The Abominable

by Dan Simmons

  Finally, when I can speak without a tremor in my voice that would match the earlier shaking of my hands, I say, “This Adolf Hitler—I have read the name but remembered nothing about him—is he a local Communist leader calling for the overthrow of the Weimar Republic?”

  “Rather the other way around, old boy,” replies the Deacon from where he is stretched out on the compartment’s other long, padded bench. “Hitler was—is, since his trial gave him a national audience for his rants—famous and much loved for his very far-right-wing views, virulent anti-Semitism and all.”

  “Ah,” I say. “But he is in prison for five years for the treason of his attempted coup last year?”

  The Deacon has sat up to light his pipe again and opens the train window a bit to reduce the smoke in the compartment, although I don’t mind it. “I believe that Herr Sigl was right on both counts about that…that is, that Hitler will be out before the new year, with less than one year served, and that the authorities are treating him like a royal guest in that prison above the river.”

  “Why?”

  The Deacon shrugs slightly. “Nineteen twenty-four German politics is far beyond my poor powers to understand, but the extreme right wing—the Nazis, to be precise—certainly seems to be speaking for a lot of frustrated people since this superinflation struck.”

  I realize that I’m not really interested in the little man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache.

  “By the by,” adds the Deacon, “that bald, round-faced, scowling gentleman who sat across from you at the table and who slapped your hand when you seemed about to touch their sacred Blood Flag?”

  “Yes?”

  “Ulrich Graf was Herr Hitler’s personal bodyguard—which may be why he took several bullets aimed Hitler’s way during last November’s absurd botch of a putsch. But Graf is a hardy fellow, as you saw tonight, and will probably live to be the savior of Germany’s Nazi hero once again, I am sure. Before becoming a Nazi and bodyguard to their leader, Graf was a butcher, a semi-professional wrestler, and a for-hire street brawler. Sometimes he would volunteer to beat up—or even kill—Jews or Communists without charging his bosses.”

  I think about this for a long moment. Finally I speak in just above a whisper, despite the compartment walls around us.

  “Do you believe Sigl in his account of how Lord Percival and the Austrian Meyer died?” I ask. Personally, as much as I disliked Sigl and some of his friends, I can’t see an alternative to believing him.

  “Not a word of it,” says the Deacon.

  This causes me to sit up straight from where I’ve been half-reclining.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you think happened to Bromley and Meyer? And why would Sigl lie?”

  The Deacon shrugs slightly again. “It is possible that Sigl and his friends were ready to make an illegal bid for the summit after they heard in Tingri that the rest of Mallory’s team had left. Sigl certainly had no Tibetan climbing or travel permit himself. Perhaps Sigl and his six friends caught up with Bromley somewhere below the North Col and pressed him and this Meyer person to go with him on the climb in the tricky near-monsoon weather. When Bromley and Meyer fell to their deaths—or perhaps died some other way on the mountain—Sigl had to retreat and make up the Lost Boys story of the other two men climbing alone and being carried away by an avalanche.”

  “You don’t believe in his avalanche story?”

  “I’ve been on that part of the ridge and face, Jake,” says the Deacon. “That section of the face rarely accumulates enough snow for the kind of massive slab-slide avalanche Sigl described. And if it did, my feeling is that Bromley had garnered enough avalanche-avoidance experience in the Alps to know better than to venture out onto such a slope.”

  “If the avalanche didn’t kill Bromley and the Austrian, do you think they fell while climbing above Camp Six with Sigl?”

  “There are other possibilities,” says the Deacon. “Especially since the little I remember about Percy Bromley would not include the possibility of his being bullied into an Everest summit attempt by a German political fanatic intent upon bagging Mount Everest for das Vaterland.”

  The Deacon studies his pipe. ”I wish I’d known Lord Percival better. As I told you and Jean-Claude, I was brought to the estate—rather as nobility would send out for any other commodity to be delivered—to be an occasional playmate for Percy’s older brother, Charles, who was about my age, nine or ten at the time. Young Percival always wanted to tag along. He was—what is your American term, Jake?—a right pain in the arse.”

