In Free Fall (34 page)

“This is going to hurt for a bit,” he says. “Get ready.”

Sebastian looks at him, waiting.

“
Doublethink
must go,” the detective says.

“What the …”

Sebastian starts to jump up, but sinks back into the chair when the detective places two heavy hands on his shoulders.

“Listen carefully,” Schilf says. “
Doublethink
must go.”

At first nothing happens. Almost a minute passes before Sebastian lifts his head again and thrashes toward Schilf like a drowning man toward his rescuer. The detective bends over Sebastian and braces himself to withstand the attack.

“No!” Sebastian screams.

“
Doublethink
must go,” the detective repeats.

“Leave me Oskar! Let the whole disaster at least make sense!”

The uproar ends as suddenly as it started. Sebastian has collapsed and is lying on top of the kitchen table, lifeless. Suicide would have been quite logical in his situation. A man who has lost everything throws his shoulders back, picks up his hat, and leaves the scene. Logic must mean honor. But now there is a new three-word sentence that is much worse than that. “Dabbelink must go” was the tragic command to destroy his own life. “
Doublethink
must go” is a farce. A grotesque coincidence, a poison that has made everything that resulted from it ludicrous.

The detective understands why Sebastian is so still. He is almost afraid he will find Sebastian’s face transformed into a ridiculous caricature of itself. Schilf’s hands are still on the man’s shoulders. The only thing needed to complete the scene is the ticking of a kitchen clock. Just as Schilf has decided that the only thing he can do is make coffee for them both in the chaos of this kitchen, Sebastian starts laughing quietly.

“Vera Wagenfort,” he says. “I recognized the voice right away. That’s the brunette who sits outside the office of the greatest particle physicist in the world.” He laughs again. “He probably expected that I’d recognize her. That I’d blithely ring him up and call him a scoundrel. Instead I murder someone. It’s true, isn’t it, that we always understand what we want to understand?”

“There might be some truth in that,” the detective says cautiously.

“And I thought I was finished.” Sebastian turns his head so Schilf can see his face, which is pressed into a lopsided grimace on the kitchen table. “Oskar was right. I know nothing of guilt.”

The sob seems to come from somewhere else in the kitchen. It is small and quiet, as if a child has started whimpering. Sebastian puts his hands to his face, his fingers spread wide. His mouth stretches itself into a rectangular opening and releases a toneless scream that shakes his entire body. The detective holds the trembling man close, gripping
his shoulders, feeling the shudders running through him. He cannot tell for certain if Sebastian is laughing or crying. There is a neutral point at which all opposites meet. This outbreak, too, is over within minutes. Schilf reaches for a kettle that has rolled under the table, fills it, and puts it on the stove.

“Tonight,” he says, as the water begins to boil, “Detective Skura and I need your help. Can I count on you?”

“You have destroyed me,” Sebastian says in a voice that seems to have been discovered for this moment. “I’m yours.”

“Good,” Schilf says.

He pours boiling water into the cups with one hand while the other takes his mobile phone out of his pocket and presses a key.

“Good evening,” he says into the telephone. “This is Detective Schilf. There’s another game that we have to finish.”

[5]

RITA REALLY OUGHT TO HAVE KNOWN
that this would be one of the strangest days in a series of strange days. This morning, the cat threw up on the kitchen table as she was having a hasty breakfast. In the vomit were pieces of the chicken salad that Rita had eaten the night before. She felt nauseous. She perked up considerably after Schnurpfeil called from Gwiggen. The case was solved, the evidence was in place, and, as ever, the final verdict would be a matter for a judge. Rita spent half the afternoon writing her report for the public prosecutor’s office and the interior ministry, but the elation that normally came with the close of a difficult case escaped her. When the telephone rang, she knew the reason why.
She
might have thought that the whole thing was wrapped up. Detective Schilf certainly didn’t think so.

