Puzzle People (9781613280126) (3 page)

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 years.

“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.”

“So . . . roughly two hundred and ninety years,” said Herr Hilst.

Annie was stunned by the enormity of the project. It all seemed so futile, but she knew how important these papers were to the German people.

“Sixteen thousand sacks?” she said.

“It sounds like a lot, but it’s only about 5 percent of the files that the Stasi collected on their citizens,” Herr Adler pointed out.

Stasi: the East German secret police. Even the name sounded harsh and intimidating every time Annie heard it. The word cut the air like a two-syllable hatchet.
Nazi. Stasi.
The similarity between the two brutal words was eerie.

“I saw one of the shredders that the Stasi used when the Wall was coming down in ’89,” Annie said. “It was an industrial monster with a wide open mouth. Almost like a wood chipper.”

She even remembered what they called those machines—a
reisswolf,
or “rip grinder.”

“Yes, but the industrial shredders were not enough,” said Herr Hilst. “Stasi agents brought in armies of smaller office shredders, burning out hundreds of machines.”

“Many agents even resorted to ripping up documents by hand, and those documents should be easier for you to reassemble,” Herr Adler added. “It’s not easy tearing documents by hand, so they weren’t ripped into nearly as many pieces as when they were shredded mechanically.”

“But how do I know that all of the pieces of a single document are even in this one sack?” Annie asked. “What if the pieces are spread all over the place?”

“Ah, good question,” Herr Adler said, grinning. “The Stasi made your job much easier than it could’ve been. When they were destroying files, they were in a panic, and no one thought of spreading out the documents among the different sacks. No one stopped to think that it might be unwise to stuff the shredded remains of individual documents in the same sack.”

“That’s because no one thought anyone would be crazy enough to piece the documents back together again. They figured that the secrets died when a document went through the shredder,” Herr Hilst said. “They were wrong.”

“They should’ve just burned them all if they wanted to destroy the evidence,” she said.

“The Stasi were doing just that in outlying offices, but people started noticing the smoke and getting suspicious and angry, even stopping them. In Berlin, they tried to be more discreet,” said Herr Adler.

Annie stared at her sack of shredded paper. Sixteen thousand sacks comprised only 5 percent of the files that the Stasi collected on its own people? It was mind-boggling. But she supposed that forty years of snooping on your citizens would create mountains of paper. Stacks of files, a bureaucratic Alps. And when a good chunk of this paper was jammed into shredders, it created a blizzard of secrets. Now these documents had to be reassembled, piece by piece, fragment by fragment, secret by secret.

“So . . . you are American?” said Herr Hilst after Herr Adler had left the room, leaving Annie to begin her work.

“Actually, I have dual citizenship because my mother is German, and she registered me for citizenship when I was a child. But I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and I’ve spent most of my life in America.”

Herr Hilst arched his eyebrows and smiled. “Arizona? I have always wanted to visit your West.”

Annie smiled back. She had noticed his lamp, which had a base resembling a stagecoach. On the bookshelf was the statue of a cowboy on a bucking horse, while a framed movie poster for a German Western hung on the wall.

“I noticed your Western decor. Very nice.”

Herr Hilst laughed uneasily. “It probably looks a little foolish. A grown man infatuated with cowboys. There weren’t many German cowboys in real life.”

“I don’t think it’s foolish in the least. Americans have a similar passion for medieval knights, even though there weren’t any American knights. I just think . . . I suppose every culture is looking for something that it’s missing.”

Although Annie’s mother was German, her father was Irish through and through, making for an interesting mix of precision and poetry. She explained that her parents moved to Germany when she was five years old, and that she lived there until she was eleven.

“So I’m well aware of the mystique that the Wild West holds throughout the country.”

Smiling, Herr Hilst picked up his mug. “Care for a cup of coffee?”

“No, but thanks.” Annie’s vice wasn’t coffee; it was another c-word—
cola.
She regularly vowed that she would cut back on Pepsi, and one time she had gone a month without a single can. But she always found some excuse to return to its sweet comfort.

With a nod, Herr Hilst left the office, and Annie gave him a smile, relieved that he liked to chat. Some German workers were all business and did not like easy banter during work, but Herr Hilst didn’t seem to fit this mold.

Annie looked down at her sack and sighed. Ten pages per day. That sounded like a lot of puzzles, and she hoped she could meet the average. She untied the rope that sealed her first sack of documents, and then she reached in and grabbed a handful of pieces and started spreading them across her desk. People, places, times, and dates—the past leaped out at her from every fragment. But she would never forget the first name that caught her eye. That name would change her life.

