The Abominable: A Novel

Chapter 6

Der Mann, den wir nicht antasten lassen.

I haven’t been to Germany in the year I’ve spent in Europe, doing almost all of my climbing in France and Switzerland, although we met more than a few German climbers in Switzerland: some Germans were friendly; many more were not. When I first met Jean-Claude and the Deacon, the three of us staring at the North Face of the Eiger and agreeing that the face was simply beyond the climbing techniques and technology of our day, there was a team of five very intense, very self-serious, very unfriendly Germans nearby who were talking as if they were actually going to try to climb die Eigerwand—the wall of the North Face. They didn’t, of course. They barely got beyond the Bergschrund and scrambled around a bit on the first 100 feet or so of slope before abandoning their bold quest.

For our trip to Germany, the Deacon and I first travel back to France, where he has to conclude some financial business, cross Switzerland to Zurich and then north to the border, where we change trains, since at the time railroad stock ran on different-gauge rails in Germany than in all the surrounding countries. This was a defensive military measure on the part of Germany’s neighbors, of course, even though the former land of the Kaiser had been defanged by the Versailles Treaty. The Deacon tells me in soft tones, even though we have a private compartment to ourselves (thanks to Lady Bromley’s expense account), that the current Weimar Republic government is a rather inefficient and mostly left-wing debating club.

Then on to Munich in the morning.

It is a rainy day, low gray clouds moving quickly westward, in the opposite direction of the train, and my first impressions of November 1924 Germany are a bit confused.

The villages are tidy—overhanging eaves, some modern buildings mixed in with homes and public buildings that look like they were there in the Middle Ages. Cobblestones wet from the rain reflect what little daylight there is. Some of the men visible walking the village streets are dressed like peasant farmers or overall-clad factory workers, but I also catch glimpses of men in modern double-breasted gray business suits carrying leather briefcases. But everyone I see out the train windows—peasants, workers, and businessmen alike—looks…weighed down. As if the gravity here in Germany is greater than in England, France, and Switzerland. Even the young men in business suits hurrying under their rain-slicked umbrellas look slightly bent, slightly stooped, heads bowed, gazes lowered, as if each were carrying some invisible burden.

Then we move through an industrial area that is all long, dirty brick and cinderblock buildings amidst mountains of slag. A few towers and industrial chimneys throw up great fingers of flame that seem to cast an orange spotlight on the scudding rain clouds. I see no human beings in this landscape as I watch mile after mile of these ugly industrial monoliths and their mountains of cinders, slag, sand, and sheer refuse slide past my train car windows in the rain.

“In January of last year,” the Deacon says, “the German government fell behind on reparation payments that were part of the treaty. The mark dropped from seventy-five to the dollar in nineteen twenty-one to seven thousand to the dollar by the beginning of nineteen twenty-three. The German government asked the Allies to grant a moratorium in reparation payments, at least until the mark began to regain some value. The response of the Allies was given by the French. Former Premier, now Prime Minister Poincaré sent in French troops to occupy the Ruhr and other industrial sites throughout the heart of Germany. When those troops arrived last year, January of ’twenty-three, the mark dropped to eighteen thousand to the dollar and had reached one hundred sixty thousand to the dollar and then a clear one million marks to the dollar by August first last year.”

I try to understand this. Economics always bored me, and while I’d read that French troops had gone into Germany to occupy the industrial area, I certainly hadn’t paid any attention to what effect such an occupation would have on Germany’s economy, such as it was after the Great War.

“By November of last year,” says the Deacon, leaning close to speak in little more than a whisper, “it would have taken a German four billion marks to buy a dollar. With the Ruhr French troops overseeing all industrial production, river traffic, and steel exports, Germany was effectively cut in two. So the German industrial workers, essentially working while under armed guard and supervision of the occupying French troops in each of those factories we’re passing, declared a general strike last year—and in most of these factories, as in the Ruhr, real production of steel or anything else has come to a stop because of the German workers’ passive resistance, active sabotage, and even guerrilla warfare. The French keep arresting and deporting and even lining up and shooting the presumed leaders of this slowdown, but it makes no difference.”

“My God,” I say.

The Deacon nods toward the men and women in the street. “Last year those people knew that even if they had millions of marks in their bank account, it wouldn’t be enough to buy them a pound of flour or a few raggedy carrots. Forget being able to pay for several ounces of sugar or a pound of meat.”

He took a deep breath and pointed through the rain-streaked window toward the suburbs of Munich we were entering. “There’s a lot of frustration and anger out there, Jake. Be careful when we go to meet Sigl. Americans, even though they helped win the War, are an oddity. But many, not all, hate the British and French on sight, and Jean-Claude might not have been physically safe here in Munich.”

“I’ll be careful,” I say, without even being sure of what “careful” will demand or amount to in this strange and sad and angry country.

The Deacon has not even booked us into a hotel. We have tickets for sleeping berths on a train leaving for Zurich at ten p.m. I’m curious about this, since it would have been easy to put the cost even of luxury hotel rooms in Munich on Lady Bromley’s advance money expense account. I know that unlike Jean-Claude, the Deacon doesn’t hate Germany or Germans—I’m also aware that he’s traveled here frequently since the War—so it isn’t anxiety or fear that is rushing us out of town tonight even before we can get a good night’s sleep. I sense that there is something about this simple interview with climber Bruno Sigl that bothers the Deacon on some level I don’t understand.

In a curt telegram, Sigl has agreed to meet us—briefly, he says, for he is a very busy man (his phrase)—in Munich at a beer hall called the Bürgerbräukeller way out on the southeastern fringes of the city. The appointment is for seven p.m., and the Deacon and I have time to stow our luggage, such as it is, at the train station, freshen up there a bit in the first-class lounge lavatory, and wander the strangely shopless streets of downtown Munich for an hour or two under our dark umbrellas before taking a cab to the edge of town.

