The Third Warning

At the Heffkes', unaccustomed schnapps loosens everyone, and hunchbacked Ulrich sings hymns in a high falsetto that stirs old, half-buried belief in Otto. Walking home tipsy and irritated by Anna's praise of faith, Otto impulsively demands a postcard and drops it despite Anna's protests that it's an unlucky day; it goes smoothly, but moments later a man comes running after them waving the card and shouting for the police. The accuser is Millek, a vindictive post-office clerk who had spent three hours spying through his peephole on a neighbour he suspects of prostitution and instead witnessed Otto's drop. A policeman takes all three to the station, where Anna slips the second postcard into a post box unnoticed. The supervisor, sceptical of Millek's record of petty denunciations, has Otto and Anna searched and finds nothing; he telephones Inspector Zott, who dismisses the case at once because the real culprit, he insists, works for the trams — and the Quangels are released.

The third warning finally arrives as capture, then Fallada snatches it back through two strokes of luck: a supervisor who distrusts his informer, and an inspector too committed to his own chart to see the man before him. The hymn-singing before the drop reads as Otto's closest approach to faith.