Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics)

21

Six Months Later: Inspector Escherich

Six months after the receipt of the first postcard, Inspector Escherich stood stroking his sandy moustache in front of the map of Berlin, which he had marked with little red flags for the points where the Quangels’ postcards had been found. There were now forty-four such flags on the map; of the forty-eight postcards that the Quangels had written and dropped in those six months, all but four were now in the hands of the Gestapo. And even those four hadn’t been passed from hand to hand in factories and offices, as the Quangels believed; barely read, they had been immediately ripped up, flushed away, or consigned to the flames.

The door opens, and Escherich’s superior, SS Obergruppenführer Prall walks in. ‘Heil Hitler, Escherich! Why so thoughtful?’

‘Heil Hitler, Obergruppenführer! It’s the postcard phantom – the “Hobgoblin”, as I like to call him.’

‘Oh? Why’s that?’

‘No reason. Just thought of it. Maybe because he wants to make everyone afraid.’

‘And how far along are we with the case, Escherich?’

Escherich gave a long, drawn-out ‘Hmm!’ He looked thoughtfully at the map. ‘Well, according to the distribution, he ought to be somewhere north of Alexanderplatz; that’s where we have the highest incidence. But the city centre and the east are fairly well covered, too. None at all in the south, and in the west, just two recorded drops south of Nollendorfplatz – I suppose he must have something that brings him there occasionally.’

‘In other words, the map doesn’t tell us anything! It’s not a blind bit of use!’

‘Wait! Patience! In another six months, unless my Hobgoblin has already blundered in that time, the map will have far more to say.’

‘Six months! You’re priceless, Escherich! You want to leave that pig to wallow and grunt for six more months, and not do anything to harass him but stick in a few more of your dainty flags!’

‘In our line of work we need to be patient, Obergruppenführer. In your terms, it would be like lying in wait for a stag. You can’t shoot before he appears. But when he comes, I’ll let him have it, don’t you worry!’

‘All I hear is patience, patience, Escherich! Do you think our bosses have that much patience? I’m afraid we’ll get a dressing-down soon that we won’t forget in a hurry. Think about it, forty-four cards, that’s almost two a week delivered to us here. My superiors know that. And so they ask me: Well? Caught him yet? Why not? What is it you do? Stick flags in a map and twiddle our thumbs, I reply. And then I get my dressing-down, and the order to arrest the man within two weeks.’

Inspector Escherich was grinning behind his sandy moustache. ‘And then you come along and you bawl me out, and give me the instruction to nab the man in one week!’

‘Take that grin off your face, you loon! If something like this comes to Himmler’s attention, all bets are off, and who knows if we won’t meet one day in Sachsenhausen, reminiscing about the good old days when all we did was stick flags into maps!’

‘Don’t worry, Obergruppenführer! I’m an old hand at this, and I know we can’t do anything better than what we’re doing at the moment: wait. Let your superiors come up with some better way of capturing my Hobgoblin if they can. Of course, they can’t.’

‘Escherich, think about it, if we get forty-four of the things in here, well, that means at least as many, maybe over a hundred postcards, knocking around Berlin, sowing dissatisfaction, encouraging sabotage. We can’t sit back and let it happen!’

‘A hundred postcards in circulation!’ Escherich said, and laughed. ‘You just don’t know the German people, Obergruppenführer! Oh, I’m so sorry, please excuse me, Obergruppenführer, I didn’t mean it to sound like that, of course the Obergruppenführer has a very keen idea of the German people, certainly better than I do, but the people are all so frightened now! They’re handing the things in like there’s no tomorrow – I bet there’s no more than ten postcards in circulation that we haven’t accounted for.’

After a wrathful look on account of Escherich’s offensive exclamation (these old policemen really were a bit dim, and acted way too pally!) and a warning raising of his arm, the Obergruppenführer said: ‘But even ten are too many! One is too many! I don’t want any circulating any more! Arrest the man, Escherich – and fast!’

The inspector stood there in silence. He didn’t lift his gaze from his superior’s gleaming bootcaps, but merely stroked his moustache and remained silent.

‘Well may you stand there in silence!’ exclaimed Prall angrily. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I’m another one of those clever dicks who can shout down your ideas, but haven’t any of their own.’

Inspector Escherich had long since lost the ability to blush. But at that instant, when his secret thoughts were so exactly as claimed by Prall, he was as near to doing it as he could be. He felt more embarrassed than he had in a long time.

Obergruppenführer Prall was aware of this. Cheerily he said, ‘Well, I don’t want to embarrass you, Escherich! And I don’t want to dole out advice, either. I’m no detective, as you know, I’ve just been delegated to head up this section. But now tell me something, will you? In the next few days I will have to report on this case, and I’d like to get my facts straight. The man has never been seen in the act of dropping these cards, is that right?’

‘Never.’

‘And no suspicions exist in the buildings where the cards were found?’

‘Suspicions? Oodles of suspicions! There’s suspicion everywhere nowadays. But there’s nothing informing it beyond pettishness against a neighbour, a bit of snooping, eagerness to come forward with an accusation.’

‘And the people bringing them in? All beyond suspicion themselves?’

‘Beyond suspicion?’ Escherich twisted his mouth. ‘Good God, Obergruppenführer, no one is beyond suspicion these days.’ And, with a hurried glance at the face of his superior, ‘Or everyone is. But we’ve gone through all the finders twice through. None of them has anything to do with the writer of the cards.’

The Obergruppenführer sighed. ‘You should have been a minister. You’re so comforting, Escherich!’ he said. ‘Well, so we’re left with the cards themselves. What sort of clues do they offer?’

