Summit: A Novel

by Harry Farthing

  Quinn was more amused by the man’s anxious turn of phrase than concerned about his visitors as he bumped into Ross MacGregor and Yves Durrand walking out. With a slightly apologetic look, Durrand said, “Neil, I know things are not great, but we’re on our way home tomorrow, so would you have a drink with us later? I’ve got a table at the Rum Doodle booked for eight. Some of the Sherps will be there too. I told Dawa this morning when he brought round the other bags. Despite everything, it would still be nice to get together one last time, and we must give the Sherpas their tips if Sarron is not going to be paying them anything.”

  Quinn was in no mood to party, but he liked the Scotsman and the Swiss and he needed to catch up with Dawa and Pemba, particularly as Henrietta was going to be speaking to them, so he agreed. Back up in his hotel room, he tried to take a nap. Despite being still exhausted from the climb and additionally drained by Henrietta Richards’ interview, he could only sleep fitfully, a staccato of bad dreams pushing him repeatedly back to wakefulness. In the end, he resigned himself to just lying there and resting. After a while he couldn’t even do that.

  He picked up Henrietta’s book that she had insisted he take with him and turned to the section about George Leigh Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine’s final attempt on the summit in 1924. He already knew well the story of how the two climbers had set off one last time for the summit and never returned, leaving the world guessing whether they actually summited before they died, making it to the top of Everest nearly thirty years before Hillary and Tenzing. He was also aware of the search for their bodies, motivated by the thought that one of them might still bear the borrowed Kodak Vest Pocket camera that they took with them, the hope being that frozen within would be undeveloped film that might finally reveal the truth of the greatest climbing mystery once and for all.

  In her book Henrietta had thoroughly assembled all the known facts, including the details of Irvine’s ice axe being found in 1933 and then Mallory’s body in 1999. Mallory’s axe and Irvine’s body were still missing and, unlikely as it seemed, it did make Quinn wonder about the old axe that Dawa had returned to him. He got up and pulled it from his dusty duffel bag. Taking a facecloth and a glass of water from the bathroom, he started to clean and, for the first time, study the axe seriously.

  It was slightly more than thirty inches long. The shaft was ash, the wood still tight, light tan in color, crosshatched with black grain lines, varnished with age. Only in one place, near the bottom, was it damaged, the wood pockmarked and gouged as if a wild animal had chewed it. On one side, near the head of the axe, he saw that the wooden shaft bore the faint stencil mark of two numbers:

  99

  On the other side, he made out a rougher carving of two capital letters, lightly cut into the wood, trying for a Gothic elegance yet slightly irregular and amateur:

  J. B.

  Resuming his study, Quinn saw that the bottom end of the axe shaft was clad in a round steel collar from which projected the steel spike that had stopped Sarron in his tracks. At the opposite end, there was an almost flat steel head that divided into a shallow triangular adze for digging and a long, almost straight pick with a row of serrations that ran partially along the bottom. The edges of both showed the axe had been well used. New silver scratches into the metal of the pick reminded Quinn of how it had arrested his own fall on the Second Step.

  Around the wooden shaft was a tarnished steel ring that slid up and down. A small metal screw projected out from the wood about six inches above the bottom end to stop the ring from sliding off. He knew that the ring had once held some form of leather or canvas hand strap.

  Beneath the neck of the axe was another ring, but this was made of a white cloth tape. The material was browned with age and exposure, fragile even if its knot was still tight. Quinn understood that it must once have been attached to some form of flag. It chilled him a little to think that the owner of the axe had anticipated reaching the summit.

  He began to scrub the metal head of the axe with the dampened facecloth.

  On one side of the long pick he identified a tiny serial number: DRGM No. 1496318.

  Turning it over, he saw that an oval had been engraved into the metal on the other side. There was writing within it.

  Quickly licking a fingertip, he rubbed at it. The spittle picked out the faint lines cut into the steel, darkening them against the dull sheen of the metal. He pushed the head of the axe up close to the bedside light. It read, “MODELL ASCHENBRENNER,” across the center of the oval. Arched under the top were the words “GARANTIE-PICKEL” and, beneath, “WERK FULPMES.”