Munich looks old but not picturesque or attractive to me. It is still raining hard against the slate-shingled rooftops, and the streets are as dark and chilly as on any November evening in Boston. All my conscious life I’ve thought my first real encounter with Germany would be strolling down the Unter den Linden in rich summer evening light, with hundreds of well-dressed and friendly Germans strolling along nodding “Guten Abend” to me.

The rain pours down as the cab’s window wipers slap uselessly against the rivulets on glass. We cross a river on a broad, empty bridge, and a few minutes later the surly cab driver announces in broken English that we are “hier”—at die Bürgerbräukeller in den Haidhausen neighborhood on Rosenheimer Strasse—and demands what has to be three times the legal fare. The Deacon pays it without protest, counting out the huge stack of high-numbered marks as if it were play money.

The stone entrance arch to the beer hall is huge and has the words

Bürger-

Bräu-

Keller

tacked one atop the other in the middle of a circular, heavy-handed wreath, a sort of lumpy stone oval with an arch key design at the bottom. All of it is dripping water running from a steep slate roof and from several overflowing gutters. Through that arch toward the actual doorway, and it’s like we are entering a train station rather than a bar or restaurant. But at least it’s not raining in the foyer.

When we are actually inside the Bürgerbräukeller, both the Deacon and I stop in a kind of shock.

Besides the fact of two or three thousand people—mostly men, guzzling beer out of huge stone mugs at tables so rough-hewn that they look as if they’d been carved in the forest that very afternoon—the place is gigantic, echoing, more a huge auditorium than any sort of restaurant or pub that I’ve ever seen. The noise of conversation and accordion music—unless that’s people screaming while being tortured—hits me like a physical shove. The next shove is the smell: three thousand partly or totally unbathed Germans, mostly working men, judging from their rough clothes, and mixed with that wall of sweat smell washing over us like a rogue wave, an accompanying stink of beer so strong that I feel like I’ve fallen into the actual beer vat.

“Herr Deacon? Come here. Here!” It’s a shouted order, not a request, from a man standing at a crowded table about halfway across the crowded room.

The standing man, who I assume to be Bruno Sigl, watches us approach through the bedlam with an unblinking, cold, blue-eyed stare. Sigl has a European reputation as a good climber—especially good, according to the alpine journals, at route finding on previously unclimbed faces in the Alps—but except for the massive forearms visible because his dark tan shirtsleeves are rolled up, he doesn’t look like a climber to me. Too self-consciously overmuscled, too top-heavy, too stocky, too blocky. Sigl’s blond hair is cut so short that it’s almost flat as a bristle brush on top and is actually shaved on the sides. Many of the larger men sitting along the table with him sport similar haircuts. For Sigl, it’s not a good look because of the jug ears that jut out from his granite block of a face.

“Herr Deacon,” Sigl says as we approach the table. The German’s deep voice cuts through the beer hall babble like a knife through soft flesh. “Willkommen in München, meine Kletterkollegen. I have read of many of your brilliant first ascents in the Alpine Journal and elsewhere.”

Bruno Sigl’s English has the expected German accent but sounds easy and fluent to my untutored ear.

I was aware that the Deacon spoke fluent German as well as French, Italian, and some other languages, but I’m still surprised at how quickly and strongly he replies to Sigl: “Vielen Dank, Herr Sigl. Ich habe ebenfalls von Ihren Erfolgen und Leistungen gelesen.”

During the night trip home on the train later that night, the Deacon will translate from memory everything that Sigl and the other Germans said, as well as what the Deacon replied in German. Here my guess is right that the Deacon is returning Sigl’s compliment by saying that he’s read of Sigl’s mountaineering exploits and successes as well.

“Herr Jacob Perry,” says Sigl, shaking my hand in a granite-crunching grip through which I can feel his rock-calloused hand. “Of the Boston Perrys. Welcome to München.”

Of the Boston Perrys? What did this German climber know about my family? And Sigl somehow had made the “Jacob” with its German Y-sound pronunciation sound very Jewish.

Sigl is wearing lederhosen—leather shorts and bib—over his military-looking brown shirt with the sleeves rolled high, and the whole getup should look ridiculous amidst all the rumpled business suits in this gigantic beer hall, but his massive, sun-browned bare thighs, arms, and oversized Rodin-sculptured hands make him look powerful instead—almost godlike.

He waves us to the bench opposite him—several of the men there move down to make room, never pausing in their drinking as they do so—and the Deacon and I sit, ready for the interview. Sigl waves over a waiter and orders beer. I’m disappointed. I expected Fräuleins with low-cut peasant blouses to be serving the beer, but it’s all men in lederhosen carrying trays of the giant stone mugs. I’m also hungry, and it’s been a long time since the Deacon and I had a light lunch on the train, but the tabletops here and all around us are empty except for beer steins and hairy male German forearms. Evidently the eating time here has either passed or is yet to come or simply doesn’t happen except for beer.

Our beers arrive almost immediately, and I must admit that I’ve never before drunk good, strong German beer from an icy-chilled stone stein. After lifting the thing three times, I begin to understand why all the men on this side of our table have huge biceps.

“Gentlemen,” says Sigl, “allow me to introduce some friends of mine here at the table. Alas, none of them is confident enough in your language to speak English this evening.”

“Although they understand it?” asks the Deacon.

Sigl smiles thinly. “Not really. To my immediate left is Herr Ulrich Graf.”

Herr Graf is a tall, thin man with a thick and absurd black mustache. We nod toward one another. My guess is that there’ll be no more handshaking.

“Ulrich was his personal bodyguard and shielded him with his own body last November, receiving several serious bullet wounds. But you see that Herr Graf has recovered nicely.”

I hear the odd, almost reverential emphasis on “his” and “him” but don’t have a clue as to who they are talking about. It appears that Sigl’s not going to enlighten me, and rather than break into the ongoing introductions, I turn to the Deacon for a hint. But the Deacon is looking at the men across the table being introduced and won’t acknowledge my questioning gaze.

