In Free Fall (36 page)

“The worst always happens afterward,” he says. “It happens when people think that the worst is already over.”

“Go on,” Sebastian says.

“When you visited Oskar in Geneva, he betrayed himself. In the process he betrayed you, too. He of all people offered you a parallel universe, a joint escape, what he most wished for himself. Betrayal weighs heavily on a man. No policeman or judge in this world can deal with it.”

“Yes; go on,” Sebastian says.

“Let’s say you accidentally bump into a woman in the pedestrian zone. She stumbles and breaks her ankle. One week later she is in a car accident. Because of her broken ankle she cannot get out of the car and burns to death. No court will convict you of murder. The police won’t even get in touch with you. But just think what your conscience will say!”

“You want Oskar to face up to his conscience,” Sebastian says slowly.

“His conscience is the only judge who can really exonerate you,” Schilf says.

Sebastian is silent. The detective shuts the window, sits down in an armchair next to the sofa, and spends the next two hours staring at the ceiling.

[7]

“IF YOU CALL UPON A MAN LIKE OSKAR
to show up at a clearing in the woods at five in the morning, he will come. Even if he is not given the right to choose the weapons.”

Doubtfully, Rita Skura holds the first detective chief superintendent’s gaze, then she nods. The forest has not yet finished its morning routine: the leaves are moist with dew, glowing as if they have just been washed, and innumerable red foxgloves are yawning with tiny speckled mouths. In the orchestra pit, the birds are tuning their instruments. The human beings look pale in the midst of this collective awakening. The early morning light picks out their every physical deficiency; it shows the rings under their eyes and sharpens the lines around mouths and noses. This morning, Schilf’s headache is not manifested as pain, but as a well-upholstered vacuum. He fingers his neck and touches the handle of vertebrae that is screwed into his skull. He touches the tubes and cables that connect the command center of his entire existence, the only place he ever resides, with the rest of his body below it. He thinks he can feel the skin already drying over his bones, and the corners of his mouth turning up into a diabolical smile that Rita will surely find repellent.

He signals to her; she goes up to Schnurpfeil, who is wearing the yellow jersey and standing forlornly next to a racing bike, and speaks
softly to him. The senior policeman leans forward so that his ear is close to her lips. Rita’s hand somehow ends up on his cheek, and her touch turns him into a beaming hero. Schilf watches as the detective and the senior policeman gaze into each other’s eyes. A lovely couple.

The detective did not wake his girlfriend before leaving the apartment. He shook Sebastian by the shoulder, with a finger to his lips. Dabbelink was frozen hard in the freezer compartment. As quietly as possible, they had pried him free with a screwdriver and tiptoed out of the apartment.

Betrayal weighs heavy, the detective thought
, the detective thinks.

But he also thinks: I have not asked her about her past. She doesn’t ask me about my future. And that’s what you call a deal. Sleep and death have this in common: they offer only single rooms. You can’t take anyone with you.

Rita takes her hand away from Schnurpfeil’s cheek.

“Go on now,” she says, her tone sharp.

The senior policeman gets on the bike and pedals furiously to get uphill. Schilf watches him conquer the long, curving ascent and pass the inn at the upper edge of the hollow until his tiny figure disappears into the trees, where he will hide himself, bicycle and all. And wait.

Schilf turns away and checks the steel cable with one hand. Sebastian, the expert in such matters, has tightened it to maximum tension, even though that is wholly unnecessary for today’s events.

Schilf signals again and Sebastian, who is wearing the same yellow jersey as Schnurpfeil, gets down on his knees. He stretches himself facedown on the pavement a few meters away from the steel cable so that his body is lying on the road. Rita Skura walks over and covers his head and shoulders, which are at the edge of the pavement, with branches.

When Schilf looks straight up he sees the second bike hanging from the treetops, dangling gently from an invisible nylon rope. On his second attempt Schnurpfeil had managed to loop the rope through the branches as if using a grappling hook. He raised the bike and tied the
rope around the trunk of a young birch tree. Schilf now unties the rope, and has to brace himself with all his might against the weight of the bicycle.

