Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

which there were several. He recalled seeing unusual activity of road construction crews on the trolly ride to the Hall of Records, unusual enough site in East Berlin on a normal day, but to see dozens of them, together with the blocked access to plat maps, could only mean the Central Committee had big plans for the city perimeter in general, and from what Nicolaus saw from the trolly, for avenue Unter den Linden, and the Brandenburger Tor in particular.

Plat maps dating back to 1943, however, were still where they would be expected in the stacks, surely of little help given the extensive re-landscaping done by the Allied B-17s that hovered over Berlin like aluminum overcast for the last two years of the war. As he thumbed through them, his eye caught a footnote describing odd underground structures indicated by dotted lines on the map leading from areas in old Berlin to the River Spree labeled “Entwässerungskanal“26. Large, concrete drainage ducts. He counted six of them in all, leading from parks and high two meters underground at their source, one going underneath Muntenstrasse 27, a meter below the surface of the River Spree.

Lengthy footnotes described the structures, notes that did not survive on modern plat maps of the city with which Nicolaus was intimately familiar. According to these notes, the structures were built by the Reich in 1943 as part of a plan to flood the city in the event of invasion by the Allies. Water would be brought by viaduct from ponds and rivers in the mountains to prevent tanks and planes from operating in the city, setting up the invaders as literal sitting ducks. The ducts would drain the water in a matter of a few hours to restore the city to normal operations. Whether these ducts still existed was not known. What was clear to Nicolaus, however, was that they had been completely forgotten and built over. They may never be used to drain water as originally intended, but they might still be quite useful to dispose of a body, or, perhaps as an escape route, something any good spy always has on hand in case the political winds change. Though not tall enough to fully stand in, being only 1.5 meters in diameter, any one of these ducts could suffice for Ulf’s new home, his taste in décor not being particularly well developed.

Providing these ducts still existed, Nicolaus cross searched municipal records for possible ingress points, not missing the irony of his being on this side of the challenge of entering a secure underground structure for a change. Over the last two decades, buildings had been erected over all of them, but because of the zones cordoned off as the border to West Berlin, not all the buildings were currently occupied. Most were even boarded up and condemned. A name on one of establishments still open, however, jumped off the index card and rang in his brain as a klaxon in a panic.

While not exactly on top of the duct, the building 100 meters away was a State-owned auto repair shop operated by a man named Raynor Zerrissen.

Nicolaus returned to the Embassy, contemplating just how to utilize Zerrissen’s proximity to the drainage duct, where he encountered a colleague at the commissary over a cup of espresso, and chatting about the unusual street works going on all over the city.

“It’s a wall” the colleague informed Nicolaus casually. “The Soviets told Honecker to build a wall. No one can come or go.”

The idea was preposterous to Nicolaus. “If people want to leave, they’ll just go around the wall, like the Germans did the Maginot line.”

“No,” his friend corrected him. “The wall completely circles West Berlin.”

“West Berlin? All of it?”

“Yep. The whole damn thing. West Berliners will be trapped in a bathtub of Capitalists in a bathroom of Marxists.”

“Why? What happened?”

“They’re not saying, but I’ve heard rumors that they’re looking for new evidence of an old Nazi war crime. Now you know everything I know. ”

Nicolaus sipped his espresso, trying to imagine the reaction of the West Berliners when they wake up in a few weeks, and the implications for him and Halina.

Nicolaus got up and started making plans. Maybe the ducts are not a new home for Ulf. Maybe they are an escape route. In a society where no one could be a trusted, perhaps the time had come to be reacquainted with their old friend, Raynor Zerrissen.

Mengele Nailed It

Though he had not seen them in over twenty years, Nicolaus assumed that the pair of legs emerging from beneath the two-stroke, two-passenger car, its original veneer of green paint scrubbed away by salty roads revealing islands of expanding rust, heralded in propaganda for being manufactured exclusively in East Germany, were those of Herr Doktor Raynor Zerrissen. Clad in gray and greasy trousers, and worn boots of an auto mechanic, he was no longer the prestigious rocket scientist. Homer had observed that ‘clothes ARE the man’, in which case Zerrissen was a man stripped of all power he once held at The Bunker, making this conversation a much easier one for Nicolaus.

While Nicolaus pondered the idea of how far the mighty could fall, the mechanic was remained unaware of his presence. He continued to peer into the undercarriage of the automobile, squinting out the glare of a bare lightbulb on the end of a threadbare fabric power cord, that snaked on the moist shop floor through three individual extension cords. Oil was dripping onto his face and eyeglasses. Draining radiators and replacing gaskets did not require Zerrissen’s degrees in math and mechanical engineering, but the State had offered him no more worthy challenges since his career came to that pyrotechnic end at the Bunker.

Nicolaus announced his presence with a flat “Bitte,” choosing to use his Polish accent, a rare use of his native tongue, carefully intoned not to imply fondness, but rather something between a command and a threat.

Zerrissen heard the word and noted the accent. He noticed a