Puzzle People (9781613280126)

by Peterson, Doug

  Germans were given the unique opportunity to see their own Stasi files. Most countries waited a generation before they grappled with the ugly past, but Germany decided to do it from the start—to open the confessional and expose the sins.

  Kurt had been there on January 15, 1990, when demonstrators unleashed their fury on the Ministry for State Security—Stasi headquarters—in Berlin. They shattered the glass doors of House 18 and swarmed inside. Before the night was over, rioters had plundered and destroyed whatever they could, hurling office furniture out of windows. The Stasi, which had been busily destroying documents, were stopped in their tracks, leaving most of the files still intact—except for sixteen thousand sacks of shredded material. Kurt didn’t participate in the festival of destruction inside the headquarters, but he had watched from a distance, wondering if his files were among the papers raining down from the windows like confetti on a parade.

  Today, his file was spread before him. His file was fairly extensive—about five hundred pages. This certainly wasn’t close to the twenty thousand pages collected on a dissident writer he knew. In a rather perverse pecking order, some people thought that the thicker the file, the greater the honor. He recalled a Humboldt University student bragging to his girlfriend about the size of his files—as if being spied upon was a validation of his importance. Kurt had blown up at the guy, and they had nearly exchanged punches.

  The fool.

  Kurt let his eyes drift across the pages. The first time around, he had read every word, forcing himself to do it. But today he skimmed. Before the file was ever shown to him, each page had to be photocopied; and then an office worker went through the files, line by line, blacking out the names of innocent people who showed up in the reports. Then the file was photocopied again to reduce the chances of someone being able to read through the black ink. If a name was that of a known Stasi employee or informer, it was not blacked out. It was exposed.

  Kurt flipped through the pages. It was almost like visiting a diary that you had written as a child—a twisted version, that is. The file stirred memories, taking him down through the stratification of time; it was an archaeological dig in the mind, burrowing into the past, layer by layer. Everything was very carefully preserved by the archivists. There were photos, train tickets, and pages and pages of reports—everything that the Stasi had gathered on him in both the East and the West. He had heard that they had reels of audio and video surveillance as well, and he wondered if there were any records of his own voice.

  19.08 hours

  Observed 56785 enter The Castle restaurant, where he greeted five friends. Four males. One female. He drank four glasses of beer.

  22.04 hours

  56785 walked the female to a taxi, where they embraced.

  Kurt remembered the name of “the female.” Nadine. They saw each other for only a couple of months before she broke it off, saying she had found another man. But it was Nadine who introduced him to his future wife, Martina. Kurt thought that if only he hadn’t met Nadine that night, then maybe he would have never known his wife, and he would never have felt her betrayal. But removing this one incident in his life would probably be like yanking out a stray thread in a sweater. Everything would unravel.

  He tried not to think about his ex-wife, but he couldn’t keep out the thoughts. Images of the day he followed Martina flashed across his mind. He suspected her of having an affair, so he had followed her like a common spy would. And when he saw her, his wife, greeting another man—embracing, kissing—she might as well have shot him point-blank.

  And now Annie had followed him.

  Maybe he had been too hard on her. She had probably seen too many American television shows, where the heroine or the hero stumbled across a terrible mystery and leaped into the investigation. To her, this probably felt like a game. She didn’t know firsthand where spying on loved ones or friends and colleagues could lead.

  Finally, Kurt came to the hardest pages. There were six pages in all, single-spaced, and he forced himself to read them, word by word. It was like walking across hot coals; only, he forced himself to do it slowly, each word seared into his mind. But he had to remember every detail because he had to tell Annie everything. No more secrets. He had to know how she truly felt about him.

  He rubbed away a tear and kept reading.

  Annie remembered.

  She was washing dishes and mulling over the past week when it suddenly hit her. The woman Herr Adler had been meeting for lunch was one of the women in her files. Elsa Krauss! But she wasn’t entirely sure. She had reconstructed a photo of Elsa a week ago, but the picture had been dated from the early 1980s—over twenty years ago. How could she be sure they were the same person?

  So she did an online search of the name Elsa Krauss and hit the jackpot in less than five minutes. She knew from the files that Frau Krauss was a clothes designer, so that helped her to narrow the search. Elsa was not a world-famous designer, it appeared, but she was well respected. Her married name was now Elsa Fleischer, but her designs still went under the name of Elsa Krauss. Annie sifted through all sorts of images of fashion shots to find a few head-and-shoulder photos of the designer herself. She clicked on an image, stared at it, mentally setting it side by side with the image in her mind of Herr Adler’s “friend” and the woman in the photo she had reconstructed.

  A match?

  One way to be sure: She could retrieve the photo from Herr Adler’s office. But it had been a week since she had reconstructed the eight-by-ten black-and-white photo, and Herr Adler had probably forwarded this sensitive material quite a while ago. Unless . . .

  Was Herr Adler holding this information back, using it for blackmail? Why else would he be meeting with someone straight out of the files?

  Annie shook her head, amazed at the kind of ludicrous ideas that popped into her head. She wished she could discuss her theories with Kurt. She was tempted to pick up the phone and talk to him this very evening, but a stray sense of paranoia drifted into her mind. Could her phone be tapped? They might even be tracking her Internet traffic.

