Juli Zeh - In Free Fall

“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.”

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.