by Trevanian
"I thought you were someone else."
"Yeah. Well, I hope!"
"Come on in."
"What you got up your sleeve this time? Going to clout me with a chest of drawers?" Ben gave orders for the mess to be cleaned up and another dinner to be served, then he went into Jonathan's room, making much of leaping through the doorway in a bound and turning on the lights before something else befell him.
Jonathan assumed a businesslike tone, partially because he wanted to work on a plan he had made while sitting in the dark, partially because he did not want to dwell on his recent faux pas.
"Ben, what information do you have on the three men I'll be climbing the Eiger with?"
"Not much. We've exchanged a few letters, all about the climb."
"Could I read them over?"
"Sure."
"Good. Now, another thing. Do you have a detailed map of the area around here?"
"Sure."
"Can I have it?"
"Sure."
"What lies to the west of us?"
"Nothing."
"That's what it looked like from the high country. What kind of nothing is it?"
"Real bad-ass country. Rock and sand and nothing else. Goes on forever. Makes Death Valley look like an oasis. You don't want to go out there, ol' buddy. A man can die out there in two days. This time of year it gets up to a hundred fifteen in the shade, and you'd play hell finding any shade."
Ben picked up the phone and asked that a map and a packet of correspondence be brought from his office, along with a six-pack of beer. Then he called out to Jonathan who had gone into the bedroom to empty his ashtray, "Goddam my eyes if I know what's going on around here! 'Course, you don't have to tell me, if you don't want to."
Jonathan took him at his word.
"No. You don't have to tell me about it. What the hell? Slap guys around in my lounge. Break heads at my bar. Bust up my dishes. None of my business."
Jonathan came into the room. "You keep a few guns around, don't you, Ben?"
"Oh-oh."
"Do you have a shotgun?"
"Now, wait a minute, ol' buddy..."
Jonathan sat in a chair across from Ben. "I'm in a tight spot. I need help." His tone suggested that he expected it from a friend.
"You know you got all the help I can give, Jon. But if people are going to get killed around here, maybe I should know something about what's going on."
There was a knock at the door. Ben opened it, and the waiter stood there with the beer, the file, and the map. He entered only after looking carefully around the door, and he left as quickly as he decently could.
"Want a beer?" Ben asked, tearing the top from a can.
"No, thanks."
"Just as good. There's only six."
"What do you know about this Miles Mellough, Ben?"
"The one you were talking to? Nothing much. He looks like he could give you change for a nine-dollar bill, all in threes. That's about all I know. He just checked in this morning. You want me to throw him out?"
"Oh, no. I want him right here."
Ben chuckled. "Boy, he's sure tickling the imaginations of a lot of girls. They're flocking around him as though he held the patent on the penis. I even saw George eyeing him."
"She'd be in for a letdown."
"Yeah, I figured."
"How about the other one? The big blond?"
"He checked in at the same time. They got adjoining rooms. I got the doctor up from town, and he fixed some on his nose, but I don't believe he's ever going to be a real close friend of yours." Ben crushed the empty beer can in his hands and opened another thoughtfully. "You know, Jon? That fight really bothered me some. You came at that man pretty slick for an aging college professor."
"You've gotten me into top shape."
"Uh-unh. No, that ain't it at all. You set him up like you were used to setting people up. He was so fazed out, he never had a chance. You remember I told you how I'd hate to be with you on a desert island with no food? Well, that's the kind of thing I mean. Like stepping on that big guy's nose. You'd already made your point. A body could get the feeling you got a real mean streak in you somewhere."
It was obvious that Ben needed at least a limited explanation. "Ben, these people killed a friend of mine."
"Oh?" Ben considered that. "Does the law know about it?"
"There's nothing the law can do."
"How come?"
Jonathan shook his head. He did not intend to pursue the matter.
"Hey, wait a minute! I just got a real scary flash. I suddenly got the feeling that all this has something to do with the Eiger climb. Else why would they know you were here?"
