In Free Fall
The time for unconscious living is past, the detective thought, the detective thinks. In the last few meters, life can no longer be worn like a shoe that you don’t notice as long as it doesn’t pinch your foot.
For a moment, Schilf is filled with such happiness that he feels like crying. But like most people, he has long ago exchanged the ability to cry with the desire for revenge. He understands perfectly well that he can no longer build a true home for anyone. He can only punish anyone who dares to destroy something as precious as a true home.
The detective takes a step backward; he has to concentrate to avoid tipping over. He feels the pulse inside the bird’s egg, and the way the second law of thermodynamics is working to throw him and his case into a state of increasing chaos. Soon he will no longer have the energy to fight against the dissolution. He has to make one final effort now. There is half a day and one night left. It is his last chance to put things in order. The two angels are holding hands. Images showing the collision of accelerated particles play in their hair.
“From all the possible outcomes, the one that has actually taken place is determined by the observer,” says the male voice coming out of the loudspeakers.
“I’m here,” Schilf says.
Maike’s back stiffens and she turns her head slowly.
“I know,” she says.
A violent explosion on the screen bathes the auditorium in white light. Every detail of Maike’s face can be seen, cool and impenetrable, like an overexposed photograph. Liam turns around, too, and his eyes look hard, like pieces of blue plastic. When he recognizes the detective, he turns his narrow back on him in a deliberate gesture.
“I can’t stand you following us,” Maike whispers.
“But I’m not following you!” the detective says in a suppressed shout.
“No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon,” the man’s voice continues.
A cartoon cat paces across the dome: the children cheer and a forest of arms rises from the human undergrowth.
“I wanted to ask you how you are,” Schilf whispers.
Maike laughs silently.
“Get lost. There’s nothing else you can get from us.”
The cat is shut inside a cardboard box. Schilf knows what is coming next. His reading on the Internet covered Schrödinger’s cat. As long as no one looks inside the box, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time, in a state called quantum superposition. From Maike’s point of view, Schilf and Rita are in just such a state. Maike cannot distinguish between them. Police work is police work. It is no use explaining that he has saved her husband the agony of remand, but that he cannot do anything about the way Sebastian is treated. Maike would certainly think he was lying.
The frantic ticking of a clock is getting on Schilf’s nerves, but he is relieved when he realizes it is coming from the loudspeakers this time, not from inside his own head.
“I’m terribly sorry about the search,” he says finally. “I must apologize on behalf of my colleague.”
“What search? What do you mean?” Maike asks.
“Don’t you know about it?”
“I haven’t been in the apartment since yesterday.”
“So …” Schilf says, feeling horror creep over him. “So you’ve left him?”
“He has left us, in both heart and mind. All we’ve done is move out of the apartment. A mere formality in comparison.”
“No,” Schilf says. “You’re wrong. Sebastian would never—”
“Detective,” Maike whispers, leaning toward him so that Liam cannot hear her, “did my husband murder Ralph Dabbelink?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you,” Maike says, and turns away. “It’s good to get a clear answer.”
“He didn’t want to.”
“No one does anything they don’t want to do.”
“He was blackmailed.”
“You believe him?”
“Strange, isn’t it? And you’re the one who’s married to him, not me.”
“What I believe doesn’t matter anymore.”
“You’re wrong there, too.”
The detective shifts a little in order to look at Maike in profile. She is not smiling. She also shows no despair, no anger, no pain. She’s a statue, Schilf thinks. Cold inside, outside pure form.
“Imagine three people walking along a beautiful road together,” Maike says. “The road suddenly comes to an end. And one of them beats his way into the bushes and runs off without hesitation. Alone.”
“That image is completely wrong.”
“Could you stop blathering?” a woman standing next to Maike asks.
“Almost done,” Schilf says, lifting his police badge up into view.
“Quantum physics opens up our thinking to an entirely different reality,” the announcer says.
“Everything I’m doing is aimed at proving Sebastian’s innocence,” the detective says to Maike. “And what’s more, to you.”
“Why?”
“I want you to stand by him.”
“Why?”
Because you belong on the postcard that I want to put on the fridge door of my memory, Schilf thinks.
He rubs both hands over his face. He is prolonging this conversation because he likes talking to this woman so much. He has to pull himself together and stop looking at her cloud of hair and her almost white eyelashes. He must make use of the seconds in which she is still listening, her arms crossed and her smooth face turned up toward the dome.
“Listen,” Schilf whispers. “Give me twenty-four hours and I’ll be able to explain everything to you. But I want the real guilty party to do that.”
“This is not my battle. I was cast aside before it began.”
“But Liam wants to know the truth. I promised him the truth.”
Maike glances at him, leans down to her son, and puts a hand on the back of his neck.
“Liam,” she says quietly, “do you still want this man to tell you anything?”
Liam looks over his shoulder and catches the detective’s eye.
“Get lost,” he says.
Schilf buckles as if he has been hit in the stomach. He turns the collar of his jacket up and presses the briefcase to his side.
“Our reality is like the smile of a cat that does not even exist,” the voice from the loudspeakers says.
