The Notorious Pagan Jones

by Nina Berry

  “But…” Thomas shook his head as Karin moved out of the way to let her mother up into the driver’s seat. “Where are you going?”

  Pagan kept her voice firm but light, optimistic. “Thomas, maybe you can help her shift or steer with your good hand. That’s it.” She nodded as Frau Kruger put in the clutch and Thomas put his unbroken right hand awkwardly on the gearshift. “Then when the soldiers move out of the way, all your mother has to do is floor it and smash through the barbed wire. Once you’re on the other side, just keep driving. Turn the corner as soon as you can to get out of sight, out of gun range.”

  “Wait—what do you mean, when the soldiers move out of the way?” Thomas asked.

  Pagan backed down the dark sidewalk along Ruppiner Strasse, heading toward the border. “When the guy at the machine gun steps away, that’s probably when you should gun it.”

  Thomas poked his head and shoulders out of the window, blond eyebrows frowning dangerously. “What’s going to make him move away?”

  Pagan shrugged and gave him a what-the-hell smile. “Me.”

  The soldier at the machine gun sat in a puddle of light in the middle of the intersection.

  Pagan sidled closer, focusing on not letting her heels click on the sidewalk. Given what she was about to try, that was the only way to keep incapacitating dread from seizing her. One step at a time, one breath at time, she approached, taking mental notes as the two soldiers in their thick brown-gray coats on either side of the machine gun paced up and down the paving stones of Bernauer Strasse to her left and right.

  The headlights of a jeep, parked in the middle of Bernauer Strasse, illuminated the scene, casting the warped shadow of the machine gun’s tripod over the thin white line painted down the middle of the street which marked East from West.

  The Stasi soldiers weren’t goose-stepping the way they did in parades or in front of Communist monuments. This was a military perimeter, not a show. The darkness, the guns, the wire were all too grim, too real.

  The soldiers kept their rifles tightly clenched in both hands in front of them. Their necks swiveled constantly this way and that, scanning the Western side for movement. Most of their attention was across the street in the French sector. The machine gun was pointed that way, too. Their main concern for now must be resistance from the West.

  But the pacing soldiers also sometimes looked down Ruppiner Strasse, in Pagan’s direction, and scanned the upper windows of the buildings overlooking their street. Good thing she’d skulked so carefully this far. She did a quick check of her purse, battered but still strapped across her body. It was dark, but she could feel the leathery cover of her passport inside. She hoped she lived long enough to need it.

  Something about the whorls of barbed wire, anchored by heavy cement barriers, edged Pagan’s dread to the side to allow the anger in. The whole situation was weirdly familiar and horribly wrong. Just last week Pagan had tried to get over the fence around Lighthouse Reformatory. But she’d been duly convicted of a crime she’d actually committed. She deserved to be a prisoner.

  The Krugers and the people of East Germany had done nothing to justify this. This wall cutting them off from the rest of the world treated them as if they were all criminals. The entire country had become a prison; the citizens were now inmates, incarcerated without trial.

  Her anger gave her strength and focus to think. Where were the guys unspooling the barbed wire? She got close to the corner, hugging the building, and peered down Bernauer Strasse to her right. She found them heading back toward the machine gun, still rolling out a curved wave of spiked wire behind them. They were on their second trip along this stretch of road. If these men passed the mouth of Ruppiner Strasse again, the Krugers would have to bust through two layers of barbed wire instead of one.

  Both soldiers holding the wire were young, tall, and strong. One had a tired, resentful look on his face as he half hobbled along, as the other one, more upright and focused, kept telling him to check the strand behind them. Of the two, he was more in charge.

  A year ago, Pagan would have been drunk by this time of night. She closed her eyes for a moment and cast herself back to that late-night tipsiness she remembered all too well. How her fingertips had buzzed, and her joints had loosened. How the alcohol made her stupid and fearless.

