Juli Zeh - In Free Fall

As a child, Rita would believe anything, and became well known as the victim of playground pranks. It was Rita who looked up to see a UFO while someone kicked her in the shin. Rita climbed a chestnut tree in a short skirt to rescue a small bird while, below, sniggering boys discussed the color of her underwear. There was no trick too obvious for her. She was cheated out of all her coloring pens in a bet and spent hours waiting in a hiding place when no one was looking for her. Nobody wanted to have her on their team when they were playing cops and robbers.

Despite this, Rita already knew from the age of ten what she wanted to be. When the time came, her parents threw up their hands in horror. But one of Rita’s strengths is an astonishing stubbornness. She stood by her decision, cleverly insisted on the truth of the paradox that people are always best at the things for which they have the least natural talent, and applied for the job.

At the interview, she answered half the questions wrongly: a result dependent entirely on the principles of probability theory. Flushed red, she promised to compensate for her unshakeable belief in normality and people’s good intentions with extraordinary diligence and care. She got the job.

The training did not come easy to her. In criminology seminars she always had to play the role of the foolish witness who is led onto slippery ground with trick questions. Not a day went by in which she did not think about giving up—until she met an instructor called Schilf, who grasped her nature from the first hour of the lesson, and took her aside during the lunch break. He told her that she was ideally suited to a career in criminology as long as she followed one simple rule. She had to learn that her trusting nature was what her opponent expected; so she always had to assume the opposite of what she was thinking, and always do the opposite of what she felt.

From then on, it did not just become better. It became good. Rita’s trusting nature was always so reliably wrong that when she followed Instructor Schilf’s advice, she achieved an amazing degree of success. She had only to look at the photo of a suspect and take him for the criminal to be certain that he was innocent. When she read a witness statement and found it believable, she knew that the witness was lying. Rita’s trusting nature transformed itself into a self-confidence so merciless that it seemed she was avenging all the humiliations of her previous life. She screamed at suspects, and her criminological sense exceeded that of not only her peers but also her instructors. When she was promoted to detective, the walrus-mustached police chief squeezed her hand; and Rita returned the pressure until this most senior officer winced in pain.

Despite this, Rita knows that her cat still has it in her to be a better investigator. Rita herself will never rise to be the stuff of police legend, though perhaps she might become the first female police chief in Baden-Württemberg. And that would be more than enough for her.

Her lack of elegance was not something that could be addressed with a simple reversal of assumptions. Although Rita’s parents were normal people of average exterior, a genetic coincidence had turned their daughter into an anatomical exception. At first sight, her physique looked like a parody of a male fantasy. Her breasts are so large that they seem to pull her upper body forward. To walk is to fall; you can see that with Rita. Her shoulders and her waist are narrow and her legs are long, like those of a jointed doll. The young officers call her corkscrew curls a mane, even though none of them has ever seen a horse with a curly mane. Rita could explain straightaway why she reminds people of a horse, or perhaps a small pony. She has a little too much of everything: too much hair, too much leg, and too much mouth. She looks like someone who was fat as a child and who has been unable to forget that way of moving. She walks with long steps and sways from side to side like a buoy in a swell. The hands that protrude from her cardigan look like they have been borrowed from a man. Even her voice would have been better suited for a man: her most harmless comments come out sounding like insults.

Rita has gotten used to all this. She now means everything she says just as it sounds. She pulls the corners of her mouth down when she smiles. She breathes in, not out, when she says “yes,” which sounds like a disapproving “huh” that makes everyone she speaks to lose all desire to carry on talking. And when she is angry she presses her lips together as if a word starting with “B” were stuck in her throat. Bullshit. Bluster. Balderdash.

Both men and women turn to look at Rita in the street, and she does not take this as a compliment but as a reaction to her physical oddity. She buttons her shirts and coats to the top in all seasons. In summer she wears flowery dresses that hang below the knee, a length no dressmaker would call fashionable. On Rita’s body this type of dress has an effect similar to that of a campsite sticker on a Maserati. A clever person has to laugh; stupid people get angry. Rita is fine with that. There are not many female detectives, and their colleagues claim they would faint at the sight of a drowned body. This is why Rita needs to package herself to display the superiority of mind over body. She wears ironic clothes and sarcastic sandals that are feared throughout the jurisdiction. When she enters a room at her workplace, all heads lower, as if the Latin teacher has just entered the classroom. If asked whether she has a sense of humor, she would answer that there is no sentence so foolish that a person could not say it in all seriousness. So why laugh?

The only thing that really interests Rita is police work. She is thirty-one, single, and childless. As a member of the murder squad, she encounters corpses every day and can examine wives battered to death, old people who have choked on their mashed potatoes, and suicide cases crushed by trains—without even thinking of fainting. She also has the young men in the police force well under control. At their morning meetings, she does not mince her words about their mistakes and failures. If anyone contradicts her, she points to a long list of cases in which she was right from the very start.

The cat is one of the few living beings whom Rita wishes well. When she holds the little animal on her lap, she can feel its warmth on her skin after a few seconds, unlike the warmth of a human being, which can take a few minutes to penetrate the clothing. Apart from that, the cat has a sensible job, unlike most people. It keeps the birds away from the windows of the ground-floor apartment. Rita tends to feel that she is being observed, and she can’t bear airborne spies.

After devouring her third egg, Rita gets up and puts the purring cat down on the chair she has just vacated. In the kitchen, she fills the feeding bowl with the ground chicken that she has bought by way of apology. Since a senior registrar and his head parted company during a cycling ride, Rita has hardly been home. Last night she stormed out of her office after the walrus-mustached police chief had called, and she woke after a few hours’ sleep feeling just as insulted. Even though she has very little experience of politically sensitive cases, she was not surprised when the police chief bellowed through the phone, explicitly demanding that she conjure up a miracle. She did not mind staying late in the office and going back to work at seven the next morning. What made her bile rise up was that they wanted to put a higher-ranking detective on the case with her. Rita Skura is young, she is a woman, and the steel-cable killing is actually the first time she has led a murder investigation. Even if the whole thing were to blow up into a real crisis, even if the chair of the bristle-haired home secretary were to wobble, Rita Skura does not need help. She must deliver concrete results by this evening, otherwise Detective Chief Superinten dent Schilf, the very man to whose advice she owes her career, will be transferred from Stuttgart to Freiburg.