  Quickly, she exited Elsa’s website.

  Be patient, be calm. Wait until tomorrow, and then tell everything to Kurt when we have a chance to slip out for lunch.

  Annie suddenly felt vulnerable. Had they been listening in on her cell phone calls as well? Could they even do that? She tried not to let her imagination run wild, but it did anyway. She pictured night intruders breaking into her apartment, so she tried to go to sleep with all the lights on. When she couldn’t drift away, she pulled out her novel. But it was a disturbing murder mystery, so she put it away and dug out some old magazines. She tried to read, but the noises of her ancient apartment drew her away from her magazine almost every half minute. She turned on the television to drown out the sounds of her imagination.

  It was a long night.

  The next morning, she slept through her alarm and had to make a mad dash to the train. She reached the office on time but was crushed to discover that Kurt had taken the entire morning off. How could he do this to her?

  She had an unproductive morning. Instead of her usual output of twelve reconstructed documents per day, she was on target to complete only six.

  “You interested in lunch?”

  Annie’s startle reflex nearly propelled her out of her chair. She wheeled around and saw Herr Adler peeking into her office.

  “What’s that?”

  “Frau Holtzmann, Frau Steinweg, and I are taking lunch at the café around the corner. Care to join us?”

  Annie knew she was being paranoid, as she envisioned herself walking down the street with Herr Adler and a black sedan suddenly screeching up to the curb, men leaping out and abducting her. Insane. Pure, unfiltered insanity.

  “Thank you, Herr Adler, but I brought my lunch today,” she said. “Maybe another day?”

  “Another time then.”

  Herr Adler smiled. It was a normal, friendly smile, but Annie read “sinister” into it. Sh
e listened to his footsteps on the tile and the sound of muffled voices. Herr Adler was probably rounding up the other two women. Conspirators? Frau Steinweg was too by-the-book to be caught up in anything sordid, but Frau Holtzmann? It was possible.

  Annie slid out of her chair, whisked across the room, and cracked open her office door. She heard the main door downstairs closing, so she edged into the hallway and down to Frau Holtzmann’s office next door. No sign of her, so Annie moved swiftly down the stairs and slipped outside. She saw the backs of Herr Adler and the two women, who were flanking him on either side. As she watched them disappear around the corner, she was startled by the front door swinging open. She whirled back around, and the glass door nearly slammed her in the face.

  “Pardon me,” said Frau Nagel, who was followed by three other puzzle women. The office was emptying for lunch, although with sixteen on staff, there was bound to be someone staying back to eat in the break room.

  Back inside and up the stairs. She should return to her office, but if she did, she would simply stew. So Annie sidled down the second-floor hallway to Herr Adler’s office at the very end. She reached for the doorknob and gave it a jiggle. Locked, of course. But Herr Adler was the embodiment of disorganization, routinely locking himself out, so he always kept a spare key next door in Frau Holtzmann’s office. And Frau Holtzmann almost never locked her door.

  Annie couldn’t believe she was doing this. She entered Frau Holtzmann’s office and headed straight for the woman’s desk, knowing she should just turn around before this got out of hand and she got nabbed in the act. But she kept going and found what she hoped was the correct key nestled inside the center desk drawer. Back in the hallway, outside of Herr Adler’s office, she looked around. The second floor was quiet. No sign of movement anywhere. She inserted the key. It fit. She turned the key, and the latch clicked.

  She decided to take just a quick look in his office and see if she could find any materials on Elsa Krauss. Or Katarina or Peter or Stefan, for that matter. Just in and out. A quick snoop. This could be her only chance.

  While processing her decision, she paid less attention to the movements downstairs. She didn’t hear the footsteps on the stairs until it was almost too late. Someone was coming up the staircase, and the second-floor landing would give this person a clear view of her, straight down the hallway. She had to move!

  Annie was inside Herr Adler’s office before she had much of a chance to evaluate whether it was the right decision. Her heartbeat was on full speed. Her legs were shaking, and she tried to slow down her breathing. She was pretty sure she hadn’t been spotted slipping into the room.

  Licking her lips, which were bone-dry, she looked around the office. A mess, as always. Herr Adler had stacks of files and papers all over the office, dispelling the stereotype of German organization. His trash can overflowed, and a couple of paper coffee cups lay on the floor, as if he had tossed them in the direction of the can and not bothered to pick up his misses.

  Herr Adler claimed to know exactly what was in each and every tower of paper. But how was Annie going to find anything in this disasterland?

  She shuffled through one of the stacks of files. It was mostly administrative paperwork and background files for the magazine articles he was writing on the side. Herr Adler still wrote for several magazines, mostly fluff pieces on actors and actresses in Germany. On the prestige scale, he had been knocked down several notches from his days as a muckraking journalist. Annie accidentally put her hand on something sticky on the desk, but she didn’t want to know what it was.

  As she tried to wipe it away with a Kleenex, she heard the worst sound imaginable. The jiggle of the doorknob. She spun around, her eyes zeroing in on the door. The knob was turning.

