In Free Fall

[1]

RITA SKURA HAS A CAT. When she lifts the animal off the ground, it spreads the toes of all four paws as though it is preparing tiny parachutes for a fall. Rita Skura would never drop her cat, but the cat does not rely on that. If it were to fall one day, it would land softly and stroke the hair on its chin with a superior look on its face. That is exactly why Rita loves her pet. It possesses two qualities that to the end of her days she will never have: healthy mistrust and natural elegance.

As a child, Rita would believe anything, and became well known as the victim of playground pranks. It was Rita who looked up to see a UFO while someone kicked her in the shin. Rita climbed a chestnut tree in a short skirt to rescue a small bird while, below, sniggering boys discussed the color of her underwear. There was no trick too obvious for her. She was cheated out of all her coloring pens in a bet and spent hours waiting in a hiding place when no one was looking for her. Nobody wanted to have her on their team when they were playing cops and robbers.

Despite this, Rita already knew from the age of ten what she wanted to be. When the time came, her parents threw up their hands in horror. But one of Rita’s strengths is an astonishing stubbornness. She stood by her decision, cleverly insisted on the truth of the paradox that people are always best at the things for which they have the least natural talent, and applied for the job.

At the interview, she answered half the questions wrongly: a result dependent entirely on the principles of probability theory. Flushed red, she promised to compensate for her unshakeable belief in normality and people’s good intentions with extraordinary diligence and care. She got the job.

The training did not come easy to her. In criminology seminars she always had to play the role of the foolish witness who is led onto slippery ground with trick questions. Not a day went by in which she did not think about giving up—until she met an instructor called Schilf, who grasped her nature from the first hour of the lesson, and took her aside during the lunch break. He told her that she was ideally suited to a career in criminology as long as she followed one simple rule. She had to learn that her trusting nature was what her opponent expected; so she always had to assume the opposite of what she was thinking, and always do the opposite of what she felt.

From then on, it did not just become better. It became good. Rita’s trusting nature was always so reliably wrong that when she followed Instructor Schilf’s advice, she achieved an amazing degree of success. She had only to look at the photo of a suspect and take him for the criminal to be certain that he was innocent. When she read a witness statement and found it believable, she knew that the witness was lying. Rita’s trusting nature transformed itself into a self-confidence so merciless that it seemed she was avenging all the humiliations of her previous life. She screamed at suspects, and her criminological sense exceeded that of not only her peers but also her instructors. When she was promoted to detective, the walrus-mustached police chief squeezed her hand; and Rita returned the pressure until this most senior officer winced in pain.

Despite this, Rita knows that her cat still has it in her to be a better investigator. Rita herself will never rise to be the stuff of police legend, though perhaps she might become the first female police chief in Baden-Württemberg. And that would be more than enough for her.

Her lack of elegance was not something that could be addressed with a simple reversal of assumptions. Although Rita’s parents were normal people of average exterior, a genetic coincidence had turned their daughter into an anatomical exception. At first sight, her physique looked like a parody of a male fantasy. Her breasts are so large that they seem to pull her upper body forward. To walk is to fall; you can see that with Rita. Her shoulders and her waist are narrow and her legs are long, like those of a jointed doll. The young officers call her corkscrew curls a mane, even though none of them has ever seen a horse with a curly mane. Rita could explain straightaway why she reminds people of a horse, or perhaps a small pony. She has a little too much of everything: too much hair, too much leg, and too much mouth. She looks like someone who was fat as a child and who has been unable to forget that way of moving. She walks with long steps and sways from side to side like a buoy in a swell. The hands that protrude from her cardigan look like they have been borrowed from a man. Even her voice would have been better suited for a man: her most harmless comments come out sounding like insults.

Rita has gotten used to all this. She now means everything she says just as it sounds. She pulls the corners of her mouth down when she smiles. She breathes in, not out, when she says “yes,” which sounds like a disapproving “huh” that makes everyone she speaks to lose all desire to carry on talking. And when she is angry she presses her lips together as if a word starting with “B” were stuck in her throat. Bullshit. Bluster. Balderdash.

Both men and women turn to look at Rita in the street, and she does not take this as a compliment but as a reaction to her physical oddity. She buttons her shirts and coats to the top in all seasons. In summer she wears flowery dresses that hang below the knee, a length no dressmaker would call fashionable. On Rita’s body this type of dress has an effect similar to that of a campsite sticker on a Maserati. A clever person has to laugh; stupid people get angry. Rita is fine with that. There are not many female detectives, and their colleagues claim they would faint at the sight of a drowned body. This is why Rita needs to package herself to display the superiority of mind over body. She wears ironic clothes and sarcastic sandals that are feared throughout the jurisdiction. When she enters a room at her workplace, all heads lower, as if the Latin teacher has just entered the classroom. If asked whether she has a sense of humor, she would answer that there is no sentence so foolish that a person could not say it in all seriousness. So why laugh?

The only thing that really interests Rita is police work. She is thirty-one, single, and childless. As a member of the murder squad, she encounters corpses every day and can examine wives battered to death, old people who have choked on their mashed potatoes, and suicide cases crushed by trains—without even thinking of fainting. She also has the young men in the police force well under control. At their morning meetings, she does not mince her words about their mistakes and failures. If anyone contradicts her, she points to a long list of cases in which she was right from the very start.

The cat is one of the few living beings whom Rita wishes well. When she holds the little animal on her lap, she can feel its warmth on her skin after a few seconds, unlike the warmth of a human being, which can take a few minutes to penetrate the clothing. Apart from that, the cat has a sensible job, unlike most people. It keeps the birds away from the windows of the ground-floor apartment. Rita tends to feel that she is being observed, and she can’t bear airborne spies.

After devouring her third egg, Rita gets up and puts the purring cat down on the chair she has just vacated. In the kitchen, she fills the feeding bowl with the ground chicken that she has bought by way of apology. Since a senior registrar and his head parted company during a cycling ride, Rita has hardly been home. Last night she stormed out of her office after the walrus-mustached police chief had called, and she woke after a few hours’ sleep feeling just as insulted. Even though she has very little experience of politically sensitive cases, she was not surprised when the police chief bellowed through the phone, explicitly demanding that she conjure up a miracle. She did not mind staying late in the office and going back to work at seven the next morning. What made her bile rise up was that they wanted to put a higher-ranking detective on the case with her. Rita Skura is young, she is a woman, and the steel-cable killing is actually the first time she has led a murder investigation. Even if the whole thing were to blow up into a real crisis, even if the chair of the bristle-haired home secretary were to wobble, Rita Skura does not need help. She must deliver concrete results by this evening, otherwise Detective Chief Superinten dent Schilf, the very man to whose advice she owes her career, will be transferred from Stuttgart to Freiburg.

Schilf’s guest lectureship at the police college had been anticipated with great interest. He was preceded by his reputation as a veritable prophet of crime. He was said to avoid working in a team and was seldom seen at headquarters, and he solved his cases more or less in his sleep. They expected a magician. When Schilf finally stood before the class, a chill wind of disappointment swept through the room. In his early fifties, he behaved like an old man. Beneath the worn jacket, his shoulders drooped as if he were trying to counteract his height. Colorless strands of hair that had once been blond hung in his face. Standing stooped at the blackboard, he snapped pieces of chalk between his fingers. He kept interrupting his lectures for no apparent reason, swaying from one foot to another and listening with a shocked expression to something within himself, as if hearing the echo of a thunderclap that had happened long ago. When he continued speaking, he spoke in sentences that no one understood. “I have no memory—that is why I can see into the future.” Or, “Two contradictory statements are mostly right and wrong at the same time.”

Or his favorite: “Coincidence is the name given to the greatest human error.”

None of the students took his strange behavior as a disguise (they were right). Rather, they believed, they were faced with the pathetic remains of a man who had once been successful (here they were wrong).

At first Rita had thought of him as a genius damned. After he had turned her from an innocent to a skeptic in one fell swoop during the first lunch break, she called him a damned genius. When he said good-bye to her after his final lesson, he took hold of her hands without ceremony, gave her a piercing glance, and said, “Rita, child, what hefty mitts you have!” She pulled her fingers free and retorted, “And what a wrinkled visage you have!” They looked each other in the eye and laughed. Rita has not seen him since.

