Puzzle People (9781613280126)

by Peterson, Doug

  “Just fine, thanks. Mind if I take a seat?”

  “Not at all. If you take a long break, maybe I’ll have a chance of finishing off as many puzzles as you today.”

  Annie dished out another polite smile. She didn’t know that people kept track of each other’s output.

  “Herr Hilst treating you fine?” Frau Holtzmann asked.

  “Oh yes, I enjoy his company. It makes the day go by quickly.”

  “Really now.” Frau Holtzmann gave Frau Kortig a knowing glance. “He’s quite the talker, isn’t he? Likes to ask questions.”

  “I like that. He has a curious mind.”

  “Especially when it comes to women. He’s probably thrilled to share the office with someone in a skirt.”

  Did Frau Holtzmann just wink?

  “I like Herr Hilst,” Frau Holtzmann added, in case she was sounding too catty. “I’ve had a soft spot for him, ever since what happened with his marriage.”

  “Oh?” Annie popped open her Pepsi and drank straight from the can. “I didn’t even know he had been married.”

  “Yes, poor thing. Married only a few years. His wife betrayed him with another man. She didn’t even try very hard to hide it.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. So . . . how is your crossword coming along, Frau Kortig?” It wasn’t a very elegant change of subject, but Annie did not want to let the gossip go on any longer.

  Evidently, her abrupt change of subject was too blatant for Frau Holtzmann. Before Frau Kortig could even squeak an answer, Frau Holtzmann excused herself and bolted from the break room, shaking her head with an air of discontent.

  “It’s a difficult puzzle,” said Frau Kortig, casting an awkward glance at Annie before rising and exiting close behind Frau Holtzmann.

  “Auf Wiedersehen,” Annie said.

  Annie left the break room with a bad taste in her mouth. She hated gossip, but she also wondered if she could have been more tactful. Frau Holtzmann struck her as the wrong kind of person to cross.

  When Annie entered her office, Pepsi in hand, Kurt raised his coffee cup in a salute. “You’ll need to down a lot more Pepsi if you want to keep up with me on the caffeine consumption.”

  “I’ll work on it.”

  Kurt surveyed his table. “You know, stumbling across that murder drives home how important these documents are—and how damaging they can be. We’re playing with dynamite here.”

  “True. This information can destroy friendships, business partnerships, careers, marriages . . .”

  Kurt got up to loosen his legs and do some stretching exercises—a ritual that Annie was used to seeing him do twice a day. Like clockwork. He said it was essential with his lower-back problems.

  “Have you heard of the case of Frieda Huber?” he asked as he rotated his head to relax his neck.

  Annie shook her head. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

  “Frieda Huber, the social activist who worked with the Church from Below,” he added, wondering if that would ring any bells.

  “No, sorry,” Annie said with a shrug.

  “She inspected her files after the Wall came down, and she discovered she had been informed on by her husband. By her own husband, the father of her three children! They divorced, as you might expect.”

  Annie couldn’t fathom what that must have felt like. Annie had lost her husband, but she could at least savor the years they had together. Frieda Huber had not just lost a husband to the Stasi. She had also lost any good memories she might have had of him. They were all tainted. Her husband was an IM—Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or “unofficial collaborator.”

  “Did the husband ever admit to it?”

  “Not at first. But he couldn’t refute what was in the files. He eventually confessed and moved to a small village in an apartment without a phone.”

  Kurt returned to his desk and then reached into his sack of fragments, pulled out a handful of scraps, and began to sort them. Annie looked down at the paper scattered across her desk.

  “People are highly creative in the ways they hurt each other, aren’t they?”

  “They are. How was your murder victim killed?”

  Annie wondered if Kurt noticed that he had just asked for a specific detail. But she was tired of feeling constrained by the rules, so she jumped at the chance to put this information on the table.

  “The victim was shot while making his confession in a deserted church.”

  Kurt stared back at Annie and cocked his head. “He was killed in a confessional?”

  “I know, I know. It can’t get any stranger.”

  Kurt shook his head. “Actually, it can. You’d be surprised.”

  9

  West Berlin

  December 1961

  Peter buried himself in the deepest recesses of the library at West Berlin’s Free University. He burrowed into the back stacks, finding a small desk in a corner, as far as possible from the traffic of other students. It gave him a sense of insulation and isolation, a way of walling himself in. The desk was tattooed with graffiti and wedged beside a dingy window that allowed in just enough light for reading.

  Peter had decided to take Katarina’s advice and read some Hemingway—The Old Man and the Sea, to be specific. He was surprised. He liked the novella—and an American novella at that. It was the story of a defeated old fisherman who had not caught a fish for eighty-four days. Alone at sea, the old man’s fortunes finally took a turn for the better when he hooked a monstrous marlin; and after three days of intense battle, he defeated the creature and strapped the glistening trophy to the side of the small boat. But as he made his way back toward the shore, a long distance away, the sharks began to arrive. Circling, always circling the boat, they stole small bites from the once-noble marlin, spreading blood in the water, attracting more sharks—too many for the old man to fight off. Too many predators, too much blood. Piece by piece, fragment by fragment, the marlin was stripped of its flesh, while the old man battled the sharks to the point of exhaustion.

