Puzzle People (9781613280126) (15 page)

20

Berlin
June 2003

People were calling it suicide.

The story going around was uncomplicated: Within the first half hour after their office had opened, Frau Kortig found an empty office on the sixth floor, opened a window, and jumped.

“I was supposed to meet her for lunch,” Annie told Kurt after they had given their statements to the police. They sat across from each other in a corner coffee shop as evening descended. Outside, it had begun to drizzle.

“You what?”

“Yesterday, Frau Kortig was agitated about something. She didn’t say what. She wouldn’t. But she asked me if we could talk at lunch today.”

“And you don’t have any idea what about?”

“Not at all, but it seemed important.”

Annie thought about telling Kurt that Frau Kortig made the mysterious comment that she was the only person she could trust. But by implication, that would mean Frau Kortig didn’t trust Kurt—or anyone else in the office, for that matter. So Annie held on to that piece of information.

“Where were you when . . . you know, when it happened?” she asked.

“In the office. But then I heard the screaming. People running in the halls.”

Annie fought to contain her emotions. “Who found her?”

“Frau Holtzmann was the first one down the stairs. It was awful. She was the closest that Frau Kortig had to a friend.”

“I can’t believe this. She jumped from the sixth floor?”

“No one would’ve seen her up there.”

“No. I suppose not.” The sixth floor was currently empty, awaiting renovation for new tenants, who were due to move in within a month. The windows of the first five floors were small, square, and numerous—like beehive honeycombs in an orange-brown rectangular box of a building. They would have been difficult to open and squeeze through. But the top floor broke the monotony of the first five floors with larger windows—large enough for a jumper to exit this world.

“I hardly knew her. I should have tried harder to reach out,” Annie said.

Kurt ran a finger around the rim of his coffee cup. “She wasn’t easy to reach. So quiet. Painfully quiet.” He paused. “Her mother committed suicide when she was ten years old. Did you know that?”

Annie looked Kurt in the eyes. This time, she couldn’t hold back the tears.

He put his hand on hers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you any more than you already were. I just thought you needed to know that her issues went deeper than office workers not reaching out. I don’t want you feeling guilty.”

She dug in her purse for a tissue but couldn’t find any. She could never find anything in this purse of hers, and she felt like screaming.

The office closed down for the remainder of the week. Annie and Kurt talked a couple of times by phone, but that was the extent of their interaction. Whatever was developing between them took a backseat to the story of Frau Kortig. The odd thing was that people got to know Frau Kortig better after her death than while she was alive. Annie found out that Gisela Kortig’s parents had been split apart by the Wall while her mother was pregnant with her back in 1961. That was Frau Kortig’s name:
Gisela.
Strange. Annie didn’t even know that until now.

Gisela spent her early years without a father, because he never made it to the West to live with them as a family. He wasn’t allowed into the West until her mother committed suicide. And that was when Gisela—Frau Kortig—collapsed into herself, like a black hole.

Everybody seeks escape in some form. But in the end, Frau Kortig’s idea of escape turned out to be death, Annie thought as she made her way down tree-lined Unter den Linden. She moved along the wide center strip of the magnificent historic boulevard stretching from the Lustgarten and Berliner Dom in the east to the Brandenburg Gate in the west.

On her way to the S-Bahn train at the Brandenburg Gate, she strolled past park benches, people walking their dogs, and a cluster of female joggers passed by her. Hearing more footsteps pounding toward her from behind, she assumed it was just a jogging straggler. But when she cast a glance over her shoulder, she was shocked to see that it was Frau Holtzmann. She was dressed in her office clothes—a dark blue pantsuit—and she was out of breath when she came to a stop upon reaching Annie.

“Guten Tag, Frau Holtzmann.”

Like a surfacing swimmer who had been underwater too long, Frau Holtzmann had to suck in a few deep breaths before she could gasp “Guten Tag” in return. Chest still heaving, she motioned toward a green bench. Nearby, a street performer was creating enormous soap bubbles for groups of tourists.

“I didn’t know you normally came this way to go home,” Annie said, settling onto the cold bench.

“I don’t.” A pause for another deep breath. “But I wanted to catch you away from the office.”

