The man said nothing, but this time it was not out of defiance, but from disappointment.
“And consider this as well, Herr Quangel,” the Inspector continued, taking full advantage of the other’s shock, “all these letters and cards were freely handed in to us. We didn’t find a single one of them. People came running to us as though they were on fire. They couldn’t hand them in quickly enough, and most of them hadn’t even read them all the way through…”
Quangel still did not speak, but his face was working. The man was in turmoil; his sharp, beady glance wavered: the eyelids flickered, the eyes wandered off, looked at the ground, then were drawn back to the little flags.
“And one other thing, Quangel. Did you ever stop to think how much misery and fear you brought upon people with those cards of yours? People were in terror, some were arrested, and I know of someone killing himself over one…”
“No! No!” Quangel cried out. “I never wanted that! I never thought that would happen! I wanted things to get better, I wanted people to learn the truth, so that the war would end sooner and the killing stop—that’s what I wanted! I didn’t mean to sow terror and dread, I didn’t want to make things worse than they were already! Those wretched people—and I made them even more wretched! Who was it who killed themselves?”
“Oh, a hustler and gambler, no great loss, don’t worry yourself about him!”
“But everyone matters! I have his blood on my hands.”
“You see, Herr Quangel,” said the inspector to the man standing grim-faced beside him. “You’ve confessed your crime, and you didn’t even notice!”
“My crime? I never committed any crime, at least not in the way you mean. My crime was thinking myself too clever, wanting to do everything by myself, even though I know really that one man is nothing. No, I didn’t do anything that I should be ashamed of, but the way I went about it was mistaken. That’s why I deserve my punishment, and that’s why I’ll go gladly to my death…”
“Oh, it won’t be as bad as that,” the inspector said consolingly.
Quangel ignored him. As if to himself, he said, “I never had that high an opinion of people, otherwise I should have known what would happen.”
Escherich asked, “Do you know how many letters and postcards you wrote, Quangel?”
“Two hundred and seventy-six postcards, nine letters.”
“Which means that all of eighteen items were not handed in.”
“Eighteen items: that’s the sum total of my work of two years, my hope. My life for those eighteen pieces of paper. Well, at least they were as many as that!”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Quangel,” said the inspector, “that those eighteen circulated from hand to hand. No, it’s just that they were found by individuals so deeply compromised already that they didn’t dare hand them in. Those eighteen cards were just as ineffectual as all the others. We’ve never heard anything from the public at large that leads us to think they had the least effect…”
“So I’ve accomplished nothing?”
“So you’ve accomplished nothing—certainly nothing that you would have wanted to accomplish! But you should be glad of that, Quangel, because it will certainly help to bring about a reduction in your punishment! Maybe you’ll get off with fifteen or twenty years!”
Quangel shuddered. “No,” he said. “No!”
“What did you expect anyway, Quangel? You, an ordinary worker, taking on the Führer, who is backed by the Party, the Wehrmacht, the SS, the SA? The Führer, who has already conquered half the world and will overcome the last of our enemies in another year or two? It’s ludicrous! You must have known you had no chance! It’s a gnat against an elephant. I don’t understand it, a sensible man like you!”
“No, and you will never understand it, either. It doesn’t matter if one man fights or ten thousand; if the one man sees he has no option but to fight, then he will fight, whether he has others on his side or not. I had to fight, and given the chance I would do it again. Only I would do it very differently.”
He turned his now steady gaze upon the inspector: “By the way, my wife had nothing to do with all this. You must let her go!”
“Now you’re lying, Quangel! Your wife dictated the postcards—you said so yourself!”
“Now you are lying! Do I seem like a man who would take dictation from his wife? Perhaps you’ll go on to say she was the mastermind behind it all. But it was me, it was all my doing. I had the idea, I wrote the cards, I dropped them, I want my punishment! Not her, not my wife!”
“She confessed…”
“She confessed nothing! I don’t want to hear any more lies about her! You shouldn’t try to tell a husband lies about his wife!”
For a moment they confronted one another, the man with the sharp bird’s head and the gray colorless inspector with his pale eyes and fair mustache.
Then Escherich lowered his gaze, and said, “I’m going to send for someone to take down your statement. I hope you’ll stand by it?”
“I stand by it.”
“And you fully understand what lies in store for you? A long jail sentence, or possibly death?”
“I know what I’ve done. And I hope you know what you’re doing, too, Inspector!”
“Oh, and what’s that, then?”
“You’re working in the employ of a murderer, delivering ever new victims to him. You do it for money; perhaps you don’t even believe in the man. No, I’m certain you don’t believe in him. Just for money,
then…”
Once again they confronted one another, and once again the inspector finally lowered his gaze, vanquished.
“Well, I’m going, then,” he said almost sheepishly. “To get a stenographer.”
And he went.
Chapter 50
THE DEATH OF ESCHERICH
Midnight finds Inspector Escherich still, or more accurately, once again in his office. He’s sitting there slumped, but however much he’s had to drink, he is unable to wash from his mind the horrible scene in which he has just participated.
