Puzzle People (9781613280126) Read online

  Katarina had no intention of slowing down.

  Peter stared out the train window into the darkness. The window was speckled with raindrops, and he examined his reflection in the darkened glass, noticing the facial features that he shared with his father. The thin lips, the thick hair, the ski-jump nose. Peter knew he should be more patient with Elsa, but he couldn’t help himself. She wasn’t the same girl he had begun dating three years ago. Elsa was two years younger than him—but in his mind, their age difference seemed to be growing. She almost seemed younger than the year before. She had followed him to Humboldt University, where he studied engineering; but her world seemed so narrow and trivial. Posting those leaflets was probably her way of trying to be more serious about life, but she went about it with such a childlike naiveté that it irritated him. It was oddly fitting that she had used a child’s crayon to create the fliers.

  Still, he should try to control his anger, he vowed.

  Peter wanted to go to sleep, but he knew the train would be reaching the Albrechtshof station shortly. So he listened to the middle-aged woman in the seat in front of him blather on to her husband about their daughter, who was dating a boy that did not meet with her approval. People didn’t talk much on East German trains, for fear of government ears; there were snoops everywhere. But that didn’t deter this woman.

  “Young people,” she scoffed. “They never listen to their elders. Not like the old days.”

  Peter was tempted to tap her on the shoulder and correct her. He was living proof that young people did exactly what their father—and their Fatherland—demanded.

  Peter and Elsa were to be married the next summer. Everyone expected it. They had known each other since they were children, and even then, people talked about how “adorable” they were together. Peter was all about duty, so he would marry Elsa. Out of duty to his father, he had also entered the university’s engineering program, even though his first love was literature. He did what was expected of him. Nothing more, nothing less. He was a prisoner of his commitments, trapped on all fronts. Peter was only twenty-two, and already he felt weary, like an old man.

  Maybe that’s my problem. Maybe Elsa isn’t too young for me. Maybe I’m prematurely old. Maybe I’m turning gray from the inside out.

  “You should talk to Agathe,” the woman in front of him was instructing her husband. “Talk some sense into her.”

  “Me?” The husband’s tone was a mixture of shock and inevitable defeat.

  Peter leaned back, closed his eyes, and tried to create a mental dam to block the woman’s stream of complaints. But with his eyes closed and no visual stimulation to distract him, her words magnified in his mind.

  “Shouldn’t we be approaching the station?” the woman suddenly said, loud enough for everyone to hear. Peter’s eyes popped open, and he sighed.

  “What now?” said her husband.

  “The train. It’s picking up speed.”

  Peter looked around and realized she was right. The train did seem to be building speed, but how could this woman know they should be slowing down? She wasn’t the conductor.

  Still, the woman sounded confident. “We should be slowing down. I’m sure of it, Harry.”

  “Do you think so, dear?” There was a note of resignation in Harry’s voice, as if it was no use to doubt her.

  Peter noticed that the man across the aisle—the one with the newspaper—had become fidgety. He looked up from his crossword puzzle, raised himself slightly from his seat, and peered around the train. Then he let his newspaper drop from his lap, leaned over, and looked out the window.

  At that moment, the conductor entered the car and bellowed, “Albrechtshof! Next stop: Albrechtshof!”

  “But we’re not slowing down,” the woman said to the conductor, even more loudly.

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re picking up speed.”

  The conductor leaned over and stared out one of the windows. Shadows of telephone poles whipped by in the dark.

  “I think you’re right,” the conductor said. Suddenly, as if someone had flipped a switch, the tension level in the train went up. The car was filled with about twenty passengers, and many of them started peering out the windows.

  The train hurtled into the night, gaining even more speed.

  “What’s happening here?” the crossword-puzzle man demanded as he leaped to his feet.

  “I don’t know, comrade.” The conductor yanked on the emergency cord, but nothing happened. He glanced out the window and then looked at his watch. Something was terribly wrong. Streaks of light flew by the window at increasing speeds.

  Peter stood to his feet and noticed that a family in the corner of the car had their heads bowed. Were they praying? The baby in the mother’s arms began to cry, and she tried to shush him. By this time, it was obvious to everyone that the train was not going to stop in Albrechtshof—the last station before the border, the last station before West Berlin.

  Suddenly, a young couple with a three-year-old boy threw themselves to the floor, and several other passengers followed in quick succession, as if their actions had been finely coordinated. This left Peter and others, including the conductor and crossword-puzzle man, staring at them in bewilderment. Half of the people in the car seemed to know something that they didn’t.

  It suddenly dawned on Peter what was about to happen, and he too hurled himself to the floor of the train. Just in time. Seconds later, the windows shattered like ice.

  Katarina heard another gunshot as she made a screeching turn around the first barrier. This time she heard the bullet pass, a tearing sound, as if the air was being ripped like paper.

  Sharply turning right, she shot around the back of the first barrier, getting ready for the next turn. The maze of barriers allowed room for only one car, so her greatest fear—besides the bullets—was encountering another car coming toward her from the West. If that happened, she wouldn’t make it.

