In Free Fall

[1]

FREIBURG IS ONLY HALF AWAKE at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. The lanes are still in shadow, and the tables and chairs of the pavement cafés around the cathedral bunch together as if they fear the weekend crowds about to descend. The waitresses walk between them like shepherds, shooing chairs into place, patting tables on the back and putting ashtrays on them.

The detective has never much liked Freiburg. The people seem too happy to him, and the reasons for their happiness too banal. It smells a little of holidays, especially when the sun is shining. Students are lifting their behinds onto hand-painted bicycles. Married women festooned in batik make their way to their favorite boutiques. A traffic jam of strollers has already formed outside a health food shop. No one here seems to feel the need to ponder the meaning of life. The detective superintendent sees only one face with a skeptical expression. It belongs to the blue and yellow macaw in a large cage next to the postcard stand outside a photo shop. The bird gazes at the detective so piercingly that he chooses a wicker chair nearby.

“My name is Agfa,” the parrot says.

“Schilf,” the detective says.

“Look out,” the parrot says.

The detective waves away a schoolgirl with green hair who is asking him for a euro even though she is wearing designer jeans and has a Dalmatian on a leash. Schilf is about to tell her that one cannot enjoy the practical advantages of wealth and the moral advantages of poverty at the same time, but the girl tells him where, in her opinion, he ought to go. Schilf grimaces. In ugly towns like Stuttgart, people at least admit that they have struck the jackpot in the lottery of life.

“We’re not open yet but you can sit there,” a waitress calls to him. She is placing menus on the tables with mechanical movements.

Schilf waves a hand casually in thanks. The waitress is not much older than the schoolgirl. She is wearing a headscarf with skulls printed on it, flip-flops, and a miniskirt so short that her pink underwear shows when she bends over. Schilf unrolls a bunch of papers and spreads them over the table. In her office, without a word, Rita had slammed down the physicist’s file onto the corner of the desk she had designated as Schilf’s workspace by pulling up a plastic chair. Schilf handed the papers to a passing officer to photocopy so that he would not have to take special care while reading them.

Despite years of experience, Schilf feels a slight shudder at the sight of a human fate turned into paper. Every file he opens is an intersection of his life and that of an unknown person. It will never be possible to untangle the threads that weave themselves together from the moment he starts reading.

Not for one second has Schilf doubted which Freiburg physicist was involved in the kidnapping case. The photo of a smiling Sebastian lies in front of him as he reads through the statement taken by Sandström.

The car had not simply disappeared. It had metamorphosed into a nothingness of a certain kind, into the terrible bequest of an event that should not have happened. Did you know, Herr Sandström, that there is an astonishing number of things that we believe will never happen? We are as convinced that these events will not happen as we are that the earth revolves around the sun. Our own death is one of these things. And the disappearance of a boy like Liam is another. When something like that happens, the world goes out of kilter. (A comment in Sandström’s nervous handwriting: The witness starts screaming.) You, Herr Sandström, you have to fix that. That’s your job. Do you see?

Schilf is certain that Sandström has not understood the witness. But he, on the other hand, does understand him. Sympathy wells up when he thinks about those words—cries for help, really—coming from the same brain that produced the sober phrases of the scientific essay. The physics professor was used to bending the world with the power of his intellect. So this was how he spoke after waiting three days for news of his son.

The waitress has finished distributing the menus. Now she starts on the tea lights—symbols of uselessness in the bright morning sun. A customer walks up to the photo shop and knocks on the bars of the birdcage.

“Pretty please,” the parrot says.

Schilf only skims the rest of the file. Sandström’s handwriting shows the increasing strain he is under. The brief report from the police psychologist states that Sebastian is not suffering from schizophrenia. The forensic team notes that the Volvo was professionally cleaned the day after the kidnapping.

“What can I get you, sir?”

Schilf lowers his papers. “You have to understand dialectics,” he murmurs.

“What did you say? You’re diabetic?”

Under her knitted brow, the waitress’s clear, green eyes are slanted. She is probably wearing tinted contact lenses to give her the transparent, all-knowing gaze of a cat. Schilf has to admit that it works.

“Look out,” the macaw says.

“Could I have a newspaper, please,” the detective says. “And a café au lait.”

“Yes, you can have that,” the waitress nods. “There’s no sugar in it.”

She comes back with a newspaper and a tall glass layered with coffee and milk in different shades. Deftly, she places a long-handled spoon down next to the glass and puts the accompanying sachet of sugar into the pocket of her miniskirt. Schilf lets her have her way, even though he prefers sugar in his coffee. He opens the newspaper. The headline is underlined in red, and stretches across the whole of the front page. “MURDERER IN WHITE.” An enormous question mark detracts from the finality of the headline. The waitress stands idly by the table, watching a group of tourists gawping at the cathedral spire with their heads thrown back. Under the headline, large photos show an angular man in a yellow sports jersey frowning as he holds a trophy up for the camera, and a bald doctor in a white coat who has not quite succeeded in pushing his hand between himself and the onlookers.

“It’s only a church tower, after all,” the waitress says maliciously. Then she makes a vague gesture in the direction of the newspaper. “It’s all nonsense.”

“What’s nonsense?” Schilf asks.

“This one didn’t kill that one,” she says, pointing first at one photograph, then the other. “You’re not from here, are you?”

“My girlfriend and I live in Stuttgart.”

Schilf recognizes the expression on people’s faces when they are sizing up a crazy old man—it’s a sure sign that he’s on the right track. The waitress nods, her eyebrows raised, and starts justifying her presence by wiping the edge of the table. Her movements are precise, like those of a machine. Now that the detective thinks about it, the parrot with his painted headdress also looks mechanical, and the group of tourists is being hustled out of the picture as if on a conveyor belt. Perhaps I’m the only creature made of flesh and blood here, the detective thought, the detective thinks. And I’m trying to investigate crimes among the robots.

“But he has a motive, after all,” Schilf says. “This senior registrar must have known about the experiments on patients, and blackmailed the medical director.”

He lifts his head to confirm that the waitress is looking at him suspiciously. He feels her catlike gaze on him as a physical sensation, especially on his forehead and temples.

“All nonsense,” she repeats stubbornly.

“How do you know?”

“Intuition.”

She taps her pirate headscarf and Schilf nods approvingly because she has located her intuition in the depths of her brain rather than between her diaphragm and pancreas, like most other people.

