Puzzle People (9781613280126) (28 page)

43

Berlin
September 2003

The attacker fired as he scampered up the stairs, as agile as an ape, and the bullet ricocheted off the third-floor walls. In close quarters, ricochets could be deadly.

While Annie got down on her hands and knees looking for her gun, lightning flashed, and she spotted Kurt in her peripheral vision. He was yanking the East German helmet from the mannequin, pulling off the poor guy’s head in the process. And as the attacker appeared through the square opening to the third floor, gun in hand, Kurt wound up and slammed the helmet into the side of the man’s face. Their attacker was Herr Adler. Annie could see that now.

Adler was temporarily stunned by the bone-crunching crack of the helmet, but he held on to his gun and staggered to his feet. Before he could regain his senses, Kurt pounced, driving him backward across the room, crashing into a display case of East German military memorabilia. Glass shattered, and the two men—not in their prime—grunted and strained. Both of them were soggy to the bone, and they slipped and slid and had a hard time holding on to each other.

Herr Adler still had a gun, but Annie couldn’t see where it was pointed. The two wrestling men created a tangled shadow of thrashing limbs and flying fists, most of which landed ineffectually. She had to help somehow, so she moved in closer. Lightning flashed through the windows, revealing Kurt on top of Herr Adler, pinning him backward against the shattered glass case. Suddenly, Herr Adler’s gun went off, a flash of fire, and Annie’s heart gave such a jolt that she thought she had been hit. She put a hand to her chest but didn’t feel a wound. The men kept struggling, a good sign that Kurt hadn’t been hit.

“Go, Annie! Run!” Kurt shouted.

But she wasn’t about to leave him. Not if she could still help him.

Adler’s gun was in his left hand, and Kurt was trying to extract the weapon, peeling back his fingers. Annie balled up her hand and pounded Adler in the face two times. But on the third smash, Herr Adler used his free hand—his right hand—to intercept her attack and latch on to her right wrist.

Screaming wildly, Annie lunged across and bit his gun hand, just as the weapon went off—inches from her ears. The side of her face burned like fire, and she was temporarily blinded by the flash. But her teeth were buried in his hand, and she bit down with such force that she was pretty sure she broke a tooth. Herr Adler screamed and dropped the gun from his hand, and it slid off into the shadows.

Somewhere in the dark of the watchtower were three guns, all of them on the floor, and one of them without bullets.

Annie made a move to drop to the floor, but Herr Adler still had her by the wrist, and he was twisting it, contorting her arm. She lost her footing and screamed. Then she heard the moist pop of a fist hitting flesh, and Herr Adler released her. She dropped down onto her hands and knees and frantically felt along the cold concrete for a gun. The lightning was coming fast and furious, and she used the strobe-like glares to hunt for one of the weapons. She noticed that Herr Adler and Kurt were doing the same thing; they were on the floor on their hands and knees, in a race to be the first to find one of the guns.

Her hand touched steel. She found one of the guns along a wall, and she crawled into the corner and sat with her back against the cold concrete. The lightning had let up for just a spell, and the total darkness left her with no idea where Herr Adler might be. She couldn’t just shoot wildly because she might hit Kurt. She heard heavy breathing, then movement in the dark, the soggy swishing sound of wet clothes. She had her gun ready, waiting for a flash of lightning. Suddenly, everything went still inside the watchtower. Kurt and Herr Adler must be waiting as well. With one of the three guns empty of bullets, this was turning out to be a bizarre game of Russian roulette.

A burst of brightness filled the watchtower, and Annie saw Kurt and Adler, plain as day, directly across the room from each other, both crouching and both aiming guns at each other.

Annie shot at Adler, and she heard other shots going off, multiple times; and even with the suppressors, the blasts were deafening inside this concrete echo chamber. But who had the empty gun? Kurt or Adler? She had no idea. The smell of gunpowder was overpowering, and she thought she would go mad with the noise and the fear.

44

Berlin
September 2003

Silence.

Then groans.

Annie crawled on hands and knees across the floor, afraid to call out to Kurt, afraid to give Herr Adler any indication of her location in the dark—or Kurt’s.

Then lightning flashed again. She froze like a nocturnal animal caught in headlight glare. For one second, she could see everything plain as day: Both men were on their backs, down but still moving, writhing on the floor. She moved into a crouch and rushed to Kurt’s side.

“Where’ve you been hit? Kurt, answer me.”

He answered with a groan. Adler’s gun had been loaded, and he had hit Kurt. This couldn’t be happening to her. Not again.

