He sat back in his chair. A small cloud of tobacco smoke rose to the ceiling.
Finally, his toothless smile. “What do you think of your cake that tastes of nothing, Salinger?”
* * *
Scratch beneath the surface of a small village of seven hundred souls and you’ll find a nest of vipers.
That evening, I made notes on what Luis had told me and, beginning the following day, I decided to go less often to Lily’s. Partly because of Werner, but also because I needed to develop the stories Luis had stuck in my head.
All the same, I didn’t spend my time twiddling my thumbs. On the contrary.
Much to my surprise, I’d started really getting to like carpentry. The idea of building a sled for Clara, which had begun as a ruse, had turned into hours spent at the back of the house in Welshboden trying to fashion something decent from the planks that Werner gave me.
Werner himself offered on many occasions to give me a hand (fearing for my safety, I suspect), but each time I refused. I wanted to succeed by myself.
I liked the smell of the wood shavings, the slow sliding of the plane as it smoothed the edges, the pain in my back after a few hours’ hard work. I had even bought a can of paint and some high-quality brushes for when I’d finished the sled. I intended to paint it red.
A nice bright red.
* * *
November seemed to rush by. Snowball fights, snowmen with carrots for noses, endless card games with Werner, and the smell of wood at the back of Welshboden. I answered Mike’s e-mails, though I refused to open the video files my partner sent me from across the ocean. I immediately deleted them, as if they were infected.
Now and again I’d reread file B, Werner’s account, the legends about the Bletterbach, the local rumors that Luis had shared with me, and I invariably found myself chewing air. It was just a cake with no taste, but it was still a great story, one of those you tell around the fire, maybe at Halloween, so I kept going back to it.
I also thought about what my next moves might be if I decided to go deeper.
Getting in touch with the officers who had pursued the case, digging up the files, which were buried God knows where. But the idea that Werner was keeping an eye on me made me quite nervous.
All the same . . .
Before going to sleep, I would reflect on how I could tell the story to Mike and persuade him to work on it a little, imagining one of our talks full of ifs and buts. The Bletterbach was the last thought of the day.
I still had nightmares.
I would see the Beast again, hear the hissing. But the Beast was less present, its voice more muffled, as if it belonged to another life. No longer a memory devouring me, but something vague and indefinable. Distant, luckily for me.
There were several nights that passed in deep black darkness. Nights from which I woke happy and full of energy. Those were the best days.
On December 1, Mr. Smith and his bunch of super-cool guys with tattoos from the network ruined everything. And yours truly received a nice slice of cake tasting of blood.
My own, to be precise.
South Tyrol Style
In that second half of November, as I said, I rationed my visits to Lily’s, but didn’t stop going there altogether. I’d grown fond of those lopsided benches and the tables that looked as if they hadn’t had a new coat of paint in at least a dozen years.
Every now and then, Luis would make a quip about people who come out with a lot of hot air, but I didn’t bear a grudge. Just as I pretended not to know that that sprightly old man he went around with, Elmar, had a past as a poacher.
I had fun showing them photographs of my progress in building the sled and took their advice to heart. At Lily’s, I was among people who maybe weren’t my people (and wouldn’t be even if I decided to spend the rest of my life in Siebenhoch), but in whose company I felt safe. They knew me and I knew them.
That’s why Thomas Pircher caught me by surprise.
That and the fact that what happened at Lily’s started 8,000 kilometers from Siebenhoch, in the swanky offices of the network.
* * *
Mike and I had obligations. Contractual obligations. Mr. Smith had a whole army of lawyers paid to make sure that contracts were honored down to the last clause. To make money, you have to be inflexible.
Mr. Smith was interested in maximizing his income, not making good or bad television. The network invested in a product and expected to see a decent return. So, since the profits from the Road Crew series had grown from season to season, the check that Mr. Smith had signed for the pre-production of Mountain Angels had had several zeroes on it. It was considered likely that the project would get the same reaction from the public as Road Crew had. That, for the great emperor of the network, meant advertising space. In other words, money. Simple as that. But then everything had gone to hell. September 15 had happened. No more factual series, Mike had told Mr. Smith. In its place, a documentary film. Ninety minutes of pure adrenaline.
Mr. Smith had shown cautious interest and in the end, in spite of opposition from various experts in the network, had agreed. But at this point, the odds in our favor had collapsed and the pressure was on.
Pressure? No, what Mike had to suffer—while I was still trying to put my shattered psyche back together—wasn’t pressure, it was an avalanche of Biblical proportions.
True, I’d cosigned all the contracts, the narrative line of the documentary was mine, the script had me as one of the main characters. But for Mr. Smith and the network, there was only one God in heaven, only one captain on the Pequod, and only one director for the film: Mike. And it was on his head that all the shit came down. Text messages at all hours of the day and night, constant e-mails and telephone calls, FedEx couriers handing over ever more threatening missives. Mike didn’t tell me about any of it. He could have (and in some respects, he really should have), but he wanted to protect me.
And I’m grateful to him for that.