Of course, she had liked the half-mad Schilf. And precisely because of this—exactly as she has learned from Schilf himself—she does not trust him. If there is one thing she does not need right now, it is the presence of a genius, especially one who sees through her system of coming to conclusions. Next to him, her diligence and carefulness will count for nothing. Ralph Dabbelink is her most important case to date. His death, which could hold the key to the hospital scandal, belongs to her.

Although it is already remarkably warm at seven in the morning, Rita pulls on a cardigan over her dress before she leaves the house. In her lipstick-red Corsa she drives to Heinrich-von-Stephan-Strasse, holds up her pass to the card reader, and parks under the moss-covered, corrugated iron roof. Ignoring the back door, she walks around the building to enter it—with shoulders thrown back and chin jutting forward—through the brick front entrance as she does every day.

[2]

AT RECEPTION, A MAN IS STANDING with both hands on the counter, his forehead against the Plexiglas, as if he cannot keep himself upright any longer. Rita knows these blokes, and finds them repulsive. This one is tall and well built, someone who could easily have made something of himself. His hair is greasy, a dull street-dog yellow. His clothes must have cost a fortune; now they are smeared with blood and crumpled from head to toe. The man has clearly spent several days in them. Regardless of whether such people hand themselves over or are brought in, they cause the kind of trouble that never ends well.

Rita instinctively holds her breath to escape any whiff of alcohol fumes. The stranger does not even turn at the sound of her slapping sandals as she passes by. He stares ahead sightlessly. The duty officer raises his hand in greeting as he continues speaking into his telephone. Almost every morning, Rita climbs the stairs feeling relieved that she no longer has to deal with a certain type of everyday business.

She reaches her office on the third floor, a little breathless, takes off her cardigan, and falls into the black leather chair. Behind the frosted glass of her desk, she still feels like a child who is shuffling around the house in her father’s shoes for fun. She doesn’t mind. She knows very well that she has an office to herself at her current grade only because none of her colleagues wants to share one with her. She loves this room, especially the under-floor computer cable that pops out through a hole in the carpet by a leg of her desk. Along with the rows of impeccably labeled folders on the shelves, it projects an atmosphere of professionalism in which Rita revels every morning, as if bathing in dragon’s blood before setting forth to do battle.

A fan of letters to be dealt with is spread out next to the keyboard. The window was open through the night and has let in cool air, which will last for a while between the thick walls of the building. Far beneath, the usual pack of sparrows twitters in the hedges that a former graveyard gardener tends with great care. Rita looks smugly across the parking lot at the treetops. They are so far away that feathered parasites cannot look in on her. If her office were on the ground floor, Rita Skura would bring her cat to work.

She looks through Dabbelink’s files for a bit. The photos have the most impact, and having seen them for a hundred times does not diminish their power to shock. Dabbelink’s head, wedged in the fork of a tree. The same head again, lying on a stretcher next to the twisted body to which it had belonged only a short while before. There is a length of spinal column sticking out of the body, white and clean. The loose ends of the carotid artery, trachea, and esophagus look like the tubes hanging out of a broken machine. The report by the forensic expert stated that the victim had noticed the trap at the final second, and lifted his head in shock—otherwise the cable would have split his skull. In retrospect, Rita is grateful to Dabbelink for this noble gesture. His condition is already problematic enough.

One of the documents that has just arrived is a report from the forensic laboratory. Delighted, the detective claps her hands like a little girl when she reads the results. Only under protest did the men securing the crime scene carefully transport two square meters of the forest floor, agitated ants and all, to the laboratory. Now they have the genetic profile of a man, who has not yet appeared in any database, but who will shortly be found. Found by her. Apart from this, an indignant Freiburg woman has filed charges against the as-yet-unknown person because she found a pile of garbage in her compost bin on the morning after the murder. With that, Rita has almost everything she needs: the murder instrument and the murderer’s shoes, trousers, and shirt. Everything except the murderer himself, whose continued absence is almost beginning to take on a physical form. The hairs that were found pronounce him blond, and his footprints indicate that he is 1.9 meters tall and weighs 85 kilos. Definitely a handsome and clever murderer, not one of the poor devils that one puts behind bars with regret.

Rita will spend the morning in the hospital and will continue looking out for a man who matches the description. In the cardiology department, there is a rumor going around that someone had been threatening Dabbelink. But no one will say who or how. In a combustible situation like this, practically everyone could have had an interest in Dabbelink’s death: a pharmaceutical company with a priceless reputation to protect; a nurse who fears losing her job; Medical Director Schlüter, afraid that someone knows too much. Rita will grab hold of Schlüter once again before he can barricade himself in the operating theater. Ever since the university has started looking into disciplinary proceedings, Schlüter has been well-nigh invisible in his department. The criminal charges triggered by the hospital scandal were made anonymously. Schlüter claims that a rival heart specialist is trying to blacken his name.

Rita will question everybody she can get hold of today. In the afternoon she will drop by the cycling club once again. The detectives who are dealing directly with the hospital scandal update her around the clock. Rita tosses the documents onto the desk and stretches her arms. She thinks she will solve this case before Detective Chief Superintendent Schilf can buy his train ticket to Freiburg. At least she will not fail for lack of persistence.

She recognizes Sergeant Schnurpfeil’s knock. As always, he waits for a clear “Come in!” before he opens the door slightly, sticks his head in, and smilingly waits for the invitation to be repeated. Only when Rita has said “Yes, come on in!” does he gather up his bulk and bring it to rest in the center of the room. Schnurpfeil is ten years younger than the detective and the only person in the precinct who, in his stoical manner, knows how to deal with her. The young female officers-in-waiting think he is the best-looking man at police headquarters. And yet he always seems uncertain, as if there were a frightened boy behind his mass of muscle, constantly worried that he will be asked to emerge one day. Even now, Schnurpfeil does not seem comfortable with the vantage point granted him by his height. When his colleagues ask him how he puts up with Rita Skura’s moods, he shrugs and says that she is clever and also a good detective. He cannot say whether her hair looks like a horse’s; and whatever else he thinks of her, he keeps to himself. The senior policeman is always sent when there is bad news. He knows that as well as she does. He stands next to the desk, twisting his cap in his hands. Rita has never yet offered him a seat.

“Schnurpfeil,” she says, looking as if she is still checking something in the file, “are you driving me to the hospital?”

“Yes,” Schnurpfeil replies. After some thought, he adds, “As well.”

He looks up and tries smiling once again. What his colleagues will never understand is that he likes talking to Rita Skura. He doesn’t mind formalities and thinks nothing of it when she addresses him in military fashion by his last name. After all, he is only a young senior officer, while she is an up-and-coming detective. He generally knows how to reply to her in a manner that will not agitate her, and he is proud of that.

“Break it to me gently,” Rita says, pushing her heavy curls off her forehead.

Rita can’t stand the summer, just as she cannot bear many other things. If it were up to her, it could be autumn or winter the whole year long. It’s easier to think when it’s cold and clothing is more sober.

“Three more senior doctors had their heads chopped off?”

Schnurpfeil avoids looking at her unshaven armpits. “A child has been kidnapped,” he says briefly.

Rita’s gaze lights on the senior policeman with hatred, as if he were criminal, victim, and witness all in one. “Say that again, if you dare.”

“A child has been kidnapped,” Schnurpfeil repeats.

Rita lets go of her hair and throws herself back in her chair, which tips gently. “The blond guy with the bloody shirt?”

“How do you know?”

She waves away his awed tones with a dismissive gesture. She should have known right away. Since she had taken the guy at reception for a tramp, he must be a professor at least.

“The father?”

“His son has been gone for four days.”

“And he’s only come in now?”

“The kidnappers stopped him. He didn’t dare go to the police.”

“Money?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“What?” Rita jumps up and takes a few threatening steps toward Schnurpfeil, who clearly considers retreating, but decides against it.

“Until now,” he says, “they have demanded absolutely nothing.”

“But they’ve been in touch with him?”

“On the day of the kidnapping. They told him to wait.”

