by Ted Bell
“Yes, Alex, that is correct. As you know, Hermann was discovered near the range of mountains where records indicate the honeycombs were sealed with cement in the 1930s.”
“Yes. He was found on a ledge halfway up Der Nadel, was he not?” Hawke said.
“All the more reason to zero in on that particular mountain.”
“Any hard evidence that your suppositions are correct?”
“Yes. Ambrose called me early this morning from Stadtspolizei HQ. The official police forensic autopsy indicates injuries consistent with a fall of roughly six feet into a snowbank. Almost directly below the Murder Wall.”
Hawke asked, “Why not inspect the Wall using helicopters? Find the hidden entrances somewhere on the face?”
“Good thinking. In fact, it was Wolfie’s first thought. We discussed that idea at length but came to the inescapable conclusion that the idea was not feasible. The sound of hovering choppers outside would alert anyone inside. Steel doors would instantly seal the mountain for good. Instantly impenetrable. Impervious to any attack by air, leaving us no choice but to use heavy artillery to blow a hole in the side of our nation’s most infamous tourist attraction.”
“I see your point,” Hawke said, mulling it over.
“You don’t seem very happy about the prospect of scaling the Murder Wall, Alex. Frankly, no one in his right mind could fault you if you decide not to attempt it again. I, for one, would never blame you. You came extremely close to dying up there.”
“No, no,” Hawke said impatiently, “that’s not what I’m thinking about at all.”
“Then what are you thinking about, Alex?” Sigrid said, her eyes suddenly clouded with fear.
“Blinky, get Wolfie on your mobile right away. Tell him we won’t be coming to St. Moritz. Tell him something rather more pressing has come up.”
“You’re going up there, aren’t you?” Sigrid said, her voice trembling.
But Alex never replied.
He was quietly staring at a soaring white peak far in the distance. It stood there, towering over the others surrounding it and putting them all to shame.
The following two weeks flew by with near miraculous speed, he noticed. He spent long days in mental and physical preparation for his imminent ascent. Two frostbiting days in the mountains, three exhausting days in a stifling-hot Tenth Mountain classroom, studying his evolving route of attack. Wolfie’s ranking army alpine experts were merciless to the point of sadism.
They pounded him on everything from projected weather and storm conditions during his ascent to potential avalanche and rock fall danger, to his meds and supplements, his pain tolerance, and his mental stamina.
And, finally, coaching him through a deep-dive investigation into the most recent decade’s history of fatal attempts by climbers seeking to put the notorious White Death on the proper side of their ledgers.
In the late afternoons, while the great criminalist Congreve was working the murder case and the missing Sorcerer, Alex and Wolfie went shopping. Browsing the various alpine gear shops of Zurich, they were like two women trying on dresses at Harrods, though style and glamour were hardly their goal. Wolfie wanted to make sure Hawke was well-equipped before his ascent.
Their only objective was Hawke’s ultimate survival in the coming test of endurance, skill, and luck. Some of his most basic equipment came courtesy of the Swiss Army. But the more sophisticated gear, the highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art climbing equipment and the most advanced survival tools and climbing techniques, all came from a little-known, back-alley shop called Schussboom.
It was very convenient, located off a back street just two blocks from his rooms at the Bauer au Lac. There he met the owner, an elderly man named Luc Bresson, a famous French climber who was both the first and the last man to conquer White Death. M. Bresson was of medium height, bone thin except for his wiry musculature, and exceedingly charming. Blue eyes a’twinkle, a luxuriant white moustache. And laughably bushy white eyebrows sprouting sprigs of hair that looked like the weird antennae of a praying mantis waving about in the breeze.
Bresson’s own story was quite amazing. And when Luc heard Hawke’s tale of his grandfather’s bones and his own doomed attempt to retrieve them, the two men had become fast friends almost instantly. Hawke learned far more in a concentrated half hour with Luc than he had in all the many hours he’d spent in Wolfie’s classroom. In two short days, it seemed that Luc Bresson had become both his mentor and his guardian angel.
