In Free Fall

  The young woman bending over him has hair dyed a synthetic shade of red, and reminds Schilf of a film he saw some years ago, in which a girl is running all the time. He means to preface his next question with a gallant gesture, but it turns into a clumsy wave because of the way he is lying on the floor.

  “Can you tell me where I am, please?”

  “In Freiburg,” the young woman says. “Or were you asking about the name of the planet? Or the galaxy?”

  Schilf tries to laugh but stops immediately, because his brain is sloshing around in hot fluid.

  “I’m familiar with the constellations. What kind of shop is this?”

  “This is the Gallery of Modern Art.”

  “Very good. That’s where I was heading.”

  “That’s probably why you walked in the door.”

  “Very likely. Is Maike here?”

  “She’s in the courtyard with the birds. Do you know her?”

  “I’m a friend of her husband.”

  Schilf allows the young woman to help him up, even though he feels quite steady on his feet by now. Her hair smells of mango, and the fair-skinned arm that she offers him smells of coconut. They pass affronted paintings, bad-tempered sculptures, and a few hostile installations; they get to the back door and linger at the threshold. Schilf feels as if he is looking into a piece of paradise. The walls of the small courtyard are covered in moss, and beams of light slant down through the leaves of an overhanging chestnut tree. The sunlight conjures up the familiar metallic shimmer on the head of the woman who is leaning over the hatch of a large aviary, just as she bent over to unlock her bicycle earlier. The caws of the parrots turn the courtyard into an exotic place, a bit of outback hidden in the midst of Freiburg’s town center.

  “Maike, you have a visitor.”

  Maike shakes seeds from a box into an earthenware bowl and distributes peanuts on little dishes as if she has heard nothing. Three of the yellow-faced birds flutter to the bottom of the cage and watch her. When she has finished feeding them, she stands straight.

  The detective thought he was prepared for anything, but he is nevertheless shocked. Maike’s eyes are expressionless, her lips pressed together. Her face is stretched over her cheekbones like a mask that has grown too small. Her obvious reluctance to engage in conversation allows the detective a few seconds in which to feel moved. There is a shadow over her bright surface, and it seems to Schilf as if it has the shape of a tall man. Suddenly he wants to do everything possible to protect Maike. He wants to sacrifice himself in order to divert catastrophe from her, even though he has come here as catastrophe’s master of ceremonies. Maike stands stiff as a post in front of him—she is nothing more than the wife of a witness, a mere accessory to a case. Not for the first time, Schilf curses his job. The investigator does his work behind a glass wall, he frequently says in his lectures at the police college, always behind a glass wall. Other people’s lives are like his own past to him: he can look at them, but not enter them, and it is always too late to change things.

  Schilf will address Maike with the formal Sie, ask her questions, and not reveal the tightening in his throat. He can’t speak clearly anyway.

  I’ve got nothing against emotions, but they really don’t have to hit me with full force every time, the detective thought, the detective thinks.

  “Why are you looking at me so strangely?” Maike asks.

  “I’m watching you exist.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Schilf,” says Schilf.

  “He says he knows Sebastian,” the redhead explains, disappearing into the gallery.

  Maike raises her eyebrows, astonished. “Just don’t tell me any bad news.”

  “It’s about paintings,” the detective assures her hastily.

  Maike’s eyebrows return to their usual place. “I’ll just quickly give the birds their water.”

  They walk by the aviary together. Another parakeet uses its curved beak to climb down a pole at the side of the cage. It stops level with Schilf’s face. Its cheeks are adorned with two red circles like over-applied rouge.

  “Can they talk?”

  “Not in our language.”

  “This morning I spoke to a parrot in town.”

  “That must have been Agfa. Look out, look out?”

  It is a good opportunity for them to smile at each other, but Maike does not use it. She pushes the nozzle of a watering can through the bars of the cage and fills the water dish.

  “What’s he called?”

  “He’s a cockatiel parakeet, from the cockatoo family.”

  “I mean, what’s his name?”