“What a fucking story.” Rita turns away and slams the window shut with such force that the glass rattles in the frame. She waves her large hands in the air a couple of times, as if brushing aside fog in order to see the senior policeman clearly.

“Doesn’t sound like pedophiles,” she says. “Probably something within the family. Has his statement been taken?”

“All done. He’s sitting downstairs.”

Rita suddenly lets her hands drop. “He’s not a doctor, is he?”

“Professor of physics at the university.”

“Thank you, Lord!” Rita shouts.

Schnurpfeil grins, as though this is meant for him. Rita leans back against the edge of the desk, which presses into her bottom slightly, and raises her index finger, which she always does when she feels overwhelmed.

“The press does not like child kidnapping cases,” she says didactically.

“We’ll separate them,” Schnurpfeil says. “The press doesn’t need to know anything about the kidnapping right now.”

Rita nods, her shoulders relaxing. As is often the case, the senior policeman has thought of something that calms her down.

“Listen, Schnurpfeil. With the best will in the world, there’s no way I can look into this personally.”

“Of course. The chief suggests that Sandström could take on the case.”

“Sandström is a total idiot,” Rita says. “Tell him that.”

Schnurpfeil reaches for a notebook.

“He should drive to the professor’s home with him. Get the technical guys and the shrinks on board. Bug the telephone, the whole lot. And interrogate him for as long as he holds out. Family problems, friends, job. I’ll drop by in the evening if I can.”

Schnurpfeil puts his notebook away. “I’ll just run down and let them know,” he says, “then I’ll drive you to the hospital.”

“Good.”

Rita Skura looks past Schnurpfeil at the bulletin board, on which there is a snapshot of her cat next to photographs of the crime scene.

“Four days,” she says. “Makes you feel sorry for the man.”

[3]

THEY HAVE TAKEN HIS CAR. They have taken his mobile phone. They have taken his shirt and his trousers and put them in plastic bags. He is wearing a suit made out of paper, which rustles with every step and makes him feel like a cross between a clown and a corpse. Right this minute he would have nothing against being laid out in an aluminum drawer with a tag on his toe, and being shoved into the wall. Cool at last. Quiet at last. To sleep at last.

They have taken the keys to his apartment from him, and now they are taking the apartment. Three plainclothes officers are on the street watching to see if the house is being watched. In the hall, a man wearing headphones is lying on his stomach, a black box by his side, fumbling in the telephone socket with a tiny screwdriver. Another man is leaning against the wall, making suggestions and flicking cigarette ash onto the parquet floor. In the kitchen, Sergeant Sandström is sitting at the table making himself a ham sandwich with gerkins and mustard. He had asked if he could “borrow” the Prosciutto di Parma. On the sofa in the living room, which Sebastian will always associate with the worst days of his life, a small woman shrouded in moss-green wool is crouching on thin legs, sticking her aristocratic-looking nose into the family photo album. A bird dressed in human clothing could not have looked stranger than she does. This is the experimental film that this apartment and I have been waiting for the whole time, Sebastian thinks.

When he had stepped into the Heinrich-von-Stephan-Strasse early this morning, the thought of letting the proper authorities deal with the situation made him nauseous with relief. The statement he’d feared making had turned out to be the simplest bit. He had been required simply to tell them what had happened (the grabber machine, pathetic stuffed animals, Vera Wagenfort); he’d kept only one sentence back from them: Dabbelink must go. After that, one thing had led to another. There was a practically endless stream of questions about anything and everything. Except whether he had killed a man.

But now what the proper authorities are doing is making him nauseous. They seem to be doing a great deal, but none of it seems to be directed at trying to get Liam back. Every time he tells himself that the police are following a tried and tested routine, the same retort sounds in his head: They are only human beings and can do nothing.

He stands in front of the open wardrobe in the bedroom, tearing the paper suit off his body as if unpacking an enormous present that he never wanted in the first place. He wants to lie down on the bed and lose consciousness, hand over the rest of his life to someone else who will know how to do something useful with it. As he gets dressed, he sets himself an ultimatum. He will give the police until midnight. Then he will tell them what the kidnappers really wanted from him. Tell them that they should ask Medical Director Schlüter where Liam is.

In the hall, the technician gives the thumbs-up—the interception circuit is almost ready. When Sebastian walks into the living room, the psychologist smiles at him, a horizontal gap opening beneath her bird beak. She has not said that Sebastian must be hiding a nasty family secret, but she is watching his every move from the corner of her eye and has been looking through that photo album for ages. Liam’s first years are thoroughly documented. After that, there are only a few photographs of him here and there, in which Sebastian—who took the photos—is practically never to be seen.

“Almost done. Then we’ll be off.”

The psychologist has persuaded him that Maike should be the first person to be told about all this. If he refuses to tell her, the psychologist herself will ring Maike in Airolo. Their keenness to get the line bugged before this phone call suggests that they suspect Liam is with his mother. Sebastian knows that there are countless cases in which parents abduct children from each other. But he does not know how to make it clear to his guests that this is not the situation.

“All working now,” the smoking technician says, as if his colleague has just repaired a broken toilet.

He beckons Sebastian over and passes him a telephone receiver with a spiral cord ending in the black box. Sandström brings his ham sandwich into the hall and smells of mustard. He wipes his nose with the back of his hand, pushing it upward at the same time, turning his face into a porcine grimace. The psychologist leans against the door frame, pushing her thumbnail between her incisors, constantly nodding at Sebastian in a friendly manner. If it were possible, he would ring Oskar instead of Maike and ask him to repeat what he had said the night before: Do you want me to come to you?

This time Sebastian would reply, Yes.

The old-fashioned receiver feels heavy in his hand. The policewoman’s gaze bores into his back as he dials the number of the sports hotel in Airolo.

This was only to be expected. Maike is not there. She didn’t go to the Alps to sit around in her room. She’s on a cycling tour, isn’t she? A hundred kilometers, right? No, definitely no mobile phone—true luxury is being out of reach. Isn’t that right? A forced laugh. Yes, by dinnertime at the latest. She will return the call.

Sebastian asks the psychologist to let him have the sofa. He does not want to answer any more questions. He tells the technicians that they are not allowed to have music or the television on. Sighing, the policemen take books and magazines off the shelves and start leafing through them. The psychologist opens a window and listens to Bonnie and Clyde, who are in the stream below quarreling over the way things are progressing. Sandström’s mobile rings in the kitchen. There’s no news from the A81, where two police officers are questioning truck drivers, toilet attendants, and restaurant employees at the service station that Sebastian told them about.

Waiting. Sebastian has had so much practice waiting that it takes only a few minutes for him to lose awareness of everything around him. He lies with his head thrown back and stares at the ceiling—its white surface seems pleasantly in tune with his state of mind. His body seems to be sinking into a warm sand dune while his consciousness rises, circling gently around itself. Sebastian has the palpable sense of time becoming disjointed. The chain of seconds breaks down into tiny particles. His self dissolves, though leaves something behind that he can identify with. It is a kind of observation post outside body and soul. From this vantage point, Sebastian can think about why he held on so long to a theory that did not reflect in the least his feeling for space and time. They are not many, the worlds in which he moves. He is in a single cosmos, a great roar in which he feels the presence of other entities aside from his own. Names can be put to them—Maike, Oskar, and Liam—and they form a weave in which energy and matter are really the same thing: information. A human consciousness that consists of nothing besides memories and experiences is pure information. The observation post called Sebastian thinks that he could sit down at a desk and make notes. He should find out if Oskar’s attempts to extrapolate from the big bang through the quantization of time are ultimately aimed at comprehending the world as one big information machine. Have they not been working on the same idea for years but from different sides: that time, not only in the philosophical but in the physical sense, is a product of consciousness and also identical to it? He should speak to Oskar straightaway, find common ground… he should… When the doorbell rings, Sebastian’s daydreams collapse and leave a single sentence: Man is a hole in nothingness.

Someone enters the apartment. A female voice calls Sandström an idiot and asks what has happened that afternoon. It is a good question. Sebastian’s watch indicates that he has spent five hours staring at the white surface of the ceiling. The woman comes in and bats the TV magazine out of the hands of the smoking technician. Sebastian has seen the woman before, that morning, when she was running up the stairs in the police station. He found her unsympathetic even from behind. Now her gaze flickers through the room as if she once lost something here and has come to get it. When she walks toward Sebastian, her curly hair is like a symbol of permanent agitation around her head. Under the tightly buttoned cardigan, the large breasts protrude more than is strictly necessary. With a paw of surprising dimensions, she crushes Sebastian’s fingers.