  Taking a left around the next barrier, she nearly lost control of the car as the back end skidded on the slick pavement and missed hitting the barrier by inches. Another gunshot rang out, but the barriers provided cover. She took a hard right, and this time the back end of the Sprite clipped the barrier as it fishtailed. She brought the car under control and then swerved wildly around the final barrier, tires screeching, engine roaring.

  Beyond the barriers was a large, heavy horizontal bar—a boom, like a gate at a train crossing, only stronger. Katarina prayed that the Austin-Healey Sprite was low enough to do this. Accelerating, she kept her eyes fixed on the bar, waiting for just the right moment. She had to time this precisely. If she ducked too late, she would be decapitated. The car rushed toward the bar, picking up speed. There was no stopping.

  Now! Katarina ducked a split second before the car raced beneath the bar, clearing it by only a few inches. Popping her head right back up, she found that she was veering too far to the left, straight for a concrete wall. She jerked the wheel right, barely missing the wall, and then headed for the concrete conduit leading into West Berlin. Only one problem: The opening had room for only one car, and another car was heading straight for her, about to enter the passageway from the western side.

  Leaning on her horn, Katarina raced through the opening, forcing the other car, which hadn’t yet entered the conduit, to swerve right and spin out of control. Katarina came shooting out of the gap, into the West, and roared into the American sector of Berlin. It was all a blur, but she thought that an American GI at Checkpoint Charlie gave her a thumbs-up.

  Katarina had done it. She had found a small hole in the Wall and had threaded the needle. She was free.

  Gunfire shattered the train’s windows, spraying glass fragments onto Peter’s back as he crouched on the floor, arms covering his head. The Volkspolizei (Vopos), the People’s Police, had fired from the platform when it became obvious that the train was not stopping in Albrechtshof. Since most people in the car had dropped to the floor, the bullets that pene
trated the windows failed to find a human target. The baby, cradled in her mother’s arms, continued to wail.

  Then a stunning jolt knocked those still standing onto the floor and sent Peter sprawling forward. It sounded as though the train was being ripped apart, and he realized it was the sound of the locomotive barreling through the barriers placed on the tracks. The train screeched as its steel wheels strained to keep the locomotive on the rails. Flat on the floor, Peter watched glass fragments dance and vibrate at eye level as the train steadily came under control and began to slow down.

  He pushed himself up from the floor and kept his eyes on the crossword-puzzle man, who was also getting back to his feet, his mouth agape and his forehead bleeding. The crossword-puzzle man staggered over to one of the men lying on the floor—the father of the family that had been praying only moments before.

  “How did you know to drop to the floor?” he demanded.

  The father sat up and brushed the glass powder from his jacket. “I could tell the train wasn’t stopping. I knew that meant trouble.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true. I had no part in this. Anyone could’ve figured out what was going on.”

  Peter got back to his feet and walked to his seat, shoes crunching on fragments of glass. The mother and the father did not look surprised by what had happened, and neither did a handful of others in this car. The train continued to slow down, and by the time the locomotive came squealing to a stop, all the passengers started shuffling toward the door. The mother had finally calmed her baby.

  Peter stood aside to let an older woman pass, and he thought she was trying to suppress a smile, as if she knew this was going to happen. When Peter piled out of the train with all of the others, he felt as if he had disembarked in another world. This was West Berlin, and there was something different in the way people looked and moved: less tension, less vigilance. He had been in West Berlin before the borders closed, but it felt strange being in the West on this day, knowing that crossing the border was now forbidden. Peter was not used to breaking rules.

  He walked along the platform in a daze—like someone staggering away from a wreck. He passed by the conductor, who was shouting in the engineer’s face. “What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you stop?”

  The engineer smiled back, wiping his hands with a rag. “There’s nothing wrong, friend,” he said matter-of-factly. “This is the right place. The right place!”

  Up ahead, friends and relatives were hugging passengers, further evidence that this had been planned. The West Berliners had known to show up at the station for this unscheduled stop.

  A young woman, a college student from the look of her, seemed as confused as Peter. She clearly had no idea that they were going to cross into West Berlin. “What are you going to do?” she asked Peter.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you going to return to the East?”

  Peter stopped and stared at her. What an amazing thought! He had assumed he would simply return to his fiancée, his family, his duties. He didn’t even think he had options.

  “My fiancé lives in West Berlin, so I’m staying here,” the girl said. “God sent me west by this miracle, and who am I to argue with God?” The girl laughed and then hurried away before something happened to spoil her dream.

  Peter turned and looked back down the tracks, staring east. All of his duties were on the other side of the border. Elsa. His father. The GDR. He was West. That was East. Wheeling back around, Peter stared to the West, caught between two worlds. Peter, the good East Berliner that he was, didn’t believe in God, so he had a hard time thinking that the Almighty had put him on this train. Yet . . . Maybe things did happen for a reason. But whose reason? He hadn’t the slightest idea.

  Peter made his choice. He took a deep breath and started walking from the platform. He walked west.

  2

  Berlin

  March 2003

  Everywhere that Annie O’Shea looked, she saw desks covered with shredded pieces of paper and people calmly putting together puzzles.

