Summit: A Novel

by Harry Farthing

  “Yes. We have arranged some old Tibetan clothes for you to wear when you start your journey to the mountain. You will need to check they fit. Later tonight when the others have retired to their rooms, we will separate the loads and prepare the small amount of equipment that is to go with you when you leave the main expedition. This you will hide on the approach to the Zemu Glacier for retrieval when you exit alone. I have already sent your other equipment through as part of a resupply to Ernst Schäfer’s expedition in Tibet. I personally checked each of the ten boxes marked ‘OS’ that Obersturmführer Pfeiffer sent here and they are complete.

  “I understand that one of Schäfer’s men will be bringing them directly to Rongbuk Monastery at the foot of Mount Everest to meet you there. I will admit to being nervous about this transfer because the British mission officer in Lhasa, Hugh Richardson, is watching Schäfer’s team like a hawk. There is little that the British can do about them being there, now that they have the permission of the Tibetan leadership, but it doesn’t mean that they like it. Richardson is looking for the slightest excuse to have the expedition expelled. Schäfer is undoubtedly a determined and resourceful man, a favorite of the reichsführer for good reason, so I think he will get the equipment through to you. However, until he does, you will have few provisions. Your journey to the mountain will be very basic but I think it will permit you to cross the country far more rapidly than the British Everest expeditions with their hundreds of porters and endless provisions. Fast and light is the only way that you will succeed with this venture. My nephew says his Panzer regiment is training with the very same philosophy. They call it ‘blitzkrieg.’ For now, that’s all I wanted to say. Professor Schmidt, do you have anything more you wish to add?”

  “Yes,” said Schmidt. “Becker, I had some of my travel photographs developed when we were in Calcutta and I thought you should see them to ensure that your mind is focused only on the operation ahead.”

  From his cotton safari jacket, Schmidt pulled a wax paper envelope and passed it to Josef.

  Opening it, Josef’s breath caught with shock; he saw that they were all of him and Magda walking along the Gneisenau’s rear sundeck. All the photographs had been taken from the inside of the ship through a window that looked out onto it. His recall of the time he had spent with Magda was still so vivid he could even remember the actual day from the clothes she was wearing. It was the third to last day of the voyage.

  Watching Josef look at them, Schmidt said, “Did you think your ship-born romance with that mischling would go unnoticed? That she was the only one snapping away with her little camera as we voyaged east? I must say that it gives me very great pleasure to advise you that I telegrammed Obersturmführer Pfeiffer about all this in Calcutta. He replied that I should give you one of the photographs so that you can look at it whenever you want and imagine all the others attached to the inside of the Operation Sisyphus file.”

  Josef took the clearest photograph of Magda just before Schmidt snatched back the others and said, “The rest are mine. Run along now, Becker.”

  Josef left with the photograph in his hand to the sound of Schmidt’s laughter.

  In the hotel lobby, Frau Fischer was at the reception counter. Seeing Josef, she asked, “Becker? Josef Becker?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I have a telegram for you from your family in Berlin. How exciting!”

  Josef took the folded paper she offered him.

  It was indeed from Berlin.

  1530.150339.PRZRIB8-BERLIN

  JOSEF.

  DELIGHTED TO HEAR ABOUT MAGDA—SHE SEEMS FAMILY ALREADY.

  WE ARE ALL ON A KNIFE EDGE JUST THINKING ABOUT THE COMING CLIMB.

  YOUR DEAR UNCLE,

  JURGEN.

  44

  Jalapahar Barracks, Darjeeling, Northeast India

  March 16, 1939

  6:00 a.m.

  Lieutenant Charles Macfarlane scraped the sharp safety razor over his chin, thinking of the day ahead. He was delighted to be finally going up into the high Himalayas, relieved he was getting a chance to do so before returning to England and his regiment, the Coldstream Guards. He’d hoped for a possible turn as a liaison officer with a foreign mountaineering team before leaving Darjeeling, and, with his year-long attachment to the 2nd Gurkha Rifles now almost over, something had finally come up.

