In Free Fall (21 page)

“You haven’t drunk your tea, Detective. Are you about to go?”

[5]

THE DETECTIVE, WHOSE EYES HAVE OF COURSE
been anything but blank throughout, thinks it quite unlikely that Sebastian has said all this. But the professor would certainly have said something, and Schilf has filled in the rest himself. He had stirred his tea through the entire lecture, as if expecting to hear another death sentence. Now he stands up, swaying lightly, like a doll struggling to maintain its balance. Fighting his headache, he waits for one of the questions that are the purpose of his visit to surface.

“Who described you as esoteric?” he finally asks.

“Oskar,” Sebastian says.

He looks at the detective through pale eyes. He has some color to his face now, and the way in which his fingers are playing a piano sonata on his lap shows that the talking has done him good.

“Who’s that?”

“That’s an excellent question.”

Leaning his head back, Sebastian listens, as if he is trying to pick out the right answer from the song of the titmice in the wisteria.
Favorite person
, they twitter,
favorite person.

“A great physicist, who is working on a new particle accelerator in Geneva. If you’re interested in physics, you should go. The very bowels of the universe are studied there.”

“By materialists, I assume.”

“You’ve got it.” Sebastian laughs. “Although I’m not at all sure about Oskar any longer. I was wondering only yesterday if we haven’t misunderstood each other all our lives.”

The detective looks at him for a moment longer than necessary before he nods. “Does the particle accelerator have any practical use?” he asks.

“Its by-products do, Oskar would say. For example, accelerated particles are used to irradiate tumors in medical science.”

“Look.”

Schilf is swaying even more than before. He makes a grab for the armchair and his fingers catch hold of a Swiss Army knife that has been driven into the leather of the chair. He puts it on the side table. There is blood on the blade. Schilf’s headache is suddenly gone, as if someone has thrown a switch.

“You’ve been very helpful,” he says.

Sebastian looks at the knife thoughtfully and wonders if it’s a sign, and if so, of what. In an instant he feels completely drained, and when he finally looks up, the detective is already in the hall. He is not walking toward the door, but farther into the apartment.

“The door’s that way!” Sebastian calls, following him.

“I’d like to meet your son before I go.”

“But he’s sleeping.”

“Not anymore.”

His eyes blinking like someone emerging from a matinee into the daylight, Sebastian stays in the hall while Schilf walks toward his son’s room and turns the doorknob.

LIAM SITS ON A CHAIR
that he has yet to grow into, with an open book that he is not reading. The room is dim and so small that the furniture seems to be jostling for space. A ray of light coming through the curtains gilds his head with silver and gold. An angel with a crown of sunshine. Schilf swallows to suppress his emotion.

“Hello,” he says after clearing his throat. “I’m from the police.” And when Liam does not respond, he says, “I’m a proper detective, like on TV.”

The book is clapped shut and Liam turns his chair around.

“I’m little, but I’m not stupid,” he says. “You can talk to me quite normally.”

Looking at Liam’s worried face, Schilf wonders how old the boy is. His soft hair has been pressed down by sleep and his scalp shows through in some places. The face beneath is serious and attentive. Schilf suddenly wonders if this child with his sharp ears can hear the voice of the observer who is asking himself if the sharp ears of a child can hear the voice of the observer. And if that is why Liam is looking at him so strangely.

“Are you in pain?” the boy asks.

Schilf looks around for somewhere to sit and settles on the edge of the unmade bed.

“No,” he says. “Not at the moment.”

Liam puts his book down, which takes three years off his appearance, and turns the chair a bit more so that he is sitting directly in front of Schilf, their kneecaps almost touching.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m investigating your kidnapping.”

Liam looks at his hands in silence, as if he is wondering whether his fingernails need cutting.

“Yes,” he says finally. “The kidnapping.”

“Are you angry about leaving scout camp early?”

“What do you mean, angry?” He rubs his eyes so hard that Schilf feels like taking hold of his wrists to stop him. “My father just picked me up early this morning. He was acting very strangely, and he didn’t tell me what was going on.”

“I know the feeling,” Schilf says. “No one tells me what’s going on either. But there have to be people like us, too.”

