In Free Fall

  Blackmail, more or less, the detective thinks. Perhaps Sebastian has jumped over the wall a second time by murdering Dabbelink. Perhaps he had secretly hoped to find Oskar still waiting behind the wall, but was shocked to the core to find that he was right. And now he is escaping into nowhere.

  Since the fracture that separated the detective from himself, he has wondered often whether people are not somehow responsible for every conceivable twist of their own fate. Whether it isn’t that people only ever blackmail themselves.

  He recognizes the glowing patches of the Place de Cornavin, Place de Montbrillant, and Place Reculet, the dark ribbon of the Rhône, the colorful twinkling lights of the Quai du Mont-Blanc, and the devouring darkness of Lake Geneva beyond it. As if on cue, the pain starts nagging between his eyes again. It grows hot and bright and draws the city closer to him, bathing it in a glittering light.

  Three people, tiny as toy figures, are walking across a pier toward the Jet d’Eau. Two of them are close together, probably arm in arm. The third, smaller person is running ahead like an excited dog. All three have blond hair. The detective sees them in unusually sharp detail in spite of the distance; he can just see their outstretched index fingers, and the happy faces turned up toward the sky to take in the whole height of the white gleam at the end of the pier. The tower of water splits the sun into all the colors of the rainbow.

  “Look, Daddy! The lake is throwing itself up into the air!”

  The spray soaks their clothes. It is warm.

  The detective is looking at a holiday snap, a postcard like the ones on his fridge. But there is one essential difference. The other side of this particular card is not blank. There is writing on it: “It’s fantastic!” or “We were here!”

  Schilf decides to take this card with him. Sebastian would certainly not object. A man, a woman, and a happy child. He will hang it over the hole in the story of his life. A life is so fragile. Something lurches out of its tracks, and instead of three people there is one, and only half of that person, too. The detective had practiced remembering for a while, then he had trained himself to forget. It had been unbearably sad to think about the life of his that had ended. Now he realizes that there is nothing easier than calling another person’s past to mind.

  Anyone who wants to die has to be whole, the detective thought, the detective thinks.

  Oskar speaks in the room somewhere behind him. “Knowing Sebastian has taught me to fear the whims of the gods.”

  Schilf has closed his eyes. His fingers close around the edge of the windowsill as if holding on to the crow’s nest in a storm-tossed ship.

  “Yesterday, I would have claimed to know one thing for certain,” Oskar says. “That I would give my life for him.”

  “And today?” Schilf asks through clenched teeth.

  “Today I am an old man.”

  Oskar takes a breath. When he speaks again, his voice is even deeper. Cold.

  “Did you know that Sebastian was with me yesterday evening?”

  “I suspected it.”

  “I asked him to leave the country with me.”

  “And he refused?”

  “He turned down everything that I had to give. It seems that he has finally made his decision. I can do nothing more for him.”

  “You’re wrong, Oskar. You will do something for him. I promise you that.”

  When the detective opens his eyes, the city has returned to its former self. It is night and there is no man, no woman, and no happy child. Even the pillar of water from the Jet d’Eau cannot be seen from here. Only the stubborn wind is still there, rattling the beams of the roof. Schilf turns around. Oskar is standing in front of him with his arms stretched out, as if he wants to embrace him. The detective would take a step backward if it weren’t for the pitched roof behind him, and behind that an abyss, a free fall. Their eyes meet.

  There is a wave of human scents. Starched cotton, expensive aftershave, and a strange happiness. An arm is draped across the detective’s shoulders. Oskar pulls him close.

  “Come. Let me help you.”

  He conducts the detective back to the sofa, nudges his head onto the armrest, and presses something cool and moist to his neck. When Schilf looks down at himself, he sees a large red patch decorating his chest. He touches his face: nosebleed. There are flecks of red on Oskar’s white cuffs.

  “I’ve messed up your shirt,” the detective says.

