Every Man Dies Alone (25 page)

While the two siblings chatted together, he could picture the small, poor village in Brandenburg. He heard how she had had to keep geese, how she had tried to avoid the hated job of digging potatoes and had oftentimes been beaten for that reason. And he learned that she was well liked in the village, because, stubborn and brave as she was, she had rebelled against all forms of injustice. Once, she had even hit a tyrannical schoolteacher three times in a row with a snowball—and had never been betrayed as the guilty party. Only she and Ulrich had known it was her, and Ulrich never tattled.

No, this was no disagreeable visit, even though it meant their output was two cards fewer than usual. The Quangels were perfectly sincere when they promised to call on the Heffkes sometime soon. They kept their word, too. Five or six weeks later, they looked them up in the little temporary accommodation they had been given in the west
of the city, near Nollendorfplatz. The Quangels took advantage of this visit to finally drop a card out west. Even though it was a Sunday and offices had little traffic, it passed off safely.

From that time on, reciprocal visits took place every six weeks or so. They weren’t overly stimulating, but for the Quangels it did at least mean a change of air. For the most part, Otto and his sister-in-law sat there silently and listened to the conversation between the two siblings, who never tired of talking about their childhood. It felt good to Quangel to get to know this other Anna too, even though he could never connect the woman who lived at his side and that girl who knew about farmwork, played tricks on people, and still had the reputation of being the best student in the little country school.

They learned that Anna’s parents were still living in her birthplace, very old now—Ulrich mentioned that he was sending them ten marks a month. Anna Quangel was about to say that the Quangels would do the same, but she caught a warning look from her husband just in time, and stopped.

It wasn’t till they were on their way home that he said, “Nah, better not, Anna. Why spoil the old people? They have their pension, and if your brother sends them ten marks a month, that’s plenty.”

“But we have so much money saved up!” Anna implored him. “We’ll never get through it. Earlier on, we thought it would do for Ottochen, but now… Let’s do it, Otto! Even five marks a month!”

Unmoved, Otto Quangel replied, “Now that we’re involved in our undertaking, we have no idea what we might need money for at some stage. It’s possible we’ll need every last mark of it, Anna. And the old people have got by without us so far—why shouldn’t they continue?”

She didn’t reply—feeling a little offended—maybe not so much out of love for her parents, because she didn’t often think about them, and only sent them a Christmas letter every year out of a sense of duty, but she did feel a little ashamed and mean in front of her brother. He wasn’t to think they couldn’t afford what he could afford.

Anna said obstinately, “Ulrich will think we can’t afford it, Otto. He won’t think much of your job if it doesn’t run to that.”

“What does it matter what other people think of me,” retorted Quangel. “I’m not going to take money from the bank for something like that.”

Anna sensed this was his last word. She didn’t say anything more, but knuckled under as she always did when she heard a sentence like that from Otto. Nevertheless she felt a bit hurt that her husband paid so little regard to her feelings. But then, Anna Quangel soon forgot her injury when they resumed their work on the great project.

Chapter 21

SIX MONTHS LATER: INSPECTOR ESCHERICH

Six months after the receipt of the first postcard, Inspector Escherich stood stroking his sandy mustache 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 center 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 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 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.