In Free Fall (30 page)

Schilf tries out an
Où se trouve
on a taxi driver, and is rewarded with the dour pointing of a finger that takes him directly to the right alley. He steps into the entryway and presses the doorbell with his wet finger. He takes his time with the stairs. Light streaming through a door left ajar takes the place of a greeting from the host. A stack of rugs prevents him from opening the door fully.

Schilf realizes what he expected to find behind this door only when he is confronted by its opposite. This is no minimalistic penthouse, there is no picture window, no Japanese furniture on shining parquet. Instead he finds an overflowing Aladdin’s cave that has not been cleared out since its occupant’s youth. Schilf obeys an impulse to take his shoes off. He steps with stockinged feet into a room
stuffed with furniture like an antiques shop. Postcards and newspaper cuttings cover every available space on the walls. Shelves bow beneath jumbles of books. There are porcelain figurines everywhere, wrist-watches without hands, glass paperweights, and foreign coins. From the ceiling lamp hangs a stuffed crow whose wings can be moved by pulling on a cord. On a sailor’s chest beside the leather armchair is a child’s drawing: a small stick figure with yellow hair and a taller one with black hair; a great big smile shared between them; signed with a clumsy “L.”

The master of the house sits cross-legged on a cushion in the middle of his private museum, waiting patiently for the detective to finish looking around. In this environment, his carefully combed hair and his white shirt are a kind of self-parody. When Schilf finally sinks into the upholstery of the battered sofa, Oskar lifts his chin, opens his mouth, and speaks.

“Surprised?”

“I have to admit I am, yes.”

“I don’t see any point in cleaning up after my own past. Cumulative chaos is a way of measuring the passage of time.”

He leaps to his feet with predatory agility.

“May I offer you something to drink?”

“Yogi tea, please, in honor of a summer that has suddenly died.”

Oskar raises an eyebrow.

“There is nothing that cannot be had in this apartment.”

Almost as soon as he has left the room, Schilf struggles out of the sofa cushions and slips into the room next door. Under another petrified mass of objects is a desk with its top drawer pulled out. The photograph is in a silver frame of the type in which other men keep pictures of their wives. Sebastian can’t be older than twenty and is wearing a silver cravat and a frock coat. His laugh is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down to the observer.

“A lovely boy,
n’est-ce pas
?”

Oskar has entered silently over the stack of rugs. When Schilf
turns around, they nearly clash heads. Schilf sees himself in the other man’s black eyes. The master of the house takes the picture out of his hand gently.

“There are few things that are sacred to me.”

“I felt a fondness for your friend right away,” Schilf says. “And I think he felt the same about me.”

“That is the fondness of the bird food for the bird. Come with me.”

Oskar puts the photograph back in the drawer and bundles the detective out of the room. The steaming cups of tea on the side table prove that Schilf has spent at least a quarter of an hour gazing at the photograph. Oskar pours a dash of rum from a white bottle into the cups.

“None for me,” Schilf says.

“I make the rules here.”

The fumes of alcohol prick the detective’s nostrils like long needles even before he takes his first sip. Behind his forehead, something contracts and then expands to twice its original size. Schilf drinks. He feels the alien heartbeat in his head more clearly than ever before. The crow hanging from the ceiling lamp flaps its wings and shadows glide up the walls. Oskar’s face is a solid plane in a web of intertwined curves. Say something, the detective thinks.

“Has Sebastian confessed?” Oskar asks.

“If not, you’ve just betrayed him.”

“Surely not, Detective. I know that you’re not as stupid as your profession would suggest.”

“Did Sebastian tell you that?”

“If you’ve come here hoping that I’ll incriminate him …” Oskar leans forward. “I’d rather rip out my tongue with my bare hands.”

“Now
you’re
the one playing dumb,” the detective says.

The next sip of tea is better than any medicine. The pressure in his head eases off and the alien heartbeat becomes a monotonous buzz that affects his hearing but not his ability to think clearly.

“I’ve handed the murder case to someone else, by the way.”

Oskar does not permit himself the slightest flicker of surprise. He
looks at the detective’s mouth expectantly and lights a cigarette, which Schilf counts as a success.