“Someone like him,” she says, pointing a false nail at Schlüter’s half-covered face, “either does things properly or not at all. It was pure coincidence that the botched job with the steel cable worked.”

Schilf suppresses a comment on the nature of coincidence, and hurries to ask his next question. “Who did it, then?”

“My name is Kodak,” the parrot says.

“Agfa,” Schilf corrects.

“That bird is a pain,” the waitress says. “Either Schlüter got someone to do it…” She sinks into thought.

Schilf is afraid that her battery is dying. “Or?” he prompts.

“Or the death of that one has absolutely nothing to do with this one. We have stuff without sugar if you want something to eat.”

She turns away and walks toward the entrance of the café with precise movements in time with the rhythmic slapping of her flip-flops. They ought to install etymological dictionaries on their robots’ hard drives, Schilf thinks. But other than that, they seem to work very well.

“Look out.”

Schilf has the impression that the bird is trying to tell him something. He gazes at the parrot thoughtfully as it nibbles away at a stalk of millet. When nothing else happens, he puts the file away and takes out his mobile phone. The rail information service informs him that the first train from Airolo won’t arrive in Freiburg until eleven o’clock that morning.

[2]

MAIKE IS ONBOARD THE FIRST TRAIN from Airolo, feeling like a passenger on a ghost train. It judders its way along a labyrinthine course while a series of dioramas passes before the windows. White goats on shiny green—one of them raising and lowering its head. Cable cars gliding in front of a panorama of mountain peaks. An old man swinging an ax next to his wooden hut. Well-fed cows advertising political neutrality. In small countries the monstrous lies in the details.

When Maike is especially happy or unhappy, she makes lists. She has a list of the best days in her life (her wedding is number one), her greatest disasters (not many entries), her most important successes (founding the Gallery of Modern Art), and her most embarrassing moments (a new cleaning lady throwing a pile of broken chairs out onto the street shortly before a gallery reception). Maike ranks favorite dishes, most annoying people, and her dearest wishes. Her memory is a well-ordered storehouse in which an archivist categorizes every new event. She can say exactly how she feels about almost everything that has happened to her. Keeping lists is her own way of making an inventory of her memories. As of yesterday evening, there is a new list: of puzzling telephone calls.

After the receptionist had put the call through to her room, it had taken Maike an entire minute to realize that the stammering caller was her husband. He said to stay calm so many times that Maike finally started panicking. It was only when she sternly told him to stop it that he told her his confused story. Liam had been kidnapped but was perfectly fine in scout camp after all. Sebastian would pick him up early tomorrow morning. Maike had better break off her holiday, too. It wasn’t actually necessary, but you never know. Perhaps the police might want to ask her a few questions.

Sebastian’s outpouring ended midsentence, like a broken tape. There was a white noise over the line while she remained silent. Oskar had once said that the whole of space was filled with white noise. Maike had heard from someone else that such noise was caused by bugging devices. For a crazy moment, she wondered if they both meant the same thing.

When she had calmed down sufficiently to ask what on earth had happened, she heard Sebastian gulping hard on the other end of the line. He asked her to believe him—first he begged her, then he suddenly started screaming. He could call Oskar instead, Oskar would stand by him. Maike’s shock turned to rage. She demanded that he pull himself together. She got no reply. Finally she realized that Sebastian was about to fall asleep while on the phone. This shocked her more than anything he said. She promised to take the first train to Freiburg in the morning. He swore that nothing had happened to Liam, then the line was cut.

Maike leans back across her seat and stretches her legs. In the seat opposite, a nun has wound her rosary so tightly around her hand that it has left red marks on her knuckles. The nun tries to engage everyone walking past her in conversation, as if she wants to prove to the poor Lord Jesus that mankind has no desire to be left in peace. Love thy neighbor. Maike shudders. When the dapper conductor speaking pretty Swiss German checks her ticket, she thanks him profusely.

She did not sleep well the previous night and spent a great deal of time imagining all kinds of different scenarios. A failed kidnapping attempt, perhaps, or maybe Liam got lost in the forest and has been found. Or perhaps Sebastian had had a nightmare and called her still half asleep, and would be thunderstuck when she walked through the door.

As morning approached, her imagined scenarios lost their definition, her theories grew wilder, and her questions led nowhere. Her thoughts began to work in images and to revolve around a night ten years ago, as if it were still the cause of every dark, incomprehensible part of Maike’s life. It was the evening of the day that stood at number one in her list of favorite memories.

A function room misty with cigarette smoke. Happy crowds swaying to music. Friends, family, and an angular figure among them who wanders the room aimlessly, anxiously, conspicuously, like a shadow that has lost its master. Maike’s feeling of delighted terror (or is it terrible delight?) every time this shadow bumps into the newly minted groom in the crowd. Proud and cold, the two men look each other in the eye. At some point Maike—incredibly drunk by then—tugs the sleeves of their frock coats and tries to get them to dance à trois. The guests clap and hoot. Oskar tears himself away and leaves the party without a word. A close-up of Sebastian’s face as he kisses Maike with mouth wide open almost as soon as Oskar has left.

In the first year of their marriage, Maike was constantly prepared for something to break free and rise from the depths of the man who smiled at her every morning across the breakfast table. Something that could not be conquered by goodwill and understanding. But nothing of the sort happened. From an anomaly, Sebastian had turned into a good husband and a loving father. He was the youngest professor on faculty at Freiburg University. Maike opened her gallery and made sure that Oskar came to dinner regularly. The family got wrapped up in the everyday.

For a long time now, Maike has thought of herself as part of a happy family. Regardless of how well or how badly their life together is going, there is one thing she has never doubted since Liam’s birth: she and Sebastian inhabit the same world. And she is prepared to do anything to keep it that way.

Perhaps, thinks Maike, looking at an Asian woman who is pushing a metal trolley down the aisle, perhaps this is what is waiting at home for me. The disaster I have feared more or less consciously for so many years. Perhaps it even has a woman’s name, like a hurricane. Perhaps my own name.

Her thoughts are about to tip over into the abstruse again. She buys a coffee from the Asian woman. The cup is so hot that she can barely hold it in her hand. Two border guards appear in the carriage and the German one holds Maike’s coffee for her so that she can dig out her ID card.

