The Eiger Sanction (32 page)

Snow continued to hiss past; then it stopped.

And it was silent on the face.

The three young men were safe, but frozen in their stances by what they had witnessed.

“Keep moving!” Ben barked, and they collected their emotions and obeyed.

The first shock knocked Jonathan over in his harness, and he hung upside down, swinging violently, his mind swirling in an eddy of semiconsciousness. The thing hit him again, and blood gushed from his nose. He wanted to sleep, and he did not want the thing to hit him again. That was the extent of his demands on life. But for a third time they collided. It was a glancing blow, and their ropes intertwined. Instinctively, Jonathan grasped at it and held it to him. It was Jean-Paul, hanging half out of his bedroll shroud, stiff with death and cold. But Jonathan clung to it.

When Anderl and Karl fell, their weight snapped the line between them and the corpse, and it tumbled over the edge and crashed down on Jonathan. It saved him from falling, counterbalancing his weight on the line that connected them and passed through a snap link and piton high above. They swung side by side in the silent cold.

“Sit up!”

Jonathan heard Ben's voice from a distance, soft and unreal.

“Sit up!”

Jonathan did not mind hanging upside down. He was through. He had had it.Let me sleep. Why sit up.

“Pull yourself up, goddamit!”

They won't leave me alone unless I do what they want. What does it matter?He tried to haul himself on Jean-Paul's line, but his fingers would not close. They had no feeling.What does it matter?

“Jon! For Christ's sake!”

“Leave me alone,” he muttered. “Go away.” The valley below was dark, and he did not feel cold any longer. He felt nothing at all. He was going to sleep.

No, that isn't sleep. It's something else. All right, try to sit up. Maybe then they'll leave me alone. Can't breathe. Nose stopped up with blood. Sleep.

Jonathan tried again, but his fingers throbbed, fat and useless. He reached high and wound his arm around the rope. He struggled halfway up, but his grip was slipping. Wildly, he kicked at Jean-Paul's body until he got his legs around it and managed to press himself up until his rope hit him in the forehead.

There. Sitting upright. Now leave me alone. Stupid game. Doesn't matter.

“Try to catch this!”

Jonathan squeezed his eyes shut to break the film from them. There were three men out there. Quite close. Tacked on the wall.What the hell do they want now? Why don't they leave me alone?

“Catch this and slip it around you!”

“Go away,” he mumbled.

Ben's voice roared from a distance. “Put it around you, goddamit!”

Mustn't piss Ben off. He's mean when he's pissed off.Groggily, Jonathan struggled into the noose of the lasso.Now that's it. Don't ask any more. Let me sleep. Stop squeezing the goddamned breath out of me!

Jonathan heard the young men call anxiously back to Ben. “We can't pull him in! Not enough slack!”

Good. Leave me alone, then.

“Jon?” Ben's voice was not angry. He was coaxing some child. “Jon, your axe is still around your wrist.”

So what?

“Cut the line above you, Jon.”

Ben's gone crazy. He must need sleep.

“Cut the line, ol' buddy. It'll only be a short fall. We've got you.”

Go ahead, do it. They'll keep at you until you do.He hacked blindly at the nylon line above him. Again and again with mushy strokes that seldom struck the same place twice. Then a thought slipped into his numb mind, and he stopped.

“What did he say?” Ben called to the rescuers.

“He said that Jean-Paul will fall if he cuts the line.”

“Jon? Listen to me. It's all right. Jean-Paul's dead.”

Dead? Oh, I remember. He's here and he's dead. Where's Anderl? Where's Karl? They re somewhere else, because they're not dead like Jean-Paul. Is that right? I don't understand it. It doesn't matter anyway. What was I doing? Oh, yes. Cut the fucking rope.

He hacked again and again.

And suddenly it snapped. For an instant the two bodies fell together, then Jean-Paul dropped away alone. Jonathan passed out with the pain of his ribs cracking as the lasso jerked tight. And that was merciful, because he did not feel the impact of his collision with the rock.

