In Free Fall (33 page)

“Listen to me!”

The panic that the detective has made such an effort to suppress bursts forth so strongly that Rita falls silent for a moment. Schilf leans
his forehead against a sandstone pillar and forces himself to speak quietly.

“You’re right, it could have happened that way. But I swear to you, Rita, that it didn’t.”

“Schilf …”

“It was a silly boy’s prank, thought up by a particularly dangerous boy. It was a great love, the Many-Worlds theory, and a masterwork by the most ruthless criminal that exists on this earth: coincidence. So ruthless that I prefer not to believe in him.”

“Detective Schilf?” Rita says. “Are you listening to yourself? Silly boy? Great love? Coincidence?”

“I can explain it all,” the detective whispers.

The little angel has reached out an arm, and his fingertips follow the lines of text on a board. He is saying something. The grown-up nods.

“I’ll bring the person who is the real culprit to you. He’ll confess. You can tell the powers that be that the case has been solved. Stop trying to beat me, Rita—help me!”

“But what are you expecting me to do, Schilf?” Rita cries.

The detective holds the phone away from his ear so that he can dry his forehead and cheeks. There is a ripple of movement below. The first few people are walking toward the stairs. Schilf bends down and picks up the briefcase wedged between his feet.

“Are you doing anything tonight?” he asks.

“Of course not.”

The two angels are floating up the stone staircase. Schilf retreats farther behind his pillar.

“I have to sort something out here first,” he says. “Don’t do anything. Be prepared.”

“One more question. Do you think this case has anything to do with hospitals at all?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“OK. See you later.”

The detective slips the mobile phone into his trouser pocket and waits until everyone else has entered the auditorium. Then he, too, produces his ticket and slips inside.

IT’S DARK
. There are no seats. Everyone is clustered together looking at the dome above them, which is lit with a bluish glow. A teacher tells her giggling class to sit down on the floor, as they can’t keep their balance in the dark. The detective has some difficulty keeping his balance, too, as he pushes his way through the crowd. A giant spiral is beginning to turn in the artificial sky.
E = mc
²
shoots across it like an asteroid. The children screech excitedly and duck.

“In the great play of Being, we are actors and spectators at the same time,” a male voice announces to open the show.

Schilf has found his two angels and is standing directly behind them. Every time the taller one moves her shoulders, the smell of her silky hair rises. She smells quite different from Julia—even sweeter. The aroma, as that of lime-blossom tea, calls forth images from the depths of his memory. This is my new past, Schilf thinks. I’ll remember this when I go: a man, a woman, and an excited boy turning their faces up to space. Perhaps a caress on the back, too, interlinked fingers, and a child’s head that fits neatly under the palm of the hand. Schilf almost taps his two targets on the shoulder; he stops himself just in time. Here, right in front of him, are two people whose future he is responsible for. Fate has united them with him in a tiny speck on the outer crust of this planet.

The time for unconscious living is past, the detective thought
, the detective thinks. In the last few meters, life can no longer be worn like a shoe that you don’t notice as long as it doesn’t pinch your foot.

For a moment, Schilf is filled with such happiness that he feels like crying. But like most people, he has long ago exchanged the ability to cry with the desire for revenge. He understands perfectly well that he can no longer build a true home for anyone. He can only punish anyone who dares to destroy something as precious as a true home.

The detective takes a step backward; he has to concentrate to avoid tipping over. He feels the pulse inside the bird’s egg, and the way the second law of thermodynamics is working to throw him and his case into a state of increasing chaos. Soon he will no longer have the energy to fight against the dissolution. He has to make one final effort now. There is half a day and one night left. It is his last chance to put things in order. The two angels are holding hands. Images showing the collision of accelerated particles play in their hair.

“From all the possible outcomes, the one that has actually taken place is determined by the observer,” says the male voice coming out of the loudspeakers.

“I’m here,” Schilf says.

Maike’s back stiffens and she turns her head slowly.

“I know,” she says.

