In Free Fall

[1]

THE THINNING HAIR ON SCHILF’S TEMPLES is lifted by the cool stream of air coming from between the front seats of the car. He does not find it unpleasant to feel a little cold, even though the air seems to be wafting from Schnurpfeil’s rigidly hostile back. The senior policeman has turned the air-conditioning up high and turned the police radio up loud. Hissing and mumbled speech drowns the conversation that they are not having. Schnurpfeil is looking the detective in the eye through the rearview mirror, and Schilf is directing him through the city with minimal movements of his fingers, a photo from a newspaper balanced on his knees. It shows part of a road and two trees directly opposite each other.

As they pass the last houses, the light and shadow of the Günterstal woods playing on the dashboard, Schnurpfeil breaks his frosty silence.

“You could have just said straight off that you wanted to go to the scene of the crime.”

“Oh dear,” Schilf cries. “You’ve seen through me. So you know where it happened?”

“Everyone knows. And I was one of the crime scene officers.”

“That’s a piece of luck.”

The detective tears up the photo, opens the window, and lets the scraps whirl out. Contentedly he breathes in the warm air rushing through the window. It smells of rosemary, thyme, and oregano. After two deep breaths, Schilf sees himself standing in front of a pretty stone cottage, pruning roses. The walls of the house glow in the evening light as fleet-footed geckos disappear into the gaps between the old stones. When this fictional detective pushes the brim of his straw hat back, an ugly surgical scar running straight across his forehead is exposed. Just as he is about to pour himself a glass of wine from a clay jug, the window closes. Schnurpfeil’s finger is pressing a button. The South of France vanishes.

“When the air-conditioning is on, the windows stay shut,” Schnurpfeil says. “Besides, I know that you’re not in charge of this crime scene. Detective Skura is.”

Schilf leans forward and pats him on the shoulder.

“You Freiburg people love your crimes. It’s as if you’ve committed them yourselves.”

For a while he looks at Schnurpfeil’s thick head of hair. Beneath this primeval forest, a brain is struggling with the thought that First Detective Chief Superintendent Schilf would need to use no more than a few calories to end the career of a young police officer. Schilf is glad that Schnurpfeil is loyal to Rita in spite of this. He would be happy to explain that, although petty territorial fights have their pleasures, he is not at all in the business of taking anything away from the sparring Rita Skura. On the contrary, since this morning—or, more precisely, since the smiling physics professor in the square photograph entered his life—he has felt a new and quite irresistible drive to make everything all right for everyone.

Schnurpfeil, he wants to shout, can you imagine that a case I didn’t even want to board the train for early this morning is really beginning to captivate me? I feel as if I’ve been given one last chance. As if I have the opportunity to repair a great breakage by putting the life of a physics professor in order. Schnurpfeil, there’s suddenly someone I have to rescue! A man whose theories sound as if he is sitting in the middle of my head and formulating my thoughts better than I ever could myself. But Schnurpfeil, Schilf wants to continue, can it be that I have to bring misfortune upon this man in order to help him, to prevent someone else from doing it, someone who might not treat the subtle dissonances of this case with the necessary caution? What do you think, Schnurpfeil? Goddamn it, it’s a classic dilemma!

And Schnurpfeil would shake his head and reply: You’re sick, go see the doctor and leave those in good health to continue their work in peace. Or he would say nothing at all because he would have understood nothing; because for him, there would be nothing to understand, and nothing to say.

“Don’t worry,” Schilf says instead of all this. “I’m still working on the child kidnapping.”

The muscles in Schnurpfeil’s neck twitch. At the Schauinsland cable-car station in the valley, Schnurpfeil switches on his hazard lights as requested. The car climbs up into the forest with its nose held high. The sun flashes through the trees like a strobe light. The detective wonders whether to call his girlfriend that evening and discuss his classic dilemma. For one dizzying second, he thinks that he does not know Julia’s telephone number, until he realizes that her number is also his own, because she lives with him. Right now she is sitting with a cup of tea at the breakfast bar, where she looks perfectly comfortable, unlike him. She is reading old case files or one of his books. The final few minutes of the journey pass easily.

“Here we are,” Schnurpfeil says, when the car stops at the side of the road.

“Final stop, scene of the crime. Everyone off!” Schilf calls in a fit of good humor. “Show me the trees.”

Schnurpfeil looks straight ahead of him like a soldier, and stays put behind the steering wheel, making no move to leave the car. Let him choke on his loyalty to Rita Skura, Schilf thinks, not feeling inclined to give an official order. Back first, Schilf climbs out of the police car. Even without help, it is easy to pick out the two trees. They flank the road like gateposts, separating two seemingly identical worlds. The forest rises up into the sky on both sides, like a three-dimensional puzzle.

How easy it is to distinguish the two halves from each other, Schilf thinks. Here and there, before and after, life and death. You could do it anywhere, with nothing but a cable.

The air tastes clean, drinkable like water. The birds twittering incessantly. We should do more open-air investigations, the detective thought, the detective thinks.

AFTER A CURSORY GLANCE AT THE MARKS left on the bark by the steel cable, he pushes his way into the scrub. He crosses the ditch, lifting brambles carefully from his shirt, and slides down into the undergrowth with one hand on the ground. The traces left by the forensic team are clear to see: bits of plaster from casts of footprints, earth that has been dug up, and branches that have been sawn off. Schilf parts the ferns with both hands and ducks under the green surface in a moment that seems fleeting. Squatting down, he looks around him. He is surrounded by hairy branches with brownish rolled-up leaves like snail shells.

The descent was hot work. His shirt sticks to his back and he tastes salt on his upper lip. Schilf rolls up his shirtsleeves and waits. He is convinced that this place will have something for him, something the forensic team could not find, because it does not consist of flakes of skin and hair. It is the story of how a boundary was crossed. A story about how thin the membrane is that holds a human life together. Schilf wants to know what it is like for one man to wait for another to die. Ants form a dark pile on top of a caterpillar, which twitches clumsily as its body is carried off in pieces. Apart from that, there is nothing that can help the detective’s understanding.

A whining noise drills into his ears. Here are the mosquitoes to give the witness statement that Schilf still needs in order to be certain of what he thinks. Seven mosquitoes land on his right forearm and sting immediately. The detective jumps up and beats at them. The survivors launch a new attack without hesitation, and reinforcements come from invisible colleagues; they tickle his neck and sting his arms and hands over and over again. Schilf rolls his shirtsleeves down quickly, shakes his trouser legs, and wipes his face. When he has calmed himself, he notices a small man standing some distance away as if rooted in the ferns, watching him perform the dance of St. Vitus. When their eyes meet, the paunchy man starts moving toward him.

“Miserable bloodsuckers, aren’t they?”

The butterfly collector approaches, raising a didactic finger.

“They’re the rats among the hexapods,” he says. “Insects with six feet,” he adds, when Schilf does not respond.

The detective looks at the backs of his hands, where the first bites are swelling. He wonders what would happen if he were to scratch them with the blade of a knife until they were bloody, and then walk into the office of the leading public prosecutor with his arms outstretched proudly, proclaiming, “Look, here’s the decisive piece of evidence!” He begins to laugh quietly. It would surely be the first case in criminal history to be decided on the grounds of an intolerable itch.

“Are you laughing at my equipment?” The butterfly collector is still. “A collecting net. And here is a storage net, which is just like life. It’s easy to enter and difficult to leave.”

The detective is busy spreading spit on his forearms.

“There’s been a lot going on here recently,” the butterfly collector says. “The police are frightening away my customers.” Lots of tiny lines on the man’s face add up to a great worry. He points accusingly at a lantern-shaped cage. “See—empty!”

“What are you looking for?”

“Six-legged specimens.” The little man stretches out his hand. “Franz Drayer. Pensioner and amateur lepidopterist, on the path to immortality. And what are you looking for?”

“A two-legged specimen.”

“Tall, blond, friendly face?”

“You saw him?”

“He was sitting in these ferns a couple of days ago. Almost at the same spot as you.”

“Thank you,” the detective says. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“You can read about me in the relevant journal!”

Schilf nods farewell and leaves a witness who does not matter to infinity.

Puffing and cursing, he reaches the road. He is combing his hair with his fingers, removing small twigs, when a ringing sound disturbs the peace of the forest.

“All right, you bastard. I’m listening.”

“Rita Skura in top form! Delighted. Sadly, my price has risen in the meantime.”

“What do you want, you miserable blackmailer?”

Schilf allows himself an artificial pause and plucks a final burr from his trousers. The police car is parked a few meters away, looking like an uninvited guest amid nature’s anarchic profusion. Schnurpfeil is sitting behind the windshield, pale and stiff as a waxwork, loath to even glance at him. Schilf turns away and looks at his feet. He needs all his concentration and persuasive powers for the next sentences, and not a resentful police officer.

“Listen, Rita. I need a little more time to clarify the matter. I’ll give you the name, to take the wind out of your bosses’ sails—otherwise, come Monday they’ll be setting the special forces on us. Are you still there? Still listening?”

“Stop blustering, Schilf. Tell me what you want.”

“I want my man to remain free. Don’t take him in until I close the file. And no press.”

This statement does not pass unnoticed. It’s half an eternity before Rita is able to reply. When she does, she sounds utterly uncertain.

“We’re talking about a murderer. I think you’re losing your marbles.”

“And you don’t have them all yet, Rita, my child. And I mean all the people who count as suspects in your case. Where are you right now?”

“In my office.”

“Are you waiting for the next call from the police chief?”

“You bastard. You know full well I can’t guarantee what you’re asking of me.”

“Oh yes you can. Call me again when you’ve made up your mind.”

Schilf hangs up. He takes loping strides toward the police car, slides into the backseat, and taps the frozen Schnurpfeil on the shoulder.

“You can drop me off at the police apartment. Then go to HQ and pick up my travel bag from Rita Skura’s office. You’ll probably be the only person to come out of there alive today.”

The senior policeman starts the engine with a roar and puts his foot down. As they snake toward the valley through narrow bends, Schilf hums a sentence that is stuck in his head: You have to complete something before it’s all over.