She feels her worry like a thousand pinpricks in her side. But whatever is waiting for her in Freiburg, she can be sure of one thing: if Sebastian swears that all is well with Liam, then it’s true. Everything else can be borne. One of the reasons Maike loves cycling is because she enjoys estimating her own strength correctly. She drinks, burns her lips, and takes another sip anyway. The Swiss idyll has been left behind on the other side of the border; outside, a pale sun is conducting the overture to another relentless summer day. Let’s see what happens, Maike thinks. Later, she will say the same to the detective: Let’s see what happens. Long before that, she will see the face of her friend Ralph Dabbelink on the newspaper racks in Freiburg Station. It will be the beginning of a new list: the most terrible days of her life. And the detective will take second place on the list of people she is most suspicious of, just ahead of Oskar, who has topped this list for years, and just behind Sebastian, the new contender who has jumped straight to number one.

[3]

THE SUN GLINTS ON THE SNOW-WHITE STUCCO. Front doors and balcony doors are open, and a state-of-the-art racing bike is leaning against a streetlamp covered in ivy. The building is lovely to look at and perfumed with the scent of wisteria, but it resembles empty packaging. All this beauty cries out for happiness, and the people who live here are no longer happy. To the detective, everything looks wrong and empty, as if the entire street has been turned into a postcard, a memory of itself. When he steps onto the footbridge, Bonnie and Clyde swim up to him on the anthracite-colored canal. From his bag, Schilf takes out a currant bun he bought on his leisurely walk through the town center. The ducks paddle against the current so that the pieces of bread drop down directly onto their beaks.

“Back, back, back,” they chorus.

“Look out,” the detective calls to them. “Look out.”

But Bonnie and Clyde clearly don’t know what to make of the parrot Agfa’s words. They turn like two synchronized swimmers and paddle swiftly down the canal. Schilf brushes crumbs from his hands and walks into the entrance hall, studying the names by the doorbells. Just as he finds what he is looking for, a thunderous bang causes the building to rumble. Up above, someone has slammed a door. Quick steps clatter down the stairs and a woman rushes out of the front door, straight past the detective. He touches his fingers to his forehead so as to raise an imaginary hat. He does not recognize the woman. Her blond hair waves around her head and falls over her eyes as she bends over to unlock her bicycle. The detective watches, transfixed. She is wearing a sleeveless shirt and cotton shorts; the morning light turns her tanned arms and legs into polished wood. In contrast, her blond hair seems far too bright, as if she had borrowed it from another pale person. The woman is livid—she hurls her bike around, swings a leg into the air, and, already moving at speed, shoves her feet into the straps on the pedals. A few seconds later, she has disappeared around the corner at an impressive angle. It occurs to the detective that he has never seen a more beautiful person.

He avoids pressing the buzzer, and climbs the stairs to an apartment on the second floor. It is apparent that someone is listening behind the door. He approaches and presses his ear against the wood in imitation. The tension is electric. Two men, separated only by a piece of wood, are straining with all their senses toward each other, as if they want to blend into a single creature. The door is wrenched open.

Sebastian is standing there with the remains of an interrupted fight on his lips—his lungs are pumped up, his mouth tensed for a scream. Helplessly his gaze moves across the detective’s face.

“Do you have a trash can?” Schilf asks.

He stretches out a scrunched-up paper bag toward his host-to-be, and bread crumbs fall out of it. Sebastian slaps the ball of paper out of his hand.

“Get lost!”

The detective has, of course, already put his foot in the door. They look each other in the eye through the narrow opening. Instead of cursing and tussling over entry to the apartment, they are suddenly standing very close together, as if enveloped in a bubble of stillness in which something beyond language is happening. An encounter. A pause, at the intersection of two different kinds of chaos.

The definitive entanglement of our lives, the detective thought, the detective thinks.

The dripping of a tap behind Sebastian’s back marks the passage of time. A jackhammer in a distant street marks the passage of time. There will probably be many questions. Why each of them feels the other has come to help him. Whether it is possible to stop a life from falling apart. How to patch it up in retrospect. If there is such a thing as mutual recognition at first sight between two strangers.

But they cannot stand like this forever.

“Professor,” Schilf says softly, apologetically, “I’m from the police.”

Sebastian immediately opens the door fully and walks down the hall with stiff legs. Without turning to look at his visitor, he drops onto the sofa in the living room, puts his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

“I’m sorry,” the detective says as Sebastian finally looks up and rubs his reddened eyes, “but I’m still here.”

Stillness seeps into the room again, but this time it does not feel intimate. It is like the silence between two travelers waiting on a platform for different trains. While Sebastian stares at the ceiling as if there were something to see up there, the detective looks around the room. The furnishings have lost their tasteful unity. They stand around indifferently like extras between takes.

Within seconds, Schilf thinks, everything here has become the past.

He listens for the echo of a scene that the room must have heard, for objects don’t have ears they can block. The shadow of a man still passes over the walls, pacing up and down, trying to find a way out, his arms raised to protect himself from something heavy that is threatening to fall on him. A woman’s screams still echo in the leather of the armchair.

This is a film! This is not reality!

Her manicured fingers have upset the pile of magazines on the side table; she had wanted to fling them onto the floor, but hasn’t after all.

Ralph dead? My son kidnapped? And I am cycling happily in Airolo, not knowing any of this?

Happiness and not knowing are the same thing, dear Mrs. Physicist, Schilf thinks.

The sofa shakes with the impact of a man’s fist.

Look! At! Me! I couldn’t ring you, for God’s sake!

A pause, a deep breath.

Keep your voice down!

The man’s laughter makes the curtains tremble.

Don’t worry. He’s dead to the world. The motion sickness pills.

The laughter trails off. The print of a woman’s hand on the glass of the side table fades away.

Something is… wrong… I can’t…

And what about me?

The man’s voice rises, driving the walls apart, transforming the room into a cathedral in which every word hangs in the air.

Do you want to know what I’ve been through? This is what it feels like, like this!

The armchair judders to one side as a small body falls into it, shaken roughly by the shoulders.

Let me go, Sebastian!

The final cry is like a bolt of lightning and the slamming door thunder. The quiet after the storm is what remains. Naked scorn. The neighbor’s dog barks with three voices: soft, medium, and loud.

“Do you know what it’s like to have lost everything?” Sebastian asks.

“More than you can imagine.”

“What’s your name, anyway?”

