In Free Fall (12 page)

Sebastian is sitting hunched over at the dining table, in the same place as the last time he had dinner with his family and with Oskar, not so long ago. His shirtsleeves are rolled up and his arms are crusted with blood. The pale material of his suit is also stained in many places. He can smell himself with every movement. The sweat of fear and sleeplessness and the stink of waiting—he can no longer tell how many days it has lasted.

“What time is it?”

Oskar’s smile turns once again to laughter. “Have you rung to ask what the time is? It’s three in the morning.”

“My God,” says Sebastian. “It’s going to be light soon.”

“You sound odd. As if you were a thousand light-years away and had been dead for a thousand years.”

“That’s about right.”

There is a certain tone of voice, a darkly vibrating melody in the undertones, that sets in whenever Oskar and Sebastian speak to each other on their own. The sound of their voices together creates an intimate space cut off from the rest of the world. To create this space, Sebastian sometimes closes his office door and rings Oskar’s work number. Then he asks him how his day has been, if he’s making progress with his work, and what the weather is like in Switzerland. Now, too, he feels the desire to get Oskar talking, to ask him about how his night has been and to listen to him talk about who he has met and what he has been doing. Lulled by the familiar tones, he would put down the telephone after a while and surrender himself to the emptiness from which he has been trying to escape by calling Oskar.

“Why have you been expecting me to call?” Sebastian asks.

“So that you can tell me the end of the Many-Worlds fairy tale.”

Sebastian has not thought about
Circumpolar
at all. In retrospect, his agitation over it seems so ridiculous that his forehead and cheeks grow warm with embarrassment.

“It’s about something else,” he says quickly. “I’ve killed a man.”

“Oh?” Oskar says.

Sebastian is silent. This indifferent “Oh?” is a crime almost equal to his own, yet it is also a precious gift. It is a tiny but razor-sharp weapon that he can brandish in the face of his conscience whenever necessary from now on. Of course he might have expected this. Oskar is not the sort of man to jump up with fists clenched. He doesn’t throw his hands up into the air or tear his hair out. His relaxed manner is not a front concealing a fearful nature—it is made of granite and its only boundary disappears at the very point that Sebastian’s worldview begins. As always, Oskar is a fatalist, which is why Sebastian hates him most and why he is now eternally grateful to him.

“Dabbelink?” Oskar finally asks.

“How do you know?”

“His picture’s in all the papers. The steel cable got me worried. You remember: Liam and the Nazis in the jeep.”

“I’d forgotten that. I thought it was my own idea.”

“One’s own ideas are rarer than we would wish them to be.”

While Sebastian sinks his head down onto the table in Freiburg, Oskar moves from side to side on his shabby sofa, trying to find a comfortable position. Compared with the flawless appearance of its owner, the state of the sofa is a scandal, but one that Oskar can well afford. He looks up through the skylight. The moon is bright as a spotlight in the theater, bathing the room in white. Oskar lights a cigarette and exhales languid curls of smoke from his mouth and nose.

“Jealous?” he asks. “Over Maik?”

“Nonsense!” Sebastian retorts, a little too indignantly.

“Then what? An escape attempt?”

“Oskar…”

“Or an experiment to prove the irreversibility of time?”

“Oskar! A man is dead. Don’t you give a shit?”

Coming from the mouth of the murderer, this sounds like bad cabaret. Only the seriousness of the situation prevents Oskar from using this opportunity to tease his friend.

“
Cher ami
.” Oskar takes two more quick puffs, then stubs the cigarette out in the ashtray on the floor next to the sofa. “Life is merely an exception in nature. Did you like Dabbelink?”

“That’s got nothing to do with it!”

“Answer me.”

“No, I didn’t like him.”

“Does he have family?”

“Everyone has family.”

“A wife and child?”

“No.”

“Did he have style?”

“Now you’re going too far!”

There is a rustling sound over the phone as Sebastian tugs his shirt out of his trousers to dab his forehead with the tails.

“Mon Dieu,”
Oskar says. “You’re behaving like any old hypocrite.”