“Rita Skura, detective.”

At least she leaves him in peace and asks her colleagues questions instead. Sandström and the police psychologist are apportioning Sebastian’s statement among themselves. They have barely finished speaking when Rita Skura tells them that that bastard of a medical director has not appeared in the hospital all day, and that the staff continue to protest their innocence. So there is basically nothing new in the case of the murdered senior registrar, and therefore the suits are having their asses kicked. While she is still cursing, the telephone rings.

The scene freezes, then chaos ensues. In the midst of the scuttling and chattering, Rita Skura takes control. She sends a technician to the black box, Sandström to the balcony, and the police psychologist to the phone with Sebastian.

“Pick up when I give the sign. Stall for time. Play dumb. Ask questions. Understood?”

“That will be my wife,” says Sebastian.

Rita shakes her head impatiently and leans back against the wall with her arms crossed, maintaining eye contact with the technician. Sebastian is overcome by a desire to put a giant glass over her, push a piece of card under it, and throw the detective out into the courtyard like a twitching insect. When she clicks her fingers, the technician hands him the telephone receiver.

“Dad?”

Liam’s voice is coming not only from the telephone receiver but from a box on which a spool of tape turns.

“Hang on, Dad. Hey, stop that!”

Liam is speaking to someone else. A giggle is heard in the background, and there is a bump and a bang. Then he’s back.

“Sorry,” he says, laughing. “There’s only one telephone here and it only takes fifty-cent pieces. Philipp and Lena keep tugging my arm. They think it’s funny or something.”

“Liam,” says Sebastian.

“Dad? Are you angry because I haven’t called for so long? I really couldn’t. We went off straightaway with rucksacks and tents. I was put with the oldest group from the start, because I talked about how to make a fire and about the bundling effect and exceeding the ignition temperature. And about how it’s not flint but pyrite that you need, and then they took me with them on the hike right away—”

“Liam! Are you OK?”

Sebastian’s broken cry interrupts Liam’s stream of chatter. There is a hesitant pause, stretching out of the phone and wrapping itself around everyone in the room, filling the hallway like an invisible gelatinous mass.

“Of course. I’m great,” Liam finally says. “Is something wrong, Dad?”

“No,” Sebastian says quickly. “Everything’s all right. I was simply… worried.”

While Liam thinks about this, Sebastian pushes his fist toward his mouth and bites into the white knuckles to stop the heaving in his gut from producing any unwanted noises.

“Some of the kids are homesick,” Liam says. “Maybe you’re homesick for me?”

This is too much, Sebastian has to get off the phone. He covers the receiver, bashes his forehead against the wall, and takes another deep breath.

“Yup, you’ve got it!” he says in just the right cheerful tone. “Listen, Liam, I’ve got to go. We… I’ll call you later, or tomorrow. I mean, I’ll come to see you.”

“No!” Liam’s horror is unmistakable. “You can’t do that! Tomorrow we want to…”

“OK, Liam, have fun! See you soon! Bye, Liam! Bye!”

The receiver falls and Sebastian with it. The technician presses a button and click, all is dark. A softness comes over his eyes, a jacket he doesn’t recognize, it smells male. Someone allows Sebastian to slide slowly to the ground. The heaving in his gut forces out a scream.

[4]

SOME DAYS, DETECTIVE SCHILF KNOWS as soon as he wakes up that he will not be leaving his apartment through the front door. Quickly and quietly, he slips into the army-green cargo pants that he buys in a work-uniform shop, and which he wore long before they became fashionable with young people. He pulls his travel bag out from under the bed and leaves the room, holding the door handle with both hands in order to close the door quietly. He stands at the breakfast bar for a few moments with a glass of Coke that is much too cold, and looks around his own apartment as if he is seeing it for the first time. For fifteen years these rooms have been somewhere for him to stay, but not a home. He feels especially out of place in the kitchen, as if some prankster has plonked him in an advertisement for modern living. He is surrounded by brushed steel and expensive kitchen equipment that he cannot operate. Even as a young lout sitting on a bar stool seemed laughable to him. A real single person’s kitchen, his landlord had declared when he moved in; and the rent is very reasonable for Stuttgart. Schilf had stuck a couple of postcards onto the fridge out of a sense of duty. They show Majorca, Lanzarote, and Gran Canaria. He had gotten them on vacation. The backs of the postcards are empty. He puts his Coke down, takes the bread bin, the unused fruit bowl, and a pile of newspapers from the windowsill, and opens the window.

To the east, the retreating night splashes the eastern sky with color, interspersed with graffiti made of clouds that the sun will soon have washed from the walls of the dawning day. Through a gap between buildings, Schilf sees a road junction. It is empty, as if cars have not been invented yet or have already been consigned to history. A lone pedestrian is creeping along by the buildings. A shift worker or a sleepless artist, the collar of his jacket turned up even though the nighttime temperature has not fallen below seventy degrees.

The detective turns his wrist: four thirty on Saturday morning. Perhaps he should take out a patent on this time of the day. Getting up early has long ceased to bother him. He can open his eyes at any given time and get out of bed as if nothing has happened, as if sleep does not exist, nor dreams, in whose corridors human beings waste a third of their lives. Rising early without difficulty is one of the few things that gets easier with age. When he was young, Schilf liked to claim that he would never grow old. The only thing old people had left to wait for was their meals.

He smiles and puts both feet down on the metal grating of the fire escape, which starts clanging like a large gong even though he has been careful. Why he leaves the building in this way on certain days, climbing like a burglar into his own life, he cannot explain. Sometimes it seems to make sense to slip around reality and all its preposterous vagaries and take it by surprise. He looks into the apartment one more time before he pulls the window closed from the outside. All is still. The apartment looks as if the detective were alone.

When Schilf looks back on his life, he thinks he was a perfectly normal person about twenty years ago. He had a job and a roof over his head, he had passions, possibly even family. Then came the fracture. While on duty, the young Schilf shot a man who was only reaching into his pocket to get his car key. Or perhaps Schilf had been driving out to wine country one weekend when a suspect forced him off the road—his wife and young son had been in the backseat. The detective insists that he cannot remember. “The fracture” is the name of a catastrophe that his bad memory conceals.

The fracture called for an entirely new person. From the remnants of his life, Schilf picked out the bits that were still functioning. This included his work, which he was good at, better than most in equivalent positions. He got up in the morning. He ate at regular intervals, availed himself of public transport and the small pleasures of life, and he knew where his bed was. But he waited in vain for these things to make him into a new, complete person. His problem was that he could not find it in his heart to end his life simply because the man leading it had reached the end. At some point, he realized that it was a matter of carrying on. The detective became a master at carrying on. Until, barely a month ago, two things happened that upset his mastery: a woman and a death sentence.

He received the death sentence on the obscenely squeaky, sweat-inducing leather of a Chesterfield armchair. This armchair stands in a study decorated in the English style, to which Schilf’s doctor leads his patients after he has shone a flashlight into various orifices. There is a thick rug on the floor and the walls are paneled with dark wood. In a gesture of ludicrous excess, gold-tooled volumes of the classics can be reached by means of a mobile librarian’s ladder.

The woman whom Schilf met is to some extent the opposite of this study. She has lightly permed dark hair, a snub nose that seems quite implausible, flat eyes that reflect the scene around her, and a build more like a girl than a forty-year-old. The detective met her in the pedestrian zone of Stuttgart city center shortly after the fatal visit to the doctor. To be precise, she walked straight into him because he had come to a sudden standstill. The ground had opened right in front of him, a common occurrence of late. He looked down into a dizzying abyss, a state outside of space and time in which everything was connected.

