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Booking my ticket, I thought of Uwe and Scheller and our puzzle women conversation so long ago. I called Uwe at the television station to catch up, and to tell him I’ve come full circle. A former colleague answered the phone. He said Uwe took a promotion to be roving correspondent in the United States, and that he and Frederica and little Lucas were now happily ensconced in Washington. I asked him to pass on my best.

The Stasi File Authority office where the puzzle women are housed is in Zirndorf, a village outside Nuremberg. The office is in the same walled compound where asylum seekers are being kept. Two Ethiopians, or perhaps Eritreans, men with sad biblical faces and aimless arms, walk about the outdoor area.

The director, Herr Raillard, meets me at the entrance and we go upstairs to his office. It is a plain administrative building that smells of floor wax and wet cardboard. Herr Raillard is a compact man with straight white hair to his shoulders and small glasses. He is an archivist.

I am nervous as a cat. I am in an unaccountable hurry. I have been thinking about this place for so long as the focus of Miriam’s hopes; I want there to be stainless steel benches and people wearing hair nets and white cloth gloves. I want security guards on the entrances and cameras in the workrooms. I want the completed puzzle pages to be scanned into computers, correlated to the files they belong to and for the people they affect to be called up by sensitive, trained personnel and informed about the new links in their lives.

I want them to find out what happened to Charlie Weber.

I am sure Herr Raillard has things to do but his desk is uncluttered and he gives me the impression of having cleared the agenda for our meeting today. He is a quiet and unassuming man, who made his career in the West German archives at Koblenz, and he is now looking forward to retirement. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I’ll be sixty-three shortly,’ as if to say, ‘and I’m out of here.’

He tells me that this work started in 1995, after the sacks of material had sat around in Berlin for five years. Fifteen thousand sacks were found at Normannenstrasse in January 1990. They contained shredded and hand-ripped files, index cards, photos and unwound tapes and film.

Herr Raillard has arranged for me to take coffee with some of the workers. I am keen to meet the puzzle people. I ask him how many there are, and whether they are all women, as I have heard. ‘Oh no,’ he says, ‘but there are probably more women than men.’ He is cautious and exact, and asks his secretary to check the numbers. She comes back with a note: eighteen women and thirteen men.

First, we go down the hall to see the workrooms. On the way, he tells me there has been some controversy because the victims want the work here to go more quickly. A computer program exists that could make this happen; it puts a lot of the pieces together very fast, based on a scan of the exact shape of the ripped edge. But, Herr Raillard says, for the purposes of evidence the documents reconstituted by computer do not count as originals. This doesn’t make much sense to me, because generally people don’t bring cases, they just want to know what happened in their lives. ‘And it would be very expensive,’ he adds. That is more likely why it’s not in use.

The door opens onto an ordinary office; my eyes take in potted plants and old paint on the walls and a poster of glassy-eyed kittens tangled in wool. There is a large desk with an empty chair behind it. ‘Must be on a break,’ Herr Raillard says, gesturing towards the chair. But I am only half listening. The window is wide open, a white curtain moves in the breeze and I am panicked, my heart climbing steps up my chest, because on the desk there are masses and masses of tiny pieces of paper—some in small stacks but others spread out all over. There are so many tatters of paper that the desk is not big enough, and the worker has started to lay them out on top of the filing cabinet as well. The pieces are different sizes, from a fifth of an A4 page