  The bird in front of Schilf’s face has finished his assessment and climbs farther down the cage to nibble at the peanuts. Maike pauses for a second before she answers.

  “He’s called Ralph.”

  “And those two there”—Schilf points quickly at a couple kissing on a perch—“they’re in love, aren’t they?”

  “They’re both male. They’re kissing to stimulate their brains and their gonads.”

  “Is that what male friendships are good for?”

  “Among cockatiels, yes,” Maike says, unmoved.

  Beneath her light eyelashes, her eyes are slightly puffy and stiff, as if she has forgotten how to blink. Expressionless, she looks the detective in the face.

  “Let’s go inside,” she says. “We can talk about paintings there.”

  The two chairs that Maike leads them toward are in the middle of the room, and too far apart for a proper conversation. They are red, and twisted into themselves, so that the back supports not the spine of the person sitting on it, but their right shoulder instead. Schilf sees the creative urge of the designer floating around the chairs like a colored cloud, and sits down only with some effort. He is unable to find a suitable posture. Finally he leans forward with his elbows resting on his knees, like a hooligan at a bus stop. He puffs out his cheeks when he sees that Maike has crossed her legs elegantly on her contorted chair, and thus turned herself into the most beautiful of all her works of art. A giant photograph covers the wall behind her. Although it contains no recognizable objects, Schilf knows immediately what it depicts. A crossroads at night, taken with an exposure of a few hours.

  Schilf doesn’t have a clue about visual art; only in a moment of insanity could he pretend he was a serious buyer. Sweat trickles through his hair down onto his neck. The way Maike is sitting in front of him—unapproachable, hyper-real, radiating coolness like the canal in front of her house—she is the only work in this room that Schilf would like to acquire on the spot, chair and all. He would display her in his apartment. She would never be allowed to move or talk, certainly not while he was at home, anyway. No wonder Sebastian loves her, the detective thinks. Questions about the laws of nature pale into insignificance next to a woman like Maike. She would be present in every imaginable parallel universe, and always herself.

  Maike is also looking at a bright red, sinfully expensive Girome chair, not with a work of art on it, but with a shapeless, sweating person who is casting her strange glances. In her head, a dead Ralph Dabbelink and a kidnapped Liam are struggling to expand themselves into something that could explode any minute. Maike is a victim—she has done nothing other than go on vacation. She is guilty only of being away for a few days, at the end of which she had to witness her husband turn first into a stranger, then into a monster who shouted at her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and threw her to the floor. The fight happened barely three hours ago, but has already become unthinkable to her. She has reckoned with a disaster of some kind, but one she could point to, not a situation in which she could no longer understand a single word in her own language. The list of the most terrible days in her life has begun to grow—each consecutive day will push the one before it out of pole position, and Maike senses that this will go on for a while.

  The man in the Girome chair is sweating as if he wished to dissolve into water and then disappear from the surface of the
earth. He is sweating too hard for a collector and certainly too much for a normal art lover looking for a deal. Only his eyes are cool. Maike sees something unapproachable in them, hyper-real, a reflection of the most beautiful of all works of art, which this man would buy on the spot if he could. This work of art is she herself. As she returns his gaze, she grows calmer and calmer, almost as if she is approaching an inner death without any fear of dying. She can hold this gaze longer than he can. She will not blink for all eternity. She has the form that is always able to outlast the content.

  “How can I help you?”

  Maike’s question comes out perfectly. The redhead is sitting at a desk by the entrance, wearing a pair of large glasses and flipping through a file in slow motion. The detective shifts his weight on the chair. His next position, with one arm resting on the too-high back, is just as uncomfortable as his first.

  “I’ve come about Blackmail I and II.”

  Maike’s face is a blank surface. “You’ve been to my apartment?”

  “Just briefly.”

  “Strange that you mention those paintings.”

  The voices of the parakeets come through the door from the courtyard—they are starting to comment on the scene. Maike crosses her legs the other way.

  “When I came back from vacation today, there was a water stain in the shape of a hand on the wall next to Blackmail I and II.”

