In Free Fall (14 page)

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

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

“A child has been kidnapped,” Schnurpfeil repeats.

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

“How do you know?”

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

“The father?”

“His son has been gone for four days.”

“And he’s only come in now?”

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

“Money?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“He doesn’t know.”

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

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

“But they’ve been in touch with him?”

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

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

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

“All done. He’s sitting downstairs.”

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

“Professor of physics at the university.”

“Thank you, Lord!” Rita shouts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schnurpfeil reaches for a notebook.

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

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

“Good.”

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

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

[3]

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Almost done. Then we’ll be off.”

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

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

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

This time Sebastian would reply,
Yes
.

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

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

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

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

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

“Rita Skura, detective.”

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

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

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

“That will be my wife,” says Sebastian.

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

“Dad?”

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

“Hang on, Dad. Hey, stop that!”

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

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

“Liam,” says Sebastian.

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

“Liam! Are you OK?”

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

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