Summit: A Novel

by Harry Farthing

  To the tinny blast of overly loud turbo-folk, he found himself within a maelstrom of other cultures, a dislocation of Turks, Eastern Europeans, Southern Italians, the darkest of African girls, all talking and drinking at the same time as if desperately trying to savor every hard-fought second of their lives. Through the windows, the neon signs of their world blinked back at him: “Casino,” “Internet,” “Sexy World,” “Handy Phone,” “Tabletop,” “Laptop,” “Non-Stop.” When finally he left its sweaty smog after one last drink too many, the fresh air hit him like a cold shower but still left him feeling dirty. His head spinning, Quinn had heard Graf’s dinner conversation all over again as he stumbled back to his hotel, the social and racial tinderbox the collector had described on the streets all around him.

  Awake now, in the darkest hour before dawn, he could only lean his aching forehead against the cold glass of the window and think about Graf himself. The collector was odd and fanciful, no doubt, the ringmaster of his own inanimate freak show, but for all his doom and gloom, his slightly barbed comments, Quinn couldn’t dislike him. There was an almost confessional honesty, a repressed gentleness to the man that kept him hovering above the abyss that so clearly fascinated him. Quinn even found himself in agreement with much that Graf said about the world, about its history, about him even. His was, indeed, a simple life, pursuing the interest he loved as Graf had pointed out. Yet it hadn’t been so simple since that last summit. Death, coma, murder, cremation, legal harassment, recurrent nightmares—his mind cascaded through it all until stopped by a stark realization.

  Graf is collecting me.

  Quinn chided himself for being so melodramatic and tried to reassure himself that he was merely a source for a somewhat eccentric antique dealer. Quinn’s ice axe, bearing its tiny swastika to Mount Everest, was a significant item for such a man, or so he said—one that could lead to more interesting finds that the man had coveted for years.

  That’s all—or was it?

  He turned back into the room and saw the old axe on the desk sat alongside the Leica camera that Graf had urged him to take and look at.

  Was he correct in his recall of the sum of money that Graf was offering to pay him if he could find a similar camera on the Second Step? It was crazy if he was. Impossible to refuse even if he wasn’t sure there was anything else up there.

  Quinn reached for his phone to text the collector that he would come by his shop at 9:00 a.m. to continue their discussions. He’d switched his phone off during the dinner and, as the alcohol flowed afterward, forgotten it. Turning it back on, it chimed its irritating welcome and immediately began a manic, beeping vibration of incoming data that sent the black plastic clam dancing in his hand. Multiple missed calls and messages; some names he recognized, some new numbers he didn’t, but they all said the same thing. “Call as soon as possible.”

  He immediately tried to ring them. With a growing sense of frustration and then panic, he got voice mail after voice mail, but no answer until a hesitant female voice finally said, “Hello?”

  Quinn took a breath of relief at someone finally replying. “This is Neil Quinn speaking. I think you rang me earlier.”

  “Yes, I did. I’m Nikki, a friend of Soraya. Doug Martin gave me your number. Look, we’ve not met, although actually you were … Look, shit, none of that matters. You should know she’s been attacked. I am actually in the Chamonix hospital now. She’s pretty badly beaten up. They are keeping her under sedation at the moment.”

  The shock of the girl’s words twisted Quinn’s insides. “What? When did this happen? Who did it?”

  “We don’t know much yet, but she’s in a really bad way. We think it happened on her way home from work at the bar, maybe around two in the morning, two-thirty. We’re not sure. She was found by a couple of guys at about three. The police were only briefly able to speak to her as she was drifting in and out of consciousness. It seems that it was some crazy French guy, and he was looking for you. But she was really messed up and couldn’t say any more than that. The doctors stopped the police from having any more contact with her.”

  Quinn couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Fuck. Could she describe the guy that did it?”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know any more than what I’ve told you. I think the Cham police are trying to get in touch with you. You should call them.”

  “Okay, but how is she now?”

  “A real mess. I’m staying here until the morning. I’ll call you when the doctor’s been around again.”

