The Abominable: A Novel

26.

I came partially conscious sometime later to the sound of two men talking loudly. They were about ten feet uphill and upwind of us—the wind was roaring down the Rongbuk Glacier valley with a renewed ferocity—and the two were speaking in German loudly enough for me to make out the words over the wind.

Pasang was lying dead, also on his belly, so close that our faces were only inches apart. He’d had no part in his black hair before, but now his leather cap and woolen top cap had been knocked off and a terrible white streak of what I assumed was exposed skull or brains ran down the top of his scalp. His face was completely covered with blood. I started to raise a hand from my side to touch him—to shake him to make sure he was really dead—when Pasang whispered without moving his bloody lips, “Don’t move, Jake.” The whisper was almost inaudible to me six inches from him, so I was sure the two Germans arguing ten feet away against the wind could not hear him.

“I’ll translate,” whispered Pasang.

“Your head…,” I whispered back.

“Scalp wounds always bleed dramatically,” was his whispered response. “I will have a headache—if we survive—nothing more. They did not search us. Let me translate, Jake, so we know when to reach under our outer jackets for our pistols.”

I’d almost forgotten the Webley revolver tucked in a pocket in my Finch duvet and the fully loaded Luger that Pasang had put in the pocket of his goose down jacket.

Amazingly, I recognized the voices from Munich. The heavier, deeper voice belonged to that right-wing German radical’s bodyguard…what was the bodyguard’s name?…Ulrich Graf.

The other voice belonged to another man at the table that night—he’d said little but I recognized his near-lisp—Artur Wolzenbrecht.

Ulrich Graf was saying, almost whining, “SS-Sturmbannführer Sigl…hat gesagt, dass ich sie aufhalten soll, und ich habe sie aufgehalten.”

In a burst of surreality, Pasang’s bloody mask of a face, his eyes still closed and caked with pooled blood that all but concealed his moving lips, whispered a simultaneous translation. If I’d known that he spoke German, I’d forgotten it.

“SS-Sturmbannführer Sigl said to stop them, so I stopped them.” It took me a second to realize that he was translating what Graf had said and another sickening second for me to realize that the “them” being stopped and shot was “us.”

“Idiot!” barked Wolzenbrecht. “Sturmbannführer Sigl hat gesagt, dass du sie aufhalten sollst, bevor sie das Tal verlassen können. Aber nicht, sie zu erschiessen.”

Pasang whispered the translation. “Idiot! Sturmbannführer Sigl said to stop them before they left the valley. Not to shoot them!”

Ulrich Graf’s voice came down the wind to us in the tone of a stupid, sulking child. “Na ja, mit meinen Schüssen habe ich sie doch angehalten, oder?”

“Well, my shooting them stopped them, didn’t it?” translated Pasang through blood-caked lips.

I heard Wolzenbrecht sigh. “Sturmbannführer Sigl hat befohlen, sie zu verhören und sie dann nach Fotos zu durchsuchen. Aber keiner von ihnen sieht so aus, als ob wir sie noch verhören könnten.”

“Sturmbannführer Sigl ordered us to interrogate them, then search them for the photographs. But neither one looks alive enough to interrogate.” This gave me a second’s hope. But I’d fallen with my right hand under my body and that hand never stopped moving—millimeter by millimeter—first under my Shackleton anorak, and then to the right pocket of my Finch duvet, where the Webley revolver painfully pressed against my lower ribs.

“Was sollen wir jetzt machen?” said Graf. “Warten, bis einer wieder zu sich kommt?”

I caught a hint of movement from Pasang and realized that he was moving his hand to the Luger in his down jacket. His whispered translation was almost inaudible even to me—“What shall we do, then? Wait for one of them to regain consciousness?”

Wolzenbrecht’s reply sounded to me like a rough imitation of a German shepherd gargling gravel. “Nein, vergiss das Verhör. Töte sie erst, und dann durchsuchen wir sie. Aber mit Kopfschuss, nicht auf den Körper zielen.”

“No. Forget the interrogation,” Pasang interpreted in a fast whisper. “Kill them first, then we will search. But fire into their heads, not into their bodies.”

That convinced me to run the risk of pulling the Webley free of my jackets and lying on it. My finger found the trigger guard, then the trigger. My thumb found the hammer. I remembered the Deacon telling me that a revolver had no safety. I could see the slight motion as Pasang freed the Luger beneath him.

“Warum denn?” demanded Graf.

“Why?” whispered Pasang, and I realized that the semi-retarded bodyguard wasn’t questioning why Dr. Pasang and I should be shot, only why we should be shot in the head and not the body.

“Damit wir keine Fotos beschädigen, falls sie welche bei sich haben, du Trottel,” snapped Wolzenbrecht. “Sturmbannführer Sigl kommt sicher bald aus den Bergen zurück. Stell die Schmeisser auf einen Schuss ein.”

Since their boots were already crunching in our direction before Pasang whispered his translation, I already had the gist of what Wolzenbrecht was saying.

“So that we don’t damage the photographs if the pictures are hidden on their persons, shithead,” whispered Pasang. “Sturmbannführer Sigl should be coming down from the mountain very soon, so set your Schmeisser to single-fire and let’s get it over with…”

Schmeisser! That goddamned submachine gun! These Nazi fuckers were going to shoot us in the head just to avoid punching holes in the obscene photos each of us was carrying—me in my carryall, Pasang in a large pocket in his wool jacket. They were content to search our corpses after shooting us in the next few seconds. Time was up.

Pasang and I rolled in opposite directions in the same instant and came to our knees with our pistols raised.

What happened next is still not clear to me. There had been two Germans striding toward us, now there were blurs of gray motion all around them. Massive figures. Glimpses of gray fur in the swirling snow. Hair everywhere.

I saw Ulrich Graf’s head flying through the air, suddenly removed from its body. I had time to see and hear Artur Wolzenbrecht scream shrilly as something looming very gray and very large in the snow flurries rose over him.

Then something hit me in the side of the head, I fired one shot from the Webley—hitting nothing, my aim knocked high—and only had time to see Pasang also falling forward from where he’d risen to his knees on the moraine rock, the Luger already dropped from his hand, his eyes closed again in that bloody face—before I went down face-first onto the stones and blackness again.