This time, his noble superior, Obergruppenführer Prall, didn’t have an Iron Cross for his darling, hardworking, successful inspector, but he did invite him to a little SS victory celebration. Then they had sat together, they had drunk a lot of powerful Armagnac out of not such little glasses, they had bragged of their capture of the Hobgoblin, and, to general applause, Inspector Escherich had been forced to read out the statement that included Quangel’s confession…
Arduous, painstaking detective work cast before swine!
And then, once they were all well sozzled, they had thought of yet more fun. Clutching bottles and glasses, they had decamped, the inspector included, to Quangel’s cell. They wanted to see that odd bird for themselves in the flesh, the maniac with the audacity to take on the Führer!
They had found Quangel rolled up in his blanket on his cot, sound asleep. A strange face, thought Escherich, not even relaxed in sleep. Asleep and awake, it looked equally opaque and worried. In this instance the man had been sound asleep…
Of course they hadn’t let him lie. They had jolted him awake, roused him from his cot. There he had stood before a lot of men in black and silver uniforms, in his much too short shift that didn’t quite conceal his nakedness—a ludicrous figure, as long as you remembered not to look at the head!
And then someone had had the idea of baptizing the old Hobgoblin, and they had emptied a bottle of schnapps over his head. The Obergruppenführer had given a little, comically slurred speech on the Hobgoblin, that pig that was now on his way to the slaughter, and at the end of his speech he had smashed his brandy balloon over Quangel’s head.
That was the signal for all the rest of them to smash their glasses over the old man’s head. A mixture of Armagnac and blood ran down his face. But while all this was going on, Escherich had had the sense that through the rivers of blood and drink, Quangel was staring at him; he could have sworn he heard him saying, So that’s the just cause
in which you do murder! These are your henchmen! This is how you are. You know very well what you’re about. But I will die for committing acts that were not crimes, and you will live—so much for the justice of your cause!
Then they had made the discovery that Escherich’s glass was still intact, and ordered him to break it over Quangel’s head as well. Prall had had to order him twice in the most explicit terms—“Have you forgotten what happened to you before, Escherich, when you were disobedient?”—and so Escherich had smashed his glass over Quangel’s head. He had to try four times, with trembling hand, before the glass broke, and all the while he’d had to face the mocking, challenging stare of Quangel. This ridiculous figure in his too-short shift was actually stronger and more dignified than all his tormentors. And with each blow that Inspector Escherich had brought down in terror and despair, he had had the sense that he was hitting out at himself, striking with an ax at the roots of the tree of his own life.
Then all at once Otto Quangel had collapsed, and they had let him lie on the bare floor, bleeding and unconscious. They had also told the guard to ignore the bastard, and had gone back upstairs to their boozy celebrations, as if they had won God knows what heroic victory.
And now Inspector Escherich is back at his desk. Up on the wall there is the map with the red flags. His body has crumpled, but his mind is still clear.
Yes, that map is finished. It can be taken down tomorrow. And the day after I’ll put up a new one, and begin the chase of a new Hobgoblin. And then another. And another. What’s it all for? Is that my purpose here on earth? I suppose it must be, but in that case, I don’t understand the world, and nothing makes sense. It really doesn’t matter what I do…
“I have his blood on my hands…” The way he said it! And his, in turn, on mine! No, there’s Enno Kluge’s as well—that wretched weakling I sacrificed in order to deliver this man to a gang of drunken thugs. He won’t whimper the way that little runt did on the pier, no, he’ll die with dignity…
And me? What about me? For me, it’s on to the next case, and if the diligent Escherich isn’t up to the expectations of Obergruppenführer Prall, I’ll get another stint in the basement. Eventually, the day will come when I’ll go down there never to come up again. Is that the day I’m living toward? No, Quangel is right to call Hitler a murderer and me his henchman. I never cared who manned the tiller, or why this war was being fought, so long as I was able to go about my usual business, the catching of human beings. Then, once I’d caught them, I didn’t care what became of them…
But now I do care. I’ve had it up to here with it; it disgusts me to keep those fellows supplied with fresh prey; from the moment I caught Quangel, it felt disgusting to me. The way he stood there and looked at me. Blood and schnapps running down his face, but the stare! This is your doing, his eyes were telling me, you betrayed me! Oh, if only I could, I would sacrifice ten Enno Kluges for the sake of this one Quangel, I would give this entire building here for his liberty! If it were still possible, I would leave here, and I would start something, like Otto Quangel did—something better conceived, but I also want to fight.
But it’s impossible, they wouldn’t let me, they call that kind of thing desertion. They would catch me and throw me in the basement again. And my flesh screams when they torture it. I’m a coward. A coward like Enno Kluge, not a brave man like Otto Quangel. When Obergruppenführer Prall yells at me, I start to shake, and I do what he tells me. I smashed my glass over the head of the only decent man here, but each blow was like a sprinkling of earth on my coffin.
Slowly Inspector Escherich got to his feet. There was a helpless smile on his face. He went to the wall and pressed his ear against it. There was quiet now in the building on Prinz Albrecht Strasse, an hour after midnight. Only the pacing of the sentry in the corridor, back and forth, back and forth…
You have no idea why you’re going back and forth, do you? thought Escherich. One day you, too, will understand that you have wasted your life…
He reached for the map and tore it off the wall. There was a flurry of little flags. Escherich scrunched up the map and dropped it on the floor.
