by Allan Folsom
152
* * *
FOR NO reason Von Holden was thinking of Scholl and why he’d had the terrible, even murderous, fear of being seen unclothed. There had been rumors—that Scholl had no penis, that it had been severed in some kind of accident during his youth. That he was a true hermaphrodite and had female uterus and breasts as well as a penis, and therefore thought of himself as a freak—
It was Von Holden’s contention that Scholl refused to be seen unclothed because he had a revulsion of any human warmth and that included the human body. The mind and the power of the mind were all that mattered, therefore physical and emotional needs disgusted him even though they remained as much a part of him as of anyone else. Abruptly Von Holden’s reverie passed and he became aware of the trail in front of him and the glacier stretching out for miles to his left.
Looking up, he saw the moon hovering between clouds. Then he saw a shadow move on the cliff above him. Osborn was climbing along the face of the rock! Directly beneath him was a wide ledge. If he saw that and reached it, it would be only moments before he found Von Holden’s tracks in the fresh snow.
Then clouds passed in front of the moon and it became dark again. Looking up, he thought he saw Osborn let go : ‘and drop to the ledge. He still had fifty or more yards to : the air shaft entrance and Osborn, as close as he was, could easily follow his trail. Enough, Von Holden thought. Kill him now and you can take his body into the shaft. No one. will ever find it.
Osborn’s fall to the ledge had knocked the wind out of him, and it took him a long moment to get his senses back. When he did, he came up on one knee and looked down toward where he’d last seen Von Holden. He could just make out the trial along the cliff face but Von Holden was gone. Standing, he was suddenly afraid he’d lost McVey’s gun. But no, it was still there in his waistband. Taking it out, he opened the chamber and turned it so that the hammer and firing pin sat on a live round. Then, with one hand against the rock wall, the gun in the other, he started forward along the ledge.
Von Holden slid the pack from his shoulders and moved into a position where he could clearly see the trail coming down behind him. Then he pulled up the nine-millimeter automatic pistol, eased back and waited.
As Osborn reached the main trail, the ledge suddenly narrowed. As it did, the moon slid out from behind the clouds once more. It was as if someone had put a spotlight on him. Instinctively he dropped to the ground just as a quick burst from some kind of automatic weapon exploded the rock wall where he had been standing. Pieces of rock and ice showered him. Then the moon went away and darkness and silence rushed in with the wind. He had no idea where the shots had come from. Nor had he heard the gun. Which meant Von Holden’s weapon probably had both a silencer and flame suppressor. If Von Holden was above him, or working toward that position, Osborn was wide open. Easing forward on his stomach, he reached the edge and peered over the side. Five feet below him was a rock outcropping. It wasn’t much but it was better protection than he had. Using the darkness for cover, he suddenly stood up, ran, and dove. As he did, he felt something hard slap against his shoulder. If flung him sideways and backward. At the same time he heard a tremendous boom. Then he felt the snow hit him hard in the back, and for an instant everything went black. When he opened his eyes all he could see was the top of the cliff. He smelled gunpowder and realized that his own gun must have gone off. Putting out a hand, he was starting to ease himself up when a shadow stepped into his circle of vision.
It was Von Holden. The rucksack was on his back and an odd-looking pistol was in his hand.
“In the Spetsnaz we were taught to smile at the executioner,” Von Holden said quietly. “It will make you immortal.”
Suddenly Osborn realized he was going to die. And everything that had brought him this far would all end, now, within a matter of seconds. The sad, tragic thing was that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. Yet he was still alive and there was the chance Von Holden would give him something before he shot him.
“Why was my father murdered?” he said. “For the scalpel he invented? For the surgery on Elton Lybarger?— Tell me. Please.”
Von Holden smiled arrogantly. “Für Übermorgen,” he said triumphantly. “For the day after tomorrow!”