“To Herr Graf’s left is Herr Rudolf Hess,” Sigl is saying. “Herr Hess commanded an SA battalion in last November’s action.”

Hess is a strange-looking man with oversized ears, a dark five o’clock shadow—the kind of man who probably has to shave twice or three times a day if he has a decent job or interacts with the public—and sad-looking eyes under heavy, cartoonish eyebrows that are either kept raised in evident surprise during the time I observe him or lowered to a glowering position. To be honest, Hess reminds me of a madman I saw once in the Boston Public Garden when I was a boy—a madman who’d escaped from a nearby asylum and who was peacefully captured by three white-coated attendants not thirty feet from me. That crazy man had been shuffling along straight toward me around the lake as though he were on a mission which only he could carry out, and Hess gives me the creeps in the same way as I’d felt looking at that man coming toward me past the Swan Boats pavilion.

I still have no clue as to what “last November’s action” was, but it sounds military. It may explain why so many men at the table are wearing quasi-military brown shirts with epaulets.

I search my memory for news from Germany in November 1923, but I’d spent that month climbing on and around Mont Blanc and couldn’t recall hearing any radio news or reading any pertinent reports in newspapers—most of which were in French or German—the few times we stayed in Swiss hotels. The past year has been a climbing vacation almost completely out of time for me—up until we read of Mallory’s and Irvine’s disappearance on Everest—and whatever “action” happened here in Munich the previous November hadn’t caught my attention. I presume it was some more of the political idiocy that Germany has been cranking out from both sides of the political spectrum ever since the weak Weimar Republic came into power after the toppling of the Kaiser.

Whatever it was, it’s irrelevant to the reason we came all this way to Munich to interview Bruno Sigl.

What isn’t irrelevant are the names of the six mountain climbers whom Sigl is now introducing—the six hairy-armed men sitting on the bench along our side of the long table.

“First, allow me to introduce our co-lead climber, along with myself, among my climbing colleagues,” Sigl is saying, palm out toward the tanned, thin-faced, solemn-looking bearded man to my immediate right. “Herr Karl Bachner.”

“Meeting you is a true honor, Herr Bachner,” says the Deacon. Then he repeats it in German. Bachner nods slightly.

“Herr Bachner,” continues Bruno Sigl, “has been the mentor of many of Munich’s and Bavaria’s top climbers—which, of course, means the top climbers in the world—at the Akademischer Alpenverein München, the climbing club of the University of Munich…”

How many times during my years at Harvard had I wished that my college had a formal climbing club such as Munich’s? While there were a few professors who climbed and helped us organize our Alaskan and Rockies expeditions, the founding of the Harvard Mountain Club was still a few years in my future.

“Herr Bachner is also a leader in the now merged Deutscher und österreichischer Alpenverein,” says Sigl.

This is German that even I can understand. I knew from the alpine journals that Karl Bachner had been the prime mover in uniting the German and Austrian alpine clubs.

Sigl gestures toward the next two young men beyond Bachner. “You have read, I presume, of the recent ice-climbing exploits of Artur Wolzenbrecht…”

The man closer to me nods in our direction.

“…and his climbing partner, Eugen Löwenherz.”

I know that the young men were famous for designing the much shorter ice axes—ice hammers, really—and thus, with the help of pitons and ice screws, what climbing Brits like Deacon derisively tend to call “the dangle and whack school,” rapidly climb straight up ice walls that would defeat our old-fashioned attempts to carve steps in the ice.

“Artur and Eugen climbed the direct route up the North Face of the Dent d’Hérens last week in sixteen hours,” says Sigl.

I whistle in astonishment. Sixteen hours for a direct North Face ascent of one of the most difficult faces in all of Europe? If it is true—and the Germans never seem to lie about their ascent claims—then these two men drinking beer to my right have opened a new era in the history of mountaineering.

The Deacon says in a rapid-fire German something he later translates for me as “Gentlemen, does either of you have one of your new ice axes with you?”

It’s Artur Wolzenbrecht who reaches under the table and brings out not one but two short ice axes, their shafts less than a third the length of my own wooden axe’s, their blades far more pointed and curved. Wolzenbrecht sets the two revolutionary climbing instruments on the table in front of him, but he does not hand them to the Deacon or me for closer inspection.

It doesn’t matter. Just looking at the shortened ice hammers (for want of a better term), I can imagine the two men hacking their way straight up the icy North Face of the Dent d’Hérens, driving in long pitons or their newly designed German ice screws all the way for their safety. And I’m sure that they used the 10-point crampons as well—invented in 1908 by the Englishman Oscar Eckenstein but rarely used by British climbers. Now frequently used by this new generation of Bavarian ice climbers. Cramponing and short-ice-hammering their way up a giant ice face. It’s beyond ingenious—it’s brilliant. I’m just not sure if it’s fair, if that makes any sense.

Sigl introduces the last three climbers—Günter Erik Rigele, who, two years ago, in 1922, successfully adapted the German piton for use on ice; a very young Karl Schneider, about whom I’d read amazing things; and Josef Wien, an older climber—his head shaved bare for some reason—whose stated goal in the alpine journals was to lead joint Soviet-German expeditions to Peak Lenin and to other impossible climbs in the Russian Pamirs and the Caucasus.

The Deacon expresses, in smooth German, his and my sense of being honored to meet these great Bavarian climbers. The six men being complimented—seven including Bruno Sigl—don’t even blink in response.

The Deacon takes another long drink of beer from the heavy stein and says to Bruno Sigl, “Can we begin our discussion now?”

“It will not be a ‘discussion,’ as you call it,” snaps Sigl, his Bavarian courtesy suddenly and totally absent. “It will be an interrogation—as if I’m in a British courtroom.”