“Finished!” he said. “Over! The Hobgoblin case is over!”
He walked slowly to his desk, pulled open a drawer, and nodded.
“Here I am, probably the only man Otto Quangel converted with his postcard campaign. But I’m no good to you, Otto Quangel, I can’t carry on your labor. I’m too much of a coward. Still, I’m your only disciple, Otto Quangel!”
Quickly he drew out the pistol and fired.
This time his hand hadn’t trembled.
The sentry ran in to find an almost headless corpse behind the desk.
Obergruppenführer Prall raged. “Desertion! All civilians are pigs! Everyone not in uniform belongs in a cell, behind barbed wire! But just you wait, whoever follows in the footsteps of Escherich, that pig, I’ll have you from the start, so that you won’t have a single thought in your head, just fear! I’ve always been too easygoing, that was my biggest mistake! Bring that pig, Quangel, upstairs! I want him to look at this mess, and clean it up!”
In this way, Otto Quangel’s only convert put the foreman to the trouble of a couple of hours of grisly overtime.
Part IV
THE END
Chapter 51
ANNA QUANGEL IS INTERROGATED
It was two weeks after her arrest, at one of her first interrogations following her recovery from the flu, that Anna Quangel let slip that her son Otto had once been engaged to a certain Trudel Baumann. At that time, Anna had not yet understood that naming anyone would endanger the party concerned. Because with pedantic precision, the friends and acquaintances of all detainees were arrested, every trace was followed up, so that “the cancer can be completely eradicated.”
Her interviewer, Escherich’s successor, Inspector Laub, a short, compact individual who loved to slap the prisoner across the face with the back of his bony hand, had, as was his habit, initially passed over this detail without seeming to pay any attention to it. He grilled Anna Quangel long and exhaustively about her son’s friends and employers, asked her things she couldn’t possibly know but was supposed to know, asked and asked, and, every so often, slapped her across the face with his bony hand.
Inspector Laub was a past master in the art of interrogation. He was capable of going for ten hours without a break, and if he could do it, then the prisoner had to do it, too. Anna Quangel was swaying with exhaustion on her stool. Her recent illness, her anxiety about Otto, of whose fate she had heard nothing, the humiliation of being slapped like a naughty child, all this combined to make her confused, and then Inspector Laub struck her again.
Anna Quangel groaned softly and covered her face with her hands.
“Take your hands down!” shouted the inspector. “Look at me! Will you do as you’re told!”
She did so, and looked at him with fear in her eyes. It wasn’t fear of him, though, but fear that she might weaken.
“When was the last time you saw your son’s so-called fiancée?”
“That was such a long time ago. I can’t remember. Before we started with the postcards. Two years… Oh, please don’t hit me again! Think of your own mother! You wouldn’t want anyone to hit your mother!”
A volley of two or three slaps hit her all at once.
“My mother is no traitorous bitch like you! If you dare refer to my mother again, I’ll hit you properly! Where did the slut live?”
“I don’t know! My husband told me she had gotten married since. She will have moved away somewhere.”
“So your husband saw her! When was that?”
“I can’t remember! It was when we were writing the cards.”
“And she was involved? She helped you?”
“No! No!” cried Frau Quangel. With terror she saw what she had done. “My husband,” she hurriedly went on, “bumped into Trudel on the street. That was when she told him she had gotten married and wasn’t working in the
factory anymore.”
“Well—go on. What factory did she go to then?”
Frau Quangel named the uniform factory.
“And then?”
“That’s all. That’s everything I know about her. Really, Inspector!”
“Doesn’t it seem odd to you that your son’s so-called fiancée hasn’t come to see her in-laws once more, not even after the death of her intended?”
“But that was what my husband is like! We never had dealings with other people, and once we began with the cards, he broke off relations with everyone.”
“You’re lying again! You only took up with the Heffkes after you’d begun writing the cards!”
“Yes, that’s true! I’d forgotten that. But Otto wasn’t at all happy about that; he made an exception because Ulrich was my brother. Still, he hated family!” She looked sadly at the inspector. Shyly, she said, “Can I ask you something now, Inspector?”
“Ask away!” growled Inspector Laub.
“Is it true…” She broke off. “I thought I saw my sister-in-law in the corridor yesterday…Is it true that the Heffkes are under arrest as well?”
“You’re lying again!” A slap, hard. And another. “Frau Heffke’s somewhere else. You couldn’t have seen her. Someone told you. Who could have told you?”
Frau Quangel shook her head. “No, no one told me. I saw her from a distance. I wasn’t even sure it was her.” She sighed. “And now the Heffkes are in prison as well, and they didn’t do anything and didn’t know anything. Poor people!”
“Poor people!” mocked Inspector Laub. “Didn’t know anything! That’s what you all say! But you’re all criminals, and as true as my name is Laub, I’ll have you disemboweled if you don’t tell me the truth! Who’s in your cell with you?”
“I don’t know her full name. I call her Berta.”
“How long has Berta been your cell mate?”