[2]

WHILE SCHILF SLEEPS IN HIS CLOTHES and shoes on the sofa of the police apartment, looking like a corpse in one of his murder cases, Sebastian is standing in his kitchen where every drawer handle is an expression of Maike’s aesthetic sensibility. He is preparing an elaborate dinner. The day on which he embraced his son in scout camp, on which his distressed wife ran through the door only to storm out again after a terrible row, and on which a detective wanted to discuss physics—this horror of a day still stubbornly refuses to come to an end. Sebastian has spent the afternoon looking out from the balcony, concentrating on not calling the gallery because he wanted to give Maike time to get used to the situation. When he was unable to bear the silence in the apartment and Liam’s polite reserve any longer, he went out to buy groceries for dinner.

Now he is cooking a Thai meal, following a recipe in a cookbook that he found at the back of a cupboard. It was still wrapped in plastic—an unwanted gift. Sebastian stands at the work surface, hunched as if he is trying to express humility before the highly specialized kitchen equipment in front of him. Even the simplest can opener fulfills its function better than Sebastian has fulfilled his.

To be a good physicist. To live a happy life. Not to upset the people he loves.

It is quiet like the eye of a tornado. Sebastian enjoys following the instructions in the cookbook. No pros and cons to weigh up, no decisions to make. He pounds coriander seeds, peppercorns, and cumin seeds into a rough paste with a heavy pestle and mortar, tosses slices of chili and ginger into the food processor, and almost forgets to thaw the prawns in water. Every now and then he bends down and takes another ingredient out of the two shopping bags that lie at his feet like obedient pets, losing some of their girth each time. Liam came into the kitchen ten minutes ago, and has been fighting his usual impatience before dinner by carrying glasses and plates from the cupboard to the kitchen table one by one, refilling the salt shaker, and constantly asking for other tasks.

“Why are we eating in here?”

“It’s cozier.”

In truth, Sebastian would not dare to attempt sitting down together in the familiar environment of the dining room.

“You can set the table,” he says for the third time.

The washed vegetables glow in appetizing traffic-light colors, reaching their visual high point just before they sink into a reddish mass along with the prawns. When Liam comes up to the stove to peek into the pans, Sebastian strokes his head and swallows hard as he realizes how perfectly the curve of the child’s skull fits into the cup of his hand. He snatches a sidelong look at his son, who does not notice. He looks at the boy’s smooth forehead, the delicate nose with its arched nostrils, the pale eyes, which hint at depths as appealing as they are dangerous. As he looks at Liam, he gets a heavy, sinking feeling in his stomach. He is shocked by the strength of this love, which is capable of sending a grown man—with all his complex memories, convictions, hopes, and ideas—to a place outside of space and time, a place in which nothing except the laws of love apply. As Liam twiddles a wooden spoon with a wagging motion of his finger, Sebastian experiences, with painful clarity, the potential “no longer being” that is inherent in all creatures and things. From now on, Liam can also be seen as the absence of Liam, and that is hard to bear. Sebastian is irretrievably tied to an anti-Liam, whose visible body is a door, the entrance to hell, a door that is not closing properly. Ever since Sebastian has gotten his son back, it has cost him enormous effort not to send him out of the room.

“Damn!”

It was stupid of him to rub his eyes with his hands. The chili and onion take effect, sending Sebastian to the sink, where he washes his face with cold water.

Maike smells the food as soon as she unlocks the door and steps into the hall. It smells of appeasement. Sebastian is standing at the stove with puffy eyes and a red nose, and Liam is doubled over with laughter, pointing at him. The spit between Liam’s teeth is green from secretly nibbled peppers. Maike stands in the door frame and wants to laugh with Liam and cry with Sebastian. She asks herself why she washed the floors of all the rooms in the gallery on her hands and knees in order to put off coming home.

“What’s going on here, then?” she asks, dropping to her knees to catch Liam as he rushes into her arms.

“Dad’s got Thai in his eyes!”

Liam puts up with a kiss and runs back to the stove. He stands on tiptoe and devotes himself to stirring the rice, as though the viscous mass on the wooden spoon could bind him to normality.

“How was your day?” Sebastian asks. For a second, it really seems as if everything were as usual.

As Usual is the worst thing that can happen to Maike right now. She drops onto a chair and smiles helplessly into the growing silence. She feels as though she has been gone not for a few days but for years, and is now returning to a life in which she can participate only as a spectator. Sebastian, who is screwing up his eyes as he tastes his curry, seems as alien to her as an actor who has stepped out of character without warning. She wants to take hold of him and shake him and scream at him, or perhaps hug him and stroke him and smell him, too—whatever it takes to get her husband back.

Since this morning, however, it has been impossible for her to make any movement in his direction, so she can only sit and look and think. It is not only Dabbelink’s death that has driven her half out of her senses. Nor Liam’s mysterious kidnapping. It is the coincidence of these two things as well as the fact that, in some final way, she understands nothing. Emptiness is not an opponent, and it is impossible to defend a family without an opponent. If Maike had experienced a little less happiness and a little more unhappiness in her life thus far, she would know what to call this empty feeling: fear.

“A strange day,” Maike says after clearing her throat, a very necessary action. “A funny guy came to see me in the gallery.”

“As tall as Dad?” Liam asks. “Only old? Bulging tummy, and a face like an elephant?”

“How do you know?”

“That’s our detective.”

“You’re joking.”

Maike has grown paler than before, if that were possible. Her patched-up calm is crumbling at the edges.

“Almost done!” Sebastian calls to her in an artificially cheery voice, like a TV chef. Maike ignores him.

“Are you saying,” she says to Liam, “that this guy works for the police? And that he was here with you both?”

“Just after you left,” Sebastian says in a low voice.

“I can’t bear this any longer,” Maike whispers.

“He promised to make everything OK.” Liam’s voice breaks with desperate enthusiasm. “He’s clever.”

“Everything is OK, my darling,” Maike says to Liam. And to Sebastian, “What did you talk about?”

Sebastian brings a pan to the table and ladles curry onto the plates.

“About the nature of time.”

He asks Liam to serve the rice, and wipes the hot ceramic stove top with a cloth. A burnt smell rises. Sebastian opens the balcony door slightly.

“The nature of time,” Maike repeats, scornfully.

She mixes rice with the curry and adds salt and pepper without tasting her food.

“Is he coming again?”

“Hopefully,” Liam says.

His wife and child are sitting in front of their plates with their cutlery raised, so Sebastian looks at them encouragingly, fishing prawns from his plate and stacking two of them on his fork, by way of demonstration. Maike glances around the kitchen as if she is looking for something: a spoon, a napkin, an answer.

“With a serious crime, you can’t just withdraw the charges,” Sebastian says. “They’re investigating the kidnapping. It’s a matter of routine.”

“Have the police been to Gwiggen?” she asks. “Have they questioned the staff? Found out who took Liam there?” Her voice sounds as if someone were dictating to her. “Have they been to the service station? Did they look for clues? Find witnesses? Question the petrol pump attendant?”

“Maike,” Sebastian says. Nothing more, but he repeats it. “Maike.”

Not far from the balcony, a group of blackbirds is conferring in the chestnut tree. It is clear from their bickering that they are discussing something urgent. Do blackbirds even perch at the tops of trees? Do they spy on apartments in old buildings, or are they earthbound birds who leave their accustomed surroundings only in exceptional circumstances? And what constitutes an exception?

When a magpie lands in the branches the blackbirds fall silent.

“A pity it’s Saturday already,” Liam complains. “Otherwise Oskar would be here.”

Sebastian bends down to him and presses his arm.

“There, there,” he says, “it’s all right.”

Liam loads his fork with curry and shoves it into his mouth. He chews once, twice, and then sits still looking at his plate as his eyes fill with water.

“Still too hot?” Sebastian asks.

Liam shakes his head and swallows with a gulp. “Spicy,” he says quietly.

“I’m sorry.” Sebastian lowers his hands as Maike pushes her plate away from her. “You don’t like it either?”

“I do,” she says, “but I’m not hungry.”

“I can eat the rice,” Liam says. “The rice is good.”

After a few more mouthfuls Sebastian puts down his fork and knife too, because the kitchen seems to be filled with the sound of his chewing. Maike is drinking water and Liam is trying to spear grains of rice on the tines of his fork. A drop of water falls from the tap and hits the stainless steel sink.

“The morning after the kidnapping,” Maike says, “you rang the camp in Gwiggen and told them Liam was sick, didn’t you?”

“Do we have to do this now?” Sebastian asks.

“And no one at the camp wondered about this illness, even though Liam had actually arrived there sometime before?”

“I’ve told you everything I know.”

“Do you wonder, perhaps,” Maike says, her voice rising in a spiral of hysteria, “why your super-detective hasn’t cleared up this point yet?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll tell you why.”

Sebastian resists the impulse to press his hands over his ears. He has never heard his wife speak in these shrill tones before. He has thought of Maike as a strong person ever since he met her, and he has never wondered what the conditions for this strength are. Just as Maike wants to grab hold of him and shake him, he, too, feels the urge to torment the figure on the other side of the table, the figure on the verge of a nervous breakdown, until it releases his wife. Until the usual, cool, collected Maike, stylish and composed to the last, appears again. Sebastian does not want to hear the next words. They have been in the room for some time, and are just waiting to be spoken by one of them.

“The police are not investigating,” Maike says, “because they don’t believe you.”

“I’m going to my room now,” Liam says.

No one stops him. Sebastian sits hunched on his chair, his arms hanging heavily by his side. He looks at Liam as if he were watching a departing train. The food on the table is no longer steaming, and there is a wrinkled skin forming over the curry. This is what a farewell dinner looks like, Sebastian thinks, or, more precisely, something within him thinks—a new, unknown voice, as if spoken by an observer in his head.

“The problem,” he says, amazed at his own calm, “is that you don’t believe me.”

Maike finishes her glass of water, but does not know what to do with her hands after that.

“Sebastian,” she says quietly, “have I ever given you cause to be jealous? Over Ralph?”

Sebastian’s knee crashes against the table as he stands up abruptly, and curry slops off the plates onto the tablecloth. He stands with his back to the room, facing the glass door to the balcony, searching for the faint reflection of his face. He looks himself in the eye in order to know what to do next. Silently, he practices the sentence that he must say, a sentence that includes the words “truth,” “trust,” “I,” and “Dabbelink.” It is probably the only chance to save himself and Maike. A new feeling keeps him from speaking. It is the conviction that it is too late, and he finds it strangely uplifting.

“Please, Sebastian! I’m asking you, please!”

