ALONE IN BERLIN — by Hans Fallada

 

Chapter 39

INSPECTOR ZOTT

Inspector Zott, a little man with a goatee beard and beer belly, might have sprung from an E.T.A. Hoffmann story. He was a creature compounded of small print, dust, and a lot of shrewdness. He had once been a figure of ridicule among the Berlin detectives because he scorned the usual methods—he hardly ever interrogated a suspect or witness, and he went green at the sight of a corpse.

His preferred procedure was sitting over his colleagues’ files, checking, comparing, writing out page-long summaries—but his particular hobbyhorse was the drawing up of charts. He tabulated anything and everything, drawing up endless, minutely considered charts from which he drew his shrewd conclusions. And since Inspector Zott, with his method of doing everything by pure logical deduction, had come up with some surprising successes in cases that had appeared intractable, his colleagues had gotten used to handing over all such cases to him—if Zott couldn’t solve them, no one could.

In and of itself, Inspector Escherich’s suggestion that the Hobgoblin case be passed to Inspector Zott was not exceptional. Only, Escherich should have allowed it to come from his superiors; put forward by himself it was simply an impertinence, no, it was fear of the enemy and desertion…

Inspector Zott closeted himself with the Hobgoblin files for three days, and only then asked the Obergruppenführer for a meeting. The Obergruppenführer, eager to see the case brought to a conclusion, had gone straight in to see him.

“Well, you old fox, what have you managed to sniff out for yourself? I’m sure you’ve got the man all taped up. That moron Escherich…”

There followed a long tirade against Escherich, who had made an almighty bollocks of everything. Inspector Zott listened without pulling a face, not even nodding or shaking his head to indicate agreement or otherwise.

Once the fire was extinguished, Zott said, “Obergruppenführer, behold the author of the postcards; a simple man, not that well educated, hasn’t had occasion to write that much in the course of his life, and who now finds it difficult to express himself in writing. He must be a bachelor or a widower and live all alone in his apartment; otherwise, his wife or landlady would surely have caught him in the act of writing at some time in the last two years. The fact that we have never heard anything about his appearance, even though we must assume that in the area north of the Alex there is a lot of gossip about these postcards, proves that no one can ever have seen him writing. He must lead an absolutely solitary life. He must be an older man—a younger one would have had enough of such an ineffectual campaign and would have gone onto some other activity. Also, he doesn’t own a radio…”

“All right, all right, Inspector!” Obergruppenführer Prall interrupted him impatiently. “I’ve heard all that long ago almost word for word from that idiot Escherich. What I need are conclusions, evaluations, results that help me lay hands on the fellow. I see you have a chart there. Tell me about it!”

“There in that chart,” replied Inspector Zott, not showing how hurt he was by Prall’s interruption, and hearing all of his sharp deductions described as having been reached by Escherich previously, “I have tabulated all the times when the cards were found. We are talking about two hundred and thirty-three cards and eight letters. If we analyze the times these were reported, we come to the following conclusions: no cards were left after eight p.m. or before nine a.m….”

“But that’s all blindingly obvious!” exclaimed the Obergruppenführer impatiently. “The buildings are locked at those times. I don’t need your charts to tell me that!”

“One moment, if you don’t mind!” said Zott, now sounding a little irritated. “I hadn’t got to the end of my conclusions. And by the way, the buildings are not unlocked at nine, as you say, but at seven, and in some cases as early as six. To proceed. Eighty percent of the postcards were reported between nine in the morning and midday. No cards were reported between midday and two p.m. Twenty percent of the cards between two and eight p.m. It follows therefore that the author—who is certainly the same person as the distributor—eats lunch very regularly from twelve to two, that he works at night, or at any rate never in the morning, and rarely in the afternoon. If I take one site, let’s say on the Alex, I see that the card was dropped at 11:15, and if I take the distance a man can cover in forty-five minutes, that is, by twelve noon, and I draw a circle with such a radius from the point, then to the north I intersect the area that is free of flags. That holds true for all the sites, with a few exceptions, which can be explained by the fact that the moment the cards were dropped is not always identical with the moment they were reported to us. From this I deduce, firstly, that the man is exceedingly punctual. Secondly, he doesn’t like to take public transport. He lives in the triangle bordered by Greifswalder Strasse, Danziger Strasse, and Prenzlauer Strasse, and at the northern end of such a triangle, presumably in Chodowiecki, Jablonski, or Christburger Strasse.”

“Brilliant, Inspector!” said the Obergruppenführer, growing more and more disappointed. “I seem to remember Escherich naming those particular streets as well. But he said there was no sense in mounting a house-to-house search. What’s your view?”

“One moment, please,” said Zott, raising his small hand, which seemed to have been yellowed from all the files on which it had been resting. He was deeply offended by now. “I want to communicate my conclusions to you quite precisely, so that you can see for yourself whether the measures I suggest are appropriate…”

He’s trying to cover for himself, the cunning bastard! thought Prall to himself. Just you wait, there’s no cover from me, and if I want to string you up by the thumbs, then I bloody well will!