“Schilf.” Sebastian slowly takes his gaze from the ceiling and repeats the name, which feels good in his mouth. Schilf.

Their eyes meet. Somewhere in the apartment an object falls to the ground but neither of them turns his head. The detective wonders why it is suddenly so dark. The headlights of a passing car lift the room and turn it on its own axis; Sebastian sits on the sofa, Schilf in the armchair, then Schilf on the sofa, Sebastian in the armchair. Then the car is gone. They nod to each other. The combine harvesters are working in the fields outside the town; somewhere Julia is sighing in her sleep. The detective wheezes air out of his lungs once (ovum) and twice (avis). A sharp beak is pecking the shell of the bird’s egg. It is bright again, midday in summer, with dusty shafts of light by the window. Sebastian looks at Schilf with a mixture of suspicion and interest. He leans forward, almost as though he wants to take the detective by the hand.

“I want no further investigations,” he says.

“You don’t want to know who kidnapped your son?”

“I want to forget.”

“Bad idea. You’ll only realize when it’s too late.”

“I’m not interested in too late. I’m interested in now. I don’t know what the word ‘future’ means anymore. There are situations where you have to draw the line. Do you see?”

“Even before you started going into detail,” the detective says.

When Sebastian raises his arms to brush his hair out of his face, they both see how badly his hands are trembling. The skin beneath his rolled-up sleeves is thickly covered with scratched insect bites, some moist and inflamed and others crusted with yellow. Sebastian buttons his cuffs.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“Yogi tea.”

“Sorry, what?”

“Look in the kitchen. A woman like your wife will have something like that.”

“How do you know Maike?”

“She just ran past me.”

Sebastian pauses for a moment before he gets up and leaves the room. Schilf listens to the rustling in the kitchen cupboards, which stops when Sebastian finds the box of tea. The detective stands up quietly and crosses the room as carefully as if the floor were littered with dry twigs that might snap beneath his feet. He has no problem finding the study. Books fill the shelves and lie in piles on the floor. The computer keyboard on the desk is covered with a strangely shaped piece of red card. Schilf rifles through a pile of papers with practiced fingers.

“The Problem of Precision in the Constants of Nature,” “The Purpose of Absurdity,” “Materialism and the Metaphysical Landscape”—We cannot ascertain that the universe was created with regard to a living observer…

Or by an observer, the detective thinks.

He opens and closes drawers. A Yogi tea has to be brewed for about fifteen to twenty minutes on a low flame.

Pencils, used paperclips, letterhead paper from the university. Right at the back of a drawer, there is a photo of two young men in formal suits, slim as whippets, hands casually shoved into the pockets of their striped trousers. Although the faces are turned toward each other, their gazes are lost in the middle distance. Schilf puts back the photo. A normal detective would find a decisive clue among such documents. Schilf finds nothing.

When Sebastian brings in the tea, Schilf has been sitting in the armchair for some time. The scent of ginger and cardamom fills the room.

“This doesn’t taste too bad.” Carefully Sebastian puts down his cup; his hands have steadied.

“Do you collect art?” Schilf asks, pointing at two knobbly paintings whose thickly applied explosions of color in red and black portray a throbbing headache. Clearly the artist takes a different view; he has marked the titles of the paintings in crude letters across the canvas: Blackmail I and II.

“My wife runs a gallery.”

“And likes cycling?”

“Is this the start of the interrogation?”

“Not an interrogation.” Schilf waves his teaspoon dismissively. “Just asking some questions.”

“What’s the difference?”

“You. You are not a suspect, but someone who has reported a crime, and also a witness.”

Sebastian laughs, and does not reply.

“If you’re ready,” Schilf says, “I would like to ask you a few questions.”

“About the kidnapping?”

Now the detective laughs.

“No. About the nature of time.”

[4]

“YOU’RE A STRANGE KIND OF DETECTIVE. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about the nature of time. That’s my job, after all. But do you really want me to speak to you as I would to my first-year students? That would be like a journey into the past. As if all this was over. Would you like to do me a kindness? Shall we talk as if nothing has happened? You’re looking at me like a doll without a brain.”

Sebastian takes a sip of tea, a second sip, then a third before he continues.

“When I was at school I once wanted to write a story in which a man finds out that he is surrounded only by dolls. I’ve no idea what happened to that story. I never wrote it down. So I’m going to talk to you as if I am talking to a doll, Detective. As if I’m talking to… a friend.

“Do you know what materialism is? The love of money? No. Or perhaps it’s that, too. The materialism I am talking about is a worldview that links everything back to one principle: that of matter. Seen this way, even thoughts and ideas are merely manifestations of the material. Dreams, for example—they’re a biochemical product.

“This view of the world is very popular. It has pushed religious belief aside, and replaced it, in fact. The Commandments of materialism are simple and threefold. Thou shalt not doubt the material nature of the universe. Thou shalt trust blindly in the chronological causality of all events. Thou shalt honor the objectivity and uniqueness of tangible reality.

“These statements of belief anchor materialists in the world better than God ever could. There is of course the odd phenomenon that contradicts the principles of materialism—or seems to—and therefore remains inexplicable, at least for the moment. But there is an unfailing remedy for such doubts. You simply paste labels over the holes in this view of the world. An example?

“Not even the most brilliant scientist has any idea why an apple falls from above to below. He simply calls this lack of knowledge ‘gravity.’ Coincidence is another of these labels. Possibly déjà vu and intuition, too. The unknowable pinned down by the act of naming. Do I hear you say that ninety-nine percent of all concepts are such labels? You may be right. If I were able to unite all the sciences, something that has existed for a long time would emerge from the process: language.

“I’ve never liked labels. When I was in school, I found it hard to believe in teachers who wrote numbers on the blackboard but could not explain what gravity was. Instead of continuing to listen to them, I waited until I was old enough to read Kant. I had always suspected my mind of doing secret things—I had an inkling that it added something to my cognition, that it brought everything I perceived into a ready-made order, creating a world that it could understand. Kant was able to prove that—he showed me time and space as forms of human perception. It was not a matter of whether or not I believed him. I felt that he was right.