Suddenly Von Holden looked up as a thundering roar spilled out of the darkness above them. It was like an enormous wind that groaned and screamed as if the earth were literally being torn from itself. The roar became deafening and there was a spray of rock and shale. Then the front wall of the avalanche hit, and both he and Osborn were hurled backward, tossed like dolls over the, trail’s edge. Down they plunged, head over heels, into a narrow and very steep couloir. Once, in midair, as he was turning, Osborn caught sight of Von Holden, his expression unnerved and disbelieving, frozen in some untold horror. Then he was gone. Swept away in a bellowing tide of ice and snow and debris.
153
* * *
VON HOLDEN emerged first, thrown free onto a nearly flat plate of rock and loose stone. Staggering up, he looked around. Above was the avalanche trail and the narrow chute down which he’d fallen. Rivulets of ice and snow still rolled down it in the aftermath. Turning, he saw the glacier, where it should have been. But nothing else looked familiar. Where he was, in relation to the trail he had been on, he had no idea. Looking up, he hoped to see the moon reemerge from behind the clouds but instead he saw the sky. No longer gray and overcast, it was crystal clear. But there was no moon or stars. In its place, reaching far into the heavens, were the red and green of the Aurora. The massive, overpowering ribbon-candy curtains of his nightmare.
Crying out, he turned and ran. Desperately looking for the trail that would lead to the entrance to the shaft. But nothing was as it should have been. He had never been in this place before. Terrified, he ran on, only to be confronted by a wall of stone, and he realized he had entered a cul-de-sac, with rock cliffs reaching hundreds of feet straight up into the red-green sky.
Breathless, heart pounding, he turned back. The red and green grew brighter and the towering curtains began to descend toward him. At the same time beginning to slowly undulate up and down, like the huge monolithic pistons of his dreams.
The curtains came closer, undulating obscenely, bathing him in the colors of their glow. Threatening to settle like a shroud around him.
“No!” he shouted, as if to break the spell and make them go away. His voice echoing off the rock masses and out across the glacier. But the spell did not break and instead they came closer, pulsating steadily, as if they were some living organism that owned the heavens. Abruptly they became translucent, like the hideous tentacles of jellyfish, and suddenly descended further as if to smother him. In silent terror, he turned and ran back the way he had come.
Once again he was in the cul-de-sac and face-to-face with headwalls of stone. Turning back, he watched in dread as the tentacles came toward him. Translucent, glowing, undulating. Lowering. Were they here to warn of his imminent death? Or this time, was it death itself? He shrunk back. What did they want? He merely was a soldier following orders. A soldier doing his duty.
Then that same sense rose in him and the fear left. He was a Spetsnaz soldier! He was Letter der Sicherheit! He would not allow death to take him with his purpose hot yet done! “Neinr he shouted out loud.
“Ich bin der Leiter der Sicherheit!” I am chief of security! Tearing the pack from his shoulders, he undid the straps and took the box from inside. Cradling it in his arms, he took a step forward.
“Das ist meine Pflicht!” This is my duty! he said, offering the box up in both hands.
“Das ist meine Seele!’ This is my soul!
Abruptly the Aurora vanished and Von Holden stood trembling in the moonlight, the box still in his arms. A moment passed before he could hear his own breathing. A moment more, and he felt his pulse return to normal. Finally, he started forward out of the cul-de-sac. Then he was out and on the edge of the mountain overlooking the glacier. Below h
im he saw the clear trail to the air shaft. Immediately he started down it, the box still clutched in his arms.
By now the storm had passed and the moon and stars were stark in the sky. The clarity of the moonlight and the angle from which it came gave the snowy landscape a raw. timelessness that made it at once past and future, and Von Holden had the sense that he had demanded and been given passage through a world that existed only on some Jar-removed plane.
“Das ist meine Pflicht!” he said again, looking up at the stars. Duty above all! Above Earth. Above God. Beyond time.
Within minutes he’d reached the split of rock that concealed the opening to the air shaft. The rock itself jutted put over the edge of the cliff and he had to step out and around it to enter. As he did, he saw Osborn sprawled on a snow covered shelf thirty yards downhill from where he stood, his left leg turned under him at an odd angle. Von Holden knew it was broken. But he wasn’t dead. His eyes were open and he was watching him.