“...Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen down; by one, two, three, four, five...”

With patience and application, he discovered the mean number of holes in each square of acoustic tile in the ceiling. Balancing this figure on his memory, he undertook to count the tiles across and down, then to multiply for the total number of tiles. This total he intended to multiply by the number of holes in each tile to arrive at the grand total of holes in his entire ceiling!

He was terribly bored. But his boredom had lasted only a few days. For the greater part of his hospitalization, his attention had been occupied with fear, pain, and gratitude at being alive. Once during the trip down from the Gallery Window he had risen foggily to the surface of consciousness and experienced the Dantesque confusion of light and motion as the train swayed and clattered through a tunnel. Ben's face rippled into focus, and Jonathan complained thickly, “I can't feel anything from the waist down.”

Ben mumbled some reassuring sounds and dissolved.

When Jonathan next contacted the world, Dante had given way to Kafka. A brilliant ceiling was flying past above him, and a mechanized voice was paging doctors by name. A starched white upside-down female torso bent over him and shook its dumpling head, and they wheeled him on more quickly. The ceiling stopped its giddy rush, and male voices somewhere nearby spoke with grave rapidity. He wanted to tell them that he could feel nothing from the waist down, but no one seemed interested. They had cut away the laces of his boots and were taking off his pants. A nurse clicked her tongue and said with a mixture of sympathy and eagerness, “That may have to be amputated.”

No! The word rushed to Jonathan's mind, but he passed out before he could tell them that he would rather die.

Ultimately, they saved the toe in question, but not before Jonathan had endured days of pain, strapped to his bed under a plastic tent that bathed his exposure-burnt extremities in a pure oxygen atmosphere. The only relief he got from the bone-eroding immobility was a daily sponging down with alcohol and cotton. Even this respite carried its calculated indignities, for the mannish nurse who did the job always handled his genitals like cheap bric-a-brac that had to be dusted under.

His injuries were widespread, but not serious. In addition to the exposure and frostbite, his nose had been broken by the impact of Jean-Paul's corpse; two of his ribs had cracked when the lasso snapped tight; and his collision with the face had resulted in a mild concussion. Of all of these, the nose bothered him longest. Even after the physical restrictions of the oxygen atmosphere tent had been lifted and the ribs had mended sufficiently to make the adhesive tape more troublesome than the pain, the broad bandage across the bridge of his nose continued to torment him. He could not even read, because the visual distraction of the white pad tempted him to stare strabismically.

But boredom was the greatest plague of all. He received no visitors. Ben had not accompanied him to Zurich. He stayed at the hotel, paying off bills and attending to the retrieval and transportation of the dead. Anna remained too, and they made love a few times.

So great was the boredom that Jonathan was driven to finishing the Lautrec article. But when he read it over the next morning, he growled and tossed it into the wastebasket beside his bed.

The climb was over. The Eiger Birds flew south to their padded nests, sated with sensation for the moment. Newsmen waited around for a couple of days, but when it became apparent that Jonathan would survive, they left the city in a noisy flutter, like carrion disturbed at their cadaver.

By the end of the week the climb was no longer news, and soon the attention of the press was siphoned off to the most publicized event of the decade. The United States had deposited two grinning farm boys on the moon, by which achievement the nation aspired to infuse into the community of man a New Humility in the face of cosmic distance and American technology.

The only letter he received was a postcard from Cherry, one side of which was covered with stamps and postal marks that showed it had gone from Long Island to Arizona to Long Island to Kleine Scheidegg to Sicily to Kleine Scheidegg to Zurich. Sicily? The handwriting was oval and large at first, then regularly smaller and more cramped as she had run out of space.