When he turns around, Maike’s eyes implore him. Sebastian feels like sliding down against the wall and dropping his head between his knees. That would probably have been a good idea, certainly better than the uncertain journey on which he has embarked. At the kitchen doorway, he looks at Maike again properly, the way she is sitting there, her frame slighter than usual, thin and hunched. He smells the fear that makes her hard and strange. He sees her eyelids fluttering and her agitated hands clawing the tablecloth. Sebastian does not know how anyone with such small hands can survive in a world like this, or bring up a child, or love a man like him. He shares Maike’s conviction that she and Liam are simply victims. He bears his guilt alone and out into the hall.

“I’m taking your car,” he calls. “Mine’s been impounded. See you later.”

He has never felt the weakness of mankind so clearly as during these few steps out of the apartment. The affectation of walking upright, the power of speech and free will, is suddenly exposed as a laughable hoax. Here are the car keys, the stair landing, the cast-iron streetlamps, the trees and the buildings, and here is Maike’s little car on a side street. The world is a signage system he just has to follow.

A liberating sense of clarity divides Sebastian’s thoughts into squares on a grid. The voice in his head tells him that he has just made an unforgivable and probably irrevocable mistake. In the continuous chain of horrible events that his life has become, walking out of the kitchen is the crowning glory. It wouldn’t be difficult to turn on his heel, climb back up the stairs, and steer the story a different way. But the observer in Sebastian recognizes that unforgivable mistakes are not the result of inattention, error, or not knowing better.

What distinguishes them is that they permit no alternative, even in full knowledge of the circumstances.

The central locking clicks. Sebastian feels the vibration of the engine in his arms and legs. He is a perfectly normal person driving a small car through the neighborhood in which he lives, shops, and works. He crosses the main road leading out of town, which is busy throughout the day regardless of what is happening in the world at large, and enters the enormous network of junctions, intersections, and connections that span the planet like the synapses of a giant brain. It’s amazing how little it takes to make a ruinous decision, Sebastian thinks. Soon after, he is on the autobahn.

[3]

IT CANNOT BE SAID THAT RITA SKURA and Detective Schilf have absolutely nothing in common. Like Rita, Schilf hated birds as a child. He had his reasons. They gobbled up the butterflies with whom he conducted epistemological debates beneath the walnut tree. They had immobile faces that showed neither pain nor joy. They stared at him fixedly, concealing a knowledge, which, in his opinion, they did not deserve. He thought it was unfair that they alone surveyed the world from above. If he had known then that it is always the observer who creates reality, he would have despised the birds even more for being the creators of a failed world.

Birds were also the source of nerve-racking noise. They didn’t give a damn about other living things who wanted to think, play, or sleep. Often the little Schilf went to his parents in bed in the middle of the night. I can’t sleep, he would cry. The birds are screaming in the garden, and trampling on the roof!

His parents laughed about that for years after he had left home, but Schilf didn’t find it funny. All those nights he had been unable to sleep, they had assured him that not a single bird could be heard for miles around. From then on, he had believed them to be on the side of the enemy.

Schilf has not thought about this for a long time; it must have turned up in his dreams. He awakens with the feeling that the sharp edge of a beak is boring into the soft inner sanctum of his skull. If only he could be left in peace to think, he would be able to ask himself what the little detective would have said about the bird’s egg in the big detective’s head.

Confused, he lies in a gloomy room, and it takes some time for him to realize where he is. The shadows around him are the furniture in the police apartment, and the shrill sounds that are tearing at his nerves are not coming from the throats of birds but from a ringing telephone. Schilf presses on the buttons of his mobile to no avail until he hits on the idea of getting up from the sofa to answer the landline.

“Is that you, Rita?”

A sunny laugh comes down the line.

“Sorry, there’s no Rita here. It’s me.”

There are not many me’s in the detective’s life. Most of the people he gets to know well disappear behind the bars of a penal institution sooner or later. So he doesn’t have to think for long.

“How did you get the number of the police apartment?”

“You gave it to me.”

Julia is right—for every “me” there is a “you.” Schilf’s new girlfriend has not been wrong about a single thing since he met her, and she seems to find that perfectly natural. The detective can see her now, sitting in the armchair next to the coffee table, hooking her finger into a hole in her sock.

“Did I wake you up?” she asks.

Schilf has not had the chance to switch on the light yet. Impenetrable darkness lurks behind the open doors of the kitchen and the bathroom, as if night were being produced for the entire country there.

“No,” he says. “What do you want?”

The laugh comes down the line again.

“To ask how you are.”

This is not an unusual request, but it surprises Schilf. Julia is ten years older than Rita Skura, but to him she stands just as clearly on the other side of the divide between young and old as Rita does. She is part of a new informal generation, a generation that treats everyone like a good friend. With someone uncomplicated like her, Schilf, with his respect for the infinite complexity of things, can relax and feel like a relic from a bygone age. A person like Julia, who can barge her way into a stranger’s life with the words “Don’t have a job, don’t have any family, and I don’t like the benefit reforms,” is perfectly capable of ringing just to ask how he is.

“Good,” Schilf says, which is true and false at the same time, and therefore needs elaboration. “I’ve found the murderer. Now I’ve got to protect him from the police.”

“I thought you worked for the police.”

“That doesn’t make things any easier.”

“Have you fallen in love with the murderer?”

Now it is Schilf’s turn to laugh. He wishes he could see life through Julia’s eyes, just for once. It must be like a building with a very straightforward design. Not your everyday detached house—that would be too boring; but perhaps a circus tent with an entrance, an exit, benches to sit on, and a roof. The detective can practically smell the sweet scent of the sawdust.

“Not exactly,” Schilf says. “For me, the murderer is a great man, the kind of person we owe something to. I owe him a thorough investigation of this case. Anything else would destroy him.”

“But it’s your job to destroy the lives of murderers.”

“There are subtle differences.”

“The good policeman saves the poor criminal! Sounds romantic.”

The length of the telephone cable and the size of the apartment allow Schilf to reach the balcony door. The balcony is so small that there is barely room to stand. People only ever want to save themselves, the detective thinks. The difference lies in what they want to save themselves from.

“I would do everything I can to help this man,” Schilf says, “whether you believe it or not.”

“I believe you,” Julia says tenderly. She has interpreted his long silence correctly. “I believe everything you tell me. I have to, for structural reasons.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you understand?”

“No.”

“I love you.”

The detective shakes his head involuntarily. There it is again, the notion that his life is completely out of control. The distant throbbing of a headache announces itself. Schilf suddenly thinks about Maike and realizes at the same time that he has skipped lunch and slept through dinner. He lights a cigarillo and inhales. The nicotine sets free a couple of endorphins somewhere in his body—he feels a slight dizziness and a gentle release. That’s what dying must be like, smoking a cigarillo on an empty stomach.

“So you’ll be staying a few more days,” Julia says.

“Looks like it.”

“Great. I’ll come to visit.”

“I’m not free tomorrow,” the detective says quickly. “I have to do something.”

“The day after tomorrow, then.”

A group of young people are walking in the street below, and their voices carry up to Schilf. Young men, rendered soft and bloated by the love of their mothers, and young women who have made up their eyelashes like spiders’ legs. They slap each other’s backs, tug each other along, lean over parked cars, staring into the dark interior. They seem aimless, incidental, a mere episode in history. At the sight of them, Schilf finds it hard to believe what human beings can achieve on this earth when they join forces. The females are still wearing shoes that are impossible to walk in.

“What would you say,” he asks his girlfriend, “if I had to go on a journey sometime soon? On my own?”

“Schilf,” Julia says, with an earnestness that takes the detective by surprise, “you haven’t asked me about my past. I won’t ask about your future. That’s what they call a deal.”

“OK,” Schilf says, using a word he detests, but which suits her “deal.” Perhaps life would be a circus tent, thinks the detective, if people had the right concepts. Concepts like rubber gloves, so you could touch things without getting your hands dirty. Julia has a lot of such concepts.

“OK,” he says again. “See you the day after tomorrow, then.”

They send kisses through their telephones, but Schilf purses his lips clumsily and makes smacking noises that are far too loud. He puts the receiver down on the windowsill and finishes smoking his cigarillo. The monotonous beep of the busy signal blends with the darkness. His inner observer has not said a word during the entire conversation with Julia. A wave of exhaustion that the detective cannot explain sweeps over him, and he decides to go back to bed.

[4]

THE SUN HAS SET INTO THE HAZE OVER THE CITY, and has taken with it not only the light but the heat of the day. Night has come out of its hiding place at the bottom of the lake more quickly than usual, and crept into the lanes. It is cool and humid, as if summer is ending today. The air already smells of poorly lit pavements, hunched shoulders, and damp hats.

Maike’s car is parked near the lake. Sebastian is sitting behind the steering wheel, trying to imagine where he will be in the winter. What he will look like then, what he will be eating, whom he will be talking to, and about what. He can’t imagine it. He remembers the feeling of never being able to think beyond the next couple of hours because every day held the possibility of turning him into someone else altogether: that was how he lived as a child. At the time, he felt so at home in the present that it seemed normal to him that it was not time passing but he himself. Although that was a happy state of being, Sebastian is not thrilled to have lost his future in his early forties. For a grown-up, the absence of time is clearly a kind of homelessness.

He looks out over the black expanse of the water, which reflects the lights on the promenade. He has not chosen to stop here; he is simply stranded, with no strength left for the next step. He could take out his mobile phone and look in the address book for a number that naturally he has long known by heart. Or turn on the engine and take the familiar route to a certain apartment. Or take the key out of the ignition, get out of the car, walk along the Quai des Eaux-Vives, and then drive back home.

Since leaving Freiburg and the horror of the last few days behind him, he has been in the grip of an exhaustion that feels like the flu. The symptoms are similar: burning eyes, a scratchy throat, and aching limbs. Sebastian barely knows how he has managed to get here, let alone why he has come in the first place. When he closes his eyes, the autobahn zooms through his head with unrelenting speed. The windshields of the cars in the oncoming lane are flecked with the pink of the evening sky to the north. Wilted sunflowers beside the autobahn turn their faces down toward the earth into which they will soon sink.

The car swerved a few times on the way here. Sebastian breathed more quickly and pinched his thigh. Because nothing helped, he thought of Dabbelink. He led himself through a series of scenes depicting blood, bones, and bicycle parts, all captioned: “This is what I did.” The effect was weaker than expected, a twitch in the stomach that was barely enough to keep his eyes on the road for five minutes. The more he tried, the less it worked. After fifty kilometers, the memory of Dabbelink left him completely cold.