“Oh?” Annie was curious, and a little apprehensive.

Frau Holtzmann took a seat next to her.

“How are you feeling?” Annie asked. She treaded lightly.

“I’m not here to talk about my feelings.”

So much for treading lightly.

“I’m sorry.”

Frau Holtzmann shifted her purse from her shoulder to her lap. She took a deep breath and didn’t say anything at first. Annie waited quietly.

“I don’t know how to say this . . .” Frau Holtzmann paused.

Annie continued to wait. Frau Holtzmann sighed.

“I just wanted to find out what you thought . . . I just . . . I guess I’ll just come out and say it. I don’t think Frau Kortig committed suicide.”

Annie felt a pulse of panic pass through her body. “But they declared it a suicide.”

“That doesn’t make it so.”

“But what makes you think . . . I mean, do you think someone killed her?”

“Of course I do,” Frau Holtzmann snapped. “If it’s not suicide, what else would it be? She didn’t just trip and fall out a window.”

“Yes, I’m sorry. It’s just . . . you think it’s murder? But why?”

Frau Holtzmann stared at the street performer, who had just created an enormous bubble, at least five feet long. Two children approached it tentatively, afraid to touch it.

“Strange things have been happening in our office.”

“Oh? What kind of strange things?” Annie asked.

Frau Holtzmann didn’t answer the question. She just kept staring at the bubbles, and Annie could see her jaw clenching.

“Have
you
noticed anything strange going on in the office?” Frau Holtzmann suddenly said, turning toward Annie. She sounded angry, almost threatening, as if she was demanding that Annie give her any and all information.

“I’m new, so it’s really hard to know what’s unusual and what’s normal.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.” The tension was almost unbearable. Annie wanted to just get up and leave. “Listen, I know this has been hard on you. On all of us. I know you want to find a reason for this.”

“Spare me your pop American psychology. I didn’t come to this conclusion because I need someone to blame, someone to direct my anger toward. I’m doing this because I believe it. Frau Kortig—Gisela—would not have killed herself.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because, for the first time in her life, she was in love.”

This was news to Annie. Frau Kortig had never married.

“Really? I didn’t know.”

“Well, now you know.”

If Frau Holtzmann was going to be so irritable, Annie would get up and leave. But she didn’t. She tried to cut the woman some slack, considering the events of the past week.

“Could something have gone wrong in her relationship?” Annie asked.

“No.” Frau Holtzmann spoke harshly and confidently, as if daring Annie to convince her otherwise. She twisted the straps of her purse as if she was trying to choke the life out of it. “Just keep your eyes open in the office for odd things.” She looked Annie directly in the face. “Keep your eyes on Herr Hilst.”

Annie sat bolt upright, as if a bucket of cold water had been poured down her back.

“Kurt? Why would you say such a thing?” She had been tiptoeing around Frau Holtzmann’s fragile emotions. But at the mention of Kurt, her hackles were up.

“I say it because I hear things.”

“What things?”

“Things about Herr Hilst. His past.”

“What about his past?” Annie snapped.

“Don’t get touchy on me. I just think you need to be careful if you’re sharing an office with Herr Hilst. He might not be who you think he is.”

“And who do you think he is?”

“I don’t know. But I’ve heard things about his past. Things he did. Possible Stasi connections.”

Annie couldn’t have been more stunned if Frau Holtzmann had slapped her.

“Stasi? Give me proof.”

“I don’t have to give you anything. These are just things I heard.”

“You mean rumors.” Annie spat out the word. “How could Kurt be involved with the Stasi? He was very young when he was living in the East. He came to the West when he was eleven!”

“Surely you know that the Stasi had informers on both sides of the Wall. He could have been an informer after he was in the West.”

An informer.
Just hearing the suspicion spoken out loud made her ill. She thought about the woman who had discovered that her husband had been informing on her for most of their marriage. She couldn’t imagine it.

“They screen people for this job,” Annie said. “How could he be a past Stasi informer and work here?”

“There have been many rumors of former Stasi working in the Stasi files authority.”

“Rumors again.” Annie didn’t want to hear any more. “You don’t like Kurt very much, do you?”