It was
Stefan Hansel.

3

East Berlin
December 1961

Erich Mielke stared down at Stefan Hansel from the framed photograph on the wall. Mielke, the minister of state security, had formed and shaped the Stasi; and in the photo, he looked irritated about something, as if he had just gazed into someone’s file and discovered all of the person’s most unpleasant secrets. Mielke’s eyes were small and accusing, his ears a little on the large side—all the better to listen to your secrets, my dear. His hair retreated from his forehead, and he had a tuft of gray perched above either ear. If Mielke in the photograph could speak, he would say, “Comrades, we must know
everything
.”

This intimidating photo was the only adornment in the plain white interrogation room. The interrogator sat behind an uncluttered blonde-wood desk, with only a phone and a call button device. Stefan was precariously perched in front of him on a squat brown stool with one short leg, so it seemed as if the tottering stool was continuously trying to buck him off.

“So you’d like me to believe that you did not know your own girlfriend was planning to escape. Is that correct, comrade?” the interrogator asked. The interrogator was Stefan’s Stasi case officer, a man who called himself Hans Wolf—surely not his real name. He was a big, beefy man, but not what you would call fat. He had large rough hands and sausage-thick fingers that hinted at manual labor in the past.

“I didn’t know she was planning such a thing.” Stefan tried to pour sincerity into his words. “She didn’t say
anything
to me about it.”

Stefan had an intensity about him, and you could see it in his eyes. He was an attractive man in his twenties with the kind of look that turned the heads of women. Narrow lips, striking blue eyes, thick eyebrows. He wore his thick dark hair slicked back—a Mediterranean look. He was fidgety, nervous, and wished he had a cigarette.

Stefan was telling the truth when he said Katarina left him in the dark. He had been perplexed when she never answered any of his phone calls, never answered any knocks on her door. He knew nothing of her fate until Wolf informed him that she had escaped to West Berlin in a borrowed car. Drove right through Checkpoint Charlie, dodging bullets.

“What does that say about you?” Wolf asked. “Your job is to keep an eye on students, and you can’t even keep track of your own girlfriend!”

Stefan looked away. “I’m sorry.”

He still couldn’t believe that Katarina had deserted him for the West. After so many girls in his life, he thought Katarina could be the one. And now this! How could she put him in such a precarious position? She had made him the boyfriend of a defector.

Wolf continued to stare at Stefan, rapping his large fingers on the tabletop.

Stefan broke the silence. “Katarina was . . . she
is,
I mean . . . she’s a mystery. I suppose that was the attraction.”

Stefan was well aware that Katarina did not buy into the East German system, for she often said things that were completely outrageous—and dangerous. She loved to make jokes at the GDR’s expense, and he remembered several of them—but he wouldn’t dare repeat them.

East German leader Walter Ulbricht and the head of the secret police, Erich Mielke, are talking about their hobbies.

Ulbricht: I collect all the jokes about me that are in circulation.

Mielke: Then we have almost the same hobby. I collect the people who bring the jokes into circulation.

Stefan kept Katarina’s most damning statements out of his regular reports as an informer. If he hadn’t, she would have landed in prison long ago.

“Katarina had help from her West German cousin,” Wolf said. “Can you think of anyone in the Eastern zone who might have assisted her in this escape?”

Stefan knew what he was driving at. Wolf thought
he
had assisted her. He saw the suspicion in the man’s eyes. Stefan had to give him some names, so he tossed out the names of a few of Katarina’s closest friends. Knowing Katarina, however, she probably acted alone. She was gregarious and beautiful, so she had more than her share of friends. But she had even more secrets than friends, and she probably concealed her escape plans from everyone.

A few times, when she had said something particularly reckless about the GDR, Stefan considered breaking up with her, thinking it might be safer to distance himself from her. But she was fun to be around, and he couldn’t resist her striking good looks and the stares she attracted when they were together. Some people thought he had Audrey Hepburn on his arm. Besides, Wolf encouraged the relationship, thinking that Stefan could use her as a way to penetrate the circle of student dissenters at Humboldt University.

“You know, we ensured that you got into the law program,” said Wolf. “You didn’t have the academic performance to qualify on your own power.”

“I’m grateful for that.”

“Don’t be.” Wolf dismissed Stefan’s gratitude with the flick of his hand. “You are not in the program any longer.”

Stefan nearly toppled from the stool as it lurched forward on its uneven legs. Law school was his dream. He loved the law. He loved the structure of it, the certainty.

“I’ll do better,” he said, pleading.