  Now there was no alcohol to ease her fright. She missed that foolish certainty, but she was an actress. She wasn’t brave, but she could pretend to be.

  She opened her eyes and, smiling and humming, stepped out of the dark. She walked right in front of the headlights of the East German jeep, casting a curvy shadow that stretched all the way across Bernauer Strasse.

  “Hey!” The man at the machine gun jerked his capped head her way.

  She ignored him, swaying toward the two men bearing the barbed wire, away from the intersection. The fine wool of her dress brushed against her knees. She could feel the holes in her stockings. Hell, she should have taken them off before she tried this. They were in a sorry state, just like her nerves.

  “Yoo-hoo!” she called, waving at the soldiers and sashaying closer. “Excuse me.”

  They stopped dead, eyes zeroed in on her like gun sights. The resentful one’s mouth fell slightly open.

  “Halt!” called the soldier at the machine gun.

  She glanced back. He was trying to swivel the gun her way, but she was still too far behind it. He’d have to pick up the tripod and turn it around to aim at her. He gave up and pulled his rifle off his back.

  Pagan’s knees were shaking. Adrenaline flooded through every cell in her body, telling her to run.

  But she was a drunk right now, or at least channeling her old drunken self. Drunks didn’t feel adrenaline. She let herself roll off her heels, ankles bowing. “I’m so sorry, but I’m lost. Oh, gosh darn it, you probably don’t speak English. Um, ich habe mich verlaufen. Is that right? Ich bin Amerikaner.”

  She smiled and expelled a hiccup. The resentful soldier’s gape reversed into a condescending smile. He muttered something to the more focused soldier beside him, but that one didn’t respond, running wary gray eyes up and down her body.

  He’d been telling his partner what to do, and he hadn’t taken her immediately at face value, so he was probably the smarter of the two. She couldn’t see much of his hair under his helmet, but his nose was long and commanding, his lower lip was full, with a deep, sensuous dent between it and his strong chin. Handsome.

  He was her target. If she could convince the cute, clever, suspicious one, she could convince them all.

  “Halt!” yelled another voice behind her. She nearly leaped into the air in surprise, but somehow maintained her relaxed, slightly sloppy stance. But now she knew that the pacing soldiers had spotted her, along with the machine gunner.

  To make sure they were all fixated on her, she pretended to spot the huge gash in her stocking and came to an unsteady halt. “Dang it all,” she said, and hauled her skirt up a good five inches to inspect how high the tear went, running a hand over her knee and thigh. “Can’t get through a night without ruining them!”

  “You’re American?” the cute soldier said in accented En­glish.

  Both he and his partner were staring at her legs. Good. And good thing they couldn’t see the tremor of terror just beneath her skin.

  “Aren’t you clever?” she said. “That’s right!”

  “You have come to the wrong place, Fraulein,” he said.

  “Get out of the street!” One of the guards behind her yelled in German. “Get back or we may have to shoot!”

  “She’s American, wait!” the cute soldier said in German.

  “Amerikaner,” a soldier behind her said with disgust, as if that explained everything.

  Pagan was only ten feet away from the cute soldier. She wobbled closer, frowning. “Would you mind helping a lady ou
t? I can’t find my friends anywhere. I mean, all I did was look up at this big old statue of a guy on a horse, and when I looked back down—poof! They were gone. Like magic!”

  She stumbled and pitched toward him. Instinctively, he dropped the handle of the barbed wire spool and caught her.

  “Oop!” As she fell, her arms dropped around his shoulders.

  He leaned toward her to keep his own balance, his hands seizing her by her rib cage. The strength in his grip was terrifying. But for her right now, this was all just a scene in a movie, one she could act the hell out of. So she still let her breasts bump against his chest. Her hair brushed his mouth.

  “Vorsicht!” he said, one hand sliding down to grab her waist, trying to right her. “Watch yourself, Fraulein.”

  “Oh, my goodness!” She leaned her whole body against his for a moment longer, as if trying to get her balance back. “I must have tripped over that nasty wire of yours.”