“All paths lead to enlightenment and none lead back! For a long time, I was tormented by the fact that my research was clearly not related to the tiniest particles and the laws which govern them, but to the physicist who studied them. At some point I came to terms with the question of whether the scientist is striving for truth in a world of objective reality, or in a world of apparitions. Instead of torturing myself further on this question, I annoyed my colleagues by claiming that we’re engaged in psychology rather than in physics. It’s just a matter of definition, isn’t it? There’s no cause for despair as long as there’s logic, that long-standing barrier between us and the bottomless abyss. Perhaps the people who called me esoteric were not wrong after all.

“Please do light up! That way you’re one of two people who are allowed to smoke in this apartment. Here’s the ashtray—you can believe in its material nature or not, but it will fulfill its function in any case.

“It’s very much the same with time. Time fulfills its function, and we don’t know much more about it than that. It’s generally accepted that time is a strictly regulated process with a necessary order of cause and consequence. The only things that humanity shares willingly are its mistakes!

“Take this building, for example. They started work on it in 1896. The hammering of carpenters echoed through the streets in 1897, and soon after that the building was finished. What do you think was the reason for its construction? A lack of living quarters in the Wilhelminian period? Or an aesthetic love of the neo-Gothic and neo-Baroque styles? Let me tell you this, Detective Schilf. The reason for its construction was its completion.

“You smile. But it goes some way toward proving my theory. What are the chances of an architect’s plan actually beaming a house? Have a guess. Eighty percent? Good. The probability of a finished building being preceded by an architectural plan is nearly a hundred percent. The construction enables the existence of the building, but the building determines its own construction. Therefore the likelihood of a building being the cause of its own construction is significantly higher than the opposite assumption.

“You’re still smiling. I ask you this: What is time when we can prove that an effect logically precedes its own cause? Now you’re laughing. I think that you have understood me from the very beginning. I see it in your blank look.

“Don’t say anything. Forget this little play of thoughts. It was only to shake the gates of your imagination. Please don’t use the saucer, Schilf. I’ve brought you an ashtray specially. Or can’t you see it?

“Let’s get to the Many-Worlds Interpretation. You must know that God is guilty of its creation—or rather: its nonexistence. Stupidly, human life all comes down to a miracle, by which I mean an impressive instance of coincidence. During the big bang, the universe could have developed in an infinite number of ways. The number of possibilities that allowed for biological life was infinitely small. Despite this, the path that led to our existence was chosen. All the constants of nature that we observe are exactly calibrated to enable an unimportant cluster of biomass called the human being to exist among them. Given the tiniest deviation from the laws of physics we would not exist.

“Savor that thought, Detective: You are improbable. I am improbable. We are a coincidence, with a probability of one in ten to the power of fifty-nine. A ten with fifty-nine zeros after it, Schilf! You would have to throw the dice that many times for your existence to happen at least once.

“Do you feel ill at the thought of numbers like that? Dizzy? I wouldn’t hold it against you. How stupid it was to get rid of a god who had been specially conceived of as the clockmaker of this precision machine called the universe! Abandoned, the physicist elevates his own existence into a matter of doubt and investigates against himself. What if the big bang had brought not just one, but ten to the power of fifty-nine worlds into existence? At least one of them with the right conditions for human beings to live in? Detective Schilf, that would turn the question of God into a problem of statistics.

“You’ve read that somewhere already? And I wrote it. So we nearly have something in common.

“Ever since quantum mechanics led to the discovery that—before the instant in which they are observed—the smallest particles exist not just as single bodies but as multiple layers, the Many-Worlds idea has become not only a philosophical convenience, but a consistent interpretation. Apart from that, it also leaves human beings their free will. For as long as we can call forth new worlds through our actions, it doesn’t matter how much we are affected by the cause-and-effect mechanisms within each world. So we remain free in our decisions.

“Those are the advantages of the Many Worlds. Their disadvantages turn even the most peaceful physicists into bad-tempered know-it-alls. They mutter that this is nothing other than a tortured attempt to circumvent the notion of an intelligent designer. Exactly, I say! The know-it-alls complain that the theory goes beyond verifiable assumptions. And again I say, exactly! They are right—the critics of the Many-Worlds Interpretation just as much as its advocates—and they are wrong in the same way. All of them. Because they are all—listen carefully—all materialists.

“I see amazement in your eyes. I’m trying to bamboozle you: I don’t give a damn about the Many-Worlds Interpretation.

“You remain impassive. You’re tough, Detective. In an interrogation—yes, I know, you’re just asking a few questions—everything has to come out, doesn’t it? I’ll tell you what I’m really working on. I’ll bet that you didn’t cotton on to any of the intellectual crimes committed daily at my desk while you were searching it. Yogi tea—a nice touch!

“Please record my confession herewith. I am a scientist, but not a materialist. What I am, I still do not know. In any case, I see not only space and time but also matter itself as the product of a collaboration between mind and reason. My world does not consist of fixed objects but of complex processes. All states of being and continuous forms are simultaneous and therefore timeless. What we see of them are merely clips, scenes from a spool of film running through the time projector inside our heads. They show us reality as a dance of concrete objects.

“Try this experiment, Schilf. Pack a camera and go to the top of a tall building one night. Choose an exposure of a few seconds and take a photograph of a crossroads. What do you see? The lights of cars and streetcars as straight or wavy lines. A network of lines. The longer the exposure, the denser the network.

“Take this cup. Imagine that you can photograph it from high above, with an exposure of a million years. It will not show as a cup, but as an impenetrable mesh. There will be a frayed, lighter patch in the middle where clay is formed in the earth. Around it will be the traces of the human beings who mine the clay and work it into porcelain. The forming of the cup. The transport of it. The use of it. Its disintegration. The material it is made of going back into circulation. You also see—we’re very high up and we have the ultimate bird’s-eye view of things—you also see the stories of how all the people involved in producing and using the cup come into existence and fall away. And the stories of their forebears as well as all those who are descended from them, and so on. You would see—no, don’t look away, look at the cup! You would see that this cup transcends time and space and is quite simply connected with everything, because everything is quite simply part of the same process. And if you were able to increase the exposure to an infinite degree, and the distance from which you view it to an infinite distance, you would see reality as it really is. Everything flowing into everything else, outside of both space and time. A tightly woven carpet by the bed of a god who does not exist. Amen.

“Are you still there? Can you hear me? I didn’t want to alarm you. Do you have a headache? Should I get some pills?

“Of course it’s fine. It always is. That is one of the things I’ve learned in the last few days.