  “Anyone wearing a white shirt is a doctor.” Oskar wipes the blood off his hands and passes the wet cloth to Schilf. “That’s what I thought when I was a child, anyway.”

  “You’ve helped me a good deal.” The detective tries to sit up, but falls back down again. “Will you do me another favor?”

  Lying down, he gropes in his back pocket for the chess computer. When the display lights up, Oskar kneels down next to the sofa.

  “What have we got here?”

  He looks at the sixty-four squares intently. Schilf knows exactly what he sees: a catastrophic situation in which everything that is still alive is pressing into one half of the playing field. Oskar scrutinizes the screen for a long time before he looks up.

  “Interesting,” he says. “You’re playing black against the computer.”

  “Certainly not,” Schilf says. “I’m white.”

  Oskar knits his brows and looks at the game again.

  “I repeat, Detective,” he says. “You’re an unusual person. You seem to love destroying yourself for the narrow chance of victory. Did you mean to tell me something with this game?”

  Schilf shakes his head in which a slowly cooling mass rolls from side to side. He passes Oskar the stylus.

  “You want me to finish this thing for you?” Oskar twirls the stylus in his fingers. “You want to watch me win this game for you?”

  Schilf does not answer. Oskar strokes his chin and looks around. Finally he puts the chess computer on the detective’s stomach and props him up so that he can see the display.

  “The knight goes here. The black queen is forked, and now your castle can move.” The stylus taps the display. Every move jiggles the small chess computer against the detective’s shirt buttons. “The pawn reaches the final row and is converted. Check. The king has to move. The rook moves in next to him. Et voilà.”

  Congratulations, the screen flashes.

  “The black king is mated,” the detective says.

  “Yes,” Oskar says. “Mated.”

  “You’re a genius.”

  “Don’t tell me that this wasn’t planned.”

  “I’ve only been playing for four weeks.”

  “In that case,” Oskar says, squinting as if he is trying to focus on a particular point behind Schilf’s forehead, “it is most certainly you who are the genius. Can you get up now?”

  Schilf wipes his face one more time and gives the cloth back to Oskar. With one hand on Oskar’s shoulder, he gets up. When they are standing in the middle of the room, he reaches for the cord hanging from the crow’s stomach.

  “That’s been broken for a long time,” Oskar says.

  In the hall, Schilf puts on his shoes but leaves the laces untied. Oskar has tugged the front door open over the rugs, and is holding it for him.

  “I think you know everything that you need to know,” he says.

  The smile they exchange in farewell is tinged with mild regret.

  THE WIND HAS SUBSIDED. The lake looks so smooth and solid that the detective feels like trying to walk on water. The gravel crunches in greeting with every step he takes. Schilf stretches an arm out to one side and imagines that Julia is leaning her head on his shoulder as they walk, saying something lovely about the clouds parting and the stars twinkling. A bird utters a shrill cry of warning, but when nothing happens it lapses into silence and invisibility again. The detective walks to the station: there is just time to catch the last train.

  He has left the small chess computer on Oskar’s sofa. He doesn’t need it anymore.

  Life is a story
with many floors, Schilf thinks. Or one with many chapters that close one after another without a sound.

  CHAPTER 7, IN EIGHT PARTS

  The perpetrator is hunted down. In the end, it is conscience that decides. A bird soars into the air.

  [1]

  FROM THE FIRST DAY THAT SCHILF MET HIS NEW GIRLFRIEND, when she expected a waiter and a menu at McDonald’s, he had decided never to introduce her to anyone he knew. Not that he’d be ashamed of her. But he fears that she might not survive the gaze of a third person, and would simply dissolve into thin air. He views her visit with mixed feelings.

  Although Schilf has pulled himself together and is striding forward purposefully, his progress is slow, as if he were walking the wrong way along a people mover. He arrives at Freiburg Station a few minutes late. A woman runs toward him on the concourse. When he steps aside to make way for her, she stops in front of him. The detective clasps her hands and feels a pang of guilt. At first he did not recognize her. Without knowing it, he had actually been expecting to see Maike. He scrabbles around and finds one of the simple words that Julia likes so much: “Hello.”