Now he knows why murderers like to return to the scene of the crime, as the detective novels maintain. It is not the irresistible lure of evil, nor a desire for atonement or the secret hope of being arrested on the spot. It is their inability to believe that the murder has actually happened. A murderer returns to the scene of the crime so as not to continue thinking of the victim as a living person. If Sebastian could turn back the clock, he would not undo Dabbelink’s murder. He did it to save Liam, and he is sure that he would have done plenty of other things merely for the illusion of saving Liam. But he would not leave the scene of the crime without having looked for the remains of his victim.

Sebastian realizes that even a minor player like Dabbelink cannot be shoved off the stage without consequences. He knows that he is lost. But this knowledge is suspended in midair as long as he thinks of his crime in terms of television images. Everything that awaits him—arrest, a torturous murder trial, perhaps a prison sentence, the loss of his family—his future misery seems to have arisen from another world altogether, a world that has no rightful claim on him. Whoever does not believe what he has done is in no position to understand what is happening to him and around him. The best thing about being at Lake Geneva is that it prevents him from pounding on the doors of the forensic department of the Freiburg police, demanding to see the head of his victim.

As if something had been decided with this realization, Sebastian starts the engine and turns the car around.

ON THE RUE DE LA NAVIGATION, he signals his name with the doorbell—short, long, short-short—and knows within seconds that Oskar is out. He wraps his jacket tightly around him and takes up his position in the entryway. Exhaustion has given way to restlessness. Newspapers tumble through the streets, a cyclist flaps past, and a siren sounds somewhere. Sebastian normally loves the anticipation that accompanies his visits to Oskar in Geneva. Despite all the changes in their lives, he and Oskar have kept a piece of the past here that seems like it will live forever. Sebastian has come here over and over again like an addict because, up there in the attic apartment, he is a god, in control of all the fulfilled and unfulfilled potential of his life. That attic is the source of his strength and life force, and also of the restlessness that now has him shifting from one foot to the other.

When a rowdy bunch of nocturnal revelers approach, bound by some giant embrace into a single being, and shout at him in German, asking where to find the best nightclub, he pushes himself away from the wall and disappears into the darkness.

The blue circle of neon lights that serves as the sign for Le Cercle Est Rond is not complete. One of the lights broke years ago, so the circle is open on one side. The bins shoved into the middle of the pavement, and several stray cats, keep the tourists away; since the red-light district was recommended as an insider’s tip in several travel guides, Oskar has been talking about looking for a new apartment. He often says that those who go to the Cercle are the last people left on the planet who go out in order not to be recognized.

The room is lit by candles jammed into empty bottles, and the light sketches the souls of people and objects in flickering shadows on the walls. The tables seem to be more for beer-drinking card players than for the well-dressed men who sit at them in twos or threes, drinking red wine. The men speak in low voices and move cautiously, as if they are trying not to frighten each other.

Sebastian pushes aside the leather curtain at the entrance. The bartender, who is washing glasses under the only electric light in the room, does not even acknowledge him with a glance, though they have known each other for a long time. Oskar is leaning back against the bar, and a lanky young man wearing round-rimmed spectacles is standing in front of him, talking eagerly in the direction of his own feet. It is not possible to tell if Oskar is listening to him as he stands there with his legs crossed and his elbows bent, motionless. His hands are dangling beside him in an attitude of courtesy mingled with lordliness, as if he were allowing a beringed finger to be kissed. In this position, he looks like he could be leaning against a tree trunk in a forest clearing in the morning mist, his white shirt open at the collar, holding a pistol in his hands.

He allows himself little more than an arch of the eyebrows when he notices Sebastian. But Sebastian can see that his friend is shaken to the core. He almost expects Oskar to clutch his hands to his heart and sink to his knees. He has known this man for half a lifetime, and he has never seen him so shaken.

The bespectacled young man has not noticed that anything has changed. His eyes dart here and there behind his glasses as he is speaking, and when he finally raises his head because he has not received a reply to a question, his age nudges eighteen. Sebastian knows these young geniuses who come from afar to discuss the theory of the quantization of time with its renowned originator. In a pub in Geneva, they meet a man who adorns his intellect not with white hair and a face furrowed by thought, but with a classically handsome profile and a smile proclaiming the right to ownership. Oskar puts his mouth close to the young man’s ear and whispers something. The boy immediately raises his hand and walks off toward the restroom.

Within seconds, they are standing opposite each other. It is Oskar who stretches his hand out first. No one can keep himself afloat day after day all on his own. The mingling of their scents is an invisible home. It houses the pain they feel about the space they share, a space that knows only biting cold and blistering heat, but not the conditions for human survival.

Oskar takes the “Reserved” placard off the table in the corner and sits Sebastian down facing a kitsch reproduction of a still life. It portrays a pheasant in its dress of feathers, its neck hanging broken over the edge of a bowl. Sitting opposite Sebastian, Oskar has a view of the whole room. Unbidden, the barman brings over two glasses and a bottle of whiskey that is as old as the bespectacled youth who has left the Cercle after his visit to the restroom. They clink glasses and drink. Oskar is outwardly calm. He does not tap his feet, or pick fluff off his suit trousers. He looks at Sebastian intently.

Sebastian is tracing the grain of the table with a finger, concentrating on not counting the years, not asking how many times he has sat in the Cercle filled with a delicate mixture of happiness and fear. Seen from here, his normal life seems like the memory of a film in which he, Maike, and Liam play the touching lead roles. Every time he has left Freiburg on the weekend for a supposed conference, Oskar has been waiting for him with eyebrows raised—mocking and acerbic, but not angry.

Perhaps Oskar’s supreme quality is not his intelligence, thinks Sebastian, but his patience, which has the force of a natural law. “How time flies” is never a statement for Oskar, always a question.

And perhaps, Sebastian thinks, Maike and Liam’s supreme quality is their boundless trust, while his own is the ability to abuse this trust without scruple. “Can that really be true?” is never a question for Sebastian, but always a matter of physics.

His index finger traces the grain of the wood on the other side of the table and when Oskar reaches out to grasp it, he gives him his hand.

“It can only be days now,” Sebastian says.

“Hours,” Oskar says.

“A detective is onto me. Either he understands nothing—or everything.”

“Everything, probably. Or were you foolish enough to hope that they wouldn’t find you?”

“Hope is the last thing to die,” Sebastian says lamely.

“And honor never does.”

Oskar drinks from his glass, then puts it down on the table.

“Cher ami,” he says, “there is this thing called life and there are stories. The curse of the human being is that he finds it difficult to distinguish between the two.”

“Say it again.”

“What?”

“When I told you about Dabbelink on the phone, what did you say?”

“‘Oh?’” Oskar says.

“I’ve been surviving on that ‘Oh?’ for forty-eight hours.”

Oskar presses his hand.

“Is that why you came?”

Sebastian does not reply. He turns in his seat and looks around the room.

“I’ve made inquiries,” Oskar says. “It’s known as coercion. Anyone blackmailed into committing a crime cannot be held responsible.”

“I’m responsible, without a doubt.”

The bartender is drying glasses and the customers are talking among themselves. No one is paying the least bit of attention to the table in the corner. Amazingly, everything looks normal.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that,” Oskar says. “Are you afraid that they won’t believe you were blackmailed?”

“It’s not that.”

“Maik?”

Sebastian nods.

“Does she know?”

Sebastian shrugs his shoulders.

“You haven’t told her… everything?”

Sebastian shakes his head. He pulls the bottle toward him and empties his second glass in a single gulp. Peat and a touch of honey, it’s a good make. Oskar lights a cigarette and looks toward the window, which merely reflects his own face back at him. Sebastian’s hand grows numb in Oskar’s grip, and he pulls it away.

“She thinks I’m a murderer,” he says.

“Not without cause, if I’ve understood everything correctly.”

“It would be simpler to tell her the truth if she wouldn’t anticipate the result.”

“Aren’t you expecting a bit much?”

“Oskar.” As Sebastian presses his hands over his eyes, he feels the effect of the chili again. “She won’t stand by me. I’ll lose her, and Liam, too.”

Oskar stubs out his cigarette and lights another one; this is faster than he normally smokes.

“You won’t give up,” he says.

“What’s absurd is that I feel as if I’ve staged the whole thing myself. Not in practice, but in theory.”

“Are you talking about your Many-Worlds Interpretation?”

“If something can happen and not happen at the same time in a microworld, the same thing must be possible in a macrocosmos, too. Haven’t I always said that?”

“Let’s put it this way: you cultivated a somewhat casual approach to the difficulties of moving from quantum mechanics to classical physics.”

Sebastian wipes his streaming eyes with his cuffs.

“Liam was kidnapped and also not kidnapped at the same time. Since then, everything has lost its validity. I now live in a one-man universe. Its name is guilt.”

The coffee machine behind the bar hisses. Someone laughs politely. The pheasant’s neck still hangs over the side of the bowl.

“Pull yourself together,” Oskar says. “You’re talking nonsense.”

“No I’m not!” Sebastian turns his red-rimmed eyes to look his friend full in the face. “If I hadn’t been so obsessed with getting a few days of uninterrupted work done, I would never have taken Liam to scout camp. That’s causality. You like causality, don’t you?”

“To hell with it,” Oskar says.

“I’d left the Many Worlds behind me long ago.” Sebastian’s voice grows louder and more urgent. “I wanted to use physics to prove that time is nothing more than a function of human perception. I wanted to pull the rug out from under your feet.”

Oskar catches the finger Sebastian is pointing at him and places it back on the table.

“Sooner or later,” Sebastian says, “you will prove through quantization that time and space share most of the properties of matter. That will be the next turning point after Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. You no longer know the craving to achieve something groundbreaking. Inside that craving lies guilt.”

His glass clinks hard against Oskar’s and they drink, holding each other’s gaze.

“Even if that were true,” Oskar says, “my achievement would have been only to add to the endless series of errors that we call human history. That’s all. You know nothing of guilt.”

“I’m going to put it to you simply,” Sebastian says. “You have chosen physics and you are loyal to it. I chose two people, and I have not been loyal to them.”

Oskar blows smoke across the table.

“You’ve really changed. I quite like it.”