A smile spreads across Liam’s face, making him look pleasant as
well as precocious and intelligent. There is something helpless in his eyes, like a small animal looking into the face of an approaching disaster that it can do nothing about.

“Will you clear this all up?”

“Most probably.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

The boy looks down at the floor to hide the glimmer in his eyes, and Schilf puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Liam,” he says. “Were you kidnapped on the way to Gwiggen?”

“Did my father say that?”

“Just give me an answer.”

“My father doesn’t lie. He loves truth above all else.”

“He loves you first,” the detective says. “Then the truth.”

When Liam lifts his head, he looks like a shrunken adult again.

“If I were to say that I wasn’t kidnapped, and my father says the opposite, can we both be telling the truth?”

“Yes,” the detective says quickly.

“Then I’ll say that I don’t know anything about a kidnapping.”

“Who took you to Gwiggen?”

“My father.”

“Are you sure?”

“I was asleep. And when I woke again, it was dark, and I was in a strange bed. Isn’t that what it says in the file?”

“More or less.” With a swift movement Schilf wipes the laugh away from his mouth and chin. “But it’s my job to ask about things that I already know. Could it be that you were sleeping very soundly?”

“Children are like that,” Liam replies earnestly. “Besides, the motion sickness pills make me drowsy.”

“Can I have a look at them?”

“I only had one for the way there and one for the way back.”

The detective nods and looks over Liam’s head at a diagram in a glass frame on the wall. The solar system is depicted in the bottom
right-hand corner, on a dark blue background. An arrow indicates the sun and its planets as a tiny point in a group of twenty fixed stars. Another arrow points from these stars to a barely discernible particle vanishing into the starry mist of the Milky Way. And the Milky Way itself is a fingernail-sized blob in a wider collection of galaxies, which, together with untold groups of other galaxies, form a supercluster. This supercluster is depicted as nothing more than a small patch of mist in the known universe, which is shown as a large hazy layer covering the diagram like a lid. Above it is a sentence: “Galaxies are to an astronomer what atoms are to a nuclear physicist.”

When Schilf changes the focus of his gaze, the glass covering the dark background reflects his face. He feels as if this picture is the only window through which he can look out of this room into the world.

“Does your father tell you about his work?”

“He thinks it’s good that I don’t understand everything yet, because explaining things helps him to think.”

“And you’re interested in what he does?”

“I research time as well. I often used to lie in bed and try to catch hold of a second. I lay in wait and then suddenly whispered ‘
Now
,’ but the second was either not there yet or already over. Now, of course, I know that time is quite different. And that they”—he points at the alarm clock ticking next to his bed—“are all lying.”

“And what is time?”

Liam turns and rustles in his desk drawer with unexpectedly lively movements until he has found a piece of paper and a pen. Schilf bends over him so that he can see better, smells the child-smell of the unfamiliar head, and starts breathing through his mouth. Liam draws two red circles a hand’s breadth apart.

“What’s that?” he asks.

“No idea,” Schilf says.

Liam taps his pen on the paper impatiently.

“Do they have anything to do with each other?”

“They look similar. I can’t say anything more.”

“Very good. And now?”

He puts the tip of his little finger down in one circle and his thumb in the other circle.

“Now they are connected,” the detective says.

“Just imagine that you and I are the circles and that the piece of paper is a three-dimensional space, and that my hand has come from an unknown, higher dimension.”

“You’re talking about coincidence,” Schilf says.

“No,” Liam says indignantly. “I’m talking about the fourth dimension. You asked about time, after all.”

“Your hand is a coincidence to the circles. Or a miracle.”

Liam thinks about this.

“Yes, possibly.”

“Did you think all that up yourself?”

“Almost. My father helped a little. He always says he is basically trying to solve quite simple puzzles.”

“What a pity that the two of us,” Schilf says, tapping himself then Liam on the forehead, “are only small red circles on a flat surface.”

Liam’s laugh does not yet have lines to flow along, but must carve out new paths on his face—yet it emphasizes his strong resemblance to Sebastian. He pushes both hands through his hair exactly like his father does. His forearms do not have a single mosquito bite on them.

“When you were little,” he asks, “did you like researching things, too?”

“Yes,” Schilf says. “I liked talking to insects.”

“But that’s got nothing to do with physics.”

