Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

laughing. A woman shoved a bottle of champagne through the driver’s side window and kissed the wide-eyed driver, while a couple of teenagers stuck flowers in the front bumper.

“What’s that about?” I asked my sister.

“Trabi thumping,” she said. “They’ve been doing it all day. Trabants are really awful cars, but that’s all they have over there.”

Another rattletrap car crept along behind it and was given the same treatment. I turned to ask Quinn how our being out in an enormous crowd watching people dent cars would accomplish anything, but she was gone. The arm I was holding on to belonged to a middle-aged man with a mustache; he was grinning at me with delight.

He went on grinning as I apologized and disengaged, feeling like an idiot, and a drunken idiot at that. I hadn’t had much beer, but it didn’t take much combined with jet lag and mass celebratory hysteria. People kept hugging me as I struggled through the crush; I stopped trying to fight them off. It was faster just to go along with it and keep moving. After a while I realized I was automatically hugging everyone I passed. When in Rome … or West Berlin.

Working my way through the crowd, I began hearing snatches of English. When I looked around, though, I couldn’t see who was speaking. I listened in vain for Quinn’s voice. Then all the voices were drowned out by the sound of fireworks. Multicolored lights blossomed overhead, briefly turning the night as bright as day. None of the joy-filled, upturned faces around me belonged to Quinn. I kept pushing toward the wall, calling out her name.

More fireworks streaked skyward and exploded. Suddenly a new light hit my eyes, blinding me for a couple of seconds before it slid away and rippled over the crowd: Someone on top of the wall was wielding a spotlight like a searchlight. The bright circle moved back and forth, pausing here and there; the people caught in it waved their arms and cheered.

Trying to blink away the dark patches of afterimage, I kept pushing toward the wall, calling out my sister’s name. More lights appeared high up now, large banks of them, sending faint multiple shadows from the people on top of the wall over the crowd below. I put one hand up to try to shield my eyes, watering madly now from the cold. Or maybe I was so caught up in the moment I was crying with happiness like everyone else in Berlin; I honestly didn’t know anymore and I was starting to feel a little scared. Not just by that but by the fact that the crowd was getting so thick that sometimes my feet didn’t touch the ground.

Abruptly, I fetched up against something hard and rough and cold. I’d reached the infamous Berlin Wall, where people had died making a break for freedom, machine-gunned by East Berlin guards—and where it seemed I was going to be crushed to death, squashed by the entire happy population of West Berlin celebrating its symbolic fall.

With great effort, I pushed myself back so I could turn around, just as something hit the stone inches from my right eye. I had a glimpse of a grinning male face and then flinched as a large hammer came at me. Chips and dust flew against the side of my face.

“Watch it, you moron!” I yelled, startled and angry. “I got that in my eye!” I had one hand pressed to my eye and I didn’t actually know if that were true, but it would have been just my luck to be blinded by fragments from the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Where the hell was Quinn? Blind or not, I was going to kill her.

“Here—a special souvenir!” Someone shoved something into my other hand and closed my fingers around it.

After a bit of careful blinking, I determined that my eye was all right even if I was still in danger of being mashed to pulp against the wall, then I turned to see the grinning face again. He was using a hammer and chisel on the wall but at a safer, lower level.

“What are you doing?” I asked, forgetting I was mad at him.

“Getting pieces of the wall,” he said happily. “Special souvenirs! I gave you one!” He jerked his chin at my closed hand. I opened my fingers to see a jagged chunk of stone sitting on my palm. “See? Piece of the real Berlin Wall, the night it came down! Have to get it while we can, before it’s gone!”

In spite of everything, I had to laugh. Yeah, the Berlin Wall was most definitely down. In a year’s time, there’d be chunks of broken stone and brick for sale in every hotel and airport gift shop, attached to key chains, set in snow globes and paperweights and framed boxes, with or without an accompanying historic photo—Pieces of the True Wall, for sale along with toilet paper, shampoo, and CDs by Duran Duran and Cyndi Lauper. The people behind the Iron Curtain had no idea what was about to hit them.

“You want some more?” the guy asked me, pausing with the chisel against the wall. There were lots of craters where bits had just been chipped away.

I dropped the fragment in my coat pocket and shook my head. “Nah. Save some for the East Berliners. They’ll need the income.”

He frowned. “I am from East Berlin,” he said.

I nodded and started to push my way past him when he grabbed my arm.

“Wait!” He fumbled in his coat pocket and came up with a compact camera. It looked brand new. “Please, could you take my picture?”

I looked at the people crowded around us. “I can try.”

He posed, smiling, holding up his hammer and chisel in one hand and a large chunk of stone in the other.

“Say ‘cheese.’”

“No, say ‘freeeeeeedom!’” someone shouted, to the delight of everyone in earshot. The guy did so but then had to wait an extra second while I found the right button for the shutter, which probably made his smile look just a bit strained. Not that it mattered: He now had photographic evidence to prove his rubble was really from the wall and not just something he picked up off the ground somewhere.

“There you go,” I said, passing the camera back to him. “That’ll take care of the provenance.”

He thanked me, looking puzzled, and went on chipping away. As I kept moving along the wall, I saw that he wasn’t the only souvenir hunter. Lots of people were doing the same thing, some of them filling plastic bags with chunks of history. There was one woman, however, who was actually fussy about the pieces she chipped out of the wall. She would work on a small area very carefully, doing her best to get a chunk at least as large as the palm of her hand. Once she did that, she would hold it for a few seconds, head bowed and eyes closed. Then she would either discard it and look for another section of wall or kiss it and drop it into the large cloth bag slung diagonally across her front.

I was curious but more concerned about finding Quinn. I tried calling out her name again, and this time, the sound of my American accent generated a new and unexpected response.

“American!” “Yay, American!” “USA … USA … USA!”

Suddenly, everyone in my immediate vicinity loved me. And I mean, loved. They rushed me all at once, pressing me into the cold stone, grabbing me, kissing my arms, my hands, whatever they could get at. This was it, I thought as I gasped for air; I was going to die of love at the Berlin Wall.

Then I felt my feet leave the ground. Oh, good, I thought giddily, I was going to crowd surf. That was so much better than getting crushed to death, I wouldn’t even mind if someone groped my butt. A small price to pay …

But I kept rising higher and higher, and before I knew what was really happening, I was already on top of the wall amid a group of laughing, dancing people who also seemed to love me a lot, while the crowd below cheered.

The only coherent thought I had was Omigod, as my sense of balance disappeared and left me teetering among strangers who might not notice I was about to fall to my death. Then my balance returned as abruptly as it had vanished and I was fine. Better than fine—it was the perfect vantage point for looking for Quinn.

I hollered as loud as I could between my cupped hands. People heard me: I saw them turn to look up at me curiously and then go on with their hugging and kissing and dancing and drinking champagne. Getting a bit more used to where I was, I started slowly sidling along the wall, stopping only for the occasional hug and kiss. Flashlights played over the sea of people. A flashlight was exactly what I needed, I thought; maybe everyone loved everyone so much up here that I could persuade somebody to loan me one.

A tall woman with spiky red hair was only too happy to let me use hers on the crowd, first demonstrating zigzags and figure eights and other patterns. I obliged briefly and then began searching methodically among the