  She laughs and puts her arms around his neck. She does not have any bags with her, but she has brought him flowers, or something similar. Three brown, velvety bulbs swaying on stalks. They look like microphones that have accidentally got into the frame.

  “Schilf,” Julia says, poking him in the ribs, “somewhat older than before.”

  “Do you have the postcard with you?”

  “Did you write to me?”

  “Yesterday. It was important.”

  “Yesterday was Sunday, Schilf. How could I have received the postcard this morning?”

  She is right, as usual. The detective is relieved to realize that the result of his postcard experiment matters less and less to him the longer Julia is standing in front of him. He puts his arm around her shoulders, just like he practiced on the shore of Lake Geneva, and lowers his head to breathe in the scent of her hair. He remembers hearing somewhere that it is not possible to dream smells.

  The sun breaking through the clouds turns the town into a silvery landscape. It must have rained again in the night; the puddles glisten like molten metal and Schilf has to screen his eyes against the sudden flashes from passing windshields. An old man in torn trousers calls out an airy greeting toward the other side of the road, where there is nobody at all. A young girl is standing at the corner of the street, motionless, holding on to an umbrella, her head tilted, as if she has forgotten where she wanted to go.

  The detective decides to feel happy because it is delightful that there is someone who got up this morning to come visit him. It makes him happy to look at Julia’s face and watch her funny hands with their short fingers moving constantly. Looking at those hands, he understands why some people believe in the goodness of human beings. A species that includes someone like his girlfriend can be driven to do dreadful things only through some enormous misunderstanding.

  Schilf’s good mood evaporates when he sees Sebastian’s face behind the clear screen of a newspaper dispenser. He sees “Hospital Scandal” and “At Large” in the headline, and quickens his step involuntarily.

  “How’s your case going?” Julia asks, in the tone of a repair person come to solve a problem.

  To Schilf’s own surprise, he has to pause to think before he can reply. Sebastian, Oskar, Many Worlds, and a decapitated cyclist arrange themselves into a pattern that seems almost logical and then falls apart again in a colorful whirl. The detective knows the murderer and the kidnapper, but the stupid thing is, Dabbelink’s death still does not make sense.

  “There’s just one detail missing,” he says as he unlocks the door of the building that houses the police apartment. “Unfortunately, it’s the load-bearing column in the whole thing.”

  “We’d best have a look,” Julia says.

  The small apartment has cast off its civil servant’s demeanor today and taken on a friendly air in the zebra shadow of the slanted Venetian blinds. Julia strolls in as if she has just come back from town, empties a bottle of water into the sink, and puts the bulbs into the bottle. The detective steps into the middle of the room with his arms spread wide and shouts “Welcome!” a little too late, and feels foolish. Only that morning, he had found the words to describe his dark tear sacs and the network of lines around his eyes. Elephant face. It is not easy for a man with an elephant face to be charming, he thinks.

  But Julia laughs the way she always does, and pulls the detective onto the sofa. She clasps his right hand with both of hers and presses it to her lips as if he had just died.

  Since the fracture, Schilf’s interest in women has limited itself mainly to their credibility on the witness stand. Julia’s appearance in the final few meters of his journey has not changed things very much, though his body has come to an arrangement with hers that both parties find fulfilling. He likes looking at her when she undresses: she unbuttons her top as unself-consciously as other women open their handbags. Schilf is freed from any obligation to feel shyness or reverence by the countless pairs of eyes that have gazed intently at Julia’s body for years. He can simply look at her.

  When her clothes have been carefully folded and draped over the back of the chair, her nakedness touches Schilf more than it arouses him. But as soon as she nestles her body against him, he makes love to her with all the passion and gratitude that he is capable of. He makes love to her so completely that everything comes to a standstill: all the pain, all the brooding, the whole human impulse toward a permanent internal report on one’s own existence. From the beginning, Julia had been able to silence the observer. There is peace for a few minutes. Infinite as the color black and beautiful as a harbinger of death.