Ever since he was a child, the detective has believed that there must be a kind of primeval reality beyond the visible world. Greater men than he have spoken of the-thing-in-itself, being as such, or simply information. The detective adds to this by calling it “the program code,” by which he means something lying behind the visible and practical desktop of the everyday. He likes this concept because it allows him to compare reality with a man-made machine, an intelligent product of intelligence. In his opinion, reality is nothing other than a creation born second by second in the head of every single observer, and thus brought into the world. A long time ago, the detective developed a method by which he attempted to read the program code. This is how he solves his cases. The fact that the ground sometimes opened before him—that, and unbidden and repeated headaches—was the reason for his most recent visit to the doctor.

Plastic bags rustled behind him. Then came a cry and a blow to the back. The impact ought to have pushed him into the abyss. He imagined himself falling, but felt no fear, only a great longing, so great that when he had taken a step forward and found firm ground beneath his feet, he turned to his attacker with an expression of deep disappointment. The woman laughed when she saw his face, shook her head cheerfully, and did not apologize. Instead, when the detective set off again, she followed him.

He had neither extended his hand nor introduced himself. He pulled her like a drag anchor all over the city center. After his visit to the doctor he had intended to do something normal, like buy a slice of pizza. But now all he wanted was to get rid of his new friend. She was carrying plastic bags in which—as became clear later—she had everything she needed to survive, and she followed the detective without asking why they kept walking past the same spots. Schilf had too little imagination, and the pedestrian zone was too small, to make such a long walk more varied. While they were waiting at the same traffic light once again, crossing the same streets, and glancing into the same shopwindows, the woman spoke unaffectedly about herself in a constant stream of chatter.

She had started modeling for life-drawing classes when she was sixteen, and soon earned so much money from it that she did not see the need for a so-called decent education. Over time, the painters became more famous and the wages higher. She had quickly realized that she was not being paid for her nakedness but for a feat of strength—her ability to remain motionless for hours. She perfected the control of physical pain in utterly dull rooms, enlivened only by the scratching of charcoal, the sharp intakes of breath, and the occasional sighs of the artists. To the delight of the painters, she was able to stand in a kind of acquiescent trance for a whole afternoon in the attitude of someone who had just received a shock. Word of her talent got around and she was never short of work. There were so many pictures of her that she never had to ask herself who she was. While other people crouched over desks in gloomy offices, she sat with her cup of café au lait in the garden of her favorite coffeehouse, feeling the breeze on her cheeks. She admitted to the detective that she had not really reckoned with having to change anything about this extremely comfortable lifestyle. That is, until an orthopedic surgeon had told her that she must never model again if she wanted to prevent the constant holdingstill from ultimately destroying her back, her knees, and her elbows.

What did the detective think of this story? the woman asked as they stopped in front of the glass doors of the McDonald’s on Schlossplatz, as if by mutual agreement. The detective had not realized that her tirades had constituted a story. A person who does not have to ask herself who she is can have little talent for the art of storytelling.

He had said this out loud, and the woman liked it. She laughed. At their feet, sparrows hopped after sweet wrappers and cigarette butts that were rolling away; it was a windy day. The long walk had exhausted the detective so much that the prospect of something edible and a cup of coffee made him feel intensely happy. They walked into McDonald’s together in the best of moods. Schilf held the glass doors open for the woman, sensing that the people coming toward him on their way out were looking at him strangely, and followed the determined steps of his companion to a table in the corner. She slumped onto the bench and shrugged off her jacket with a smooth movement of her shoulders. After the orthopedic surgeon’s diagnosis, she said, her savings had barely lasted for a couple of weeks. Like the cricket in the fable, during an endless summer she had not bothered herself with thoughts of the harsh winter days to come. That was why she was now looking for someone to take care of her.

The detective understood what was going to happen. He sat down, stood up again, and asked if he could get her something. A hamburger, perhaps, an apple pie, or chicken scraps in oily batter. With a reproving yet almost tender look, the woman asked him to sit back down again like a civilized person and look out for a waiter from whom they could request a menu. Now the detective not only knew what was going to happen. He was overcome by the firm suspicion that this woman, who had been sent to him quite by chance along with the death sentence, really did not exist at all. Someone who asks for a menu in McDonald’s fitted too well into the strange form of his imaginative power. In her position, nothing would be easier than simply to go mad, the woman said, still looking at him with those eyes that reflected everything. But what life had to offer was still more appealing to her than insanity.

Even before the detective walked up to the counter to order a meal for two from a pale girl, he had given the woman his address and the key to his apartment. When he came back from work that evening, she had tidied up, vacuumed, made the bed, and cooked some soup. As they ate together for the second time that day, she revealed her name: Julia.

That was four weeks ago. Since then, of course, the detective has tried his best not to make any noise when he gets up early. His new girlfriend lies asleep in bed.

[5]

SCHILF CAREFULLY PUTS ONE FOOT IN FRONT of the other on the clanging metal grate. He sucks the excessively warm morning air through his teeth and gazes at the facades of the buildings around him. People are sleeping behind all these dark windows, in layers beside and above each other like pupating maggots. This image does not exactly make him feel any keener on today’s continuation of his existence. Just as he is halfway down the steps, the inner observer starts talking.

Once again, Detective Schilf left the apartment by the fire escape, the voice in his head says. He was not keen on his new case.

Schilf has known this voice for over twenty years, ever since the fracture that divided the story of his life into two halves. From time to time the urge to comment off-camera on all his actions overwhelms him like a chronic disease. Then there is no longer a present tense in his head, only a narrative preterit, and there is only the third person instead of “I.” His thoughts suddenly start sounding as if someone in the future were talking about him and this early morning, which is fastened to the wall of the building by a zipper of metal grating. Schilf has learned not to defend himself. It is possible to run away from many things, but not from what is going on in one’s own head. He has christened this voice the “inner observer,” in the way that human beings give names to things they do not understand. Sometimes the observer’s visits last only a couple of hours. At other times, he stays close for weeks and turns the world into a radio play without off-switch or volume control, with Schilf as writer, speaker, and listener all in one. The observer keeps silent about some things, but then goes into great detail on other occasions. He can always be relied on at the beginning of a difficult case. He loves nothing more than to repeat what the detective is thinking.

The last thing I need is a beheaded cyclist, the detective thought, the detective thinks.

Two days ago, the walrus-mustached police chief had honored him with a personal phone call and—a sign of the estimation in which he is held—canceled the holiday Schilf had planned. “The Freiburgers can’t cope,” the chief had shouted into the telephone. “The hospital scandal is driving the whole town crazy. First four heart patients die, then a senior registrar is murdered. Even the blockheads in the press can see the connection. Take your vacation later, Schilf. Clear up this Dabbelink business first.”

In other circumstances, Schilf would have obeyed the chief’s orders without resistance. He obeys now, but his resistance is enormous. When he considers the matter carefully, there is a problem asleep in his apartment, and another problem (perhaps even the same one) that has inhabited his head for quite some time. The detective does not want to go to Freiburg now. He feels repelled by the thought of the tiny police apartment not far from Heinrich-von-Stephan-Strasse. He is not interested in dead anesthetists or the megalomania of a medical director. He has worked nonstop for years and he needs a break. Right now, there are more important things than this Dabbelink, who is in the safe mitts of Rita Skura.

Schilf considers smoking a cigarillo on an empty stomach, and abandons the idea. For a while he peers into the stillness of the courtyard. Slowly a cat walks across the cleanly swept flagstones. When Schilf starts moving again, it flees into the nearest building with one leap.

Some days there is just no choice other than to leave through the back door, the detective thought, the detective thinks.

He walks down the groaning metal steps. Ignoring the creaking in his knees and shoulders, he climbs sideways over the gate at the end of the fire escape and jumps the final one and a half meters down to the ground.

BARELY TWO HOURS LATER, Schilf leans his head against the cool, vibrating glass of a window, feeling his terrible headache subside. The air-conditioning is blowing into his face through a vent. In a broad curve the train rounds a small town, which with its church tower, half-timbered houses, and tidy meadows looks like an exhibit in an open-air museum. As the rear of the InterCity train comes into view, Schilf thinks, as he does on every train journey, what a miracle of human endeavor he is sitting in. What powerful masses are accelerated by mankind, what pains it takes to wrest materials from the earth in order to forge them into something that serves a great idea. And how it strives toward a goal that, despite thousands of years of philosophical efforts by the cleverest of men, is still utterly unknown.