  The call ended. Quinn had no doubt that it was Sarron, Henrietta Richards’ words at the cremation ringing out in the silence of the hotel room: “He’ll be back for you, Neil … sooner or later.”

  If Sarron had attacked Soraya demanding news of Quinn, it was inevitable that she would have told him what she knew, and she knew he was there to see an antiques dealer. If he drove through the night, the Frenchman could be there later that day. However Quinn didn’t remember telling Soraya the name of the antiques dealer. Sarron was going to have to find him first and Munich was a big city, surely with many antiques dealers.

  Still unnerved by the news about Soraya, he typed a text to Graf: “Something has come up. Meet at shop early. 8:00 a.m.?”

  His phone almost immediately announced a response: “Jawohl, mein führer!” A winking, smiley emoticon followed.

  “Shit, that guy really is a piece of work,” Quinn said to himself as he sat back on the bed, trying to work out what the hell he should do next.

  The phone bleeped again.

  “Bring the axe and the camera.”

  52

  At the glass door of Graf’s shop, Quinn braced his hangover for its cacophonous doorbell, only to be startled by the blast of a car horn exactly as his hand touched the handle.

  Cursing loudly, he turned to see the collector behind the wheel of a black Mercedes 500SL, the coupe’s long nose poking out from an arch on the far side of the courtyard. The powerful car immediately rumbled out onto the cobblestones, making a circle to stop beside him. The passenger door clicked open, and the collector beckoned Quinn into the car as he got out, saying, “I need to get a few things from my shop before we go.”

  Quinn folded himself into the low-slung seat, inserting the old ice axe and his daypack with the Leica camera inside behind it. The sickly sweet sound of Julie Andrews singing “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music surrounded him as he closed the door and waited.

  After a few minutes, Graf returned, placing his attaché case behind his seat.

  Quinn raised an eyebrow at him. “Julie Andrews? Really?”

  “Not a favorite? Oh dear. I thought it might get you in the correct mood to think about mountains and Nazis.”

  The collector touched a hidden button on the steering wheel.

  The music jumped to the husky voice of Dietrich singing “Lili Marlene.”

  “Easier on your hangover perhaps?” he said, smiling at Quinn then pushing another button. The large, multicylindered engine reawakened and the car began to roll forward, wide tires rippling on the stones and crunching on the salt already cast in anticipation of the icy winter months ahead.

  “I am impressed that you wanted to make a start so soon after our dinner, if not a little excited, I must say. In the event you did correctly determine that I was only a pretend prince of darkness, I took the liberty of planning a little trip for us to meet someone in Garmisch. I think he will finally rid you of your secret hope that the axe belonged to some brutish Ivan or Chinaman with a penchant for secondhand climbing equipment. You did bring the camera?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We’ll need that this afternoon.”

  The sleek Mercedes began to travel quickly through the central Munich traffic.

  “Despite my little jokes and tales of the macabre, I feel that I have been very open with my proposition to you, Neil. Now it
is time for you to be the same with me. I’d like to hear the full story of the ice axe. We have a while before our first destination, so spare not the tiniest detail.”

  Quinn paused and then, pushing through his fatigue, proceeded to tell Graf the whole saga from beginning to end.

  The collector listened, quite still, with the attention of a heron studying a pond. As requested, Quinn did not spare anything, telling Graf not only about finding the axe but also about Nelson Tate Junior, Pemba, Dawa, Soraya, and his suspicion that Sarron was on his way to Munich at that very moment. The only thing about which he was deliberately vague was the original location of the axe, being no more precise than saying it was found on the Second Step as things unraveled with the kid.

  By the time he was finished, the Mercedes was punching its way down the fast lane of the autobahn, passing all other cars as if they were standing still, the Bavarian Alps rising up in front of them. Thinking on what he had been told for a few minutes, Graf said, “Your story is actually stranger and more violent than I expected but I can’t say that disappoints me. Abyssus abyssum invocat, as they say. Am I right that you mentioned that there was the string of a flag on the shaft of the axe? I don’t recall seeing that when you showed it to me yesterday.”

