Hans’s mouth twisted. “You bourgeois people,” he said in tones of disgust. “You can’t bear it when others have power over you.”

“Bourgeois?” said Lili. “I don’t have a uniformed chauffeur to hold an umbrella over me while I walk from the car to the house. Nor does Alice. There’s only one bourgeois in this room, Hans.”

He picked up the package and handed it to Alice. “Open it,” he said.

Alice took off the brown paper wrapping. Inside was a copy of Plum Nellie’s latest album, The Interpretation of Dreams. Her face lit up.

Lili wondered what trick Hans was up to now.

“Why don’t you play your father’s record?” Hans said.

Alice withdrew the inner white envelope from the colored sleeve. Then with finger and thumb she took the black plastic disc from the envelope.

It came out in two pieces.

Hans said: “It seems to be broken. What a shame.”

Alice began to cry.

Hans stood up. “I know the way out,” he said, and he left.

• • •

Unter den Linden was the broad boulevard through East Berlin to the Brandenburg Gate. Under another name, the street continued into West Berlin through the park called the Tiergarten. Since 1961, though, Unter den Linden had dead-ended at the Brandenburg Gate, blocked by the Berlin Wall. From the park on the west side, the view of the Brandenburg Gate was disfigured by a high, ugly, gray-green fence covered with graffiti, and a sign in German that said:

WARNING

YOU ARE NOW LEAVING

WEST BERLIN

Beyond the fence was the killing field of the Wall.

Plum Nellie’s road crew built a stage right up against the ugly fence and stacked a mighty wall of loudspeakers facing out into the park. On Walli’s instructions, equally powerful speakers faced the other way, into East Berlin. He wanted Alice to hear him. A reporter had told him that the East German government objected to the speakers. “Tell them that if they take their wall down, I’ll do the same with mine,” Walli had said, and the quote was in all the papers.

Originally they had thought to do the German gig in Hamburg, but then Walli had heard about Hans Hoffmann breaking Alice’s disc, and in retaliation he had asked Dave to reschedule in Berlin, so that a million East Germans would be able to hear the songs Hoffmann had attempted to deny to Alice. Dave had loved the idea.

Now they stood together, looking at the stage from the side as thousands of fans gathered in the park. “This is going to be the loudest we’ve ever been,” said Dave.

“Good,” said Walli. “I want them to hear my guitar all the way to fucking Leipzig.”

“Remember the old days?” Dave said. “Those tinny little speakers they had in baseball stadiums?”

“No one could hear us—we couldn’t hear ourselves!”

“Now a hundred thousand people can listen to music that sounds the way we intended.”

“It’s kind of a miracle.”

When Walli returned to his dressing room, Rebecca was there. “This is fantastic,” she said. “There must be a hundred thousand people in the park!”