  To the left of the oval, Quinn noticed another, much smaller engraving. He wet his finger again and rubbed some more.

  The tiny design revealed a faint line drawing of what he thought was a bird with outstretched wings.

  A feeling of urgency took him, and, spitting directly onto the metal, Quinn continued to wipe at the faint incision.

  It was a bird, a simple line drawing of an eagle. Its two wings were made up of four linear blocks, one stacked above the other to give a rigid, stepped shape that stretched out to either side. The head of the bird between the outstretched wings was looking to the left. Its square profile tapered into a sharply hooked beak. The small design was imperial, almost Roman at first sight.

  The eagle was perched on a tiny circle. To the left of the circle was the letter Z, to the right the letters Fg. Within was an ancient Asian symbol with a much more modern European familiarity.

  A swastika.

  31

  Tripureshwar, Kathmandu, Nepal

  June 5, 2009

  4:45 p.m.

  Up a narrow alley leading down to the refuse-strewn north bank of the Bagmati River, punch after punch was being driven into Dawa’s midriff. His lungs, stomach, and bowels had all emptied by the tenth pummeling hit. The crude metal knuckle-duster being used was now tearing the stomach muscle and splitting the internal organs within, snapping ribs when the punches landed high.

  When it was clear that Dawa could no longer stand on his own, sprays of blood replacing the vomit that accompanied the first blows, the taller of Dawa’s attackers motioned the other to stop holding him from behind and let him fall. The Sherpa crumpled down onto the dirt and mud of the unpaved side street.

  Immediately the pair started kicking the motionless body, each impact breaking the Sherpa some more. The two Gurung were enjoying their work. They missed their old army days spent interrogating Maoist suspects—and anyone else, for that matter—who irritated their masters. Too much had changed since the threat of the communists in the hills had finally ousted their king, forcing them out of the army and into the dark underside of the city. At least Sarron still gave them the occasional opportunity to relive old times.

  They particularly hated the Sherpas. As the pair kicked, again and again, they reminded themselves how the climbing Sherpas thought they were such big men in Kathmandu, flashing their dollars around, riding their new motorcycles, always kowtowing to the foreigners. It felt good to be able to bring a couple of them back down to earth and get paid for the pleasure.

  Reluctantly heeding the instruction from Sarron to wound, not kill, the tall man stopped the other. He stood above the inert body and paused for a few moments as he slipped the knuckle-duster back into his pocket and looked down, coldly studying their violent handiwork, impressed at how they had reduced the strong Sherpa to a broken, bloody mess. They still had it.

  After another minute or two to regain his breath, the man raised his knee and brought his heavy boot down as hard as possible on Dawa’s right ankle. There was a snap of tendon and bone. It produced little more than a dull grunt from the unconscious body. He picked his leg up again and repeated the action on the left knee. With that, the man said in Nepali, “That’ll put an end to your climbing, you monkey. Hope you enjoyed your ‘summit bonus’ from Sarron.”

  L
aughing to himself, he turned to his colleague. “Two down, one more to go. Let’s get out of here.” They returned to their stolen car, the passenger door bearing the vivid scratches from its contact with Pemba’s Hero Honda. As it sped away, wheels spinning on the dirt, a skinny, black, feral dog wandered over to Dawa’s contorted, immobile form and started licking at the blood and vomit covering him. He didn’t move.

  32

  The Khumbu Hotel, Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal

  June 5, 2009

  7:30 p.m.

  The shower beat down on Quinn as he still tried to make sense of the swastika on the old ice axe. But however hard he thought about it, he could produce little more than a simple statement in response: the British had Everest, and the Germans had Nanga Parbat, a well-known, well-documented mountaineering fact from the early days of Himalayan climbing that he had learned as a boy—two countries, two mountains, two completely separate prewar histories of trying to climb them.

