Summit: A Novel

by Harry Farthing

  The German’s voice grew inside Quinn’s head. “There are not these things for you here. There never were. You must go up with us.”

  Quinn struggled to his feet, trying to push the hallucinations from his mind.

  He failed.

  “Get the things. Be quicker!” Becker said.

  Quinn fought to free Stevens’ pack from his rigid body. Discarding the heavy, empty oxygen cylinder within, he reached back further inside, seeking Becker’s camera, still sealed in the nylon pouch.

  “It’s there,” he heard himself say.

  “Good. We go now.”

  Quinn shouldered Stevens’ rucksack and began to move, step by individual step, back up to the top of the ridge.

  There, outlined on the white snow, he saw the old ice axe.

  He picked it up and leaned forward onto it as he looked up at the peak above. The clouds had receded. The wind had dropped. A bright moon outlined the snow and rocks of the mountain before him and he could trace the line of the route to the top.

  He suddenly felt alone. The two shadows had disappeared so he contemplated what they had suggested. He could try to go up and over the mountain, traverse it from the north to the south. He understood that it would take him back into Nepal, away from the Chinese, away from Sarron. It was an elegant escape, one that would probably kill him.

  Even as he worked to dismiss the idea as madness, he heard Henrietta say that he was capable of greatness if he set his mind to it. Her voice stung him into putting his left foot forward.

  His right foot slowly followed.

  Squeezing his lungs, he took another step.

  Clenching his fists and his toes, he took five more but couldn’t summon a sixth.

  He leaned again onto the head of the old axe, gasping for air, head spinning.

  His consciousness shuffled.

  The two ghosts reappeared before him.

  He followed, asking himself at what point he would accept that he was one of them. With no hope of a future, he climbed locked in the past. With each step he pushed down into the moments of his lifetime. He replayed old successes and enjoyed past happinesses. He was shamed again by old humiliations and felt the renewed disappointment of ancient failures. He acknowledged the wrongs he had done and made promises to do better. As he stepped forward, he continually made promises.

  The steps became sequences, and the sequences became parts of the mountain. He passed the First Step and Mushroom Rock, and, once more, the Second Step began to loom large in his mind. A thought came with it that the shadows had tricked him, that they had set him up to return the camera to its rightful home, to leave his body next to Nelson Tate Junior’s. The idea wounded him. He decided he was not going to listen to them anymore, but they were no longer there to ignore.

  Lonely and betrayed, Quinn moved along the exposed traverse until the Second Step was rising up above him, black and sheer in the night. Feeling as if his lungs were bleeding, he looked up at it to realize that he had traveled further across the bottom of the obstacle than the normal route. He began to haul himself up, inch by inch, through the rocks and the boulders toward the exposed slabs above. He pushed through the pain, dragging himself upward with his hands, his elbows, his knees, his toe points, until, totally exhausted, he collapsed forward into the snow. As if surrendering to it, he pushed his face deep in.

  It touched something.

  With a gloved hand he clawed at the snow to reveal a frozen face.

  It was Nelson Tate Junior.

  The blue lips began to move.

  “You let me die.”

  Something inside Quinn shattered.

  “I didn’t,” he sobbed in reply. “I didn’t.”

  He turned over, lying back on the snow and rock.

  Looking up at the stars again, snippets of music began to play inside his head. A few chords, half a chorus, then a burst of static that stopped the melody as if an ancient valve radio was being tuned to another station. Even so he recognized it as the music that had journeyed with him through his life—rock, punk, reggae, rhythm and blues. It annoyed him that the dial never settled long enough to play the whole song. He decided to turn off the radio and die.

  The voice of the German climber startled Quinn from the slumber he had slipped into. “Okay, Englishman, enough rest. Make your peace with the dead. We go on now.”

  “But I thought …” Quinn said aloud, but before he could finish the sentence, Becker was gone.

  The German and the Sherpa were moving up the rocks above. Quinn watched as they strenuously climbed the crack that split the rock face. Becker led, and then hauled Ang Noru up after him with a rope.

  Quinn followed them, stepping up the metal ladder that was attached to the side of the fault.

  Crossing the flatter ridge beyond, he thought that all three of them were moving too slowly.

  They were definitely going to miss their cutoff time, that sacrosanct hour by which, if they hadn’t summited, they would have to start to descend.

  Shouldn’t I turn them back now, get them going down?

  He stopped himself.

  There was no cutoff time, no down, for that matter, only up; so he continued after the pair as they tramped ahead of him through the new snow left by the storm.

  Quinn crawled his way up through the rocks of the Third Step as the line of the horizon melted, red lava welling up behind it.

  Dawn.

  Ahead Becker had fallen into the snow. Ang Noru was helping him up.

  Quinn watched as the pair staggered onward.

  They no longer floated.

  They continually stumbled and fell, every step an agony.

  Quinn felt it too, but still he followed while the new day gained height in a swelling spectrum of orange, yellow, and white that hit the huge bulk of the mountain to project an immense triangular shadow to the west as regular as the Great Pyramid. Further on, the elongated heights of Makalu stared south like its Sphinx.

