Juli Zeh - In Free Fall

When the train starts moving again, the gentle eyes of a few lost calves glide by. They are the reason the train has been held up in this field for almost an hour. A trampled-down fence, men in orange protective suits doing their work.

Wet calves are a good omen, the detective decides. They are the opposite of black cats, crows, and hooting owls. The ZDF television station has agreed to send a video recording of Circumpolar to him today. Schilf rubs his hands together and tries to calm himself down by breathing in and out slowly. He cannot shake the feeling that he has missed something, as if he has made the irrevocable decision to be in the wrong place. Suddenly he sees a cat in front of him, and he recognizes it as the cat in the photographs on Rita’s bulletin board. It is sitting behind a patio door cleaning its front paws with a knowing expression on its face, as if it were responsible for the two wrists being roughly pressed together in an apartment at the other end of town. A boy’s fair head appears in the gap of a half-opened bedroom door. A look from those eyes, widened in shock, drives a splint into the father’s brain. A metallic click as the handcuffs snap shut. A hysterical blond woman runs down the hall, dissolving. She is not trying to scratch the people in uniform but the man in the middle.

You have a son!

The scream performs somersaults and is cut off by the crash of a door slamming shut. Blue light flashes rhythmically over the backdrop of an overcast day. The cat leans its head to one side and scratches itself behind an ear.

The series of pictures does not stop when the man in his mid-fifties packs his markers and leaves the train.

A woman in a flowery dress and a cardigan pushes her thick curls back. Sitting opposite her is a man, now free of handcuffs, but with a gray face. A lovely couple. The hatred between them spreads swiftly, like a gas diffusing through the room.

Do you know why you are here?

Where is Detective Schilf?

I am the one heading this investigation.

The woman’s look suggests a score of over 90 percent in the shooting range. The man grows paler. Schilf clutches at a suffocating feeling in his chest. The woman laughs through her nose and switches on a recording device. She tells the man about his right to remain silent, to lie, or to hook up with some crooked lawyer. The man does not want to know about his rights.

He dictates his confession and says that he was blackmailed. The cat stops moving when a sparrow lands on the patio. The woman lets the man talk and updates him on the investigation. There are no traces in the car. The son knows nothing. The people at the service station know nothing. There are only those two calls to his mobile from withheld numbers, and he could have made those himself, if he doesn’t mind her saying so. The sparrow decides to look for another spot to rest. The cat feigns indifference. The man says something now about rights and justice. The woman flips through her papers and then she says:

You may go now.

The man is at a loss.

What did you say?

Don’t leave town, and be prepared.

The woman assumes an official air and takes notes. The man does not move.

Kindly put me on remand.

The cat smiles. The train drills into the next wall of rain.

If you’re going to rip my life to shreds, the man screams, then please at least keep hold of the remains!

The woman in the flowery dress takes a deep breath and bellows so loudly that her voice echoes throughout the corridors of the police department:

Out!

The train has drawn into a station, so Schilf steps outside, paces up and down the platform angrily, and lets the rain cool his face. His heart tells him that it would have been better simply to have taken Sebastian out of the country, but his head tells him that it was right to follow the path of law.

So Schilf stands in the rain and says to hell with head and heart, in equal measure.

The good news is that he has gotten out of the train in Basel, where he has to change trains anyway. In the InterCity train a man in his mid-fifties with a handlebar mustache is sitting opposite him, looking down at a book without moving his eyes. By the time they get to Delémont, he has not turned a single page. He looks exactly like the man with the markers.

If it is my consciousness that is creating the world, it clearly doesn’t have much imagination, the detective thought , the detective thinks.

He gulps down two more ibuprofen. See you again soon, the man with the handlebar mustache says in Geneva.

THE WATER OF THE RHÔNE HAS BEEN SCULPTED into blades of black that sweep into the city in long rows. It is unusually dark for nine thirty on a summer’s evening. Yellow light runs from post to post along the embankment and over the bridge toward the city center. In this bad weather, the detective is practically alone with the elements.

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.