The silence that follows is a pause at first, then it grows intolerable, and finally becomes a matter of course. Sebastian has told Oskar everything he knows, and the speech that Oskar has prepared is meant for another situation altogether. The silent telephone line is like an open door between two empty rooms. In Freiburg, the first light of dawn is creeping toward Sebastian’s fingertips. In Geneva, Oskar lights one cigarette after another. The twitter of lone birds waking can be heard in both cities. Merciful night dissolves and flows in all directions. In both places, the new day dawns—a rock with sharp edges, ready to peel the skin from the body of anyone who challenges it.
It is light when Oskar speaks again. His voice is a whisper that barely makes it across the distance between the telephones.
“Maik knows nothing?”
“Not yet.”
“Go to the police.”
“What?”
“I’ve thought about it. Go to the police.” Oskar’s breath hisses into the covering of the microphone. “Just tell them that Liam has disappeared. Once he’s back… Sebastian? Liam will be back. Tell me that you heard that.”
“Yes.”
“As soon as he’s back, we’ll worry about the rest.”
Very little has changed in Sebastian’s posture, although the morning light makes him look even more pathetic than before. His face has lost its luster. The absence of light shows that he has just reached the bottom of the pit. Free fall has ended. Oskar’s decision has exploded a world in which there is no demonstrable reality, and in which there is always the same number of reasons for and against every action. Sebastian stretches out to touch the armrest of the chair where his friend sat the last time they had dinner together, but he can’t reach it—his arm is too short.
“Do you want me to come?” Oskar asks.
“What?”
“Do you want me to get on a train and come to you?”
“No.”
“I’d have done it gladly. Think carefully about what you’re going to tell them.”
“Sure.”
“Sebastian, I…”
The line is dead. Neither of them could have said with any certainty which of them hung up first.
CHAPTER 4, IN SEVEN PARTS
Rita Skura has a cat. The human being is a hole in nothingness. After a delay, the detective chief superintendent enters the scene.
[1]
RITA SKURA HAS A CAT. When she lifts the animal off the ground, it spreads the toes of all four paws as though it is preparing tiny parachutes for a fall. Rita Skura would never drop her cat, but the cat does not rely on that. If it were to fall one day, it would land softly and stroke the hair on its chin with a superior look on its face. That is exactly why Rita loves her pet. It possesses two qualities that to the end of her days she will never have: healthy mistrust and natural elegance.
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.