I gape at this, but the Deacon only smiles and says, “Not at all. If we were in an English courtroom, I would be wearing a funny white wig and you would be in the dock.”

Sigl frowns. “I am only a witness, Herr Deacon. It is the defendant—the usually guilty party—who sits in the dock in British courts, no? The witness sits…where? On the chair near the judge, ja?”

“Ja,” agrees the Deacon, still smiling. “I stand corrected. Would you prefer that we speak in German so that all your friends can understand? I’ll translate for Jake later.”

“Nein,” says Bruno Sigl. “We will speak English. Your Berlin accent grates on my Bavarian ears.”

“Sorry,” says the Deacon. “But we agree that you were the only witness to see Lord Percival Bromley and his fellow climber Kurt Meyer swept to their death by an avalanche, is this not true?”

“By what authority, Herr Deacon, do you interrogate…or even interview me?”

“No authority whatsoever,” the Deacon says calmly. “Jake Perry and I came to Munich to speak to you as a personal favor to Lady Bromley, who, understandably, simply seeks more details about her son’s sudden death on the mountain.”

“A favor to Lady Bromley,” Sigl says, the sarcasm audible in his voice even through the heavy German accent. “I presume there is money changing hands as part of this…favor.”

The Deacon merely continues smiling and waits.

Finally Sigl slams down his empty stone stein, waves the attentive waiter over for a new one, and grumbles, “Everything I saw of the accident I reported both to German newspapers and in the German alpine journal and in a letter to your Royal Geographic Alpine Club journal.”

“It was a very short report,” the Deacon says.

“It was a very quick avalanche,” snaps Sigl. “You were on both of Mallory’s earlier Everest expeditions. I trust you saw snow avalanches? Or at least in the Alps?”

The Deacon nods twice.

“You know, then, that one second the person or persons are there, the next second they are not.”

“Yes,” agrees the Deacon. “But it is difficult to understand what Lord Percival and the man named Meyer were doing on the mountain at all. Why were they there? Why were you and your six German friends there? Your report in the journals said that you and several other German…explorers…had come south to Tibet through China. That your permit was Chinese, not Tibetan, but for some reason the Tibetan dzongpens accepted it as they would an official pass. You told the Frankfurter Zeitung that you’d diverted your route when you heard in Tingri that a German and an Englishman had rented yaks and purchased climbing equipment in the Tibetan town of Tingri Dzong, and that you and your friends had gone south to investigate…out of sheer curiosity. Nothing more.”

“Everything I told the newspapers is correct,” Sigl says in a dismissive tone. “You and your American comrade came all the way to Munich to hear me confirm what I have already explained?”

“Much of it makes little or no sense,” says the Deacon. “Lady Bromley—young Percival’s mother—will be very appreciative if you can help us discover the missing facts. That’s all she wants.”

“And you have come all this way to help the old lady learn a few more…how do you say it in England?…tit-bits about her son’s death,” says Sigl with an expression very close to a sneer. I marvel that the Deacon keeps from losing his temper.

“Was this Kurt Meyer from your…ah…exploration group?” asks the Deacon.

“Nein! We had never heard of him before the Tibetans in Tingri Dzong told us his name…and that he had ridden southeast toward Rongbuk with Lord Percival Bromley of England.”

“So Meyer was not a climber?”

Sigl drinks a long gulp of beer, belches, and shrugs. “None of us had ever heard of Kurt Meyer. We heard his name only from the Tibetans in Tingri who had spoken to him. Between those of us at this table, we know almost all of Germany’s and Austria’s real climbers. Ja, meine Freunde?” He is addressing the question to his fellow Germans. They nod, and several of them say “Ja” even though Sigl just told us they didn’t understand English.

The Deacon sighs. “Rather than my directing questions to you that make you feel like you’re in a courtroom, Herr Sigl, why don’t you just tell us the full story of why you were there at the approaches to Everest, and what you saw of Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer? Perhaps you even know why the two men’s ponies had been shot.”

“We saw the ponies lying there dead when we arrived,” says Sigl. “The Camp One area, as you know, Herr Deacon, is very rough moraine. Perhaps the ponies had both broken their legs. Or perhaps Herr Bromley or Herr Meyer had gone mad and shot the ponies. Who knows?” The German climber shrugs again.

“As for our reason for ‘following’ Bromley and Meyer to Rongbuk Glacier,” continues Sigl, “I shall reveal to you what I have told no one—not even our local newspapers. My six friends and I were merely interested in meeting George Mallory, Colonel Norton, and the other climbers we had heard were attempting Everest that spring. Obviously, since we were in China during most of our trip, we heard no news of Mallory’s and Irvine’s deaths, or even that the expedition had reached the mountain. But when the Tibetans in Tingri told us that Bromley was headed for the mountain they call Chomolungma, we decided—as you British and Americans say—‘Why not?’ And so we went southeast rather than back north.”

(Und zo ve vent soudeast razzer zan back nord. Sigl’s accent is beginning to grate on me for some reason.)

“But certainly,” said the Deacon, his tone polite but insistent, “when you saw that Norton’s and Mallory’s Base Camp had been abandoned, except for scraps of tents and dumps of uneaten canned food, you must have known that the expedition had already departed. Why then continue up the glacier all the way to the North Col and above?”

“Because we saw two figures descending the North Ridge, and it was obvious they were in trouble,” snaps Sigl.

“You could see that from Base Camp, twelve miles away from Mount Everest?” asks the Deacon, more in a tone of wonder than one of challenge.

“Nein, nein! We had gone up to Camp Two after finding the dead ponies, thinking that Bromley and this Meyer person whom we’d never heard of might be in some difficulty. We saw them on the ridgelines from Mallory’s Camp Two. We used fine German field glasses—Zeiss—the best in the world.”