Wolf leaned back in his chair, still staring at Stefan. Stefan looked away but found himself eye to eye with Erich Mielke in the photograph. So he turned back to Wolf, then moved his eyes to the floor. At least there weren’t any eyes staring back at him from the tile.

“Don’t worry, we still plan to use you,” said Wolf, finally breaking the silence. “Perhaps if you improve your performance—perhaps then you can still study law.”

“Thank you, Herr Wolf. What must I do?”

“Students at Free University are helping our students escape. We know that for a fact. But we need to know the
how, when,
and
where.”

Stefan nodded uneasily.

“We also need to know the who.”

Peter’s father, Herr Hermann, scared Elsa. He always had. But especially today.

“Did you say anything that would have caused Peter to flee the Republic?” Herr Hermann asked calmly, tapping off the ash from his cigarette.

Coughing in the fog of smoke that filled her small apartment, Elsa shrank back in the couch. “No. Nothing was wrong between us.” She didn’t mention the small tiff as Peter was boarding the train. Or the big blowup when she told him she had posted subversive leaflets.

“I cannot believe that my son would do such a thing, unless he was driven to it.”

Herr Hermann rose from the chair and walked to the window. He lit up another cigarette—his fourth since arriving. He was in his fifties, a handsome man—impeccably groomed, cleanshaven, with every hair on his head neatly combed in place. He made the trip from his home in Zwickau to Berlin as soon as possible after Stasi agents had appeared at his door asking questions about Peter. He exhaled a cloud of unfiltered smoke and stared out the window.

“Do you know what it’s like to have the government,
my
government, come to my door asking if I knew anything about my own son’s plot to escape to West Berlin?”

Elsa didn’t answer. She stared at her hands.

“Do you?”

“No, sir.”

“It is humiliating. I am a loyal citizen. Peter has also been a loyal citizen. He always has been. Only an outside influence could have driven him to do such a thing.”

Elsa knew what he was getting at. Only
she
could have driven Peter away.

She still could not believe that Peter had given her up for the West. She had sensed a hardening in his attitude toward her over the past year, a gray coldness. But she didn’t think he would ever leave her. She had thought about asking if he wanted to put off their wedding, wondering if that might bring back the Peter she had known most of her life. Was he just feeling trapped?

In her heart, she believed that Peter was fleeing the authoritative rule of his father, but she would not dare voice such an idea. Herr Hermann had pressured his son into engineering because of his own passion for technology and science. Herr Hermann saw the East as dominant in all things technological; the Soviet Sputnik program was proof of that. The socialist workers’ paradise would be efficient, clean, reliable, and modern; and his son would be a part of this brave new world, whether he liked it or not.

The irony, Elsa thought, was that Herr Hermann worked at the Trabant factory in Zwickau. The Trabant—or Trabi as most called it—was a compact communist-made car that belched smoke; in fact, the car was an even heavier smoker than Herr Hermann. It took twenty-one seconds to go from zero to sixty-two miles per hour, and its top speed was seventy. Some joked that the best way to double the value of a Trabi was to fill up the tank. Was this the GDR’s idea of socialist dominance in technology?

“Tell me what happened between you and Peter!” Herr Hermann suddenly burst out. “Did you argue?” He wheeled around from the window and stabbed a finger in Elsa’s face. “I want to know what you did to drive Peter to the West! Tell me!”

Elsa knew this outburst was inevitable, but it shocked her anyway. She flinched at his finger, then dissolved into tears. “I don’t know why he left. He loved me.”

“He could not have loved you. He had it good here, so why else would he leave unless he wanted to be rid of you!”

Elsa wouldn’t look Herr Hermann in the face. When she dared look up, she kept her eyes on his large hands, afraid of them, as if they were autonomous and very dangerous creatures. She was well aware of how much he relied on the back of his hand when Peter was growing up. Elsa eyed the door, wondering if she could reach it before Herr Hermann could grab her. He must have noticed the direction of her gaze, because he stepped between her and the door.

“You’re telling me you never fought? All couples fight. What did you fight about?”

“I don’t know. We hardly fought at all. He loved me.”

In truth, she wasn’t sure if he loved her, but she wasn’t about to admit that to his father. Finally fed up, Herr Hermann stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door on the way out and rattling a vase from a shelf. It crashed to pieces on the floor.

For almost a half hour, Elsa sat on her couch, shaking. She made herself a cup of tea but let it go cold before taking even one sip. She had classes to attend that afternoon, but she spent it in bed with the drapes drawn.

She didn’t think things could get any worse. But they could, and they did. One night later, the Stasi came for her.