The Eiger Sanction (27 page)

“I think I have a right to some kind of explanation. Your entrance into my room was—irregular?”

Bidet sat heavily on the bed, his body slumping, his eyes averted, and there was something so deflated in his manner that Jonathan had no qualms about the fact that his gun was now within reach. “There is no more ridiculous image in the world, Jonathan, than the outraged cuckold.” He smiled sadly. “I never thought I would find myself playing the Pantaloon.”

Jonathan experienced that uncomfortable combination of pity and disgust he always felt toward the emotionally soft, particularly those who lacked control over their romantic lives.

“But I cannot become much more ludicrous in your eyes,” Bidet continued. “I imagine you already know about my physical limitations. Anna usually tells her studs. For some reason, it inspires them to greater effort on her behalf.”

“You are putting me in the awkward position of having to declare my innocence, Jean-Paul.”

Jean-Paul looked at Jonathan with hollow nausea in his eyes. “You needn't bother.”

“I'd rather. We have to climb together. Let me say it simply: I have not slept with Anna, nor have I any reason to believe that advances would be greeted with anything but scorn.”

“But last night...”

“What about last night?”

“She was here.”

“How do you know that?”

“I missed her... I looked for her... I listened at your door.” He looked away. “That is despicable, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is. Anna was here last night. I met her in the hall, and I offered her a drink. We did not make love.”

Jean-Paul picked up his gun absently and toyed with it as he spoke. Jonathan felt no danger; he had dismissed Bidet as a potential killer. “No. She made love last night. I touched her later. I could tell from—”

“I don't want to hear about it. I have no clinical curiosity, and this is not a confessional.”

Jean-Paul toyed with the small Italian automatic. “I shouldn't have come here. I have behaved in poor taste; and that is worse than Anna, who had only behaved immorally. Let me ascribe it to the stress of the climb. I had had great hopes for this climb. I thought if Anna were here to see me climb a mountain that very few men would dare to even touch—that might—somehow. I don't know. Whatever it was, it was a senseless hope.” He looked over at Jonathan with beaten eyes. “Do you despise me?”

“My admiration for you has found new limits.”

“You phrase well. But then, you have the intellectual advantage of being emotionless.”

“Do you believe me about Anna?”

Jean-Paul smiled sadly. “No, Jonathan. I don't believe you. I am a cuckold, but not a fool. If you had nothing to fear from me, why were you lying there on the floor, anticipating my revenge?”

Jonathan could not explain and did not try.

Jean-Paul sighed. “Well, I shall return to my room to blush in private, and you will be freed from the duty of having to pity and detest me.” In a gesture of dramatic finality, he snapped back the slide of the automatic, and a cartridge arced from the chamber, struck against the wall, and bounced onto the rug. Both men looked at the shiny brass with surprise. Jean-Paul laughed without mirth. “I guess I am deceived more easily than I thought. I could have sworn this gun was empty.”

He left without saying good-night.

Jonathan smoked and took a sleeping pill before attempting sleep again, this time in his bed, considering it now safe with the same kind of superstitious faith in anti-chance that prompts bomber pilots to fly into ack-ack puffs, or woodsmen to seek shelter from storms under lightning-cleft trees.

Jean-Paul slackened his pace and dropped back to Jonathan, who resented this intrusion on his sacramental relations with simple sensation.

“About last night, Jonathan—”

“Forget it.”

“Will you?”

“Certainly.”

“I doubt it.”

Jonathan lengthened his stride and let Jean-Paul fall behind.

They approached the fireflies of light that had directed them across the lea and came upon Ben and his group of volunteers laying out and checking the gear with the aid of flashlights. Karl considered it necessary to his posture as leader to issue a couple of superfluous instructions while the team quickly geared up. Ben groused heavily about the cold and the earliness of the hour, but his words were designed only to combat the silence. He felt empty and useless. His part in the climb was over, and he would return to Kleine Scheidegg to handle the reporters and watch the progress of the climbers through the telescope he had brought for the purpose. He would become an active member again only if something happened and he had to organize a rescue.

Standing next to Jonathan, but looking away up toward the mountain that was a deeper black within a blackness, Ben pulled his ample nose and sniffed, “Now you listen to me, ol' buddy. You come off that hill in one piece, or I'm going to kick your ass.”

“You're a sloppy sentimentalist, Ben.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Ben walked away and gruffly ordered his young volunteers to accompany him back to the hotel. When they were younger and more dramatic, he might have shaken hands with Jonathan.