  While he shaved, Macfarlane reminded himself of what his local commanding officer, the irascible Colonel Atkinson, had told him about the expedition he was joining that morning. “Bunch of Jerry hobbyists, really. No serious mountaineering ambitions, certainly not for Kangchenjunga itself, but they are Germans and so we do need to keep an eye on them. It will give you a chance to get up into the snow for a bit of a look before you head back to Blighty. You might even be able do a bit of hunting while the gentlemen of the swastika are doing their hill walking. Bharal, tahr, argali, wolves, even snow leopard can be found near the Zemu Glacier where you’ll be. That surly SS chappie Schäfer bagged quite a bit when he was up there, I hear. Anyway, look on this trip as bit of a reward, old man; your fellow officers here have given you very favorable reports, and I am only disappointed we can’t persuade your regiment to let us keep you for a little longer.”

  Macfarlane was going to miss the eccentric colonel, India too. His time there had absolutely flown by. The region fascinated him and he was incredibly impressed by the brigade’s cheery-faced Gurkha troops. They were an indomitable group, strong and humorous, hardworking and loyal, traits that tended to distract you from a deadly streak of savagery they could tap into in an instant. It took little to imagine the stories of them in the Great War volunteering to crawl through no-man’s land to the German lines to slit a sleepy sentry’s throat or retire an off-duty machine-gun team with their long, spoon-bladed kukri. Macfarlane’s razor caught with a sting. Wiping the small trail of blood that ran off his chin, he told himself to stop daydreaming, or he’d cut his own throat.

  The next hour he spent packing his rifles and his kit bag. The expedition was due to head out from Darjeeling at 11:00 a.m., and Ernest Smethwick, the secretary of the British Himalayan Club, was going to introduce him to its leader, a Professor Markus Schmidt, at 9:00 a.m. sharp, so he left to breakfast with Smethwick at the Windermere, and afterward they walked together up to the Hotel Nanga Parbat.

  They arrived to a whirlwind of activity. Porters were hauling boxes and bags from every direction to furiously load three old tea lorries. A motor coach with “St. Michael’s School for Boys, Darjeeling” painted along the side was parked beyond them awaiting the expedition team itself. Nearer the front door, another, smaller group was being addressed by a dapper-looking local man wearing a trilby with a long pheasant tail feather waving from its brim. Upon seeing Smethwick and the English officer, the man instantly stopped talking, stood almost to attention, and enthusiastically shook Smethwick’s hand. Smethwick turned to Macfarlane, then back to the man, saying, “Lieutenant Macfarlane, let me introduce you to Namgel Sherpa. He is the sirdar for this expedition, and these good men around him are the climbing Sherpas.”

  With a nod to each, Smethwick greeted the others by name. “Dorge Temba, Nima, Sen Bhotia, Lobsang …” He looked at the last and hesitated before finally saying, “Ang Noru.” Macfarlane thought Smethwick gave the man a rather severe look—a look that was returned in kind.

  After Smethwick had said, “Good luck, you chaps; we must go in to meet Professor Schmidt,” he confirmed Macfarlane’s observation, saying under his breath, “Keep a close eye on the last one, Ang Noru. He’s trouble. Wouldn’t be on any English expedition, that’s for sure.”

  Inside they sought out Schmidt, who was with Hans Fischer. Smethwick introduced Macfarlane, and all four sat to consider the objectives of the expedition. A large map was unrolled, and Schmidt explained in slow, faltering English how the team was to go north by road into the tiny kingdom of Sikkim, then to its capi
tal, Gangtok. From there, they would journey still further north, up the Tista Valley, following the old trade route toward Tibet as far as the monastery town of Lachen. West of that they would establish a camp at the foot of the Zemu Glacier.

  The professor stressed that the expedition was as much a wildlife and geological endeavor as it was about mountaineering, but then, with a puff, pronounced, “But we are not without alpine ambition. We might try for a repeat of Siniolchu or possibly attempt Nepal Peak to remind you what we Germans are made of.” Abruptly standing up, he looked down at the English lieutenant to say, “We will be leaving at 11:00 a.m., following the taking of an official expedition photograph for which you will not be required. I will introduce you to the team now, and then you will check our paperwork for passage into Sikkim. I do not want any delays from the authorities at the border, and it will be your job, Tommy, to ensure that doesn’t happen.”