  This was the kind of weariness that Peter understood. So, finishing the final pages of the book, he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. He slept, but for how long, he wasn’t sure. He was jolted awake by a hand on his shoulder.

  “Hallo, Herr Hermann.”

  Craning his stiff neck, Peter was irritated to see a middle-aged man—the same man who had already paid him several unwelcome visits. He was thin and wore a homburg. His breath smelled of cigarettes and alcohol.

  “I told you before. Not interested.”

  The man smiled broadly, displaying unusually white, aligned teeth. The man liked to smile, probably more out of a desire to display his finest asset than out of any genuine joy. “You might be more interested in what I have to say today.”

  “I told you, it wasn’t my idea to come to the West,” Peter said. “But it’s home now. I like it here.”

  The man pulled up a chair. “Do you love the West more than your fiancée? Why don’t you want to be reunited with her?”

  Peter cracked open his book, even though he had just finished it. Maybe the man would get the message. “I’ve answered your questions already. Leave me alone.”

  The man craned his neck to get a good view of the front of Peter’s book and read the cover. “Ernest Hemingway? You’re subjecting yourself to American trash?”

  Peter pretended to keep reading, but the words on the page didn’t register. “We have no more to discuss.”

  “If you truly love your fiancée, you might desire news of her.”

  Peter set his book facedown on the table, pages opened. “What are you talking about?”

  “Frau Krauss is in prison.”

  Peter felt an ulcerous stab in his stomach. He didn’t think they would dare lay a hand on Elsa. Her father worked in the SED, the Communist Party, as a midlevel bureaucrat, and Peter hoped this would give her some measure of protection in the wake of his defection. He was wrong.

  “On what grounds is she in prison? If the Rep
ublic sees a girl like her as a threat to its very existence, then your government is in dire straits.”

  The man flashed his teeth again and drew the Hemingway book across the table before picking it up and nonchalantly flipping through the pages. Then he looked up from the book, directly at Peter. “You can free Elsa, if you choose. She’s not getting much sleep in such a cold cell.”

  For weeks now, the man had been trying to coax Peter into becoming an informer on the western side of the border. But every time Peter thought he had driven him away, the man was back. Why couldn’t these people leave him alone, leave Elsa alone? Peter just wanted to be left in peace with his books!

  He rubbed his temples, for a headache was growing. He felt pressure internally and externally. He still hadn’t communicated with his father since he left the East, but he could sense his father’s disapproval from a hundred miles away. He had sent a carefully worded letter to Elsa, but he doubted that it ever reached her. He wished he could talk to her and explain to her why he was trying to begin a new life. He wished he could bring her across the border so they could start fresh—without all of the family pressures bearing down on them.

  And now this.

  “Elsa’s father will not allow you to harm her,” Peter said.

  “Frau Krauss’s father is a nobody.”

  Peter picked up the book and tapped one corner against the desk. He was tempted to smack this man across the face with it. He clenched his jaw and heard his teeth grind. He still had feelings for Elsa. He couldn’t just leave her defenseless in the East, for it didn’t take much for her to buckle. Her fragility was what attracted him to her in the first place—and frustrated him to no end.

  Peter slammed his book down on the table, sending a bang down the long corridor of bookshelves. The man didn’t flinch.

  “What would I have to do to free her?” Peter asked softly.

  The man smiled. Then he told Peter exactly what was expected of him.

  East Berlin

  Sitting up in bed, Elsa stared at the beige telephone perched on an antique end table. She knew it was probably tapped, but at least she was out of prison and back in her apartment where she could sleep. They were listening, they always were; but the one concession was that at least no one could wiretap her dreams. She had been freed from prison three days before, but freedom was all a matter of degree, she thought. Elsa wondered if anyone was completely free, no matter what side of the border they found themselves on.

  She looked around at her room, furnished with hand-me-downs from her grandparents. Her Oma and Opa, now deceased, had been wealthy, so the furniture was exquisite, although showing its age. She craved old-world comfort. Her bed was hand-carved antique French walnut, and against the wall was a finely crafted lady’s writing desk with a leather top—a piece of furniture that she used as a dressing table, set below a mirror. She savored these items because there wasn’t much in the way of luxury in her apartment. She was happy she had a phone and a private toilet, but for baths, she had to go to her parents’ home.

  Elsa had no illusions. She knew that every room of her apartment was infested with bugs, and not the kind that could be exterminated with chemicals. She had always had an intense fear of insects—the more legs, the worse. But she would have welcomed a room filled with centipedes than one filled with the kind of electronic bugs she knew were all around her. In prison, she felt the constant presence of eyes peering in at her through the one peephole in the door. But in her home, it was ears, not eyes, that did the prying. She felt the constant presence of another.

  Elsa had recently heard about the “smell samples” stored in jars, and she wondered if they had used them with her. Evidently, the Stasi covered all of the senses in their incessant monitoring. A friend told her that Stasi agents would hide a yellow dust cloth beneath the chairs of prisoners during interrogations, picking up the person’s scent. Using trained sniffer dogs, they then tried to match the scent to something the person had touched—such as illegal leaflets. The Stasi maintained a large “smell conserve”—rows and rows of jam jars that contained innocent-looking yellow dust rags, each one carrying the scent of a suspect.

