first place.

As she made her way around the corner, she nearly ran headlong into a man coming in her direction and had to dance to the left to keep from making full contact.

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite Lipsi partner!” the man announced, putting a hand on her shoulder. She peered over the top of her sunglasses and found herself staring into the grinning face of Stefan Hansel.

“Guten Tag, Herr Hansel. We do dance well together, don’t we? It took a little dancing just now to avoid a collision.” Elsa’s voice reverted to a slight babyish quality. She hated it when she did that, but the baby voice just came out of her whenever she was in a flirty mood. It was like being possessed by a doll.

Stefan took her proffered hand and shook it.

“I didn’t see you in class last week,” he said.

So he had noticed. Since they had danced together a few weeks back, they had chatted briefly after art history class. But she had missed the last two.

“Family commitments. But you’ll see me again this week.”

“Good, good. I’m glad.” He smiled brightly. They stared at each other for a few heartbeats. “I could fill you in on what you missed—if you’d like. Do you want to get together?”

Elsa was torn. Peter had been in touch with her again through an intermediary, with promises of getting her out of East Berlin, and a plan was in the works. But she couldn’t forget the photograph of Peter and that other woman. She wanted to prove to herself that she too could attract someone else. Peter might be less likely to take her for granted if he didn’t have a monopoly on her affections. Besides, this flirtation with Stefan was innocent. That’s all.

“I’d like that,” she said.

“Good. Dinner tonight, and then we study?”

They set up the time and place and then parted ways. Elsa was shocked that she didn’t feel guilty at all. In fact, she looked forward to the evening. She had just the right dress for the occasion.