by Dan Simmons
I was aware that the Deacon spoke fluent German as well as French, Italian, and some other languages, but I’m still surprised at how quickly and strongly he replies to Sigl: “Vielen Dank, Herr Sigl. Ich habe ebenfalls von Ihren Erfolgen und Leistungen gelesen.”
During the night trip home on the train later that night, the Deacon will translate from memory everything that Sigl and the other Germans said, as well as what the Deacon replied in German. Here my guess is right that the Deacon is returning Sigl’s compliment by saying that he’s read of Sigl’s mountaineering exploits and successes as well.
“Herr Jacob Perry,” says Sigl, shaking my hand in a granite-crunching grip through which I can feel his rock-calloused hand. “Of the Boston Perrys. Welcome to München.”
Of the Boston Perrys? What did this German climber know about my family? And Sigl somehow had made the “Jacob” with its German Y-sound pronunciation sound very Jewish.
Sigl is wearing lederhosen—leather shorts and bib—over his military-looking brown shirt with the sleeves rolled high, and the whole getup should look ridiculous amidst all the rumpled business suits in this gigantic beer hall, but his massive, sun-browned bare thighs, arms, and oversized Rodin-sculptured hands make him look powerful instead—almost godlike.
He waves us to the bench opposite him—several of the men there move down to make room, never pausing in their drinking as they do so—and the Deacon and I sit, ready for the interview. Sigl waves over a waiter and orders beer. I’m disappointed. I expected Fräuleins with low-cut peasant blouses to be serving the beer, but it’s all men in lederhosen carrying trays of the giant stone mugs. I’m also hungry, and it’s been a long time since the Deacon and I had a light lunch on the train, but the tabletops here and all around us are empty except for beer steins and hairy male German forearms. Evidently the eating time here has either passed or is yet to come or simply doesn’t happen except for beer.
Our beers arrive almost immediately, and I must admit that I’ve never before drunk good, strong German beer from an icy-chilled stone stein. After lifting the thing three times, I begin to understand why all the men on this side of our table have huge biceps.
“Gentlemen,” says Sigl, “allow me to introduce some friends of mine here at the table. Alas, none of them is confident enough in your language to speak English this evening.”
“Although they understand it?” asks the Deacon.
Sigl smiles thinly. “Not really. To my immediate left is Herr Ulrich Graf.”
Herr Graf is a tall, thin man with a thick and absurd black mustache. We nod toward one another. My guess is that there’ll be no more handshaking.
“Ulrich was his personal bodyguard and shielded him with his own body last November, receiving several serious bullet wounds. But you see that Herr Graf has recovered nicely.”
I hear the odd, almost reverential emphasis on “his” and “him” but don’t have a clue as to who they are talking about. It appears that Sigl’s not going to enlighten me, and rather than break into the ongoing introductions, I turn to the Deacon for a hint. But the Deacon is looking at the men across the table being introduced and won’t acknowledge my questioning gaze.
“To Herr Graf’s left is Herr Rudolf Hess,” Sigl is saying. “Herr Hess commanded an SA battalion in last November’s action.”
Hess is a strange-looking man with oversized ears, a dark five o’clock shadow—the kind of man who probably has to shave twice or three times a day if he has a decent job or interacts with the public—and sad-looking eyes under heavy, cartoonish eyebrows that are either kept raised in evident surprise during the time I observe him or lowered to a glowering position. To be honest, Hess reminds me of a madman I saw once in the Boston Public Garden when I was a boy—a madman who’d escaped from a nearby asylum and who was peacefully captured by three white-coated attendants not thirty feet from me. That crazy man had been shuffling along straight toward me around the lake as though he were on a mission which only he could carry out, and Hess gives me the creeps in the same way as I’d felt looking at that man coming toward me past the Swan Boats pavilion.
I still have no clue as to what “last November’s action” was, but it sounds military. It may explain why so many men at the table are wearing quasi-military brown shirts with epaulets.