Frau Holtzmann’s jaw tensed. “Listen, I came to give you a friendly warning. Don’t go questioning my motives.”

“I’m not. I just don’t like rumors.”

Frau Holtzmann was on her feet in a second. “That’s enough. I’m not on trial here.”

“But you’re making insinuations . . . accusations . . .”

“Just be careful if you know what’s good for you. That’s all I’m saying.”

Frau Holtzmann stormed down the parkway, flicking her hand in the air and popping one of the enormous bubbles that drifted over the heads of two children. Annie stood up and was tempted to run after her, to convince her of Kurt’s innocence, but she knew better.

She sat back down on the bench, and she noticed that her hands were shaking. Was it fear or anger? She really didn’t know. What she did know was that her relationship with Kurt was confusing enough without something like this.

21

West Berlin
May 1962

Katarina lay flat on her stomach on the roof of the deserted West Berlin factory, binoculars pressed against her eyes. She trained the binoculars on St. Boniface Cemetery on the eastern side of the Wall.

Just beyond the Wall was a dog run, where German shepherds patrolled with instinctive authority. The dog runs were long fenced-in pens, running right alongside the Wall. The dogs’ long leads were connected to a wire cable that ran the entire length of the run, allowing the animals to cover every inch of ground in their domain. The German shepherds on guard were deep-chested, lean, dark, intimidating, and highly intelligent—the culmination of East Germany’s highly efficient dog-breeding program.

Just beyond the dog run was St. Boniface Cemetery, where the graves ran all the way up to the dog run and the Wall. There had been rumors that the East Germans were going to remove a swath of graves to create a death strip—a formidable stretch of land on the eastern side of the Wall. Katarina and her tunneling friends didn’t miss the irony of a death strip in a graveyard. But for now, they didn’t have to worry about the additional fortifications, just the border patrols that passed among the gravestones.

An elderly couple shuffled around a small gravestone, and not far from the couple, standing at the edge of a grove of trees, stood two border guards who patrolled this area. They calmly watched the old couple, as if they seriously thought these two eighty-year-olds were suddenly going to make a run for it, hurl themselves over the dog-run fence, fight off the German shepherd, and clamber over the Wall without breaking a hip.

The dog runs were effective, but the Kappel Group had a way around the dogs. They would go
under
them, and today was the first test of their newly completed tunnel. But nothing could happen if that elderly couple didn’t finish their visitation, and if the border guards didn’t resume their foot patrol.

Peter was not able to assist with this inaugural escape through the tunnel because he had an important exam at Free University, and there were more than enough volunteers to help. Katarina had an exam as well, but she would not have missed this for the world. She was almost insanely committed to the cause, and her grades had suffered. She knew that if she didn’t straighten up, she might get booted out of school, but she really didn’t care. Most students had the universal nightmare, in which they had gone through half a school year before suddenly realizing they had forgotten to show up to class. Katarina’s nightmares reflected very different priorities. She sometimes dreamed that she had faithfully gone to class, only to suddenly realize she had forgotten to show up at the tunnel and had missed out on the escapes.

Her thoughts snapped back to the present when she noticed movement by the guards. One of the men flicked aside his spent cigarette, and they continued on with their foot patrol, evidently concluding that the two elderly folks posed no threat to the GDR.

“Guards are on the move,” Katarina reported into her walkie-talkie. On the other end was Jürgen Becker. “But the older couple is still there. Over.” They would have to wait.

She put the binoculars back to her eyes and watched the old couple for a few more minutes. The man had his arm around his wife, who kept dabbing her eyes. She wondered what their story might be. A son or daughter who had died much too young? She wished the couple would get up and depart, and she felt guilty for being impatient with their grief.

The graveyard was crisscrossed by low hedges and bushes, and it had a rambling, overgrown look. Katarina soaked up the cemetery’s brooding, melancholy atmosphere, and she was struck by the number of angel statues throughout the cemetery. Her favorite was a female angel—green in color and with enormous wings. The angel seemed to be in midstride as she held out a stone rose. A little to the north was an equally large angel, perhaps five feet tall, a male holding out a feather. She could understand the angel holding out the rose, a thing of fleeting beauty in a field of death, but what was the meaning of the angel holding out a feather? Was he offering the feather to cemetery mourners as a way of reminding them that he was always near? She thought it only fitting that their tunnel opened up only a stone’s throw from the shadow of this angel. They could use any protection they could get.