In November, Mr. Smith’s patience ran out. He had signed a check and now he demanded to know where his money had gone. Mike did everything that heroes do at times like these: he wheedled, made up excuses to justify the delays, and bowed and begged. He defended me and the project with all his heart for as long as he could.
In the end, he had to give in.
On the morning of November 30, at exactly nine o’clock, he found himself in a conference room on the top floor of the network’s headquarters, as nervous as someone condemned to death, showing a rough cut of In the Belly of the Beast.
The extremely select audience consisted of Mr. Smith, a few experts from the creative team, two executives with hangovers, and a guy from marketing with horn-rimmed glasses, tattoos on both arms and a Dolce & Gabbana suit, who was constantly taking notes on an iPad and whom Mike had nicknamed T.A.
Total Asshole.
The screening went better than expected. Mr. Smith decided that there was indeed money to be made from it, offered a few words of advice just to keep up appearances (advice that Mike ignored), and even the experts from the creative team and the two executives admitted through clenched teeth that maybe not all the money invested had ended up down the toilet.
The man who was most generous with his praise was Total Asshole. He gave Mike buddy-buddy pats on the back, shook his hand, said “wow” at least twenty times, and never stopped sniffing. After which, he gathered his notes and went off to talk to the press.
I’ll give him this: Total Asshole knew his job. He created a storm that, unfortunately, broke on my nose.
Literally.
* * *
On December 1, after a day spent tidying the house, helping Werner to replace a pipe in the toilet at Welshboden, and trying to explain Darwin to Clara (she had seen a documentary on television and couldn’t understand how T Rex had turned into a hen, which obliged me to bring up Yodi), once dinner was over I went down to the village with the intention of grabbing a beer, having a little chat with the Elmar & Luis double
act and then burying myself under the blankets and enjoying eight well-deserved hours of sleep.
It was my exhaustion that prevented me from noticing the looks when I went into Lily’s.
Eyes that stared at me for a frozen moment and then went back to looking somewhere else. No reply to my usual “Hello!” in a now almost passable dialokt.
There were even some who stood up and walked out. Just like in a Western.
I ordered a beer and sat down at the table of my two favorite drinking companions. “Quiet evening, isn’t it?”
Elmar clicked his tongue, then raised his newspaper, creating a barrier between him and me.
Surprised, I looked at Luis and raised an eyebrow.
“Hi, Salinger,” was his greeting.
I waited for my beer. It didn’t come.
I cleared my throat. “What’s up, boys?”
“Boys,” Elmar croaked. “You can say that to someone else.”
Usually, Lily’s was filled with chatter, coughing fits, and cursing in two languages. That evening of December 1: silence. I heard someone muttering. A couple of chairs squeaking on the floor. Nothing else, apart from the sensation of having all eyes aimed at me. Luis was stooped over his tankard of beer, now almost empty, as if trying to read the future in the lukewarm dregs.
“Luis?” I said, lightly brushing his elbow.
“Don’t touch me, Salinger. Don’t. Touch. Me.”
I moved back, wounded. “What the hell is going on here?” I snapped.
“This is what’s going on,” was the gruff reply of someone behind me, who threw a copy of the Alto Adige down on the table. Followed by a copy of the Dolomiten.
“You can read, can’t you?” Elmar said. I had never seen that expression on his face before. Usually, he was a mild old man with dentures that had a tendency to slip out, especially when he had to deal with words of more than three syllables. The scorn with which he uttered that sentence hurt me.
All I needed to see was the headlines.
“But I didn’t—”
“You didn’t know?”
“Yes, I knew, but—”
“Then you’re no longer welcome here.”
I sat there openmouthed. “I can explain.”
“What would you like to explain?” Luis almost snarled.
“I’d like,” I said, trying to display a calm I didn’t possess, “to explain my point of view.”
“Have they written crap? Have two different papers written crap? Is that what you’re trying to say? A conspiracy against you? Or maybe you’d like me to read you what’s written here? Maybe it’s a problem of language comprehension, your language comprehension.”
A number of people laughed.
It was nasty laughter. I couldn’t believe I was the target of this hostility. Not here, not at Lily’s. Not from these people.
“I don’t—”
At this point, I felt a hand come down on my shoulder.
“Did you hear what Luis said? Just get out of here.”
The blood went to my head. But I resisted the impulse to grab that hand and shake it off.
“I just want to give you my side of—”
“You talk too much,” said the bearded man behind the counter: Stef, the owner of Lily’s. “I pay the bills in this place and I’m telling you to get lost.”
I had no choice. That much was clear. There was a nasty atmosphere. But just like Kurt, Evi, and Markus, I, too, took for a simple storm what in fact was a hurricane.
“Listen,” I said, “there’s been a misunderstanding. Is the film coming out? Yes. Will the film feature the accident? Yes. Will it be a second-rate product? No. Will it make me look like a hero? No. Above all,” I said emphatically, looking Luis in the eyes, “will it show the men of Dolomite Mountain Rescue in a bad light?” I paused briefly, praying that they would believe me. Because that was the naked truth and I wanted them to know it. “Absolutely not.”
Luis shook his head. “It says here it’s going to be called In the Belly of the Beast.”