“I’m going to get help, Kurt, I’m going to—”

Another flash of lightning, and then Annie screamed. When the light filled the room, for one terrible second, she saw Adler standing only five feet away from them, grinning like a bloody ghoul. In that one second, the image burned into her mind. Adler was on his feet, but he was doubled over like a hunchback and covered in his own blood. With his right hand, he held his side, where his clothes had become soaked red. His face was also smeared in blood, and his gun dangled from his left hand. The sight was straight out of a nightmare. Then he raised his gun.

Annie aimed and fired, and Adler moaned, then staggered backward in the dark. She fired again. In the next lightning flash, she saw Adler in a heap on the floor in a pool of his own blood. Sick to her stomach, she slowly set down her gun and called out to Kurt. He didn’t answer. He had stopped moving. It was happening again.

“Kurt! Don’t, Kurt!”

Everything from that point on was a fog. She remembered the flashing lights. The sound of voices. Men shouting orders. Someone putting their hands on her shoulders. A blanket being draped over her back. Soothing words. Flashlights. Ambulance sirens. She hated ambulance sirens. She was on a stretcher, looking up into the sky. Rain was still coming down, although lighter now, and it hit her in the face. She remembered raising her hand and staring at it; it was covered in blood. Was it her blood? Kurt’s blood? She was so cold, and she couldn’t stop shivering.

45

Berlin
September 2003

Peter and Katarina walked along the East Side Gallery on Mühlenstrasse, by the banks of the Spree. The East Side Gallery was the longest remaining stretch of the Wall—a little over a half mile long, one of the largest open-air art galleries on the planet. It consisted of over one hundred pieces of art, painted on the Wall in a revolution of colors. Katarina and Peter came here at least once a year, just to remind themselves of a history that was already beginning to feel foggy and unreal.

“I still can’t believe it,” he said.

Katarina took his hand. “I’m so sorry.”

They had read the news. Elsa had been arrested and charged with the murder of Stefan Hansel. It had also come out that she had been an informer for the Stasi before the Wall came down. She was back in prison, only this time in the prison of a unified Germany. She was on suicide watch.

“I feel responsible,” Peter said.

“It’s not your fault. Those were her choices.”

“But if I hadn’t chosen the West over the East back in ’61 . . . This all came from that one decision.”

“You found
me
from that one decision too.”

“I know, I know.”

Peter squeezed her hand. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that his one choice had destroyed a person’s life. If he hadn’t stepped aboard that particular train on that particular day at that particular time, everything would have come out completely different. If he had just returned to East Berlin and broken it off with Elsa in a normal fashion, maybe none of this would have happened to her. He found Katarina because of all that had happened, so in truth, he wouldn’t change a thing. But he felt so guilty about Elsa. He had broken his word with her, and he had broken her in the process.

Peter and Katarina knew the artwork along the East Side Gallery by heart. There was the row of colorful and cartoonish abstract heads. There was a dove of peace in midflight, chained to a hand that stuck out of a prison cell while flashing the peace sign. In another picture, a crowd of finely dressed but grotesque-looking people were hemmed in tightly by a wall on both sides. All of them had square concrete heads from which protruded fork tines, and skewered on top of each fork was a banana. West Berliners: the banana people. The East Berliners were the skeletal people peering over the Wall.

The banana painting was Peter’s personal favorite, but Katarina’s favorite was most people’s preference—the one that everyone posed in front of. This huge image depicted the Soviet general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, giving a full, on-the-lips kiss to the East German general secretary, Erich Honecker. A lover’s embrace, from the looks of it. Brezhnev’s enormous eyebrows looked like huge black birds about to take off from his forehead, and Honecker’s face was painted in ghoulish green.

The famous painting was based on an actual photograph of the two men kissing, mouth-to-mouth, in 1979 on the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR. The fraternal kiss, mocked in the West, was a common form of physical expression among socialist men in the East. But now it came across as more of a Judas kiss, a kiss of death splattered across the Wall.

The East Side Gallery was showing its age. The paintings were fading and graffiti-covered, and chunks of the Wall had been chiseled out by tourists and others.

“I didn’t mean to say I made the wrong choice coming west,” Peter said, stopping to face Katarina. “You and the children are the best things that ever happened to me.”

“I know what you mean. But Elsa wasn’t your fault. She was a tortured soul. She still is.”

“Not when I knew her. She was like a child, almost. It was like I deserted a child.”

“That, in itself, does not sound healthy. You were supposed to be her fiancé, not her father.”

The newspaper was sketchy in the details, but things didn’t look good for Elsa. Not only had she been pinned with Stefan’s death, but she had attacked a man and a woman in an apartment.