The climbers moved out in the dark, scrambling up the scree and onto the rock rubble at the base. By the time they touched the face proper, the first light had begun to press form into the black mass. In that cringing light, the rock and the snow patches appeared to be a common, dirty gray. But Eiger rock is an organic tonic gray, produced by the fusion of color complements in balance, not the muddy gray that is a mixture of black and white. And the snow was in reality crisp white, unsooted and unpitted by thaw. It was the light that was dirty and that soiled the objects it illuminated.

They roped up, following their plan to make the lower portion of the face in two separate, parallel lines of attack. Freytag and Bidet constituted one rope, and Karl had most of their pitons clanging about his middle. He intended to lead all the way, with Bidet retrieving such iron as had to be planted. Jonathan and Anderl had shared their iron because, by common unspoken assent, they preferred to leapfrog, alternating the sport of route-finding and leading. Naturally, they moved much faster this way.

It was nine in the morning, and the sun was touching, as it did briefly twice each day, the concave face of the Eigerwand. The principal topic of conversation among the Eiger Birds in the dining room was a prank the Greek merchant had played on his guests during a party the night before. He had soaked all the rolls of toilet paper in water. His American society wife had considered the prank to be in poor taste and, what is more, unnecessarily wasteful of money.

Ben's breakfast was interrupted by a shout from the terrace followed by an excited rush of Eiger Birds toward the telescopes. The climbers had been spotted. The economic machinery of the hotel went into operation with the lubrication of careful preparation. Uniformed attendants appeared at each telescope (except the one that had been reserved at great cost by the Greek merchant). With typical Swiss efficiency and monetary foresight, the attendants were equipped with tickets—a different color for each instrument—on which three-minute time allocations were printed. These were sold to the Eiger Birds at ten times the normal cost of the coin-operated machines, and milling queues immediately began to form around each telescope. The tickets were sold with the understanding that the management would not return money in the case of heavy weather or clouds obscuring the climbers.

Ben felt the bitter gorge of disgust rise in the back of his throat at the sight of these chattering necrophiles, but he was also relieved that the climbers had been discovered. Now he could set up his own telescope in the open meadow away from the hotel and keep a guardian eye on the team.

He was just rising from his coffee when a half dozen reporters breasted upstream against the current of the excited exodus and pushed into the dining room to surround Ben and ask him questions about the climb and the climbers. Following earlier plans, Ben distributed brief typewritten biographies of each man. These had been prepared to prevent the news-people from resorting to their florid imaginations. But the personal accounts, containing only the birthplaces and dates, occupations, and mountaineering careers of the team members, were barren resources for those newsmen who sought human interest and sensationalism, so they continued to assail Ben with a babble of aggressive questions. Taking his breakfast beer along with him, his jaw set in grim silence, Ben pushed through them, but one American reporter grasped his sleeve to stop him.

“Now, you're real sure you have no further use for that hand?” Ben asked, and he was instantly released.

They followed him tenaciously as he crossed the lobby with his energetic, hopping stride, but before he could get to the elevator door a tweeded English woman columnist—tough, stringy, and sexless, with precise clipped diction—interposed herself between him and the elevator door.

“Tell me, Mr. Bowman, in your opinion do these men climb out of a need to prove their manhood, or is it more a matter of compensating for inferiority feelings?” Her pencil poised over her notebook as Ben responded.

“Why don't you go get yourself screwed? Do you a lot of good.”

She had copied down the first words before the gist of the message arrested her pencil, and Ben escaped into the elevator.

Jonathan and Anderl found a shallow shelf just to the west of the mouth of the chute that Karl had estimated would be the key to the new route. They banged in a piton and tied themselves on while they awaited the arrival of Karl and Jean-Paul. Although the beetling cliff above them flowed with icy melt water, it protected them from the rock fall that had been plaguing their climb for the last half hour. Even as they arranged coils of rope under them to keep out the wet, chunks of rock and ice broke over the crest of the cliff and whined past, three or four feet out in front of them, to burst on the rocks below with loud reports and a spray of mountain shrapnel.

Their ledge was so narrow that they had to sit hip to hip, their legs dangling out over the void. The climb had been fast and magnificent, and the view was breathtaking, so, when Anderl produced a bar of hard chocolate from his coat pocket and shared it with Jonathan, they felt exhilarated and contented, munching away wordlessly.