A violent explosion on the screen bathes the auditorium in white light. Every detail of Maike’s face can be seen, cool and impenetrable, like an overexposed photograph. Liam turns around, too, and his eyes look hard, like pieces of blue plastic. When he recognizes the detective, he turns his narrow back on him in a deliberate gesture.

“I can’t stand you following us,” Maike whispers.

“But I’m not following you!” the detective says in a suppressed shout.

“No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon,” the man’s voice continues.

A cartoon cat paces across the dome: the children cheer and a forest of arms rises from the human undergrowth.

“I wanted to ask you how you are,” Schilf whispers.

Maike laughs silently.

“Get lost. There’s nothing else you can get from us.”

The cat is shut inside a cardboard box. Schilf knows what is coming next. His reading on the Internet covered Schrödinger’s cat. As long as no one looks inside the box, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time, in a state called quantum superposition. From Maike’s point of
view, Schilf and Rita are in just such a state. Maike cannot distinguish between them. Police work is police work. It is no use explaining that he has saved her husband the agony of remand, but that he cannot do anything about the way Sebastian is treated. Maike would certainly think he was lying.

The frantic ticking of a clock is getting on Schilf’s nerves, but he is relieved when he realizes it is coming from the loudspeakers this time, not from inside his own head.

“I’m terribly sorry about the search,” he says finally. “I must apologize on behalf of my colleague.”

“What search? What do you mean?” Maike asks.

“Don’t you know about it?”

“I haven’t been in the apartment since yesterday.”

“So …” Schilf says, feeling horror creep over him. “So you’ve left him?”

“He has left us, in both heart and mind. All we’ve done is move out of the apartment. A mere formality in comparison.”

“No,” Schilf says. “You’re wrong. Sebastian would never—”

“Detective,” Maike whispers, leaning toward him so that Liam cannot hear her, “did my husband murder Ralph Dabbelink?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” Maike says, and turns away. “It’s good to get a clear answer.”

“He didn’t want to.”

“No one does anything they don’t want to do.”

“He was blackmailed.”

“You believe him?”

“Strange, isn’t it? And you’re the one who’s married to him, not me.”

“What I believe doesn’t matter anymore.”

“You’re wrong there, too.”

The detective shifts a little in order to look at Maike in profile. She is not smiling. She also shows no despair, no anger, no pain. She’s a statue, Schilf thinks. Cold inside, outside pure form.

“Imagine three people walking along a beautiful road together,” Maike says. “The road suddenly comes to an end. And one of them beats his way into the bushes and runs off without hesitation. Alone.”

“That image is completely wrong.”

“Could you stop blathering?” a woman standing next to Maike asks.

“Almost done,” Schilf says, lifting his police badge up into view.

“Quantum physics opens up our thinking to an entirely different reality,” the announcer says.

“Everything I’m doing is aimed at proving Sebastian’s innocence,” the detective says to Maike. “And what’s more, to
you
.”

“Why?”

“I want you to stand by him.”

“Why?”

Because you belong on the postcard that I want to put on the fridge door of my memory, Schilf thinks.

He rubs both hands over his face. He is prolonging this conversation because he likes talking to this woman so much. He has to pull himself together and stop looking at her cloud of hair and her almost white eyelashes. He must make use of the seconds in which she is still listening, her arms crossed and her smooth face turned up toward the dome.

“Listen,” Schilf whispers. “Give me twenty-four hours and I’ll be able to explain everything to you. But I want the real guilty party to do that.”

“This is not my battle. I was cast aside before it began.”

“But Liam wants to know the truth. I promised him the truth.”

Maike glances at him, leans down to her son, and puts a hand on the back of his neck.

“Liam,” she says quietly, “do you still want this man to tell you anything?”

Liam looks over his shoulder and catches the detective’s eye.

“Get lost,” he says.

Schilf buckles as if he has been hit in the stomach. He turns the collar of his jacket up and presses the briefcase to his side.

“Our reality is like the smile of a cat that does not even exist,” the voice from the loudspeakers says.