"Stay out of it, Ben."
"Now, listen to me. You don't need any more trouble than that mountain's going to give you. I haven't told you this, but I better. You're training real good, and you're still a crafty climber. But I've been watching you close, Jon. And to be honest, you don't have more than a fifty-fifty chance on the Eiger at best. And that doesn't count your fooling around trying to kill people and them trying to kill you. I don't mean to dent your confidence, ol' buddy, but it's something you ought to know."
"Thanks, Ben."
A waiter knocked at the door and brought in a tray with a training meal for two, which they consumed in silence while Jonathan pored over the terrain map and Ben finished the cans of beer.
By the time the meal was a clutter of duty dishes, Jonathan had folded up the map and put it into his pocket. He began questioning Ben about his forthcoming climbing partners. "How close has your correspondence with them been?"
"Nothing special. Just the usual stuff—hotel, rations, team rope and iron, how to handle the reporters—that sort of stuff. The German guy does most of the writing. He kind of thought the whole thing up in the first place, and he makes noise like a leader. That reminds me. Are you and I going to fly over together?"
"I don't think so. I'll meet you there. Listen, Ben, have any of them...? Are they all in good physical shape?"
"At least as good as you."
"Have any of them been hurt lately? Or wounded?"
"Wounded? Not as I know of. One of them—the German—wrote that he had a fall early this month. But nothing serious."
"What kind of fall?"
"I don't know. Roughed up his leg some."
"Enough to make him limp?"
"Well, that's pretty hard to tell from a guy's handwriting. Hey, why you asking me all this shit?"
"Never mind. Will you leave this file of correspondence with me? I want to read it over—get to know these men a little better."
"No skin off my ass." Ben stretched and groaned like a sated bear. "You still planning to make that climb on the needle in the morning?"
"Of course. Why wouldn't I?"
"Well, it might be a little tough, climbing with a shotgun cradled over your arm."
Jonathan laughed. "Don't worry about it."
"Well, in that case, we better get some sleep. That needle ain't no tent pole, you know."
"You mean it ain't no bedpost."
"It ain't neither one."
Shortly after Big Ben had gone, Jonathan was propped up in bed studying the letters from the other climbers. In each case, the first letter was rather stiff and polite. Evidently, Ben's answers had been robust and earthy, because all succeeding letters cleaved to hard technical matters of climbing: weather reports, observations about conditions on the face, descriptions of recent training climbs, suggestions for equipment. It was in one of these letters that the German mentioned a short fall he had taken resulting in a gashed leg which, he assured Ben, would be in fine shape by the Eiger ascent.
Jonathan was deep in this correspondence, trying to read personality between the arid lines, when he recognized the scratching knock of George Hotfort wanting to be let in.
His recent encounter with Mellough made him cautious. He turned off his reading light before crossing to unlatch the door. George entered into the dar
kness uncertainly, but Jonathan latched the door behind her and conducted her to the bed. He was eager to use her as sexual aspirin, to relieve the tensions of the afternoon, although he knew he would only experience discharge and release without local sensation.
Throughout the event, George's eyes locked on his, expressionless in their Oriental mold, totally severed from her aggressive and demanding body.
Sometime later, while he slept, she slipped away without a word.
ARIZONA: June 28
He sensed that he was going to be magnificent.
Immediately upon waking, he was eager for the climb on Big Ben Needle. Once or twice in his climbing career he had experienced this scent of victory—this visceral hunch. He had it just before he set a time record on Grand Teton, and again when he introduced a new route up the Dru into the mountaineering handbooks. His hands felt strong enough to punch holds into the rock, if need be, and his legs carried him with more than vigor and ease, with a sensation of moon gravity. He was so finely tuned to this climb that his hands, when he rubbed the palms together, felt like rough chamois gloves capable of adhering to flat, slimy rock.
After his shower, he neither shaved nor combed his hair. He preferred to be rough and burry when he met the rock.