  They skirted some rocks.

  Moving out and around, only Quinn held on to the old, frayed ropes that lined the narrow path. To their right, it felt as if they were looking off the very edge of a flat Earth.

  The path twisted back on itself to pick a way straight up through the rocks and ice that led to another snowfield above.

  They were all gasping and failing now, their journey broken into groups of three steps, two steps, no steps.

  When eventually they surmounted the steep climb to the top of the snow and stopped together, Quinn remotely studied the huge bulbous cornice of ice above that overhung the Kangshung face. It told him that they were near. He said the same to the German and the Sherpa.

  They dragged themselves forward, each step a single one that had to be accommodated with rest and recovery.

  An eternity passed in this way until a flash of color registered ahead.

  More scraps of red, green, yellow, and orange poked out from the hard cap of frozen snow, signaling an end to their world of ice and rock and announcing the beginning of space.

  The three linked arms and took the last steps to the summit before collapsing into the snow.

  91

  The Summit of Mount Everest—29,029 feet

  May 17, 2010

  9:30 a.m.

  The five Sherpas coming up from the south side were jubilant. After the storm of the previous day, it was a perfect morning and their work of fixing the ropes along the Knife-Edge Ridge and up the famous Hillary Step had gone quickly and well despite the new snow. It was an unspoken privilege of preparing the route to the top that the Sherpas summited first, before any of the foreign climbers, and the Mother Goddess was showing her approval of the correct natural order by rewarding them with a beautiful day.

  Traversing the slow diagonal from the top of the Hillary Step, the summit mound finally appeared.
The Sherpas were extremely surprised, a little shocked even, to see a climber already sitting there, totally still, alone in the morning brightness on the top of the world. Approaching, they thought, at first, that the figure was dead, a forgotten corpse from the season before. But as they got closer, they saw the man was alive.

  Kneeling around him, they peered at his broken and cut face. With a sense of horror, they remarked on the streaks of blood and ice that covered his suit.

  The man did not move. He made no acknowledgement of their arrival.

  Seeing that the figure lacked an oxygen system, one of the Sherpas unclipped his mask and, dialing up the regulator, passed the mask to the man. He very slowly took hold of it. The Sherpas would say later that he seemed to offer it to other invisible figures on either side of him before pushing it onto his own face. They thought, at the time, that the man was very close to the end, that his mind was gone.

  For fifteen minutes he sat there, silently breathing the oxygen.

  Another of the Sherpas then passed him a flask of warm tea. Again he appeared to offer it to others, invisible to the Sherpas but real to him, before drinking from it himself.

  More time passed.

  The Sherpas waited, not sure what to do next. They had to descend soon.

  Finally, Neil Quinn beckoned the nearest Sherpa close to his face. He paused, looked from side to side, and then whispered through broken lips, “It’s only me now. I think I should go down with you. But first I need to find my ice axe. I left it here last year.”

  92

  Shambhala Hotel, Lhasa, Tibet

  May 23, 2010

  2:30 p.m.

  Sarron was growing impatient. He wanted his moment of victory. Even though he had retrieved the camera and left Quinn for dead high on the mountain, he couldn’t celebrate until he had heard from Stefan Vollmer.

  Drinking a warm beer from its shiny blue can, he looked down from his top-floor room in the Shambhala Hotel with intense frustration. On the bustling pavement below, a group of Chinese big-city tourists, each clad in a white face mask and an electric blue windbreaker, trotted hastily behind a guide waving an equally blue flag, desperate to not be left behind. Sarron raised his gaze to look across a group of old buildings seemingly sinking under the weight of their heavyset roofs into the brown-tinted smog that blanketed the city. Beyond, the improbable white mass of the Potala Palace jutted up through the haze.

  Staring at it, he could feel his left eye flickering uncontrollably. He told himself that he was exhausted, that he needed to be on his way from that damn place. Pushing on his left eyelid with two fingers, he finally decided his destination. It would be Chile. He’d thought maybe Argentina like Vollmer’s Nazi ancestors, but no, it would be Chile. He’d heard it was easier there. He could start again like many before him, far away on the other side of the world. He was finished with the mountains. He would get a place by the sea. But first, he needed money. He needed that call from Vollmer.

  Turning back into the room, he looked at the silent cell phone lying on the unmade bed. He picked it up to check that it had a signal; four bars stepped up alongside a full-mast icon.

  No new messages.

  Vollmer’s people must have received the camera by now. The international transport firm had been efficient. They had even sent a European representative to receive and package the camera to keep it at freezing temperature. The courier said he was taking the camera to Switzerland, where Vollmer had identified a specialist team to extract and develop the film. Sarron had been surprised and excited when the man said it would be there in less than twenty-four hours.

  But that was three days ago now.

  Sarron decided that he had to leave the room. He didn’t want to; it was an unnecessary risk at this stage of the proceedings, but he couldn’t stay inside any longer. He was mentally crawling up the walls in anticipation and suspense. He had to get out for a while.