  “It was very weatherworn. I think it came off when Sarron’s thugs beat me with it in Kathmandu.”

  “Ouch. It spoke to you of the summit, didn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what I was imagining in the beer hall last night is actually possible: a swastika flying over the summit of Mount Everest. It presents a most exquisite irony, don’t you think? The Everest world fixated on finding Sandy Irvine’s body and the camera that could finally prove that he and Mallory gloriously made it to the top in 1924, when you could have found proof of a somewhat different and distinctly less palatable first summit, long before that of Hillary and Tenzing. Beautiful.”

  “It’s possible, but as I have said, I only found the axe.”

  “But perhaps there is more still waiting up there on the Second Step?”

  Quinn pushed his mind back to the gorak cave and his desperate struggle to save Nelson Tate Junior. He saw again that mound of snow and ice rising inside it, the glimpse of something dark within.

  “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  “Well I am,” Graf replied, “and I am taking you to meet someone who might be able to tell us some more about all this. Dieter Braun is his name, a rare individual these days, Neil Quinn, because he is an eyewitness of those times. He must be at least ninety years old, maybe more, but he’s still mentally alert. He says it is only because he is cursed. But his curse may be our fortune.”

  “How so?”

  “At night he begs for old age to take his memories.”

  “And it doesn’t?”

  “No, and some of them are very bad indeed.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “He returned to Garmisch in the late ’50s when he was finally released by the Russians. He became somewhat of a historian for his regiment and their role in the war. He says he owed it to the many who didn’t return. Dieter is not so active now, but occasionally he contacts me with an item he wants to sell or a story he wants to tell. I don’t think he has much longer to live.”

  Graf accelerated the car still harder as if fearful that Braun might die before they could get there.

  “But then again, he has survived so much. He went into Poland in ’39, followed by the Low Countries and France. He even trained to scale your White Cliffs of Dover until Operation Sealion was abandoned and they were sent to take Yugoslavia through the mountains instead. In the summer of ’41, they arrived at the ostfront, the worst front of all. By the time Stalingrad finally collapsed onto the remains of the one million soldiers that died there, the war was lost, even if Hitler didn’t want to admit it. Braun was one of the few from his regiment who survived the rear guard action all the way back to the mountains of Southeastern Austria. There, they finally surrendered, only to be transported back to Russian prison camps and used as slave labor to rebuild what they had destroyed, easily forgotten by a world that had no desire to remember them. Even fewer returned a second time.”

  Quinn said nothing, considering the misty German countryside flashing by, taking in its soft green farmland dotted with small animal sheds like dollhouses, feeling the weight of all the death and suffering that had sprung from such a gentle-looking land. His thoughts drifted on to Soraya, Dawa, Pemba. Involuntarily, he sighed aloud before saying, “But if there really is anything else up there, shouldn’t it just be left alone? Too many people have been hurt already.”

  “Perhaps, if we could be sure that sooner or later it would not be found by someone else. You know very well that they are still looking all over the North Face for the body of Sandy Irvine. How long until the searchers arrive at the same place as you?”

  “Perhaps, but why are you really so keen to get your hands on it?”

  “Because I not only want to possess this discovery for myself but also to keep it away from others, to stop it becoming an icon to people who should receive no encouragement or further inspiration.”

  “But are there really that many today?”

  “Neil, I have heard it said that here in Germany, one in ten under the age of twenty now regularly visits some form of neo-Nazi website. Maybe this is inaccurate, but even if it is only one in a hundred or even a thousand, surely that is still unacceptable given our past? And it is not only here—Greece, Bosnia, Russia, the Ukraine—they are all experiencing revivals of the far right in some form or another. If certain people within those groups became aware of what we might have, they would stop at nothing or no one to use it to their advantage. If that were to result in the persecution of a single person, then we would hold responsibility for that. Sometimes outwardly insignificant things become difficult to stop. You, of all people, should understand the dangers of rolling a small snowball down a large hill …”

  53

  The car turned off the autobahn and descended a slip road into Garmisch where it slowly drove down the town’s picturesque main street. Continuing past an immense red brick barracks garrisoned by the US Army, the Mercedes finally turned down a side street to stop in front of a squat, chalet-style house.