The Deacon nods his acknowledgment of this fact. “So you set up your own tents at the site of Mallory’s old Camp Three just below the thousand-foot ascent to the North Col, then climbed onto the Col itself. Did you use the rope ladder that Colonel Norton’s group had left behind for the last hundred-some vertical feet?”

Sigl waves away that suggestion with a flicking motion of his fingers. “We used no old ladder or fixed ropes. We used our own ice-climbing axes and other German techniques to ascend the ice wall.”

“Kami Chiring reported seeing several of your men coming down from the Col using Sandy Irvine’s rope ladder,” says the Deacon.

“Who is this Kami Chiring?” demands Sigl.

“The Sherpa you met and aimed a revolver at near Camp Three that day. The one you told the story of Bromley’s death to.”

Bruno Sigl shrugs and sneers. “Sherpa. There you have it. Sherpas lie constantly. As do Tibetans. My six friends and I went nowhere near that worn-out rope ladder. We had no need to, you see.”

“So you were on a purely exploratory trip through China, but you brought your mountain- and ice-climbing gear with you,” says the Deacon, getting out his pipe and beginning to fill it. The huge room cannot get much smokier than it is already.

“There are mountains and steep passes in China, Herr Deacon.” Sigl’s tone has gone from surly to contemptuous.

“I did not mean to interrupt your narrative, Herr Sigl.”

Again Sigl shrugs. “There is very little…narrative, as you call it…left, Herr Deacon. My friends and I climbed to the North Col because we could see that the two figures descending the North Ridge were in trouble. One appeared to be snow-blind and was being led, almost held up, by the other.”

“So you set up camp on the North Col?” says the Deacon, lighting and breathing his pipe alive.

“We did not!” cried Sigl. “We had no camp on the North Col.”

“Kami Chiring saw at least two tents on the same ledge on the Col that Norton and Mallory had used for their Camp Four,” says the Deacon. Again, his voice is more curious than challenging. A man simply trying to ascertain a few facts to help a grieving mother get over the confusing disappearance of her son.

“The tents were Bromley’s,” says Sigl. “One was already in tatters from the high winds. The same winds that forced the retreating Bromley and Meyer off the ridgeline onto the unstable snow of the face just above Camp Five. I shouted at them in both English and German not to go onto the face—that the snow there was not stable—but either they did not hear me through the wind or they ignored me.”

The Deacon’s heavy eyebrows rise slightly. “You were close enough to speak to them?”

“To shout to them,” Sigl says in tones one would use with a slow child. “We were still thirty meters or more apart. Then the snow under them simply shifted and fell thousands of feet down the face in one roaring mass. They disappeared completely in the avalanche and I heard no more from them.”

“You didn’t attempt to go lower to see if they might have survived?” There is no accusation in his voice, but Bruno Sigl still bridles and glowers as if he’s been insulted.

“It was impossible to go lower on that face. There was no face left. All the snow on it had disappeared with the avalanche, and it was obvious that young Bromley and Kurt Meyer were dead—buried under tons of snow thousands of feet below—gone. Hinüber.”

The Deacon nods as if he fully understands. I remember that he had seen—and warned George Mallory against trying to ascend—the long snow slope leading to the North Col, a slope that had killed seven of Mallory’s porters in the avalanche on Everest in 1922.

“You wrote in your newspaper reports and in fact have just repeated that the wind on the ridge leading up to Camp Six was so terrible that both Lord Percival and Herr Meyer had to retreat to the rock bands and ice fields of the North Face for their descent to Camp Five,” says the Deacon.

“Ja, that is accurate.”

“Presumably, Herr Sigl, you were also forced off the ridge and onto the face during your ascent in searching for the two men. That means you met them, saw them, and shouted to them, and they to you, while on the face rather than the ridge. Which would explain the avalanche that would not have happened on the ridge itself.”

“Yes,” says Sigl. His tone around the English word has a finality to it, as if the interview is now over.

“And yet,” says the Deacon, steepling his long fingers, “you tell me that both you and the doomed men were able to shout and be heard at a distance of over thirty meters—a hundred feet apart—even with such a wind roaring over the ridge.”

“What are you suggesting, Englander?”

“I am suggesting nothing,” says the Deacon. “But I’m remembering that when I was on that ridge at that altitude in nineteen twenty-two and then forced off the ridge with two other climbers and onto the rocks of the North Face by the wind, we couldn’t hear each other’s shouts at five paces, much less at thirty meters.”

“So you are calling me a liar?” Sigl’s tone is very low and very tight. He’s taken his hands and forearms off the table, and his right arm moves as if he is taking something—a small pistol, a knife—from his broad belt.

The Deacon sets his pipe down carefully and lays both of his long-fingered, rock-scarred hands palm down on the table. “Herr Sigl, I am not calling you a liar. I am trying to understand Bromley’s—and his Austrian climbing partner’s—last minutes alive so that I can report in detail to Lady Bromley, who is beside herself with grieving. So much so that she has fantasies that her son is still alive on the mountain. I presume that once you left the ridgeline to continue climbing along the face, the force and roar of the wind died enough that you were able to shout thirty meters to Bromley.”

“Ja,” says Sigl, his face still closed with anger. “That was precisely the situation.”

“What,” asks the Deacon, “did you shout to them, especially to Bromley, and what did they say in return before the avalanche? And which of the two appeared to be snow-blind?”

Sigl hesitates, as if any more participation in this interview will be too much of a surrender for him. But then he speaks. His friend with the strange eyebrows and haunted eyes, Herr Hess, appears to be following all the exchanges in English with absorbed comprehension, but I can’t be sure. Perhaps the thin man is merely straining to understand a word or two, or is waiting impatiently for Sigl to translate. At any rate, he seems quite interested in the exchange.

I’m convinced, though I’m not sure why, that the man to my immediate right—the famous climber Karl Bachner—does understand the English being batted back and forth.

“I called to Bromley, who seemed to be leading the snow-blinded and staggering Meyer, ‘Why are you two so high?’” says Sigl. “And then I shouted up at them, ‘Do you need help?’”

