“Then there is you, Mr. Neil Quinn, the high-altitude climber who sells me old things he finds high on Everest, who asks me about a German ice axe a few days after he returns from climbing to its summit once again, at the same time feeding alpine forum sites with leading questions, clearly blundering his way toward a story I have long suspected—a secret that, like all the best secrets perhaps, should not be told or, at least, not too widely. A secret that also, if true, would be the pride of my collection.
“I know you will have considered it, so let us imagine another scenario together: the image of a climber on the top of Everest raising a swastika flag. Think of it. Think also of what it could have done before the war. If you need help imagining it, we can actually consider another of your beloved Seven Summits to help. The mountain of Elbrus is in the Caucasus and, I understand, now a sought-after climb as the highest peak in Continental Europe and therefore one of the seven you climbers seek to collect.”
“It is.”
“Well, did you know that during Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s ultimately ill-fated attempt to invade Russia, his elite mountain troops, the very same Gebirgsjäger who, surprise, surprise, bore an ice axe identical to the one now in your possession, climbed Elbrus and planted a swastika on its summit?”
Quinn shook his head as the collector continued.
“Hitler was actually said to be furious when he heard about it. He considered it a waste of effort when the Russian tide was beginning to turn so unfavorably for him at Stalingrad. But a few years earlier, I suspect, it would have made him somewhat happier. Wouldn’t he have greeted them with handshakes and medals as he did the conquerors of the Eiger Nordwand? Surely a picture of the swastika on the summit of Mount Everest would have delighted him even more. It would have been the greatest example of the force of Nazi will imaginable, a tool of incredible power in the hands of Goebbels and his ministry of propaganda. Think further. Imagine what such an image might even do today in the wrong hands. It might not kill sixty million people, but it could inspire further mayhem in certain quarters somewhere out there in our increasingly anarchic world. You need to consider this, Mr. Quinn.”
“But there is no record of such a thing ever happening. No mention, in fact, anywhere. I have looked hard.”
The collector reached down and opened his attaché case. Pulling out a thin file, he opened it onto the table to reveal pages of handwritten notes and an old newspaper cutting inserted in a clear plastic sleeve. Passing the sleeve to Quinn, Graf explained what he was handing over.
“I stumbled on this editorial many years ago by accident. It is the reason why I have always suspected that the Nazi leadership attempted to climb Mount Everest in 1939 and why I too have searched since, mostly in vain, for the tiniest further detail. It is the very reason why I buy old oxygen cylinders from people like you who regularly visit the high parts of that mountain, hoping that it might one day produce another clue, and finally, it did.”
Quinn looked at the old cutting. Through the clear plastic cover, heavy black print was blocked all over the browning newspaper. Even though the text meant nothing to him, it appeared sinister and perverse. In a grainy photo at the foot of the article, he slowly recognized the faces of the two men pictured meeting a stern-faced Adolf Hitler: Kasparek and Harrer, the first to climb the North Face of the Eiger.
“I took the liberty of quickly translating it when I knew you were on your way to see me,” Graf said as he handed across another sheet of paper covered in elegant copperplate handwriting.
Quinn quickly read the collector’s translation of the article, entitled “An Insult of Mountainous Proportion.”
Digesting the contents, he put down the notes and asked, “So you think that Hitler would have listened to an appeal such as this and responded with an attempt on Everest?”
“Hitler? Göring? Goebbels? Who knows? The only thing that I have always been sure of is that by 1939 the Nazi leadership were capable of anything. Lozowick called them ‘the alpinists of evil,’ and I have always suspected it was more than metaphor even if further proof eluded me.”
“Well I’m sorry to disappoint, but the only thing I found was the axe and anyone could have taken that up there.”
“I suspect not, actually, and that is why I have brought you here. I would like to pay you handsomely to go back and retrieve whatever else is there. I am hoping particularly that you might find one of these.”
Reaching again into his case, Graf lifted out a bundle in red velvet cloth and put it on the table.