Her binoculars moved back to the couple. They hadn’t budged. The husband continued to hold his wife, and now he too was dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. They were both kneeling on the grass, the woman running her hands across the cold stone marker. The two mourners would have to clear out soon if the Kappel Group had any hope of getting the family through the tunnel before the guards made another pass.

Katarina’s thoughts drifted to Peter, which happened quite often these days. They continued to flirt around the edges, but nothing had happened since the dance, other than a neck massage here or a touch on the arm there. She didn’t think about him as much as she did about the tunnel, but he was a close second. Stefan was a distant fourth, even behind her schoolwork.

Movement at last! Putting the binoculars back to her eyes, Katarina saw that the elderly couple had finally completed their cemetery visit. The man had a difficult time getting off his knees and an even harder time helping his stout wife back to her feet. He put an arm around her shoulder and tried to direct her away from the grave, but it was as if she had become as solid and immovable as one of the stone angels. The woman couldn’t take her eyes off the gray gravestone. As the man drew his wife away, she kept pausing to look back; eventually, they hobbled through the cemetery’s wrought-iron gate.

“All clear. Over,” Katarina said, taking another scan of the area to make sure the Vopos were nowhere in sight.

She directed her binoculars to the edge of the grove, where she knew the escaping family was due to emerge: a mother, a father, their sixteen-year-old daughter, and their eight-year-old niece. The parents wanted to be reunited with their twenty-one-year-old son and his wife, both on the western side. They wanted to see their new grandchild for the first time.

Come on, come on. Where are they?

At last, the family emerged from the trees, the mother carrying a bouquet of flowers for the grave. The father had hold of the eight-year-old niece’s hand, and he tugged her along with a sense of urgency not natural among typical mourners. They had been told to walk slowly, deliberately, like a funeral procession. But the father was clearly anxious. Katarina couldn’t blame him. The mother glanced around a couple of times. More suspicious behavior.

The family had no trouble finding the grave, for the gravestone had been marked with a gray vase filled with dead flowers, not far from the angel with the feather. The family fell to their knees in front of the gravestone—and waited.

Protection. Give them protection.
Katarina had never been much for praying, but she found herself instinctively drawn to it ever since she started the escape business. Her father had been a believer, but not her mother. After her father had died and her mother turned to drink, she became the family’s protector, in charge of watching over her younger sister, Gabriele. So she was used to taking responsibility for people’s fate—like this East German family. Once she gave the signal, the gravestone at their feet would open wide, revealing the entrance to the underworld—the entrance to the freshly completed tunnel.

Katarina was about to give the go-ahead to Jürgen when she saw more movement. Far down the path, at the edge of a cluster of trees, the same border guards had reappeared! That couldn’t be right. They weren’t supposed to make another pass by the cemetery so soon.

In her panic, Katarina dropped her walkie-talkie, and it skittered toward the edge of the roof. If she lost it, she would not be able to send out a warning in time. She watched in horror as the device slid to a stop, with the antenna sticking over the lip of the roof, causing it to teeter. She pounced on the walkie-talkie before it could tumble over the edge, but she discovered it had lost its power upon impact. She looked up and took another glance at the approaching guards. They were moving in the direction of the family, who continued to kneel at the grave, expecting it to open up at any moment. Katarina didn’t think they would open up the tunnel without her go-ahead, but who knew? The family had to be wondering what was taking so long, and Jürgen was probably thinking the same thing. She banged the side of the walkie-talkie a couple of times, and the instrument crackled back to life.

“Guards returning. Do not open the grave. Over.”

“Repeat. Over,” Jürgen acknowledged.

“Guards are returning. Do
not
open the grave. Over.”

She hoped her words came through the static clearly.

By this time, the guards had almost reached the point on the walking path where they had been earlier. The father had noticed them. The entire family knelt in a small semicircle, heads down, but the father raised his head for a second. He looked straight at the guards.

Don’t panic. Please don’t panic.