  Schilf does not reply. He noticed the stain.

  “My husband threw a vase against the wall because … Excuse me.” Maike shakes her head. Her lips begin to stretch into a smile for the first time. “It’s not a good day. Signs everywhere.”

  The smile spreads and makes the detective’s heart lurch.

  “There’s a sad story behind those pictures. The world is full of them.”

  “Of pictures? Or sad stories?”

  “Perhaps they’re the same thing.”

  “You could be right.”

  “Do you want to hear the story?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “IT’S THE FINAL WORK BY THE ARTIST. He put forty pounds of oils on the canvas. Painted as if he were using up his supplies. Then he retired from painting.”

  Maike speaks quietly and quickly. The artist, a favorite of the Muses, and Maike’s very own discovery, fell in love one day with a young boy, who soon moved in with him. The relationship was of the kind that turned every park bench into the stage for a Greek tragedy. There was nothing remarkable about the artist’s appearance apart from a pair of incredibly bright eyes, but his boyfriend seemed to be made according to the sketches of a Michelangelo. Slender, dark, and supple. Pure body, no soul.

  At gallery receptions, the young man strolled gracefully through the rooms, intent only on distracting the guests from the exhibition. Both men and women gazed after him. If the evening went well, there was more talk about him than about the paintings. He did not like his lover’s work. He did not like art at all. He thought that art existed only to detract from the beauty of life, by which he meant, above all, his own beauty.

  “Do you know what jealousy is?” Maike asks.

  “From hearsay,” says the detective.

  Two years passed. The young man showed off his bruises proudly. When the fighting could escalate no further, he set an ultimatum. It was either him or the paintings.

  “The artist chose love,” Schilf guesses.

  “Wrong,” Maike says.

  The artist chose art. He sent his lover packing and expressed his despair in color, creating Blackmail I and II. After that, his muse left him, too, and followed his boyfriend.

  “He never painted anything of note after that,” Maike says. “Sometimes love is a kind of destructive rage.”

  She raises her little finger to the corner of her eye as if trying to brush something away. Neither of them feels that the next sentence is their responsibility. While Maike looks down at her feet, the orchestra of thoughts in Schilf’s head plays a polyphonic symphony of questions to ask and statements to make. Philosophical remarks about the architecture of fate. Queries about the price of the paintings that he is supposed to be interested in buying. Banalities about breeding parakeets. When he finally opens his mouth, he has assembled the most deadly collection of words imaginable.

  “How are you coping with Ralph Dabbelink’s death?”

  Maike jumps up almost before the name is out of his mouth. She looks around as if she has come in here by mistake and stumbled into a conversation among strangers.

  “How do you know Ralph?”

  “From the newspapers.”

  “Did they say I was friends with him?”

  “I know that from Sebastian.”

  “You’re lying!” Maike shouts.

  She is right, for it was not Sebastian who told the detective about Maike’s friendship with Dabbelink, but Maike herself, or, to be precise, her racing bike, combined with the paleness of her cheeks, on which her tan looks artificial. She has pushed both hands into her pockets, and is kneading the fabric of her trousers.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Please go.”

  Maike walks over and looks directly down at him. Schilf rises clumsily. He can see that she is struggling for composure and losing it. Her self-control is falling away like a broken facade; an expression of naked fury is coming to the fore. When she lifts a pair of touchingly balled fists, Schilf does not feel that her aggression is directed at him. It is Sebastian’s chest that she is punching, Sebastian’s skin that she is digging her nails into. It is also his arm that she is holding on to, and it is even his voice that makes comforting noises. They sink into an embrace that the detective has not sought. He feels the fat of his stomach yielding to Maike’s weight, the softness of his body. It takes only seconds for Maike to push him away from her and re-create some space. The redhead looks over, indifferent as a machine that has not been programmed to deal with occurrences of this kind.

  “I’m here to warn you.”

  The detective hears the sweet whispering of a rejected lover; it comes from his own mouth. Quickly he pulls back the hands that for some unknown reason are reaching toward Maike.