I search my memory for news from Germany in November 1923, but I’d spent that month climbing on and around Mont Blanc and couldn’t recall hearing any radio news or reading any pertinent reports in newspapers—most of which were in French or German—the few times we stayed in Swiss hotels. The past year has been a climbing vacation almost completely out of time for me—up until we read of Mallory’s and Irvine’s disappearance on Everest—and whatever “action” happened here in Munich the previous November hadn’t caught my attention. I presume it was some more of the political idiocy that Germany has been cranking out from both sides of the political spectrum ever since the weak Weimar Republic came into power after the toppling of the Kaiser.
Whatever it was, it’s irrelevant to the reason we came all this way to Munich to interview Bruno Sigl.
What isn’t irrelevant are the names of the six mountain climbers whom Sigl is now introducing—the six hairy-armed men sitting on the bench along our side of the long table.
“First, allow me to introduce our co-lead climber, along with myself, among my climbing colleagues,” Sigl is saying, palm out toward the tanned, thin-faced, solemn-looking bearded man to my immediate right. “Herr Karl Bachner.”
“Meeting you is a true honor, Herr Bachner,” says the Deacon. Then he repeats it in German. Bachner nods slightly.
“Herr Bachner,” continues Bruno Sigl, “has been the mentor of many of Munich’s and Bavaria’s top climbers—which, of course, means the top climbers in the world—at the Akademischer Alpenverein München, the climbing club of the University of Munich…”
How many times during my years at Harvard had I wished that my college had a formal climbing club such as Munich’s? While there were a few professors who climbed and helped us organize our Alaskan and Rockies expeditions, the founding of the Harvard Mountain Club was still a few years in my future.
“Herr Bachner is also a leader in the now merged Deutscher und österreichischer Alpenverein,” says Sigl.
This is German that even I can understand. I knew from the alpine journals that Karl Bachner had been the prime mover in uniting the German and Austrian alpine clubs.
Sigl gestures toward the next two young men beyond Bachner. “You have read, I presume, of the recent ice-climbing exploits of Artur Wolzenbrecht…”
The man closer to me nods in our direction.
“…and his climbing partner, Eugen Löwenherz.”
I know that the young men were famous for designing the much shorter ice axes—ice hammers, really—and thus, with the help of pitons and ice screws, what climbing Brits like Deacon derisively tend to call “the dangle and whack school,” rapidly climb straight up ice walls that would defeat our old-fashioned attempts to carve steps in the ice.
“Artur and Eugen climbed the direct route up the North Face of the Dent d’Hérens last week in sixteen hours,” says Sigl.
I whistle in astonishment. Sixteen hours for a direct North Face ascent of one of the most difficult faces in all of Europe? If it is true—and the Germans never seem to lie about their ascent claims—then these two men drinking beer to my right have opened a new era in the history of mountaineering.
The Deacon says in a rapid-fire German something he later translates for me as “Gentlemen, does either of you have one of your new ice axes with you?”
It’s Artur Wolzenbrecht who reaches under the table and brings out not one but two short ice axes, their shafts less than a third the length of my own wooden axe’s, their blades far more pointed and curved. Wolzenbrecht sets the two revolutionary climbing instruments on the table in front of him, but he does not hand them to the Deacon or me for closer inspection.
It d
oesn’t matter. Just looking at the shortened ice hammers (for want of a better term), I can imagine the two men hacking their way straight up the icy North Face of the Dent d’Hérens, driving in long pitons or their newly designed German ice screws all the way for their safety. And I’m sure that they used the 10-point crampons as well—invented in 1908 by the Englishman Oscar Eckenstein but rarely used by British climbers. Now frequently used by this new generation of Bavarian ice climbers. Cramponing and short-ice-hammering their way up a giant ice face. It’s beyond ingenious—it’s brilliant. I’m just not sure if it’s fair, if that makes any sense.
Sigl introduces the last three climbers—Günter Erik Rigele, who, two years ago, in 1922, successfully adapted the German piton for use on ice; a very young Karl Schneider, about whom I’d read amazing things; and Josef Wien, an older climber—his head shaved bare for some reason—whose stated goal in the alpine journals was to lead joint Soviet-German expeditions to Peak Lenin and to other impossible climbs in the Russian Pamirs and the Caucasus.
