by Hans Fallada
But under the influence of alcohol and his comrades, he became like them: unpredictable, brutal, impulsive, and always ready to rule out any other view, even if it was nothing but a different view on drinking and schnapps. If Escherich had refused to touch glasses with him, he would have been as lost as if he had allowed the worst offender to run free. If anything, it would have been slightly worse, because there was an element of personal insult if the junior did not raise a full glass with his superior as often as he was required to do.
Escherich, then, clinked glasses with Prall—clinked glasses several times—and drank.
“Well now, Escherich, what’s up?” Prall said at last, gripping his desk to steady himself. “What’s that you’ve got with you?”
“A statement,” said Escherich. “One that I’ve drawn up on that Hobgoblin case I’m working on. There are a couple more reports and statements to come, but this is the main part of it. If you please, Obergruppenführer.”
“Hobgoblin? Hobgoblin?” said Prall, thinking as hard as he could. “Oh, you mean the fellow with the postcards? Ah, did you manage to come up with some plan, as I ordered?”
“At your orders, Obergruppenführer. Would you care to read the statement?”
“Read? Nah, not now. Maybe later. Tell you what, why don’t you just read it to me, Escherich?”
He interrupted the reading after only three sentences. “Let’s have another one first. Cheers, Escherich! Heil Hitler!”
“Heil Hitler, Obergruppenführer!”
After he had emptied his glass, Escherich went back to his statement.
But now the drunken Prall had thought of an amusing game. Each time Escherich had read three or four sentences, he interrupted him with a call of “Cheers!” and Escherich, after he had clinked glasses again, would have to begin again at the beginning. Prall wouldn’t let him get past the first page, he kept calling out another “Cheers!” He could see—despite his drunkenness—the man struggling, how reluctant he was to drink, how ten times at least he thought of throwing down his statement and walking out, and how he didn’t dare, because the other was his superior and he had to kowtow, suppress all signs of his rage…
“Cheers, Escherich!”
“Thank you, Obergruppenführer, sir! Cheers!”
“Now read on, Escherich! No, start at the top. That part I didn’t quite get. Always been slow on the uptake…”
And Escherich read. Yes, now he was being tormented just as a couple of hours ago he himself had tormented the skinny Kluge. Just like Kluge he was tormented by the desire to get out the door. But he was forced to read, to read and to drink, as long as the other man wanted. Already he could feel his head fogging up—the good work he had done, for nothing! Too bloody well behaved!
“Cheers, Escherich!”
“Cheers, Obergruppenführer!”
“Okay, start again!”
Until Prall got bored with his game, and said, “Ach, stop with all this stupid reading! You can see I’m drunk, can’t you? How am I going to understand that stuff? Showing off to me with your smarty-pants report! Other reports will follow—not so important as that by the great detective Escherich! How dare you! Cut to the chase: Have you caught the postcard writer, or not?”
“At your orders, Obergruppenführer, no. But…”
“Then what are you doing here? Stealing my valuable time, and swilling my lovely Armagnac?” This, already, in a yell. “Have you completely lost your mind? But from now on I’m going to speak to you in a different tone! I’ve been far too kind to you, I’ve stood for your cheek. Do you understand me?”
“At your orders, Obergruppenführer!” And quickly, before the yelling could begin again, Escherich blurted out, “But I’ve at least caught someone who dropped the postcards. Or I think he has.”
This news calmed Prall a little. He glowered at the Inspector and said, “Bring him in! I want him to tell me who supplied him with the cards. I’m going to twist it out of him—I feel in the mood now.”
For a moment, Escherich reeled. He could say that the man wasn’t in the building and that he would go and pick him up—and then he would do just exactly that, from the street, or from his flat, with the help of those trailing him. Or he could carefully stay away, wait for the Obergruppenführer to sleep off his drunk. By then he would probably have forgotten everything.
But then, Escherich being Escherich, which is to say a detective set in his ways, and not a coward but rather a man of courage, he said: “I let the man go, Obergruppenführer!”
