Every Man Dies Alone (26 page)

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 off. 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.

On his way home to Lotte, Enno Kluge was grinning again. So, solid, hard-working Eva was in a jam herself, and had taken off to Ruppin to her relatives, and no longer dared show her face in Berlin! Of course, Enno hadn’t been stupid enough to let the postal officials know where Eva had gone to; he was as smart as Frau Gesch any day of the week. It would be one last way out: if things ever came to a head in Berlin, he could always turn up at Eva’s, maybe she would take him in. She might feel constrained in front of her relatives not to treat him too coldly. Eva still set store by appearances and a good reputation. Plus he had her over a barrel with Karlemann’s heroic deeds; she wouldn’t be able to stand it if he started telling her relatives about that. She’d sooner have him back.

One last way out, if everything went pear-shaped. For the time being, he still had his Lotte. She was really pretty okay, except for her gabbiness and her damned habit of bringing men back to the flat. He had to spend half the night, sometimes the whole of it, hunkered in the kitchen—and that meant no work again the following morning.

Work would never come right again, and he knew it really. But maybe the war would end sooner than people thought and he would succeed in keeping them off his back. And so he had very gradually fallen into his old habits of idling and staying away. When the boss saw him he would flush purple. Then there was a second telling-off from the management, but this time it hadn’t had much effect on him. Enno Kluge knew the game: they needed workers, they couldn’t afford to just throw him out!

Then there had been a run of three days off in quick succession. He had met this delightful widow, no longer in her first flush
of youth, a bit of spare flesh on her, but still decidedly a cut above his other women of the moment. My God, she even had a flourishing pet shop business near the Königstor! She traded in birds and fish and dogs, she sold feed and collars and sand and dog biscuits and mealworms. You could buy tortoises there, frogs, salamanders, and cats… A business that was really thriving, and she was a good, hard working businesswoman.

He had identified himself to her as a widower, and he had made her believe Enno was his surname; she called him Hänschen. Definitely, he was in with a chance with this woman—he had seen that pretty clearly on his days off, when he helped her out in her shop. A man like him, in need of a little tenderness, that was just what she needed, really. She was at that point where a woman gets to wondering if she’ll ever find a man again for her old age. Of course she would want to marry him, but he would be able to sort something out there. After all, there were now such things as war marriages, where they weren’t that fussy about paperwork, and he certainly wouldn’t have to worry about Eva making a nuisance of herself. She would be pleased to be rid of him for good, she wouldn’t suddenly kick up!

With that, he suddenly felt a burning desire to be done with the factory for good. He had to play the invalid anyway, as he had been away for three days without permission, so why not go the whole way! And during his medical leave he could work on charming this widow, Hetty Haberle. He felt disgusted by Lotte now. He couldn’t stand that situation any more, not the backchat, not the other men, and least of all, not her advances to him when she was juiced up. No, in three or four weeks he wanted to be a married man and living in a well-regulated home! And for that he needed a doctor.