Oskar has stood up and opened the skylight. He rests his elbows against the ledge and stretches his back, as though he is going to speak to a large audience. His fatalism is not entirely responsible for his calm demeanor, as Sebastian thinks. Ever since he read about Dabbelink’s death in the newspaper, he has had time to consider every sentence in this conversation. The difficult part lies before him. From now on, every word must count. From now on, every word is a fiber in the rope with which Oskar wants to pull his friend over to him.

He wants to remind him that the entire universe owes its existence to a break in symmetry. Also that the existence of human consciousness is merely a result of this terrible breach, the space between its poles (big and small, hot and cold, black and white) spanned by thought. Without opposites there can be no distinctions, no space and no time; without opposites everything and nothing would be identical. Since distinctions are the basic condition for the material world, how is man supposed to believe in the moral validity of the distinction between “good” and “evil”? Why should one feel appalled about the extinction of a Dabbelink—when it was not even known if the man had style? Oskar laid particular importance on the first few words of the introduction:
Morality is the duty of the stupid. Intelligent people exercise freedom of choice
.

He has just drawn a breath when Sebastian cuts in.

“That’s not all, Oskar. Liam has been kidnapped.”

Individual stars hang on tight in the glow of light over Geneva. The city, thinks Oskar, is an enormous sack full of fear, sorrow, revulsion, and a tiny bit of happiness, tied up at the top.

“Liam is in scout camp,” he says slowly.

“Listen to me,” Sebastian says. “Dabbelink’s death is Liam’s ransom. Do you understand?”

The sofa is directly under the skylight, so Oskar merely has to turn around to sit down again.

“And…” Oskar does not normally break off midsentence. “And is Liam back?”

Sebastian covers his face with his fingers. This simple question would be reason enough to end the conversation and go back to lying on the sofa in the living room. Instead, he starts talking.

After a few coherent sentences (Sunday evening, service station, motion sickness pills) he starts losing himself in details. He talks about laughing truck drivers, ants carrying dead caterpillars, butterfly collectors, and an extended typology of waiting. Talking works well—everything can be described, everything consists of harmless details that add up to an event. When Sebastian has finished, he feels as if he has spoken for half an hour, but Oskar has smoked only a single cigarette in that time.

The silence that follows is a pause at first, then it grows intolerable, and finally becomes a matter of course. Sebastian has told Oskar everything he knows, and the speech that Oskar has prepared is meant for another situation altogether. The silent telephone line is like an open door between two empty rooms. In Freiburg, the first light of dawn is creeping toward Sebastian’s fingertips. In Geneva, Oskar lights one cigarette after another. The twitter of lone birds waking can be heard in both cities. Merciful night dissolves and flows in all directions. In both places, the new day dawns—a rock with sharp edges, ready to peel the skin from the body of anyone who challenges it.

It is light when Oskar speaks again. His voice is a whisper that barely makes it across the distance between the telephones.

“Maik knows nothing?”

“Not yet.”

“Go to the police.”

“What?”

“I’ve thought about it. Go to the police.” Oskar’s breath hisses into the covering of the microphone. “Just tell them that Liam has
disappeared. Once he’s back… Sebastian? Liam will be back. Tell me that you heard that.”

“Yes.”

“As soon as he’s back, we’ll worry about the rest.”

Very little has changed in Sebastian’s posture, although the morning light makes him look even more pathetic than before. His face has lost its luster. The absence of light shows that he has just reached the bottom of the pit. Free fall has ended. Oskar’s decision has exploded a world in which there is no demonstrable reality, and in which there is always the same number of reasons for and against every action. Sebastian stretches out to touch the armrest of the chair where his friend sat the last time they had dinner together, but he can’t reach it—his arm is too short.

“Do you want me to come?” Oskar asks.

“What?”

“Do you want me to get on a train and come to you?”

“No.”

“I’d have done it gladly. Think carefully about what you’re going to tell them.”

“Sure.”

“Sebastian, I…”

The line is dead. Neither of them could have said with any certainty which of them hung up first.

CHAPTER 4, IN SEVEN PARTS

Rita Skura has a cat. The human being is a hole in nothingness. After a delay, the detective chief superintendent enters the scene.

[1]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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