by Hans Fallada
Inspector Escherich, standing in the doorway with the writing things in his hand, has a smile on his face. So that’s what the Obergruppenführer means by interrogating a suspect! Another five minutes like that, and she’ll be out of commission for the next five days. No amount of cunningly conceived torment will give her back her consciousness then.
But for a little while, it might not be such a bad idea. Let her feel a little fear and pain, and then throw herself all the more at him, the soft cop!
When the Obergruppenführer sees the inspector pop up beside the bed, he stops his maltreatment of the suspect and says, half apologetically, half reproachfully, “Your touch is far too soft for women like this, Escherich! You have to squeeze them till the pips squeak!”
Prall turns to the invalid, who is lying in bed with her eyes shut, trying to breathe. “Listen to me, Frau Quangel!”
She seems not to hear.
The inspector reaches out and gently pulls her upright. “There,” he says, mildly. “Now won’t you open your eyes, please!”
She does so. Escherich was quite right: after the shaking and the threats, his friendly, polite voice is welcome to her.
“You just told me that no one here has had occasion to write anything for a long time? Well, look at this pen. It’s been used very recently, yesterday or today; the ink on it is very fresh! You see, I can scratch it off with my nail!”
“I wouldn’t know about that!” says Frau Quangel. “You’d better ask my husband about that—I don’t understand.”
Inspector Escherich looks at her attentively. “You understand perfectly well, Frau Quangel!” he says, a little more harshly. “But you don’t want to understand, because you know you’ve already given yourself away!”
“No one here writes anything!” Frau Quangel repeats stubbornly.
“And I don’t need to ask your husband anymore,” the inspector continues, “because he’s already confessed. He wrote the cards, and you dictated them…”
“Well, if Otto’s confessed, what are you worried about?” says Anna Quangel.
“Give the bitch a smack in the chops, Escherich!” the Obergruppenführer suddenly butts in. “She’s got a nerve to string us along like this!”
But the inspector doesn’t give the bitch a smack in the chops; instead, he says, “We caught your husband with two postcards in his pocket. There was nothing he could say.”
At the mention of the two postcards that she spent so long looking for in her fever, Frau Quangel gets another shock. So he did take them with him, even though they’d agreed that she was to drop them the next day or the day after. That was wrong of Otto.
Something must have happened with the cards, she thinks to herself. But Otto hasn’t confessed anything; otherwise, they wouldn’t be standing around here, questioning me. They would simply…
And out loud she asks, “Why don’t you bring Otto here, then? I don’t know what you keep going on about postcards for. Why would he write postcards?”
She lies back in bed, mouth and eyes closed, resolved not to say another word.
For a moment, Inspector Escherich looks thoughtfully down at the woman. She is exhausted, he can see that. For the time being, there’s nothing to be done with her. He spins round, calls a couple of his men, and gives the order: “Move the woman to the other bed, and then search this one minutely! Obergruppenführer, if you please!”
He wants to get his superior out of the room, for fear of another Prall-style interrogation. It’s very likely that he will need this woman in the course of the next few days, and he would prefer her to be clear-headed and strong. Besides, she seems to belong to the minority that respond to threats with increased obstinacy. There’s nothing to be gained by knocking her about.
The Obergruppenführer is loath to leave her behind. He would only too gladly have shown the old cow what he thought of her. He would have vented his irritation with this whole never-ending Hobgoblin story on her. But with the two detectives in the room…and in any case, by nightfall the bitch would be safely in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse basement, and then he could do whatever he liked with her.
“You do mean to arrest the baggage, Escherich?”
“Certainly,” replied the inspector, as he watched his men meticulously unfold and refold every single piece of bed linen, drill through the sofa cushions with long pins, and feel along the walls. He added, “But I need to see that I get her in a fit state to answer questions. In her fever she only half understands things that are put to her. She must be made to understand that her life is in danger. Then she will be frightened, and with fear…”
“I’ll happily teach her what fear is!” growled the Obergruppenführer.
