In Free Fall (18 page)

“Let’s get to the point, Schilf,” she says. “I wanted to suggest that you call the police chief.”

He has made a mistake that is stupid even for a beginner. The move was so irresponsibly rash that Schilf can hardly believe it when his knight disappears with a brief flicker of the screen. In the heat of
battle, he has omitted to protect a particular square. He sinks back into the synthetic upholstery, exhausted. Rita’s Corsa is one of those cars that will always smell like new. The detective considers abandoning the game, tipping his own king over and surrendering. He looks out of the window in a rage. He sees light patches on the grassy banks of the Dreisam. Snowdrifts or seagulls that are lying on their fronts with their wings spread wide, or sleeping sheep, if sheep ever sleep—he is not entirely sure on this point. Rita clears her throat.

“Listen, Schilf. Tell the chief that you are urgently needed for the hospital scandal. And leave the cyclist, who you don’t think is important anyway, to me.” She casts him a wary look in the rearview mirror. “The cases are closely connected. We would be working together either way.”

Schilf saves the game for later. He thinks longingly of a world in which he has not made that stupid move with his knight and in which he wins every game against the chess computer, which is why he must always lose in this world: for there is no victory or defeat and no right or wrong; rather: victory
and
defeat as well as right
and
wrong.

“Are you even listening?” Rita asks.

“No,” Schilf says. “But you can keep the cyclist. And the rest of all that nonsense. I’ll take on the physics professor. Now look where you’re going.”

“Why?”

“Because of the traffic light!”

She slams on the brakes, and a treble C rings out. The detective’s slack body folds around the seat belt. He rubs his stomach, groaning.

“But why,” Rita says suspiciously as she reverses the car out of the intersection, “why don’t you want to do the job on account of which you’ve come here specially?”

On account of which
. Schilf knows why he liked Rita Skura from the moment he met her. In her own way, she is as lost in this world as he is. He aims a wintry smile at the rearview mirror. He’s going to be sick if they don’t get there soon.

“At my age,” Schilf says, “you no longer judge crimes by their prominence.”

“Not according to your most recent successes.”

“Listen to me, Rita. You can have Dabbelink.”

Rita does not quite manage to hide her pleasure. She turns into Heinrich-von-Stephan-Strasse with a flourish, lifts her pass up to the machine at the entrance, and parks in the shade of a tree, for the places under the corrugated iron roof have long since been taken. She rests her hands on the steering wheel. In the sudden silence, the birdsong is surprisingly loud.

“I have never forgotten that I must proceed from the opposite of my own convictions,” Rita says. “Going by this rule, I will actually have to trust you.”

“You are a good child,” Schilf says.

The moment of weakness passes. Rita kicks open her door, plants her feet squarely on the ground, and waits with her fists pressed into her sides for Schilf to emerge from the car.

“This is how it’s going to be,” she says. “For as long as you’re here, we’ll be sharing an office.
My
office.”

She locks the car and holds the detective back when he starts walking toward the building. He looks down at her and feels the hint of a fatherly smile on his lips.

“Two more things,” she says. “First—no tricks.”

“I have a new girlfriend, by the way,” the detective says.

“Are you sure she isn’t a social worker who visits you regularly?”

“Not at all sure,” says Schilf. “I’ll get the file on the physicist and pay him a visit. You can look after my bag in the meantime.”

“Second!” Rita screams after him. “No smoking in my office!”

The detective’s laughter is visible in his receding back.

CHAPTER 5

The detective superintendent solves the case but the story does not end.

[1]

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

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

“My name is Agfa,” the parrot says.

“Schilf,” the detective says.

“Look out,” the parrot says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pretty please,” the parrot says.

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

“What can I get you, sir?”

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

“What did you say? You’re diabetic?”

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

“Look out,” the macaw says.

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

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

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

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

“What’s nonsense?” Schilf asks.

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

“My girlfriend and I live in Stuttgart.”

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

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

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

“All nonsense,” she repeats stubbornly.

“How do you know?”

“Intuition.”

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

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

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

“My name is Kodak,” the parrot says.

“Agfa,” Schilf corrects.

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

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

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

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

“Look out.”

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

[2]

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

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