When Ben knocked at his door, he was already tying off his boots and admiring their feel: broken in from his recent training climbs, but the cleats in excellent condition.
"You look mighty ready." Ben had just gotten out of bed and was still in his pajamas and robe, grizzled and carrying with him his first can of beer.
"I feel great, Ben. That needle of yours has had it."
"Oh, I wouldn't be surprised if it took some of the shine off you before it's all over. It's near four hundred feet, mostly grade 6."
"Tell your cooks we'll be back in time for lunch."
"I doubt that. Especially considering you got to drag a tired old man along behind you. Come to my room and I'll get dressed."
He followed Ben down the hall and into his rooms where he declined the offer of a beer and sat watching dawn quicken, while Ben slowly found and donned the various elements of his climbing gear. The finding was not easy, and Ben grumbled and swore steadily as he shoveled clothes out of drawers onto the floor and emptied boxes of random paraphernalia onto his rumpled bed.
"You say I'm going to pull you along behind, Ben? I had imagined you would lead. After all, you know the route. You've been up before."
"Yeah, but I ain't one to hog all the fun. Goddam my eyes if I can find that other sock. Can't stand wearing socks that don't match. Puts me off balance. Hey! Maybe if I worked it out just right I could make up for these missing toes by wearing a lighter sock on that foot! 'Course I'd run the risk of ending up with the opposite of a limp. I might find myself up an inch or two off the ground, and that'd play hell with my traction. Hey, get off your ass and kick around in this stuff and see if you can find my climbing sweater. You know, the old green one."
"You're wearing it."
"Oh, yeah. So I am. But lookee here! I ain't got no shirt on under it!"
"Not my fault."
"Well, you ain't helping much."
"I'm afraid if I got out into the middle of the room they'd never find me again."
"Oh, George would come across you when she put all this mess away."
"George cleans up your room?"
"She's on my payroll, and she's got to do more to earn her keep than just be a spittoon for your sperm."
"You have a delicate sense of imagery, Ben."
"No shit? All right, I give up. Goddam my eyes if I can find them boots. Why don't you let me use yours?"
"And I go up barefoot?"
"Considering how sassy-assed and prime you're feeling, I didn't figure you'd notice the difference."
Jonathan leaned back in the chair and relaxed with the dawn view. "I really do feel good, Ben. I haven't felt like this for a long time."
Ben's characteristic gruffness fled for a moment. "That's good. I'm glad. I remember how it used to be for me."
"Do you miss climbing much, Ben?"
Ben sat on the edge of his bed. "Would you miss it if someone ran off with your pecker? Sure, I miss it. I'd been climbing since I was eighteen. At first, I didn't know what to do with myself. But then..." He slapped his knees and stood up. "Then, I got this place. And I'm living high on the hog now. Still..." Ben wandered over to the closet. "Here's my boots! I'll be goddamed!"
"Where were they?"
"In my shoe rack. George must have put them there, goddam her."
Over breakfast in the glittering, empty restaurant kitchen, Jonathan asked if Miles Mellough had done anything of interest after the fight.
"He worry you, Jon?"
"Right now I'm only worried about the climb. But I'll have to deal with him after I get back."
"If he don't deal with you first."
"Say it out."
"Well, one of my help heard this Mellough and his friend having a set-to in their rooms."
"Your help spends a lot of time with their ears to doors?"
"Not usually. But I figured you might want me to keep an eye on these guys. Anyway, the fancy one was some kind of pissed off at the way the other guy let you set him up. And the big fellow said that it would be different next time. Then later on they ordered a rental car from town. It's parked out front now."
"Maybe they want to take in the countryside."
"What's wrong with our guest cars? No, I figure they want to get somewhere in a hurry. Maybe after they've done something to be ashamed of. Like killing somebody."
"What makes you think they're going to kill somebody?"
