Nightmare in Berlin by Hans Fallada Page B

against that person, set his spies to work to listen and watch, and then either issued threats or drew the net closed, whichever best suited his own needs.
    As a result, his business flourished. As well as the cart horses, he now kept a separate team that only hauled crates of beer and barrels. And Zaches, the obsequious, ever-courteous pauper had now turned into Mr. Zaches, the National Socialist Party member, a man with a finger in every pie and a sharp tongue in his head, who knew that he had a lot of money behind him, as well as a Party that could make or break its fellow citizens, and held the power of life and death over them. On the back of all this, Zaches had become big and fat, and only his unhealthy, sallow complexion and his dark, piercing eyes, which avoided the direct gaze of others, recalled the lean years of the past. When the war broke out and merchandise in his line of business became particularly scarce and sought-after, his substantial earnings were unaffected; on the contrary, he made more money from a limited supply of inferior merchandise than he had been making from the good stuff. On top of that, the departure of so many men to go and fight in the war brought him a number of new posts, and like all National Socialists he did not feel bound by the rules governing the rationing of food. He took whatever he needed from the land — bacon, eggs, poultry, butter, and flour — and what he couldn’t eat himself he sold on at extortionate prices, secure in the knowledge that an old Party member was effectively untouchable.
    And so he remained — until the Red Army arrived on the scene. Zaches was one of the first to be arrested. His sworn statement that he had only joined the Party for economic reasons was surely no less than the truth in his case, but for many years now he had been such a selfish parasite and enemy of the people that economic reasons were no mitigation whatsoever. Yet once again he had more luck than he deserved. The authorities soon had to grant him a measure of freedom again, because he was needed for work in the town’s dairy. In his youth, Zaches had learned the dairy trade, and when times were tough he had helped out there from time to time — so now he was just the man to step in and lend a hand. For better or worse, it was necessary to employ him there, though nobody liked the idea — least of all Doll. But the pressing need to feed the mothers and children of the town meant that political interests had to take a back seat for now.
    Things went on in this way for a while, until certain rumours began to reach the ears of the mayor, and he summoned the onetime beer wholesaler and now dairy manager Zaches to his office. ‘Look here, Zaches!’ he said to the sallow-faced and still portly man, who couldn’t bring himself to look Doll in the eye, ‘I’m hearing all kinds of stories about a big stockpile of goods you’re supposed to have hidden somewhere. What’s that all about?’
    Not surprisingly, Zaches assured him that he had no such hidden stock of supplies. He freely admitted that he had had cases of wine and schnaps buried in his garden in seven different places. But these hiding places had all been discovered, he said, and now he had nothing more hidden away.
    While Zaches was speaking thus, in all apparent honesty, Doll had been observing him closely, and now he said: ‘Everyone in the town knows about the seven hiding places. But there’s a persistent rumour going around that what they found was just a trifle compared with the big hoard that hasn’t been found yet …’
    â€˜There is no big hoard any more, Mr. Mayor’, insisted Zaches. ‘It’s all been found. I don’t have anything more.’
    â€˜Repeat what you just said, Zaches, and look me in the eye while you’re talking!’
    â€˜Eh?’ Zaches was thrown into confusion by such an unusual request. ‘How do you