When the next stretch of forest wraps itself around the train, he turns his gaze away from the window and the world becomes a blur in the corner of his left eye.

Schilf managed to miss the five o’clock train to Freiburg even though he had reached the Stuttgart station with plenty of time to spare. A magazine held him up—it was lying on the platform and he nearly slipped on it. He picked it up out of the wind, which was riffling its pages, and read where it had fallen open.

The article, by a professor of physics, was about the theories of the time-machine murderer—the case that had brought Schilf a promotion to first detective chief superintendent and, moreover, secured him a modest place in police history. As he devoured the article, he felt as if it had been written just for him. He stood reading in front of the departure board, did not move aside when someone asked him to, did not hear the announcement about the train’s arrival, and was quite unable to tear his eyes from the article. When he had finished, he looked up at the departing train in astonishment, ready to believe that he was sitting in his reserved seat—number 42 in coach 24—and was traveling, split from himself, on another train track into a parallel universe. His right hand fingered his temples as if he were looking for a lever to reverse his little mistake. He had simply looked up from the magazine too late, and not jumped onto the train. Such a detail could surely not have buried itself in the world’s memory so quickly and so irrevocably.

Schilf stood alone, lost in thought in the nighttime quiet of the platform, and remained in the same spot for one hour, without moving. When the next train drew in, he had not even started waiting.

The InterCity train in which he now sits is exactly the same as the one he has missed. Doggedly, Schilf sits in seat 42, coach 24. He places his feet to the left and the right of his bag, puts his hands on his knees, and stretches his back. In this position, he is able to stare off the headache that has resurfaced and also forget about his spine for a while. As he has known for some time, aging does not only bring the ability to wake at four in the morning without being able to go back to sleep. Aging is above all a continuing rendezvous with one’s own body, a dialogue with pipes, filters, hinges, and pumps that have been doing their work behind the scenes for years, but now suddenly impinge on the consciousness with their demands for attention. Mapping the self is equivalent to dying; to have totally grasped oneself is death, the detective thinks, sitting upright like a statue, swaying gently with the rise and fall of the train. Once again he says to himself that his badly constructed replacement life has finally been turned upside down. He feels ridiculously happy at the thought. Mentally he feels sharper than he has for a long time, precisely here: at the outer limit of his strength.

Outside, the landscape interrupts its hurried progress; a few passengers get off and on. Schilf lifts his bag onto the seat next to him so that nobody will sit there. The magazine that has gripped him sticks out of a side pocket willfully. If Schilf has understood correctly, the physics professor’s statements seem to confirm the theories of the time-machine murderer. But it is not entirely clear if the professor is defending the Many-Worlds Interpretation or merely explaining it. The detective turns to the contents page once again. The square photo shows a blond, laughing professor. He looks happy. Schilf likes the caption: “Everything that is possible happens.” Somehow this fits with his hazy ideas about the program code for reality, even though the time-foam model seems much too clichéd.

EVEN AS A CHILD, he loved the idea that the world could really be quite different from the way human beings perceived it. In summer, the little detective lay on his belly in the garden behind his parents’ house talking to a butterfly about whether the nut tree by the wall was really a single object or, as seen through the compound eye of the insect, a conglomeration of two thousand nut trees spliced together. There was no conclusion to the discussion, for both the little detective and the butterfly were irrefutably right. From this butterfly, from echo-sounding bats, and from mayflies, Schilf has learned that time, space, and causality are matters of perspective, in the truest sense of the word. Lying in the grass, distracted and focused at the same time, he did not find it difficult to let go of the guide-rail of familiar perception for a few moments and to float free over an unimaginable chaos. How nicely he chatters away to himself, said one delighted parent to the other. Whereas the detective came close to losing his mind at the age of ten.

His childish efforts have developed into a method of working now, except Schilf can no longer lie in the garden. With painful concentration, he bores holes into the desktop made up of crime scene descriptions and witness statements until it is porous enough to allow for conclusions about the program code, about reality. He sees coincidences as metaphors and contradictions as oxymorons, and the repeated appearance of details as leitmotifs. When Schilf gets a hollow feeling in his stomach, as if he were on a trajectory at the very apex of a parabola, he reaches out instinctively to hold on to something (the corner of a table, a door frame, the edge of the sink) and reaps the reward for his efforts: premonitions, daydreams, feelings of déjà vu.

No one in his office understands how he works; they see only his successes. His colleagues shake him by the hand, call him a fantastic clairvoyant to his face and a lucky bastard behind his back. When the case of the time-machine murderer was solved, they said that he had done nothing more than sit around quietly for days until the murderer had contacted him and politely asked him to take down his confession.

THE DETECTIVE HAD ACTUALLY SPENT WEEKS breaking down the cage of his perceptions into pieces in order to find the threads that connected him with the person he was looking for. He combined the study of files with meditation as he waited for a clue that would tell him where and when the coincidence that he urgently needed would occur. At some point the telephone rang and a woman who had dialed the wrong number kept asking for someone called Roland. That same afternoon, a bird crashed into the window of the conference room and dropped onto the window ledge as if it was dead, but when a young female officer tried to pick it up, it flew off, perfectly unharmed. A little later, the detective stumbled in the hallway and broke the glass of his watch against a door frame. In the watch department of the Karstadt department store, two young men were standing in front of him in line, one of them resembling the third murder victim. They were chatting and laughing about how a life without watches and clocks was not only possible but actually more pleasant. The detective decided not to repair his watch and went back out into the street, where he accepted a flyer for a performance at the Panorama Café in the Stuttgart television tower. That evening, he turned on the television and landed on Vertigo, a film about a dead woman returning, with an ending that the detective did not understand.

The next day, Schilf sat for hours in the café in the television tower, eating plum cake and looking at the cars far beneath him negotiating their complicated routes through the pattern of streets, and at the Black Forest shrouded in mist on the horizon. He had put his broken watch down on the table. When a young man sat down at the table next to him and started scribbling busily in a notebook, a bird crashed into the large window. In his surprise the detective knocked his broken watch from the table. The man at the next table put his pen behind his ear and picked up the watch for him. They started talking. The young man was wearing a blue shirt with white trousers, and his mobile phone was in a leather pouch on his belt. After two hours of animated conversation the detective said he had to make a quick phone call. The young man lent him his mobile phone, and Schilf walked a few meters away from him out of politeness and called his colleagues at headquarters. It was only later that he found out the surname of his new acquaintance was Roland.

Schilf would never forget the accusing look of the murderer as he was arrested. The young man had trusted him at first glance. He had told Schilf that he came from the future, and that he had landed in this time in order to conduct a few groundbreaking experiments. He was working on nothing less than a solution to the grandfather paradox. He wanted to prove that changes in the past had no effect on later events at all; so a time traveler could kill his forebears without endangering his own existence in the future. Schilf continued listening with interest for another half hour before two plainclothes officers walked in and arrested the young man so courteously that none of the other people in the café noticed.

During the trial, the murderer had presented a file detailing the lives of his victims up to the year 2015. Desperately, he had assured the court over and over again that the victims were alive in the future, some of them were married and had successful careers. Moreover, they had agreed to the experiment. He himself was not like everyone else, he shouted. He did not live here, he was only a guest, on a work trip to a world without consequences, and therefore was not responsible for any actions, however strange. In the jungle of time, the time-machine murderer screamed as Schilf was leaving the room, every moment was itself the next one.

Schilf leaned against the wall in the corridor outside the courtroom. He knew that the jury would convict someone who would not learn, someone lonely, someone innocent in the tragic sense.

[6]

THE DETECTIVE RUBS BOTH HANDS OVER HIS FACE. When the InterCity train takes the next curve, he becomes aware of whirling flecks, as seagulls seem to follow the train like an ocean liner. Although the speed of the train clearly rules out the possibility of seagulls, which must be an optical illusion, he can even see their orange beaks and the black feathers on top of their heads when he squints.