It would prove to be one of fate’s better ideas before all this Sturm und Drang was over.
Hawke spent the better part of that warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in mid-December on the deck of a famous restaurant, high in the Alps. A glorious spot, accessible only by cable car. He and Sigrid had invited Blinky to join them in an alpine brunch at Grossescheidegg, a popular five-star restaurant and Gasthaus pitched on the side of a towering mountain.
Hawke stood waiting in the sun on the busy deck, waiting to be shown to their table right next to the rail. He stood transfixed at the sight of the beckoning giant. And he finally came to a startling realization. In truth, he was afraid of that mountain. Even now, seated with his friends at a table on the rail, looking up at the mist-enshrouded pinnacle, his groin tingled with icy fear.
And, yet, still his hands itched for the touch of the bitch’s cold and ragged rock, the looming vertical face before him. He felt exhilarated at just the thought of trying to beat the savage into submission once more. Once again, he found himself eavesdropping on that perverse internal dialog, the duel between his flinching mind and his boisterous spirit; a conversation that every serious mountaineer knew so well.
Grossescheidegg was known for its outstanding Ungarische Goulasch. The broad terrace, filled with round white metal tables and giant red umbrellas, had spectacular views of the murderous mountain that, even now, beckoned to him. To reach the celebrated watering hole, you had to drive along the lake south of Zurich for roughly an hour. In the center of the tiny village of Verblen was a cable car station. The views from the swinging car alone were worth the trip up to Grossescheidegg, situated at 13,000 feet.
While waiting for their food to arrive, Hawke admired Sigrid standing at the rail among a small group of Italians. She was the long-legged blonde, the one with the deep bronze tan, the one who was using one of the six coin-operated telescopes. The scope she’d deliberately chosen was in a direct line between Hawke and the mountain peak.
The weather had changed drastically over the weekend. Days were now warm and sunny, and Sigrid’s wardrobe had been adjusted accordingly.
She had chosen to wear tight white shorts, and very clunky clogs. She bent over the instrument, directing her excellent bottom toward him. He could not help noticing that her splendid mountain tan must have been acquired in those very shorts. Since the advent of very short skirts, Swiss women had returned to those remarkable clogs. Some Bernese wag had once said that Swiss women’s shoes had been made by fastidious Bernese shoemakers who had had the shoes carefully described to them on the telephone but had never actually seen them firsthand.
“Quite a spectacular vision,” Blinky said, sipping his pale Pinot Grigio.
“I could not possibly agree more,” Hawke said, taking a deep draught of his St. Pauli Girl, chosen because the beer label had a bosomy milkmaid in a revealing dirndl. “Simply awe-inspiring,” Alex replied, his eyes fixed on this woman who had taken such a hold of his life.
“Alex, my old friend. I refer to the mountain.”
“Ah. That, too!”
Alex now followed the direct line created by following Sigrid’s telescope angled up to the mountaintop, and focused his eyes once more on what he now thought of as his personal demon.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
White Death. Appropriate name, Hawke thought. Early mountaineers had given the mountains far more benign names: Jungfrau, the
Virgin. Monch, the Monk, and so forth. But this particular massif had a far more malicious moniker: the White Death.
Always known to Hawke as “the Bitch.”
That was because the alpine pioneers had long ago listed it as one of the “impossible” faces, in the days when sportsmen had engaged in pure climbing, before men had armed themselves with piton and snap ring. Later, many of the “impossible faces” would fall to the record books. But the southern face of his mountain had retained her virginity for a very long time.
Luc Bresson had told him the story. In the mid-1930s, he’d said, the Nazi mountain-and-cloud cult sent wave after wave of fair-haired German youth to have a go at Der Nadel—restless Hitler Youth fueled by a lust to chalk up one more victory on the Vaterland side of the scoreboard. Hitler himself offered a gold medal struck with a diamond swastika for the first to make it to the top. Years went by, and, in a neatly regimented sequence, all those flaxen-haired romantics would plummet to their deaths. But the Bitch, in all her glory, still retained her hymen.