“Were your six German explorer friends with you on the ridge then when you were shouting toward Bromley?” asks the Deacon.

Sigl shakes his cropped and shaven head. “Nein, nein. My friends were more affected by the altitude than was I. They were either resting at Camp Three—as your English expedition had called it—or just come up onto the North Col. I had climbed the North Ridge to Camp Five and above alone. As I explained in my various newspaper and alpine journal reports, I was alone when I encountered Bromley and his snow-blind partner. Certainly you have read my statements before this?”

“Of course.” The Deacon resumes smoking his pipe.

Sigl sighs, seemingly at the perverse slowness of his English interlocutor.

“If you don’t mind my asking, what was your destination, Herr Sigl? Where were you originally headed with those Mongolian horses and mules and gear?”

“To see if I could meet George Mallory and Colonel Norton and perhaps reconnoiter Mount Everest from a distance, Herr Deacon. Just as I explained earlier.”

“And perhaps to climb it?” asks the Deacon.

“Climb it?” repeats Bruno Sigl and laughs harshly. “My friends and I had only basic climbing equipment—nowhere near enough to lay siege to such a mountain. Also, the monsoon was already weeks overdue and might descend upon us at any minute. It was your Bromley who was foolish enough to think that he could climb Everest using the few leftover tins of food, fraying rope ladders, and snow-covered fixed ropes that Mallory’s expedition had left behind. Bromley was a fool. To his last steps onto the unstable snow, he was a total fool. He killed not only himself but a fellow countryman of mine.”

Several of the German climbers to the right of me nod in agreement, as does the Rudolf Hess fellow. The big man with the shaved head next to Sigl, the fellow introduced as someone’s bodyguard, Ulrich Graf, continues to stare straight ahead through all this banter as if he is drugged. Or simply totally uninterested.

“My dear Herr Deacon,” continues Sigl, “by all accounts Mount Everest is not the mountain for a solo ascent.” He looks at me hard. “Or even for two…or three…ambitious alpine-style climbers from different countries. Mount Everest will never be climbed alpine style. Or by solo ascent. No, I only wanted to see the mountain from a distance. Besides, it is a British hill, is it not?”

“Not at all,” says the Deacon. “It belongs to whoever climbs it first, whatever the Royal Geographical Society’s Alpine Club might think about the matter.”

Sigl grunts.

“When you shouted at Bromley and Meyer on the face, that last day,” continues the Deacon. “Could you describe again what you said to them?”

“As I said, it was very brief,” says Sigl. He looks impatient.

The Deacon waits.

“I asked them—shouted to them—‘Why are you so high?’” Sigl says again. “And then I asked if they needed help…they obviously did. Meyer was obviously snow-blind and so exhausted that he could not stand without Bromley’s help. The British lord himself looked confused, lost…dazed.”

Sigl pauses to drink more beer.

“I warned them not to step out onto the snow slope, they did, the avalanche began, and that was the end of all conversation with them…forever,” says Sigl. It’s obvious he is not going to repeat the story again.

“You said that you called to them in German as well as in English,” says the Deacon. “Did Meyer respond in German?”

“Nein,” says Sigl. “The man the Tibetans in Tingri had called Kurt Meyer seemed too exhausted and in pain from his snow blindness to speak. He never said a word. Right up until the avalanche took him away, he never uttered a word.”

“Did you say—shout—anything else to them?”

Sigl shakes his head. “The snow shifted under them, the avalanche carried them off the face of Everest, and I made my way back to the more solid ridge—almost crawling in the howling winds—and retreated down to Camp Four and then the North Col and then away from the mountain.”

“You couldn’t see any hint of their bodies below?” asks the Deacon.

Sigl is angry now. His lips are thin and his voice is a bark. “The drop from that point on the North Face to the Rongbuk Glacier below is more than five of your verdammte English miles! And I was not looking for their corpses eight kilometers below, Herr Deacon, I was using my ice axe to get off my own loose slab of snow—which might join the rest of the avalanche any second—and back to the ice-covered slabs of the North Ridge so that I could descend to the North Col as quickly as possible.”

The Deacon nods his understanding. “What do you think those two were up to, then?” The Deacon’s voice sounds sincerely curious.

Bruno Sigl looks down the table toward Bachner and the other German climbers and I wonder again How many of them are following this conversation in English?

“It’s obvious what the truth was,” says Sigl, a tone of audible contempt in his voice now. “I stated it a few minutes ago. Were you not listening, Herr Deacon? Do you not see it as obvious yourself, Herr Deacon?”

“Tell me again, please.”

“Your Bromley—veteran of a few guided climbs in the Alps—decided that he could use the remnants of ropes and camps left behind by Norton and Mallory’s group to climb Mount Everest on his own, with only the idiot Kurt Meyer as his porter and fellow climber. It was pure Arroganz…Stolz…what is the Greek word…hubris. Pure hubris.”

The Deacon nods slowly and taps his lower lip with the pipe stem as if a serious mystery has been cleared up. He says, “How high do you think they got before turning around?”

Sigl snorts a laugh. “Who on earth cares?”

The Deacon waits patiently.

Eventually Bruno Sigl says, “If you’re thinking that the two fools might have summited, put it out of your mind. They’d been gone from our sight far too few hours to have gone much further than Camp Five…perhaps Camp Six if they’d used some of the oxygen apparatus left at Camp Five, if there was oxygen apparatus left there. Which I doubt. Not as high as Camp Six, I am certain of that.”

“Why are you certain?” asks the Deacon in a reasonable, interested voice. He is still tapping his lower lip with the pipe stem.

“The wind,” says Sigl with total finality. “The cold and wind. It was unbearable on the ridgeline where I met them just above Camp Five. Up near Camp Six, above eight thousand meters and then out onto the exposed higher North East Ridge or bare face up there, it would have meant death to try to proceed. There is no chance they had got that far, Herr Deacon. No chance at all.”