  The earliest Quinn could remember reading of anyone other than an Englishman even going near Everest was the solitary Canadian, Earl Denman, in 1947, and then maybe a similarly solo Swede, or was it a Dane, a few years later. Whatever, they made valiant but strictly personal efforts long after the days of the swastika. They also hadn’t even gotten high on the mountain, certainly nowhere near to the Second Step. He squeezed his brain to think some more about the bigger teams of Swiss, French, Chinese, the rumored Russians, even, who all joined the race among countries to try to be first to the top by one route or another in the ’50s and ’60s, but still, there were no Germans, even without swastikas.

  Perhaps it was one of the Russians that left the axe up there?

  He recalled again the old climber’s legend that in 1952 a Russian team led by a Dr. Pawel Datschnolian had tried to snatch a first summit of the mountain from the British who, still unsuccessful, were due to return to the mountain the following year. It was said that they took the north-side route but that the entire summit party of six was simply blown off the mountain, never to be seen again. Even with the fall of the Iron Curtain and subsequent opening up of Russian records to the rest of the world, no one had ever been able to prove the veracity of the story one way or the other.

  Did I find evidence that the story is actually true?

  Nineteen fifty-two was only seven years after the end of World War Two in Europe—the axe could easily have been a returning Russian soldier’s souvenir from the rubble of Germany.

  Well, it’s my souvenir now. An ice axe with a fucking swastika!

  Given the current circumstances, it seemed in some way appropriate, Quinn thought, as he dressed quickly and checked his wallet for the little cash remaining to him. He then rummaged in another of his duffel bags to pull out some locking carabiners and a new set of four ice screws. As he held them in his hands, they seemed to offer a poor return for saving his life but they were the best he could do to tip Dawa. At least the Sherpa should be able to sell them for good money to one of the many trekking shops in Thamel. Putting them into the deep side pocket of his cargo pants, Quinn set off on the short walk to the Rum Doodle, the Thamel restaurant named after the imaginary forty-thousand-and-half-a-foot peak made famous in the 1950s novel of the same name.

  The Rum Doodle was a well-known place of celebration for all the tours, treks, and climbs that finished in Kathmandu. If you summited Everest, you even ate there for free, after the restaurant owner had quickly verified the fact with Sanjeev Gupta, of course. He had little to celebrate this time, but for the sake of his two clients, Quinn told himself to put his troubles aside and make an effort. Walking into the bar, Quinn saw the pair already propping it up. The Sherpas weren’t there yet.

  Yves handed Quinn a large, fiftieth-anniversary bottle of Everest beer, wet and cold. It tasted good as they rather halfheartedly toasted Durrand’s summit. As Quinn continued to drink from the oversized bottle, the gold-rimmed oval label featuring that same summit photo of Tenzing loosened and shifted in his hand as they always did. Quinn peeled it off. Everyone always did that too—some intent on sticking the label in the diary of their trip, others on the backs of unknowing teammates where they dried and loosened their grip to slip to the floor, leaving the most famous image in mountaineering to stare back up through the lesser feet that unknowingly trampled it. Quinn put his onto the bar counter, smoothing it out flat with still-numb fingertips. Whenever he looked at it, he felt the stab of pain from the thought that he was most probably at the end of the long road that photo had first set him on. It soured the beer in his stomach.

  The three of them continued to wait at the bar but still the Sherpas didn’t arrive. In the end, they moved to their table and ordered. When the dinner was finished, Quinn reluctantly agreed to give up on them ever arriving and to continue on to the Tom & Jerry, one of Thamel’s best-known pubs. Tipping the waiter more generously than usual in compensation for the fact that he had to leave two steak dinners off the bill and that half their party hadn’t turned up, they left a message for the Sherpas that they had gone on and left.

  The Tom & Jerry was even more crowded than the Rum Doodle, but they were eventually able to take one of the red vinyl-covered booths. There, the three of them drank and talked some more, until Quinn was interrupted by a small face at the end of the table frantically beckoning to him. “Mr. Neil, it is me, Phinjo. The cook boy. Lhakpa sends me to find you. You must come now, Mr. Neil, now!”