“Oskar, is there anything more important to you than quantum physics?” Sebastian asks.

The armrests creak as Oskar jolts back in his chair with a laugh that changes his face completely. Sebastian has witnessed this laugh a thousand times, but it still astounds him. The corners of his own mouth turn up, and they are suddenly smiling at each other, sitting wrapped in a cocoon of warmth and mellow light that the outside world cannot touch. The moment passes as quickly as it came.

“Are you really sitting there asking me that in all seriousness?”

Sebastian examines his empty glass intently and pushes it aside.

“Let me tell you a story,” Oskar says. “The day after the kidnapping you called me on the phone. After work, I drove straight to Freiburg, and got there very late. We sat up talking the whole night. I drove back to Geneva at about six in the morning and turned up at the institute more or less on time.”

Sebastian’s mouth is hanging open slightly.

“You’re mad,” he says.

“And you should start protecting yourself.”

“In my statement, it says that I was alone in the apartment the whole time after Liam disappeared.”

“Maik wasn’t supposed to find out that you called on me for support instead of her.”

“What were you really doing that night?”

“Nothing that anyone I met would remember.”

Sebastian is gripping the edge of the table with his hands. The whiskey is going to his head and he feels as if his skull is getting ready to detach itself from his shoulders.

He pauses, then says, “I don’t want an alibi.”

“Bien,” Oskar says. “How about another story.” He looks at his reflection in the mirror again and smooths his hair. His hands are trembling. “We’re in Switzerland. That gives us a couple of days. I can get my affairs in order within two weeks.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This,” Oskar says, knocking on the table, “is not the only continent on this earth.”

“You want us to run away? Go into hiding? Live with the Bedouin?”

“Not exactly.” Oskar leans forward. “There are research centers in China. And in South America. At my level, certain irregularities will be mere trifles. We would be welcomed with open arms.”

It takes Sebastian a few seconds to register the meaning of these words. He lets go of the table, shifts in his seat, tries to prop himself up on one elbow, and sits still again.

“What about Liam?” he asks.

“We’ll take him with us. As far as work goes, you’ll have to stay in the background for a bit. You’d have time for him.”

“You’re not serious,” Sebastian whispers.

“Yes I am,” Oskar says. “For you, the last few years have been all about your wife. About your family. About physics. For me…” He places his cigarette packet and his lighter in parallel before he continues. “It was only ever about us.”

Their knees touch under the table. Oskar reaches out with his hands and pulls Sebastian’s head toward him until they are bent over the table, forehead to forehead, breathing the same air. Sebastian leans forward with his whole weight, concentrates on the warm point where their heads meet, and wishes he could flee his own body through this point and find refuge under the crown of his friend.

Of course. It would work. It even had a certain logic to it. Running away, not the first time, but the last. In retrospect, it would give the long series of small escapes a goal and a cause. Everything would acquire an order, even start to make sense. He would be no longer just the ball in the game, but the master of his own misfortune. This time he would kidnap Liam himself and acknowledge what he has long been: a criminal. The passage of time would help him to regard the exceptional situation as normal.

And normality as the past, Sebastian thinks.

Only when their foreheads crack painfully together, because he is shaking with violent sobs, does Sebastian notice that he is crying.

“You know I have always…”

“Let’s not talk about it,” Oskar says. “This isn’t a good moment.”

“When I look at Liam…”

He finds it hard to speak. He is clasping his friend around the neck, holding tight to keep himself from collapsing onto the table.

“When I look at Liam,” he says, “it’s impossible to regret anything.”

“I can’t regret anything either,” Oskar says. “The past is a stingy beast. It doesn’t relinquish anything, especially not decisions.”

Oskar takes a handkerchief out of his pocket. He dries Sebastian’s eyes and cheeks before pushing him away and sitting him upright again.

“You’ve had a few drinks,” he says. “Are you driving back anyway?”

Sebastian nods.

“That’s a terrible shame.”

Sebastian turns away and presses his lips together.

“This way or that,” Oskar says, “it will pass. After that, you’ll be a new person. Not a better person, but still there.”

His unfiltered cigarette has burned down to a stub in the ashtray. Oskar flinches as he burns his finger trying to put it out.

“Do tell me why you came to Geneva tonight,” Oskar says.

“To tell you that we won’t be seeing each other anymore.”

The man who looks up at Sebastian as he rises from the table no longer looks like himself. His face has no greatness, no beauty, and no aristocratic air. It is suddenly so helpless that the changing expressions on it look like blueprints. The sketch of a smile, a diagram of mockery, a draft of exhaustion. The anatomy of sadness.

“Do me a favor,” Sebastian says. “Stay there and don’t watch me as I leave.”

The pheasant has opened its eyes and is gazing into emptiness. Glasses clatter behind the bar. Outside, the night is waiting. The streets of the city are filled with mist. It smells of rain.

[5]

THE DRUMS HAVE BEEN CALLING TO HIM for an hour now, sounding the beat to which he should march. He knows they are right, that it is time to finally make a move. Nonetheless he hesitates as if he still has something important to do, something to verify and to understand. Then a scream, piercing like a battle cry.

The digital display of the alarm clock shows a four and two zeros. The detective often wakes exactly on the hour. There is no end to the scream, which turns out to be the cry of a baby in the apartment next door. The drumming, on the other hand, is coming from the rain falling against the window with the relentlessness of a machine. Schilf swings his legs out of the bed. He feels more rested than he has for a long time, and is startled to find that the day is far from beginning. He presses the light switch to no effect and walks over to the balcony door. Drops of water are racing across the glass in horizontal lines, as if the building were traveling through the night at speed. Outside there is a darkness that has no place in a city. The streetlights are not working, and only the yellow glow of a blinking warning light illuminates the hell outside. There is a tree lying in the road, and another has fallen on top of three parked cars. The storm tugs at the branches, still dissatisfied with its vanquished opponents. Schilf enjoys watching chaos that, for once, has not been created by human beings.

Shivering, he turns away and sits down at the desk. He finds a stack of postcards in the drawer. By the flame of a lighter, he writes on the back of the first one: “Dear Julia, When you come to visit, bring this card with you as evidence that you exist. Urgent [in capital letters with three clumsy-looking exclamation points]. Schilf.”

He burns his thumb on the lighter and lowers his head over his second card: “Dear Maike, Whatever happens, you must not stop believing. You have no right to destroy Sebastian. Please [a splotch of ink where he strikes out three exclamation points]. Yours, Detective Schilf.”

Content with his work, he addresses the first card to his own apartment in Stuttgart and the second to the Gallery of Modern Art. As a precaution, he takes the last two pills that the doctor prescribed him for headaches, then sits down on the sofa with the chess computer.

He has paid too little attention to his king from the start. He has watched pale-faced but unwavering as his major pieces died heroes’ deaths. A large proportion of foot soldiers have also fallen victim to Schilf’s fanaticism. He is sending his last pawns, rook, and knight to lay siege to the opposing king, who is barricaded behind a standard defense, bored and probably smoking one cigarette after another. Schilf pictures him with his shirt half open, holding a pistol in his limp fingers. If the detective were to grant his opponent a pause for breath, if he doesn’t force it to move to save its king, he is finished. Even as he brings up the game, he is filled with rage against the superior enemy force, against its solid formation and distribution of pieces, which are always in the right place at the right time. The computer catches every one of his attacks in a net of calculations. Schilf is fighting against a determinist, an ultramaterialist who with precise knowledge of a situation and the laws that apply can determine past and future, and whose most important ability consists of predicting the moment and the manner in which everything that wishes to live will die.

The detective decides to beat the computer using its own weapons. He lifts his feet up onto the sofa and sets to work calculating every possible move and countermove.

By the time it grows light, he has not shifted one centimeter from his position. His deliberations are now being accompanied by the whine of an electric saw, which is biting into solid wood on the street below. The rain machine has shifted down a gear or two, and glaring light that leaves no shadow makes everything in the room look washed-out. At about eight o’clock the detective stretches his legs and massages his neck. He has not made a single move. But he now has a vague idea of where the next attack against his opponent should be made.

Out on the street, he walks over a carpet of wet sawdust. It smells like a circus ring. He steps over branches that have been torn off in the storm, and drops the two postcards in a mailbox on his way to the streetcar stop. Onboard, strangers are telling each other about the damage done in their neighborhoods. Their eyes are shining with the happiness that is only ever brought about by a natural catastrophe representing the comeback of a half-forgotten god.

Schilf gets off the streetcar near the Institute of Physics and takes a detour along Sophie-de-la-Roche-Strasse. The peaceful canal has been transformed overnight into a muddy torrent filled with leaves and plastic bottles. Bonnie and Clyde are nowhere to be seen. Schilf manages to duck behind a parked car just as Sebastian appears from around the corner. Sebastian’s arms are wrapped tightly around his body. He does not have a jacket, a bag, or an umbrella. He looks like a man who has spent half the night on the autobahn and then slept two hours on the swivel chair in his office at the institute.

So you’ve come back to us, the detective thought, the detective thinks.

With difficulty he suppresses the impulse to follow Sebastian.

NOT LONG AFTER, he is standing in front of the locked glass door of the natural sciences library looking at the posted opening times. It is a while before he realizes that it’s the weekend, so he will have to wait another hour. Resigned, he follows his own wet footsteps back through the Gustav Mie building and goes to the cafeteria, which is empty but open. He calls out in a loud voice for a double espresso before he sits down at one of the freshly wiped tables. He puts his mobile phone down and places his hands on either side of it. Barely five minutes pass before it rings.

“Miserable criminal!”

Schilf is happy to hear that Rita Skura avoids repeating herself when she dishes out insults. It is good to hear her voice.

“I have you to thank for the most ridiculous Sunday morning of my life,” she says.

She sounds relieved. Schilf wedges his phone between his shoulder and his cheek.

“Good morning,” he says. “Lovely weather, isn’t it?”

“Of course I had to lie,” Rita says, undeterred. “Sooner or later I could have brought in the murderer by other means.”

“Of course,” Schilf says. “Sooner—or later.”

Rita’s snort makes the diaphragm of the speaker vibrate.

“Do you know the chief public prosecutor?” she shouts. “Have you tried dictating terms to a guy like that?”