  No. She was not free, not by a long shot. Freedom was all a matter of degree.

  When Elsa first returned home from prison, she immediately went to sleep. But she drifted away for only about ten hours; after all of the sleep deprivation, she had expected to be lost to the world for at least sixteen. Now she was awake, but depressed. She knew what she had to do, but she couldn’t get herself to rise out of bed.

  Elsa’s mother had not been in touch with her yet, which was not surprising. But her father’s disregard was devastating. He had made only one call, a short conversation devoid of comfort. Were they afraid to be linked to their own daughter?

  Then there was Peter. He had abandoned her too. At first, she kept expecting him to return from West Berlin and show up at her door and put everything right. But by now, she had no more expectations. She didn’t care. She had given up on everything, except sleep.

  Peter seemed so full of life when they were younger—so kind and sensitive and strong. When she was twelve, they had their first dance together—a Pioneer dance, of course, celebrating the anniversary of the founding of their Young Pioneers brigade. The yearly dance provided the two greatest hours of the year, as far as Elsa was concerned. She remembered being dressed smartly in her Pioneer blouse and scarf, sitting primly along the wall when Peter approached her and asked her to dance—a waltz, she thought. She was so happy then. She didn’t know why people had to change.

  Elsa remembered the first time that Peter’s demeanor had taken a turn and he became more serious, more adult. When his best friend’s father started working in West Berlin, he became furious. Berlin “border jumpers” were common before the Wall went up, and they stirred up resentment. Peter detested these East Germans who crossed the border every day to make better money working in West Berlin and then returned to the East, where they lived and took advantage of the free health care and free education.

  Sometimes a student would vanish from her school, and classmates would start whispering that so-and-so’s family had absconded to the West. This news would infuriate Peter, even when he didn’t know the person very well. But when his best friend, Dirk, vanished to the West with his family two years ago, Peter turned bitter. Elsa still loved Peter, and he still had flashes of playfulness in him, but he also had many secrets that he kept from her. She never suspected he had any desire to live in the West.

  Elsa lay back down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling for at least fifteen minutes, tracing the cracks as if they were maps of branching rivers. Then she drifted into another sleep. Eight more hours of dreamless sleep. This was the best part of her day.

  10

  Berlin

  April 2003

  “Murder?”

  Herr Adler looked down at the reconstructed document that Annie had placed on his desk. His lips moved as he read silently.

  While Herr Adler studied the document, Annie glanced around his office. It was surprisingly cluttered for a man coordinating such a meticulous operation. Reconstructing shredded documents required a high level of organization, but Herr Adler’s office showed no sign of German order. Then again, it wasn’t Herr Adler’s job to do any of the actual reconstruction, and he claimed to have his own mysterious system, despite the look of things. Annie also noticed a coffee stain on the front of his white short-sleeved shirt. He wore a tie, but he wore it loosely, and it looked like it had collected a few stains as well.

  “You have been highly productive,” Herr Adler said before taking a sip of his coffee. “You also seem to have a knack for uncovering informational gems. You’ve been here only two months and you’ve already stumbled across a murder.”

  “I wasn’t sure if I should bring this kind of thing to your attention.”

  “By all means, yes. You did good, Frau O’Shea. Have you found any other documents pertaining to this
person, this victim—this Stefan Hansel?”

  “Yes. Yes, I have.”

  “I’ll need to bring this case to the attention of the proper authorities. So I would like you to bring me any materials pertaining to people connected with this murder case, so I can pass on the information.”

  “There are several people with links to the victim, including his girlfriend, who escaped to West Berlin in ’61.”

  Herr Adler leaned back in his chair, his mug still in one hand; a streak of coffee slid down the side of his cup and hit his pant leg, but he didn’t notice. “That’s interesting. Make sure you bring those to my attention.” He pointed at the murderer’s reference number—5839392. “Have you encountered this number in any other documents?”

  Annie came around the side of the desk and leaned over to look, even though she knew what number he was talking about. “I don’t remember seeing that number on anything else, but I’ll watch out for it.”

  “Yes, do that.”

  As she made for the door, Herr Adler tossed out another encouraging “Good work.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Annie hurried out of the office, anxious to get back to work, to maintain her pace of reconstructing documents. Having built a reputation for speed and efficiency, she felt a subtle pressure to perform at the same level. But before heading back to her office, she stopped at the restroom, where she encountered Frau Kortig leaning over the sink and staring into the mirror, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. Her eyes were red-rimmed and moist, and she sniffed and blew her nose. She had been crying.

  “Is there anything wrong?” Annie asked.

  “No.” The word was clipped and definitive.

  Frau Kortig didn’t make eye contact. She put away her handkerchief and turned away from the sink.

  “Are you sure? Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Frau Kortig stared into space, biting her lip. She looked around the bathroom, as if making sure no one was nearby. Her chin began to quiver.

  Annie felt the urge to ask questions, but she knew to be quiet.