  “Gott im Himmel, she’s cute!” the resentful soldier said in German, pushing his cap back in wonder. “Even if she’s drunk off her little derriere.”

  Pagan kept one hand on the cute soldier’s chest, wobbling until he put his hands on both her shoulders to keep her steady. “What did he say?”

  Amusement finally turned his lips up. “He said, you’re pretty far away from your friends, I think.”

  Liar. He was attracted to her. She could tell from the way his fingers tightened, the way his pupils dilated as his eyes moved down her neck. But something behind his eyes remained cold and distant. She repressed a shudder and the desire to shove him away. She needed him for one more minute.

  “I’m starting to think I ended up in exactly the right place,” she said, and stepped into him again, one hand on his waist, the other still against his chest.

  He smiled and slid his hands down to her hips.

  “You lucky son of a bitch,” the resentful soldier muttered.

  She couldn’t feel much through the cute soldier’s thick wool, but he was tall and well-muscled. His heavy leather belt bore a flashlight and his pistol. The pistol was secured in its holster by a leather flap with metal snaps.

  “It isn’t proper to take advantage of a female comrade in distress,” he said. His lips twitched. “Are you in distress, Fraulein?”

  She stepped back and pointed his own pistol at his chest. Her hands were shockingly steady. “Not anymore.”

  A startled shout erupted from the resentful soldier.

  The cute one’s smile soured. His eyes glinted dangerously, giving her the faintest warning before he lunged.

  She skittered back, aimed, and pulled the trigger.

  The gun recoiled in her hand, giving off a loud crack. She’d sighted perfectly thanks to her Young Annie Oakley training.

  The cute soldier stopped in his tracks, paling, eyes wide. The other Stasi men hollered in alarm, and lifted their rifles at her.

  But no splotch of blood appeared on the cute soldier’s uniform, or anywhere else. His face cleared in relief. Anger followed.

  “Blanks,” said Pagan in German. She remembered the exact right word because she’d heard Ulbricht use it during his phone call to Honecker. “Your friends have them loaded, too. How many more before I get down to the real bullets?”

  The cute soldier took a furious step toward her. The others began to close in.

  Pagan fired again.

  He pulled himself up, fury twisting his handsome face. It felt good and right to frighten him. Finally she had a proper venue for her fury.

  “How many more blanks?” she demanded.

  He was thinking, hard. “They’re all blanks,” he said.

  “Oh, please,” she said in English, and spared a glance to her left and saw that all three soldiers blocking the intersection of Ruppiner Strasse and Bernauer Strasse had left their posts to curve around her in a semicircle, rifles at the ready. “One more move and your friend is dead,” she told them.

  The cute soldier reached for his own rifle, slung across his back.

  She fired his pistol at him again.

  He flinched and dropped his hands, unhurt, but sweating.

  “I don’t think they’re all blanks,” she said, smiling, and sighted down the pistol to aim at his head. “How many?”

  He shook his head, lips white with rage, eyes on the pistol in her hand.

  Her finger tightened on the trigger.

  “Three!” the cute soldier said. “Three blanks. The rest are real bullets!”

  Pagan backed up a step, farther from the intersection. As if pulled by a string, they all followed her a single pace. Good.

  “So the next bullet will work,” she said. She was still speaking German, so they could all understand her.

  “You won’t be able to kill us all,” her target said. His hands were slowly clenching into fists.

  “Probably not,” she admitted. “So make no mistake. If any of your friends so much as flicks an eyelash at me, I’ll kill you. Let’s find out which of them hates you the most.”

  Silence. Behind the cute soldier, the resentful one swallowed audibly.

  An engine snarled like a buzz saw, coming fast. A blur of red tore down Ruppiner Strasse, tires smoking, and smashed into the barbed wire. Metal scraped over metal with a hair-raising screech.

