In Free Fall

[1]

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

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

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

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

“Do you have the postcard with you?”

“Did you write to me?”

“Yesterday. It was important.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’d best have a look,” Julia says.

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

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

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

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

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

With a contented sound Julia leans into his arm.

“Don’t go,” Schilf whispers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schilf nods.

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

“And who is who?”

The detective does not answer.

He enjoys watching the program a second time. The presence of the two men is even stronger on the larger screen. Transfixed, Schilf notes every look and every gesture, observes Oskar’s predatory elegance and Sebastian’s nervous watchfulness, and registers the fluctuations in tension. Julia yawns and looks bored.

“One universe,” Oskar says. “With no possibility for escape. That’s what you should be researching. That’s where you should be living.”

When the discussion gets livelier, Julia sits up.

“What are they fighting about?”

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

“Wait a minute,” the detective says.

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

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

Julia presses both hands to her ears with a scream.

“What’s going on?” she says angrily.

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

“Listen.”

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

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

“Now,” Schilf says, leaning forward.

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

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

“Turn it off now,” Julia orders.

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

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

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

Julia settles back into the sofa contentedly and takes her cup off the armrest.

“What strange methods of investigation you have.”

When Schilf grabs her by the shoulder, coffee spills onto her bare legs and leaves a dark spot on the sofa cover.

“Hey!” Julia shouts. “Are you crazy?”

He lets go of her immediately and his elephant eyes look her in the face.

“What did the man say?” he asks pleadingly.

An artistic work of transformation plays over Julia’s features: first indignation, then astonishment, and finally mockery.

“What do you mean?” she says. “It was perfectly clear.”

She looks first into one of the detective’s eyes, then into the other, before a glow of realization dawns on her face.

“I see,” she says. “You haven’t read Orwell!”

“So?” the detective prompts.

“That is doublethink,” Julia says. “It means holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. In Orwell that is a practice of totalitarian systems.”

“No,” Schilf says. It sounds like a cry for help. Julia takes his hand, looking concerned.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you think it works?”

“Yes, yes.”

“There you go. And that guy there,” she indicates Oskar, who is still pointing his finger and smiling devilishly, “thinks that guy there”—Sebastian, sitting next to the host, is flickering on the screen—“is particularly good at it.”

“Doublethink must go,” the detective says.

He can’t stop staring at his girlfriend; his frozen gaze needs somewhere to land. His heart is beating like a drum. The black king has forced itself into the farthest corner of H8. The white king has fallen off the edge of the board. Chess pieces whirl around and sixty-four squares have torn themselves apart, clattering onto the hard ground.

Is the existence of mankind in the world not enough of a misunderstanding? the detective thinks. Must aural misunderstandings add to the confusion?

And: When branches surface at two different places in a pond, they can absolutely belong to the same bough.

He feels gentle fingers stroking his cheek. This time they are not his own.

“Have we solved the case?” Julia asks tenderly.

“Fuck, yes,” the detective says.

[2]

TO SENIOR POLICEMAN SCHNURPFEIL, Rita Skura is the most beautiful woman in the world. There has never been a more beautiful woman and there never will be, unless they were to have a child together. Schnurpfeil does not think of himself as a clever person. He has not experienced much, and therefore has not much to tell. He also has no particular abilities that would distinguish him in a crowd. But he knows that he is good-looking and feels that, for this reason alone, he is a good match for Rita Skura. Besides which he has been exemplary in his loyalty to her. And she doesn’t have a boyfriend. She is married to her ambition, and this quality, as Schnurpfeil’s perusal of the pay-banding has told him, will bring her a considerable income one day. Rita will pursue her career and earn more and more, first enough for two, then for three or four. Schnurpfeil would not mind staying at home and taking care of everything for a woman like Rita; on the contrary, he would be proud of her. His plans are clear, well thought out, and quite flawless. He just hasn’t found the right moment to present them to her.

The senior policeman leans back in the passenger seat of an Austrian police car and gazes at a landscape that looks as if it were shorn every morning by a lawn mower. When Rita had asked him if he fancied a trip to the Bregenz region, he imagined blue skies, white clouds, and green meadows, all of which are very much in evidence. But Schnurpfeil also thought of the safety belt between Rita’s breasts, and of her brown eyes with the sun smiling out of them. He said yes so enthusiastically that Rita gave him an odd look. Schnurpfeil didn’t mind this. Odd looks were the least of his troubles when it came to the detective.

However, now it is not Rita sitting next to him but an Austrian policeman whose stomach barely fits behind the steering wheel. He lets rip at the hordes of tourists on whom he and his countrymen depend. The town center in Bregenz is full of people who behave as if their visitors’ taxes have paid for an all-day pedestrian zone, so reluctant are they to make way for cars. Schnurpfeil can at least be thankful that he does not have to find his own way to a place called Gwiggen. On the backseat, his green police cap and the Austrian’s white one lie next to each other harmoniously, a symbol of international police cooperation.

When the car starts creeping up the foothills of the Pfänder mountain, swinging heavily from side to side on the curves, the Austrian releases a sigh that smells of Jagdwurst. He comments on the beauty of the landscape as if he had discovered it himself. Schnurpfeil does not understand how someone can be proud of a region that is too kitschy even for a postcard. Anyone not wearing lederhosen or a dirndl looks out of place here. This scenery might have been the right environment in which to discuss his life plans with Rita. But now he has no choice but to bring the detective the information that she needs: all of it, quickly and thoroughly, to her full satisfaction, as he always does.

The car finally judders over a dirt track and comes to rest in the shade of a thoroughly German oak tree. The Austrian wipes his neck with a checked handkerchief and puts his seat back, while Schnurpfeil gets out and walks toward the wooden house. With its wide balcony and its intricately carved gables, it looks like a giant cuckoo clock. In the meadow, a tower made of wooden posts, barrels, and cable rises up so mysteriously that the senior policeman does not even attempt to guess at the purpose of this construction. In the distance, a group of children is running along the edge of the forest.

Inside, the building smells of tea and shoes. There is no one at reception or in the dining hall. Schnurpfeil opens and closes numbered doors, and looks into room after room full of bunk beds until he stumbles upon a boy and a girl in a shabbily furnished office. His appearance throws them into some confusion. The fat boy stares at the police badge, his eyes bulging as if his head is bursting with sheer concentration. Schnurpfeil decides to address himself to the girl. Her hair is shaved at the sides and tied in a ponytail. When she speaks, the stud of her tongue piercing clicks against her teeth. Once the senior policeman realizes that these are not children on vacation but two of the group leaders, his tone becomes more formal.

They remembered Liam, yes, of course. His father had caused a stir when he came to pick up his son out of the blue. The girl had helped the poor boy pack. Head lowered, he had folded his socks one by one and insisted on making his bed exactly as they had all learned on their first day.

Who had brought the poor boy here?

The two group leaders look up at the ceiling and grimace. Difficult to say. On the first day, about a hundred children arrived in Gwiggen. It could have been the man who picked him up, but perhaps not. In any case, the man wasn’t particularly tall. And wasn’t especially short, either.

Schnurpfeil loses patience immediately. He has always found it difficult to take people with Austrian accents seriously. With an imperious movement he waves the fat boy away from the chair behind the computer, sits down, and grabs at a tattered ledger that is lying open on top of a pile of magazines. The book contains charts full of information: arrivals, departures, details of age, gender, illness, dietary requirements, details of deposits. All the entries are in different inks and different handwriting. Leafing through the pages, the senior policeman finds Liam’s name under number 27. There is his date of arrival, but no other comments. As he is about to put back the book, a piece of yellow paper falls out from between the pages.