“You’ve answered my questions with great patience, Herr Sigl,” says the Deacon. “I thank you in all sincerity. This information might help Lady Bromley put her mind at rest.”

Sigl only grunts at that. Then he looks at me. “What are you staring at, young man?”

“Your red flags on that wall in that roped-off corner,” I admit, pointing behind Sigl. “And the symbol in the white circle on the red flags.”

Sigl stares at me and his blue eyes are as cold as ice. “Do you know what that symbol is, Herr Jacob Perry from America?”

“Yes,” I say. I’d studied a lot of Sanskrit and the Indus Valley cultures at Harvard. “It’s the symbol from India, Tibet, and some other Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain cultures meaning ‘good luck,’ or sometimes ‘harmony.’ The Sanskrit word for it, I believe, is svastika. I’m told that one finds it everywhere on old temples in India.”

Sigl is glaring at me now, as if I might be making fun of him or of something sacred to him. The Deacon lights his pipe and looks at me but says nothing.

“In today’s Deutschland,” Sigl says at last, barely moving his thin lips, “it is the swastika.” He spells it for me using English-sounding letters. “It is the glorious symbol of the NSDAP—Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. It and the man in those photographs will be the salvation of Germany.”

I have good vision, but I can’t make out the “man in those photographs.” There are two rather small framed photos on the wall under the red flags in that roped-off corner, plus another furled red flag directly in the corner, rising about six feet high on a staff. I assume it’s a flag similar to the two hanging on the wall.

“Come,” orders Bruno Sigl.

Everyone—the Germans, including Hess and the baldheaded man next to Sigl on the opposite side of the table and Bachner and all the climbers on our side, followed by the Deacon still puffing at his pipe—get up as I follow Sigl to the corner.

The rope that sets off this little corner memorial area—it looks like an ad hoc shrine—is simply quarter-inch climbing rope painted gold and anchored on two of those little posts that maître d’s keep their short velvet ropes hooked to at the entrance to fancy restaurants.

One man appears in both photos, so I have to assume that he—as well as this socialist party with the swastika flag—is the “salvation of Germany.” In the photo below the red flag on the wall to the right, it is just the one man. At a distance one might think it’s a photo of Charlie Chaplin because of the silly little mustache under his nose, but it’s not Chaplin. This man has dark hair parted severely in the middle, dark eyes, and an intense—one might say furious—gaze at the camera or photographer.

The photograph on the left shows the same man standing in a doorway—the doorway of this beer hall, I realize—with two other men. The other two are in military uniforms, the Charlie Chaplin–mustached fellow in baggy civilian clothes. He’s the shortest and certainly least imposing of the three men in the photograph.

“Adolf Hitler,” says Bruno Sigl and looks closely at me for my response.

I have none. I think I’ve heard the name in reference to some of the constant unrest here in the Germany of November 1924, but it has made no real impression on me. Evidently he’s a Communist leader within his National Socialism workers’ party.

Behind me, the great climber Karl Bachner says, “Der Mann, den wir nicht antasten lassen.”

I look to Sigl for some translation, but the German climber says nothing.

“The man we will not see impugned,” the Deacon translates, the pipe in his hand now.

I see now that the red flag with the white circle and swastika on the staff has been torn—as if bullets had passed through it—and bloodied, if the dried brown spots are indeed blood. I lift my hand toward it to ask a question.

The baldheaded, round-faced muscleman who sat silent next to Sigl through the entire discussion at the table now moves quickly to slap my hand down and away so that I don’t actually touch the torn fabric.

Shocked, I lower my hand and stare at the glowering wrestler-type.

“This is the Blutfahne—the Blood Flag—sacred to followers of Adolf Hitler and of Nationalsozialismus,” says Bruno Sigl. “It must not be touched by non-Aryans. Never by an Ausländer.”

The Deacon does not translate the word for me, but I can guess the meaning from context.

“Is that blood?” I ask stupidly. Everything I’ve done, said, or felt this evening feels stupid to me. And I’m starving to death.

Sigl nods. “From the massacre of nine November of last year, when the Munich police brutally opened fire on us. The flag belonged to the Fifth SA Sturm—much of the blood on it is from our comrade, the martyr Andreas Bauriedl, who fell atop the fallen flag when he was murdered by the police.”

“The unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch,” the Deacon explains to me. “It started from this beer hall, as I remember.”

Sigl glares at him through my friend’s pipe smoke. “We prefer the term Hitlerputsch or Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch,” snaps the German climber. “And it was not—as you say—‘unsuccessful.’”

“Really?” says the Deacon. “The police put down the uprising, scattered the marching Nazis, and arrested its leaders, including your Herr Hitler. I believe he’s currently serving a five-year sentence for treason in the old fortress prison of Landsberg, on a cliff above the river Lech.”

Sigl smiles strangely. “Adolf Hitler has become a hero of the German people. He will be out of prison before the end of this year. Even while there, he is treated like royalty by his so-called ‘guards.’ They know that he will someday lead this nation.”

The Deacon taps out his pipe, sets it in his tweed jacket pocket, and nods appreciatively. “Thank you, Herr Sigl, for tonight’s information and for setting me straight, as they say in Jake’s America, about my misperceptions and faulty information regarding the Hitlerputsch and the current status of Herr Hitler.”

“I will walk you to the door of the Bürgerbräukeller,” says Sigl.

Our train to the border on the way to Zurich leaves the station promptly at ten p.m. Promptness, I’m learning, is a German trait.

I’m glad that we have a private compartment in which we can stretch out on the padded benches and doze, if we choose, before we change rails and trains at the Swiss border later in the night. On the cab ride from the Bürgerbräukeller to the Munich train station, I realize that I’ve sweated through my undershirt, through my starched shirt, and into my thick wool suit jacket. My hands are trembling as I watch the lights of Munich recede into the relative darkness of the countryside. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see the lights of any city disappear behind me.

