In Free Fall(101)

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.