The roar—Jesus Christ, the animal roar! The normally—by the standards of Nazi top brass—rather sedate Prall forgot himself to the degree that he grabbed his Inspector by the scruff of his neck, and shook him about, as he yelled, “Let him go? You let him go? Do you know what I’m going to do to you, you son of a bitch? I’m going to lock you up, give you a taste of the pokey! You’ll have a thousand watt lamp dangling off your mustache, and if you drop off, I’ll get them to beat you awake…”
It went on like that for quite a while. Escherich kept quite still and allowed himself to be shaken about and scolded. Now it was a good thing that he had had a few. Slightly numbed by the Armagnac, he had only a vague sense of what was going on; it felt a little like a dream.
Oh, shout all you like! he thought. The longer you shout, the sooner you’ll lose your voice. Go ahead, give old Escherich an earful!
And indeed, after shouting himself hoarse, Prall let go. He poured himself another glass of Armagnac, glared at Escherich, and wheezed, “Now, tell me what possessed you to commit an act of such colossal stupidity!”
“First, I want to report,” Escherich said quietly, “that the man is under the constant surveillance of two of our best men from HQ. I think that sooner or later he will lead us to his taskmaster, the writer of the postcards. At present, he denies knowing him. The well-known great unknown.”
“I would have squeezed the name out of him all right! Putting a tail on him—they’ll end up losing the fellow altogether!”
“Not these people! They’re the best at the Alex!”
“Well, I don’t know!” But it was clear that Prall was feeling a little sunnier. “You know I don’t like these independently made decisions. I want the man in my own grasp, where I can get at him!”
You’re damned right you do, thought Escherich. And in half an hour you’ll have realized that he’s got nothing to do with the postcards, and you’ll be on my case again…
But aloud he said: “He’s such a timid little creature, Obergruppenführer! If you rough him up, he’ll tell you whatever you want to hear, and we’ll be chasing a hundred false trails. This way he’ll lead us straight to the writer.”
The Obergruppenführer laughed: “Ha, you old fox! Well, let’s have another anyway!”
And they did.
The Obergruppenführer looked appraisingly at the inspector. His outburst had done him a lot of good, had even sobered him up a little.
He thought for a moment, and then he said, “That statement of yours, you know…”
“Yes, sir!”
“… I want you to give me a few copies of it. For now you can put it away.” Both men grinned. “You never know, it just might get a few Armagnac stains in here…”
Escherich put the statement back in the file, and the file back in his briefcase.
In the meantime, his superior was rummaging around in a drawer of his desk, and now he came round the side of it, a hand behind his back. “As a matter of interest, Escherich, do you have the Iron Cross?”
“No, Obergruppenführer!”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Escherich! Now you do!” And he held out his hand. And in the flat palm of it was a cross.
The inspector was so overwhelmed that he was only able to mumble. “But, Obergruppenführer! I don’t deserve this… I have no words…”
He was ready for everything, he thought, during his dressing-down five minutes ago, even a couple of days and nights in the base
ment, but being awarded the Iron Cross at the end of it, that…
“… sir, my humble thanks…”
Obergruppenführer Prall enjoyed the bewilderment of the newly decorated man.
“Well now, Escherich,” he said after a time. “You know I’m not really like that. And at the end of the day, you’re a hardworking official. You just need a little prodding from time to time, to keep you from going to sleep. Let’s have one more. Cheers, then, Escherich, here’s to you! Here’s to your cross!”
“Cheers, Obergruppenführer! And once again, my very humble thanks!”
The Obergruppenführer started to babble: “Actually, the cross wasn’t being kept for you at all, Escherich. Your colleague Rusch was supposed to get it for a smart operation he conducted involving an old Jewess. But then you turned up.”
He went on babbling for a while, then he turned on the red light over his door, which signified “Important meeting in progress! Do not disturb,” and settled down to sleep on the sofa.