“Allow me a final comment. A couple of words on coincidence, the mention of which makes your eyes light up. If you, Schilf, as I suspect, are also not a materialist, you will be able to make something of the following connection.

“Let us assume that a human being stands before reality like someone walking along the shore of a peaceful lake. The smooth surface of the water reflects a familiar world and hides what is beneath. Now a large bough floats to the surface, and only the tips of two separate branches emerge from the water in different places. The person by the lake will not perceive this as a bizarre coincidence. He will quite rightly assume that the branches are connected to one another beneath the water. Without realizing it, he has understood what coincidence is.

“You haven’t drunk your tea, Detective. Are you about to go?”

[5]

THE DETECTIVE, WHOSE EYES HAVE OF COURSE been anything but blank throughout, thinks it quite unlikely that Sebastian has said all this. But the professor would certainly have said something, and Schilf has filled in the rest himself. He had stirred his tea through the entire lecture, as if expecting to hear another death sentence. Now he stands up, swaying lightly, like a doll struggling to maintain its balance. Fighting his headache, he waits for one of the questions that are the purpose of his visit to surface.

“Who described you as esoteric?” he finally asks.

“Oskar,” Sebastian says.

He looks at the detective through pale eyes. He has some color to his face now, and the way in which his fingers are playing a piano sonata on his lap shows that the talking has done him good.

“Who’s that?”

“That’s an excellent question.”

Leaning his head back, Sebastian listens, as if he is trying to pick out the right answer from the song of the titmice in the wisteria. Favorite person, they twitter, favorite person.

“A great physicist, who is working on a new particle accelerator in Geneva. If you’re interested in physics, you should go. The very bowels of the universe are studied there.”

“By materialists, I assume.”

“You’ve got it.” Sebastian laughs. “Although I’m not at all sure about Oskar any longer. I was wondering only yesterday if we haven’t misunderstood each other all our lives.”

The detective looks at him for a moment longer than necessary before he nods. “Does the particle accelerator have any practical use?” he asks.

“Its by-products do, Oskar would say. For example, accelerated particles are used to irradiate tumors in medical science.”

“Look.”

Schilf is swaying even more than before. He makes a grab for the armchair and his fingers catch hold of a Swiss Army knife that has been driven into the leather of the chair. He puts it on the side table. There is blood on the blade. Schilf’s headache is suddenly gone, as if someone has thrown a switch.

“You’ve been very helpful,” he says.

Sebastian looks at the knife thoughtfully and wonders if it’s a sign, and if so, of what. In an instant he feels completely drained, and when he finally looks up, the detective is already in the hall. He is not walking toward the door, but farther into the apartment.

“The door’s that way!” Sebastian calls, following him.

“I’d like to meet your son before I go.”

“But he’s sleeping.”

“Not anymore.”

His eyes blinking like someone emerging from a matinee into the daylight, Sebastian stays in the hall while Schilf walks toward his son’s room and turns the doorknob.

LIAM SITS ON A CHAIR that he has yet to grow into, with an open book that he is not reading. The room is dim and so small that the furniture seems to be jostling for space. A ray of light coming through the curtains gilds his head with silver and gold. An angel with a crown of sunshine. Schilf swallows to suppress his emotion.

“Hello,” he says after clearing his throat. “I’m from the police.” And when Liam does not respond, he says, “I’m a proper detective, like on TV.”

The book is clapped shut and Liam turns his chair around.

“I’m little, but I’m not stupid,” he says. “You can talk to me quite normally.”

Looking at Liam’s worried face, Schilf wonders how old the boy is. His soft hair has been pressed down by sleep and his scalp shows through in some places. The face beneath is serious and attentive. Schilf suddenly wonders if this child with his sharp ears can hear the voice of the observer who is asking himself if the sharp ears of a child can hear the voice of the observer. And if that is why Liam is looking at him so strangely.

“Are you in pain?” the boy asks.

Schilf looks around for somewhere to sit and settles on the edge of the unmade bed.

“No,” he says. “Not at the moment.”

Liam puts his book down, which takes three years off his appearance, and turns the chair a bit more so that he is sitting directly in front of Schilf, their kneecaps almost touching.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m investigating your kidnapping.”

Liam looks at his hands in silence, as if he is wondering whether his fingernails need cutting.

“Yes,” he says finally. “The kidnapping.”

“Are you angry about leaving scout camp early?”

“What do you mean, angry?” He rubs his eyes so hard that Schilf feels like taking hold of his wrists to stop him. “My father just picked me up early this morning. He was acting very strangely, and he didn’t tell me what was going on.”

“I know the feeling,” Schilf says. “No one tells me what’s going on either. But there have to be people like us, too.”

A smile spreads across Liam’s face, making him look pleasant as well as precocious and intelligent. There is something helpless in his eyes, like a small animal looking into the face of an approaching disaster that it can do nothing about.

“Will you clear this all up?”

“Most probably.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

The boy looks down at the floor to hide the glimmer in his eyes, and Schilf puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Liam,” he says. “Were you kidnapped on the way to Gwiggen?”

“Did my father say that?”

“Just give me an answer.”

“My father doesn’t lie. He loves truth above all else.”

“He loves you first,” the detective says. “Then the truth.”

When Liam lifts his head, he looks like a shrunken adult again.

“If I were to say that I wasn’t kidnapped, and my father says the opposite, can we both be telling the truth?”

“Yes,” the detective says quickly.

“Then I’ll say that I don’t know anything about a kidnapping.”

“Who took you to Gwiggen?”

“My father.”

“Are you sure?”

“I was asleep. And when I woke again, it was dark, and I was in a strange bed. Isn’t that what it says in the file?”

“More or less.” With a swift movement Schilf wipes the laugh away from his mouth and chin. “But it’s my job to ask about things that I already know. Could it be that you were sleeping very soundly?”

“Children are like that,” Liam replies earnestly. “Besides, the motion sickness pills make me drowsy.”

“Can I have a look at them?”

“I only had one for the way there and one for the way back.”

The detective nods and looks over Liam’s head at a diagram in a glass frame on the wall. The solar system is depicted in the bottom right-hand corner, on a dark blue background. An arrow indicates the sun and its planets as a tiny point in a group of twenty fixed stars. Another arrow points from these stars to a barely discernible particle vanishing into the starry mist of the Milky Way. And the Milky Way itself is a fingernail-sized blob in a wider collection of galaxies, which, together with untold groups of other galaxies, form a supercluster. This supercluster is depicted as nothing more than a small patch of mist in the known universe, which is shown as a large hazy layer covering the diagram like a lid. Above it is a sentence: “Galaxies are to an astronomer what atoms are to a nuclear physicist.”