  Picking up the cell phone, Sarron pulled on a wide-brimmed sun hat and dark glasses and went down to the street. There he pushed into the crowd, letting it sweep him along. He had no idea where he was going. Oblivious to the street scene, his internal vision flooded once again with images of what had happened high on the mountain: Oleg Vishnevsky falling into the Kangshung void; his brother, Dmitri, being shot. As he walked, he could feel his knife still lodged in that other climber’s neck, refusing to pull free from the spine however hard he tried. He had winded himself killing that man. After, it had been all he could do to get away with the camera.

  Reliving once again those murderous, bloody scenes, Sarron realized with a jolt that his phone was ringing.

  He darted into a side street to take the call.

  It was Vollmer.

  As Sarron put the phone to his ear, his head spun with urgency as he heard the German say, “Sarron?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Stefan Vollmer. I have the pictures on my computer screen in front of me.”

  A burst of adrenaline made Sarron’s heart leap. He clenched a fist and started punching at the air before getting control of himself. “Fantastique!”

  There was a long pause before Vollmer spoke again. “I think that the only thing I can do, Sarron, under the circumstances, is to forward them to your email. You can take a look at them and then conclude how you wish to settle this matter with me.”

  “Yes, of course. How are they? Was the film good? Are they in focus?”

  “Yes, Sarron, just like new, perfectly in focus. Please be clear about one thing. We will find you.”

  The line went dead.

  Sarron ran back into the main street and across the road, dodging traffic as his eyes searched the row of cafés and tourist shops that lined the pavement. Fixing his sight on the Mandala Internet Café, he ran in. Beyond the dim café bar at the front, a neon-bright room to the rear was filled with figures hunched before old computer screens set within individual, half-partitioned chipboard cubicles.

  Every computer was occupied. Sarron bit his lip, pacing backward and forward, before noticing that a small, fat Chinese man in an electric blue windbreaker and a face mask was occupying one of the screens furthest from the door. He walked over and gently squatted down on his haunches alongside the truant. When he turned his face up, the man jumped in his seat, his concentration on the naked women on the computer screen shattered by the surprise of someone so close to him. With a look of terror, he jerked his hands from the keyboard to shield his face from the stranger. Sarron stared between the chubby fingers into the small, blinking eyes and hissed, “Fuck off, Chinois, or I will kill you.”

  The little man grabbed the effeminate satchel bag on his lap, jumped up, and fled, leaving Sarron free to sit down, clear the screen of Thai pornography, and log into an email account.

  The connection was slow.

  Finally, he got in.

  A new email from the blind account that had been used by Vollmer throughout their deal was listed.

  He rushed to open it.

  It was a forward of another email from the photographic studio in Switzerland.

  Ignoring the reams of text in German, he raced to open the attached photographs.

  They took forever to download.

  The waiting was interminable. Sarron scraped his fingernails frenetically at the edge of the cheap table on which the monitor was sitting. A piece of the table’s hard plastic veneer split and stuck beneath one of his nails. It stung with a sharp pain and ran red with a rivulet of blood.

  He cursed and sucked at the wound to stem the bleeding as the downloading symbol continued to make its snaillike trail across the screen.

  His heart pounded.

  His head distorted time.

  Each second seemed to take a minute, each minute an hour, until finally the first picture signaled its arrival.

  He opened it.

  It was in blac
k and white, crystal clear.

  The image showed a black metal frame taken against the background of a featureless white sky. The frame’s sparse diamond lattice was rigid with only the odd flourish in the metalwork to speak of a blacksmith seeking to impose some small signature of his skill on what was an ugly, brutal piece of ironwork.

  The more Sarron studied the photograph, the more he understood that he was actually looking at a gate, in fact, set within a larger metal frame. It was slightly ajar. At its top, two separate metal rectangles were stacked one above the other. Within the rectangles were set letters. They stood out in strict silhouette against the white of the sky:

  ARBEIT

  MACHT FREI

  Sarron had seen the words before, but couldn’t instantly recall where.

  Confusion pushed him to the next image.

  Putting his hand back on the grimy mouse, now smeared with his blood, he scrolled and clicked.

  The next photograph revealed cast concrete posts that stretched lines of barbed wire above a deep trench. The wire curled over at the top, turning back in on itself. The ceramic bobbins that secured the wire to the posts told him that it was an electric fence. They too faced inward. A fence designed to keep people in, not out.

  With a growing sense of panic, Sarron opened all the photographs Vollmer had forwarded. One after another the images stacked the screen, photograph after photograph of unspeakable tortures, of human experimentation, of starvation, of death piled high, of ovens—a sequence of horrors dealt as randomly as a pack of cards. Sarron flicked through every image, shock burning his stomach, his left eyelid uncontrollable.

  His attention froze on one. It was of a man in a long overcoat wearing a feathered Tyrolean hat standing in front of a large yet simple map that covered a wall. The map was actually little more than a grey shadow, but its shape obviously represented all of Europe. Sarron read the names arranged around the man—Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Wewelsburg, Sachsenhausen, Mittelbau-Dora, Ravensbrück, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, and, at the very tip of the old man’s pointing finger, above a dot for Munich, Dachau. He looked closely at the face beneath the hat. It was the same man that he and Oleg Vishnevsky had killed.