As the detective wends his away through the crowd, he feels his nose, his mouth, and his ears as if he were learning to recognize himself in the dark through his sense of touch.
“Pardon,” he whispers. “I’m going now.”
Again and again, as if he has to tell every one of the hissing spectators: “I’m going now.”
[4]
THE BRIEFCASE MAKES IT DIFFICULT TO RUN. Schilf wedges it under his arm as he runs past the station and onto Stephan-Mayer-Strasse. The entire city seems to be fired up by his exertion. Passersby turn into multicolored streaks and buildings hold in their stomachs and lean forward to watch him hurry past. A boy runs alongside him for a while, shouting, “Giddy-up! Giddy-up!,” and clapping his hands. It is only when Schilf reaches Sophie-de-la-Roche-Strasse that he slows down. His heart is pounding hard against his ribs. Beneath his feet the ground breathes, the pavement rises steeply heavenward. The detective half expects that he will turn into a murky fluid at any minute.
Bonnie and Clyde drop from the wall into the water and glide toward him, tugging a ripple behind them.
“Quick, quick, quick,” they quack.
Schilf cannot speak, but raises his hand to thank them before he enters the building.
The walls of the stairwell mimic his panting. Schilf pulls himself up by the handrail, step by step. He has not given any thought to how he will get the door to the apartment open in case of emergency. When he gets to the second floor, the door is open. Schilf checks the lock; it is undamaged. Either his colleagues have made a very clean job of it or they were admitted voluntarily. In any case, the open door is no longer
a technical problem, but an invitation.
Although Schilf first visited the apartment no more than two days ago, he has difficulty recognizing it even from where he stands in the doorway. Paper is strewn everywhere, the carpets have been rolled up, and the pictures taken off the wall. Everything gives the impression of forced departure and homelessness. Schilf does not have to think long about where to find Sebastian. Certain things always happen in the kitchen, which is the stomach of an apartment, just like the hallway is its legs, the living room its heart, and the study the convolutions of its brain.
All is still in the kitchen. The wire noose hanging from the ceiling casts a sharp shadow on the floor. The ceiling lamp has been removed and placed on top of the table like a suction cup. A chair had been knocked over and its legs are lying against the oven door. The contents of the drawers are scattered on the floor: cutlery lying between candles, string, plastic wrap, and cleaning cloths. Pots and pans are piled up on the windowsill. Sebastian’s body blends seamlessly into the picture. He is sitting at the table, motionless, bent over like a question mark, staring blankly at an empty glass decorated with a picture of two nuzzling parakeets.
“Goodness gracious,” the detective says.
He drops the briefcase and hurries over to Sebastian with both arms stretched out as if he is trying to take something heavy from him. Sebastian lifts his gaze, but does not quite manage to look the detective in the eye.
“Liam gave it to his mother for her birthday this year,” he says, lifting his finger ever so slightly to point at the glass. “We stumbled upon it in a department store. Maike was very pleased with it.”
“How lovely,” the detective says.
“I thought it would be easier. It was quite simple with Dabbelink. Steel cable is steel cable, I thought.”
“That is not just a bad solution,” Schilf replies. “It’s no solution at all.”
“Oskar once said that life is an offer that you can also refuse. But I wasn’t in a position to decide then. Same story my whole damn life.” Sebastian’s laugh turns into a coughing fit. “What brings you here?”
“I have a message for you.”
Sebastian finally raises his head.
“From Maike?”
“No.” Schilf clears his throat. “You’ll find out very soon who it’s from.”
An ambulance siren draws closer, grows louder, and shrieks a high-pitched warning. Its frequency decreases as the vehicle passes.
“The Doppler effect,” Sebastian says. “A great example of how everything is relative.”
Together, they listen to the sound ebbing away. Schilf feels like a surgeon who is allowing his patient a few moments of peace before he cuts away an abscess without anesthetic. This abscess is a mistake. It is the final, the biggest, and the most painful mistake that Schilf wants to cut out and replace with the steel instrument called truth, which will function as a sterile foreign body in the organism of the patient. The detective wishes an anesthetist were present.
“This is going to hurt for a bit,” he says. “Get ready.”
Sebastian looks at him, waiting.
“Doublethink must go,” the detective says.
“What the …”
Sebastian starts to jump up, but sinks back into the chair when the detective places two heavy hands on his shoulders.
“Listen carefully,” Schilf says. “Doublethink must go.”
At first nothing happens. Almost a minute passes before Sebastian lifts his head again and thrashes toward Schilf like a drowning man toward his rescuer. The detective bends over Sebastian and braces himself to withstand the attack.
“No!” Sebastian screams.
“Doublethink must go,” the detective repeats.
“Leave me Oskar! Let the whole disaster at least make sense!”
The uproar ends as suddenly as it started. Sebastian has collapsed and is lying on top of the kitchen table, lifeless. Suicide would have been quite logical in his situation. A man who has lost everything throws his shoulders back, picks up his hat, and leaves the scene. Logic must mean honor. But now there is a new three-word sentence that is much worse than that. “Dabbelink must go” was the tragic command to destroy his own life. “Doublethink must go” is a farce. A grotesque coincidence, a poison that has made everything that resulted from it ludicrous.