When Schilf changes the focus of his gaze, the glass covering the dark background reflects his face. He feels as if this picture is the only window through which he can look out of this room into the world.

“Does your father tell you about his work?”

“He thinks it’s good that I don’t understand everything yet, because explaining things helps him to think.”

“And you’re interested in what he does?”

“I research time as well. I often used to lie in bed and try to catch hold of a second. I lay in wait and then suddenly whispered ‘Now,’ but the second was either not there yet or already over. Now, of course, I know that time is quite different. And that they”—he points at the alarm clock ticking next to his bed—“are all lying.”

“And what is time?”

Liam turns and rustles in his desk drawer with unexpectedly lively movements until he has found a piece of paper and a pen. Schilf bends over him so that he can see better, smells the child-smell of the unfamiliar head, and starts breathing through his mouth. Liam draws two red circles a hand’s breadth apart.

“What’s that?” he asks.

“No idea,” Schilf says.

Liam taps his pen on the paper impatiently.

“Do they have anything to do with each other?”

“They look similar. I can’t say anything more.”

“Very good. And now?”

He puts the tip of his little finger down in one circle and his thumb in the other circle.

“Now they are connected,” the detective says.

“Just imagine that you and I are the circles and that the piece of paper is a three-dimensional space, and that my hand has come from an unknown, higher dimension.”

“You’re talking about coincidence,” Schilf says.

“No,” Liam says indignantly. “I’m talking about the fourth dimension. You asked about time, after all.”

“Your hand is a coincidence to the circles. Or a miracle.”

Liam thinks about this.

“Yes, possibly.”

“Did you think all that up yourself?”

“Almost. My father helped a little. He always says he is basically trying to solve quite simple puzzles.”

“What a pity that the two of us,” Schilf says, tapping himself then Liam on the forehead, “are only small red circles on a flat surface.”

Liam’s laugh does not yet have lines to flow along, but must carve out new paths on his face—yet it emphasizes his strong resemblance to Sebastian. He pushes both hands through his hair exactly like his father does. His forearms do not have a single mosquito bite on them.

“When you were little,” he asks, “did you like researching things, too?”

“Yes,” Schilf says. “I liked talking to insects.”

“But that’s got nothing to do with physics.”

“I used to stand next to the rain barrel for hours, saving bees that had fallen. I used to think about what that meant to the bees.”

“Did you want to be a vet?”

“For the bees, my hand was fate. And a kind of fourth dimension.”

“You’re a freak,” Liam says.

The detective tweaks the boy’s nose playfully, and the laugh they share comes easily this time. Schilf goes to the door. He feels light-hearted.

“Will you remember your promise?” Liam says.

“Do you know Oskar?”

“Yes, Oskar’s cool.”

“Do you think I should visit him?”

“Definitely.”

The detective raises a hand in farewell and Liam waves back.

Sebastian is still out in the hall. He hasn’t moved at all. He is overcome with confusion after hearing murmuring voices and laughter coming from Liam’s room. Schilf walks past him on his way to the front door.

“Good-bye,” the detective says and then repeats, “You’ve been very helpful.”

As Schilf shambles down the stairs to the street, tiles start coming off the roof above him. Beams and rafters and joists fly apart in all directions. The rapid crumbling of the walls runs along the top of the whole building like stitches unraveling in a sweater. The foundation disappears and the earth closes over. A pencil sucks up the lines of an architectural drawing until the piece of paper is blank. The idea of a four-story building in the Wilhelminian style evaporates into mist in the head of the architect. Somewhere in the distance, a cockatoo flies up into the air with a shrill cry of warning.

[6]

“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT NOW?”

“Yes. The heat. Thank you for the water.”

The detective has spent a lot of time recently telling people how he is feeling and thanking them for something or other. It is probably part of getting old, like waking up early.

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

“Can you tell me where I am, please?”

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

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

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

“This is the Gallery of Modern Art.”

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

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

“Very likely. Is Maike here?”

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

“I’m a friend of her husband.”

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

“Maike, you have a visitor.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m watching you exist.”

“Who are you?”

“Schilf,” says Schilf.

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

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

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

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

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

“Can they talk?”

“Not in our language.”

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

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

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

“What’s he called?”

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

“I mean, what’s his name?”

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

“He’s called Ralph.”

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

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

“Is that what male friendships are good for?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How can I help you?”

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

“I’ve come about Blackmail I and II.”

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

“Just briefly.”

“Strange that you mention those paintings.”

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

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

Schilf does not reply. He noticed the stain.

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

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

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

“Of pictures? Or sad stories?”

“Perhaps they’re the same thing.”

“You could be right.”

“Do you want to hear the story?”

“Absolutely.”

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

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

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

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

“From hearsay,” says the detective.

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

“The artist chose love,” Schilf guesses.

“Wrong,” Maike says.

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you know Ralph?”

“From the newspapers.”

“Did they say I was friends with him?”

“I know that from Sebastian.”

“You’re lying!” Maike shouts.

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

“Who are you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Please go.”

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

“I’m here to warn you.”

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

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

“We’ll see,” Maike says.

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

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

“Get lost.”

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

[7]

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the end of this speech, face impassive, he presented an alibi for the night of Dabbelink’s death. A short break with friends at the Montreux Palace Hotel on Lake Geneva. The dates tripped off his tongue with such confidence that Rita immediately decided to delegate the task of checking them to Sergeant Sandström. Schlüter wished her good day, waved his attendants over, allowed a nurse to open the door for him, and marched down the corridor toward the room of the patient he was scheduled to visit.

Too proud to run after him, Rita had stayed put, ground her teeth, cursed her job, and realized too late that the glass door could be opened only from the other side. She had far too little evidence to name Schlüter as a suspect. He was not even a witness whom an investigating judge could summon to give a statement.