The Deacon expresses, in smooth German, his and my sense of being honored to meet these great Bavarian climbers. The six men being complimented—seven including Bruno Sigl—don’t even blink in response.
The Deacon takes another long drink of beer from the heavy stein and says to Bruno Sigl, “Can we begin our discussion now?”
“It will not be a ‘discussion,’ as you call it,” snaps Sigl, his Bavarian courtesy suddenly and totally absent. “It will be an interrogation—as if I’m in a British courtroom.”
I gape at this, but the Deacon only smiles and says, “Not at all. If we were in an English courtroom, I would be wearing a funny white wig and you would be in the dock.”
Sigl frowns. “I am only a witness, Herr Deacon. It is the defendant—the usually guilty party—who sits in the dock in British courts, no? The witness sits…where? On the chair near the judge, ja?”
“Ja,” agrees the Deacon, still smiling. “I stand corrected. Would you prefer that we speak in German so that all your friends can understand? I’ll translate for Jake later.”
“Nein,” says Bruno Sigl. “We will speak English. Your Berlin accent grates on my Bavarian ears.”
“Sorry,” says the Deacon. “But we agree that you were the only witness to see Lord Percival Bromley and his fellow climber Kurt Meyer swept to their death by an avalanche, is this not true?”
“By what authority, Herr Deacon, do you interrogate…or even interview me?”
“No authority whatsoever,” the Deacon says calmly. “Jake Perry and I came to Munich to speak to you as a personal favor to Lady Bromley, who, understandably, simply seeks more details about her son’s sudden death on the mountain.”
“A favor to Lady Bromley,” Sigl says, the sarcasm audible in his voice even through the heavy German accent. “I presume there is money changing hands as part of this…favor.”
The Deacon merely continues smiling and waits.
Finally Sigl slams down his empty stone stein, waves the attentive waiter over for a new one, and grumbles, “Everything I saw of the accident I reported both to German newspapers and in the German alpine journal and in a letter to your Royal Geographic Alpine Club journal.”
“It was a very short report,” the Deacon says.
“It was a very quick avalanche,” snaps Sigl. “You were on both of Mallory’s earlier Everest expeditions. I trust you saw snow avalanches? Or at least in the Alps?”
The Deacon nods twice.
“You know, then, that one second the person or persons are there, the next second they are not.”
“Yes,” agrees the Deacon. “But it is difficult to understand what Lord Percival and the man named Meyer were doing on the mountain at all. Why were they there? Why were you and your six German friends there? Your report in the journals said that you and several other German…explorers…had come south to Tibet through China. That your permit was Chinese, not Tibetan, but for some reason the Tibetan dzongpens accepted it as they would an official pass. You told the Frankfurter Zeitung that you’d diverted your route when you heard in Tingri that a German and an Englishman had rented yaks and purchased climbing equipment in the Tibetan town of Tingri Dzong, and that you and your friends had gone south to investigate…out of sheer curiosity. Nothing more.”
“Everything I told the newspapers is correct,” Sigl says in a dismissive tone. “You and your American comrade came all the way to Munich to hear me confirm what I have already explained?”
“Much of it makes little or no sense,” says the Deacon. “Lady Bromley—young Percival’s mother—will be very appreciative if you can help us discover the missing facts. That’s all she wants.”
“And you have come all this way to help the old lady learn a few more…how do you say it in England?…tit-bits about her son’s death,” says Sigl with an expression very close to a sneer. I marvel that the Deacon keeps from losing his temper.
“Was this Kurt Meyer from your…ah…exploration group?” asks the Deacon.
“Nein! We had never heard of him before the Tibetans in Tingri Dzong told us his name…and that he had ridden southeast toward Rongbuk with Lord Percival Bromley of England.”
“So Meyer was not a climber?”
Sigl drinks a long gulp of beer, belches, and shrugs. “None of us had ever heard of Kurt Meyer. We heard his name only from the Tibetans in Tingri who had spoken to him. Between those of us at this table, we know almost all of Germany’s and Austria’s real climbers. Ja, meine Freunde?” He is addressing the question to his fellow Germans. They nod, and several of them say “Ja” even though Sigl just told us they didn’t understand English.
