The Eiger Sanction (21 page)

Karl's face was broad and regular, but too immobile to be interesting; he was handsome without being attractive. His blond—really colorless—hair was fine and lank, and he combed it back in a flat pompadour from his wide, aggressively intelligent forehead. He was the tallest man in the party by two inches, and his excellent body tone enabled him to maintain his rigid sitting posture without appearing foolish.

“Well!” Jean-Paul said, breaking off his chat with Karl and turning to Jonathan and Anna. “You two don't seem to have been chatting.”

“We were comparing silences,” Jonathan said, “and hers turned out more interesting than mine.”

“She's a remarkable woman.” Jean-Paul looked at his wife with undisguised pride.

“I believe that.”

“She was in ballet before her unfortunate marriage, you know.” Jean-Paul was in the habit of protecting himself by beating others to the assumption that the union had been socially and emotionally morganatic. It was not only that he was a manufacturer; his company made a comically common household article.

Anna laughed softly. “Jean-Paul likes to think he snatched me from the stage at the height of my career. Actually, age and declining popularity were working toward the same goal.”

“Nonsense!” Jean-Paul asserted. “No one could ever guess your age. How old do you think she is, Jonathan?”

Jonathan was embarrassed for both of them.

“My husband admires frankness, Doctor Hemlock. He considers tact to be a kind of deviousness.”

“No but. Come on, Jonathan. How old would you say Anna is?”

Jonathan lifted his hands palms up in a gesture of helplessness. “I—ah—imagine a man would only consider her age if he were trying to decide whether the praise should go to Nature or to the lady herself.”

It had not been very good, but Anna applauded mockingly, soundlessly tapping the tips of three fingers into her palm.

Sensing that nothing of consequence was going to be talked about here, Karl rose and excused himself. Jean-Paul moved down one chair to tighten the party.

“It is certainly magnificent,” he said, looking dreamily out to the Eiger. “It's a perfect choice for my last mountain.”

“Your last?”

“I am no longer young, Jonathan. Think of it! At forty-two, I shall be the oldest man to climb it. These two young men are fantastic climbers. We shall have our work cut out, you and I. You are—forgive me but—you are...?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Ah! Just my wife's age!”

She closed her eyes and opened them tiredly.

To change the subject, Jonathan asked, “Are you interested in climbing, Anna?”

“Not especially.”

“But she will be proud of me when I return, won't you, dearest?”

“Very proud.”

“I don't know when I've felt so good,” Jean-Paul said, stretching his arms athletically and allowing one to drop across Anna's shoulders. “I feel I have achieved the best conditioning possible at my age. Each night for the past six months I have performed a complicated set of calisthenics. And I have been religious about them. I work so late that my poor wife is usually asleep when I join her.” He laughed and patted her.

“By now she must be very eager,” Jonathan said, “to see you make the climb.”

Anna glanced at him, then looked away to the windows which were beginning to dapple with a light rain.

From habit Jean-Paul cursed the break in the weather, but his experience in these Bernese Alps told him that the preceding sunshine, not this rain, was the exception.

“This will bring fresh snow to the upper reaches,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Yes, some,” Jonathan agreed. He refilled his cup and excused himself to step out onto the terrace where he stood under an overhanging eave and enjoyed the smell of the rain.

The sky was zinc, and the color of the few gnarled evergreens that clung to the rocky soil of Kleine Scheidegg had been subtracted to olive drab by the loss of sunlight. There was no wind, and he sipped his coffee and listened to the rustle of rain in the meadow grass.

They were a cool lot. One of them, at least, was cool. He had met the possible sanction targets, but no gesture, no nervousness, no glance had given him a hint. Jonathan would be on dicey ground until Search contacted him with the target's identity.

Gray and listless mists concealed the upper third of the North Face. He recalled the ghoulish pun German sports writers resurrected each time a team attempted the Eiger. Instead of Nordwand, North Wall, they called it the Mordwand, Murder Wall. The days were past when German and Austrian youths threw their lives against the Eigerwand with reckless WagnerianTodeslieb ; great names had mastered the face: Hermann Buhl, Lionel Terray, Gaston Rebuffat; and dozens of lesser men had climbed it, each eroding, with his success, a fragment of the glory accruing to the task; but nonetheless, as he stood in the half-shelter sipping his coffee and looking across the meadow, Jonathan experienced an expanding desire to try again the face that had twice driven him back.

On his way up to Ben's room, he passed Anderl in the corridor, and they exchanged nods of greeting. He had taken an instant liking to this short, sinewy lad with his mop of dark hair so obviously unused to the comb, and his long strong fingers designed by nature for finding and clinging to the smallest indentations in the rock. It would be too bad if Anderl turned out to be the sanction target.

His knock at Ben's door was answered by a booming, “Fuck off!”

Jonathan opened the door and peeked in.

“Oh, it's you, ol' buddy. Come on in. And lock the door behind you.”

Jonathan moved a coil of nylon line off the spare bed and stretched out. “Why the fierce greeting?”

Ben had been packing the haversacks, evenly distributing the weight, but making sure each pair of kits contained every necessity for a good bivouac, should the team break into two climbing ropes. “Oh, I thought you were one of those reporters.” He grumbled something to himself as he snatched tight a strap. Then, “Goddam my eyes if they ain't been pecking at my door every five minutes. There's even a newsreel team here. Did you know that?”

“No. But I'm not surprised. The Eiger Birds are here in force now. The hotel's filled up and they're spilling over into Alpiglen and Grindelwald.”

“Fucking ghouls.”

“But the fattest cats of all are right here in the hotel.”

Ben tied off one of the haversacks with a grunt, “Like who?”