Gently he strokes the smooth surface of the rolled-up magazine. It is not actually the contents of the article that fascinate him so much, but the feeling that he recognizes the voice of the person who wrote it. While reading, he could hear it in his head, as if the professor of physics were speaking to him in person. As to a friend. The detective is sure that this article has been written by someone who does not believe in what he is saying. Someone who doubts reality, despairs of it, as one who is lost in a labyrinth. The detective superintendent learned something else from the butterflies with their compound eyes: those who believe in nothing also know nothing. Without a reliable cure for doubt, there can be no cognitive orientation. Schilf would give anything to speak with this Sebastian about it. Perhaps he does not need a doctor, but a physics professor for the yawning abyss that has started opening up in front of him at the most inconvenient moments. His doctor had not done much more than ask him a load of questions. He had asked about Schilf’s successes in his work and the ever-increasing price he paid for them—memory loss, headaches, a loosening grip on reality. The following week the detective was shoved into a scanner like a loaf of bread into the oven, so that magnetic fields could throw the atomic nuclei in his head out of balance. Sometime after that, he sat once again in the wood-paneled study and the assistant brought him a coffee so that he would have something to stir. Schilf dropped one lump of sugar after another into the cup and kept on stirring. While he was doing this, the doctor told him about the secret subtenant in his head. Name: Glioblastoma multiforme. Age: definitely a few months, perhaps even several years. Size: 3.5 centimeters. Place of birth: the frontal lobe, a little left of center. Function: causing memory loss, chronic headaches, and a loosening grip on reality.

The sugar in the detective’s cup melted into the cooling liquid, forming a saturated solution. He had to stop stirring so that the doctor could pat him on the hand. On the table in front of him were the results of the MRI scan, photographs in tones of gray that Schilf found so attractive that he considered getting them framed. Glioblastoma multiforme sounded like a rare tree or a deformed insect, so he gave his subtenant a new name: ovum avis—bird’s egg. As the doctor was writing down the name of a specialist for the detective, Schilf rose and said farewell. He did not intend to return. And he would not go to the famous specialist. Anyone who regularly attends postmortem examinations does not expect much from having his own skull sawed open.

“ARE YOU STILL THERE? Can you hear me? Damn.”

Smiling, the detective shakes his head and stretches his spine until he hears a crack. Two rows behind him, someone is furiously pressing the keys of a mobile phone. The advent of the mobile has finally given human beings a means of expressing their metaphysical isolation and their deep-seated doubt about the existence of other life-forms. Can you hear me? Are you there? Who could claim with any certainty that the other person was really there and could hear you speaking? All sentient beings are necessarily solipsists and therefore occupied with ignoring that very fact throughout their lives, the detective thinks. He himself would have every reason to take his mobile phone out of his bag, dial the number to his own apartment, and wait to see if his new girlfriend picks up the phone—he still does not quite believe that she exists if she is not in front of him. Are you still there? He could ring himself or the bird’s egg in his head and ask the same question. If the doctor is right, Schilf has only a few weeks, at most a couple of months left of the rendezvous with the self that people generally call their existence. He would need this time for an investigation in which he himself would be the chief suspect. The connection between his new girlfriend and the bird’s egg had to be cleared up. Perhaps the time-machine murderer is an accomplice and the physics professor a valuable witness. The detective would also have to bridge larger gaps—to find out how the fragments of his life could make a whole. With some patience he would find a solution, one that at least he alone understood. After all, it is not every day that one is declared dead and then called the love of someone’s life within a few hours. Before he finally signs off, the only thing to be done, surely, is to make himself whole.

Somewhere in the growing distance, Julia rolls onto her other side and sighs in her sleep because the narrow room is slowly growing too warm for her. When Schilf thinks about her, about the soft-skinned being heavy with sleep in his bed, who quite naturally spends the day tidying his apartment and reading his books and glows with cheerfulness all the time like a puppy, his stomach contracts with a mixture of fear and happiness. He does not believe in the redeeming power of love, and therefore does not plan to connect his desire to live with the tingle in his stomach. Nevertheless, he does not want to die—so far he has gotten no further than this with his musings. The only thing certain is that Schilf and the detective must hurry at all costs if they still want anything in particular from each other.

[7]

AFTER CHANGING TRAINS IN KARLSRUHE, the detective decides to put his musings aside. From his bag he takes a leather pouch, and from this a matte-silver object no bigger than a pack of cards. His new girlfriend has given it to him. She thinks the game of kings suits him and that if someone were to write a book about him one day, he could be the chess-playing detective, just like Sherlock Holmes was the violin-playing detective. Schilf refrained from pointing out that Holmes was not really a detective and that the violin was not a game of strategy, and accepted the gift with thanks. When he presses the “on” button, the display lights up in shades of blue like a new day dawning. Schilf learned the rules of chess thirty years ago from a friend at school, without mustering any enthusiasm for the game. But he has hardly been able to put down the electronic game since he received it. This pleases Julia. She perches on the side of his armchair looking over his shoulder while he taps away at the blue screen, and her hair tickles him until he has lost and goes out for a meal with her.

The game that was interrupted the previous evening appears at the touch of a button. It is the detective’s turn, as always. The computer never needs more than a couple of seconds to make its move, but he takes half an hour over every one of his. It waits patiently for him. He is unable to work out the simplest algorithm in his head, so he ties himself into knots with his calculations until he finally makes an incredibly clumsy move after rallying himself to “just give it a go.” The gadget lets him make his own fateful mistakes, so at the end he is plagued by the feeling that he has not been beaten but has checkmated himself.

At Offenburg, Schilf’s bishop embarks on a daring attack on the queenside, which he feels he has prepared for by advancing a phalanx of pawns. His little soldiers have marched determinedly against the enemy and are now looking the opposing queen full in the face. Just for fun, Schilf imagines that she has Rita Skura’s face. In the background, a couple of agitated officers are occupied with a plan that is too cunning for their own good. It has not fooled any grandmasters. It has also never worked.

Schilf’s army is literally fighting for its life when the train arrives in Freiburg. On the platform, waiting passengers drop their bags and press their hands to their ears. An infernal screeching of brakes suspends time for three whole seconds. The detective gathers himself and his things quickly.

As he shuffles along next to his greenish reflection on the long row of train windows, he asks himself for the umpteenth time why he plays chess against a stronger opponent as if his life depended on it, without ever once pressing the button to reverse a mistake. In real life he would reverse any number of mistakes without hesitation. He would have given the most personal match of his life—which ended with the fracture, a disastrous checkmate—a new twist. Perhaps the “touch-move” rule applies less to chess than to character, thought the detective, thinks the detective.

AT THE END OF THE PLATFORM, a woman in a flowery dress and a cardigan is waiting for a cup of coffee from the drinks machine. She does not bother to turn around.

“Schilf. Congratulations on your promotion.”

Rita Skura watches the final drops of coffee drip into her cup, giving Schilf enough time to recover from his shock. She takes the cup from the drip tray and sips from it before extending her right paw to the detective, a gesture that in defiance of several thousand years of cultural history has something threatening about it. She grabs the straps of his bag and tries to take it from him, but he resists indignantly. They tug back and forth a few times until Rita Skura suffers the first defeat of the day, as is evident from the look in her eyes. They walk side by side without another word. Secretly the detective steals a glance at his former student: the deep furrow above the bridge of her nose and the pursed lips, with which she sips from the cup as she walks. He is glad to see her again. At the police college he liked her ambition, her chin quivering constantly with tension, a testament to how seriously she took the world around her—it was rather touching. He almost envied her sincerity then. When he looks at her furrowed brow, he is nearly sorry that he had destroyed her childish trust in appearances with a single piece of advice. He had not remembered how short she was. Her bouffant hair barely reaches his shoulder.

Rita Skura takes long strides, and the skirt of her flowery dress swings around her legs like a sail whipping in a storm. She overtakes him on the steps up to the pedestrian bridge and waits at the top, visibly pleased at the opportunity to look down on him.

“Miss your train?” she asks. “Didn’t get out of bed on time?”

“Delay tactics,” the first detective chief superintendent pants as he walks up the steps. “To prolong the anticipation.”

