Puzzle People (9781613280126) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.