It is impossible to ignore a cry for help. Rita did as Schilf asked and borrowed a police van. The walrus-mustached police chief had called her up once again and told her that her career depended on delivering a full report tomorrow, a report in which the words “doctor,” “patient,” and “hospital” did not appear. Now she is sitting on the backseat with an avowed murderer, in the full knowledge that her professional future is, as they say, hanging by a thread. When she starts thinking about what kind of net this thread belongs to, she can understand why the feeling of nausea has come back and won’t go away.

The first thing Rita Skura and Schnurpfeil did was collect Schilf and the murderer from the house by the canal. The murderer had a blue and white cooler with him. He climbed into the backseat next to Rita without a greeting, proffering instead an explanation that the box belonged to his ex-family. After that, Schilf ordered them to stop at the cycling club, where he commandeered two racing bikes without any legal justification. The two bikes are now in the back of the VW van, as good as stolen property. The next stop was the forensic department. Their business there finished, the murderer was now looking ahead of him with a rapt expression, balancing the cooler on his lap and stroking the blue lid from time to time. Rita has to stop herself thinking about what the box contains and how it got in there, otherwise she will go mad. Schnurpfeil seems to be feeling the same way. Following Schilf’s instructions, he is steering the vehicle through the city center, but takes the bends so swiftly and brakes so hard that his passengers bow toward each other simultaneously before righting themselves again.

But the worst thing of all is the voice of the first detective chief superintendent. Schilf is crouched on the passenger seat talking to the windshield about branches and ponds and parallel universes and other bizarre stuff. The crazed monologue makes Rita Skura wish that Schnurpfeil would draw into the next petrol station and throw everyone except her out, and simply drive off, out of the city, onto the A5 toward Basel, and go straight on until the sea can be glimpsed between the trees. Sadly, Schnurpfeil makes no move to do this, but is concentrating on the evening traffic. Nothing in his actions betrays the fact that he imagines throwing everyone except Rita out at the next petrol station and driving off with her, until he reaches the sea.

Rita’s fingers drum up a storm on her lap. Schilf’s cry for help has shaken her self-confidence somewhat. Her instincts tell her to call up the chief public prosecutor and request an arrest warrant for Sebastian. But if she is to proceed from the opposite of her instincts, as she
normally does, she must stay where she is and follow the ideas of someone of unsound mind. Her method of working doesn’t seem to be effective any longer. Or perhaps it simply cannot be applied to its progenitor.

When Schilf’s babbling stops for a moment, Rita ventures to speak.

“This is madness.” She leans forward and taps her forehead. “You’re dangerous, Schilf. This is totally birdbrained.”

The detective breaks into a sudden fit of laughter that fills the vehicle. He sounds like he is suffocating by the end of it.

“Birdbrained!” he splutters, also tapping his forehead. “That’s a good one.”

“I’m getting out at the next junction,” Rita says.

“At the next junction,” Schilf says to Schnurpfeil, putting his hand on the driver’s forearm, “stop in front of the sports shop.”

The van brakes. Schnurpfeil gets out and slams his door. Schilf passes him the briefcase through the open window.

“Two tops, two pairs of trousers, and two pairs of shoes,” he says. “The jerseys in yellow. And take Sebastian with you for size.”

Sebastian puts the cooler down at his feet as gingerly as if it were a newborn baby in a cot, and gets out of the van. Her mind completely blank, Rita watches him as he walks into the shop with Schnurpfeil. When the two men have disappeared, Schilf puts an arm over the headrest and looks back at her. They are silent. It feels good to be silent, even though Rita knows that this long stare is only Schilf’s way of preventing her from getting out and walking away.

“All right, then,” she finally says. “Give it to me straight, in simple language.”

Schilf presses his thumb and index finger against his eyelids, as if he needs to concentrate intensely.

“Oskar created a parallel universe,” he says, “in which Liam had been kidnapped and not kidnapped at the same time. Sebastian was
supposed to recognize what it means not to be able to trust in reality. What it is like to have no ‘either/or’ but only an ‘as well as.’”

“So much for the theory,” Rita says. “Let’s move on to the practice.”

“In a way, the kidnapping was an experiment. But something went wrong. Another memorial to the horror of what we call coincidence was built. And that tangled up the worlds.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t follow you.”