“Not in the way you mean—and anyway, she needs to be over her fever,” said Escherich, and then he exclaimed, “What do we have here?”
One of his men had been working on the little shelf of books. He had shaken one of the books, and something white had fluttered to the ground.
The inspector was first to the spot. He picked up the piece of paper.
“A card!” he exclaimed. “An unfinished draft of a card!”
And he read it out: “FÜHRER, YOU GIVE THE ORDERS, WE OBEY! YES, WE HAVE BECOME A FLOCK OF SHEEP, FOLLOWING OUR FÜHRER TO THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE. WE HAVE GIVEN UP THINKING FOR OURSELVES…”
He lowered the card and looked about him.
All eyes were on him.
“We have the proof!” said Inspector Escherich, with a touch of solemnity. “We have the culprit. We have clear proof of guilt, no need for a forced confession. This long, long campaign was worth it!”
He looked around, his dim eyes shining. This was his hour, the hour he had been looking forward to for so long. For a moment, he thought about the long, long way he had come to get here. From the first card, which he had taken receipt of with smiling indifference, to this one now in his hand. He thought of the great wash of cards and the red flags proliferating on his map, and he thought of little Enno Kluge.
Once again, he was with him in the police cell, and then above the dark surface of the Schlachtensee. A shot rang out, and he thought he was blind for life. He saw himself: two security men throwing him down the stairs, bleeding, finished, while a little pickpocket slithered about on his knees, appealing to his holy Virgin. Fleetingly, too, his thoughts took in Zott—poor man, his streetcar theory was dashed.
It was the zenith of Inspector Escherich’s life. It had been worth it, worth the patience and the long-suffering. He had caught him at last, his Hobgoblin, as he had begun calling him in jest, though he had turned into a real one later: he had almost shipwrecked Escherich’s life. But now they had him, and the chase was over, the game at an end.
Inspector Escherich raised his head like one awakening. He gave orders: “I want the woman taken away in an ambulance. Two-man escort. You’re in charge, Kemmel. There’s to be no interrogation; in fact, I don’t want anyone to speak to her. A doctor, right away. I want the fever gone in three days, tell him, Kemmel!”
“At your orders, sir!”
“The rest of you are to tidy up the flat, I want it impeccable. What book was the card in? Radio kit instructions? Okay! Wrede, put the card back where you found it! In one hour everything has to be shipshape, because that’s when I’ll be returning here with the culprit. I don’t want to find anyone still here. No sentries, no one. Got it?”
“At your orders, sir!”
“Well, shall we be going then, Obergruppenführer?”
“Aren’t you going to confront the woman with the postcard, Escherich?”
“What would be the point? In her fever we won’t get a proper reaction out of her, and I’m only interested in the husband. Wrede, did you happen to see any spare keys?”
“In the woman’s handbag.”
“Let’s have them—thank you. All right then, let’s be off, Obergruppenführer!”
Downstairs at his window, Judge Fromm watched them go. He waggled his head from side to side.
Later on, he saw Frau Quangel being lifted on a stretcher into an ambulance, but from the look of the stretcher bearers, he could tell they weren’t taking her to an ordinary hospital.
“One after the other,” Judge Fromm said softly. “One after the other. The house is emptying. The Rosenthals, the Persickes, Borkhausen, Quangel—I’m almost on my own here. Half the population is set on locking up the other half. Well, it can’t go on like this much longer. At any rate, I will remain here; no one is about to lock me up…”
He smiles and nods.
“The worse it gets, the better it will be. The sooner it will all be over!”
Chapter 49
THE CONVERSATION WITH OTTO QUANGEL
Inspector Escherich had not found it easy to persuade Obergruppenführer Prall to let him conduct the first interview with Otto Quangel alone. But in the end, he had been successful.
When he accompanied the foreman up the steps to his flat, it had already gotten dark. There was a light on in the stairwell, and Quangel turned on another light when they entered the flat. He made straight for the bedroom.
