“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 mustache. “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 anymore! 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 mustache 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’s 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 neighbor, 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 skillfully…”
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 mustache. 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 gotten 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 ther
e 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 foreordained 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 colorless 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.
Chapter 22
SIX MONTHS LATER: ENNO KLUGE
The precision machinist Enno Kluge sat impatiently in the waiting room. He was sitting with some thirty or forty others. A tetchy assistant had just called out number 18. Enno was number 29. He would be another hour, and they were already waiting for him at the Also Ran.
Enno Kluge was fed up with sitting. He knew he couldn’t go till the doctor had signed his certificate, otherwise there’d be trouble at the factory. But he couldn’t wait any longer, or he’d miss making his bets.
Enno wants to pace back and forth. But the room’s too full for that, the other people will complain. So he goes out to the corridor, and when the assistant sees him and tells him irritably to get back in the waiting room right away, he asks for the toilet.
She shows him unwillingly, and even thinks of waiting outside the door for him. But then the corridor bell sounds several times in succession, and she has to receive patients 43, 44, and 45, take down their information, fill in the card index entries, stamp their medical cards.
That’s how it is from early morning till late at night. She’s dead on her feet, the doctor’s dead on his feet, and she never seems to get out of this state of irritation that she’s been in for weeks and weeks now. In this state, she’s capable of venting real hatred on the never-ending stream of patients who never leave her any peace, who are standing patiently at the door when she arrives at eight in the morning and are still hanging around at ten at night, filling the waiting room with their miasma: all of them shirkers, shirkers from work or from the front, people hoping for a medical certificate to help them procure more rations or better rations. All of them are people dodging their duty, which she can’t do. She has to stick it out here, she mustn’t get sick. (What would the doctor do without her?) She even has to be friendly to all those liars that soil everything, piss on everything, puke over everything. The toilet’s always full of cigarette ash.
That reminds her of the little creep she had to conduct to the toilet just a while ago. He’s sure to be there still, puffing away. She leaps up, runs out, and rattles the door.
“Occupied!” comes the call from inside.
“Will you hurry up and get out of there!” she begins to scold. “What makes you think you can monopolize the toilet! There’s other people want to use it as well as you!”
As Kluge slinks past her she shouts after him, “Of course it’s all fugged up with smoke! I’ll tell the doctor how ill you are! You’ve got it coming to you!”
Discouraged, Enno Kluge leans against the wall of the waiting room—his chair has been taken in the meantime. The doctor has got to patient 22. Probably completely pointless to go on waiting here. The bitch outside is perfectly capable of telling the doctor to refuse him a certificate. And then what? Then there’s trouble in the factory! It’s the fourth day he’s been off; they’re perfectly capable of sending him to a punishment battalion or a concentration camp—it’s just the kind of thing they do! He needs a certificate today, and it’s best he stays here, given that he’s been waiting so long anyway. If he goes to a different doctor, the other waiting room will be just as full, and he’d have to sit there till night, and at least he’s heard this guy is pretty free with his certificates. So he’ll just have to miss playing the ponies today, his pals will have to get by without Enno, it can’t be helped…
He leans against the wall and coughs, a feeble so-and-so. Better be nothing at all. He’s never really got over his beating up by that SS man Persicke. True, work got a bit better after a couple of days, even though his hands never recovered their old dexterity. He was just about as good as a run-of-the-mill worker now. He would never recover his old finesse, or become a respected man in his field.
Perhaps that was why he felt so indifferent about work, but it could equally well be that in the long run he didn’t really enjoy it. He didn’t see the point. Why strain yourself if you could live passably well without it! Was it the war? Let them fight their shitty war by themselves, he didn’t care for it. If they sent the bigwigs to the front, then the war would be over just like that!
No, it wasn’t the meaninglessness of his work that made it repugnant to him. It was the fact that Enno was able to get by without working. Yes, he had been weak, he would admit it now: he had gone back to his women, first to Tutti, then to Lotte, and they were both quite prepared to keep this small, adhesive man afloat for a while. And as soon as you got involved with women, any form of ordered existence went out the window. In the morning they started scolding him when he called for his coffee and breakfast at six. What was he thinking of? At such a time, normal people were asleep! He should just crawl back to his warm bed!
Well, once or twice you might come through a battle like that, but the third time, if you were Enno Kluge, you didn’t. You gave in, you went back to the women in their beds, and you slept for another hour, or two, or even three hours.
If it was as late as that, then he didn’t bother turning up at the factory, but took the day o
ff. If it was any earlier, he came in late, with some lame excuse, got yelled at (but he was used to that, he’d stopped listening), put in a couple of hours, and went home, to be greeted with more yelling: What was the point of keeping a man in the house if he was gone all day? For the few marks he brought home! There were easier ways of earning money than that! No, if it had to be work, it would have been better to stay in his tight little hotel room—women and work were not compatible. There was one exception, and that was Eva—and of course Enno Kluge had tried to crawl back to her, the postie. But then he learned from Frau Gesch that Eva had gone away. Frau Gesch had got a letter from her, she was somewhere up in Ruppin, with relatives. Frau Gesch had the keys to the flat now, but she wouldn’t dream of giving them to Enno Kluge. Who was it who paid the rent, him or his wife? So then, the flat was hers, not his! Frau Gesch had put herself to enough trouble on his account, she was damned if she was going to let him into the flat.
But if he wanted to do something for his wife, he ought to go round to the post office sometime. They had tried to get in touch with Frau Kluge a couple of times, and once a summons to some Party tribunal had come; Frau Gesch had simply sent it back with “Recipient no longer known at this address.” But why didn’t he go to the post office and get it sorted out? His wife probably had some sort of outstanding claim there.
The part about the claim had tempted him; he could, after all, document himself as the lawful husband. But going there turned out to be a big mistake; they gave him a real going-over at the post office. Eva must have got in some trouble with the Party, they were furious with her! In the end he was in no hurry to document himself as her lawful husband—quite the opposite, he tried as hard as he could to prove that he had been separated from Eva for a long time, and knew nothing, and wished to know nothing about what she was doing.
In the end, they let him go. What was there they could do with a little man like that, who was all set to wail at a moment’s notice and trembled each time they barked at him? So, let him go then, let him get the hell out, and if he did see his wife again, he should send her along to the office. Or better yet, he should tip them a wink where she was staying, and they could take care of the rest themselves.