  Schmidt smirked to himself and walked away without so much as a by-your-leave. The man’s use of the German nickname for a British soldier grated on Macfarlane as he was forced to get up and follow. By the time the professor had introduced the lieutenant to his companions, all bar one, Macfarlane knew that he was going to dislike Schmidt intensely.

  The obnoxious professor appeared in no hurry to track down the absentee, so Macfarlane quickly excused himself to consider the expedition’s paperwork. He reviewed the name of each team member again as he studied the completed forms noticing that the man he hadn’t yet met was called Josef Becker. He was twenty-seven, from Elmau in Bavaria, and for his profession Schmidt had written “lanwirtschaftlicher arb.”

  The lieutenant asked Fischer’s wife for a translation and then, crossing it out, wrote “farmworker” alongside it in English so the border authorities would know what it meant. It sounded rather odd as he inked it in, but his mind was already occupied with wondering exactly how annoying and difficult Schmidt was going to prove to be.

  45

  Wunderkammer Graf Antiquitäten, Theatinerhof, Munich, Germany

  September 18, 2009

  5:15 p.m.

  The gold-embossed letters across the main window announced Quinn’s arrival at his destination: Wunderkammer Graf Antiquitäten. The shop was set to the far side of a courtyard that made Quinn think more of Italy than Germany. The square’s elegant cobblestone piazza was surrounded on all sides with full-height, arched windows and doors, set within mustard-yellow, plastered walls below pitched roofs of overlapping orange tiles. Overlooking it all were the encrusted, rococo towers of an ornate Catholic church; the courtyard must have once been adjoining cloisters.

  The music that had followed him across the square to the shop’s dark windows further contradicted the location. The Magyar polka of the five Hungarian buskers, huddled against the early evening cold in the courtyard’s entrance, was an infectious, toe-tapping groove of guitars and violins racing to keep up with the rattle of the cimbalom at the quintet’s center. It pushed Quinn east, making him think of gypsies, not Nazis, despite the small sign he had just passed that identified the exact place where Adolf Hitler’s original putsch in 1923 had come to a bloody end.

  Quinn’s first view into Graf’s shop was obstructed by the reflection of his own tall body in his black wax-cotton motorcycle jacket. The head of the old axe, wrapped in a piece of sheet and looped with an off-cut of climbing cord, projected above his right shoulder like a Franciscan crucifix. Cupping a hand over his eyes, he leaned in closer to the glass in order to get a better view. The sights within instantly assaulted him.

  An aging king cobra, splitting and flaking from the rusty wire frame that supported it, reared up as if about to strike at him through the glass. Below it lurked a small stuffed crocodile, black and polished with age like carved ebony. A fully distended puffer fish was keeping the grinning reptile company, a look of surprised agony on its bloated face telling of a final brief moment of understanding that it was never going to be allowed to exhale. Interspersed with the varnished taxidermy were bones of all shapes and sizes, some reassembled into the complete skeletons of reptiles, birds, small mammals, even a hollow-shelled turtle. Behind them, a fossilized fish skeleton lay within a slab of cream limestone. Another, smaller fish skeleton was visible within the curved cage of its spiny ribs, a secret cannibalistic shame laid bare in stone for all to see in eternity.

  Raising his gaze a little, Quinn’s eyes met the cobalt glass stares of two stuffed crows. They looked down their sharp jet-black beaks at him from either side of a bony human spine to which their feet were bound with barbed wire. The sight instantly took Quinn back to that desperate gorak scratching and clawing at him on the Second Step. Quickly looking away to break the recall of the oily bird, his eyes were drawn to an array of other artifacts that warped and disassembled the familiar of human life. A compartmentalized wooden box contained fifty glass eyes staring, lidless, in every direction, each iris a slightly different shade of blue or green or grey. Two large glass domes stood to either side, one filled with severed antique dolls’ heads, the other crammed with detached legs and arms, each limb chubby and porcelain white. Last, and most disturbing of all, an array of jars containing fetuses in yellowing, syrupy formaldehyde behind peeling, handwritten labels. The realization they were actually baby sharks swept Quinn’s body with a physical surge of relief.

  It didn’t last long.