A few minutes later, when Sigrid returned to the table, Blinky smiled and said, “Alex and I have just been enjoying the spectacular view, my good woman.”
“Disturbing view is more like it,” she said. “May we switch places, dear Blinky? I don’t think I could stand to sit here looking at that damn thing while I eat.”
“Of course you can,” he said, and got to his feet to effect the swap. Now seated next to Sigrid, Hawke took her hand beneath the table. It was a private sign between them. He would squeeze it thrice and she would return the favor. Three squeezes meant I . . . love . . . you!
“Are you quite all right, darling?” he whispered to her.
“Of course. Don’t be silly. Why shouldn’t I be? It’s just that I don’t do very well at this altitude.”
But Hawke was no longer listening.
He had turned sideways in his chair. Blinky saw that he was staring up at the needle-shaped pinnacle of Der Nadel. And he had a very strange look on his face. A chill went up Blinky’s spine—that look was a cloud of fear, and it was the very first time Blinky had ever seen it pass across Alex Hawke’s face.
The jolly threesome spent another half hour or so enjoying the Hungarian soup and the ice-cold Hofbrau beer. Blinky worked his magic, steering the group away from what was clearly the elephant at the table: the bloody mountain that would not leave any of them alone. For his part, Blinky was enjoying the sight of Lord Alexander Hawke flirting with a woman he so obviously had come to care for deeply. And, equally obviously, passionately.
“Will you excuse me for a moment?” Alex said, rising from the table while staring up at his mountain. “Brief change in the weather. A brief moment where you can actually see that infamous needle scratching at the underside of heaven. Have a look. That perpetual mist hanging around the summit is giving me a brief window to . . . I’ll be right back.”
Sigrid and Blinky sat watching him move through the tourists to the rail, where he fed some coins into the telescope.
“Excuse me,” Hawke said to a blond woman dressed in that ’70s all-white disco glitz of the long-gone jet-setters. “Would you mind very much moving a few feet to your right? Terribly sorry.”
She whirled around as if to say something nasty, got a look at who she was talking to, and said, “Of course not, honeychile, is this all right? Maybe another foot?”
Hawke nodded, gave her a smile, and stared up at the other bitch there that day. The Murder Wall had disappeared into the mists again. The air seemed to be turning cooler . . . as the mountain was again lost to him. He closed his eyes and felt the warm sun on his face.
The warmth of the weightless mountain sunlight was snatched away time and again by invading wisps of cool highlands air. He’d lost his precious moment of unfettered observation.
Every time he looked up at the death-shrouded colossus, he could almost feel it throwing its weight around, almost like it was trying to stare him down.
He felt a chill breeze on his cheek and shivered involuntarily. He flashed on his first attempt at the Wall, how he and his grandfather had been beaten senseless by brutal flash storms from the north, collected and amplified in the natural amphitheater of the Murder Wall. Raging fits of wind and snow that had lashed at them and ripped their goggles from their eyes. These had been the shrieking storms that could instantly snap a man’s neck against that sheer rock face. And then leave him to hang there on the face, twisting in the wind, frozen, for as many years as it took for someone to recover him. . . . That had been his thought when his piton had given way and he’d plummeted nearly a thousand feet before jolting to a stop when his line had snapped tight.
The violence of the sudden arrest had broken his left leg. His seventy-year-old grandfather had quickly rappelled down to his position and splinted the fracture. Hawke had insisted he was all right and could wait for the rangers to get him down. After a fruitless argument with his stubborn grandson, the older man had continued his climb to the summit. He had one more mountain to climb, he had always told his friend, one more mountain to climb.
And that was the last they had ever seen of the man who had been his beloved guardian since he was seven years old.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Blinky watched Alex at the rail for a few moments, then turned his attention to Sigrid while he had the chance.