“Wonderful news!!! I have been released from that burden (hem, hem) I carried for so long! Released and released! Fantastic man! Quiet, gentle, calm, witty—and a lover ofme . Happened like that (imagine snap of fingers)! Met. Married. Mated. And in that order, too! What's this world coming to? You've lost your chance. Cry your eyes out. God, he's wonderful, Jonathan! We're living at my place. Come and see us when you get home. Which reminds me, I drop over to your place once in a while to make sure no one's stolen it. No one has. But some bad news. Mr. Monk quit. Got a steady job working for the National Park Service. How's Arizona? Released, I say! Tell you all about it when you get back. All right, how's Switzerland?”

Flip.

Jonathan lay looking up at the ceiling.

The first day after restrictions against visitors were lifted, he had the company of a man from the American Consulate. Short, plump, with long hair crisscrossed over the naked pate, raven eyes blinking behind steel-rimmed glasses, he was of that un-dramatic type CII recruits specifically because they do not fit the popular image of the spy. So consistently does CII use such men that they have long ago become stereotypes that any foreign agent can pick from a crowd at a glance.

The visitor left a small tape recorder of a new CII design that had the “play” and “erase” heads reversed, both operative in the “play” mode, so that the message was destroyed as it was played. The model was considered a marked improvement over its more secretive predecessor, which erased before playing.

As soon as he was alone, Jonathan opened the lid of the recorder and found an envelope taped to the underside. It was a confirmation from his bank of the deposit of one hundred thousand dollars to his account. Confused, he pushed the “play” button, and Dragon's voice spoke to him, even thinner and more metallic than usual through the small speaker. He had only to close his eyes to see the iridescent ivory face emerging through the gloom, and the pink eyes under tufted cotton eyebrows.

My dear Hemlock... You have by now opened the envelope and have discovered—with surprise and pleasure, I hope—that we have decided to pay the full sum, despite our earlier threat to deduct your more outrageous extravagances... I consider this only fair in light of the discomfort and expense your injuries have cost you... It seems obvious to us that you were unable to make the sanction target reveal himself, and so you took the sure, if grimly uneconomical, path of sanctioning all three men... But you always were extravagant... We assume the killing of M. Bidet was accomplished during your first night on the mountain, under cover of dark... How you contrived to precipitate the other two men to their deaths is not clear to us, nor does it interest us particularly... Results concern us more than methods, as you may recall.

Now, Hemlock, I really ought to rebuke you for the shopworn condition in which you returned Clement Pope... You escape my wrath only because I had all along planned to bestow some deserved punishment on him... And why not at your hands?... Pope had been assigned to the Search task of locating your target, and he failed to identify his man... As an eleventh-hour expedient, he came up with the notion of setting you up a decoy... It was certainly second-rate thinking and the product of a frightened and incompetent man, but there were no viable alternatives open to us... I had faith that you would survive the admittedly tense situation, and, as you see, I was correct... Pope has been removed from SS and has been assigned to the less demanding task of writing vice-presidential addresses... After the beating you gave him, he is quite useless to us... He suffers from what in a good hunting dog would be called gun-shyness.

It is with great reluctance that I place your file among the “inactives,” although I will confide in you that Mrs. Cerberus does not share my melancholy... To tell the truth, I suspect in my heart of hearts that we shall be working together before long... Considering your tastes, this money will last no more than four years, after which—who can say?

Congratulations on your ingenious solution to the crisis, and good luck to you in your Long Island shrine to your self-image.

The end of the tape flap-flap-flapped as the take-up reel spun. Jonathan turned the machine off and set it aside. He shook his head slowly and said to himself helplessly, “Oh, God.”

“Let me see now. It was forty-two down by—one, two, three, four...”

Ben had difficulty getting in the door. He swore and kicked at it viciously as he stumbled in, a huge cellophane-wrapped basket of fruit in his arms.

“Here!” he said gruffly, and he thrust the crinkling burden toward Jonathan, who had been laughing uncontrollably since first Ben burst in.

“What is this wonderful thing you bring me?” Jonathan asked between racks of laughter.