As the detective wends his away through the crowd, he feels his nose, his mouth, and his ears as if he were learning to recognize himself in the dark through his sense of touch.

“Pardon,” he whispers. “I’m going now.”

Again and again, as if he has to tell every one of the hissing spectators: “I’m going now.”

[4]

THE BRIEFCASE MAKES IT DIFFICULT TO RUN
. Schilf wedges it under his arm as he runs past the station and onto Stephan-Mayer-Strasse. The entire city seems to be fired up by his exertion. Passersby turn into multicolored streaks and buildings hold in their stomachs and lean forward to watch him hurry past. A boy runs alongside him for a while, shouting, “Giddy-up! Giddy-up!,” and clapping his hands. It is only when Schilf reaches Sophie-de-la-Roche-Strasse that he slows down. His heart is pounding hard against his ribs. Beneath his feet the ground breathes, the pavement rises steeply heavenward. The detective half expects that he will turn into a murky fluid at any minute.

Bonnie and Clyde drop from the wall into the water and glide toward him, tugging a ripple behind them.

“Quick, quick, quick,” they quack.

Schilf cannot speak, but raises his hand to thank them before he enters the building.

The walls of the stairwell mimic his panting. Schilf pulls himself up by the handrail, step by step. He has not given any thought to how he will get the door to the apartment open in case of emergency. When he gets to the second floor, the door is open. Schilf checks the lock; it is undamaged. Either his colleagues have made a very clean job of it or
they were admitted voluntarily. In any case, the open door is no longer a technical problem, but an invitation.

Although Schilf first visited the apartment no more than two days ago, he has difficulty recognizing it even from where he stands in the doorway. Paper is strewn everywhere, the carpets have been rolled up, and the pictures taken off the wall. Everything gives the impression of forced departure and homelessness. Schilf does not have to think long about where to find Sebastian. Certain things always happen in the kitchen, which is the stomach of an apartment, just like the hallway is its legs, the living room its heart, and the study the convolutions of its brain.

All is still in the kitchen. The wire noose hanging from the ceiling casts a sharp shadow on the floor. The ceiling lamp has been removed and placed on top of the table like a suction cup. A chair had been knocked over and its legs are lying against the oven door. The contents of the drawers are scattered on the floor: cutlery lying between candles, string, plastic wrap, and cleaning cloths. Pots and pans are piled up on the windowsill. Sebastian’s body blends seamlessly into the picture. He is sitting at the table, motionless, bent over like a question mark, staring blankly at an empty glass decorated with a picture of two nuzzling parakeets.

“Goodness gracious,” the detective says.

He drops the briefcase and hurries over to Sebastian with both arms stretched out as if he is trying to take something heavy from him. Sebastian lifts his gaze, but does not quite manage to look the detective in the eye.

“Liam gave it to his mother for her birthday this year,” he says, lifting his finger ever so slightly to point at the glass. “We stumbled upon it in a department store. Maike was very pleased with it.”

“How lovely,” the detective says.

“I thought it would be easier. It was quite simple with Dabbelink. Steel cable is steel cable, I thought.”

“That is not just a bad solution,” Schilf replies. “It’s no solution at all.”

“Oskar once said that life is an offer that you can also refuse. But I wasn’t in a position to decide then. Same story my whole damn life.” Sebastian’s laugh turns into a coughing fit. “What brings you here?”

“I have a message for you.”

Sebastian finally raises his head.

“From Maike?”

“No.” Schilf clears his throat. “You’ll find out very soon who it’s from.”

An ambulance siren draws closer, grows louder, and shrieks a high-pitched warning. Its frequency decreases as the vehicle passes.

“The Doppler effect,” Sebastian says. “A great example of how everything is relative.”

Together, they listen to the sound ebbing away. Schilf feels like a surgeon who is allowing his patient a few moments of peace before he cuts away an abscess without anesthetic. This abscess is a mistake. It is the final, the biggest, and the most painful mistake that Schilf wants to cut out and replace with the steel instrument called truth, which will function as a sterile foreign body in the organism of the patient. The detective wishes an anesthetist were present.