“I’ve seen you on television. I was impressed by the program. May I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you believe in God?”

It is impossible not to like Oskar when he laughs.

“Sebastian was right,” he says. “You are an unusual detective.”

“So he did talk about me.” Schilf blushes—perhaps it is the alcohol. “Will you answer my question?”

“I’m a religious atheist.”

“Why religious?”

“Because I believe.” Oskar blows smoke off to one side politely. “I believe that the existence of the world cannot be conclusively explained to us. It takes a truly metaphysical strength to accept this.”

“A strength that Sebastian does not possess?”

“You’re touching on a sensitive point. The grown-up Sebastian you have met is actually still the boy that you saw in that photo. Like all boys, he longs for a world in which one can be both a pirate and a bookworm.”

“What do you mean?”

Oskar watches as Schilf pours himself more tea and pushes the bottle of rum across the table.

“Sebastian loves his life,” Oskar says, “but he still wishes he had not made a certain decision many years ago. Back then he leapt over a wall to save himself.”

“What’s behind the wall?”

“
C’est moi
,” Oskar says. “And physics.”

“A tragedy of classical proportions.” Schilf blows at the steam rising from his cup.

“Irony doesn’t suit you.”

“I meant that seriously.”

“Then you’ve understood what I am talking about.”

They hold each other’s gaze until Schilf looks away and takes his cigarillos out of his pocket. Oskar stretches across the table to give him a light, and stays in that position.

“Intelligent people,” he says, “often pour their despair into scientific formulae. In order to be happy, a man like Sebastian would need a second, a third, perhaps even a fourth world.”

“So that everything that is possible happens,” says Schilf.

Oskar’s features soften into a laugh again, and he runs his fingers through his hair.

“You really are good,” he says, letting himself sink back. “So you’ll understand why the idea of several contradictory things happening at the same time is very attractive to some people. And why it’s like a nightmare, too.”

He looks intently at the glowing tip of his cigarette, takes a final drag, and stubs it out in the ashtray. The stuffed crow has swung nearer. To Schilf, it looks like it is hanging directly over Oskar’s head.

“Thinking like that negates the validity of every experience,” Oskar continues. “It negates us.”

“Perhaps Sebastian has realized that now.” Schilf lets ash fall onto the carpet. “After the kidnapping, which he’s constantly talking about.”

The remains of a laugh play in the corners of Oskar’s mouth.

“Yes,” he says, “perhaps.”

“Sebastian and his family,” the detective says, “are an equation with one unknown. Someone has adjusted one of reality’s screws. It’s the right way to create a false picture. When a person deludes himself into thinking he is in charge, reality puts her fat arms on her hips and leers at him. On the contrary, a good lie is the truth plus one. Don’t you think?”

“To be honest, you’re talking rather confusedly.” Oskar’s eyes bore into Schilf’s face.

This time it is the detective who laughs.

“You may be right,” he says. “Do you know that your friend doesn’t really hold to the Many-Worlds Interpretation at all, but is pursuing advanced theories on the nature of time?”

“Did he tell you that?”

Schilf nods.

“That doesn’t matter,” Oskar says, suddenly brusque. “He’s looking for new ways to escape himself.”

They are silent until the final echoes of the last sentence die away. Schilf’s body fills the corner of the sofa like a soft mass that would feel comfortable in any given position, while Oskar sits with his legs stretched out before him, looking ahead with hooded eyes.

Finally the detective speaks. “Do you love Sebastian?” he asks.

“A good question,” Oskar says, still sitting in the same position.

There is a pause, and Schilf stands up. With his cigarillo in the corner of his mouth, he walks over to the dormer window, where for a moment the view takes his breath away. The steps to Oskar’s apartment have taken him right up to the sky. From this bird’s-eye view, the city is a circuit board of twinkling lights. Rows of diodes connect up into a network of communicating lines, like letters of the alphabet.

Blackmail, more or less, the detective thinks. Perhaps Sebastian has jumped over the wall a second time by murdering Dabbelink. Perhaps he had secretly hoped to find Oskar still waiting behind the wall, but was shocked to the core to find that he was right. And now he is escaping into nowhere.