The detective understands why Sebastian is so still. He is almost afraid he will find Sebastian’s face transformed into a ridiculous caricature of itself. Schilf’s hands are still on the man’s shoulders. The only thing needed to complete the scene is the ticking of a kitchen clock. Just as Schilf has decided that the only thing he can do is make coffee for them both in the chaos of this kitchen, Sebastian starts laughing quietly.
“Vera Wagenfort,” he says. “I recognized the voice right away. That’s the brunette who sits outside the office of the greatest particle physicist in the world.” He laughs again. “He probably expected that I’d recognize her. That I’d blithely ring him up and call him a scoundrel. Instead I murder someone. It’s true, isn’t it, that we always understand what we want to understand?”
“There might be some truth in that,” the detective says cautiously.
“And I thought I was finished.” Sebastian turns his head so Schilf can see his face, which is pressed into a lopsided grimace on the kitchen table. “Oskar was right. I know nothing of guilt.”
The sob seems to come from somewhere else in the kitchen. It is small and quiet, as if a child has started whimpering. Sebastian puts his hands to his face, his fingers spread wide. His mouth stretches itself into a rectangular opening and releases a toneless scream that shakes his entire body. The detective holds the trembling man close, gripping his shoulders, feeling the shudders running through him. He cannot tell for certain if Sebastian is laughing or crying. There is a neutral point at which all opposites meet. This outbreak, too, is over within minutes. Schilf reaches for a kettle that has rolled under the table, fills it, and puts it on the stove.
“Tonight,” he says, as the water begins to boil, “Detective Skura and I need your help. Can I count on you?”
“You have destroyed me,” Sebastian says in a voice that seems to have been discovered for this moment. “I’m yours.”
“Good,” Schilf says.
He pours boiling water into the cups with one hand while the other takes his mobile phone out of his pocket and presses a key.
“Good evening,” he says into the telephone. “This is Detective Schilf. There’s another game that we have to finish.”
[5]
RITA REALLY OUGHT TO HAVE KNOWN that this would be one of the strangest days in a series of strange days. This morning, the cat threw up on the kitchen table as she was having a hasty breakfast. In the vomit were pieces of the chicken salad that Rita had eaten the night before. She felt nauseous. She perked up considerably after Schnurpfeil called from Gwiggen. The case was solved, the evidence was in place, and, as ever, the final verdict would be a matter for a judge. Rita spent half the afternoon writing her report for the public prosecutor’s office and the interior ministry, but the elation that normally came with the close of a difficult case escaped her. When the telephone rang, she knew the reason why. She might have thought that the whole thing was wrapped up. Detective Schilf certainly didn’t think so.
It is impossible to ignore a cry for help. Rita did as Schilf asked and borrowed a police van. The walrus-mustached police chief had called her up once again and told her that her career depended on delivering a full report tomorrow, a report in which the words “doctor,” “patient,” and “hospital” did not appear. Now she is sitting on the backseat with an avowed murderer, in the full knowledge that her professional future is, as they say, hanging by a thread. When she starts thinking about what kind of net this thread belongs to, she can understand why the feeling of nausea has come back and won’t go away.
The first thing Rita Skura and Schnurpfeil did was collect Schilf and the murderer from the hous
e by the canal. The murderer had a blue and white cooler with him. He climbed into the backseat next to Rita without a greeting, proffering instead an explanation that the box belonged to his ex-family. After that, Schilf ordered them to stop at the cycling club, where he commandeered two racing bikes without any legal justification. The two bikes are now in the back of the VW van, as good as stolen property. The next stop was the forensic department. Their business there finished, the murderer was now looking ahead of him with a rapt expression, balancing the cooler on his lap and stroking the blue lid from time to time. Rita has to stop herself thinking about what the box contains and how it got in there, otherwise she will go mad. Schnurpfeil seems to be feeling the same way. Following Schilf’s instructions, he is steering the vehicle through the city center, but takes the bends so swiftly and brakes so hard that his passengers bow toward each other simultaneously before righting themselves again.
But the worst thing of all is the voice of the first detective chief superintendent. Schilf is crouched on the passenger seat talking to the windshield about branches and ponds and parallel universes and other bizarre stuff. The crazed monologue makes Rita Skura wish that Schnurpfeil would draw into the next petrol station and throw everyone except her out, and simply drive off, out of the city, onto the A5 toward Basel, and go straight on until the sea can be glimpsed between the trees. Sadly, Schnurpfeil makes no move to do this, but is concentrating on the evening traffic. Nothing in his actions betrays the fact that he imagines throwing everyone except Rita out at the next petrol station and driving off with her, until he reaches the sea.
Rita’s fingers drum up a storm on her lap. Schilf’s cry for help has shaken her self-confidence somewhat. Her instincts tell her to call up the chief public prosecutor and request an arrest warrant for Sebastian. But if she is to proceed from the opposite of her instincts, as she normally does, she must stay where she is and follow the ideas of someone of unsound mind. Her method of working doesn’t seem to be effective any longer. Or perhaps it simply cannot be applied to its progenitor.