  “You never saw Percival after that?”

  “Oh, I’d bump into him from time to time at English garden parties or on the Continent,” the Deacon says vaguely.

  “Was Percival really…inverted?” It’s hard for me to say the word aloud. “Did he really frequent European brothels where young men were the prostitutes?”

  “So it’s rumored,” says the Deacon. “Is that important to you in some way, Jake?”

  I think about that but can’t make up my mind. I’ve led a sheltered life, I realize. I’ve never had any inverted friends. Or at least none that I knew about.

  “How else might Bromley and Kurt Meyer have died?” I ask, embarrassed and eager to change the subject.

  “Bruno Sigl may have killed them both,” says the Deacon. There is a blue haze between us, but it hovers and then moves for the open window. The sound of steel wheels on metal rails is very loud.

  I’m profoundly shocked at this. Is the Deacon saying this for effect? Just to shock me? If so, he’s succeeded beautifully.

  My mother is Catholic—a former O’Riley and another stain on the escutcheon of the old-line Boston Brahmin Perry family—and I was raised to understand the difference between venial and mortal sins. Killing another climber on such a mountain as Everest would be, to me, somewhere beyond a major mortal sin. For a climber, it adds a sense of blasphemy to the mortal sin of murder. “Kill fellow climbers? Why?” I manage at last.

  The Deacon tamps his pipe out in an ashtray set into the end of an armrest. “I rather imagine we shall just have to go climb Mount Everest and do what we’re supposed to be doing—that is, find the remains of Lord Percival Bromley—to find out.”

  The Deacon pulls a tweed hat down over his eyes and goes to sleep in seconds. I sit upright in the clacking train compartment for a long time, thinking, trying to sort out things which simply defy sorting.

  Eventually I shut the window. The air outside is getting colder.

  Chapter 7

  The ledge was about the width of that bread tray…

  It is on another train, this one a narrow-gauge railway climbing 7,000 feet from miasmic Calcutta to the high hills of Darjeeling at the end of March 1925, that I finally take time to think back about the busy winter and spring months before our departure.

  In early January of 1925, all three of us had traveled back to Zurich to visit George Ingle Finch, who, with the possible exception of Richard Davis Deacon, was the finest British alpinist still living.

  And while Finch had been a fellow Everest expedition climber with Mallory and Deacon in 1922, he shared the Deacon’s bad fortune of falling out of favor with the Powers That Be—twice, in Finch’s case, not just running afoul of George Leigh Mallory’s sensibilities, but alienating the entire Mount Everest Committee, the Alpine Club, and two-thirds of the Royal Geographical Society.

  Finch had studied medicine briefly at the École de Médecine in Paris and then switched to the physical sciences while studying at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich from 1906 to 1922, then served as a captain in the Royal Field Artillery in France, Egypt, and Macedonia during the Great War, and after the War had returned to mostly Swiss alpine climbing, in the process bagging more first ascents in the Alps than the rest of the chosen Everest expedition members combined. He was much more aware of German and other new European climbing techniques than any of the Everest Committee or other Brit
ish climbers—but he’d been left off the 1921 roster, officially because of poor results on his physical. The real reason was that although he, Finch, was a British citizen and decorated Great War artillery officer, he’d spent so many years climbing and living in the German-Swiss-speaking part of Switzerland before and after the War that he was more comfortable speaking German than English. As Brigadier General Charles Bruce had described the selection committee’s choices, “If at all possible, they, we, wished to keep the Everest expeditions all an Old Boys’ Club, you see. ‘BAT’ we called it amongst ourselves—‘British All Through.’”

  According to the Deacon, General Bruce, the same Everest Committee man and 1922 expedition leader who’d argued for a BAT climbing team, had once written to other potential committee and team members (including the Deacon) that George Finch was “a convincing raconteur of quite impossible qualifications. Cleans his teeth on February 1st and has a bath the same day if the water is very hot, otherwise puts it off until next year.”

