Rita Skura sinks back into her seat, exhausted. What a ridiculous waste of a few weeks. Sleepless nights, visits to the hospital, neglecting the cat, being unfairly taken to task by her superiors—what had it all been for? Who on earth was interested in an exceptional performance to no end? There was only one way to see it: total failure. The thought has barely crossed her mind before she feels as if she has been declared cured, all without having an operation. She is floating in the air, she could sing out loud. She could kiss the detective or wring his neck.
She doesn’t have much time to brood. Schnurpfeil wrenches the driver’s door open and slips behind the wheel. While Sebastian gets into the back and puts the cooler back on his lap, the senior policeman sits motionless with both hands on the steering wheel, his head hanging like a schoolboy’s.
“Stage fright?” Schilf asks.
“I don’t think I want to go on,” Schnurpfeil says.
Rita sizes up everyone in the van with an appraising look. All at once, she thinks she knows how Sebastian feels. And how Schilf feels. Maybe even how Oskar feels. In the end, it’s simply about confronting total defeat with a brave face. She stretches a hand out quickly and places it on the senior policeman’s shoulder.
“Schnurpfeil,” she says, “I am leading this investigation.”
A smile flits over his face.
“What now?” he asks.
“Back home,” Schilf says, “to wait.”
[6]
JULIA RUSHES TO MEET HIM IN THE HALLWAY of the police apartment with such expectancy that Schilf is happy to have something to offer her. His girlfriend links arms with him as he introduces her to the murderer. Sebastian is lingering by the door that has just closed behind him, and seems quite helpless: too tall and angular for the narrow space. He grips the handle of the cooler. Schilf and his girlfriend are both smiling at him and he looks at them shyly, as if he is facing a court of law.
Schilf had not wanted to leave Sebastian alone again, so had asked him to spend the final few hours before the big event together. When Sebastian hesitated, Schilf turned the invitation into an order. Now Schilf realizes that a detective can no longer be an official when he is at home, in front of his girlfriend. Sebastian is suddenly presented with a stranger and his younger girlfriend, and is wondering what these two people think of him. In front of the police, a murderer is not ashamed of his crime, just as a patient seeing his doctor is not ashamed of his illness. But Sebastian does not have any practice in living with his crime in the personal realm. Like an accident victim, he must learn everything from scratch: speaking, hand gestures, looking people in the eye. The sooner you start, the better, the detective thinks.
Julia reaches out to shake Sebastian’s hand and says that she likes him in person even more than she did on television, and he relaxes visibly. As the detective walks ahead of them into the living room, he realizes that the result of an important experiment has almost passed him by. While climbing the stairs, he was nervous about this meeting between Julia and Sebastian. He had imagined his girlfriend extending her hand to Sebastian and a lightning bolt striking at the same time, reducing her to a puff of smoke. Or, worse still, he had imagined Sebastian entering the apartment and simply walking through Julia as if she were simply not there. Schilf feels a fleeting prick of conscience. He is not sure why this fear surfaced at the crucial moment—because it was so absurd or because he now no longer cared whether Julia disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Sebastian looks around the apartment, and says something pleasant but untrue about it. The detective positions his girlfriend in the open-plan kitchen with her back against the wall and indicates that Sebastian should bring the cooler. Schilf has brought not only the murderer with him, but something special that more or less belongs to the murderer. This needs to go into the freezer, urgently.
“A picnic?” Julia asks.
She chats away, joking about ice cream and cold beer while Schilf lifts the blue lid off the cooler. Dabbelink’s stare turns Julia’s voice into background noise, as if someone has turned the volume down. The skin on the face has dried up and drawn tight over the bones, so the eyes are open and staring, as if the cyclist were speeding toward a taut steel cable for all eternity. The nose is out of joint and the mouth is stretched in an evil grin. The cervical vertebrae stick out of the tangle of severed tubes, white and clean like a handle. Sebastian pushes in front of Schilf; he wants to lift the head of his victim out of the box himself.
“Careful,” Schilf says. “It’s only held in place by skin.”
When they had been standing over the large aluminum drawer in the forensic department, Sebastian bent down low as if to kiss his victim, then looked at the detective with shining eyes. Thank you, he said. Whatever you’re planning, you’ve just saved me from going mad.