The Deacon sighs. “Rather than my directing questions to you that make you feel like you’re in a courtroom, Herr Sigl, why don’t you just tell us the full story of why you were there at the approaches to Everest, and what you saw of Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer? Perhaps you even know why the two men’s ponies had been shot.”
“We saw the ponies lying there dead when we arrived,” says Sigl. “The Camp One area, as you know, Herr Deacon, is very rough moraine. Perhaps the ponies had both broken their legs. Or perhaps Herr Bromley or Herr Meyer had gone mad and shot the ponies. Who knows?” The German climber shrugs again.
“As for our reason for ‘following’ Bromley and Meyer to Rongbuk Glacier,” continues Sigl, “I shall reveal to you what I have told no one—not even our local newspapers. My six friends and I were merely interested in meeting George Mallory, Colonel Norton, and the other climbers we had heard were attempting Everest that spring. Obviously, since we were in China during most of our trip, we heard no news of Mallory’s and Irvine’s deaths, or even that the expedition had reached the mountain. But when the Tibetans in Tingri told us that Bromley was headed for the mountain they call Chomolungma, we decided—as you British and Americans say—‘Why not?’ And so we went southeast rather than back north.”
(Und zo ve vent soudeast razzer zan back nord. Sigl’s accent is beginning to grate on me for some reason.)
“But certainly,” said the Deacon, his tone polite but insistent, “when you saw that Norton’s and Mallory’s Base Camp had been abandoned, except for scraps of tents and dumps of uneaten canned food, you must have known that the expedition had already departed. Why then continue up the glacier all the way to the North Col and above?”
“Because we saw two figures descending the North Ridge, and it was obvious they were in trouble,” snaps Sigl.
“You could see that from Base Camp, twelve miles away from Mount Everest?” asks the Deacon, more in a tone of wonder than one of challenge.
“Nein, nein! We had gone up to Camp Two after finding the dead ponies, thinking that Bromley and this Meyer person whom we’d never heard of might be in some difficulty. We saw them on the ridgelines from Mallory’s Camp Two. We used fine German field glasses—Zeiss—the best in the world.”
The Deacon nods his acknowledgment of this fact. “So you set up
your own tents at the site of Mallory’s old Camp Three just below the thousand-foot ascent to the North Col, then climbed onto the Col itself. Did you use the rope ladder that Colonel Norton’s group had left behind for the last hundred-some vertical feet?”
Sigl waves away that suggestion with a flicking motion of his fingers. “We used no old ladder or fixed ropes. We used our own ice-climbing axes and other German techniques to ascend the ice wall.”
“Kami Chiring reported seeing several of your men coming down from the Col using Sandy Irvine’s rope ladder,” says the Deacon.
“Who is this Kami Chiring?” demands Sigl.
“The Sherpa you met and aimed a revolver at near Camp Three that day. The one you told the story of Bromley’s death to.”
Bruno Sigl shrugs and sneers. “Sherpa. There you have it. Sherpas lie constantly. As do Tibetans. My six friends and I went nowhere near that worn-out rope ladder. We had no need to, you see.”
“So you were on a purely exploratory trip through China, but you brought your mountain- and ice-climbing gear with you,” says the Deacon, getting out his pipe and beginning to fill it. The huge room cannot get much smokier than it is already.
“There are mountains and steep passes in China, Herr Deacon.” Sigl’s tone has gone from surly to contemptuous.
“I did not mean to interrupt your narrative, Herr Sigl.”
Again Sigl shrugs. “There is very little…narrative, as you call it…left, Herr Deacon. My friends and I climbed to the North Col because we could see that the two figures descending the North Ridge were in trouble. One appeared to be snow-blind and was being led, almost held up, by the other.”
“So you set up camp on the North Col?” says the Deacon, lighting and breathing his pipe alive.
“We did not!” cried Sigl. “We had no camp on the North Col.”
“Kami Chiring saw at least two tents on the same ledge on the Col that Norton and Mallory had used for their Camp Four,” says the Deacon. Again, his voice is more curious than challenging. A man simply trying to ascertain a few facts to help a grieving mother get over the confusing disappearance of her son.