In Free Fall(81)

The detective has grown warm. He has grabbed hold of the mouse to pause the clip, and is looking for a way to play the last few seconds again.

“That’s not allowed,” the librarian says.

Schilf gives a start, as though someone has stabbed him in the neck. A shadow falls over the workstation.

“You can’t download films here. The computers are here for research.”

This country is made up of prohibitions just like a house of cards is made of cards, the detective thinks. Perhaps I ought to have applied for something on the other side back then.

“This is a scientific program,” he says out loud. “I’m from the police.”

“And I’m enforcing the rules,” the librarian says. “Do you have a search warrant?”

Without waiting for his reply, she leans forward and closes every open window with a rapid tap of the keys. Schilf has to get up from his chair in order to create some distance between himself and the woman. Her eyelids are covered with a thick layer of purple eye-shadow.

“Can I help you in any other way?”

“No thank you,” the detective says. “I was just about to go.”

On the street, he stands under a lowering sky and does not know where to go next. Cars pass in both directions and people stride toward secret destinations. Pain drills into his lower jaw. Schilf puts both hands to his face to prevent it from falling apart. He has to keep watching the cars so that they will continue moving, has to lean against the wall so that it won’t collapse. He has to watch the passersby so that they won’t crumble into dust. He is a pillar of the sky, a generator of time, the perpendicular in the earth’s axis. If he closes his eyes the earth will no longer exist. Only the headache.

Not yet, not now, the detective thinks.

His next few steps land on firm ground, small paving stones that are exactly the same size as the soles of his shoes. He takes out his mobile phone and gets through to international directory assistance. He asks for a number in Geneva.





[7]


BIRD FLU HAS SCURRIED INTO EUROPE on its clawed feet. Migratory birds spread the virus to the farthest corners of the world. Seagulls are dropping dead from the sky near the coast of Hamburg and mankind is preparing for an epidemic. Everything that flies is being executed. Soon the last feather will float to earth in a forest clearing. After that, Detective Schilf will be carrying the last surviving bird’s egg in his head.

He puts down the crumpled newspaper that he found on his seat. Bird flu. As if there were no other problems. He has used up the doctor’s painkillers, and has managed to get only ibuprofen in the pharmacy at the station. Sitting opposite him is a mustached man in his mid-fifties, who is busy copying the train schedule into a notebook with a marker. The barren stomp and jangle of twenty-first-century music is forcing its way out of a girl’s headphones. Two rows down, a train conductor is rebuffing an angry woman’s accusations. Please let me finish what I am saying. The staff is doing its best. Everything that is possible happens.

Outside, the gray ceiling of sky stretches westward. A successful performance of late autumn in July.

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.