Katarina and Peter stood directly in front of the Kiss and didn’t say a word. He put his arm around her shoulder. His wife, once so athletic, had become sedentary over the past ten years. Ever since she had broken an arm and a leg skiing, she had slowed down. At age sixty-two, that was normal for most people, but he had never expected it from her.

Katarina worked part-time in a bookstore and read every chance she had. Peter was looking to retire from teaching soon, and then they would travel, maybe even spend a year in the States.

She leaned her head on his shoulder. “We don’t have to do this, if you don’t want to.”

Peter sighed. “I want to. It’s tradition. And I’m all about tradition.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay, I just thought that—”

“Let’s do this,” he said, realizing that he probably sounded phony in his enthusiasm.

“All right.”

She snagged a passing tourist, a gray-bearded American wearing an Illinois sweatshirt, and asked the man if he could take their photograph. She told the tourist how to operate her camera, and then she and Peter positioned themselves in their usual spot—directly in front of the smooching Brezhnev and Honecker. The tourist positioned himself so he could get it all in—the painting, Katarina, and Peter.

“Ready?”

The tourist nodded.

Peter, playing the role of Brezhnev, took Katarina in his arms and gave her a deep, long kiss.

“Okay . . . one, two, three. Got it,” the tourist announced, lowering the camera. He stared at his subjects, who continued to kiss.

“I’ll take two—just to be sure,” he suggested.

They continued to kiss, even through the second photo.

“Well . . . maybe a third one. To be safe,” said the tourist with an awkward laugh.

They continued to kiss, even after the third photo.

Still in a lip-lock with her husband, Katarina gave the tourist the thumbs-up and then held out her hand for the camera. The tourist shrugged, laughed uncomfortably again, and handed the camera to her, even as the kiss continued. Then he made his escape when he had the chance.

Katarina and Peter’s children would have disowned them if they had seen the two of them making such a scene in front of the Kiss. But their kiss went on and on, and they didn’t let up until another man and a woman came by for their turn to pose.

When the man cleared his throat, they finally pulled away from each other. Then they laughed and strolled off down the street, hand in hand; and for one moment, Peter didn’t feel so gray at heart. He felt young—even younger than the day he arrived in West Berlin. Katarina had a way of doing that to him.

46

Berlin
October 2003

“Gunfights are overrated,” Annie said.

“I’ll never look at the O.K. Corral fight the same way again,” Kurt added.

It had been two weeks since the night of the gunfight, and Kurt’s left arm was in a sling. He had taken a bullet in the shoulder and another in the calf, and he had lost a lot of blood; but he was alive, and Annie was grateful.

Maybe it was their close brush with death, but Annie had found herself strangely drawn to the Chapel of Reconciliation, built just a few years ago along Bernauer Strasse on the very site where the previous Church of Reconciliation had been taken down by the GDR’s carefully placed explosives in 1985. Today was their second visit to the chapel in the past week. Kurt also had a crutch under his right arm as they made their way across the former death strip, past a long stretch of remaining Wall, and past a memorial to over one hundred and thirty people murdered while trying to escape across the Wall. Annie kept her arm on Kurt’s shoulder as they approached the chapel on this breezy afternoon. For two weeks, they had been sucked into a whirlpool of media attention and legal wrangling, and they craved the peace and contemplation of the chapel.

The Chapel of Reconciliation was a remarkable place, like no other chapel either of them had ever seen. It was a modern oval-shaped building built on the very foundation of the old no-man’s-land church. Most distinctive, the outside “skin” of the church was a curtain of vertical louvers made out of Canadian Douglas fir. The Iron Curtain had given way to this wooden curtain that let the air penetrate.

They passed through a door in the curtain and then through another doorway to enter the inner core of the church—a rounded sanctuary, like the nucleus of a living cell. The sanctuary was built from compressed earth that contained fragments of bricks from the old destroyed church. So the new chapel, quite literally, contained the old church in its body; it was as if the new chapel had absorbed all of the pain and suffering in a beautiful new form.

The sanctuary was stark, with rounded earthen walls and a couple rows of chairs along the back. There were only a few other people present this day—tourists snapping photos. Annie and Kurt took seats near the altar, a simple square table also made out of compressed earth. They sat in silence, and Annie couldn’t help but think that fourteen years earlier, people could not have imagined this chapel sitting here with almost no trace of the nearby Wall or dog runs or border guards. In 1989, Erich Honecker said the Wall would stand for another one hundred years, and within the year, it was obliterated.

It gave her some consolation that separations and divisions and walls are not permanent. She thought of Jack and the brutal separation that occurred an eternity ago, it seemed. But even that separation wasn’t permanent. Their reunification would happen someday, and she wouldn’t be in this chapel if she didn’t believe it.