“You’re afraid, aren’t you?” he said to her.
“Afraid? Hell, I’m terrified. I care for him, you know. A lot. Aren’t you?”
“Not terrified, no. Concerned, perhaps. And then only because I love him.”
“I care for him a lot, you know.”
“I can see that every time you’re together. Do you think you’ve fallen in love with him?”
“It sounds ridiculous, but I do. We’ve only been together six days, but our orbits are colliding and it feels like gravity is pulling our souls toward each other. We laugh about it all the time, falling in love so quickly. So, yes, I am terrified. It took me a lifetime to find a real man, a man I could love, and now he wants to kill himself.”
“Trust me, he’s the least suicidal man you’ll ever meet. Alex loves life too much to ever think of ending it.”
“So why the hell is he doing this?”
“Two reasons. First, duty. He’s vowed to protect his Queen and country, and he’ll damn well do it. And, second, a more personal reason. His grandfather is waiting for him up there at the top of Der Nadel.”
“What? He said something about that, but I didn’t understand it.”
“The old man’s bones are resting up there. Climbing has long been a Hawke family passion. Before his death, the earl was one of the most celebrated mountaineers in Europe. Alex tried once to return his remains to a shady little plot in Oxfordshire, but he himself had never made it to the summit.”
“And now he’s trying again?”
“Yes. As well as helping Wolfie solve the mystery surrounding Sorcerer.”
“Tell me the truth, Blinky. Does Alex have even a remote idea of what he’s doing up there?”
“Yes. He does.”
“And why would that be?”
“Sigrid, please understand this. You’ve been with him a very short time. You’re now seeing a side of Alex you have not seen. I’ve known him forever, and I’ve seen it all. I know what he’s capable of, believe me. And that is anything he sets his mind on doing, frankly.”
“You really think he’ll survive? Make it up there and back in one piece?”
“I certainly do.”
“Tell me why, Blinky. I need to know why you’re not terrified the way I am.”
“Very well. Alex first visited Switzerland in his early twenties with his grandfather. The Earl wished to see Der Nadel. He wanted a firsthand look at what he would be up against. Someone should have stopped the old gent. Alex made the first half of the climb alon
gside him. At around twelve thousand feet, a piton failed, and Alex was hurt. Too badly to continue, but not so bad as to be unable to return back to the base camp.
“His grandfather made his way down to his grandson at great possible risk to himself. He finally reached him in the midst of a sudden snowstorm and got his leg splinted. He made ready to haul him back down to camp. He insisted, but Alex flatly refused his help. He urged his grandfather to keep going. The old man was so close to victory then and—”
“Oh my God. So that’s it. Alex feels responsible for his grandfather’s death.”
“I’m afraid he does. Always has. Very sad, heartbreaking really, after losing both parents at such a tender age.”
“But he kept at it.”
“He was still in his early twenties. By age twenty-four he had conquered two of the most feared summits in the world, Everest and the Eiger.”
“So, he was good, wasn’t he?”
“Beyond good. Read the history of that era in the sport.”
“Why was he? So good up there in the clouds, I mean.”
“My dear. In this rarefied world, there are two types of athletes who choose to climb mountains. First, there is the kind of man who is particularly suited to rock work where the minute tactics of leverage and purchase fit his intellectual style. These men are given the nickname ‘Rapier.’ They strike, parry, and thrust with speed and precision, practically swinging across the face of the mountain, like Tarzan through the trees; in a kind of zone, with very little contact with the rock itself. They want as little to do with the mountain as possible.”
“That sounds like it must be beautiful to watch,” Sigrid said.
“Oh, it is. And then there is another man, let’s call him the ‘Mace.’ He wants to batter the mountain into submission with his bare hands, to simply overpower it as he climbs upward. And then, when he is on the ice and the treacherous snow, he pants and bulls his way through waist-high drifts, breasting a path upward like an inexorable engine of fate.”