Since the fracture that separated the detective from himself, he has wondered often whether people are not somehow responsible for every conceivable twist of their own fate. Whether it isn’t that people only ever blackmail themselves.

He recognizes the glowing patches of the Place de Cornavin, Place de Montbrillant, and Place Reculet, the dark ribbon of the Rhône, the colorful twinkling lights of the Quai du Mont-Blanc, and the devouring darkness of Lake Geneva beyond it. As if on cue, the pain starts nagging
between his eyes again. It grows hot and bright and draws the city closer to him, bathing it in a glittering light.

Three people, tiny as toy figures, are walking across a pier toward the Jet d’Eau. Two of them are close together, probably arm in arm. The third, smaller person is running ahead like an excited dog. All three have blond hair. The detective sees them in unusually sharp detail in spite of the distance; he can just see their outstretched index fingers, and the happy faces turned up toward the sky to take in the whole height of the white gleam at the end of the pier. The tower of water splits the sun into all the colors of the rainbow.

“Look, Daddy! The lake is throwing itself up into the air!”

The spray soaks their clothes. It is warm.

The detective is looking at a holiday snap, a postcard like the ones on his fridge. But there is one essential difference. The other side of this particular card is not blank. There is writing on it: “It’s fantastic!” or “We were here!”

Schilf decides to take this card with him. Sebastian would certainly not object. A man, a woman, and a happy child. He will hang it over the hole in the story of his life. A life is so fragile. Something lurches out of its tracks, and instead of three people there is one, and only half of that person, too. The detective had practiced remembering for a while, then he had trained himself to forget. It had been unbearably sad to think about the life of his that had ended. Now he realizes that there is nothing easier than calling another person’s past to mind.

Anyone who wants to die has to be whole, the detective thought
, the detective thinks.

Oskar speaks in the room somewhere behind him. “Knowing Sebastian has taught me to fear the whims of the gods.”

Schilf has closed his eyes. His fingers close around the edge of the windowsill as if holding on to the crow’s nest in a storm-tossed ship.

“Yesterday, I would have claimed to know one thing for certain,” Oskar says. “That I would give my life for him.”

“And today?” Schilf asks through clenched teeth.

“Today I am an old man.”

Oskar takes a breath. When he speaks again, his voice is even deeper. Cold.

“Did you know that Sebastian was with me yesterday evening?”

“I suspected it.”

“I asked him to leave the country with me.”

“And he refused?”

“He turned down everything that I had to give. It seems that he has finally made his decision. I can do nothing more for him.”

“You’re wrong, Oskar. You will do something for him. I promise you that.”

When the detective opens his eyes, the city has returned to its former self. It is night and there is no man, no woman, and no happy child. Even the pillar of water from the Jet d’Eau cannot be seen from here. Only the stubborn wind is still there, rattling the beams of the roof. Schilf turns around. Oskar is standing in front of him with his arms stretched out, as if he wants to embrace him. The detective would take a step backward if it weren’t for the pitched roof behind him, and behind that an abyss, a free fall. Their eyes meet.

There is a wave of human scents. Starched cotton, expensive aftershave, and a strange happiness. An arm is draped across the detective’s shoulders. Oskar pulls him close.

“Come. Let me help you.”

He conducts the detective back to the sofa, nudges his head onto the armrest, and presses something cool and moist to his neck. When Schilf looks down at himself, he sees a large red patch decorating his chest. He touches his face: nosebleed. There are flecks of red on Oskar’s white cuffs.

“I’ve messed up your shirt,” the detective says.

“Anyone wearing a white shirt is a doctor.” Oskar wipes the blood off his hands and passes the wet cloth to Schilf. “That’s what I thought when I was a child, anyway.”

“You’ve helped me a good deal.” The detective tries to sit up, but falls back down again. “Will you do me another favor?”

Lying down, he gropes in his back pocket for the chess computer. When the display lights up, Oskar kneels down next to the sofa.

“What have we got here?”

He looks at the sixty-four squares intently. Schilf knows exactly what he sees: a catastrophic situation in which everything that is still alive is pressing into one half of the playing field. Oskar scrutinizes the screen for a long time before he looks up.