  AFTERWARD, THEY RAISE THE BLINDS and drink coffee next to the closed balcony door, clinking their cups against the glass to toast the Monday morning. On the street below, a child skitters past on steel roller skates, the kind that haven’t been made for decades. Two doves fight over a walnut that neither can open. Schilf squints into the bright light until the two doves are unmasked as crows, winter birds, birds of doom that have slipped in through a tear in the colorfully painted curtain that calls itself summer. For a few seconds he sees the trees as black skeletons against a pale sky, and he sees a large plain on which thousands of crows gather; he sees them taking flight and the sun darkening. The interval is over, his head is the same as it always was.

  With a contented sound Julia leans into his arm.

  “Don’t go,” Schilf whispers.

  “I was gone already,” Julia says. “Now I’m here.”

  She looks at him with her ocean-deep eyes, raises her eyebrows, and stretches her mouth wide, like an actress in a silent film. Schilf puts a hand on her head, closes his eyes, and tries to read her thoughts.

  “We’ll soon be treating each other like a memory that is uncomfortable, but necessary,” he says.

  The doorbell rings and they collide. A young trainee police officer is standing outside, and she is looking keen to get away. Schilf realizes too late that he is not wearing any trousers. He takes the envelope from her and only just stops himself from giving her a tip. The word “URGENT” stands out in red letters on the package.

  The buttons on the video recorder stubbornly change places until Julia pushes the detective aside. The machine swallows the video obediently.

  “Evidence?” Julia asks, making herself comfortable in front of the television with her cup of coffee.

  Schilf nods.

  “The murderer and his best friend,” he says, as the Circumpolar set appears.

  “And who is who?”

  The detective does not answer.

  He enjoys watching the program a second time. The presence of the two men is even stronger on the larger screen. Transfixed, Schilf notes every look and every gesture, observes Oskar’s predatory elegance and Sebastian’s nervous watchfulness, and registers the fluctuations in tension. Julia yawns and looks bored.
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  “One universe,” Oskar says. “With no possibility for escape. That’s what you should be researching. That’s where you should be living.”

  When the discussion gets livelier, Julia sits up.

  “What are they fighting about?”

  “That’s not a scientific argument,” Sebastian shouts. “That’s moralistic dogmatism!”

  “Wait a minute,” the detective says.

  He turns the volume up. A glass of water hits the glass table with the force of a gunshot.

  “In your double worlds you live a double life,” Oskar says.

  Julia presses both hands to her ears with a scream.

  “What’s going on?” she says angrily.

  Sebastian’s Adam’s apple moves up and down in close-up. Schilf takes hold of his girlfriend’s wrists and forces her to uncover her ears.

  “Listen.”

  “Let me put it in Orwell’s words,” Oskar says.

  As he stands up, the murmuring in the audience swells to a roar that makes the floor of the apartment vibrate. The rustling of clothing. Oskar’s leather soles on the wooden rostrum. How dare he, hisses the television host. Oskar’s microphone is lying on the glass table and it is difficult to hear what he is saying. He is pointing at Sebastian with an index finger.

  “Now,” Schilf says, leaning forward.

  The microphones in the auditorium have picked up Oskar’s voice. He sounds as if he is speaking from a great distance.

  “That is Dabbelink,” the detective hears him say.

  “Turn it off now,” Julia orders.

  Schilf has dropped the remote control; Julia reaches for it and pauses the tape. On the screen the host freezes with his arms raised; all three figures are united in one trembling statue. Next the host would probably attempt to point to the physicists’ excitement as proof of his program’s importance. Afterward he would continue the discussion. If Julia allowed him.

  The detective’s blood has gone to his feet. He feels his pale cheeks with his fingers in an unconscious movement.

  “I don’t get it,” he groans. “My head is bursting.”