“My wife’s ill,” he murmured.
“Your wife isn’t here any more,” said the inspector. “She’s been taken away. Won’t you come and join me here…”
“My wife has a high temperature—the flu…” Quangel murmured.
It was plain to see that he was shaken by the news that she had been taken away. The stolid indifference he had manifested so far was gone.
“A doctor’s looking after her,” the inspector said soothingly. “I think she’ll be over the fever in two or three days. I ordered an ambulance.”
For the first time, Quangel took a closer look at the man opposite him. His beady bird’s eye lingered on the inspector a long time. Finally Quangel nodded. “An ambulance,” he said, “a doctor—that’s good. Thank you. That’s right. You’re not a bad man.”
The inspector took his opportunity. “We’re not so bad, you know, Herr Quangel,” he said, “not as bad as we’re painted. We do all we can to ease the conditions of inmates. All we want is to establish whether a crime has been committed or not. That’s our business, just as your business is manufacturing coffins…”
“Yes,” said Quangel, “that’s right, the manufacture and supply of coffins.” There was an edge to his voice.
“Are you suggesting that I supply the contents for the coffins?” replied Escherich with faint irony. “Is that really the view you take of your case?”
“There is no case!”
“Oh, yes, there is, a bit of one. I mean, here, take a look at this pen, Quangel. It’s your pen, that’s right. The ink is still quite fresh. What were you writing with it yesterday or today?”
“I had to sign something.”
“And what did you have to sign, Herr Quangel?”
“I had to sign a medical certificate for my wife. My wife’s ill with the flu…”
“And your wife told me you never wrote anything. Everything that gets written in this household, she told me, is written by her.”
“That’s quite right. She does all the writing. But yesterday I had to do it, because she has a fever. She doesn’t know anything about that.”
“And Herr Quangel, did you notice this,” the Inspector continued, “the way the pen sticks! It’s quite a new pen, but the nib is already splitting. It must be because you have such a heavy hand, Herr Quangel.” He laid the two postcards from the factory on the table. “You see, the first of these cards is written quite smoothly. But on the second one, you see—here—here—and on the B—the nib stuck!
Well, Herr Quangel?”
“Those are the cards,” said Quangel apathetically, “that were on the floor in the factory. I told the man in the blue jacket to pick them up. He picked them up. I took one look at them and I handed them over to the representative of the Arbeitsfront. He took them away with him. That’s the extent of my knowledge of the cards.”
Quangel spoke in a slow, monotonous drone, sounding like an old, rather dim man.
The Inspector said, “Now come on, Herr Quangel, can’t you see that the end of the second card is written with a split nib?”
“I wouldn’t know about that. I’m not a scribe or a learned man, as it says in the Bible.”
For a moment there was silence in the room. Quangel stared vacantly at the table in front of him.
The inspector looked at him. He was firmly convinced that this man wasn’t as slow and lumbering as he pretended to be, but rather as sharp as his profile and as quick as his eye. His first duty was to get the man to betray some of that inner sharpness. He wanted to talk to the clever author of the postcards, not this ancient foreman, grown dull from decades of labor.
After a while Escherich asked, “What are those books on the shelf?”
Slowly Quangel raised his head, looked at the Inspector for a moment, and then jerked his head round till the shelf was in front of him. “Those books? There’s my wife’s hymnal and her Bible. And the others are probably all books belonging to my son, who fell in the war. I don’t read or own any books. I was never much good at reading…”
“May I see the fourth book from the left, Herr Quangel, the one with the red jacket?”
Slowly and carefully Quangel took the book from the shelf and set it down on the table in front of the inspector.
“Otto Runge’s Radio Assembly Kit,” the inspector read out. “Well, Quangel, and what does this book signify to you?”
