Puzzle People (9781613280126) Read Free

two-lane inspection bay. All cars had to be checked thoroughly because people had tried smuggling human cargo in their trunks. So Katarina started to pull toward the inspection bay. The guard, clearly bored by the routine, looked away for just a moment, and that’s when she made her move. Flooring the accelerator, she swung the steering wheel hard to the left, and the Austin-Healey Sprite took off with a squeal that jolted the guard out of his stupor.
    “Halt!”
    Katarina took a quick glance at the startled guard in her rearview mirror and saw him point a gun in her direction. She ducked a split second before the guard fired a shot, but she didn’t hear the bullet find a target and figured that it must have gone flying by, into the night. Straightening back up, she headed directly for the first of a series of barriers—four-foot-high walls designed to slow down cars by forcing them to weave around the barriers.
    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