Ben paused, hoping to make an effect, "The waiter told me the big fellow carries a gun." Jonathan concentrated on sipping his coffee and denied Ben the expected reaction. Ben tore off the top of a can of beer. "You don't seem much bothered about that guy carrying a gun."
"I knew he did, Ben. I saw it under his coat. That's why I stepped on his nose. So he wouldn't be able to see clearly. I needed walking away time."
"Here I was thinking you had a mean streak, and all the time you was just doing what you had to do."
"You should be ashamed of yourself."
"I could cut out the tongue that spoke evil of you, ol' buddy."
"I was just trying to stay alive."
"And that's why you want the shotgun?"
"No, not for protection. I need it for attack. Come on! That hill's eroding out there. There won't be much left of it by the time you get ready."
Jonathan's boots crunched over the loose fall rock around the base of the needle which beetled out overhead, still black on its western face in the early morning. A rock drill, a hammer, and fifteen pounds of pitons, snap rings, and expansion bolts clanged and dangled from the web belt around his waist.
"Right about here," he judged, guessing the position of a long vertical crack he had observed the day before. The crack, averaging four inches in width and running up from the base for a hundred feet, seemed to him to be the highway up the first quarter of the face. It was after the fissure petered out that the mushroom top began its outward lean, and then the going would be more challenging.
"Is this the way you started up, Ben?"
"It's one way, I guess," Ben said noncommittally.
They roped up. "You don't intend to be very helpful, do you?" Jonathan said, passing the loose coils of line to his partner.
"Hell, I don't need the practice. I'm just along for the ride."
Jonathan adjusted the straps on the light pack Ben had insisted he carry for training. Just before taking to the rock, they urinated into the arid ground, pressing out the last drops. Numberless beginners have overlooked, in their eagerness to start, this propitiatory libation to the gods of gravity, and have rued the oversight when they were later faced with the natural problem while on the face, both hands engaged in the more pressing matter of survival. The only solution available under such circumstances is not calcu
lated to make the climber a social success during the press of congratulations following the climb.
"OK, let's go."
The move up the crack went quickly and uneventfully, save in places where the fissure was too wide for a snug foot jam. Jonathan drove no pitons for climbing, only one each thirty feet or so to shorten the fall, if there was one.
He enjoyed the feel of the rock. It had character. It was well-toothed and abrasive to the grip. There were very few good piton cracks, however. Most of them tended to be too wide, requiring one or two additional pitons as wedges, and they did not drive home with the hard ring of the well-seated peg. This would matter more once they began the three hundred feet of outward-leaning climb. Jonathan realized he would have to use the drill and expansion bolt more than he cared to. He had always drawn a fine, but significant line between piton and expansion bolt. The conquest of a face by means of the piton had elements of seduction about it; the use of the drill and bolt smacked of rape.
They moved smoothly and with high coordination. Ben tied off and belayed from below, while Jonathan inched up as far as his rope would allow before finding an acceptable purchase from which to belay Ben up to him. Ben's passage was always faster. He had the psychological advantage of the line; he used the holds and grips Jonathan had worked out.
Even after the crack petered out and progress slowed, Jonathan's feeling of indomitability persisted. Each square meter of face was a gameboard of tactics, a combat against the unrelenting, mindless opposition of gravity in which the rock was a Turkish ally, ready to change sides if the going got rough.
They niched up, Ben's experienced and sympathetic pressure on the line lending it cooperative life, always slack when Jonathan was moving, always snug when it alone held him on the face. For some time there had not been a free purchase where either man could hold to the rock without rope or piton.
Jonathan began to tire; the drag of his pack and the knotting pressure on thighs and calves were constant mortal reminders. But his hands were still strong, and he felt fine. Particularly did he enjoy the touch of the rock, warm where the sun was upon it, cool and refreshing in the shade. The air was so clean it had a green flavor, and even the salt taste of his sweat was good. Nevertheless, he did not object when, after three hours and with two-thirds of the face under them, Ben called for a rest.