“Listen, Schilf. Tell the chief that you are urgently needed for the hospital scandal. And leave the cyclist, who you don’t think is important anyway, to me.” She casts him a wary look in the rearview mirror. “The cases are closely connected. We would be working together either way.”
Schilf saves the game for later. He thinks longingly of a world in which he has not made that stupid move with his knight and in which he wins every game against the chess computer, which is why he must always lose in this world: for there is no victory or defeat and no right or wrong; rather: victory and defeat as well as right and wrong.
“Are you even listening?” Rita asks.
“No,” Schilf says. “But you can keep the cyclist. And the rest of all that nonsense. I’ll take on the physics professor. Now look where you’re going.”
“Why?”
“Because of the traffic light!”
She slams on the brakes, and a treble C rings out. The detective’s slack body folds around the seat belt. He rubs his stomach, groaning.
“But why,” Rita says suspiciously as she reverses the car out of the intersection, “why don’t you want to do the job on account of which you’ve come here specially?”
On account of which. Schilf knows why he liked Rita Skura from the moment he met her. In her own way, she is as lost in this world as he is. He aims a wintry smile at the rearview mirror. He’s going to be sick if they don’t get there soon.
“At my age,” Schilf says, “you no longer judge crimes by their prominence.”
“Not according to your most recent successes.”
“Listen to me, Rita. You can have Dabbelink.”
Rita does not quite manage to hide her pleasure. She turns into Heinrich-von-Stephan-Strasse with a flourish, lifts her pass up to the machine at the entrance, and parks in the shade of a tree, for the places under the corrugated iron roof have long since been taken. She rests her hands on the steering wheel. In the sudden silence, the birdsong is surprisingly loud.
“I have never forgotten that I must proceed from the opposite of my own convictions,” Rita says. “Going by this rule, I will actually have to trust you.”
“You are a good child,” Schilf says.
The moment of weakness passes. Rita kicks open her door, plants her feet squarely on the ground, and waits with her fists pressed into her sides for Schilf to emerge from the car.
“This is how it’s going to be,” she says. “For as long as you’re here, we’ll be sharing an office. My office.”
She locks the car and holds the detective back when he starts walking toward the building. He looks down at her and feels the hint of a fatherly smile on his lips.
“Two more things,” she says. “First—no tricks.”
“I have a new girlfriend, by the way,” the detective says.
“Are you sure she isn’t a social worker who visits you regularly?”
“Not at all sure,” says Schilf. “I’ll get the file on the physicist and pay him a visit. You can look after my bag in the meantime.”
“Second!” Rita screams after him. “No smoking in my office!”
The detective’s laughter is visible in his receding back.
CHAPTER 5
The detective superintendent solves the case but the story does not end.
[1]
FREIBURG IS ONLY HALF AWAKE at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. The lanes are still in shadow, and the tables and chairs of the pavement cafés around the cathedral bunch together as if they fear the weekend crowds about to descend. The waitresses walk between them like shepherds, shooing chairs into place, patting tables on the back and putting ashtrays on them.
The detective has never much liked Freiburg. The people seem too happy to him, and the reasons for their happiness too banal. It smells a little of holidays, especially when the sun is shining. Students are lifting their behinds onto hand-painted bicycles. Married women festooned in batik make their way to their favorite boutiques. A traffic jam of strollers has already formed outside a health food shop. No one here seems to feel the need to ponder the meaning of life. The detective superintendent sees only one face with a skeptical expression. It belongs to the blue and yellow macaw in a large cage next to the postcard stand outside a photo shop. The bird gazes at the detective so piercingly that he chooses a wicker chair nearby.
“My name is Agfa,” the parrot says.
“Schilf,” the detective says.
“Look out,” the parrot says.
The detective waves away a schoolgirl with green hair who is asking him for a euro even though she is wearing designer jeans and has a Dalmatian on a leash. Schilf is about to tell her that one cannot enjoy the practical advantages of wealth and the moral advantages of poverty at the same time, but the girl tells him where, in her opinion, he ought to go. Schilf grimaces. In ugly towns like Stuttgart, people at least admit that they have struck the jackpot in the lottery of life.