Six Months Later: Inspector Escherich

Six months on, Inspector Escherich has forty-four red flags on his map of Berlin, accounting for all but four of the Quangels' forty-eight postcards, most surrendered by frightened citizens rather than passed hand to hand as the Quangels imagine. His superior, SS Obergruppenführer Prall, bursts in demanding results and warning of Himmler's displeasure, but Escherich, a self-styled patient hunter of his 'Hobgoblin,' argues that only time will thicken the map enough to locate the writer. He reasons the man is a widower or lives alone, a manual labourer who rarely misspells a word, hates the Winter Relief Fund, and has no fixed job given the scattered hours of the drops. Prall leaves unconvinced but resigned. Alone, Escherich admits to himself that he has grown genuinely absorbed in the chase — not from duty but from a hunter's hunger for the kill. As he eats lunch, a call comes in: a station believes it has caught the card dropper.

Escherich becomes a fully drawn antagonist here — patient, self-aware, almost admiring of his quarry. The real tension is procedural rather than personal: Prall's political panic against Escherich's craftsman's confidence, with the closing phone call promising the collision of both threads readers now expect.