The father bowed his head back down, and Katarina could see his mouth moving. He was either praying or giving instructions to the children not to run. There was nothing illegal about praying at a grave. If questioned, the family had been given a cover story about why they were in the cemetery—and they had grave passes to prove it, compliments of the Kappel Group.

Strange. One of the guards was leaning over, scanning the ground. Had he lost something? The other guard, gun slung over his shoulder, strode toward the family. Katarina tried to focus on the father’s face to judge his fear response, but she couldn’t gauge his level of anxiety through the binoculars. Border guards were finely attuned to people’s fear. She knew of East Berliners who had been nabbed simply on the basis of their nervous behavior while trying to cross the border with forged passports.

The father had the presence of mind to rise up and meet the approaching guard. If he could keep the guard at a distance from the children, that would reduce the chances of something going wrong. Children were unpredictable. So were adults, for that matter.

The border guard was speaking, and the father was nodding and then reaching into his pocket. He pulled out his grave pass—his permission to be this close to the Wall—and he handed it over. The guard studied the pass; they exchanged words. But he didn’t return the pass to the father, and that wasn’t a good sign. Katarina noticed that her hands had become slick with perspiration. She wiped her right hand on her pant leg and prayed.

The guard continued to talk to the father. The entire family had been drilled on their cover story, but would it hold up under scrutiny? The father turned toward his family and motioned in their direction, and Katarina prayed that the guard wouldn’t interrogate the children; that could spell disaster.

Suddenly, the other border guard shouted out in joy, and Katarina shifted her binoculars in his direction. The other Vopo was bent over, picking something off the ground, and he held it triumphantly in the air. Whatever it was, it fit snugly in his hand. A pack of cigarettes. The guard had dropped his pack of cigarettes and had come back to retrieve it.

The Vopo who had been conducting the interrogation smiled at his colleague and, to Katarina’s complete relief, handed the grave pass back to the father. Then he strode back through the graves, probably expecting his partner to share his cigarettes. Sure enough, the other Vopo pounded the pack against his hand and then pulled out two cigarettes, one for each of them. The other guard produced a box of matches, and they both lit up. But they still didn’t move. They continued to stare at the small cluster of mourners; the family wasn’t yet in the clear.

The mother lifted her head and glanced over at the guards.
No, no, don’t do that.
It was natural to look at the border guards, but do it too much and you invited questioning. The family had been instructed that if anything like this happened, they should keep praying for at least ten or fifteen minutes. They shouldn’t depart the gravesite immediately, or that would raise suspicions. But after ten or fifteen minutes, they were supposed to make their way back to their car and try the escape another day, another time.

Katarina checked her watch. It had been about fifteen minutes since the family knelt at the grave, but they weren’t moving. The father must have decided to wait out the Vopos. She knew the family was desperate to get out, and if it didn’t happen today, they were probably afraid it might never happen. But they shouldn’t stay at the grave so long, or that too might raise an alarm.

The mother suddenly threw herself forward on the gravestone, and for a second, Katarina thought she was going to pull open the hatch in panic. But no, she was just kissing the gravestone—like a grieving friend would do. The eight-year-old appeared to be crying. Maybe out of genuine fear, rather than great acting ability.

Suddenly, the mother began to wail. She bobbed up and down, her nose nearly touching the gravestone, and her husband and children gathered on all sides, wrapping their arms around her. The wailing carried to all corners of the cemetery. The keening was so authentic that Katarina wondered if the woman had worked on the stage.

The outburst of grief did the trick. The guards, clearly uncomfortable by such a raw display of emotion, headed back down the path in the direction of the trees. Katarina kept her eyes on them every step of the way until they vanished into the grove.

“The Vopos are beyond the trees,” she reported into her walkie-talkie. “But give it a little time. Over.”

Katarina wanted to wait until the Vopos were farther away before giving the all clear to Jürgen, who was positioned in the basement at the mouth of the tunnel. On her signal, he was to give three strong tugs on a rope that ran the length of the tunnel and was being held by Alexander. Then Alexander would push open the trapdoor from below, and the grave would open wide, for their tunnel came out in a small patch of ground yet unclaimed by the dead.