Kurt held her hand as he bowed his head in prayer. She closed her eyes and tried to pray, trying to ignore the steady click of tourist cameras. She didn’t know what was to become of their relationship. Their Berlin office had closed down since the scandal broke concerning Herr Adler, who had survived the gunfight, incredibly enough. But at least she had taken him down with a few lucky shots, so maybe she had a little Annie Oakley in her after all.

Adler had been charged with the murder of Frau Kortig, who the police believed had threatened to reveal what he was doing. Whether she had been involved in Adler’s scheme was for the police and the courts to sort out. Authorities also learned that Adler had been working with a group of former Stasi agents, three of whom were already taken into custody. One of these agents was Herr Ostermann, the huge man that Annie and Kurt encountered on the night of the gunfight—the one with the shattered nose, compliments of Kurt. He too had survived, despite the bullet that Kurt had fired into his thigh while he fled the watchtower.

With their Berlin office shut down, all the work went to the original puzzlers in the office located outside of Nuremburg. But fewer puzzlers meant it would be even more years before all the files would be completed. Annie hoped they could come up with a computer program to do this work and cut a couple hundred years off of the task.

Annie helped Kurt to his feet, and then she ran her hand across the light brown wall, feeling the roughness of the surface, which showed small pieces of stone—remnants of the old church—like bone fragments in an archaeological dig. Then they approached the enormous dark-wood carving of the Last Supper recessed in the wall. A couple of the carved disciples had been decapitated by vandals or Vopos back when this piece of art hung in the original church.

Outside, the wind nearly snatched the sun hat from Annie’s head. She held on to it with one hand and kept her other hand on Kurt’s shoulder to steady him. They paused in front of a statue depicting two people on their knees, wrapped in an embrace, their heads on each other’s shoulders—a symbol of reconciliation. The two people looked as if their bodies were merging together, one of them absorbing the pain of the other.

“What will you do now?” Kurt asked.

Annie cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

“Are you still planning on leaving Germany?”

That was a good question. Her first inclination was to run, to flee. Her feelings for Kurt scared her—especially knowing she almost lost him and could lose him in the blink of an eye. Coming to Germany had been a form of running away. But she had wound up in the belly of the beast and nearly died as a result. Maybe she needed to stop running.

“I’ve been giving it a lot of thought,” she said.

Annie found a soft spot on the grass right beside a piece of the old church steeple—a cross that had been ripped off the church when the steeple came down in 1985. The end of the cross had been bent by the force of it slamming into a nearby cemetery, and it curved dramatically, like a plowshare. Kurt groaned as he found a spot beside her. He picked at the grass.

“You’ve been thinking. And?”

She turned toward him and matter-of-factly said, “What do you think of going West?”

He was in the process of chewing on a blade of grass when these words hit him.

“West? You mean Arizona?”

“You said you’ve always wanted to see the West.”

“Yes, but . . .”

Annie smiled. “Remember, Karl May wrote all of those Westerns, and he never once set foot in America. You can do him one better by visiting the Wild West.”

Continuing to pick at the grass, Kurt looked up at her, squinting in the sun. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Just say you’ll think about it.” She played with her sun hat, running the brim through her hands. “I’m tired of separations. I want to see my children again. Germany is a long way, and I miss them.”

“I can understand that.”

She paused before adding, “But I don’t want to be separated from you either. Would you come over? To America?”

She couldn’t resist using those words:
Come over.
Kurt stared back at her, chewing on a fresh blade of grass. All of a sudden, he tossed aside the grass blade, broke into a broad smile, leaned over, and planted a big kiss on her lips. “Let’s go then.”

Annie laughed, thinking he was kidding.

Kurt reached out for her hand. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. I’ve decided. We don’t have jobs anymore. I don’t have a family here tying me down. So let’s go West.”

She didn’t expect him to make such a snap decision. “But, Kurt, don’t you think you need to think this over?”

“I have.”

“For half a minute! You call that thinking it over?”

“That’s all I need.” Kurt continued holding out his hand and said, “I’ve decided: I’m making the leap. I’m coming over, Annie O’Shea.”

Annie helped him up once again, and she swatted grass from the back of her sundress. Kurt was coming to Arizona. This was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Then why was she so nervous all of a sudden?

“Are you sure?”

“No doubts.”

She put her arm around Kurt’s waist, and they walked back past the Bernauer Strasse Wall, and Annie couldn’t help but realize that her life had just made a major turn.
Die Wende.
The Turn. It happened so suddenly that it scared her. But at least she was running
toward
something for a change.

They got back to his apartment with plenty of time for him to prepare a lavish meal before it turned dark. Annie ate her ice cream first. Just the way she liked it.