When Escherich, still clutching his medal, walked into his own office, his deputy was sitting there on the telephone, calling out, “What? Hobgoblin case? Never heard of it! Are you sure?”
“Give it to me!” said Escherich, and took the receiver. “And get lost!”
He shouted into the mouthpiece: “Inspector Escherich speaking! What’s that about the Hobgoblin? Do you have something to report?”
“Beg to report, Inspector Escherich, unfortunately we lost the man…”
“You what?”
Escherich was close to exploding with rage, as his superior had done just a quarter of an hour before. He mastered himself and said, “What can possibly have happened? I was told you were a good man, and the fellow you were observing was just a little whippet!”
“Well, that’s one way of putting it, Inspector. He can certainly run like one, and he suddenly got away in the crush on the subway platform at the Alex. He must have noticed we were shadowing him.”
“Oh no, not that too!” Escherich groaned. “You bloody fools have completely messed up my plan. Well, I can’t send you any more, because he knows you. And other men wouldn’t know him!” He reflected. “All right, get back to headquarters, quick as you can! Each of you is to get a stand-in. And one of you is to position himself round the corner from his flat, but keep hidden, all right? I don’t want him running away a second time. It’s your job to show your stand-in which one Kluge is, and then you buzz off. And I want the other man to go to the factory where he works, and report to the management. Hang on, you buffoon, I haven’t given you the address yet.” He looked it up, and read it over the line. “Right, and now get to your places, quick as you can! The second stand-in doesn’t have to go to the factory till tomorrow morning, and he can go alone! They’ll point him out all right! I’ll talk to the management. And in an hour I’ll be at the flat…”
But he had so much dictating and telephoning to do that he didn’t get to Eva Kluge’s flat until very much later. He didn’t see his men, and he rang the bell in vain. The only person he could turn to was the neighbor, Frau Gesch.
“Kluge? Herr Kluge? No, he doesn’t live here. It’s just his wife who lives here, sir, and she won’t let him into the house. She’s away. An address for him? How should I know? He’s always hanging around with some woman or other. Or so I’ve heard, but I’m not saying anything. The wife was furious with me once because I helped her husband get into the flat.”
“Listen, Frau Gesch,” said Escherich, having slipped into the flat as she threatened to shut the door on him. “Why don’t you just tell me everything you know about the Kluges!”
“Why should I? Anyway, who are you to walk into my flat just like that…”
“Inspector Escherich of the Gestapo. If you’d like to see my I.D…”
“No, no!” cried Frau Gesch, shrinking back against the kitchen wall. “I don’t want to see nor hear nothing! And as for the Kluges, I’ve just told you everything I know!”
“Oh, I don’t know, it seems to me you might think it over, Frau Gesch, because if you don’t want to talk to me here, I’d have to invite you back to Prinz Albrecht Strasse and conduct a proper interrogation. I’m sure you wouldn’t like that. This is just a cozy chat we’re having here, you see I’m not taking any notes…”
“Honest, Inspector. I really don’t have any more to say. I don’t know anything about those two.”
“Please yourself, Frau Gesch. Get your coat, I’ve got a couple of men downstairs waiting, we can take you with us right away. And I suggest you leave your husband—you do have a husband? Of course you have a husband!—just leave him a note: ‘I’ve popped out to the Gestapo. Don’t know when I’ll be back.’ All right, Frau Gesch! Get writing!”
Frau Gesch had turned pale, her limbs shook, her teeth were rattling away.
“You wouldn’t do such a thing to a poor woman, sir!” she begged.
He replied with a show of coarseness: “That’s exactly what I’ll do, Frau Gesch, if you continue to refuse to answer a few simple questions. So now, see sense, sit down and tell me everything you know about the Kluges. What is the wife like?”