In round handwriting: Stefan, no. 27, not coming because of flu. The father rang. F.

Schnurpfeil asks the girl if she wrote this.

She shakes her head vigorously. F is another person. And the note was wrong. The poor boy was there. Just left early. Why does the officer look at her so strangely?

Schnurpfeil sinks back into the chair as the group leaders discuss the situation. He clenches and unclenches his fists, observing the play of muscles in his forearms. He thinks about the moment when he will report back to the detective. Perhaps he will claim that the forgotten note was lying hidden in the pile of magazines. Rita Skura will look up at him and push the hair away from her forehead, showing him her armpits. Thank you, Schnurpfeil, well done.

The silence in the room brings him out of his reverie. The fat boy is staring at him and the girl has disappeared to fetch reinforcements. A few minutes later, Schnurpfeil is surrounded by children who all look like Liam, whose photo he has seen in the file. High voices screech and sticky fingers reach out for the leather holster containing his weapon. Schnurpfeil does not like children, other than the ones he will bear with Rita Skura.

He jumps up and makes his way to a man towering over the throng. That’s Stefan, the boss, the fat boy says. With his untidy beard, Stefan looks like an eternal conscientious objector. He speaks in a nasal tone that infuriates Schnurpfeil.

He couldn’t leave the scouts alone in the field, so he brought them in. He knows nothing about a phone call or flu. There’s a lot going on, he doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head. And he doesn’t understand what’s so important about this now.

Schnurpfeil grabs Stefan by the arm and presses hard.

Yes, of course he remembers. A tall man brought the sleeping Liam to Gwiggen and carried him into the house in his arms.

The senior policeman strengthens his grip, whereupon Stefan remembers that the man had dark hair. And when the senior policeman adds the pressure of his other hand, he also remembers that the stranger had really piercing black eyes and a really arrogant face. He is really sure that this was not the same man who took Liam away a few days later.

Schnurpfeil puts away the yellow note, takes down F’s full name, and wishes everyone good day in his purest German before he blazes his way through the babbling hordes of children and leaves the room.

The Austrian officer has fallen asleep in the car and wakes with a start when Schnurpfeil shakes him by the shoulder and asks him for the car phone. Of course it would be more pleasant to deliver the news in person. But Rita Skura does not joke about such matters. Complete. Thorough. Swift. Satisfaction guaranteed.

The senior policeman picks up the receiver and moves it as far from the car as the cable will allow.

“Mission accomplished, boss!”

“Enough of that Starship Enterprise crap,” Rita says. “Spit it out.”

It is precisely these retorts that Schnurpfeil most loves about Rita Skura.

[3]

“JULIA? IS THAT YOU?”

“Far from it, Schilf. Why do you always answer the phone with a question?”

This has never occurred to the detective before. It is probably just the way he is.

“And who is Julia?”

“My girlfriend. I told you about her, in a moment of weakness.”

“Whatever you say!” Rita is in a good mood. “I probably didn’t believe it.”

“Same here.”

“Very funny. I’m calling to lecture you.”

“All right,” Schilf says morosely. “It’s an upside-down world.”

Rita has not phoned at a good time. The round foyer has the acoustics of a cathedral. Schilf tucks himself between two pillars beneath a cupola painted with the constellations of a winter sky. Downstairs, people are milling about as they wait for the program to start. They peer into display cases set in the walls or stand in small groups chatting. The floor shakes when a train passes behind the building.

“The theme of today’s lecture is: ‘What it feels like to have a case snatched away from under your nose.’”

“Go on, then.”

“Do you know who took Liam to scout camp after the supposed kidnapping?”

“Yes.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Certainly not.”

Rita Skura sucks air through her teeth. The hissing sounds like a false bottom being moved aside. The conversation stagnates, while her good mood changes into its opposite.

“Then say who it is,” she finally huffs.

“Oskar.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s the truth. How about you?”

“My people were in Gwiggen.”

The detective can’t help smiling. He knows that the role of Rita’s “people” is played by Senior Policeman Schnurpfeil.

“I received a description from Gwiggen. It matches a photo in the murderer’s desk drawer.”

“What were you doing in Sebastian’s desk?” the detective asks sharply.

“A search,” Rita says. “That tried-and-tested tool of police investigations.”

“For God’s sake! Why don’t you just stop this nonsense and leave him in peace?”

“It’s perfectly simple, Schilf. He killed a man.”

“He’s confessed.”

“I’m looking for a motive.”

“Then you can call me!”

Startled by the loudness of his own voice, Schilf claps a hand over his mouth. Carefully, he leans over the balustrade. No one looks up at him. The two people he would like to corner are standing in front of a glass case containing globes of various sizes. A pyramid-shaped piece has been cut from each, revealing the colorful stripes inside.

“I’m not calling with questions anymore,” Rita says, “but with answers.”

When the two people turn away from the display case, Schilf lifts his gaze to the solar system hanging from steel cables in the middle of the foyer, turning like a giant mobile. Schilf envies the drive toward orderliness that keeps the planets on course. He has looked up the second law of thermodynamics on the Internet: In any system chaos increases constantly unless immense amounts of energy are used to stop it. Schilf has clearly not had enough energy even to protect Sebastian from Rita’s search. His apartment must look as if a tornado had passed through.

“Anyway,” he says, “I’m happy that you finally believe it.”

“Believe what?”

When Schilf’s targets stop in front of the next display case, a spotlight casts a halo of light around their blond hair. Two angels striding through space, the detective thinks.

“That you finally believe in the blackmail.”

“For goodness’ sake.” The cheerful Rita has disappeared. It is the police officer who is talking: cool, unscrupulous, and efficient. “You don’t seem to be up to speed. This Oskar person who brought the kidnapped boy to Gwiggen is Sebastian’s best friend.”

“The stuff of Greek tragedy,” Schilf says.

“I call that being an accessory to murder, and very clever, too. The professor has to get rid of a rival. His friend fakes a blackmail. Much better than a shaky alibi. I knew from the start that this was a crime of passion.”

“And that’s why you proceeded from the opposite of this conviction, right?”

“In any case,” Rita says, “crimes of passion are terrific. Crimes of passion have nothing to do with the hospital scandal.”

“Listen to me!”

The panic that the detective has made such an effort to suppress bursts forth so strongly that Rita falls silent for a moment. Schilf leans his forehead against a sandstone pillar and forces himself to speak quietly.

“You’re right, it could have happened that way. But I swear to you, Rita, that it didn’t.”

“Schilf…”

“It was a silly boy’s prank, thought up by a particularly dangerous boy. It was a great love, the Many-Worlds theory, and a masterwork by the most ruthless criminal that exists on this earth: coincidence. So ruthless that I prefer not to believe in him.”

“Detective Schilf?” Rita says. “Are you listening to yourself? Silly boy? Great love? Coincidence?”

“I can explain it all,” the detective whispers.

The little angel has reached out an arm, and his fingertips follow the lines of text on a board. He is saying something. The grown-up nods.

“I’ll bring the person who is the real culprit to you. He’ll confess. You can tell the powers that be that the case has been solved. Stop trying to beat me, Rita—help me!”

“But what are you expecting me to do, Schilf?” Rita cries.

The detective holds the phone away from his ear so that he can dry his forehead and cheeks. There is a ripple of movement below. The first few people are walking toward the stairs. Schilf bends down and picks up the briefcase wedged between his feet.

“Are you doing anything tonight?” he asks.

“Of course not.”

The two angels are floating up the stone staircase. Schilf retreats farther behind his pillar.

“I have to sort something out here first,” he says. “Don’t do anything. Be prepared.”