Opening it as if unpeeling a fruit, he revealed a vintage Leica camera.
47
Olav Hotel, Avenue du Midi, Chamonix, France
September 19, 2009
1:55 a.m.
Soraya closed the back door of the Olav’s public bar behind her and locked it. Outside, the streetlights were fighting a losing battle against the small hours of the night. It was freezing so she tugged the hood of her sweatshirt out from under her fleece jacket and over her baseball cap.
Retreating into the little cocoon it created, she set off through the now deserted streets. It had been a busy Friday night, a busy summer season, in fact. It would be over soon and the next few months would be slower. She could kick back a bit and relax, and then, when the winter ski season began, she could get back to using every bit of her spare time snowboarding. Chamonix had some of the best off-piste skiing in the Alps. Soraya reminded herself that was why she was there. It would be good.
Life is good—or is it?
Walking down the hill at a near trot to escape the cold, she tried to imagine where Neil Quinn was at that very moment. He should have finished his booking in Saas Fee and would, she guessed, be in Munich visiting that antiques dealer he had mentioned. Once again, she asked herself what he was doing there. It seemed a bit odd. She wondered if it might actually be another woman even if she had to admit to herself that he’d made no effort to hide the screen of his phone in the bar when he scrolled through its address book to text that he would be visiting after his next job in Switzerland. On it, she briefly glimpsed a name, Graf, before he started to type. It had made her think of the German tennis player her father used to watch on TV when she was a kid in Australia. Still, it rankled her more than it should for someone who was meant to be playing by her own “no commitment” rule …
Striding on, she reflected on why she was even so concerned. Was Neil Quinn getting to her?
Turning into the narrow alley where she had a small studio apartment on the second floor, Soraya pulled her backpack forward to feel inside for her keys. As she did so, a dark shadow suddenly grabbed her left shoulder and the back of her neck from behind and slammed her against the side of the building.
Soraya instinctively twisted away but was unable to prevent the side of her face from impacting on the rough brickwork. There was a white flash of pain as the soft skin of her cheek and two teeth instantly broke, something deeper in her jawbone cracking. She heard the noise it made just before the inside of her mind folded in on itself.
She was out for a second or two, somewhere else.
When she came back, too stunned to scream or shout, her attacker flipped her around. With one viselike hand covering her mouth, the other ripped down the hood of her sweatshirt and knocked off her baseball cap before grabbing her by the throat and pushing her hard back against the wall a second time.
The new impact of her bare head on the brick wall split her scalp, immediately unleashing a flow of blood into her long, straight hair.
A voice screamed, “Please no!” and, from deep within the pain of the two blows against the wall, Soraya recognized it as her own.
A dreadful realization anticipated what was going to happen next. It sparked a desperate fight in her.
She tried to bite at the hand that covered her mouth, but her broken jaw offered no strength, only pain.
She scratched wildly, but the man was strong and his body positioned to negate every move she tried to make. Her attacker’s face was wedged hard into the crook of the left arm that covered her mouth, and his right shoulder was pushed in behind the hand around her throat, the elbow jutting outward to lock against the wall. In this way, he was pinning her against the brickwork, yet protecting his head. His groin and his legs were also pushed tight into the wall to the side of her. There was nothing she could do to connect with him.
With utter horror, Soraya understood that the man had done this before. She attempted to scream again, but this time no sound could emerge from her blood-filled and obstructed mouth.
The man didn’t move. He simply held her head hard against the wall and, as she slowly became exhausted from her ineffectual efforts to twist away from him, finally he said, very quietly, “Ça suffit.”
Soraya could hear his panting breath, see his incensed light-blue eyes glaring into hers as he then almost whispered, “Stop struggling and listen,” with a slow and deliberate precision, giving a squeeze of her throat with every word, as if forcing each one down into it.
