Fallada, Hans - Every Man Dies Alone by Fallada Hans

Author:Fallada, Hans [Fallada, Hans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2012-08-16T16:39:48+00:00

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.

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