“One more question. Do you think this case has anything to do with hospitals at all?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“OK. See you later.”

The detective slips the mobile phone into his trouser pocket and waits until everyone else has entered the auditorium. Then he, too, produces his ticket and slips inside.

IT’S DARK. There are no seats. Everyone is clustered together looking at the dome above them, which is lit with a bluish glow. A teacher tells her giggling class to sit down on the floor, as they can’t keep their balance in the dark. The detective has some difficulty keeping his balance, too, as he pushes his way through the crowd. A giant spiral is beginning to turn in the artificial sky. E = mc² shoots across it like an asteroid. The children screech excitedly and duck.

“In the great play of Being, we are actors and spectators at the same time,” a male voice announces to open the show.

Schilf has found his two angels and is standing directly behind them. Every time the taller one moves her shoulders, the smell of her silky hair rises. She smells quite different from Julia—even sweeter. The aroma, as that of lime-blossom tea, calls forth images from the depths of his memory. This is my new past, Schilf thinks. I’ll remember this when I go: a man, a woman, and an excited boy turning their faces up to space. Perhaps a caress on the back, too, interlinked fingers, and a child’s head that fits neatly under the palm of the hand. Schilf almost taps his two targets on the shoulder; he stops himself just in time. Here, right in front of him, are two people whose future he is responsible for. Fate has united them with him in a tiny speck on the outer crust of this planet.

The time for unconscious living is past, the detective thought, the detective thinks. In the last few meters, life can no longer be worn like a shoe that you don’t notice as long as it doesn’t pinch your foot.

For a moment, Schilf is filled with such happiness that he feels like crying. But like most people, he has long ago exchanged the ability to cry with the desire for revenge. He understands perfectly well that he can no longer build a true home for anyone. He can only punish anyone who dares to destroy something as precious as a true home.

The detective takes a step backward; he has to concentrate to avoid tipping over. He feels the pulse inside the bird’s egg, and the way the second law of thermodynamics is working to throw him and his case into a state of increasing chaos. Soon he will no longer have the energy to fight against the dissolution. He has to make one final effort now. There is half a day and one night left. It is his last chance to put things in order. The two angels are holding hands. Images showing the collision of accelerated particles play in their hair.

“From all the possible outcomes, the one that has actually taken place is determined by the observer,” says the male voice coming out of the loudspeakers.

“I’m here,” Schilf says.

Maike’s back stiffens and she turns her head slowly.

“I know,” she says.

A violent explosion on the screen bathes the auditorium in white light. Every detail of Maike’s face can be seen, cool and impenetrable, like an overexposed photograph. Liam turns around, too, and his eyes look hard, like pieces of blue plastic. When he recognizes the detective, he turns his narrow back on him in a deliberate gesture.

“I can’t stand you following us,” Maike whispers.

“But I’m not following you!” the detective says in a suppressed shout.

“No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon,” the man’s voice continues.

A cartoon cat paces across the dome: the children cheer and a forest of arms rises from the human undergrowth.

“I wanted to ask you how you are,” Schilf whispers.

Maike laughs silently.

“Get lost. There’s nothing else you can get from us.”

The cat is shut inside a cardboard box. Schilf knows what is coming next. His reading on the Internet covered Schrödinger’s cat. As long as no one looks inside the box, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time, in a state called quantum superposition. From Maike’s point of view, Schilf and Rita are in just such a state. Maike cannot distinguish between them. Police work is police work. It is no use explaining that he has saved her husband the agony of remand, but that he cannot do anything about the way Sebastian is treated. Maike would certainly think he was lying.

The frantic ticking of a clock is getting on Schilf’s nerves, but he is relieved when he realizes it is coming from the loudspeakers this time, not from inside his own head.

“I’m terribly sorry about the search,” he says finally. “I must apologize on behalf of my colleague.”

“What search? What do you mean?” Maike asks.

“Don’t you know about it?”

“I haven’t been in the apartment since yesterday.”

“So…” Schilf says, feeling horror creep over him. “So you’ve left him?”

“He has left us, in both heart and mind. All we’ve done is move out of the apartment. A mere formality in comparison.”

“No,” Schilf says. “You’re wrong. Sebastian would never—”

“Detective,” Maike whispers, leaning toward him so that Liam cannot hear her, “did my husband murder Ralph Dabbelink?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” Maike says, and turns away. “It’s good to get a clear answer.”

“He didn’t want to.”

“No one does anything they don’t want to do.”

“He was blackmailed.”

“You believe him?”

“Strange, isn’t it? And you’re the one who’s married to him, not me.”

“What I believe doesn’t matter anymore.”

“You’re wrong there, too.”

The detective shifts a little in order to look at Maike in profile. She is not smiling. She also shows no despair, no anger, no pain. She’s a statue, Schilf thinks. Cold inside, outside pure form.

“Imagine three people walking along a beautiful road together,” Maike says. “The road suddenly comes to an end. And one of them beats his way into the bushes and runs off without hesitation. Alone.”

“That image is completely wrong.”

“Could you stop blathering?” a woman standing next to Maike asks.

“Almost done,” Schilf says, lifting his police badge up into view.

“Quantum physics opens up our thinking to an entirely different reality,” the announcer says.

“Everything I’m doing is aimed at proving Sebastian’s innocence,” the detective says to Maike. “And what’s more, to you.”

“Why?”

“I want you to stand by him.”

“Why?”

Because you belong on the postcard that I want to put on the fridge door of my memory, Schilf thinks.

He rubs both hands over his face. He is prolonging this conversation because he likes talking to this woman so much. He has to pull himself together and stop looking at her cloud of hair and her almost white eyelashes. He must make use of the seconds in which she is still listening, her arms crossed and her smooth face turned up toward the dome.

“Listen,” Schilf whispers. “Give me twenty-four hours and I’ll be able to explain everything to you. But I want the real guilty party to do that.”

“This is not my battle. I was cast aside before it began.”

“But Liam wants to know the truth. I promised him the truth.”

Maike glances at him, leans down to her son, and puts a hand on the back of his neck.

“Liam,” she says quietly, “do you still want this man to tell you anything?”

Liam looks over his shoulder and catches the detective’s eye.

“Get lost,” he says.

Schilf buckles as if he has been hit in the stomach. He turns the collar of his jacket up and presses the briefcase to his side.

“Our reality is like the smile of a cat that does not even exist,” the voice from the loudspeakers says.

As the detective wends his away through the crowd, he feels his nose, his mouth, and his ears as if he were learning to recognize himself in the dark through his sense of touch.

“Pardon,” he whispers. “I’m going now.”

Again and again, as if he has to tell every one of the hissing spectators: “I’m going now.”

[4]

THE BRIEFCASE MAKES IT DIFFICULT TO RUN. Schilf wedges it under his arm as he runs past the station and onto Stephan-Mayer-Strasse. The entire city seems to be fired up by his exertion. Passersby turn into multicolored streaks and buildings hold in their stomachs and lean forward to watch him hurry past. A boy runs alongside him for a while, shouting, “Giddy-up! Giddy-up!,” and clapping his hands. It is only when Schilf reaches Sophie-de-la-Roche-Strasse that he slows down. His heart is pounding hard against his ribs. Beneath his feet the ground breathes, the pavement rises steeply heavenward. The detective half expects that he will turn into a murky fluid at any minute.

Bonnie and Clyde drop from the wall into the water and glide toward him, tugging a ripple behind them.

“Quick, quick, quick,” they quack.

Schilf cannot speak, but raises his hand to thank them before he enters the building.