Steel cord, dead body, bike.

He gives the final signal and Rita Skura steps behind the tree on the right-hand side of the steel cable, while he takes his position behind the tree on the left.

The orchestra of birds has finished tuning up and is whistling an aleatoric overture. Although Schilf is tense, his heart beats only reluctantly. At his feet, ants are carrying leaf fragments back and forth. No dead caterpillar this time, and no mosquitoes. Schilf’s head expands into a wide room in which thoughts wander with echoing steps.

What if he doesn’t come?

Then the story has no end.

And if it all makes no sense?

Then nothing new will have been said about human life, the detective thought
, the detective thinks.

But here he is. He has thought it a good idea to wear a hat and carry a stick; they fit in with this romantic and somehow tragic charade. He looks like a man going for a Sunday stroll a hundred years ago.

Oskar checked into his room in the Panorama Hotel at the summit of Schauinsland late yesterday evening, and paid the bill in advance. He informed reception that, at dawn, he would be going on a long hike. Nobody found that strange. Patiently, he reciprocated the exaggerated smiles of the hotel employees.

He passed the night sitting on the balcony, watching a solid fog fill the crevices of the mountain landscape, thinking about whether the expression “a long hike” sounded strange. He had expected the police to get in touch ever since Schilf had come to see him. He hoped that they would be discreet enough not to visit him at work. He had prepared a reply for every possible question.

It was simply a joke between friends. No one was meant to come to any harm. Everything else that had happened could not, as the
lawyers say, with all due and proper care, have been foreseen, so he could in no way be accused of it.

He had not reckoned on an invitation to take an early morning walk in the woods. It was very clear to him that his rehearsed replies would be of no use here. They probably wanted to confront him with Sebastian. Perhaps it was Sebastian himself who was behind the whole thing. Perhaps, Oskar thought, as he spent hour after hour staring into the dark, savagely silent mountain landscape, the detective is not a detective at all but a paid henchman. And Sebastian will shoot Oskar at the very scene of the crime. The question is: Will he toss Oskar a second weapon before that?

Oskar has not wasted a second asking himself whether it was sensible to accept the invitation. In a moment of weakness, he had a vision of himself standing opposite Sebastian in the dawn mist, each aiming at the other with an old-fashioned pistol before they hesitate, lower their weapons, and walk toward each other with arms held wide. He forbade himself this thought immediately. He knows he has lost his friend. Now he wants only to find out what these people have in store for him. He is longing to see how much he means to them. Is the intelligence of a chess-playing detective really equal to his? Nothing would be worse than losing to an inferior opponent.

If this mixture of anticipation and trepidation suited someone who was marching along an unknown path toward an unclear destination, the hike that Oskar had started on early this morning would truly be a long one.

There is a break in the forest. Oskar looks out over a broad hollow, dotted with sleeping cows, dark mounds of flesh in the grass. The road leads up toward the old inn, which looks rather put-upon with its blocked-up windows and doorways. Just before the building, the road swings around toward the left in a steep curve, disappearing between the trees after a hundred meters.

Oskar is happy to have the chance to walk a stretch under the open sky. Every dead tree in the forest is a shadowy man in a long coat, and
the snap of every twig is a mysterious footstep. Enjoy the beauty of nature, the detective had said on the phone. Oskar counts his steps to avoid self-reflection. The seconds have slowed down, and are much slower than the tempo of his steps. One after the other they tip over the edge of the present in slow motion. Perhaps it seems that way because Oskar is striding forward so briskly. It happened down there. At three hundred his understanding of the situation begins to slip away. At four hundred he no longer knows what he is doing here at all. At five hundred he has reached the inn. He cranes his neck and squints into the distance. Something is shining in the half-light under the treetops where the road enters the forest.

A bell sounds and he nearly jumps out of his skin. He had not heard the cyclist coming from behind. He just manages to leap to one side as something yellow flashes past him. At the end of the curve the racing bike straightens its course and the cyclist pedals on with his head lowered. Oskar wants to scream. Barely a split second later, the bike reaches the forest. Something explodes onto the road and a shower of metal parts catch the light; screws and rods clink and clatter in every direction. Another split second, and all is silent. Deathly silent.