“Don’t take another chance with him,” he thought. “Shoot him now.”
There was a puff of snow from Von Holden’s boot as he stepped closer to the edge and looked down. His movement had put him in deep shadow, with the full light of the moon on the Jungfrau above him. But even in the darkness Osborn could see him shift the weight of the box and cradle it in his left arm. Then he saw a secondary movement and the pistol come up in his right hand. Osborn no longer had McVey’s gun—it had been lost in the rush of the avalanche that had saved his life. He’d been given one chance, he wouldn’t get another unless he did something himself.
Grimacing in agony as his fractured leg twisted beneath him, Osborn dug in with his elbows and kicked out with his other leg. Unbearable pain shot the length of his body as he inched backward, squirming like a broken animal over the ice and rock, trying wildly to drag himself across the shelf and out of the line of fire. Suddenly he felt his head dip backward and he realized he had come to the edge. Cold air rushed up from below and he looked over his shoulder and saw nothing but a vast dark hole in the glacier beneath him. Slowly he looked back. He could feel Von Holden smile as his finger closed around the pistol’s trigger.
Then Von Holden’s eyes flashed in the moonlight. His gun bucked in his hand and he jerked sideways, his shots spraying off into space. Von Holden kept shooting and his entire body jumped with the rattle of the gun until it was empty. Then his hand went limp and dropped to his side and the gun fell away. For a moment he just stood there, his eyes wide, the box still cradled in his left arm. Then, ever so slowly, he lost his balance and pitched forward, his body plunging downward, sailing over Osborn, free-falling in the clear night air toward the gaping darkness below.
154
* * *
OSBORN REMEMBERED hearing dogs and then saw faces.
A local doctor and Swiss paramedics. Mountain rescuers who carried him in a litter up through the snow in the darkness. Vera. Inside the station. Her face white and taut with fear. Uniformed policemen on the train as he went down. They were talking but he didn’t remember hearing them. Connie. Sitting beside him, smiling reassuringly. And Vera again, holding his hand.
Then drugs or pain or exhaustion must have taken over because he went out.
Later he thought there was something about a hospital in Grindelwald. And an argument of some kind as to who he was. He could have sworn Remmer came into the room and after him, McVey in his rumpled suit. With McVey pulling up a chair next to the bed and sitting down, watching him.
Then he saw Von Holden back on the mountain. Saw him teeter on the edge. Saw him fall. For the briefest instant he had the impression that someone was standing on the ledge directly behind him. He remembered trying to think who it could be and realized it was Vera. She held an enormous icicle arid it was covered with blood. But then that vision faded to one infinitely clearer. Von Holden was alive and falling toward him, the box still clutched in his arms. He was falling not at normal speed but in some sort of distorted slow motion and in an arc that would send him over the edge and down into the fathomless darkness thousands of feet below. Then he was gone, and all that was left was what had been said before, just as the avalanche struck.
“Why was my father murdered?” Osborn had asked.
“Für Übermorgen,” Von Holden had answered. “For the day after tomorrow!”
155
* * *
Berlin, Monday, October 17.
VERA SAT alone in the back of a taxi as it turned off Clay Allee onto Messelstrasse and into the heart of Dahlem, one of Berlin’s handsomest districts. A cold rain was falling for the second day and people were already complaining about it. That morning the concierge at the Hotel Kempinski had personally delivered a single red rose. With it had come a sealed envelope with a hastily scrawled note asking her to take it to Osborn when she visited him at the small, exclusive hospital in Dahlem. The note had been signed “McVey.”
Because of road construction, the route to Dahlem backtracked and she found herself being driven past the destruction that had been Charlottenburg. Workmen were out in the heavy rain, gutting the structure. Bulldozers steamrolled over the formal gardens clearing the ruins, pushing them into great piles of charred rubble that were then machine-loaded into dump trucks and driven away. The tragedy had made headlines worldwide and flags flew at half mast across the city. A state funeral had been planned for the victims. Two former presidents of the United States were to attend as was the president of France and the prime minister of England.