Schilf not only knows the man but can also visualize him, hunched into his own body fat, perched behind a desk of presidential proportions. When the newly appointed chief public prosecutor had the immense piece of furniture delivered at his own cost, the laughter of the Freiburg judiciary had been heard all the way to Stuttgart.

This colossus of a man hates being on call during weekends. And he also hates summer. In summer, women like Rita Skura walk around in flowery dresses while men have sweat running down their buttoned-up shirt collars. The chief public prosecutor has probably not invited Rita Skura to come in. The door was wrenched open the very moment she knocked. She has already ruined the previous evening with her phone calls; now she stands before him like a Joan of Arc from Baden, offering herself up as her heaviest cannon, the hands on her hips a challenge. As she speaks, the chief public prosecutor plucks at his hair, observes her for a moment, and visualizes her floating to the ground. All the while he grinds his jaw incessantly, as if he were chewing on something. As soon as Rita has finished, he heaves himself out of his armchair with a groan and closes the window. What he has to say does not need an audience.

“Listen,” Rita says on the telephone now. “No forty-eight-hour remand if he makes a full confession. That’s all that was possible. I had to swear to God that he is not a flight risk.”

“If he were a flight risk he would be long gone. It’s not far to Switzerland.”

“If it were that simple,” Rita says, insulted, “why didn’t you explain it to the public prosecutor yourself?”

A fat woman with dyed red hair and plucked eyebrows approaches in her apron and puts a cup down on the table.

“It’s normally self-service here,” she says.

“Because it’s your case after all, Rita, my child,” Schilf says. “Excellent work. You’ll be police chief in no time.”

He puts twice the required amount into the serving woman’s outstretched hand and looks away to avoid her death stare. The coffee is surprisingly good. It’s a good day all in all. The detective is doing the right thing and getting what he wants.

“Toady,” Rita says. “Of course it’s my case. And it’s the last one that you’ll be interfering with.”

“Believe me, I’ve only been sent in the name of God. You’ll never have the misfortune of accepting my help again.”

“Glad to hear it.”

The detective thinks he would like to bottle a few of Rita’s snorts to tide him over in bad times.

“Now hand the guy over,” she says.

“How do you know it’s a man?”

“Women don’t decapitate their victims.”

“The New Testament would have it otherwise.”

“Wrong, Schilf. Salome asked for John the Baptist to be beheaded. That was secondary liability at best, or just incitement.”

“You know your Bible,” Schilf says in acknowledgment, “and the basics of German criminal law. What would happen if Salome had blackmailed the murderer into doing the deed, though?”

“This isn’t a seminar on criminal law!” Rita growls.

“Coercion,” Schilf says. “Extenuating circumstances according to the prevailing view?”

“Who… is.… it?”

With every word, Schilf thinks he hears Rita chopping the air with the side of her hand. Rita had been an astonishingly good shot during her training. You could tell from her hand, the detective thinks. He would quite happily stand in front of her while, feet shoulder-width apart, arms outstretched, she aimed a Walther PPK at him. The bullet would bore a hole in his forehead, pierce through the bird’s egg in his frontal lobe, and drill painlessly into his brain. Schilf sees himself falling to his knees and collapsing onto his side, as he has observed other men doing a few times over the course of his career. Set free by Rita’s hand, he would fly out through the hole in his forehead and finally mesh with the network of the universe, where there is no time and space, and would enter the state popularly known as “the past.”

What a lovely dream, the detective thinks.

“The physicist,” he says. “The one with the kidnapped son.”

He lights a cigarillo and enjoys the first puffs in total peace. Not even the sound of breathing comes from the telephone.

“Good,” Rita finally says. Her voice is businesslike, if a little husky. “I thank you.”

“Wait.” Schilf takes the cigarillo out of his mouth and bends forward, as if Rita were sitting on the other side of the table. “He was blackmailed.”

“At least,” Rita says slowly, “the case seems to have nothing to do with the hospital scandal.”

“You don’t know that yet,” the detective superintendent says sharply. “Were you listening to me? I said: Sebastian was blackmailed.”

“The police chief will cry with joy.”

“Rita!” The detective barely notices that the woman in the apron is beside him again. “Have you asked yourself why I’m telling you who it is? So that the case won’t be taken away from you! You’re the one with the most sense in that whole pigsty. Don’t tell me that I’ve been mistaken!”

“All right, Schilf.”

“The man is innocent,” the detective says.

“Surely. The main thing is, there’s no connection to the hospital scandal.”

The conversation is over. The line is dead.

“You’re not allowed to smoke here,” the woman in the apron says.

“Damn,” Schilf says.

“Absolutely no smoking here.”

The detective looks into her doughy face and flashes his police ID at her.

“Another espresso,” he says.

As the fat woman waddles hastily back to the counter, he drops his head into his hands. It’s practically impossible, inconceivable that he has just made a serious mistake. He is holding the cigarillo between his thumb and his index finger, and ash falls past his right temple onto the table. There is the smell of singed hair.

[6]

THERE IT IS AGAIN, THE DOUGHY FACE. Plucked eyebrows and dyed red hair in the shape of a cloud. This time the woman is a kind of librarian who is looking at the detective in an unfriendly manner. Her fleshy fingers are tapping away continuously with great precision on a computer keyboard. The familiar pounding has started behind Schilf’s temples.

“What do you want?”

It is not easy to answer this question. Schilf probably wants a new Rita Skura, one who is not thinking of her own career or of the walrus-mustached police chief, but only of how she can help the first chief detective superintendent in his mission for truth and justice. And he wants a slim librarian with hair that has been combed back, and a large room whose walls are lined with shelves of oak that go right up to the ceiling. He wants absentminded scientists who climb ladders to reach the volumes on the very top shelves. He wants green lampshades on antique desks.

Schilf is nauseated by the smell of the freshly cleaned carpet underfoot. Metal shelving divides the room into cells containing dark computer monitors. He is the only visitor. The conversation with Rita feels like rheumatism in his bones. He longs for a living being, for understanding and support, or perhaps just for the warmth of a freshly run bath.

“What do you want?” The librarian repeats herself slowly and clearly. She probably has to deal with confused foreign researchers quite often.

“Quantum physics,” the detective says.

The woman’s face shakes with silent laughter, and Schilf realizes that he has made a joke. He does not join in.

“Go ahead,” she says.

Schilf does not bother with the rows of books whose covers threaten investigations of the cosmological lambda term or the missing-mass problem. He sits down at one of the computers and types Sebastian’s name into the catalogue search function. The list is long. Schilf chooses two publications whose titles contain more familiar than unfamiliar words. He writes down the classification codes on a piece of paper and walks back to the desk. The librarian perches a pair of spectacles on her wide face and waddles over to a shelf of journals. The prim design of the booklets she pulls out would warn off any normal person from trying to read them. The librarian pats him encouragingly on the shoulder as she hands them over, and Schilf is left with his booty.

“Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation as the Foundation for Quantum Cosmology.”

“The Fluctuating Scalar Field, i.e.: The Eternal Return of the Same.”

Schilf makes a concerted effort not to wonder about the sense of this undertaking and whispers encouraging words to himself: Let’s just see, piece of cake, this. He starts reading the first article.

Since his phone call with Rita, he has been plagued by the feeling that he has no time left, and that whatever he does, he is neglecting something else far more important. His method does not work in such a situation. In order to look through things, to lurk and listen and wait for something to rise from the cellar of reality to the surface, he needs one thing above all: inner peace. Now he can only struggle to understand things with the usual tools of the trade, which will bring an average rate of success at best. His startled brain races along the words stretching across the pages like worms, staggers then falls, catches itself in the barbs of a semicomprehensible sentence (“Applied to the cosmos, the quantization machine leads to an assumption of general wave function”), and slides across the slippery ground of the next clause. It stumbles over a familiar phrase (“everything is possible and happens somewhere”) and ends up standing in front of the impenetrable wall of string theory and supersymmetry.

Schilf does not understand a word. He does not have the faintest idea what Sebastian is writing about. The pounding of his headache has turned into hammering. He puts the journal aside and rouses the computer. On the home page of the search engine he discovers a report on the re-arrest of the former chess world champion Kasparov. He feels a little better after reading this short article without any trouble. Filled with hope, he types Sebastian’s name into the gateway to the virtual world.

Two photographs immediately pop up under the heading Circumpolar. There is Sebastian’s boyish, laughing face, next to a striking man whom Schilf would have immediately cast as Mephisto if he were directing a film of Faust. The detective looks at the two men for a long time: the laughter and the silence, the wanting and the waiting, the white king and the black king. A two-headed oracle, the detective thinks. It is some time before he realizes what the Web page is actually offering. You can download an episode of the science program Circumpolar, subtitled “The Clash of the Physicists.” Schilf pulls his chair closer to the screen and clicks on “Watch Now.”

Sebastian and Oskar are seated on protruding chairs in the narrow prison of a small screen. The show’s host is sitting between them in a deliberately casual manner, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees as he introduces the program.

Twenty-first century. Challenges that no one had ever expected. The intersection between science and philosophy.

If the host had been alone onstage, he would have looked like everyone’s picture of the kindly professor: spectacles, beard, and uncut hair. Next to his lofty guests, he simply looks untidy. Oskar lets an arm dangle over his chair’s armrest, and examines the polished tips of his shoes. On the other side, Sebastian is looking straight into the camera with a defiant expression, and he winces when it is his turn to speak. He twists the microphone in his hands for such a long time that the detective feels nervous watching him. Finally, without any preamble whatsoever, Sebastian begins to speak.

“The parallel universe theory rests upon an interpretation of quantum mechanics, according to which a system assumes all circumstances that are possible within the specific probabilities. The elementary particles are the basic building blocks of our world. Their existence determines our existence. That can mean that we and everything visible around us are adopting all states at every moment.”

By his sharp intake of breath while lifting the microphone gently, the host signals that more than three long sentences in a row are unthinkable even for the audience of a public broadcasting station. Sebastian refuses to be thrown off track. The detective nods at him across everything that separates them.

“We can imagine it visually,” Sebastian says. “There is a universe in which Kennedy did not travel to Dallas on that fateful day, and was not shot. And one in which I didn’t have cheesecake on my birthday but chocolate cake.”

There is the sound of grateful laughter in the studio. Only now does the camera swing around to show that the three men on the stage are not alone in the room. The detective realizes that “LIVE” is displayed in tiny letters in a corner of the screen. Transfixed by the notion that the Sebastian onscreen has no idea yet of the reversal of fortune that awaits him, Schilf misses the next few phrases and just catches Sebastian gesturing with his hand that he will stop after his next sentence.

