Puzzle People (9781613280126)

by Peterson, Doug

  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 p
assage, 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.

  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.