Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics)

45

Inspector Escherich is Free Again

Inspector Escherich is back. The man who was written off as dead or good as dead has returned to life from the basements of the Gestapo. A little rumpled, a little in need of repair, but still, he is back at his desk, and his colleagues hasten to give him their sympathy. They had always gone on believing in him. They had been willing to do everything they could for him. ‘Only, you know, when the top brass drops someone in it, there’s nothing the likes of us can do about it. You just get your fingers burned. Well, you know all that anyway, Escherich, you understand.’

Escherich assures them he understands everything. He twists his mouth into a grin, but the grin looks a little sad, presumably because Escherich has not yet got the hang of grinning with a few teeth missing.

There were only two people who impressed him when he returned to work. One was Inspector Zott.

‘Colleague Escherich,’ he had said, ‘I am not being sent down to the basement in your place, even though I deserve it ten times more than you ever did. Not just because of the mistakes I made, but because I behaved like a bastard to you. My only excuse is that I did really believe you’d done bad work…’

‘Don’t mention it,’ Escherich had replied with his gap-toothed smile. ‘None of us have come out of the Hobgoblin case with reputations enhanced, not you, not me, none of us. It’s funny, but I’m quite excited to meet this man who has created such a lot of misfortune for his fellow men with these postcards. He must be a really odd bird…’

He looked thoughtfully at the inspector.

Zott extended his parchment-coloured hand. ‘Please don’t think too badly of me, Colleague Escherich,’ he said quietly. ‘And one other thing: I’ve got the idea that the culprit is something to do with the tram service. You’ll find it written up in the files. Please don’t lose sight of that in the course of your own investigations. It would make me very happy if at least in that one point my ideas proved to be correct! Just bear it in mind!’

And with those words Inspector Zott disappeared up to his own cubbyhole, there to devote himself entirely to his own theories.

The second, of course, was Obergruppenführer Prall. ‘Has Escherich,’ he said with raised voice, ‘Inspector Escherich! How are you feeling?’

‘Perfectly well!’ replied the inspector. He was standing behind his desk, his thumbs pressed against his trouser seams, a drill he had picked up down in the cells. However much he tried not to, the inspector was trembling. He looked alertly at his superior, toward whom he felt nothing but fear, insensate fear that Prall might at any moment send him down to the basement again.

‘If you feel perfectly well, Escherich,’ Prall went on, perfectly aware of the effect his words were having, ‘then you’ll surely be able to work. Or not?’

‘I am able to work, Obergruppenführer, sir!’

‘And if you can work, Escherich, then you can catch the Hobgoblin? You can do that, can’t you?’

‘Yes, sir, I can!’

‘In double-quick time, Escherich!’

‘In double-quick time, Obergruppenführer, sir!’

‘You see, Escherich,’ drawled Obergruppenführer Prall, all the while gorging himself on his subordinate’s obvious fear, ‘you see what good a little spell in the basement does! That’s how devoted I am to my men! You no longer feel terribly superior to me, Escherich?’

‘No, Obergruppenführer, certainly not. At your orders, Obergruppenführer, sir!’

‘You’re no longer of the view that you’re the cleverest little bastard in the entire Gestapo, and that nothing anyone else does is worth shit – you don’t think that any more, do you, Escherich?’

‘At your command, sir, Obergruppenführer, no, I don’t think that any more.’

‘Now, Escherich,’ the Obergruppenführer went on, giving the flinching Escherich a playful but painful punch on the nose, ‘whenever you next feel incredibly clever, or you undertake private initiatives, or you think that Obergruppenführer Prall is as thick as pigshit, well, just let me know in time. Then, before things get too bad, I’ll put you down for another little rest cure. All right?’

Inspector Escherich stared helplessly at his superior. He was shaking so hard a blind man would have heard it.

‘Well, Escherich, will you tell me in time, whenever you next feel incredibly clever?’

‘At your orders, Obergruppenführer, sir!’

‘Or if you’re not getting on too well with the work, so that I can give you a little giddyap?’

‘At your orders, Obergruppenführer, sir!’

‘I think we understand each other, Escherich!’

The master suddenly and most unexpectedly put out his hand to the sufficiently humiliated man. ‘Escherich, I’m glad to see you back at work. I hope for excellent collaboration. Where are you going to begin?’

‘I’m going to get a detailed description of the man from the supervisor at the Nollendorfplatz station. It’s time we got one! And maybe the officer who questioned the two suspects still has a sense of their names. Then I’ll carry on with Zott’s house-to-house inquiries…’

‘All right, all right. That’s a start. I want you to report to me every day…’

‘At your orders, Obergruppenführer, sir!’

And that was the second conversation that made an impression on Inspector Escherich upon the resumption of his official duties. After a while, he bore no more visible traces of his experience; his teeth were fixed. His colleagues even found that Escherich had become a lot nicer. He seemed to have lost his air of superiority and condescension. There was no one he could feel superior to now.

Inspector Escherich works, makes inquiries, questions witnesses, collates descriptions, reads through files, makes telephone calls – Escherich is working much the way he always had. But even if no one notices anything different about him, and even if the man himself lives in hope of one day being able to face Prall, his superior, without shaking, Escherich knows he will never be his old self again. He is just a sort of robot now; what he does is routine. Along with his feeling of superiority, he has lost his pleasure in work – his old conceit was what fertilized, so to speak, the fruit the man bore.

Escherich once felt very secure. He once thought nothing could happen to him. He worked on the assumption that he was completely different from everyone else. And Escherich has had to give up these little self-deceptions. It happened basically in the few seconds after SS man Dobat smashed him in the face and he became acquainted with fear. In the space of a very few days, Escherich became so thoroughly acquainted with fear that now there is no chance of him forgetting it for as long as he lives. He knows it doesn’t matter how he looks, what he does, what honours and praise he receives – he knows he is nothing. A single punch can turn him into a wailing, gibbering, trembling wretch, not much better than the stinking coward of a pickpocket who shared his cell for a few days and whose hurriedly rattled off last prayers are still ringing in his ears. Little better than that. No, no better at all!

There’s one thing still keeping Inspector Escherich going, and that’s the thought of the Hobgoblin. He’s got to catch him; he doesn’t care what happens afterwards. He has to look this man in the eye; he has to talk to this man who has been the cause of his downfall. He wants to tell that fanatic to his face what panic, ruin, and hardship he has brought to so many people. He wants to crush him, his secret enemy.

If only he had the man already in his grip!