“I used to stand next to the rain barrel for hours, saving bees that had fallen. I used to think about what that meant to the bees.”

“Did you want to be a vet?”

“For the bees, my hand was fate. And a kind of fourth dimension.”

“You’re a freak,” Liam says.

The detective tweaks the boy’s nose playfully, and the laugh they share comes easily this time. Schilf goes to the door. He feels light-hearted.

“Will you remember your promise?” Liam says.

“Do you know Oskar?”

“Yes, Oskar’s cool.”

“Do you think I should visit him?”

“Definitely.”

The detective raises a hand in farewell and Liam waves back.

Sebastian is still out in the hall. He hasn’t moved at all. He is overcome with confusion after hearing murmuring voices and laughter coming from Liam’s room. Schilf walks past him on his way to the front door.

“Good-bye,” the detective says and then repeats, “You’ve been very helpful.”

As Schilf shambles down the stairs to the street, tiles start coming off the roof above him. Beams and rafters and joists fly apart in all directions. The rapid crumbling of the walls runs along the top of the whole building like stitches unraveling in a sweater. The foundation disappears and the earth closes over. A pencil sucks up the lines of an architectural drawing until the piece of paper is blank. The idea of a four-story building in the Wilhelminian style evaporates into mist in the head of the architect. Somewhere in the distance, a cockatoo flies up into the air with a shrill cry of warning.

[6]

“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT NOW?”

“Yes. The heat. Thank you for the water.”

The detective has spent a lot of time recently telling people how he is feeling and thanking them for something or other. It is probably part of getting old, like waking up early.

The young woman bending over him has hair dyed a synthetic shade of red, and reminds Schilf of a film he saw some years ago, in which a girl is running all the time. He means to preface his next question with a gallant gesture, but it turns into a clumsy wave because of the way he is lying on the floor.

“Can you tell me where I am, please?”

“In Freiburg,” the young woman says. “Or were you asking about the name of the planet? Or the galaxy?”

Schilf tries to laugh but stops immediately, because his brain is sloshing around in hot fluid.

“I’m familiar with the constellations. What kind of shop is this?”

“This is the Gallery of Modern Art.”

“Very good. That’s where I was heading.”

“That’s probably why you walked in the door.”

“Very likely. Is Maike here?”

“She’s in the courtyard with the birds. Do you know her?”

“I’m a friend of her husband.”

Schilf allows the young woman to help him up, even though he feels quite steady on his feet by now. Her hair smells of mango, and the fair-skinned arm that she offers him smells of coconut. They pass affronted paintings, bad-tempered sculptures, and a few hostile installations; they get to the back door and linger at the threshold. Schilf feels as if he is looking into a piece of paradise. The walls of the small courtyard are covered in moss, and beams of light slant down through the leaves of an overhanging chestnut tree. The sunlight conjures up the familiar metallic shimmer on the head of the woman who is leaning over the hatch of a large aviary, just as she bent over to unlock her bicycle earlier. The caws of the parrots turn the courtyard into an exotic place, a bit of outback hidden in the midst of Freiburg’s town center.

“Maike, you have a visitor.”

Maike shakes seeds from a box into an earthenware bowl and distributes peanuts on little dishes as if she has heard nothing. Three of the yellow-faced birds flutter to the bottom of the cage and watch her. When she has finished feeding them, she stands straight.

The detective thought he was prepared for anything, but he is nevertheless shocked. Maike’s eyes are expressionless, her lips pressed together. Her face is stretched over her cheekbones like a mask that has grown too small. Her obvious reluctance to engage in conversation allows the detective a few seconds in which to feel moved. There is a shadow over her bright surface, and it seems to Schilf as if it has the shape of a tall man. Suddenly he wants to do everything possible to protect Maike. He wants to sacrifice himself in order to divert catastrophe from her, even though he has come here as catastrophe’s master of ceremonies. Maike stands stiff as a post in front of him—she is nothing more than the wife of a witness, a mere accessory to a case. Not for the first time, Schilf curses his job. The investigator does his work behind a glass wall, he frequently says in his lectures at the police college, always behind a glass wall. Other people’s lives are like his own
past to him: he can look at them, but not enter them, and it is always too late to change things.