“It’s a book of my son Otto’s, who fell in the war,” Quangel replied slowly. “He loved radios. He was well known for it; the employers in the engineering companies all wanted him, he knew each and every…”
“And does nothing else occur to you, Herr Quangel, when you see this book?”
“Nope!” Quangel shook his head. “Nothing. Like I say, I don’t read books.”
“But perhaps you use it to keep things in? Why don’t you open the book, Herr Quangel!”
The book fell open at the place where the card lay.
Quangel stared at the words: “FÜHRER, LEAD—WE FOLLOW!
YES, WE FOLLOW…”
When had he written that? It must have been long, long ago. Right at the beginning. But why hadn’t he finished it? And what was the card doing in Ottochen’s book?
Slowly it came back to him: the first visit of his brother-in-law, Ulrich Heffke. He had had to put the card away in a hurry, and had taken up the carving of Ottochen instead. He’d put the card away and forgotten all about it—he had, and Anna had, too!
This was the danger he had always sensed! This was the unseen enemy whose presence had haunted him. This was the mistake he had made, the one he hadn’t been able to remember…
They’ve caught you! said a voice within him. You’ve had it—and it’s all your own fault. Your goose is cooked.
And: Did Anna confess to anything? They must have shown her the card too. But Anna will have denied it, I know her, and that’s what I’ll do, too. Of course, she was feverish, so…
The inspector asked, “Well, Quangel, cat got your tongue? When did you write the card?”
“I don’t know anything about the card,” he replied. “I wouldn’t know how to write something like that, I’m too stupid!”
“Then what’s the card doing in your son’s book? Who put it there?”
“How would I know?” Quangel replied almost rudely. “Maybe you put it in there yourself, or one of your men did! You hear about it being done, evidence being supplied where there is none!”
“The card was found in the presence of several excellent witnesses. Your wife was present, too.”
“Well, and what did she say?”
“When the card was found, she immediately confessed that she dictated the card and you wrote it. Come on, Quangel, don’t be so obstinate. Just admit it. If you admit it now, you’re not telling me anything I don’t know. But you will make it easier for yourself and your wife. If you don’t admit it, I will have to take you
back to Gestapo headquarters, and the basement there is a pretty rough sort of place…”
The memory of what he himself had experienced there caused Escherich’s voice to tremble slightly.
He got a grip on himself and went on, “Whereas if you confess, I can hand you over to the examining magistrate. And then you’ll end up in Moabit, and you’ll be well treated, like any other detainee.”
But try as Escherich might, Quangel stuck to his guns. Escherich had made a mistake after all, which the sharp-witted Quangel had spotted right away. Quangel’s lumbering manner and the statements of his superiors had sufficiently impressed Escherich that he didn’t think Quangel was the author of the cards, but merely the writer of what his wife dictated…
And the fact that he had now said it a second time proved to Quangel that Anna had not confessed. That was just a line the inspector was spinning.
He continued his denials.
Finally, Escherich broke off the unsuccessful interview in the apartment and took Quangel back to Prinz Albrecht Strasse. He hoped the change of ambience, the swarm of SS men, and the whole menacing apparatus would intimidate the man, and make him more amenable to persuasion.
They were in the inspector’s office, and Escherich showed him the map of Berlin with the many red flags.
“Take a look at this, Herr Quangel,” he said. “Each flag indicates where a postcard was handed in. The exact place. If you look closely,” he tapped with his finger, “you’ll see that there are flags all over this whole area, except in this spot. Because that’s Jablonski Strasse, where you live. Of course you didn’t drop any cards there, because you’re too familiar a figure…”
But Escherich saw that Quangel wasn’t even listening. At the sight of the map, a strange, inexplicable excitement had come over the man. His eyes were rolling, his hands shaking. Almost shyly, he said, “That’s a lot of flags you’ve got there—do you know how many there are?”
“I can tell you the exact number,” replied the inspector, now understanding why his man was so shaken. “There are 267 flags, indicating 259 cards and eight letters. How many did you write, Quangel?”