  “This way,” said Herr Adler, director of the small group of puzzlers working away in a boxy six-story building on Dorotheenstrasse, near Schadowstrasse, in the heart of the administrative center of Berlin. He motioned Annie upstairs and along the narrow institutional hallways. The second floor was more of the same—rooms filled with puzzles and secrets.

  Annie O’Shea had loved jigsaw puzzles for as long as she could remember, and her interest had almost become an obsession during the lonely years living with her missionary parents in West Germany. Now the hobby was going to pay off in a small way. She was starting a new job in which she was going to be paid to do jigsaws. Granted, her salary would be modest at $30,000. But Annie, a forty-five-year-old widow with two grown children back in the States, didn’t live a lavish lifestyle. She would get by.

  She checked out the office like a fussy new nanny inspecting the premises. “How many work here?” she asked in fluent German.

  “It varies, but we have sixteen right now,” Herr Adler said. “But if you count the workers in Zirndorf, we have closer to fifty-five.”

  Annie noticed that with the exception of Herr Adler, most of the puzzlers were women, piecing together scraps with double-stick tape. Herr Adler was like an amiable sultan, surrounded by his harem. He stood about five feet six inches tall, and everything about him seemed round, as if he had been constructed out of circles. He wore round wire-rimmed glasses sitting on a round baby face with a rounded forehead sloping back to meet his receding hair, which had clearly been darkened to hide his years. His clothes were rumpled and plain—white shirt, blue tie with traces of coffee stains.

  “No alarms to get in and out of the offices?” Annie asked.

  “No. The building has a security system, of course, which I trigger when I close up each night. But nothing more has been needed.”

  Annie was surprised, considering the kind of work that took place here. There were also no signs of security cameras. From all appearances, the office interior looked as though it hadn’t changed since the 1970s. It was a Bauhaus box—sparse and sterile, with white walls so bright that you could go blind staring at them too long.

  Annie realized she was moving down the hall about a step or two ahead of Herr Adler, so she slowed her pace. She was not tall, only five feet two inches, but she moved through life at breakneck speed, and she often had to consciously slow down to keep from racing ahead of people. This small bundle of American energy was trim for her age, despite her penchant for ice cream and Pepsi. She had shoulder-length brown hair, and some of her freckles were beginning to merge and look more like age spots.

  “As you can see, many of our puzzlers work alone,” said Herr Adler. “Less distractions, but more boring. You’re one of the lucky ones. You’ll be sharing an office.”

  He led her into a large office, and Annie was pleasantly surprised to see a man who appeared to be in his mid to late forties, about her age. The office looked as if it had been split down the middle into two completely different offices, each with its own personality. One side was orderly and cozy, with potted plants and pictures and many personal touches that offset the bareness of the building. The other half was as sterile as a glass desert. The man occupied the cozy half of the office, and he swung around in his plush upholstered swivel chair.

  “May I introduce you to Herr Hilst,” said Herr Adler. “And, Herr Hilst, this is Frau O’Shea.”

  “Good to meet you,” Annie said to the man as he rose and shook hands with her. Herr Hilst’s face was long and narrow, his eyes a little sad, with traces of wrinkles beneath each. Most noticeable was his smile, which hinted at mischief.

  “Pleased to meet you, Frau O’Shea.”

  Annie had to bite her tongue to keep from saying, “Call me Annie,” as she would have in the United States. She knew the rules here. Some coworkers in Germany never moved to a first-name basis, even if they had worked together for twenty ye
ars.

  “You’ll have plenty of time to get acquainted with Herr Hilst,” said Herr Adler. “But now let me introduce you to the friend you’ll be spending most of your time with.”

  Herr Adler motioned toward a large brown bag, tied at the neck by a small thin rope. Inside of the sack were thousands upon thousands of ripped and shredded scraps of paper, fragments filled with secrets.

  “This is your first bag, and you’ll probably be spending most of the year with it. So get to know it. Take it out for coffee. Maybe you can even dance with it.” Chuckling, Herr Adler glanced over at Herr Hilst and added, “Frau O’Shea used to teach dance lessons back in the United States.”

  “Very good! I did a little dancing myself in the day,” said Herr Hilst.

  “Ah,” said Annie. She smiled, unsure of how to follow up on that comment.

  “So . . . I hope you like jigsaw puzzles,” said Herr Hilst.

  “Oh yes. Very much.”

  “Frau O’Shea has even participated in jigsaw puzzling competitively,” Herr Adler chimed in.

  Annie blushed. “Only in a few small charity events.”

  “Super,” said Herr Hilst. “We’ll need someone who can work with speed.”

  “Our estimate is that it’s going to take our team almost three hundred years to finish assembling all of the papers that the Stasi shredded when the Wall was coming down,” added Herr Adler.

  Annie laughed lightly, until Herr Hilst said, “He’s not kidding. He’s done the math.”

  Herr Adler rattled off the numbers. “Most of us reconstruct about ten pages a day. When we’re at a full staff at both offices, that amounts to five hundred and fifty pages per day and over a hundred and thirty-seven thousand pages every year. We’re working through sixteen thousand sacks of shredded documents, and each sack contains about twenty-five thousand pages.”