The frantic ticking of a clock is getting on Schilf’s nerves, but he is relieved when he realizes it is coming from the loudspeakers this time, not from inside his own head.
“I’m terribly sorry about the search,” he says finally. “I must apologize on behalf of my colleague.”
“What search? What do you mean?” Maike asks.
“Don’t you know about it?”
“I haven’t been in the apartment since yesterday.”
“So …” Schilf says, feeling horror creep over him. “So you’ve left him?”
“He has left us, in both heart and mind. All we’ve done is move out of the apartment. A mere formality in comparison.”
“No,” Schilf says. “You’re wrong. Sebastian would never—”
“Detective,” Maike whispers, leaning toward him so that Liam cannot hear her, “did my husband murder Ralph Dabbelink?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you,” Maike says, and turns away. “It’s good to get a clear answer.”
“He didn’t want to.”
“No one does anything they don’t want to do.”
“He was blackmailed.”
“You believe him?”
“Strange, isn’t it? And you’re the one who’s married to him, not me.”
“What I believe doesn’t matter anymore.”
“You’re wrong there, too.”
The detective shifts a little in order to look at Maike in profile. She is not smiling. She also shows no despair, no anger, no pain. She’s a statue, Schilf thinks. Cold inside, outside pure form.
“Imagine three people walking along a beautiful road together,” Maike says. “The road suddenly comes to an end. And one of them beats his way into the bushes and runs off without hesitation. Alone.”
“That image is completely wrong.”
“Could you stop blathering?” a woman standing next to Maike asks.
“Almost done,” Schilf says, lifting his police badge up into view.
“Quantum physics opens up our thinking to an entirely different reality,” the announcer says.
“Everything I’m doing is aimed at proving Sebastian’s innocence,” the detective says to Maike. “And what’s more, to you.”
“Why?”
“I want you to stand by him.”
“Why?”
Because you belong on the postcard that I want to put on the fridge door of my memory, Schilf thinks.
He rubs both hands over his face. He is prolonging this conversation because he likes talking to this woman so much. He has to pull himself together and stop looking at her cloud of hair and her almost white eyelashes. He must make use of the seconds in which she is still listening, her arms crossed and her smooth face turned up toward the dome.
“Listen,” Schilf whispers. “Give me twenty-four hours and I’ll be able to explain everything to you. But I want the real guilty party to do that.”
“This is not my battle. I was cast aside before it began.”
“But Liam wants to know the truth. I promised him the truth.”
Maike glances at him, leans down to her son, and puts a hand on the back of his neck.
“Liam,” she says quietly, “do you still want this man to tell you anything?”
Liam looks over his shoulder and catches the detective’s eye.
“Get lost,” he says.
Schilf buckles as if he has been hit in the stomach. He turns the collar of his jacket up and presses the briefcase to his side.
“Our reality is like the smile of a cat that does not even exist,” the voice from the loudspeakers says.
As the detective wends his away through the crowd, he feels his nose, his mouth, and his ears as if he were learning to recognize himself in the dark through his sense of touch.
“Pardon,” he whispers. “I’m going now.”
Again and again, as if he has to tell every one of the hissing spectators: “I’m going now.”
[4]
THE BRIEFCASE MAKES IT DIFFICULT TO RUN. Schilf wedges it under his arm as he runs past the station and onto Stephan-Mayer-Strasse. The entire city seems to be fired up by his exertion. Passersby turn into multicolored streaks and buildings hold in their stomachs and lean forward to watch him hurry past. A boy runs alongside him for a while, shouting, “Giddy-up! Giddy-up!,” and clapping his hands. It is only when Schilf reaches Sophie-de-la-Roche-Strasse that he slows down. His heart is pounding hard against his ribs. Beneath his feet the ground breathes, the pavement rises steeply heavenward. The detective half expects that he will turn into a murky fluid at any minute.
Bonnie and Clyde drop from the wall into the water and glide toward him, tugging a ripple behind them.