  Suddenly Quinn saw not the black crow but a ghost staring back at him.

  He jerked away from the window’s glass.

  When he looked again, he saw that it was actually a human skull, hovering between the glass bell jars of amputated doll parts, studying him in return with hollow eye sockets. Its two rows of teeth, long to their roots, began to open and close as if laughing hysterically at his fright.

  Slowly, the grinning skull lowered on unseen hands to be replaced by the head of a man of about seventy. The image of the skull lingered within the face that replaced it, a shadowy outline beneath the pale skin, little flesh to hide it. A shaved head showing patches of grey stubble above each ear revealed the precise, round curve of the cranium. The faint outline of a short white beard in no way hid the pointed jawbone. Only the eye sockets were obscured as white light reflected off small round glasses, masking the eyes within. Quinn watched as a pair of thin lips exaggeratedly mouthed “Boo!” at him and then vanished from the window.

  A glass door within the next arch opened, setting off a brass bell that clanged with an irritating racket, vibrating violently on a coiled leaf spring as if determined to wake the dead. When it finally quieted, Bernhard Graf, patiently standing to the side of his now-open door, said in the same elegantly fluent yet accented English that Quinn recalled from the telephone call, “Mr. Neil Quinn, for I can only assume it is you, do enter. I am, of course, Dr. Bernhard Graf.”

  Quinn hesitated.

  “Come in,” Graf urged with a smile of reassurance. “Whilst it is my deliberate intention to deter the loitering teenager and the ignorant tourist with the somewhat disturbing nature of my shop window and, should that not suffice, with my unnecessarily irritating doorbell, I am most keen for you to enter. I have been looking forward to meeting you all summer. I see you have brought the ice axe as I asked. That is exciting indeed.”

  The collector retreated before him into the shop. Everywhere Quinn looked there were glass-fronted cases full of objects. Every inch of free wall space was covered with more artifacts, some even suspended from the ceiling. His eyes adjusting to the subtle backlighting, Quinn was assaulted by the sheer variety of the items. Antlers, daggers, fossils, spears, swords, bones, surgical tools, helmets, false limbs, effigies, skins, feathers, tribal masks, battle flags, gods, devils—it was endless, all of it sinister and disturbing.

  Instinctively Quinn tried to seek safety in the familiar. He identified a pair of wooden skis and then some big snowshoes, lattices of taut gut pulling on curved ash frames like vintage tennis rackets. In an u
mbrella stand filled with fencing swords, walking sticks, tribal clubs, a sawfish blade, and a narwhal tusk, he noticed two wooden ice axes, much like the one he was carrying, the sharp edges of their metal heads covered in wrinkled brown leather covers. In one display case there was another group of alpine items. He wondered if it contained the oxygen cylinder he had sold to Graf. Squatting down to get a closer look, he tried to further settle his mind with recognition of the old metal pitons, the snow daggers, the long-toothed crampons like animal traps arranged on the glass shelves within.

  “Mr. Quinn, I hope there will be plenty of time for us to study old climbing things together in the coming days. But for now, let us take a seat, share a schnapps, perhaps?” Graf raised his eyebrows in wry recognition of the rhyme in his English question. As if reading Quinn’s mind, he then said, “I am afraid you won’t find your oxygen cylinder which I am sure you have regretted selling to me many times. It was a beautiful piece but sadly proved irrelevant to my specific interest. I too received an offer for it that I could not refuse. Please take a seat and permit me to pour you a drink so I might study your famous ice axe. Dirk, bring out the Williams Birne.”

  Graf pointed Quinn to two chairs with a small glass-topped table in between, while a man in his late twenties, dressed in a black suit and a black silk shirt that both precisely matched the color of his parted hair, appeared from a room to the rear of the shop. Bringing forward a crystal decanter filled with a clear liquid and three small glasses on a silver tray, the thin white Dirk placed them on the table and waited as if ready to join them.

  “Time to disappear now, Dirk,” Graf said dismissively. The younger man’s face hardened, his eyes narrowing as he looked first at Graf and then at Quinn unslinging the axe from his shoulder. Graf stopped Quinn from unwrapping it with an outstretched hand, saying to Dirk, “Later. Okay?”