“It burned before. In 1746,” the cabdriver told her, his voice strong and filled with pride. “It was rebuilt then. It will be rebuilt again.”
Vera closed her eyes as the taxi turned on Kaiser Friedrichstrasse for Dahlem. She’d come down with him from the mountain and had stayed with him as long as they’d let her. Then she’d been given an escort to Zurich and told Osborn would be taken to a hospital in Berlin. And that’s where she’d gone. It had all happened in too little time. Images and feelings collided, beautiful, painful, horrifying. Love and death rode hand in hand. And too closely. It seemed, almost, as if she’d lived through a war.
Through most of it had been the overriding presence of McVey. In one way, he was a kind and earnest grandfather who cared for the human rights and dignity of everyone. But in another, he was his own sort of Patton. Selfish and ruthless, relentless, even cruel. Driven by pursuit of truth. At any cost whatsoever.
The taxi let her off under an overhang and she entered the hospital. The lobby was small and warm and she was startled to see a uniformed policeman. He watched her carefully until she announced herself at the desk. Then he immediately rang for the elevator and smiled at her as she entered.
Another policeman stood outside the second-floor elevator and a plainclothes inspector was outside the door to Osborn’s room. Both men seemed to know who she was, the last even greeting her by name.
“Is he in danger?” she asked, concerned at the presence of the police.
“It is simply a precaution.”
“I understand.” Vera turned to the door. Beyond it was a man. she barely knew, yet loved as if centuries had passed between them. The brief time they’d spent together had beer! like no other. He’d touched her on a level no one else ever had. Perhaps it was because when they’d looked at each other the first time, they’d also looked down the road. And what they’d seen, they’d seen together, as if there would never be a time when they would part. And then out on the mountain, under the most cruel of situations, he’d confirmed it. For both of them.
At least that was what she thought. Suddenly she was afraid that everything she felt was hers alone. That she’d misread it all and that whatever they’d had between them had been fleeting and one-sided, and that on the other side of the door she’d find not the Paul Osborn she knew but a stranger.
“Why don’t you go in?” The inspector smiled and opened the door.
He lay in bed, his left leg beneath a sprawling web of pulleys and ropes and cou
nterweights; He was wearing his L.A. Kings T-shirt, bright red jockey shorts and nothing else, and when she saw him all her fears vanished and she started to laugh.
“What’s so damn funny?” he demanded.
“Don’t know . . .” She giggled. “I don’t know at all . . . . It just is . . .”
And then the inspector closed the door and she crossed the room and came into his arms. And everything that had been—on the Jungfrau, in Paris, in London and in Geneva came rushing back. Outside, it was raining and Berlin was complaining. But to them, it made no difference at all.
156
* * *
Los Angeles.
PAUL OSBORN sat on the grass and stone patio of his Pacific Palisades home and stared out at the horseshoe of lights that was Santa Monica Bay. It was seventy-five degrees and ten o’clock at night a week before Christmas.
What had happened on the Jungfrau was too tangled and complex to try to make sense of. The last moments were especially disturbing because he couldn’t say for certain exactly what had happened, or how much of what he thought had happened had really taken place at all.
As a physician, he understood that he had suffered significant physical and emotional trauma. Not just in the last weeks but across the arc of his entire life from childhood to adult, though certainly he could point to the closing days in Germany and Switzerland as the most tumultuous of all. But it had been there on the Jungfrau that the line between reality and hallucination finally ceased to exist. Night and snow had melded with fear and exhaustion. The honor of the avalanche, the certainty of imminent death at the hands of Von Holden, and the excruciating pain of his broken leg rubbed whatever cognizance there still was out of existence. What was real, what was a dream, was all but impossible to tell. And now that he was home, broken but alive and mending, did it make any difference anyway?