The walls of the stairwell mimic his panting. Schilf pulls himself up by the handrail, step by step. He has not given any thought to how he will get the door to the apartment open in case of emergency. When he gets to the second floor, the door is open. Schilf checks the lock; it is undamaged. Either his colleagues have made a very clean job of it or they were admitted voluntarily. In any case, the open door is no longer a technical problem, but an invitation.

Although Schilf first visited the apartment no more than two days ago, he has difficulty recognizing it even from where he stands in the doorway. Paper is strewn everywhere, the carpets have been rolled up, and the pictures taken off the wall. Everything gives the impression of forced departure and homelessness. Schilf does not have to think long about where to find Sebastian. Certain things always happen in the kitchen, which is the stomach of an apartment, just like the hallway is its legs, the living room its heart, and the study the convolutions of its brain.

All is still in the kitchen. The wire noose hanging from the ceiling casts a sharp shadow on the floor. The ceiling lamp has been removed and placed on top of the table like a suction cup. A chair had been knocked over and its legs are lying against the oven door. The contents of the drawers are scattered on the floor: cutlery lying between candles, string, plastic wrap, and cleaning cloths. Pots and pans are piled up on the windowsill. Sebastian’s body blends seamlessly into the picture. He is sitting at the table, motionless, bent over like a question mark, staring blankly at an empty glass decorated with a picture of two nuzzling parakeets.

“Goodness gracious,” the detective says.

He drops the briefcase and hurries over to Sebastian with both arms stretched out as if he is trying to take something heavy from him. Sebastian lifts his gaze, but does not quite manage to look the detective in the eye.

“Liam gave it to his mother for her birthday this year,” he says, lifting his finger ever so slightly to point at the glass. “We stumbled upon it in a department store. Maike was very pleased with it.”

“How lovely,” the detective says.

“I thought it would be easier. It was quite simple with Dabbelink. Steel cable is steel cable, I thought.”

“That is not just a bad solution,” Schilf replies. “It’s no solution at all.”

“Oskar once said that life is an offer that you can also refuse. But I wasn’t in a position to decide then. Same story my whole damn life.” Sebastian’s laugh turns into a coughing fit. “What brings you here?”

“I have a message for you.”

Sebastian finally raises his head.

“From Maike?”

“No.” Schilf clears his throat. “You’ll find out very soon who it’s from.”

An ambulance siren draws closer, grows louder, and shrieks a high-pitched warning. Its frequency decreases as the vehicle passes.

“The Doppler effect,” Sebastian says. “A great example of how everything is relative.”

Together, they listen to the sound ebbing away. Schilf feels like a surgeon who is allowing his patient a few moments of peace before he cuts away an abscess without anesthetic. This abscess is a mistake. It is the final, the biggest, and the most painful mistake that Schilf wants to cut out and replace with the steel instrument called truth, which will function as a sterile foreign body in the organism of the patient. The detective wishes an anesthetist were present.

“This is going to hurt for a bit,” he says. “Get ready.”

Sebastian looks at him, waiting.

“Doublethink must go,” the detective says.

“What the…”

Sebastian starts to jump up, but sinks back into the chair when the detective places two heavy hands on his shoulders.

“Listen carefully,” Schilf says. “Doublethink must go.”

At first nothing happens. Almost a minute passes before Sebastian lifts his head again and thrashes toward Schilf like a drowning man toward his rescuer. The detective bends over Sebastian and braces himself to withstand the attack.

“No!” Sebastian screams.

“Doublethink must go,” the detective repeats.

“Leave me Oskar! Let the whole disaster at least make sense!”

The uproar ends as suddenly as it started. Sebastian has collapsed and is lying on top of the kitchen table, lifeless. Suicide would have been quite logical in his situation. A man who has lost everything throws his shoulders back, picks up his hat, and leaves the scene. Logic must mean honor. But now there is a new three-word sentence that is much worse than that. “Dabbelink must go” was the tragic command to destroy his own life. “Doublethink must go” is a farce. A grotesque coincidence, a poison that has made everything that resulted from it ludicrous.

The detective understands why Sebastian is so still. He is almost afraid he will find Sebastian’s face transformed into a ridiculous caricature of itself. Schilf’s hands are still on the man’s shoulders. The only thing needed to complete the scene is the ticking of a kitchen clock. Just as Schilf has decided that the only thing he can do is make coffee for them both in the chaos of this kitchen, Sebastian starts laughing quietly.

“Vera Wagenfort,” he says. “I recognized the voice right away. That’s the brunette who sits outside the office of the greatest particle physicist in the world.” He laughs again. “He probably expected that I’d recognize her. That I’d blithely ring him up and call him a scoundrel. Instead I murder someone. It’s true, isn’t it, that we always understand what we want to understand?”

“There might be some truth in that,” the detective says cautiously.

“And I thought I was finished.” Sebastian turns his head so Schilf can see his face, which is pressed into a lopsided grimace on the kitchen table. “Oskar was right. I know nothing of guilt.”

The sob seems to come from somewhere else in the kitchen. It is small and quiet, as if a child has started whimpering. Sebastian puts his hands to his face, his fingers spread wide. His mouth stretches itself into a rectangular opening and releases a toneless scream that shakes his entire body. The detective holds the trembling man close, gripping his shoulders, feeling the shudders running through him. He cannot tell for certain if Sebastian is laughing or crying. There is a neutral point at which all opposites meet. This outbreak, too, is over within minutes. Schilf reaches for a kettle that has rolled under the table, fills it, and puts it on the stove.

“Tonight,” he says, as the water begins to boil, “Detective Skura and I need your help. Can I count on you?”

“You have destroyed me,” Sebastian says in a voice that seems to have been discovered for this moment. “I’m yours.”

“Good,” Schilf says.

He pours boiling water into the cups with one hand while the other takes his mobile phone out of his pocket and presses a key.

“Good evening,” he says into the telephone. “This is Detective Schilf. There’s another game that we have to finish.”

[5]

RITA REALLY OUGHT TO HAVE KNOWN that this would be one of the strangest days in a series of strange days. This morning, the cat threw up on the kitchen table as she was having a hasty breakfast. In the vomit were pieces of the chicken salad that Rita had eaten the night before. She felt nauseous. She perked up considerably after Schnurpfeil called from Gwiggen. The case was solved, the evidence was in place, and, as ever, the final verdict would be a matter for a judge. Rita spent half the afternoon writing her report for the public prosecutor’s office and the interior ministry, but the elation that normally came with the close of a difficult case escaped her. When the telephone rang, she knew the reason why. She might have thought that the whole thing was wrapped up. Detective Schilf certainly didn’t think so.

It is impossible to ignore a cry for help. Rita did as Schilf asked and borrowed a police van. The walrus-mustached police chief had called her up once again and told her that her career depended on delivering a full report tomorrow, a report in which the words “doctor,” “patient,” and “hospital” did not appear. Now she is sitting on the backseat with an avowed murderer, in the full knowledge that her professional future is, as they say, hanging by a thread. When she starts thinking about what kind of net this thread belongs to, she can understand why the feeling of nausea has come back and won’t go away.

The first thing Rita Skura and Schnurpfeil did was collect Schilf and the murderer from the house by the canal. The murderer had a blue and white cooler with him. He climbed into the backseat next to Rita without a greeting, proffering instead an explanation that the box belonged to his ex-family. After that, Schilf ordered them to stop at the cycling club, where he commandeered two racing bikes without any legal justification. The two bikes are now in the back of the VW van, as good as stolen property. The next stop was the forensic department. Their business there finished, the murderer was now looking ahead of him with a rapt expression, balancing the cooler on his lap and stroking the blue lid from time to time. Rita has to stop herself thinking about what the box contains and how it got in there, otherwise she will go mad. Schnurpfeil seems to be feeling the same way. Following Schilf’s instructions, he is steering the vehicle through the city center, but takes the bends so swiftly and brakes so hard that his passengers bow toward each other simultaneously before righting themselves again.