Rita snorts derisively. She has waited on the platform for an hour and God knows she has no time to waste. When Schilf reaches the top step, she looks at him properly for the first time. Her gaze flits over him with an expression of suppressed rage. The detective wonders why she is not pretty, why all the female qualities in her do not make a pretty woman, but simply Rita Skura. The veins on the backs of her hands are prominent and look like satellite images of deltas in the Amazon River, but that cannot be the reason. She tosses the coffee cup into a trash can decisively, pinching her nose with the other hand at the same time to clear her ears. As if she is crashing in an airplane, Schilf thinks, feeling a ripping sensation in the cortex of his brain, going from his left temple down to his ear. The two of us have arrived in this world like seasick fish, he thinks, but he does not know what this means. He reaches for the knob on the handrail and closes his eyes as the pain rises and swells. He hears the people behind him cursing as they have to maneuver past, and he sees Rita slipping her foot out of her flat shoe and wiggling her toes to rearrange the holes in her stocking. But he cannot actually see anything with his eyes closed, and Rita Skura is not wearing stockings.

Schilf tears his eyes open again and stares Rita Skura in the face, shocked because what she is saying comes through to him only after some delay. Her lips are moving like those of an actress in a badly dubbed film.

“You don’t have to act the invalid with me,” she says. “I know you better than that.”

“That’s what I’m counting on,” he gasps in reply.

The headache disappears as quickly as it arrived. Schilf wipes the sweat from his brow with his shirtsleeve. Rita stares at him with knitted brows, turns abruptly, and walks on, shoveling air aside with both arms. Schilf has to make an effort to keep up with her. At the station exit he insists on having a sandwich, not knowing whether he is really hungry or simply wants to annoy his colleague. He will find out that these feelings are astonishingly similar.

Standing with their elbows on the sticky surface of a table, they listen to the soft squeaking of mozzarella between Schilf’s jaws.

“I’m burning in hell,” Rita says with a mixture of derision and wonder, “and you’re eating cheese.”

Broad shafts of sunlight suddenly fall through the glass front of the station, turning the people in the concourse into slivers of themselves. In the midst of this biblical light show, an unimpressed Rita Skura counts off the hell she is talking about on her fingers.

“Scandal at the hospital. Beheaded cyclist. And to top it off, a lunatic who is claiming that his son was kidnapped, though the son knows nothing of it.”

Schilf lowers his sandwich. “Oh?”

Rita picks up a piece of tomato that has dropped onto the table and puts it in her mouth. “Some family nonsense. The man reports a kidnapping and as soon as the phones are bugged, the boy calls from holiday camp, safe and sound.”

“And the father?”

“Apologizes profusely, withdraws his report, and assures us that no further investigations will be necessary.”

“That’s not for him to decide.”

“I know. But the case will peter out anyway. We have more important things to do.”

“Oh, the cyclist,” Schilf says. “You shouldn’t worry so much about him.”

Her index finger is pointing like a weapon at his head—directly at the bird’s egg, he thinks, feeling a faint pulsing.

“Don’t play Superman with me,” Rita says.

“I meant well.”

“In case you failed to notice when you read the file, this cyclist was the right-hand man of Medical Director Schlüter. Strange coincidence, isn’t it?”

Schilf suppresses a yawn, passes her the rest of his sandwich, and wipes his hands on a paper napkin.

“The press is roasting us on a spit,” Rita says with her mouth full. “People don’t like it when the gods in white are under suspicion.”

“And you come to the station yourself and wait an hour to welcome me in person?”

Rita shoves the last piece of bread into her mouth and chews for far too long. She does not object when Schilf takes a pack of cigarillos out of his pocket.

“I wanted to talk to you without being disturbed,” she says in an unusually quiet voice.

“This is a no-smoking station!” the sandwich man calls from behind the counter.

“And this is a smoking madman with good friends in the health and safety inspectorate!” Rita shouts back.

Schilf blows smoke through his nostrils and observes the play of light on the wisps as they rise through the air. The sandwich man starts wiping his counter.

“Experimenting on patients,” Rita says. “Horrible stuff, don’t you think?”

“The kidnapping guy,” Schilf says. “What does he do?”

“He’s a professor of physics,” says Rita. “But that’s not what this is all about. Just try proving that a doctor has done something wrong. They’re all stonewalling. That’s where you come in. Detective Schilf?”

Schilf is no longer listening. He has wedged the cigarillo between his teeth, picked up his bag, and has already walked a few steps toward the exit.

“Come on,” he calls over his shoulder.

Behind the glass doors is a solid wall of heat. It shimmers in the air above the lipstick-red Corsa in the no-parking zone. In a sudden fit of respectfulness, Rita opens the rear door for Schilf. Moved by this, the detective climbs into the backseat. He had hoped for air-conditioning, but there is none. While a cursing Rita attempts to ease the car into traffic, Schilf finds time for a move with his knight that has occurred to him as a final opportunity for salvation. His defense is in tatters, his queen barricaded in by her own officers. Fleeing forward is his only option, moving another piece into the disputed area of the enemy kingdom. A gap opens up for Rita. The car moves forward in fits and starts. Her eyes seek out the detective’s gaze in the rearview mirror.

“Let’s get to the point, Schilf,” she says. “I wanted to suggest that you call the police chief.”

He has made a mistake that is stupid even for a beginner. The move was so irresponsibly rash that Schilf can hardly believe it when his knight disappears with a brief flicker of the screen. In the heat of battle, he has omitted to protect a particular square. He sinks back into the synthetic upholstery, exhausted. Rita’s Corsa is one of those cars that will always smell like new. The detective considers abandoning the game, tipping his own king over and surrendering. He looks out of the window in a rage. He sees light patches on the grassy banks of the Dreisam. Snowdrifts or seagulls that are lying on their fronts with their wings spread wide, or sleeping sheep, if sheep ever sleep—he is not entirely sure on this point. Rita clears her throat.

“Listen, Schilf. Tell the chief that you are urgently needed for the hospital scandal. And leave the cyclist, who you don’t think is important anyway, to me.” She casts him a wary look in the rearview mirror. “The cases are closely connected. We would be working together either way.”

Schilf saves the game for later. He thinks longingly of a world in which he has not made that stupid move with his knight and in which he wins every game against the chess computer, which is why he must always lose in this world: for there is no victory or defeat and no right or wrong; rather: victory and defeat as well as right and wrong.

“Are you even listening?” Rita asks.

“No,” Schilf says. “But you can keep the cyclist. And the rest of all that nonsense. I’ll take on the physics professor. Now look where you’re going.”

“Why?”

“Because of the traffic light!”

She slams on the brakes, and a treble C rings out. The detective’s slack body folds around the seat belt. He rubs his stomach, groaning.

“But why,” Rita says suspiciously as she reverses the car out of the intersection, “why don’t you want to do the job on account of which you’ve come here specially?”

On account of which. Schilf knows why he liked Rita Skura from the moment he met her. In her own way, she is as lost in this world as he is. He aims a wintry smile at the rearview mirror. He’s going to be sick if they don’t get there soon.

“At my age,” Schilf says, “you no longer judge crimes by their prominence.”

“Not according to your most recent successes.”

“Listen to me, Rita. You can have Dabbelink.”

Rita does not quite manage to hide her pleasure. She turns into Heinrich-von-Stephan-Strasse with a flourish, lifts her pass up to the machine at the entrance, and parks in the shade of a tree, for the places under the corrugated iron roof have long since been taken. She rests her hands on the steering wheel. In the sudden silence, the birdsong is surprisingly loud.

“I have never forgotten that I must proceed from the opposite of my own convictions,” Rita says. “Going by this rule, I will actually have to trust you.”

“You are a good child,” Schilf says.

The moment of weakness passes. Rita kicks open her door, plants her feet squarely on the ground, and waits with her fists pressed into her sides for Schilf to emerge from the car.

“This is how it’s going to be,” she says. “For as long as you’re here, we’ll be sharing an office. My office.”

She locks the car and holds the detective back when he starts walking toward the building. He looks down at her and feels the hint of a fatherly smile on his lips.

“Two more things,” she says. “First—no tricks.”

“I have a new girlfriend, by the way,” the detective says.

“Are you sure she isn’t a social worker who visits you regularly?”

“Not at all sure,” says Schilf. “I’ll get the file on the physicist and pay him a visit. You can look after my bag in the meantime.”

“Second!” Rita screams after him. “No smoking in my office!”

The detective’s laughter is visible in his receding back.