  With some difficulty Quinn pushed his way out to the young Sherpa. Putting a big hand on Phinjo’s small shoulder, he directed him to the relative quiet of the street outside. “Phinjo, what is it?” he asked.

  The boy started crying uncontrollably.

  “Phinjo, tell me,” Quinn demanded.

  Through sobs, the boy blurted out words that slowly became sentences.

  “Pemba … it’s Pemba. He dead … Motorcycle. His motorcycle crash … on Durbar Marg. We think it because of the rain. Killed. He killed by fall.”

  Quinn struggled to take in what he was hearing as the boy continued to speak.

  “Then people find Dawa by the river. He beaten. Very bad, Mr. Neil, beaten very bad. Maybe he die too.”

  All Quinn could manage in reply was a shocked, “What?”

  “They break his legs, Mr. Neil, so he can’t climb. Now we think maybe also Pemba killed. Not accident. Lhakpa say Sarron.”

  The little cook boy broke down, once more crying hopelessly.

  Quinn looked back over his shoulder, his horror at the news developing into a chilling recognition that it must be connected with the two men who had tried to find him at the hotel earlier that day. Sarron really was coming after them as he had threatened.

  Phinjo regained some control. Wiping the back of his hand across his eyes, he stuttered, “Lhakpa send me to say to you, ‘Be careful.’ They think Frenchie Sarron mad, mad for long time now, and he pay killers to hurt you and Dawa and Pemba. Lhakpa hiding. He safe. He say you be safe too, Mr. Neil.”

  Quinn pulled some notes from his wallet and pushed them into the boy’s hand. “Thank you, Phinjo. Now go home quick in a taxi. Don’t stop for anything or anyone. Do you understand me?” Wiping his sleeve again across his nose and mouth, the boy hugged Quinn then ran off into the Kathmandu night.

  Quinn hurried back into the bar and quickly forced his way to the booth.

  “Yves, we’ve got to go now. I can’t explain here. Just get Ross moving. Come on. Now.”

  MacGregor was drunk and unsteady on his feet, forcing Quinn and the Swiss climber to pull him outside and into a passing taxi with them. As they traveled the few blocks back to their hotel, Quinn explained to Durrand what the cook boy had told him, the Swiss climber sobering up in front of his eyes.

  At the hotel the little doorman was nowhere to be seen.

  Quinn looked into the darkened lobby. He could see no one, so, with Durrand’s help, they moved the wasted Sco
t inside and up to the door of the small cage elevator.

  “Yves, if they’re here, I don’t think they will be after you two—only me. Get Ross up to his room and leave him on the floor in the recovery position. You know it, right?”

  “Of course.” Yves nodded.

  “Then if you hear anything else, please get help—whatever you can, just get it, okay?”

  The cage door of the old elevator closed with a screech, and after a dull thump and a whirr, the car elevated slowly upward.

  Watching it rise, Quinn wondered what to do next. He searched the lobby for something with which to defend himself. There was nothing.

  A hint of panic was stopped by an idea. Reaching into the pocket of his cargo pants, he took out the two longest of the ice screws he had intended to give to Dawa.

  Each one was about ten inches long. He ripped off the sleeves of blue plastic webbing that covered the tubes’ sharp threads and uncapped the ends to reveal the four razor-sharp points with which each chromoly tube finished. The sharp, steel edges glinted in the light as, taking one in each hand like a dagger, Quinn slowly and silently began to ascend the stairs.

  Creeping up to the top-floor corridor, he then approached the door to his room at the end of the hall.

  Nearing it, he thought he heard a faint noise from inside.

  Inching closer, he saw that the door was very slightly ajar, yet the room was pitch black inside.

  Quinn paused, took a deep breath, and then, touching the tip of the ice screw in his right hand against the door, slowly pushed it back.

  When the door was almost open, the head of the old ice axe swept down from the dark interior, crashing onto the ice screw, causing Quinn to instantly drop it.