‘Few. Precious few!’ said Escherich. ‘And I wouldn’t want to be a minister, I’m telling you the truth, Obergruppenführer! After the first mistake he made by mentioning his son, I thought he would betray himself. But he’s turned out to be a cunning so-and-so.’

‘Tell me, Escherich!’ Prall suddenly exclaimed, ‘did you ever think it might be a woman? It just occurred to me, hearing you speak of the only son.’

The inspector looked at his superior in surprise for a moment. He reflected. Then he said, sadly shaking his head, ‘No, it’s not that either, Obergruppenführer. That’s one of the points I’m absolutely certain of. My Hobgoblin is a widower, or a man who lives by himself. If there was a woman anywhere involved, there’d have been some loose talk, I’m sure of that. Six months – no woman can keep a secret for that length of time!’

‘Maybe a mother who’s lost her only son?’

‘Not possible. That least of all!’ determined Escherich. ‘Whoever has a sorrow will seek comfort, and to obtain comfort, you have to talk. I’m sure there’s no woman in the picture. There’s only one person who knows the story, and he’s not telling anyone!’

‘As I said: a minister! What other leads?’

‘Few, Obergruppenführer, very few. I’m pretty sure the man is a miser, or has at some time had a run-in with the Winter Relief Fund. Because whatever else he writes on the cards, he never fails to say: DON’T GIVE TO THE WINTER RELIEF FUND!’

‘Well, Escherich, if it’s a matter of looking for people in Berlin who are loath to give to the Winter Relief Fund…’

‘As I say, Obergruppenführer. It’s not much.’

‘What else?’

The inspector shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nothing, really,’ he said. ‘We can fairly safely assume the card dropper doesn’t have a regular job, because the cards have been found at all times of day, from eight in the morning to nine at night. And as the staircases that my Hobgoblin likes to use are much frequented, we can probably assume that there’s only a short time between a card being dropped and its being handed in to us. And other than that? Perhaps a manual worker who hasn’t had occasion to do much writing in his life, but not badly educated, hardly ever misspells a word, expresses himself fairly skilfully…’

Escherich stopped, and both men said nothing for quite a long time, as they stared blankly at the map with its red flags.

Then Obergruppenführer Prall said, ‘A hard nut to crack, Escherich. A hard nut for both of us.’

The inspector said comfortingly, ‘There’s no nut that’s too hard to crack – a nutcracker will do the job!’

‘Sometimes you get your fingers jammed, though, Escherich!’

‘Patience, Obergruppenfhürer, a little patience!’

‘Well, as long as the people upstairs are patient; it’s not my call. Go and rack your brain some more, maybe you’ll find a better strategy than just waiting around. Heil Hitler, Escherich!’

‘Heil Hitler, Obergruppenführer!’

On his own again, Inspector Escherich stood a while in front of the map, stroking his moustache. The case wasn’t entirely the way he had presented it. Here, he wasn’t the hard-boiled detective whom nothing could shock or surprise. He had become interested in this quiet and, alas, still unknown cardwriter, who had thrown himself so fearlessly and so deliberately into an almost hopeless struggle. The Hobgoblin case, to begin with, had been one among many. But now he was interested. He had to find the man who was out there under one of the ten thousand roofs of Berlin; he wanted to see him face to face, this man who, with the regularity of a machine, turned out two or three postcards every week, which arrived at his desk on Monday evening, or Tuesday morning at the very latest.

Escherich had long run out of the patience he had prescribed to the Obergruppenführer. Escherich was a huntsman – the old detective was a lover of the chase. It was in his blood. Others hunted wild boar; he hunted humans. The fact that the boar or the human had to die at the end of the chase – that didn’t move him at all. It was preordained for the boar to die like this, as it was for humans if they wrote such postcards. He had been racking his brain for some time on how to find the Hobgoblin sooner – he didn’t need Obergruppenführer Prall to prod him. But patience remained the only method. In such a minor matter, you couldn’t unleash the resources of an entire police force, search every apartment in Berlin – quite apart from the fact that he wasn’t supposed to provoke agitation in the city. He needed to have patience.

And then, if you were sufficiently patient, something might happen quite suddenly: almost always, something happened. The criminal would make a mistake, or luck would desert him. It was those two things you had to wait for, the mistake or the change of luck. One or the other almost always happened. Escherich hoped that in this case, though, there wouldn’t be any ‘almost’. He was interested, all right, powerfully interested. Basically, he didn’t care now whether he settled some criminal’s hash or not. Escherich, as noted, was a hunter. Not because he loved the taste of roast meat, but for the pleasure of the chase. He knew that at the moment the quarry was killed, or the criminal was caught and confronted with the evidence – at that moment his interest in a case would die. The quarry was killed, the man was in a detention cell, the hunt was over. Till the next one.

Escherich turns his colourless gaze away from the map. Now he sits at his desk and slowly and thoughtfully eats his lunch. When the telephone rings, he hesitates briefly, then picks up. Fairly indifferently, he listens to the voice at the other end: ‘This is the Police Department at Frankfurter Allee. Inspector Escherich?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Are you working on the case of the anonymous postcards?’

‘Yes, I am. Any developments? Come on, make it quick!’

‘We’re pretty sure we’ve caught the card dropper.’

‘In the act?’

‘All but. He denies it, of course.’

‘Where are you holding him?’

‘Here at the station.’

‘Keep him, I’ll be with you in ten minutes. And don’t question him further! Leave the fellow in peace! I want to talk to him myself. Understood?’

‘Perfectly, Inspector!’

‘I’m on my way!’

For a moment, Inspector Escherich stood nearly motionless by the telephone. The lucky chance – Lady Luck! He knew it, it was a matter of patience!

He hurried off to the first interrogation of the cardwriter.