  Every head but Pagan’s swiveled to follow. The car slowed but didn’t stop, dragging the heavy concrete blocks used to anchor the wire over the worn cobblestones.

  “Halt!” one of the pacing sentries shouted, lowering his rifle toward the car.

  The machine gunner ran for his emplacement. “Halt!”

  A barrage of gunfire assaulted her ears. Or what sounded like real gunfire.

  Pagan was sprinting for the cover of the trees along Ruppiner Strasse, praying that those first shots were blanks.

  She made it to a tiny cross street and spared a glance over her shoulder. The red convertible was on the West Berlin side of Bernauer Strasse, zooming deeper into the safety of the French sector, dragging barbed wire behind it. As she watched, the wire rolled up and over the car’s roof, ripping a jagged hole in the soft material before striking sparks off the back trunk and falling free.

  She had time for one huge grin.

  “Stop now or I’ll shoot!” a voice called clearly in English. A familiar figure was racing toward her.

  The cute one. He lowered his rifle and fired, but no bullet whizzed past her or slammed into her body, no leaves were knocked from the trees.

  “Blanks!” she shouted at him in German, and, powered by a spurt of excitement and fear, she darted down the lane.

  She was grateful for how dark it was here. She ran full-out, pumping her arms hard. As she reached the end another shot rang out behind her. Above her head, a brick exploded.

  Her heart nearly stopped. So much for the blanks.

  She didn’t spare a moment to fire back, although she still had the pistol in her hand. She rounded the corner and zigged immediately down another alley to her right, leaping over piles of rubbish. She turned down the next street and dismay nearly overcame her. He was driving her deeper into East Berlin.

  The cute soldier’s footsteps followed as she scurried across the next street toward the roofless ruin of a structure standing empty in the early morning darkness.

  Her breath was coming in short, irregular gasps. She stumbled over a fallen block of stone and fell, scraping her hands and jarring her wrists.

  “I see you!” the soldier shouted in English, appearing at the mouth of the last alley she’d traversed, raising his rifle to his shoulder again.

  Her breathing was frayed. Her chest hurt, and her burning thighs trembled. An armed soldier was hunting her in the dark through a city she didn’t know. She was nothing but a whirring, mindless tangle of panic.
But she’d die in her tracks before she gave the son of a bitch the satisfaction of giving up.

  She half dived through the crumbling frame of a large window and fell hard onto a clump of damp weeds. A bullet ricocheted past her.

  Heavy treads sprinted toward her. He wasn’t a cute soldier; he was a goddamned relentless one. She loped carefully over the debris-strewn landscape. A gaping hole yawned in some rotting wood at her feet and she leaped over it. From there she sprang onto the stone frame of another window, crouching to look back.

  The relentless one was stomping around, searching for her. Another stomp, and his foot plunged through the rotting wood. He yelled and dropped his rifle, plunging into a jagged hole up to his waist.

  Pagan let out a whispered “Ha!” and slipped off her window ledge, angling down a passage between buildings. Her pursuer was noisily hauling himself out of his pit, cursing as wood snapped against him.

  She lost count of how many blocks she pelted down, how many random turns she made. She’d lost all sense of direction when she heard him behind her again. At the familiar thump of his boots, she reached for a random doorknob.

  Miraculously, it turned under her hand. She slid inside, shut the door behind her, and turned to look down the long nave of an abandoned church. Above, the roof vanished over where the altar had once been.

  She had no idea whether she’d find a way out, but Pagan picked her way through smashed statues and broken pews on wobbly legs. She found an intact wooden doorway in the back and paused, listening, waiting to be discovered. But the room lay dark and still. She left the door open to let in the moonlight and glided through another room and outside into a back alley. Behind her the wall was combed with scaffolding.

  Back inside the shambles of the church, something clattered. She whirled.

  Another heavy click. The relentless soldier must have seen her enter.

  She took two steps down the alley and stopped. The blank wall of a building closed it at one end, the windows of an apartment complex shut it off at the other.