  At its door, they were met by Dieter Braun’s daughter, a neat, handsome woman who appeared younger than the midfifties she must have been. She greeted Graf in the Bavarian dialect, seemingly cordial yet formal. The pair talked on the doorstep and, after Graf had glanced a couple of times at Quinn without breaking the conversation, she switched to a simple yet well-structured English, holding his outstretched hand for slightly longer than was necessary. “I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Quinn. My father is in the sunroom. I will show you in. He is pleased you are coming. We do not get many visitors these days.”

  She showed them into the immaculately tidy house. Not a single light was on, making it lonely and dark until they entered a bright sunroom to its rear. The room’s main window shone with a spectacular view of the jagged Wetterstein mountains. The Zugspitze massif and the spiky Waxenstein peak pushed up from pine-clad slopes, bleak and savage despite the almost suffocating warmth of the sunroom.

  Turning back into the room, Quinn saw an ice axe identical to the one he was holding mounted on one of the walls. It was displayed with a coil of rope, an army field cap, and a tarnished metal plaque of a large edelweiss flower. Dieter Braun was sitting below it in an upright wicker chair pointed toward the window, his legs covered in a blanket. The old soldier looked all of his ninety-plus years. His remaining hair was white, combed back. His face was thin and proud, blue eyes still clear but red-rimmed, the skin a faint cream color, almost translucent. Transparent nasal cannulas were piping oxygen into him from a cylinder on a trolley set to the side of his chair. His breathing was labored, a faint rasp emitting from within his lungs. Quinn noticed that par
t of one of Braun’s ears was missing but the old soldier didn’t seem deaf. With their first steps into the room, the ancient man had immediately turned in his chair to take in the arrival of the collector with his battered attaché case. A faint smile had come to the corner of his lips as he looked at it.

  Braun’s daughter gestured for them to sit and have coffee. She served it to Quinn and Graf from a round glass pot that was placed on the windowsill above a small burner that infused the room with a smell of coffee and methylated spirit. “Please don’t tire him too much. Even Papi is beginning to feel his years now. I have to go and get some things from the shops, his medicine too, so I will leave you to talk until I get back. I think then that will have been enough,” she said to them both. As she started to leave, she spoke somewhat more brusquely to her father, who waved her away with a dismissive, “Ja, ja, ja.”

  Graf immediately started talking to Braun until he heard the front door shut; then he stood to remove a new bottle of Stolichnaya vodka from his case. He quickly poured the coffee from his own cup into a pot of geraniums and, taking a tissue from a box on a side table, wiped it out before filling it with the clear spirit. He passed the cup to Braun, who took a long, slow draught. As he did so, his eyes rolled up into his head, and he shuddered. When he opened them again, he stared straight at Quinn and began to speak to him in German. The voice was soft but still clear, broken only by Braun’s heavy breathing. Quinn couldn’t understand a word, looking to Graf and hunching his shoulders a little as if in question.

  “Dieter is apologizing that he doesn’t speak English,” Graf responded. “He said that if they had won, you would be speaking German now, which would be easier for an old man like him. He says that a lot of things would have been easier if that idiot hadn’t sent them to Russia.”

  The old soldier rolled his eyes at the delay of translation, taking another swig from the cup of vodka before his German filled the room again. He began to talk about the war, Graf’s accented English over Braun’s voice reminding Quinn of a Second World War documentary series he used to watch on TV as a child. When Quinn gave a sideways glance at the fact that Graf was already refilling the cup with vodka, the collector instantly translated the old man’s response to his look of concern: “Don’t be alarmed, Britischer. It won’t kill me. Dr. Graf always brings me a taste of Russia when he comes. I spent ten years in their gulags. A love of vodka was the only thing those bastards gave me that I wish to keep. I have often longed to be able to return the dust of their godforsaken roads and buildings that fills my lungs.”