“Imagine two trains traveling next to each other for an instant, at exactly the same speed, totally parallel. At this point, it is possible to change trains. Oskar drew up the timetable, and coincidence created the disaster. And Sebastian slid from one universe into the other.”

Schilf takes his hand away from his face at last. His eyes are glittering.

“Rita, my child, we’re going to create a second parallelism, in order to enable Sebastian to return to his world.”

“You can be really frightening sometimes.”

Rita casts a glance at the cooler, tosses her hair back, and looks out of the window as if she is trying to convince herself that outside, at least, everything is as it was.

“This is what I understand,” she says. “It’s not about this nonsense of parallel universes, but about the fact that Oskar is the one who is really guilty. You’re saying that he has fucked up his friend’s life in order to teach him a lesson about responsibility. And he’s sitting in Geneva pretending that this has nothing to do with him.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying!”

Schilf’s face lights up and Rita cannot bear to contradict him. She allows him to stretch out his hand and pat her on the cheek. Sometimes she wishes that her work still required her to wear a uniform. That would keep the world at a slight distance.

“You want revenge,” Rita says, “justice, a moral victory. All things that have nothing to do with police work. That’s what you yourself taught us in our seminars.”

“I want to re-create a certain order of things,” Schilf says. “Apart from that, you’re right.”

“You’re overstepping the bounds of your responsibilities, and for your own personal pleasure, too. Give me one reason why I should play along, Schilf!”

“All right,” the detective says. “I’ll show you the reason.”

Rita recognizes the documents that he is pulling from his briefcase. They are copies from the file on Dabbelink’s murder. But Schilf is looking for something else. He flips back and forth, dips his hand into the briefcase again, and takes out a semitransparent photograph. The picture trembles between his fingers as he passes it to her. Rita lays the murky photograph against the window.

It shows a cloudy shape at least as wide as a hand—it is oval and so indistinct that it seems to be moving against the black background. Curved around the shadowy center is a tube, white as a maggot and filled with labyrinthine entrails. The whole thing is held together by two layers of skin on the outside: one thick and black in color and the other thinner and pale. Although Rita finds the sight repellent, she cannot tear her eyes from it. At the bottom of the picture is the detective’s name in capital letters.

“Since you constantly seem to doubt my intentions,” Schilf says, “why not simply look inside my brain?”

He rubs the top of his sparsely covered head, with its elephant face sitting loosely on the bone structure in front.

“Take a good look.”

His index finger strokes the back of the maggot and traces the curling outline tenderly. At the bend, Rita notices a patch that looks like a bird’s egg in both shape and size. Schilf taps it with his finger a few times.

“Good Lord,” Rita says.

“No,” Schilf says, “certainly not him.”

Rita Skura sits there staring at the patch, silent, as if the connection
between her brain and her body has just been severed. She knows that she should hug him. She would even do it gladly. He smiles bravely, a child turned into a grizzled old man, and Rita wants to hold him tight for a while and press her face against his, not to comfort him, but because she suddenly feels alone, abandoned, as if she is surrounded by marionettes and Schilf is the only other creature on earth who belongs to that dying species: the live human being.

But she can do nothing. She cannot find the right gesture, cannot even smile along with Schilf, although he is looking at her with such warmth.

“How long?” she asks, finally.

“Who knows? A couple of weeks.”

Schilf takes the result of the MRI scan back and puts it in the briefcase at his feet. When he straightens, he and Rita are sitting one in front of the other like passengers on a bus. Rita sees his scalp showing through his thinning hair, and some flakes of dandruff.

“That’s some ammunition, eh, Rita my child? Do you believe that I’m serious now?”

Rita nods. Schilf must have heard that. His smile causes his ears to lift.

A dove has been run over on the road. Feathers dance around the squashed remains whenever cars whoosh past. The traffic light turns red and the cars roll up to it with studied slowness, stopping at a well-calculated distance. A passing woman looks curiously at the police van. On the other side of the road, a young man is whistling for his dog. A cyclist rushes to get off the pavement, and nearly crashes into a child, who drops his ice cream and starts crying.