But the worst thing of all is the voice of the first detective chief superintendent. Schilf is crouched on the passenger seat talking to the windshield about branches and ponds and parallel universes and other bizarre stuff. The crazed monologue makes Rita Skura wish that Schnurpfeil would draw into the next petrol station and throw everyone except her out, and simply drive off, out of the city, onto the A5 toward Basel, and go straight on until the sea can be glimpsed between the trees. Sadly, Schnurpfeil makes no move to do this, but is concentrating on the evening traffic. Nothing in his actions betrays the fact that he imagines throwing everyone except Rita out at the next petrol station and driving off with her, until he reaches the sea.

Rita’s fingers drum up a storm on her lap. Schilf’s cry for help has shaken her self-confidence somewhat. Her instincts tell her to call up the chief public prosecutor and request an arrest warrant for Sebastian. But if she is to proceed from the opposite of her instincts, as she normally does, she must stay where she is and follow the ideas of someone of unsound mind. Her method of working doesn’t seem to be effective any longer. Or perhaps it simply cannot be applied to its progenitor.

When Schilf’s babbling stops for a moment, Rita ventures to speak.

“This is madness.” She leans forward and taps her forehead. “You’re dangerous, Schilf. This is totally birdbrained.”

The detective breaks into a sudden fit of laughter that fills the vehicle. He sounds like he is suffocating by the end of it.

“Birdbrained!” he splutters, also tapping his forehead. “That’s a good one.”

“I’m getting out at the next junction,” Rita says.

“At the next junction,” Schilf says to Schnurpfeil, putting his hand on the driver’s forearm, “stop in front of the sports shop.”

The van brakes. Schnurpfeil gets out and slams his door. Schilf passes him the briefcase through the open window.

“Two tops, two pairs of trousers, and two pairs of shoes,” he says. “The jerseys in yellow. And take Sebastian with you for size.”

Sebastian puts the cooler down at his feet as gingerly as if it were a newborn baby in a cot, and gets out of the van. Her mind completely blank, Rita watches him as he walks into the shop with Schnurpfeil. When the two men have disappeared, Schilf puts an arm over the headrest and looks back at her. They are silent. It feels good to be silent, even though Rita knows that this long stare is only Schilf’s way of preventing her from getting out and walking away.

“All right, then,” she finally says. “Give it to me straight, in simple language.”

Schilf presses his thumb and index finger against his eyelids, as if he needs to concentrate intensely.

“Oskar created a parallel universe,” he says, “in which Liam had been kidnapped and not kidnapped at the same time. Sebastian was supposed to recognize what it means not to be able to trust in reality. What it is like to have no ‘either/or’ but only an ‘as well as.’”

“So much for the theory,” Rita says. “Let’s move on to the practice.”

“In a way, the kidnapping was an experiment. But something went wrong. Another memorial to the horror of what we call coincidence was built. And that tangled up the worlds.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t follow you.”

“Imagine two trains traveling next to each other for an instant, at exactly the same speed, totally parallel. At this point, it is possible to change trains. Oskar drew up the timetable, and coincidence created the disaster. And Sebastian slid from one universe into the other.”

Schilf takes his hand away from his face at last. His eyes are glittering.

“Rita, my child, we’re going to create a second parallelism, in order to enable Sebastian to return to his world.”

“You can be really frightening sometimes.”

Rita casts a glance at the cooler, tosses her hair back, and looks out of the window as if she is trying to convince herself that outside, at least, everything is as it was.

“This is what I understand,” she says. “It’s not about this nonsense of parallel universes, but about the fact that Oskar is the one who is really guilty. You’re saying that he has fucked up his friend’s life in order to teach him a lesson about responsibility. And he’s sitting in Geneva pretending that this has nothing to do with him.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying!”

Schilf’s face lights up and Rita cannot bear to contradict him. She allows him to stretch out his hand and pat her on the cheek. Sometimes she wishes that her work still required her to wear a uniform. That would keep the world at a slight distance.

“You want revenge,” Rita says, “justice, a moral victory. All things that have nothing to do with police work. That’s what you yourself taught us in our seminars.”

“I want to re-create a certain order of things,” Schilf says. “Apart from that, you’re right.”

“You’re overstepping the bounds of your responsibilities, and for your own personal pleasure, too. Give me one reason why I should play along, Schilf!”

“All right,” the detective says. “I’ll show you the reason.”

Rita recognizes the documents that he is pulling from his briefcase. They are copies from the file on Dabbelink’s murder. But Schilf is looking for something else. He flips back and forth, dips his hand into the briefcase again, and takes out a semitransparent photograph. The picture trembles between his fingers as he passes it to her. Rita lays the murky photograph against the window.

It shows a cloudy shape at least as wide as a hand—it is oval and so indistinct that it seems to be moving against the black background. Curved around the shadowy center is a tube, white as a maggot and filled with labyrinthine entrails. The whole thing is held together by two layers of skin on the outside: one thick and black in color and the other thinner and pale. Although Rita finds the sight repellent, she cannot tear her eyes from it. At the bottom of the picture is the detective’s name in capital letters.

“Since you constantly seem to doubt my intentions,” Schilf says, “why not simply look inside my brain?”

He rubs the top of his sparsely covered head, with its elephant face sitting loosely on the bone structure in front.

“Take a good look.”

His index finger strokes the back of the maggot and traces the curling outline tenderly. At the bend, Rita notices a patch that looks like a bird’s egg in both shape and size. Schilf taps it with his finger a few times.

“Good Lord,” Rita says.

“No,” Schilf says, “certainly not him.”

Rita Skura sits there staring at the patch, silent, as if the connection between her brain and her body has just been severed. She knows that she should hug him. She would even do it gladly. He smiles bravely, a child turned into a grizzled old man, and Rita wants to hold him tight for a while and press her face against his, not to comfort him, but because she suddenly feels alone, abandoned, as if she is surrounded by marionettes and Schilf is the only other creature on earth who belongs to that dying species: the live human being.

But she can do nothing. She cannot find the right gesture, cannot even smile along with Schilf, although he is looking at her with such warmth.

“How long?” she asks, finally.

“Who knows? A couple of weeks.”

Schilf takes the result of the MRI scan back and puts it in the briefcase at his feet. When he straightens, he and Rita are sitting one in front of the other like passengers on a bus. Rita sees his scalp showing through his thinning hair, and some flakes of dandruff.

“That’s some ammunition, eh, Rita my child? Do you believe that I’m serious now?”

Rita nods. Schilf must have heard that. His smile causes his ears to lift.

A dove has been run over on the road. Feathers dance around the squashed remains whenever cars whoosh past. The traffic light turns red and the cars roll up to it with studied slowness, stopping at a well-calculated distance. A passing woman looks curiously at the police van. On the other side of the road, a young man is whistling for his dog. A cyclist rushes to get off the pavement, and nearly crashes into a child, who drops his ice cream and starts crying.

“A civil war will break out if we stay here any longer,” Schilf says.

“What if he doesn’t come tonight?” Rita asks.

“A man of honor turns up to a duel.”

“How do you know that?”

Schilf turns sideways to look at her from the corner of his eye.

“Shall I take the photo out of the briefcase again?”

The minutes dawdle past, and the door to the sports shop finally opens. Schnurpfeil is laden with colorful plastic bags. Sebastian waves.