  31

  West Berlin

  July 1962

  Peter absorbed the slap. He didn’t even try to duck out of the way when he saw it coming. He felt he deserved it. He and Elsa stood face-to-face in his Berlin apartment. Her eyes were wild, red-rimmed, and wide with disbelief.

  “Why did you even bring me here?” she shouted. “Why would you bring me west just to toss me aside for another woman?”

  “Please lower your voice.” The walls of his apartment building were thick, but he knew that his neighbor, Mr. Bremmer, probably had a listening glass pressed up to the wall at this very moment.

  “I will not lower my voice!” she shrieked. “I asked you! Why did you bring me west?”

  “You were in trouble. I heard you had been . . . punished.”

  “I was in prison because of you! Do you know what it’s like to want to die rather than live a nightmare?”

  Peter shook his head slowly. “But I thought you wanted out. And at the time, I thought I wanted you with me . . . forever.”

  “Is one week your idea of forever?” She spied the glass vase on his coffee table, snapped it up, and hurled it against the wall. The vase exploded, glass particles going in all directions. She let out a shout and slapped a hand on her bare arm, as if a bee had stung her. She dropped backward onto the couch, screaming, and Peter saw a small glass shard sticking out of her arm. When she spotted it, protruding from her skin, she started shouting, “Oh God, oh God, oh God!”

  Peter swooped in and held her arm still and examined the fragment. It was small, and it hadn’t penetrated very deeply. “It’s okay. It’s going to be fine.”

  “It’s not okay! And I’m not fine!”

  “Easy, easy, I’m just going to pluck it out.”

  “No, don’t, don’t, don’t . . .”

  “It’s already out.” The removal of the glass shard produced a trickle of blood, so he pulled out a handkerchief. Elsa made a move to rise, to get away from him, but she thought better and decided to succumb to his first aid. He pressed the handkerchief onto her wound and watched a small circle of red expand on the white cloth.

  She returned to her moaning: “Oh God, oh God, oh God!”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said. “I fully intended to marry you when we made arrangements for your escape.”

  That much was true. Even when she arrived in West Berlin a week ago, Peter had decided to go through with the marriage, despite his feelings for Katarina—and despite Elsa’s rage over seeing them in an embrace. He would not break his word, and until yesterday, he had decided he could learn to live with Elsa.

  But Peter ultimately realized he would never be able to say the vows: “I promise to be loyal to you in good and bad days, in health and illness, to love and respect, until death separates us.” Beneath those words, he would really mean “to tolerate you in health and illness, to endure . . .”

  So Peter made his choice, and he chose Katarina. It was Katarina he loved.

  Lifting his handkerchief just a little, Peter assessed Elsa’s wound. It was a small cut, and the blood had already begun to congeal. A bead of bright red emerged, so he pressed back down. She had begun to calm down.

  “Would you have preferred to stay in the East?” he asked.

  “If it meant avoiding this humiliation . . . probably.”

  Peter didn’t believe it, but he didn’t say so.

  “I just wanted to make sure you were safe,” he said. “I couldn’t stand the idea of you in prison—because of what I had done.”

  “Then why didn’t you come right back to East Berlin . . . for my sake?” she asked, still trying to catch her breath between sobs.

  “If you were me, would you want to return to my father?”

  She went silent. Peter knew this reasoning would make some sense to her. She despised his father.

  “I nearly lost my mind in there,” she said.

  “I had no idea you’d be arrested. If I did, I would have returned to East Berlin immediately. I thought your family connections would protect you.”

  Peter didn’t stop to evaluate whether he was lying or not. He just said it. He knew Elsa would want to hear those words.

  He retrieved bandages and ointment from the
bathroom and then went to work on her wound, thankful that she had stopped shouting. She got her sobs under control as Peter sat down next to her.

  “Do you still care for me at all?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever love me?”

  “I did.”

  Peter finished bandaging her wound, and he touched the side of her face with his hand. “I did,” he repeated, wiping away a tear with his finger.

  She leaned her head on his shoulder. He knew what she was doing, but he was afraid to reject her advances. She was fragile. She reached out and took his hand, and he allowed that as well. She stroked the back of his hand. Then she leaned in to give him a kiss, but he cut her off by giving her a quick kiss on the side of the face and then rising to his feet.

  “Let me get you a glass of water.”

  Elsa stared at the floor and shrugged in response.

  Peter left her side and hurried into the kitchen, where he paused to lean against the counter, take a deep breath, and collect his wits. As he filled a glass with tap water, he thought he heard the click of his door.

  When he went back out to the living room, he found that Elsa had gone. Afraid that she might do something rash, he thought about following her. But it was just a passing thought. He let her go.

  Katarina caught up with Wolfgang in front of the Henry Ford Building at Free University. He was lighting up a cigarette just outside the entrance to the wide white building when she stepped in front of him.

  “This was your doing, wasn’t it?” she said.

  She got in his face. Wolfgang finished lighting up, turned his head, and nonchalantly blew smoke over his left shoulder before answering in a calm, even voice.

  “Jürgen told you?”

  “You know he did. But this was your idea, right?”

  Jürgen had informed Katarina the night before that they had to “regrettably” drop her from the Kappel Group.