Finally, when I can speak without a tremor in my voice that would match the earlier shaking of my hands, I say, “This Adolf Hitler—I have read the name but remembered nothing about him—is he a local Communist leader calling for the overthrow of the Weimar Republic?”

“Rather the other way around, old boy,” replies the Deacon from where he is stretched out on the compartment’s other long, padded bench. “Hitler was—is, since his trial gave him a national audience for his rants—famous and much loved for his very far-right-wing views, virulent anti-Semitism and all.”

“Ah,” I say. “But he is in prison for five years for the treason of his attempted coup last year?”

The Deacon has sat up to light his pipe again and opens the train window a bit to reduce the smoke in the compartment, although I don’t mind it. “I believe that Herr Sigl was right on both counts about that…that is, that Hitler will be out before the new year, with less than one year served, and that the authorities are treating him like a royal guest in that prison above the river.”

“Why?”

The Deacon shrugs slightly. “Nineteen twenty-four German politics is far beyond my poor powers to understand, but the extreme right wing—the Nazis, to be precise—certainly seems to be speaking for a lot of frustrated people since this superinflation struck.”

I realize that I’m not really interested in the little man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache.

“By the by,” adds the Deacon, “that bald, round-faced, scowling gentleman who sat across from you at the table and who slapped your hand when you seemed about to touch their sacred Blood Flag?”

“Yes?”

“Ulrich Graf was Herr Hitler’s personal bodyguard—which may be why he took several bullets aimed Hitler’s way during last November’s absurd botch of a putsch. But Graf is a hardy fellow, as you saw tonight, and will probably live to be the savior of Germany’s Nazi hero once again, I am sure. Before becoming a Nazi and bodyguard to their leader, Graf was a butcher, a semi-professional wrestler, and a for-hire street brawler. Sometimes he would volunteer to beat up—or even kill—Jews or Communists without charging his bosses.”

I think about this for a long moment. Finally I speak in just above a whisper, despite the compartment walls around us.

“Do you believe Sigl in his account of how Lord Percival and the Austrian Meyer died?” I ask. Personally, as much as I disliked Sigl and some of his friends, I can’t see an alternative to believing him.

“Not a word of it,” says the Deacon.

This causes me to sit up straight from where I’ve been half-reclining.

“No?”

“No.”

“Then what do you think happened to Bromley and Meyer? And why would Sigl lie?”

The Deacon shrugs slightly again. “It is possible that Sigl and his friends were ready to make an illegal bid for the summit after they heard in Tingri that the rest of Mallory’s team had left. Sigl certainly had no Tibetan climbing or travel permit himself. Perhaps Sigl and his six friends caught up with Bromley somewhere below the North Col and pressed him and this Meyer person to go with him on the climb in the tricky near-monsoon weather. When Bromley and Meyer fell to their deaths—or perhaps died some other way on the mountain—Sigl had to retreat and make up the Lost Boys story of the other two men climbing alone and being carried away by an avalanche.”

“You don’t believe in his avalanche story?”

“I’ve been on that part of the ridge and face, Jake,” says the Deacon. “That section of the face rarely accumulates enough snow for the kind of massive slab-slide avalanche Sigl described. And if it did, my feeling is that Bromley had garnered enough avalanche-avoidance experience in the Alps to know better than to venture out onto such a slope.”

“If the avalanche didn’t kill Bromley and the Austrian, do you think they fell while climbing above Camp Six with Sigl?”

“There are other possibilities,” says the Deacon. “Especially since the little I remember about Percy Bromley would not include the possibility of his being bullied into an Everest summit attempt by a German political fanatic intent upon bagging Mount Everest for das Vaterland.”

The Deacon studies his pipe. ”I wish I’d known Lord Percival better. As I told you and Jean-Claude, I was brought to the estate—rather as nobility would send out for any other commodity to be delivered—to be an occasional playmate for Percy’s older brother, Charles, who was about my age, nine or ten at the time. Young Percival always wanted to tag along. He was—what is your American term, Jake?—a right pain in the arse.”

“You never saw Percival after that?”

“Oh, I’d bump into him from time to time at English garden parties or on the Continent,” the Deacon says vaguely.

“Was Percival really…inverted?” It’s hard for me to say the word aloud. “Did he really frequent European brothels where young men were the prostitutes?”

“So it’s rumored,” says the Deacon. “Is that important to you in some way, Jake?”

I think about that but can’t make up my mind. I’ve led a sheltered life, I realize. I’ve never had any inverted friends. Or at least none that I knew about.

“How else might Bromley and Kurt Meyer have died?” I ask, embarrassed and eager to change the subject.

“Bruno Sigl may have killed them both,” says the Deacon. There is a blue haze between us, but it hovers and then moves for the open window. The sound of steel wheels on metal rails is very loud.

I’m profoundly shocked at this. Is the Deacon saying this for effect? Just to shock me? If so, he’s succeeded beautifully.

My mother is Catholic—a former O’Riley and another stain on the escutcheon of the old-line Boston Brahmin Perry family—and I was raised to understand the difference between venial and mortal sins. Killing another climber on such a mountain as Everest would be, to me, somewhere beyond a major mortal sin. For a climber, it adds a sense of blasphemy to the mortal sin of murder. “Kill fellow climbers? Why?” I manage at last.

The Deacon tamps his pipe out in an ashtray set into the end of an armrest. “I rather imagine we shall just have to go climb Mount Everest and do what we’re supposed to be doing—that is, find the remains of Lord Percival Bromley—to find out.”

The Deacon pulls a tweed hat down over his eyes and goes to sleep in seconds. I sit upright in the clacking train compartment for a long time, thinking, trying to sort out things which simply defy sorting.

Eventually I shut the window. The air outside is getting colder.