Rita Skura had spent the rest of the morning on the hospital ward, annoying nurses, patients, and junior doctors with questions, all without obtaining a single useful piece of information. All of them had genuinely liked Dabbelink, who had been a competent senior registrar and a pleasant colleague. Sadly, no one knew him well. Unmarried, childless. Willing to be on call during weekends. All were shocked by his terrible death. Rita finally lost her cool in front of an innocent-looking trainee nurse. She sawed through the air with her large hands until the girl burst into tears. Then she had to take the girl in her arms and comfort her because an irate detective had been beastly to her.

Rita watches a patient have a sneaky cigarette on a balcony. The staff of this damned hospital, she thinks, is behaving like a family of rabbits gone to ground after a bird of prey has snatched one of their number. In truth, she cannot find fault with their behavior. Murders and other terrible things are happening outside, but inside the hospital nobody has enough time to spare from the business of saving lives to even glance up from their conveyer belts.

She snaps her mobile phone open and rings Schnurpfeil, whose obedient voice gives her peace of mind even in the most awful situations. Of course he will come to pick her up, in half an hour, yes, and with great pleasure. In the meantime, he adds shyly, she should order a turkey sandwich in the hospital canteen, so that she doesn’t forget to have lunch again.

Rita gets into the elevator, and as it descends she stares at her neon-gray face in the mirror. If the Freiburg police force fails to deliver any results of note over the weekend, the press will give the bristle-haired home secretary hell, and he will give the mustachioed police chief a roasting, and so on. Rita is, as she knows, at the bottom of the food chain.

WHEN THE DOORS OF THE ELEVATOR OPEN, she is greeted with a sight not calculated to raise her spirits. There is not much happening in the wide expanse of the reception area. Visitors cross the room with hurried steps and there is a splashing noise from a nihilistic indoor fountain complete with a few goldfish. The usual potted palms add to the impression of freshly scrubbed futility. To the left of the entrance is the canteen with its red, yellow, and blue chairs.

First Detective Chief Superintendent Schilf is sitting in the middle of this garish splendor, exactly at the spot where two waves of the pattern in the tiles meet. He is hunched over on a particularly yellow chair, tapping away on the display of a small gadget that he is holding close to his face. Like an old man who has stumbled into the play area in a shopping center. His gaze follows a patient carrying a plate with three slices of cake on it. He looks as if he is looking out for someone he knows.

Rita watches from a distance until her desire to spray him with disinfectant and watch him die like a large bug on the floor has grown into an alarmingly vivid fantasy. Schilf barely seems to notice her when she walks up to him.

“What the devil are you doing here?”

“Playing chess,” the detective replies without raising his head. “One of mankind’s most elegant attempts to forget itself.”

“Is it working?”

“Neither the game nor the forgetting.”

He sighs. Until now, Rita Skura had quite understandably thought that he was here to get in her way, to snoop over her shoulder, and, worse still, to help her. When he sighs for a second time and looks around anxiously at the dull thud of a pair of crutches, she is no longer sure. Schilf seems to have come on personal business.

“Are you looking for someone?”

He shakes his head as if he has been caught out, straightens himself, and tries to look serious.

“Oh no,” he says. “I’m probably afraid I’ll discover a second Schilf here, shuffling around the corner in a shabby dressing gown.”

“If I ever have to stay in a hospital,” Rita Skura says, “I’ll only wear evening dress.”

“That’s what everyone thinks, Rita, my child. But when it actually happens, they always turn into a down-at-heel shadow of themselves.”

“How do you know?”

“One of the most important qualities of a good detective is omniscience.”

Rita snorts with irritation and goes up to the counter, where she orders dead bird on bread. The waiter does not laugh; and it was not intended as a joke.

“How’s it going?” Schilf asks when she sits down at his table.

“Wretchedly.” The sandwich falls apart at first bite. “Doctors will sell their grandmothers before they betray one of their own. It’s not impossible that this piece of wisdom comes from you.” Rita licks mayonnaise from her wrist. “And by the way, we have an agreement. A clear division of labor. At the risk of repeating myself: What the devil are you doing here?”

“What would you do if you knew you were going to die soon?”

The sandwich stops in midair.

“What are you on about, Schilf?”

“I’m trying to have a conversation with you. We don’t always have to talk about work.”

Rita is ready with an acerbic reply, but she thinks better of it, and pauses to consider.

“I’d find a new home for my cat,” she says. “And travel around to visit all the people I love.”

“Would that be a long journey?”

“Fairly short.”

Schilf nods. Two visitors have met at the hospital entrance and started a conversation. You can’t give up hope, one of them says. Yes, hope, the other one says, that’s the last thing to die. Both laugh, but stop immediately. They are standing in the path of the sensor for the automatic doors, which open and close busily.

“It would have to be a ground-floor apartment,” Rita says, “with a garden. For the cat, I mean.”

She pinches scraps of turkey from the plate, shoves them into her mouth, and swallows without chewing. More than anything, she would like to go home right now, draw the curtains, and stop up her ears with cotton wool to block out the twittering of birds. She would lie in bed, stroke the cat, and ask herself why she hadn’t listened to her parents.

“This hospital is not good for us,” Schilf says to her lowered head. “Let’s talk about work again instead.”

“Great,” Rita says. “And how’s it going with you?”

When Schilf reaches for her plate, she picks up the remaining piece of bread and bites into it defiantly.

“The usual,” Schilf says. “As far as that goes, I’m quite the old hand. A real Stalin of investigative methods.”

Rita looks at him, bewildered.

“By the way, I’ve found your cyclist’s murderer,” the detective says.

Rita nearly spits the piece of bread across the table. She looks at the remains of her pathetic lunch and waits for rage to fill her. It does not come. She just feels tired, with an air of finality.

“I warned you,” she says lamely. “You mustn’t cross me.”

“But you’re empty-handed.”

“But they’re my hands!”

As proof she shows the detective the palms of her hands, which despite her size are most elegant.

Schilf stands up, puts away his chess computer, and takes out an old-fashioned fountain pen. The nib tears the paper napkin as he scribbles down a telephone number.

“I still have to check on one detail. Call me if you want to know the outcome. In the meantime, I’m going for a walk in the woods.”

Just as Schilf is leaving the table, Schnurpfeil appears at the entrance and looks around. Conversation ceases at neighboring tables with the appearance of the policeman in the perfectly fitting uniform. Schilf goes straight up to him. He pushes the senior policeman, who is gazing imploringly at Rita, back onto the street.

Exit Schilf, the detective chief superintendent and Rita think at the same time.