“I don't know. Fruit and such shit. They hustle them down in the lobby. What's so goddam funny?”

“Nothing.” Jonathan was limp with laughing. “It's just about the sweetest thing anyone's ever done for me, Ben.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

The bed shook with a fresh attack of laughter. While it was true that Ben looked silly grasping a beribboned basket in his ample paw, Jonathan's laughter carried notes of hysteria born of boredom and cabin fever.

Ben set the basket on the floor and slouched down in a bedside chair, his arms folded across his chest, the image of grumpy patience. “I'm real glad I cheer you up like this.”

“I'm sorry. Look. All right.” He sniffed back the last dry, silent laugh. “I got your postcard. You and Anna?”

Ben waved his hand. “Funny things happen.”

Jonathan nodded. “Did you find...”

“Yeah, we found them at the base. Anderl's father decided to have him buried in the meadow within sight of the face.”

“Good.”

“Yes. Good.”

And there was nothing more to say. This was the first time Ben had visited Jonathan in the hospital, but Jonathan understood. There is nothing to say to a sick man.

After a pause, Ben asked if they were treating him all right. And Jonathan said yes. And Ben said good. Ben mentioned the Valparaiso hospital after Aconcagua where their roles had been reversed while Ben recuperated from toe amputations. Jonathan remembered and even managed to dredge up a couple of names and places that they could both nod over energetically, then let slip away.

Ben walked around the room and looked out the window.

“How are the nurses?”

“Starched.”

“Have you invited any aboard?”

“No. They're a pretty rank lot.”

“That's too bad.”

“Yes, it is.”

Ben sat down again and flicked lint off his pants for a while. Then he told Jonathan that he intended to catch a plane back to the States that afternoon. “I should be in Arizona by tomorrow morning.”

“Give my love to George.”

“I'll do that.”

Ben sighed, then stretched vigorously, then said something about taking care of yourself, then rose to go. When he picked up the fruit basket and put it near the bed, Jonathan began to laugh afresh. This time Ben stood there taking it. It was better than the long silences. But after a while he began to feel stupid, so he put the basket down and made for the door.

“Oh, Ben?”

“What?”

Jonathan brushed away the tears of laughter. “How did you get mixed up in the Montreal business in the first place?”

...Ben had stood for many minutes at the window, his forehead resting against the frame, looking down on the traffic that crawled along the colorless street lined with optimistic saplings. When at last he spoke, his voice was husky and subdued. “You really took me off balance.”

“That's the way I had rehearsed it while I lay here counting holes in the ceiling.”

“Well, it worked just fine, ol' buddy. How long have you known?”

"Just a couple of days. At first it was just bits and pieces. I kept trying to picture the man with the limp in Montreal, and none of the men on the mountain quite fit. You were the only other person coming for the climb. Then all sorts of things fell into place. Like the coincidence of meeting Mellough at your lodge. And why would George Hotfort stick me with a half dose? Miles wouldn't do that. He already had my answer. And why would George do that for Miles? So far as I know, there was only one thing that really interested her, and Miles couldn't offer that. But she might do something like that for you.

And you might want her to do it because you wanted me to kill Miles quickly, before he could tell me who the man in Montreal was."

Ben nodded fatalistically. “I used to wake up in a sweat, imagining that Mellough had told you out there on the desert, and you were playing cat and mouse with me.”

“I never gave Miles a chance to tell me anything.”

It was Jonathan who broke the ensuing silence. “How did you get mixed up with him?”

Ben continued to stare out the window at the traffic. Evening was setting in, and the first streetlamps had come on. “You know how I tried to make a go of it with that little climbing school after I couldn't climb anymore. Well, it never did pay for itself. Not many people came, and those who did—like you—were mostly old climbing buddies what I hated to charge. There's not a whole lot of ads in the help-wanted pages for gimpy ex-climbers. I suppose I could have found some nine-to-five sort of thing, but that isn't my style. I guess you know what I mean, considering what you do to make your money.”