  “You have to stand by Sebastian no matter what happens. He …”

  “We’ll see,” Maike says.

  She wipes moisture from her face and smooths her hair. In another five seconds, she will have changed back into the untouchable gallery owner, curator of strangers’ fates, saleswoman of sorrow turned into paintings. Three more seconds.

  “Don’t make a mistake. Leave everything else to me.”

  “Get lost.”

  She does not shout, but turns the words into a polite request. The detective obeys. The doorbell chimes the “Ode to Joy.” Maike goes to the window and watches him as he walks down the lane, taking small steps and lifting his knees up high as if to avoid invisible obstacles. He takes an intolerably long time to reach the corner, where he does not turn, but simply dissolves into air.

  [7]

  RITA SKURA IS HAVING A SHITTY DAY, one of those days that get worse and worse with every passing minute. At around two o’clock in the afternoon, she sinks down into one of the armchairs that are on every floor for anyone feeling faint. Even with her eyes closed she can see the figures in dressing gowns shuffling down corridors, and hear the slapping of the slippers dangling from bare feet. All morning she has been surrounded by a cloud of disinfectant that ought to spread cleanliness, but which merely reminds her of flaking scalps, bedsores, and open ulcers. The light of the fluorescent tubes pursues Rita just as doggedly. It turns even healthy faces into grimaces of misery, and makes the summer’s day outside look like a mocking stage-set, no more real than an Alpine panorama on a billboard advertising chocolate.

  Rita Skura is young enough to think that good health is simply a matter of having the right attitude. She is a stranger to a place like this. She has always found the idea of people drilling bits of metal into each other, or cutting each other up into bloody
sections, more tolerable than the exhibits of decline that accompany what they call a natural death. At such an endpoint to the glory of human life, the following question arises: Why does someone like Rita Skura devote all her energy to hunting down people who have done nothing more than replace this tortuously slow decline with a quick exit? No one can put the real criminals—illness, mortality, and the fear of both—behind bars.

  Thoughts like these do not pass through Rita’s mind as she leans back in a soulless, artificial leather armchair and pulls her cardigan tight around her—of course not, she is not the type to think like this. She is worrying instead about wasting time. She has not been in the business long, but she knows immediately when she is not making progress. And if Rita hates anything, it is dead ends.

  On this wasted day, her only success so far has come from brazenly taking Medical Director Schlüter by surprise and forcing him into a brief interview. Early that morning, she swept past reception confidently, took the elevator to the cardiology department, and hid behind an aluminum cupboard in the corridor. When the medical director appeared during his rounds, followed by a flock of white coats, she stepped out in front of him at the door to the nearest patient’s room. Schlüter did not seem surprised. Without saying a word, he grabbed her sleeve. His familiarity with body parts not his own was evident in the firmness of his grip and the indifference he showed to Rita’s anatomical particularities. He dragged her through a glass door that he shut behind them. The senior registrars and the nurses locked outside immediately started up a conversation, looking through the glass with the studied indifference of goldfish.

  Rita and Medical Director Schlüter found themselves in a section of the utility passage, surrounded by buckets, cleaning carts, and discarded wheelchairs. Unusually for Rita, she hardly got a word in. Schlüter did not raise his voice, and his lecture lasted less than five minutes.

  The police had been plaguing him for two weeks—him, who had taken the Hippocratic oath not just as a matter of form but to his very heart—with the most absurd accusations. He was not sure if a thick-skulled civil servant such as Rita was able to appreciate what it was like to continue carrying out his very complicated duties under these circumstances. Some patients were refusing to take medication because they were afraid that they would be poisoned by doctors testing unauthorized pills on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry. Even less could Rita imagine that the gruesome death of his anesthetist affected him, Schlüter, most of all. He would not put up with it any longer. If Rita and her friends didn’t immediately stop treating him like a murderer in public, they would find themselves charged with libel and facing a massive police scandal. He did not think it necessary to list the influential persons he played golf with on a regular basis.