  But Finch’s primary sin in the various BAT-eyes of the committee, according to the Deacon, was, besides a frequently unkempt appearance and an odd German accent, the “impossible qualifications” part—that is, George Finch kept coming up with climbing innovations for conquering Mount Everest. Neither the Royal Geographical Society nor the Alpine Club (nor, for that matter, the Mount Everest Committee) liked “innovations.” The old ways were the good ways: hobnailed boots, nineteenth-century-style ice axes, and thin layers of wool between the climber and the almost-out-of-the-earth’s-atmosphere sub-zero-degrees-Fahrenheit temperatures at 28,000 feet and above.

  One such absurd Finch innovation, said the Deacon, was an overcoat the successful alpinist had designed and had made—just for Mount Everest conditions—consisting of a goose-down-layered (rather than regular wool or cotton or silk) overcoat. Finch had experimented with many materials, finally settling on a thin but very strong balloon fabric, to create a long overcoat with many sewn compartments of goose down to trap air pockets of a person’s warmth much as the down had done for the goose in the Arctic.

  The result, explained the Deacon, was that at altitudes of 20,000 feet and above on the 1922 expedition, Finch was the only man not freezing in the high-altitude winds and cold.

  But the death knell for George Finch’s inclusion in the 1924 expedition, despite his excellent climbing record in the previous Everest attempt (he and young Geoffrey Bruce briefly set a high-altitude climbing record on their bold but unsuccessful May 27, 1922, summit bid), was that it had been Finch who proposed and adapted the Royal Flying Service oxygen equipment that members of the team had used—to very good effect—in 1922 and ’24. (Mallory and Irvine were wearing Finch’s oxygen apparatus, although much redesigned by the tinker-genius Sandy Irvine, when the two heroes disappeared in their summit attempt on that final 1924 expedition.)

  Arthur Hinks, the Everest Committee man most in charge of spending (and hoarding) the expeditions’ funds, had written of Finch’s oxygen apparatus—long after it had been proven in altitude-chamber experiments, on the Eiger, and upon Mount Everest itself—with this much-repeated official comment: “I should be especially sorry if the oxygen outfit prevents them going as high as possible without it. If some of the party do not go to 25,000 ft to 26,000 ft without oxygen they will be rotters.”

  Rotters?

  “Easy enough for a man who never leaves London’s sea level to say,” commented the Deacon as we traveled by rail to Zurich in January of 1925.

  “I’d like to transport Mr. Hinks to twenty-six thousand feet on Everest and watch him gasp, retch, and flop around like a fish out of water,” continued the Deacon, “and then ask him if he considers himself a ‘rotter.’ I certainly consider him such, even when he stays at sea level.”

  This was why we were tentatively planning to take twenty-five sets of the Irvine-improved Finch oxygen rigs and one hundred tanks of oxygen on our own expedition. (This was more than the ninety tanks that Mallory and his team had taken along for their 1924 expedition to serve dozens of the climbers and high-altitude porters. And there would be only the three of us.) “What about ‘Cousin Reggie’?” Jean-Claude had asked, reminding the Deacon of Lady Bromley’s condition that we take Bromley’s tea plantation cousin with us.

  “‘Cousin Reggie’ can bloody well stay at Base Camp and breathe the thick yak-scented air at sixteen thousand five hundred feet,” said the Deacon.

  And now, in the cold first month of the year in which we’d try or die on Mount Everest, the Deacon wanted us to meet and speak with George Finch in his adopted hometown of Zurich. (The Deacon had invited him to London, offering to pay his expenses, which made sense since there were three of us and only one Finch, but the irascible climber had cabled back, “There’s not enough money in all of England to induce me to return to London now.”)

  We met George Ingle Finch at the Restaurant Kronenhalle, an upscale place even by Zurich’s high standards for fancy restaurants, and one well known throughout Europe. The Deacon had informed us that, despite its once proud history, Kronenhalle had become pretty run-down in recent years and during Germany’s era of hyperinflation, the old restaurant floating by on its nineteenth-century reputation for excellence. But then a certain Hilda and Gottlieb Zumsteg had recently purchased and renovated the place, bringing the whole large establishment, including a new chef, a menu that was a combination of the best Bavarian, classic, and Swiss cuisine, and superlative service, up to the true standards of Swiss and Zurich excellence. So while Germans were starving a few miles across the border, the Swiss bankers, merchants, and other upper-class citizens could dine in luxury.

