Oh, that man! Was she going to be left with no one? After the son, was she going to lose the father?

In the meantime, Quangel was walking briskly in the direction of Prenzlauer Allee. It had occurred to him that it was a good idea to look at a building like that properly, to see if his impression of it was at all accurate. Otherwise, he would have to think of something else entirely.

On Prenzlauer Allee, he slowed down; his eye scanned the nameplates on the housefronts as though looking for something specific. On a corner house he saw signs for two lawyers and a doctor, in addition to many other business plates.

He pushed against the door. It was open. Right: no porters in houses with so many visitors. Slowly, his hand on the banister, he climbed the steps, once a grand staircase with oak flooring, which through heavy use and years of war had lost all trace of grandeur. Now it looked merely dingy and worn, and the carpets were long since gone, probably taken in at the beginning of the war.

Otto Quangel passed a lawyer’s sign on the first floor, nodded, and slowly walked on up. It wasn’t as though he was all alone on the stairway, not at all. People kept passing him—either from behind, or coming down the other way. He kept hearing bells going off, doors slamming, phones ringing, typewriters clattering, people talking.

But in between there was a moment when Otto Quangel was all alone on the stairs, or at least had his part of the stairs all to himself, when all of life seemed to have withdrawn into the offices. That was the moment to do it. In fact, everything was exactly the way he had imagined it. People in a hurry, not looking each other in the face, dirty windowpanes letting in only a murky gray light, no porter, no one anywhere to take an interest in anyone.

When Otto Quangel had seen the plate of the second lawyer on the first floor, and an arrow pointing visitors up another flight of steps to the doctor’s office, he nodded in agreement. He turned around: he had just been to see a lawyer, and now he was leaving the building. No point in looking further: it was exactly the sort of building he needed, and there were thousands upon thousands of them in Berlin.

Foreman Otto Quangel is standing in the street again. A dark-haired young man with a very pale face walks up to him.

“You’re Herr Quangel, aren’t you?” he asks. “Herr Otto Quangel, from Jablonski Strasse?”

Quangel utters a stalling “Mhm?”—a sound that can indicate agreement as much as dissent.

The young man takes it for agreement. “I am to ask you on behalf of Trudel Baumann,” he says, “to forget her completely. Also tell your wife not to visit Trudel anymore. Herr Quangel, there’s no need for you to…”

“You tell her,” says Otto Quangel, “that I don’t know any Trudel Baumann and I don’t like to be approached by strangers on the street…”

His fist catches the young man on the point of the chin, and he crumples like a wet rag. Quangel strides casually through the crowd of people gathering, straight past a policeman, toward a tram stop. The tram comes, he climbs in, and rides two stops. Then he rides back the other way, this time on the front platform of the second car. As he thought: most of the people have gone their way; ten or a dozen onlookers are still standing in front of a café where the man was probably carried.

He is already conscious again. For the second time in the space of two hours, Karl Hergesell is called upon to identify himself to an official.

“It’s really nothing, officer,” he assures him. “I must have trodden on his toe, and he bopped me one. I’ve no idea who he was, I’d hardly started apologizing when he caught me.”

Once again, Karl Hergesell is allowed to leave unchallenged, with no suspicion against him. But he realizes that he shouldn’t go on trying his luck. The only reason he went to see Trudel’s ex-father-in-law was to gauge her safety.