“If you go back to my chart,” the inspector went on in his lecturing tone, “then you’ll see that all the cards were dropped on weekdays. From that we deduce that the man doesn’t leave home on Sundays. Sunday is his writing day, which is borne out by the fact that most of the cards were reported on Mondays and Tuesdays. The man is always in a hurry to get the incriminating material out of his house.”

The little pot-belly raised a finger. “The only exceptions are the nine cards that were found south of Nollendorfplatz. They were all dropped on Sundays, at almost exact three-monthly intervals, generally in the late afternoon or early evening. From which we draw the conclusion that the writer has a relative, perhaps an aging mother, to whom he is obliged to pay regular visits.”

Inspector Zott paused and looked at the Obergruppenführer through his gold-rimmed spectacles, as if in expectation of some word of praise or recognition.

But all Prall said was, “That’s all well and good. Very shrewd, I’m sure. But I can’t see where it gets us….”

“It gets us a little further!” the inspector ventured to contradict him. “Of course I will arrange to have my men make discreet inquiries on the streets in question, to see if there is anyone living there who fits the bill.”

“Well, that’s a start!” the Obergruppenfuhrer exclaimed, relieved. “Anything else?”

“Also,” said the inspector with an air of quiet triumph, producing a second chart, “I have made up a second map, on which I have drawn red circles of one kilometer in diameter around the main sites where the cards have been found. I have left out Nollendorfplatz and the presumptive residence. If I look at the eleven principal sites—there are eleven, Obergruppenführer—then I make the surprising discovery that all of them, all without exception, are on or near the location of streetcar stations. See for yourself, Obergruppenführer! Here! And here! Here! Here the station is a little to the right, but still well within the radius. And here—bang in the middle again…”

Zott looked at the Obergruppenführer almost beseechingly. “That can’t be coincidence!” he said. “There are no coincidences like that in detective work! Obergruppenführer, the man must have something to do with the electrical streetcar network. There’s no other possibility. He must work night shifts there, occasionally afternoons. He won’t do his work in uniform, we know that from the two witnesses who saw him drop his cards. Now, Obergruppenführer, I want your permission to put a very good man on each of these eleven stations. That strikes me as a more promising tactic than house-to-house inquiries. But if we do both, and both thoroughly, I’m sure we’ll be crowned with success.”

“You cunning old fox, you!” shouted the Obergruppenführer, now very bullish, and he gave the inspector a whack on the shoulders that almost knocked him off his feet. “You wily old crook! That plan with the streetcar stations is excellent. Escherich is a moron! How did he miss that? Of course you have my permission! Get a move on, and in two or three days tell me you’ve caught the fellow! I want to break it to that incredible fool of an Escherich what an ass he is!”

The Obergruppenführer left the office with a satisfied smile on his face.

Alone again, Inspector Zott coughed nervously. He sat down at his desk with his charts, squinted over at the door, coughed again. He hated all those loud-mouthed, brainless, bullying types. And this one in particular, who had just left him, he hated worst of all, that ape who kept holding Escherich up to him: “Escherich said that, too,” and “that’s what that idiot Escherich always used to say.”

And then he had slapped him on the back, and the inspector detested any form of physical contact. No, that man—well, he could only wait and hope. Those fellows weren’t as secure as they liked to make out; their yelling only masked their insecurity, the fear that they would one day be toppled. However confident and soldierly their bearing, they knew perfectly well that they knew nothing and were nothing. To have to explain to such a dunderhead his great discovery with the streetcar stations—a man who couldn’t even follow such reasoning when it was demonstrated to him! Well, it was pearls before swine, the old story!

The inspector returns to his files, his charts, his plans. He has a tidy mind; he shuts a desk drawer and instantly forgets its contents. He opens the drawer marked STREETCAR STATIONS, and starts thinking about what sort of work the author of the postcards might do. He calls the personnel department of the public transport service and asks for a list of all the types of jobs there. He takes notes.

He is obsessed with the idea that the wanted man has something to do with streetcars. He is so proud of his discovery. He would be immeasurably disappointed if they brought him Quangel as the guilty man—a foreman in a furniture works. It would mean nothing to him that the culprit had been arrested—it would only pain him that his beautiful theory was wrong.

And for this reason, when a day or two later inquiries are in full swing both in the streetcar stations and the houses, and the supervisor tells him they might have caught the man, he merely asks what the man’s job is. Carpenter, he is told, and the man has no more interest for him. He is looking for a streetcar employee!

He hangs up, end of story. So much so that the inspector doesn’t even notice that the station is on Nollendorfplatz, that it’s late afternoon on a Sunday, and that a card is due near Nollendorfplatz round about now. The inspector doesn’t even make a note of the station number. Those fools, they do nothing but blunder around—end of story!

My people will inform me tomorrow, the day after at the latest. The uniformed police are all blunderers—after all, they aren’t detectives.

And so it comes about that the Quangels are released…