Frau Gesch saw sense. Basically, the gentleman from the Gestapo was a very kind gentleman, not at all the way she expected. And, of course, Inspector Escherich learned all there was to be learned from Frau Gesch. He even learned about the SS man Karlemann, because what the corner pub knew, Frau Gesch also knew. It would have wrung the heart of the ex-postie Eva Kluge if she had learned how much she and her former darling son Karlemann were the subject of gossip.
When Inspector Escherich said good bye to Frau Gesch, he left behind not only a couple of cigars for her husband, but also an eager, unpaid, and invaluable spy for the Gestapo. She would keep a vigilant eye on the Kluges’ apartment, but more than that, she would listen to everything that went on in the house and in the shops, and she would call the kindly inspector the moment she heard anything she felt would be useful to him.
Following this conversation, Inspector Escherich called off his two men. The chances of finding Kluge anywhere near his wife’s flat were pretty slender, and anyway, he now had Frau Gesch there. Then Inspector Escherich went to the post office and the Party branch, to collect further data on Frau Kluge. You never knew when such things might come in handy.
Escherich could quite easily have told the people at the post office and at the Party HQ of the probable connection between Frau Kluge’s leaving the Party and the atrocities perpetrated by her son in Poland. He could have given away her address in Ruppin, having jotted it down when Frau Gesch showed him her letter enclosing the keys to the flat. But Escherich didn’t do so. He asked plenty of questions, but he didn’t supply any information. It might be the Party and the post office, both official institutions, but the Gestapo wasn’t there to help others run their affairs. It regarded itself a little too highly for that—and in that respect, Inspector Escherich shared the general overweening ethos of the Gestapo.
The gentlemen at the factory then got the same treatment. They were in uniform, and as far as salary and rank went they were far superior to the colorless inspector. But he was adamant: “No, gentlemen, the case against Kluge is purely a Gestapo matter. I can’t say any more about it. I will only tell you to allow Herr Kluge to come and go at work as and when he pleases. I don’t want him shouted at or bullied, and you’re to admit my officers into your factory without let or hindrance, and support them in their work to the utmost of your ability. Have I made myself clear?”
“I want written confirmation of those instructions!” shouted the officer. “And I want it today!”
“It’s a bit late for today. But maybe tomorrow. Kluge won’t be coming in before tomorrow anyway. If he comes in again at all! All right then, gentlemen, Heil Hitler!”
“Goddamnit!” growled the officer. “Those guys get more and more arrogant! I wish the whole Gestapo would go to hell! Just because they have the power to arrest anyone in the country, they th
ink they can do as they please. I’m an officer, a professional officer…”
“Oh, one more thing…” Escherich’s head appeared again in the doorway. “Does the man keep papers, letters, personal effects here?”
“You’d better ask his supervisor about that! He’s got a key to the lockers…”
“Very good,” said Escherich. He sat down. “Will you ask him then, First Lieutenant. And if it’s not too much trouble for you, make it snappy?”
For a moment, the two eyed each other. The eyes of the mocking, colorless Escherich and those of the first lieutenant, dark with rage, fought it out. Then the officer clicked his heels together and rushed out of the room to obtain the desired information.
“There’s a queer fish!” said Escherich to a Party official suddenly scrabbling about with papers at his desk. “Wishes the Gestapo would go to hell. I’d like to know how long you’d be sitting securely in your places, if it weren’t for us. Ultimately, the Gestapo is the state. Without us, everything would collapse—and it’d be you going to hell in a handcart!”
Chapter 25
FRÄULEIN HETTY MAKES UP HER MIND
Both Inspector Escherich and his two spies from the Alex would have been surprised to learn that little Enno Kluge had had no sense of being followed after all. But from the moment that Deputy Inspector Schröder let him go, he’d had only one thought: I want to get out of here, and back to Hetty!
He ran through the streets without seeing a soul—he noticed no one behind him or beside him. He didn’t look up, he just kept thinking Hetty!
The subway entrance swallowed him up. He got onto a train and so for the time being gave Inspector Escherich, the gentlemen of the Alex, and the entire Gestapo the slip.