“Before I forget,” Schilf says. “The police chief rang me. I’m supposed to go back to Stuttgart immediately.”

Rita sits bolt upright, as if she’d had an electric shock.

“The hospital scandal has dissolved into thin air,” Schilf says, blowing into the palm of his hand. “Puff!”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that my time is limited, on all fronts.”

While Rita huffs, as if she is an overheating computer about to crash, Schilf turns to her once more.

“It was a trainee nurse,” he says. “She gave heart patients blood-thinning drugs before their operations instead of the prescribed tranquilizers. Apparently these pills all look the same. A stupid mistake.”

Rita Skura sinks back into her seat, exhausted. What a ridiculous waste of a few weeks. Sleepless nights, visits to the hospital, neglecting the cat, being unfairly taken to task by her superiors—what had it all been for? Who on earth was interested in an exceptional performance to no end? There was only one way to see it: total failure. The thought has barely crossed her mind before she feels as if she has been declared cured, all without having an operation. She is floating in the air, she could sing out loud. She could kiss the detective or wring his neck.

She doesn’t have much time to brood. Schnurpfeil wrenches the driver’s door open and slips behind the wheel. While Sebastian gets into the back and puts the cooler back on his lap, the senior policeman sits motionless with both hands on the steering wheel, his head hanging like a schoolboy’s.

“Stage fright?” Schilf asks.

“I don’t think I want to go on,” Schnurpfeil says.

Rita sizes up everyone in the van with an appraising look. All at once, she thinks she knows how Sebastian feels. And how Schilf feels. Maybe even how Oskar feels. In the end, it’s simply about confronting total defeat with a brave face. She stretches a hand out quickly and places it on the senior policeman’s shoulder.

“Schnurpfeil,” she says, “I am leading this investigation.”

A smile flits over his face.

“What now?” he asks.

“Back home,” Schilf says, “to wait.”

[6]

JULIA RUSHES TO MEET HIM IN THE HALLWAY of the police apartment with such expectancy that Schilf is happy to have something to offer her. His girlfriend links arms with him as he introduces her to the murderer. Sebastian is lingering by the door that has just closed behind him, and seems quite helpless: too tall and angular for the narrow space. He grips the handle of the cooler. Schilf and his girlfriend are both smiling at him and he looks at them shyly, as if he is facing a court of law.

Schilf had not wanted to leave Sebastian alone again, so had asked him to spend the final few hours before the big event together. When Sebastian hesitated, Schilf turned the invitation into an order. Now Schilf realizes that a detective can no longer be an official when he is at home, in front of his girlfriend. Sebastian is suddenly presented with a stranger and his younger girlfriend, and is wondering what these two people think of him. In front of the police, a murderer is not ashamed of his crime, just as a patient seeing his doctor is not ashamed of his illness. But Sebastian does not have any practice in living with his crime in the personal realm. Like an accident victim, he must learn everything from scratch: speaking, hand gestures, looking people in the eye. The sooner you start, the better, the detective thinks.

Julia reaches out to shake Sebastian’s hand and says that she likes him in person even more than she did on television, and he relaxes visibly. As the detective walks ahead of them into the living room, he realizes that the result of an important experiment has almost passed him by. While climbing the stairs, he was nervous about this meeting between Julia and Sebastian. He had imagined his girlfriend extending her hand to Sebastian and a lightning bolt striking at the same time, reducing her to a puff of smoke. Or, worse still, he had imagined Sebastian entering the apartment and simply walking through Julia as if she were simply not there. Schilf feels a fleeting prick of conscience. He is not sure why this fear surfaced at the crucial moment—because it was so absurd or because he now no longer cared whether Julia disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Sebastian looks around the apartment, and says something pleasant but untrue about it. The detective positions his girlfriend in the open-plan kitchen with her back against the wall and indicates that Sebastian should bring the cooler. Schilf has brought not only the murderer with him, but something special that more or less belongs to the murderer. This needs to go into the freezer, urgently.

“A picnic?” Julia asks.

She chats away, joking about ice cream and cold beer while Schilf lifts the blue lid off the cooler. Dabbelink’s stare turns Julia’s voice into background noise, as if someone has turned the volume down. The skin on the face has dried up and drawn tight over the bones, so the eyes are open and staring, as if the cyclist were speeding toward a taut steel cable for all eternity. The nose is out of joint and the mouth is stretched in an evil grin. The cervical vertebrae stick out of the tangle of severed tubes, white and clean like a handle. Sebastian pushes in front of Schilf; he wants to lift the head of his victim out of the box himself.

“Careful,” Schilf says. “It’s only held in place by skin.”

When they had been standing over the large aluminum drawer in the forensic department, Sebastian bent down low as if to kiss his victim, then looked at the detective with shining eyes. Thank you, he said. Whatever you’re planning, you’ve just saved me from going mad.

Now, although Sebastian takes hold very gently, Dabbelink cannot help grimacing between his hands. Schilf casts a quick glance at his girlfriend, whose gaze is fixed on the head of the dead man, this three-dimensional caricature that was once a living face. Julia does not look as though she intends to become hysterical.

“So that’s what’s left,” she says.

Schilf nods at her. He is relieved to realize once again exactly why he liked his girlfriend from the moment he met her.

Dabbelink does not fit in the freezer at first go, so they scrape the lumps of ice off the sides of the compartment with a knife. Having succeeded, they feel quite comfortable with each other. Julia makes spaghetti and Sebastian lays the small table. Over dinner, they avoid talking about anything to do with Dabbelink, Oskar, Maike, Liam, or what could happen later that night. The only shared topic of conversation is the hospital scandal. Medical Director Schlüter has been suspended, not on grounds of bodily harm with fatal consequences, but because of inadequate supervision of his staff. The familiar public debate over poorly financed hospitals had started again immediately. Schlüter will pursue his career elsewhere. The rest is politics.

They don’t talk much. Schilf is the only one who has a second helping. Never has a meal tasted so good to him.

JULIA INSISTED ON GOING TO BED AFTER DINNER. Why sit around endlessly at the table, weighed down by troublesome thoughts, when they might as well sleep for a couple of hours and wake up at a set time? Schilf envies her deep calm. Her head barely touched the pillow before she fell asleep, as if at the flick of a switch. Her ability to give her body clear commands means that she is as good at falling asleep as she is at sitting still for hours in a life-drawing class. She once said to Schilf that she could not understand the phenomenon of insomnia at all: you have only to turn on your side to embrace a temporary death.

Propped up on one elbow, Schilf watches his girlfriend sleep. She has kicked off the blanket but is holding on to a corner of it, which covers her shoulders, neck, and part of her face. She bears no resemblance to an unplugged machine that by day pulls the wool over Schilf’s eyes. She breathes evenly, snuggled up in her own body warmth like a little planet with its own atmosphere. The longer Schilf looks at her, the more he thinks he has a miracle right in front of him. How can this be: a perfect system which, other than food, contains everything it needs for life!

The astonishment he feels rouses such a clamor within him that he is afraid the sound of his thoughts will wake Julia. He gets up quietly and closes the bedroom door behind him.

He stands in front of an open window. His head is clear, with no pneumatic drill trying to demolish the load-bearing walls. Behind him on the sofa is a large, dark shape: Sebastian, who is perfectly still, as if relieved he no longer has to come up with any answers. The zebra stripes across the room have grown sharper and the moon is tussling with the streetlamps over the color of the light. The street beneath is still covered with a carpet of wood shavings. Schilf remembers the feathery feel of it beneath his feet, and the smell of it, like a circus ring. He lights a cigarillo. The smoke casts shadows on the windowsill that curl around each other, fade, and then start swirling again when he blows the next puff out of his lungs. This is how he imagines the mysterious mesh of reality, the primordial soup at the heart of it all: shadows of a god smoking by a window.