When he was sure that she was complying with his instructions, he said in a faster, louder voice, “I am told that you are fucking Neil Quinn. I am already pissed off that I have wasted a lot of time in this shitty little town trying to find him. If you give me any more trouble, I will fuck you myself, do you understand me?”
Soraya writhed and tried to shake her head from side to side, but her defiance turned to panic as she felt herself beginning to choke on more blood and saliva. She tried to cough it up but couldn’t, her body convulsing as she began to drown in it.
Sarron released his grip slightly so her head could move forward, loosening the hand over her mouth to let her breathe and swallow for a moment, before banging it back again, hard. As her eyes rolled back into her head from the third impact, he spat, “I repeat myself, bitch! ‘Do you understand me?’”
Her resistance disintegrated with that final blow. Sobbing, she attempted to nod her head within the lock of the man’s renewed grip.
“Okay, good. Now I am going to take my hand off your mouth, and you are going to tell me where I can find Neil Quinn. If you try to scream, I will instantly squeeze your throat again like this.” He gripped her neck tight once more and then, just as quickly, stopped, saying, “Now tell me!”
Soraya struggled to get any words out whatsoever, violently coughing up more bloody sputum, gasping for air.
“I said, ‘Tell me!’”
“Not here,” was the eventual, faint response.
“Where the fuck is he then?”
She hesitated until a new tightening on her throat squeezed out the words, “Switzerland … working … no, Germany.”
“Which fucking one is it?”
“Germany … Munich.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think so …”
“Why is he there?”
“Don’t know.”
“Try again!”
“Antiques dealer.”
“What?”
“He’s seeing an antiques dealer. Please believe me.”
“Then give me his name.”
“Graf.”
“When did he go?”
“Today, yesterday, whatever it is.”
“How?”
“By motorcycle from Saas Fee in Switzerland.”
The hold on her instantly released and Sarron disappeared from the alley as the broken girl folded to the ground, unconscious. Five minutes later, as he raced the stolen Renault out of Chamonix, intent on getting through the Mont Blanc tunnel and into Italy as fast as he could, Sarron punched the redial on his cell phone. It took some time to answer while the car sped up the hill, wallowing and sliding around its sequence of switchback bends. When someone did answer, all Sarron said was, “Change of plan. Munich—as soon as you can get there.”
48
The Zemu Ridge, Northwest Sikkim—18,750 feet
April 3, 1939
6:30 a.m.
Namgel’s words cut through the canvas skin of the sagging Schuster tent. “Sahibs. We go summit. Breakfast tea.” Within, Josef laboriously crawled forward to receive the two tin cups he knew the Sherpa, crouched outside in the deep snow, was waiting to pass in.
Moving in the limited space of the cramped two-man tent, Josef could feel the altitude holding his body back, making him unnaturally slow and awkward. It was a new sensation to be so high. Unfastening the entrance, the cold beyond the tent instantly assaulted his outstretched fingers. It stabbed into the tip of the one damaged by the gestapo, painfully reminding Josef why he was really there.
Quickly pulling the two cups back in, his movements dislodged a shower of rime ice from inside the top of the tent. The flakes caught the back of his neck and slid down under his shirt collar, causing him to shudder involuntarily and spill some of the tea. Shaking it off, Josef began to drink what was left. It faintly heated his insides and filled his stomach with a feeling of optimism. Despite everything, he was looking forward to going still higher.
“Time to go,” he said to the other occupant of the tent, invisible within his long, eiderdown bag. Leaning closer, Josef tried to determine if Schmidt was still sleeping. It was difficult to tell now that he wasn’t snoring like a pig.
The bag’s exterior was still, encrusted with a thin layer of ice, giving it the appearance of a fat brown slug frozen to death by a hard morning frost. Looking at it with loathing, Josef told himself that the man was probably still out cold. Despite the long trek across Northern Sikkim, the heavy, overfed professor was nowhere near the condition necessary for what they were attempting, even if that obvious fact hadn’t stopped him from engineering everything so that he, and only he, would accompany Josef on this, the first ascent of the expedition.