Oskar’s leather-soled shoes are not made for running on slippery pavement. He slips and stumbles, ducks under the steel cord just in time, and slides to a standstill. He steps carefully over the wreckage of the bicycle. A man in a yellow jersey lies there, his upper body hidden in the undergrowth, his legs stretched out into the road. Oskar stares, incapable of taking another step, completely unable to think clearly. The eloquent inner monologue which has been with him since his childhood, always ready to pipe up, has been silenced. It’s incredible how loudly the birds are singing.

Oskar senses rather than hears the movement behind him. He tears his gaze from the body on the road and turns around. The first detective chief superintendent is standing to the left of the steel cable, still as a waxwork. On the right-hand side is a woman in a flowery dress.

Two sentinels at the posts of a demonic gate.

The woman is holding a man by his hair, a man who consists only of a face and a neck. The eyes are wide open and staring shamelessly at Oskar. The woman starts walking toward him and seems to want to pass the severed head to him; a Salome, only without the silver platter. She stops in the middle of the road and puts the head on the ground. It tips over to one side and rolls toward Oskar, turns a semicircle on a vertebra, and lies still. Oskar realizes that he needs to breathe. His dizziness subsides after two breaths.

“I understand.” He wants to cross his arms but they are hanging too heavily by his sides.

“Sebastian!” he shouts. Nothing in the tableau moves, so he lowers his voice. “You weren’t the expert in doublethink. I’m afraid it was me.”

If he had a saber, he would turn it around now and lay it on the ground in front of him.

[8]

HE EXPECTED THE ATTACK
, so the shock from the bird’s egg does not topple him immediately. A whistling in the ears, wherever they may be, a stabbing behind the forehead, wherever that has gone, finally a rip straight across the brain, whoever is using it. A rip through the whole body, cutting the detective in two. A person has two of almost everything—legs, hands, eyes, nostrils—so two people can easily be made out of him.

The first few seconds are not painful. Schilf uses both hands to support his head, in which a determined battle is raging. Something is struggling to break free of a prison in which it has been growing for far too long. A sharp beak pecks against the shell. Black dots dance rhythmically in the field of vision. His eyes are no use any longer, so he cannot see if Sebastian and Oskar are lying in each other’s arms. If Schnurpfeil is pushing his bike up the road to stand next to Rita Skura. Instead he sees a fountain of water rising to infinite heights, and a broken rainbow in the mist. A boy whose hair is dotted with spray stretches his arms out toward the sky, laughing. When he turns around, his face is just as much Liam’s as another boy’s. My son, the detective thinks. They’re all lying, the boy says, pointing at his watch. A blond woman looks down at the boy, smiling. Then she looks Schilf in the eye. We’ll see, she says.

A trembling sensation starts under Schilf’s skin. His teeth chatter
violently, as if attempting to grind themselves to powder. He scrabbles in his hair with all ten fingers, looking for purchase. Pain finally scythes his legs. The shell shatters.

The detective keels over and does not hit the ground, loses himself in a fall with neither above nor below. He does not feel his hands and feet any longer, only a breeze on his forehead. His skull has opened, a twitching, a fluttering, something forces its way out. It shakes itself, spreads its wings, casts a rainbow of iridescent light that is more beautiful than anything Schilf has ever seen.

Good-bye, observer, the detective thinks.

A bird soars into the air. Finds its flock. Circles over the city.

[
EPILOGUE
]

AS YOU TAKE OFF TOWARD THE NORTHEAST
, Freiburg looks less like a city than a carpet of colors flowing into each other. A shimmering rainbow mass. No one could say whether he is a part of it or it is a part of him. A mosaic of roofs on which the morning sun lavishes its golden tones. The quicksilver ribbon of the Dreisam winds its way through. You can float on the bluish air like it is water. The mountains call the birds home. The birds report their news.