In the kitchenette, the door of the built-in refrigerator glows like a white screen. Schilf crooks his fingers and casts the shadow of a panting dog onto its surface. Apart from the anticipation stirring in his stomach, he feels content. There is so little that a man can achieve in his life. Recognize the smell of a woman. Stroke a child’s head. Beat an adversary in a duel. Think on the nature of things without forgetting that a man takes all his ideas with him one day, when he leaves the world through the well-used back door.

Schilf has gotten through his stock of happiness in the first few decades of his life, and has been operating on his current account since. Many years ago he stopped thinking that death was the worst thing that could happen to anyone. And Sebastian’s explanations about long exposure time have eliminated once and for all any dizziness Schilf felt about standing at the edge of the final abyss. For this reason alone, he shall always be indebted to Sebastian.

Without fear, Schilf can think about his consciousness sinking painlessly back into the froth of information and transformation from which it once rose, and in which it thirsted all its life. He is not even afraid of having to leave an unpalatable block of matter behind, one that is just as hard and ugly as the deep-frozen Dabbelink. The recycling machine called nature will make sure that everything is used again. Whether he is hurriedly buried somewhere, cremated, or scattered over the sea, there are enough plants and animals around to find nourishment in the organic material that is currently still standing in human form at this window, emitting billows of smoke and thinking profound thoughts. They will turn him into something beautiful: green tendrils, blossoms, or colorful plumage. What had only yesterday seemed to him a depressing whirl of unsolved questions has transformed itself into a well-tempered score that has been preserved for millennia. The detective will take care of one last thing, and then go.

A lone dog passes beneath the window.

“What happened to the time-machine murderer in the end?” asks a voice in the darkness behind Schilf.

The detective turns around. Sebastian is lying in exactly the same position on the sofa, and there is no movement to indicate that he is awake.

“Life,” Schilf says.

Smiling, he draws on his cigarillo. He is filled with a sense of well-being by having this man bundled up in a blanket in his apartment; he thinks Sebastian must be aglow inside. He imagines Sebastian sitting in his study thinking about the nature of time, holding a pencil between his thumb and index finger, a cap of sunlight on his head. He hears Liam playing in the next room, and hears the rustle of pages as Maike flicks through an art catalogue in the living room. These images, or so he hopes, belong as much to the future as to the past. Memories that he can take with him.

A few streets away, the dog finishes his nightly walk, curls up on the mat in front of his owner’s door, and thinks of nothing. He does not even speculate about the nature of time, which has no more meaning for him than the difference between being present or absent, something he can control by either opening or closing his eyes.

“He was convicted even though he believed that he was conducting a physics experiment?” Sebastian asks.

“They did not punish him for his convictions, but for his methods.”

“If your plan works, what will happen to Oskar?”

“He will sacrifice a part of his life in order to give you back a part of yours.”

The dog blinks and finds everything is in its place. His master’s shoes are next to him and the mat he is lying on smells pleasantly of himself.

“Do you understand,” Sebastian says, “that it is impossible for me to transform back into myself?”

“Yes,” Schilf replies. “But if we don’t try this, you will become like me one day.”

“Turn into a detective?” Sebastian laughs. “From a murderer?”

The first detective chief superintendent raises his eyebrows. He stubs out his cigarillo and tosses it into the street.

“If Oskar confesses, there’s a good chance that you’ll be acquitted.”

“A life behind bars seems quite desirable to me at the moment.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Detective Skura says that the people in Gwiggen recognized Oskar. You could convict him by conventional means.”

“I’m amazed that a man like you understands so little.”

“I have a very narrow specialty.”

This time they both laugh. Sebastian shifts under his blanket. The detective grows serious.

“The worst always happens afterward,” he says. “It happens when people think that the worst is already over.”

“Go on,” Sebastian says.

“When you visited Oskar in Geneva, he betrayed himself. In the process he betrayed you, too. He of all people offered you a parallel universe, a joint escape, what he most wished for himself. Betrayal weighs heavily on a man. No policeman or judge in this world can deal with it.”

“Yes; go on,” Sebastian says.

“Let’s say you accidentally bump into a woman in the pedestrian zone. She stumbles and breaks her ankle. One week later she is in a car accident. Because of her broken ankle she cannot get out of the car and burns to death. No court will convict you of murder. The police won’t even get in touch with you. But just think what your conscience will say!”

“You want Oskar to face up to his conscience,” Sebastian says slowly.

“His conscience is the only judge who can really exonerate you,” Schilf says.

Sebastian is silent. The detective shuts the window, sits down in an armchair next to the sofa, and spends the next two hours staring at the ceiling.

[7]

“IF YOU CALL UPON A MAN LIKE OSKAR to show up at a clearing in the woods at five in the morning, he will come. Even if he is not given the right to choose the weapons.”

Doubtfully, Rita Skura holds the first detective chief superintendent’s gaze, then she nods. The forest has not yet finished its morning routine: the leaves are moist with dew, glowing as if they have just been washed, and innumerable red foxgloves are yawning with tiny speckled mouths. In the orchestra pit, the birds are tuning their instruments. The human beings look pale in the midst of this collective awakening. The early morning light picks out their every physical deficiency; it shows the rings under their eyes and sharpens the lines around mouths and noses. This morning, Schilf’s headache is not manifested as pain, but as a well-upholstered vacuum. He fingers his neck and touches the handle of vertebrae that is screwed into his skull. He touches the tubes and cables that connect the command center of his entire existence, the only place he ever resides, with the rest of his body below it. He thinks he can feel the skin already drying over his bones, and the corners of his mouth turning up into a diabolical smile that Rita will surely find repellent.

He signals to her; she goes up to Schnurpfeil, who is wearing the yellow jersey and standing forlornly next to a racing bike, and speaks softly to him. The senior policeman leans forward so that his ear is close to her lips. Rita’s hand somehow ends up on his cheek, and her touch turns him into a beaming hero. Schilf watches as the detective and the senior policeman gaze into each other’s eyes. A lovely couple.

The detective did not wake his girlfriend before leaving the apartment. He shook Sebastian by the shoulder, with a finger to his lips. Dabbelink was frozen hard in the freezer compartment. As quietly as possible, they had pried him free with a screwdriver and tiptoed out of the apartment.

Betrayal weighs heavy, the detective thought, the detective thinks.

But he also thinks: I have not asked her about her past. She doesn’t ask me about my future. And that’s what you call a deal. Sleep and death have this in common: they offer only single rooms. You can’t take anyone with you.

Rita takes her hand away from Schnurpfeil’s cheek.

“Go on now,” she says, her tone sharp.

The senior policeman gets on the bike and pedals furiously to get uphill. Schilf watches him conquer the long, curving ascent and pass the inn at the upper edge of the hollow until his tiny figure disappears into the trees, where he will hide himself, bicycle and all. And wait.

Schilf turns away and checks the steel cable with one hand. Sebastian, the expert in such matters, has tightened it to maximum tension, even though that is wholly unnecessary for today’s events.

Schilf signals again and Sebastian, who is wearing the same yellow jersey as Schnurpfeil, gets down on his knees. He stretches himself facedown on the pavement a few meters away from the steel cable so that his body is lying on the road. Rita Skura walks over and covers his head and shoulders, which are at the edge of the pavement, with branches.

When Schilf looks straight up he sees the second bike hanging from the treetops, dangling gently from an invisible nylon rope. On his second attempt Schnurpfeil had managed to loop the rope through the branches as if using a grappling hook. He raised the bike and tied the rope around the trunk of a young birch tree. Schilf now unties the rope, and has to brace himself with all his might against the weight of the bicycle.