Josef suspected—no, he knew—that Schmidt was using him to ensure that he got to the top of at least one mountain and that he did so with Josef by his side. If Operation Sisyphus proved successful, it didn’t take much to imagine the professor dining out forever on the story of how he had climbed a Himalayan peak with the man who stole Everest from the British. Ever the organizer, once the Base Camp had been established, Schmidt had neatly divided up the team to take some separate first looks at the higher snowfields above the Zemu Glacier. Undoubtedly, this was a good tactic to permit Josef and Ang Noru to make a first climb together and then make their subsequent exit from the expedition, but Josef was concerned that theirs was the only group attempting an actual summit. Even if the peak was low compared to the monsters that surrounded it, not even meriting a name on their maps, he still thought it would attract too much attention from that British Army officer, Macfarlane. The man was no fool, always watching them.
“Sahibs, sun coming. Necessary faster,” Josef heard Ang Noru shout this time.
Short of breath, Josef had to pause before he could answer with a simple, “Yes.”
Drawing in some more deep gulps of air to build his strength, he gave the inert sleeping bag next to him a hard kick with the heel of his double-stockinged foot. Schmidt exploded upward in a paroxysm of coughing before looking around with puffy, blinking eyes, saying breathlessly, “What was that? What time is it?”
Josef looked at Schmidt’s altitude-swollen face and, shrugging his shoulders, said, “Nothing,” as he passed him the cup of tea. Through the slit entrance of the tent beyond the bewildered professor, Josef could see that the snowy plateau on which they were camped was already beginning to glow golden from the dawn sun. He could hear also the low chatter of the two Sherpas as they made ready to leave the camp. “Drink the tea, eat some biscuit, and get ready as quickly as you can. It’s time to go up.”
In the cramped confines of the tent, Josef began his own preparations to go out into the cold. After twisting his woolen scarf around his neck a
nd up over his head and ears, he struggled back into his windproof outer jacket and boots. He smeared his face with zinc cream, pulled his scarf up around his head, and then reached inside the deep ammunition pocket of the snow-troop jacket for his snow goggles. Looping them around his neck, he opened his rucksack to retrieve something else he had specially packed for that moment. From deep inside, Josef pulled out his army field cap tied in a tight roll since Germany. He had kept the cap hidden during the expedition’s long trek into the glacier, wary particularly of that English army officer, but if he was going to the top that day he was going to wear it instead of the woolen one he had been using. He always wore it on his big climbs.
Untying the string, he beat the cap against his knee to loosen it for reshaping. As he did so, he felt the metal of the skull and crossbones badge that Pfeiffer had attached. He looked at it. The sight instantly took him back to Wewelsburg, but his thoughts didn’t stop there. They traveled on further to that tramping file of nine Jews, the black woods dripping with rain, the blast of the wind carving down onto them from the snowy chapel ridge, the glint of that same badge on the cap of the SS officer who had taken all their lives away, one way or another. That badge has got to go, Josef told himself as he pushed the cap down onto his head and then himself out of the tent into the freezing air to join the two Sherpas.
The sun was climbing in the east by the time Schmidt was finally ready to leave. Together the four of them began to wade through the deep snow to reach the narrow ridge that led to the summit. Ang Noru broke the trail, followed by Becker, Schmidt, and then Namgel. They moved forward well until they roped together and filed up onto the narrow, snowy ridge. There, Schmidt immediately started to make the going painfully slow.
Every few steps they had to stop for the wheezing professor. Josef could feel the Sherpas growing frustrated, even if they said nothing beyond a questioning, “Sahib?” each time they halted. He quickly instructed Namgel to move ahead of Schmidt and shorten the rope between them all. He knew it would have the effect of the three of them almost pulling the professor along but he didn’t care. He just wanted to get Schmidt to the top as soon as possible and then back down so the real purpose of his journey could start.
Summit: A Novel Page 25