“Everything that is possible happens.”

The audience claps. Sebastian’s fervor makes his statement sound like a promise of salvation. Even the host pretends to clap as he asks Oskar to give his opinion. Oskar has listened to Sebastian with a smile on his face, more amused than mocking, as if he is a grown-up listening to a precocious child.

“What Sebastian has described,” he says, holding the microphone very close to his mouth, in a voice that makes the detective shudder, “is a cozy attempt to circumnavigate God.”

There are murmurs and subdued laughs. Sebastian looks offstage, as if the whole thing suddenly has nothing to do with him.

“You’ll have to explain that,” the host says, when Oskar does not continue.

“It’s quite simple.”

In the dead silence of the studio, Oskar takes a sip of water. It is clear that he is in control of the situation on the stage.

“According to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, a creator never need make a decision. We exist simply because everything that is at all possible exists somewhere.”

Ever since his conversation with Sebastian, the detective has been working on a formulation that he himself does not fully understand: The world is the way it is because there are observers to watch it existing.

Schilf regrets that television programs don’t permit interruptions.

“That is a cheap response to a question of metaphysics,” Oskar says. “Totally unusable as a scientific viewpoint.”

“Why unusable?” the host asks, raising a hand to shush another murmur rising in the audience.

“Because other universes avoid experimental examination.”

Oskar leans back as if he has had the last word for the evening. In the same instant Sebastian bends forward and speaks into the microphone.

“That’s how it is in theoretical physics,” he says. “Even Einstein’s ideas were partly worked out on paper to begin with, and then proven later in experiments.”

“In the words of Einstein himself,” Oskar replies calmly, “‘Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.’”

“What I’m talking about here,” Sebastian says, “has been described by many reputable physicists: Stephen Hawking, David Deutsch, Dieter Zeh.”

“Then Hawking, Deutsch, and Zeh have just as little an idea of physics,” Oskar says.

As the audience protests, a close-up of Oskar’s laughing face is shown. The arrogant expression has disappeared and he looks like a schoolboy who is delighting in pulling off a successful prank. The camera turns to Sebastian, who is shaking his head and lifting a finger to show that he has something to say. Schilf leans forward so that his nose is practically touching the monitor. Don’t let yourself be wound up by him. Don’t defend anything that you don’t believe in. Tell them that there is no time and space. That Many Worlds and one world are all the same, even if matter is nothing more than an idea in the observer’s thoughts.

The host calls for silence so that Sebastian can speak.

“The discussion here doesn’t seem to be about the intersection between physics and philosophy,” Sebastian says, “but about the intersection between physics and polemic.”

Laughter from the audience shows that they are on his side again.

“Much as barbed language can be fun—”

“By the way,” Oskar interrupts, placing a finger on his cheek as if something has just occurred to him, “according to your theory, it is not just the Creator who does not have to make any decisions. Nobody else does, either.”

“On the contrary,” Sebastian says. “One of the philosophical advantages of the Many-Worlds Interpretation is that it can explain the free will of mankind. In linear time—”

“Now it’s getting esoteric!” Oskar laughs.

The camera is too late to catch Oskar, reaching him only as he waves away the host’s admonishment. Schilf, who is watching the screen so intently that his eyes are burning, notices that Oskar’s left foot is twitching.

“In linear time,” Sebastian says, “our fates are determined from the earliest past into the most distant future. Our decisions are nothing more than biochemical processes in the brain that are subject to the laws of cause and effect.” He leaves a dramatic pause before continuing. “Now imagine that every conceivable causal sequence exists at the same time in parallel universes. The way every individual universe develops may be predetermined, but our freedom consists of being able to choose one of these many worlds with every decision.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, justification for the freedom of will through physics,” the host says exultantly. His glasses reflect the spotlights, and he looks incredibly happy, as if he can see his program director’s beaming face as he speaks.

“And that holds true, although science and determinism normally—”

“Then I would like to know,” Oskar interrupts, “why we can’t simply exercise an act of will to choose a universe in which the Second World War never happened. That would be nice.”

The blood has risen in Sebastian’s face. He slides forward and sits upright.

“That’s because we are subject to the principle of self-consistency,” he says. “And you know that only too well! Otherwise, according to the second law of thermodynamics, we could dissolve into a state of cumulative chaos.”

“And that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Oskar says. “Looking at you, one might conclude that this dissolution can sometimes happen all too quickly.”

He gives Sebastian a challenging look and taps his finger on his forehead.

“Excuse me,” the host says, “we can’t…”

The uproar in the studio drowns him out. Oskar makes an impatient gesture with his hand to wave away any further disturbance, and turns his perfect profile to the camera, looking past the host, straight at Sebastian. The twitch in his left foot has grown more violent. His relaxed manner suddenly seems a poor front. He looks like a man whose smooth facade conceals boundless rage.

“If every decision is accompanied by its opposite,” he says, “then it is no decision at all. Do you know what your justification for free will is? It’s a license to behave like a swine!”

“Please…” the host says.

“That’s…” Sebastian attempts.

“One universe,” Oskar says. “With no possibility for escape. That’s what you should be researching. That’s where you should be living. And where you should take responsibility for your own decisions.”

“That’s not a scientific argument,” Sebastian says, barely managing to control himself. “That’s moralistic dogmatism!”

“And a good deal better than immorality legitimized by physics.”

“Not one word more!” Sebastian screams.

“In your double worlds,” Oskar says with feverish intensity, “you live a double life. And you pretend that you can do something and also not do it at the same time.”

There is a merciless close-up of Sebastian’s Adam’s apple rising and falling as he swallows heavily. The unrest in the audience has increased again. One man raises his fist, but it is not clear against whom or what.

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

He has left the microphone on the glass table. He points his index finger at Sebastian and says something that cannot be heard in all the commotion. The host’s mouth is opening and shutting helplessly.

Oskar says something else that cannot be heard, and then the picture freezes.

The detective has grown warm. He has grabbed hold of the mouse to pause the clip, and is looking for a way to play the last few seconds again.

“That’s not allowed,” the librarian says.

Schilf gives a start, as though someone has stabbed him in the neck. A shadow falls over the workstation.

“You can’t download films here. The computers are here for research.”

This country is made up of prohibitions just like a house of cards is made of cards, the detective thinks. Perhaps I ought to have applied for something on the other side back then.

“This is a scientific program,” he says out loud. “I’m from the police.”

“And I’m enforcing the rules,” the librarian says. “Do you have a search warrant?”

Without waiting for his reply, she leans forward and closes every open window with a rapid tap of the keys. Schilf has to get up from his chair in order to create some distance between himself and the woman. Her eyelids are covered with a thick layer of purple eye-shadow.

“Can I help you in any other way?”

“No thank you,” the detective says. “I was just about to go.”

On the street, he stands under a lowering sky and does not know where to go next. Cars pass in both directions and people stride toward secret destinations. Pain drills into his lower jaw. Schilf puts both hands to his face to prevent it from falling apart. He has to keep watching the cars so that they will continue moving, has to lean against the wall so that it won’t collapse. He has to watch the passersby so that they won’t crumble into dust. He is a pillar of the sky, a generator of time, the perpendicular in the earth’s axis. If he closes his eyes the earth will no longer exist. Only the headache.

Not yet, not now, the detective thinks.

His next few steps land on firm ground, small paving stones that are exactly the same size as the soles of his shoes. He takes out his mobile phone and gets through to international directory assistance. He asks for a number in Geneva.

[7]

BIRD FLU HAS SCURRIED INTO EUROPE on its clawed feet. Migratory birds spread the virus to the farthest corners of the world. Seagulls are dropping dead from the sky near the coast of Hamburg and mankind is preparing for an epidemic. Everything that flies is being executed. Soon the last feather will float to earth in a forest clearing. After that, Detective Schilf will be carrying the last surviving bird’s egg in his head.

He puts down the crumpled newspaper that he found on his seat. Bird flu. As if there were no other problems. He has used up the doctor’s painkillers, and has managed to get only ibuprofen in the pharmacy at the station. Sitting opposite him is a mustached man in his mid-fifties, who is busy copying the train schedule into a notebook with a marker. The barren stomp and jangle of twenty-first-century music is forcing its way out of a girl’s headphones. Two rows down, a train conductor is rebuffing an angry woman’s accusations. Please let me finish what I am saying. The staff is doing its best. Everything that is possible happens.

Outside, the gray ceiling of sky stretches westward. A successful performance of late autumn in July.

When the train starts moving again, the gentle eyes of a few lost calves glide by. They are the reason the train has been held up in this field for almost an hour. A trampled-down fence, men in orange protective suits doing their work.

Wet calves are a good omen, the detective decides. They are the opposite of black cats, crows, and hooting owls. The ZDF television station has agreed to send a video recording of Circumpolar to him today. Schilf rubs his hands together and tries to calm himself down by breathing in and out slowly. He cannot shake the feeling that he has missed something, as if he has made the irrevocable decision to be in the wrong place. Suddenly he sees a cat in front of him, and he recognizes it as the cat in the photographs on Rita’s bulletin board. It is sitting behind a patio door cleaning its front paws with a knowing expression on its face, as if it were responsible for the two wrists being roughly pressed together in an apartment at the other end of town. A boy’s fair head appears in the gap of a half-opened bedroom door. A look from those eyes, widened in shock, drives a splint into the father’s brain. A metallic click as the handcuffs snap shut. A hysterical blond woman runs down the hall, dissolving. She is not trying to scratch the people in uniform but the man in the middle.

You have a son!

The scream performs somersaults and is cut off by the crash of a door slamming shut. Blue light flashes rhythmically over the backdrop of an overcast day. The cat leans its head to one side and scratches itself behind an ear.

The series of pictures does not stop when the man in his mid-fifties packs his markers and leaves the train.

A woman in a flowery dress and a cardigan pushes her thick curls back. Sitting opposite her is a man, now free of handcuffs, but with a gray face. A lovely couple. The hatred between them spreads swiftly, like a gas diffusing through the room.

Do you know why you are here?

Where is Detective Schilf?

I am the one heading this investigation.