  Restaurant Kronenhalle was situated at Rämistrasse 4, less than a mile southwest of the University of Zurich (where two of Jean-Claude’s three older brothers attended classes before returning to France to die in the Great War) and precisely where the Limmat River flows into Lake Zurich. The late January wind blowing off that lake, blocked only intermittently on the broad Rämistrasse by softly rumbling streetcars, froze me to the bone despite my heaviest wool formal overcoat.

  It’s at this moment that I found myself wondering, If I’m freezing with chattering teeth just crossing the Rämistrasse in Zurich in a slight breeze from a Swiss lake for a few moments exposed to the wind, how in God’s name am I going to survive and conquer the space-blown sub-arctic winds of Mount Everest above 26,000 feet?

  I thought I’d dined well in Boston, New York, London, and Paris—all on my aunt’s bequest money or through the largesse of Lady Bromley with the Deacon picking up the actual tab—but the Kronenhalle certainly had to be the largest and most formal-feeling restaurant I’d ever set foot in. The day we met Finch was the only day of the week when they served lunch, and still the waiters, maître d’, and other personnel were dressed in tuxedos. Even the tall potted plants configured here and there, in this corner and next to that pillar and over near that window, looked too formal to be mere vegetable matter; they seemed to wish they were also wearing tuxedos.

  I was wearing the dark suit that the Deacon had purchased for me in London, but crossing the vast open spaces of Zurich’s Restaurant Kronenhalle, its luncheon tables filled mostly with formally dressed men but also a few elegant women, made me realize how insecure I still felt in European high society. Even though I was wearing my best (and only) pair of highly polished black dress shoes, I suddenly thought how clodhopperish and scuffed they must look to everyone in the huge restaurant.

  Sitting alone at the white-linen- and silver-service-covered table to which we were led was a short, thin, sharp-faced man. He was ignoring the glasses of wine and water already poured and seemed to be lost in a book he was reading. Finch was the only man in the room wearing a regular daytime-wear tweed suit and waistcoat—neither looking all that clean at the moment (there were cigarette ashes on his waistcoat)—and his posture was the comfortable, oblivious, cross-legged sprawl that I associate with the very, very rich or simply the very, very self-confid
ent. The Deacon cleared his throat, and the gaunt-faced man looked up, folded the book, and set it on the table. The title was a long one in large-word German that I couldn’t translate.

  Finch removed his reading glasses and looked up at us as if he had no idea who we were or why we were standing by his table. I couldn’t be sure if the smudge under his nose was the rough sketch of a brownish mustache on his tanned face or simply more of the brownish stubble that already stippled his jaw and cheeks.

  The Deacon reintroduced himself, although the two men had spent the entire 1922 Mount Everest expedition in each other’s company, and then introduced each of us. Finch didn’t bother to get to his feet but raised what looked like a limp hand dangling—almost as if he expected it to be kissed rather than shaken. Still, his handshake was surprisingly firm—almost shockingly firm, given the long, thin fingers. Then I noticed the damage to those hands and fingers and nails; if nothing else this man was an alpinist who’d spent years jamming his bare hands into cracks and holds in granite, limestone, and sharp ice.

  “Jake, Jean-Claude,” continued the Deacon, “I’d like to present Mr. George Ingle Finch. You both know that two and a half years ago, Mr. Finch and I were on the expedition that climbed to just above twenty-seven thousand three hundred feet on the East Ridge and North Face of Everest…without oxygen. It was an altitude record at the time. But even though we climbed without the tanks that day, George helped design the oxygen apparatus that Mallory and Irvine were using when they disappeared last June, and he’s been kind enough to offer to take us to his workshop here in Zurich after lunch to show us how it works…and to give us some advice on various aspects of our…recovery expedition.”