Jonathan mentioned the names of a Greek merchant and his recently-acquired American society wife. The management of the hotel had erected a large rectangular oriental tent that gave onto one of the telescopes on the terrace. The tent was hung in silk and equipped with heaters and a small refrigerator, and the telescope had been reserved for their personal use, after being scrubbed down carefully with disinfectant. Every social precaution had been taken to insulate them from the company of the lesser Eiger Birds, but the Greek's penchant for lavish waste and gross practical jokes had instantly attracted the attention of the press.

Jonathan noticed a powerful brass telescope in the corner of the room. “You bring that with you?”

“Sure. You figure I'm going to line up with a pocketful of coins to watch you on the face?”

“I'm afraid you're going to have to make your peace with the newsmen.”

“Why?”

“It would be best if you kept them informed, once” we're on the hill. Just basic statistics: how high we are, the weather, our route—things like that."

“Tell 'em nothing, that's my motto. Fuck 'em.”

“No. I think you should cooperate a little. If you don't, they'll make copy out of their imaginations.”

Ben tied off the last of the kits and opened a bottle of beer from his supply on the dresser. “Whew! I've been busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. But I got you people ready to move out at a minute's notice. There's a report of a cone of high pressure moving in, and youknow that bitch-kitty of a hill ain't going to give you more than two or three days of weather.” He tossed a ring of ice pitons off his bed and stretched out.

Jonathan asked for his evaluation of the climbers, and Ben screwed up his face. “I don't know. Too much of a mixed bag for my taste. That German kid's too cocky-assed.”

“I have a feeling he's a good climber, though.”

“Could be. But he ain't many grins in a bivouac. He's got all the makings of a first-class snot. Doesn't seem to realize that we were making major climbs when he was still shitting yellow. Now that Austrian boy—”

“Anderl.”

“Yeah, Anderl. Now, he's a climber. He's got the right look. Kinda looks like you did.” Ben leaned up on one elbow and added pointedly. “Thirteen years ago.”

“All right. All right.”

“Hey, ol' buddy? Toss your poor crippled friend another can of beer?”

Jonathan grunted up and did so, noticing for the first time that Ben was drinking American beer, an extravagance in Switzerland. But like most big American beer drinkers, Ben had no taste for the relatively thick German product. Jonathan leaned against the window and watched the rain. He saw Anderl out on the meadow, his arm around a girl who had his jacket over her head. They were returning to the hotel. “What do you think about Jean-Paul, Ben?”

“Not so good. The way I peg it, you are just a gnat's ass inside the age limit for this kind of go. And he's on the other side of the line.”

Jonathan did not agree. “He looks to me like he has a lot of staying power. There's generations of peasant endurance in the man.”

“If you say so, ol' buddy.” Ben swung his legs down and sat up, his tone changing suddenly, like a man who is finally getting to the point. “Back at my place you said that maybe you wouldn't be making this climb after all. Is that still the way it is?”

Jonathan sat on the windowsill. “I don't know. There's a job I have to do here. The climbing's really only side action.”

“Pretty big league, for side action.”

“True.”

“What kind of job?”

Jonathan looked into Ben's laugh-lined face. There was no way to tell him. Out beyond the window there were islets of snow on the meadow being grayed and decayed by the ram. “The skiers must be cursing this rain,” he said for something to say.

“What kind of job?” Ben persisted. “Does it have something to do with that Mellough guy?”

“Only obliquely. Forget it, Ben.”

“Kinda hard to forget. After you left, all hell broke loose at the lodge. There were government men all over the place, talking tough and generally making asses of themselves. They were scouting out in the desert and getting themselves lost and organizing patrols and cutting around with helicopters. They had the whole county in an uproar before they were through.”

Jonathan smiled to himself at the image of a CII operation of this type: all the coordination of a joint Arab/Italian invasion. “They call it undercover work, Ben.”

“Is that what they call it? What happened out there anyway? When you brought back the shotgun, it had been fired. And no one ever saw Mellough and his boyfriend again.”

“I don't want to talk about it. I have to do what I do, Ben. Without it, I would lose my house and things I have spent years collecting.”

“So? You lose your house. You could still teach. You like teaching, don't you?”

Jonathan looked at Ben. He had never really thought about whether or not he liked teaching. “No, I don't think so. I like being around good heads that appreciate my mind and taste, but as for simple teaching—no. It's just a job.”

Ben was silent for a time. He finished the beet and crushed the can in his hand. “Let's call off the climb,” he said firmly. “We'll tell 'em you're sick or something. Trouble with hemorrhoids, maybe.”

“My Achilles anus? No way, Ben. Forget it.” Jonathan wiped the haze from the window with the back of his hand and peered out at the misted mountain. “You know what's weird, Ben?”

“You.”

“No. What's really weird is that I want another shot at the hill. Even forgetting the thing I have to do here, it's something I really want to do. You understand the feeling?”

Ben fiddled for a moment with a coil of nylon line. “Of course I understand it. But I'll tell you something, ol' buddy. The sweet smell of decay is heavy in the air.”

Jonathan nodded.

Conversation among the team at luncheon centered on the weather, which had settled to a steady, plump rain which occasional gusts of wind rattled against the windows. They knew it would bring fresh snow to the Third Ice Field and, higher, to the White Spider. Much depended on the temperature on the face. If it was cold, and the snow dry and powdery, it would slip off in regular hissing slides, leaving the glaciated perennial ice and neve clean enough for a climb. If, on the other hand, the temperature should rise and make the snow moist and cohesive, it would build up, poising on the 60° inclines of the ice fields, ready to avalanche at the slightest disturbance.

Ben knew Jonathan had studied the surface of the North Face during his conditioning climb up the west flank two days before.

“Could you see much?”

“Yes. The weather was clear.”