The woman’s look suggests a score of over 90 percent in the shooting range. The man grows paler. Schilf clutches at a suffocating feeling in his chest. The woman laughs through her nose and switches on a recording device. She tells the man about his right to remain silent, to lie, or to hook up with some crooked lawyer. The man does not want to know about his rights.

He dictates his confession and says that he was blackmailed. The cat stops moving when a sparrow lands on the patio. The woman lets the man talk and updates him on the investigation. There are no traces in the car. The son knows nothing. The people at the service station know nothing. There are only those two calls to his mobile from withheld numbers, and he could have made those himself, if he doesn’t mind her saying so. The sparrow decides to look for another spot to rest. The cat feigns indifference. The man says something now about rights and justice. The woman flips through her papers and then she says:

You may go now.

The man is at a loss.

What did you say?

Don’t leave town, and be prepared.

The woman assumes an official air and takes notes. The man does not move.

Kindly put me on remand.

The cat smiles. The train drills into the next wall of rain.

If you’re going to rip my life to shreds, the man screams, then please at least keep hold of the remains!

The woman in the flowery dress takes a deep breath and bellows so loudly that her voice echoes throughout the corridors of the police department:

Out!

The train has drawn into a station, so Schilf steps outside, paces up and down the platform angrily, and lets the rain cool his face. His heart tells him that it would have been better simply to have taken Sebastian out of the country, but his head tells him that it was right to follow the path of law.

So Schilf stands in the rain and says to hell with head and heart, in equal measure.

The good news is that he has gotten out of the train in Basel, where he has to change trains anyway. In the InterCity train a man in his mid-fifties with a handlebar mustache is sitting opposite him, looking down at a book without moving his eyes. By the time they get to Delémont, he has not turned a single page. He looks exactly like the man with the markers.

If it is my consciousness that is creating the world, it clearly doesn’t have much imagination, the detective thought, the detective thinks.

He gulps down two more ibuprofen. See you again soon, the man with the handlebar mustache says in Geneva.

THE WATER OF THE RHÔNE HAS BEEN SCULPTED into blades of black that sweep into the city in long rows. It is unusually dark for nine thirty on a summer’s evening. Yellow light runs from post to post along the embankment and over the bridge toward the city center. In this bad weather, the detective is practically alone with the elements.

Schilf tries out an Où se trouve on a taxi driver, and is rewarded with the dour pointing of a finger that takes him directly to the right alley. He steps into the entryway and presses the doorbell with his wet finger. He takes his time with the stairs. Light streaming through a door left ajar takes the place of a greeting from the host. A stack of rugs prevents him from opening the door fully.

Schilf realizes what he expected to find behind this door only when he is confronted by its opposite. This is no minimalistic penthouse, there is no picture window, no Japanese furniture on shining parquet. Instead he finds an overflowing Aladdin’s cave that has not been cleared out since its occupant’s youth. Schilf obeys an impulse to take his shoes off. He steps with stockinged feet into a room stuffed with furniture like an antiques shop. Postcards and newspaper cuttings cover every available space on the walls. Shelves bow beneath jumbles of books. There are porcelain figurines everywhere, wrist-watches without hands, glass paperweights, and foreign coins. From the ceiling lamp hangs a stuffed crow whose wings can be moved by pulling on a cord. On a sailor’s chest beside the leather armchair is a child’s drawing: a small stick figure with yellow hair and a taller one with black hair; a great big smile shared between them; signed with a clumsy “L.”

The master of the house sits cross-legged on a cushion in the middle of his private museum, waiting patiently for the detective to finish looking around. In this environment, his carefully combed hair and his white shirt are a kind of self-parody. When Schilf finally sinks into the upholstery of the battered sofa, Oskar lifts his chin, opens his mouth, and speaks.

“Surprised?”

“I have to admit I am, yes.”

“I don’t see any point in cleaning up after my own past. Cumulative chaos is a way of measuring the passage of time.”

He leaps to his feet with predatory agility.

“May I offer you something to drink?”

“Yogi tea, please, in honor of a summer that has suddenly died.”

Oskar raises an eyebrow.

“There is nothing that cannot be had in this apartment.”

Almost as soon as he has left the room, Schilf struggles out of the sofa cushions and slips into the room next door. Under another petrified mass of objects is a desk with its top drawer pulled out. The photograph is in a silver frame of the type in which other men keep pictures of their wives. Sebastian can’t be older than twenty and is wearing a silver cravat and a frock coat. His laugh is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down to the observer.

“A lovely boy, n’est-ce pas?”

Oskar has entered silently over the stack of rugs. When Schilf turns around, they nearly clash heads. Schilf sees himself in the other man’s black eyes. The master of the house takes the picture out of his hand gently.

“There are few things that are sacred to me.”

“I felt a fondness for your friend right away,” Schilf says. “And I think he felt the same about me.”

“That is the fondness of the bird food for the bird. Come with me.”

Oskar puts the photograph back in the drawer and bundles the detective out of the room. The steaming cups of tea on the side table prove that Schilf has spent at least a quarter of an hour gazing at the photograph. Oskar pours a dash of rum from a white bottle into the cups.

“None for me,” Schilf says.

“I make the rules here.”

The fumes of alcohol prick the detective’s nostrils like long needles even before he takes his first sip. Behind his forehead, something contracts and then expands to twice its original size. Schilf drinks. He feels the alien heartbeat in his head more clearly than ever before. The crow hanging from the ceiling lamp flaps its wings and shadows glide up the walls. Oskar’s face is a solid plane in a web of intertwined curves. Say something, the detective thinks.

“Has Sebastian confessed?” Oskar asks.

“If not, you’ve just betrayed him.”

“Surely not, Detective. I know that you’re not as stupid as your profession would suggest.”

“Did Sebastian tell you that?”

“If you’ve come here hoping that I’ll incriminate him…” Oskar leans forward. “I’d rather rip out my tongue with my bare hands.”

“Now you’re the one playing dumb,” the detective says.

The next sip of tea is better than any medicine. The pressure in his head eases off and the alien heartbeat becomes a monotonous buzz that affects his hearing but not his ability to think clearly.

“I’ve handed the murder case to someone else, by the way.”

Oskar does not permit himself the slightest flicker of surprise. He looks at the detective’s mouth expectantly and lights a cigarette, which Schilf counts as a success.

“I’ve seen you on television. I was impressed by the program. May I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you believe in God?”

It is impossible not to like Oskar when he laughs.

“Sebastian was right,” he says. “You are an unusual detective.”

“So he did talk about me.” Schilf blushes—perhaps it is the alcohol. “Will you answer my question?”

“I’m a religious atheist.”

“Why religious?”

“Because I believe.” Oskar blows smoke off to one side politely. “I believe that the existence of the world cannot be conclusively explained to us. It takes a truly metaphysical strength to accept this.”

“A strength that Sebastian does not possess?”

“You’re touching on a sensitive point. The grown-up Sebastian you have met is actually still the boy that you saw in that photo. Like all boys, he longs for a world in which one can be both a pirate and a bookworm.”

“What do you mean?”

Oskar watches as Schilf pours himself more tea and pushes the bottle of rum across the table.

“Sebastian loves his life,” Oskar says, “but he still wishes he had not made a certain decision many years ago. Back then he leapt over a wall to save himself.”

“What’s behind the wall?”

“C’est moi,” Oskar says. “And physics.”

“A tragedy of classical proportions.” Schilf blows at the steam rising from his cup.

“Irony doesn’t suit you.”

“I meant that seriously.”

“Then you’ve understood what I am talking about.”

They hold each other’s gaze until Schilf looks away and takes his cigarillos out of his pocket. Oskar stretches across the table to give him a light, and stays in that position.

“Intelligent people,” he says, “often pour their despair into scientific formulae. In order to be happy, a man like Sebastian would need a second, a third, perhaps even a fourth world.”

“So that everything that is possible happens,” says Schilf.

Oskar’s features soften into a laugh again, and he runs his fingers through his hair.

“You really are good,” he says, letting himself sink back. “So you’ll understand why the idea of several contradictory things happening at the same time is very attractive to some people. And why it’s like a nightmare, too.”

He looks intently at the glowing tip of his cigarette, takes a final drag, and stubs it out in the ashtray. The stuffed crow has swung nearer. To Schilf, it looks like it is hanging directly over Oskar’s head.

“Thinking like that negates the validity of every experience,” Oskar continues. “It negates us.”

“Perhaps Sebastian has realized that now.” Schilf lets ash fall onto the carpet. “After the kidnapping, which he’s constantly talking about.”

The remains of a laugh play in the corners of Oskar’s mouth.

“Yes,” he says, “perhaps.”

“Sebastian and his family,” the detective says, “are an equation with one unknown. Someone has adjusted one of reality’s screws. It’s the right way to create a false picture. When a person deludes himself into thinking he is in charge, reality puts her fat arms on her hips and leers at him. On the contrary, a good lie is the truth plus one. Don’t you think?”

“To be honest, you’re talking rather confusedly.” Oskar’s eyes bore into Schilf’s face.

This time it is the detective who laughs.

“You may be right,” he says. “Do you know that your friend doesn’t really hold to the Many-Worlds Interpretation at all, but is pursuing advanced theories on the nature of time?”

“Did he tell you that?”

Schilf nods.

“That doesn’t matter,” Oskar says, suddenly brusque. “He’s looking for new ways to escape himself.”

They are silent until the final echoes of the last sentence die away. Schilf’s body fills the corner of the sofa like a soft mass that would feel comfortable in any given position, while Oskar sits with his legs stretched out before him, looking ahead with hooded eyes.

Finally the detective speaks. “Do you love Sebastian?” he asks.

“A good question,” Oskar says, still sitting in the same position.

There is a pause, and Schilf stands up. With his cigarillo in the corner of his mouth, he walks over to the dormer window, where for a moment the view takes his breath away. The steps to Oskar’s apartment have taken him right up to the sky. From this bird’s-eye view, the city is a circuit board of twinkling lights. Rows of diodes connect up into a network of communicating lines, like letters of the alphabet.

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

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

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

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

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

The spray soaks their clothes. It is warm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And today?” Schilf asks through clenched teeth.

“Today I am an old man.”

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

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

“I suspected it.”

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

“And he refused?”

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

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

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

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

“Come. Let me help you.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What have we got here?”

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

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

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

Oskar knits his brows and looks at the game again.

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations, the screen flashes.

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

“Yes,” Oskar says. “Mated.”

“You’re a genius.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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