“That’s correct.”
“It says that you and your friend are the authors.”
“That’s correct, too.”
Luis looked at me as if to say, You see? I’m right.
“But it isn’t true that it’ll engage in hypotheticals, like it says here. It isn’t true that it’ll be a . . .” I looked for the sentence and read it out loud, “. . . ‘an attack on the failings of Mountain Rescue.’”
Elmar again clicked his tongue.
“You have to believe me. I can have you shown a few clips, I can—”
“How long have you been in Siebenhoch, Salinger?”
“Almost a year.”
“How long did it take you to shoot your lousy film?”
“Three months, more or less.”
“And you still don’t get it?”
“Get what?” I asked, hurt.
“What happens in the mountains stays in the mountains.” It wasn’t Luis who said this, it was the man whose hand was still pressing down on my shoulder. “Stupid Walscher.”
This was the proverbial last straw.
I exploded.
“Get your hands off me,” I hissed, leaping to my feet.
The man, an Alpine guide more or less my age, was a good ten centimeters taller than me and his eyes, blurred by alcohol, were no less nasty than mine. His name was Thomas Pircher. I’d even bought him a beer once.
“Or else?”
The man struck. Fast.
He caught me on the nose.
“Or else I’ll teach you a new way to shit, Walscher. Maybe from the ear, what do you say to that?”
I staggered back, bent double with the pain, while blood gushed onto the floor. Some applauded, others whistled.
Nobody tried to help me.
Pircher grabbed me by the hair, slapped me twice, and hit me in the solar plexus. I collapsed to the floor and dragged myself behind Luis and Elmar’s table.
“You want some more?”
I didn’t reply, I was too intent on trying to breathe. He poured a beer over my face. Then he kicked me twice in the ribs.
It was a beating in authentic South Tyrol style. If I hadn’t reacted immediately, I’d have left Lily’s on a stretcher.
I shook my head and tried to get up. Nothing doing. The world was spinning and it seemed as if it didn’t want to stop. The blows increased. Some urged Thomas to hit harder. Others jeered. There was no doubt about it, they were really enjoying it.
“Listen . . .” I mumbled, playing a trick as old as the world.
There was a one in a million chance that it might work, but Thomas Pircher fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
He bent down to listen to what I was muttering. Incredible, the innocence of some people.
I lifted my head abruptly and caught him on the chin. The pain on the back of my neck was strong, but bearable. Mitigated by the cry that escaped my attacker. I didn’t waste even one second. I got up, grabbed a chair, and brought it down on his back.
Thomas went down immediately.
I stood there motionless, challenging everyone there to square up.
“Who else wants some?” I cried.
At this point, I saw my reflection in the window of Lily’s. The chair leg in my right hand, my face reduced to a mask of blood, and an insane expression in my eyes. I felt a sense of disgust and futility. I could have yelled my innocence until my throat hurt, but the customers of Lily’s would have believed only what was there in black and white in the newspapers.
Maybe the next day, by the light of day, some of them would question what the hacks had written, which was taken straight from Total Asshole’s press releases. In a week, most of them would listen to me. In six months, I might even be able to exchange a few jokes with Thomas Pircher, who was still moaning on the floor. But not that evening, that evening nobody would pay any attention to me. Whatever I might say in my defense would sound false and empty.
I
dropped the chair leg, wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my jacket, and went home.
* * *
Annelise was awake. Better that way. I couldn’t have justified my swollen nose and the blood anyway. I told her what had happened and she flew into a rage. She threatened to bring in Werner, and it took quite a lot of effort to calm her down. It was pointless getting agitated. When the film was shown, things would sort themselves out. In the meantime we would have to make the best of it.
“But—”
“No buts. What do you want to do? Lodge a complaint? In a place where fights break out even at church bingo?”
“But—”
“I’ll have to go to another bar, what’s the big deal? There are plenty to choose from.”
Annelise treated my wounds and I promised her that I would go to the emergency room to get checked out, which I did the following day, accompanied by Werner, who, needless to say, already knew all the details of the fight at Lily’s.
At the San Maurizio, it emerged that neither my nose nor my ribs were broken. They both hurt badly and the doctors prescribed some painkillers. I thanked Werner for the ride, said goodbye, and went home. That evening, I had a long conversation on the phone with Mike, who told me he still hadn’t quite figured out the “leak” deliberately engineered by Total Asshole to give our documentary an aura of controversy, then, dead tired, I took refuge ’round the back of Welshboden and worked on the sled I wanted to give Clara for Christmas.
* * *
On the night of December 2, I dreamed about the Beast. Inside. In the whiteness. Between those jaws that wanted to crush me. The sensation of total hostility.
Get out, hissed the Beast.
Get out.
Der Krampusmeister
I’d first heard about it from Annelise, years earlier, and swollen face or not I wouldn’t have missed it for the world now that I was in Siebenhoch.
On December 5, the feast of Saint Nicolas (here called San Nicolò, with the stress on the last syllable), Alto Adige celebrated the saint in its usual style, a mixture of the burlesque and the sinister.
Beneath the Mountain Page 11