Steel cord, dead body, bike.

He gives the final signal and Rita Skura steps behind the tree on the right-hand side of the steel cable, while he takes his position behind the tree on the left.

The orchestra of birds has finished tuning up and is whistling an aleatoric overture. Although Schilf is tense, his heart beats only reluctantly. At his feet, ants are carrying leaf fragments back and forth. No dead caterpillar this time, and no mosquitoes. Schilf’s head expands into a wide room in which thoughts wander with echoing steps.

What if he doesn’t come?

Then the story has no end.

And if it all makes no sense?

Then nothing new will have been said about human life, the detective thought, the detective thinks.

But here he is. He has thought it a good idea to wear a hat and carry a stick; they fit in with this romantic and somehow tragic charade. He looks like a man going for a Sunday stroll a hundred years ago.

Oskar checked into his room in the Panorama Hotel at the summit of Schauinsland late yesterday evening, and paid the bill in advance. He informed reception that, at dawn, he would be going on a long hike. Nobody found that strange. Patiently, he reciprocated the exaggerated smiles of the hotel employees.

He passed the night sitting on the balcony, watching a solid fog fill the crevices of the mountain landscape, thinking about whether the expression “a long hike” sounded strange. He had expected the police to get in touch ever since Schilf had come to see him. He hoped that they would be discreet enough not to visit him at work. He had prepared a reply for every possible question.

It was simply a joke between friends. No one was meant to come to any harm. Everything else that had happened could not, as the lawyers say, with all due and proper care, have been foreseen, so he could in no way be accused of it.

He had not reckoned on an invitation to take an early morning walk in the woods. It was very clear to him that his rehearsed replies would be of no use here. They probably wanted to confront him with Sebastian. Perhaps it was Sebastian himself who was behind the whole thing. Perhaps, Oskar thought, as he spent hour after hour staring into the dark, savagely silent mountain landscape, the detective is not a detective at all but a paid henchman. And Sebastian will shoot Oskar at the very scene of the crime. The question is: Will he toss Oskar a second weapon before that?

Oskar has not wasted a second asking himself whether it was sensible to accept the invitation. In a moment of weakness, he had a vision of himself standing opposite Sebastian in the dawn mist, each aiming at the other with an old-fashioned pistol before they hesitate, lower their weapons, and walk toward each other with arms held wide. He forbade himself this thought immediately. He knows he has lost his friend. Now he wants only to find out what these people have in store for him. He is longing to see how much he means to them. Is the intelligence of a chess-playing detective really equal to his? Nothing would be worse than losing to an inferior opponent.

If this mixture of anticipation and trepidation suited someone who was marching along an unknown path toward an unclear destination, the hike that Oskar had started on early this morning would truly be a long one.

There is a break in the forest. Oskar looks out over a broad hollow, dotted with sleeping cows, dark mounds of flesh in the grass. The road leads up toward the old inn, which looks rather put-upon with its blocked-up windows and doorways. Just before the building, the road swings around toward the left in a steep curve, disappearing between the trees after a hundred meters.

Oskar is happy to have the chance to walk a stretch under the open sky. Every dead tree in the forest is a shadowy man in a long coat, and the snap of every twig is a mysterious footstep. Enjoy the beauty of nature, the detective had said on the phone. Oskar counts his steps to avoid self-reflection. The seconds have slowed down, and are much slower than the tempo of his steps. One after the other they tip over the edge of the present in slow motion. Perhaps it seems that way because Oskar is striding forward so briskly. It happened down there. At three hundred his understanding of the situation begins to slip away. At four hundred he no longer knows what he is doing here at all. At five hundred he has reached the inn. He cranes his neck and squints into the distance. Something is shining in the half-light under the treetops where the road enters the forest.

A bell sounds and he nearly jumps out of his skin. He had not heard the cyclist coming from behind. He just manages to leap to one side as something yellow flashes past him. At the end of the curve the racing bike straightens its course and the cyclist pedals on with his head lowered. Oskar wants to scream. Barely a split second later, the bike reaches the forest. Something explodes onto the road and a shower of metal parts catch the light; screws and rods clink and clatter in every direction. Another split second, and all is silent. Deathly silent.

Oskar’s leather-soled shoes are not made for running on slippery pavement. He slips and stumbles, ducks under the steel cord just in time, and slides to a standstill. He steps carefully over the wreckage of the bicycle. A man in a yellow jersey lies there, his upper body hidden in the undergrowth, his legs stretched out into the road. Oskar stares, incapable of taking another step, completely unable to think clearly. The eloquent inner monologue which has been with him since his childhood, always ready to pipe up, has been silenced. It’s incredible how loudly the birds are singing.

Oskar senses rather than hears the movement behind him. He tears his gaze from the body on the road and turns around. The first detective chief superintendent is standing to the left of the steel cable, still as a waxwork. On the right-hand side is a woman in a flowery dress.

Two sentinels at the posts of a demonic gate.

The woman is holding a man by his hair, a man who consists only of a face and a neck. The eyes are wide open and staring shamelessly at Oskar. The woman starts walking toward him and seems to want to pass the severed head to him; a Salome, only without the silver platter. She stops in the middle of the road and puts the head on the ground. It tips over to one side and rolls toward Oskar, turns a semicircle on a vertebra, and lies still. Oskar realizes that he needs to breathe. His dizziness subsides after two breaths.

“I understand.” He wants to cross his arms but they are hanging too heavily by his sides.

“Sebastian!” he shouts. Nothing in the tableau moves, so he lowers his voice. “You weren’t the expert in doublethink. I’m afraid it was me.”

If he had a saber, he would turn it around now and lay it on the ground in front of him.

[8]

HE EXPECTED THE ATTACK, so the shock from the bird’s egg does not topple him immediately. A whistling in the ears, wherever they may be, a stabbing behind the forehead, wherever that has gone, finally a rip straight across the brain, whoever is using it. A rip through the whole body, cutting the detective in two. A person has two of almost everything—legs, hands, eyes, nostrils—so two people can easily be made out of him.

The first few seconds are not painful. Schilf uses both hands to support his head, in which a determined battle is raging. Something is struggling to break free of a prison in which it has been growing for far too long. A sharp beak pecks against the shell. Black dots dance rhythmically in the field of vision. His eyes are no use any longer, so he cannot see if Sebastian and Oskar are lying in each other’s arms. If Schnurpfeil is pushing his bike up the road to stand next to Rita Skura. Instead he sees a fountain of water rising to infinite heights, and a broken rainbow in the mist. A boy whose hair is dotted with spray stretches his arms out toward the sky, laughing. When he turns around, his face is just as much Liam’s as another boy’s. My son, the detective thinks. They’re all lying, the boy says, pointing at his watch. A blond woman looks down at the boy, smiling. Then she looks Schilf in the eye. We’ll see, she says.

A trembling sensation starts under Schilf’s skin. His teeth chatter violently, as if attempting to grind themselves to powder. He scrabbles in his hair with all ten fingers, looking for purchase. Pain finally scythes his legs. The shell shatters.

The detective keels over and does not hit the ground, loses himself in a fall with neither above nor below. He does not feel his hands and feet any longer, only a breeze on his forehead. His skull has opened, a twitching, a fluttering, something forces its way out. It shakes itself, spreads its wings, casts a rainbow of iridescent light that is more beautiful than anything Schilf has ever seen.

Good-bye, observer, the detective thinks.

A bird soars into the air. Finds its flock. Circles over the city.