Jonathan could not ignore the sound that surrounded them as totally as silence. For the last hour, as they approached the mouth of the chute on a line a little to the right of it, the roar of rushing water had increased in volume. He imagined, although he could not see from his perch, that the chute was a cataract of melt water. He had climbed up through waterfalls like this before (the Ice Hose over on the normal route was no mean example) but his experience had not decreased his respect for the objective danger.

He glanced over at Anderl to see if his worry was shared, but the blissful, almost vacant smile on the Austrian's face was evidence that he was in his element, full of contentment. Some men are native to the mountain and, while they are on rock, the valley does not exist, save as the focus point for that patient and persistent gravity against which they hold out. Jonathan did not share Anderl's contented insouciance. So long as he had been climbing, the world had narrowed to the rope, the rock, the purchase, and body rhythms. But now, with a safe stance and time to reflect, lowland troubles returned to him.

For instance, it could be Anderl. Anderl could be the target. And a hunter in his own right now. At least half a dozen times in the past three hours, Anderl had only to cut the rope and give a slight tug, and Jonathan would no longer be a threat. The fact that he had not done so in no way excluded him as a possibility. They were too close to the base; there would be evidence, and a cut rope looks very different from a frayed rope. And too, they were probably being watched at every moment. From far down there, from the toy terrace of the miniature hotel there were probably half a score of eyes empowered by convex glass to observe them.

Jonathan decided he could rest easy. If it happened, it would be higher up, up where the distance made them little dots, barely distinguishable to the most powerful glass. Perhaps when cloud and mist descended to conceal them altogether. Up where the body and the severed rope would not be found for months, even years.

“What are you frowning about?” Anderl asked.

Jonathan laughed. “Morbid thoughts. About falling.”

“I never think about falling. What's the use? If a fall wants to happen, it will happen without my thinking about it. I think about climbing. That requires thinking.” He punctuated this simple philosophy by pushing the last of the chocolate into his mouth.

This was the longest speech Jonathan had ever heard Anderl make. Clearly, here was a man who came to full life only on the mountain.

First Karl's hand, then his head came into view over the outcropping of rock below, and soon he was in a stance just under theirs, steadily taking in the line that led down to Jean-Paul until he too had hoisted himself over the ridge, red-faced but triumphant. The new arrivals found a slim ledge for themselves, banged in protecting iron, and rested.

“What do you think of my route now, Herr Doctor?” Karl shouted up.

“So far so good.” Jonathan thought of the roaring melt water above them.

“I knew it would be!”

Jean-Paul drew lustily at his water bottle, then rested out against the rope that was connected to his piton by a snap ring. “I had no idea that you gentlemen intended torun up the hill! Have pity on my age!” He laughed hastily, lest anyone imagine he was not joking.

“You will have time to rest now,” Karl said. “We shall be here for at least an hour.”

“An hour!” Jean-Paul protested. “We have to sit here for an hour?”

“We shall rest and have a little breakfast. It's too early to climb up through the chute.”

Jonathan agreed with Karl. Although a climber on the Eiger must expect to be the target for fairly regular sniping by rock and ice fall, there is no sense in facing the veritable fusillade with which the mountain covers its flanks in midmorning. Stones and mountain rubble that are frozen into place through the night are released by the melting touch of morning sun and come arcing, bouncing, and crashing down from the vast collection trough of the White Spider, directly, although distantly, above them. The normal line of ascent is well to the west of this natural line of fire.

“We shall allow the mountain to dump out her morning garbage before we try the chute,” Karl announced. “Meanwhile, let us enjoy the scenery and have a bite to eat. Yes?”

Jonathan read in Karl's artificial cheer that he, too, was affected by the roar of water rushing down the chute, but it was equally obvious that he would not be receptive to criticism or advice.

Nevertheless: “Sounds like we have a wet time ahead of us, Karl.”

“Surely, Herr Doctor, you have no objection to a morning shower.”

“It's going to take a lot out of us, even if it is a go.”

“Yes. Mountain climbing is demanding.”

“Snot.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Jean-Paul took another drink of water then passed the plastic canteen over to Karl, who returned it, declining to drink. After he had struggled the bottle into his pack, Jean-Paul looked out over the valley with awe and appreciation. “Beautiful, isn't it. Really beautiful. Anna is probably watching us through a telescope at this very moment.”

“Probably,” Jonathan said, doubting it.

“We'll take the chute in a rope of four,” Karl said. “I shall lead: Anderl will bring up the rear.”