92

Shambhala Hotel, Lhasa, Tibet

May 23, 2010

2:30 p.m.

Sarron was growing impatient. He wanted his moment of victory. Even though he had retrieved the camera and left Quinn for dead high on the mountain, he couldn’t celebrate until he had heard from Stefan Vollmer.

Drinking a warm beer from its shiny blue can, he looked down from his top-floor room in the Shambhala Hotel with intense frustration. On the bustling pavement below, a group of Chinese big-city tourists, each clad in a white face mask and an electric blue windbreaker, trotted hastily behind a guide waving an equally blue flag, desperate to not be left behind. Sarron raised his gaze to look across a group of old buildings seemingly sinking under the weight of their heavyset roofs into the brown-tinted smog that blanketed the city. Beyond, the improbable white mass of the Potala Palace jutted up through the haze.

Staring at it, he could feel his left eye flickering uncontrollably. He told himself that he was exhausted, that he needed to be on his way from that damn place. Pushing on his left eyelid with two fingers, he finally decided his destination. It would be Chile. He’d thought maybe Argentina like Vollmer’s Nazi ancestors, but no, it would be Chile. He’d heard it was easier there. He could start again like many before him, far away on the other side of the world. He was finished with the mountains. He would get a place by the sea. But first, he needed money. He needed that call from Vollmer.

Turning back into the room, he looked at the silent cell phone lying on the unmade bed. He picked it up to check that it had a signal; four bars stepped up alongside a full-mast icon.

No new messages.

Vollmer’s people must have received the camera by now. The international transport firm had been efficient. They had even sent a European representative to receive and package the camera to keep it at freezing temperature. The courier said he was taking the camera to Switzerland, where Vollmer had identified a specialist team to extract and develop the film. Sarron had been surprised and excited when the man said it would be there in less than twenty-four hours.

But that was three days ago now.

Sarron decided that he had to leave the room. He didn’t want to; it was an unnecessary risk at this stage of the proceedings, but he couldn’t stay inside any longer. He was mentally crawling up the walls in anticipation and suspense. He had to get out for a while.

Picking up the cell phone, Sarron pulled on a wide-brimmed sun hat and dark glasses and went down to the street. There he pushed into the crowd, letting it sweep him along. He had no idea where he was going. Oblivious to the street scene, his internal vision flooded once again with images of what had happened high on the mountain: Oleg Vishnevsky falling into the Kangshung void; his brother, Dmitri, being shot. As he walked, he could feel his knife still lodged in that other climber’s neck, refusing to pull free from the spine however hard he tried. He had winded himself killing that man. After, it had been all he could do to get away with the camera.

Reliving once again those murderous, bloody scenes, Sarron realized with a jolt that his phone was ringing.

He darted into a side street to take the call.

It was Vollmer.

As Sarron put the phone to his ear, his head spun with urgency as he heard the German say, “Sarron?”

“Yes.”

“This is Stefan Vollmer. I have the pictures on my computer screen in front of me.”

A burst of adrenaline made Sarron’s heart leap. He clenched a fist and started punching at the air before getting control of himself. “Fantastique!”

There was a long pause before Vollmer spoke again. “I think that the only thing I can do, Sarron, under the circumstances, is to forward them to your email. You can take a look at them and then conclude how you wish to settle this matter with me.”

“Yes, of course. How are they? Was the film good? Are they in focus?”

“Yes, Sarron, just like new, perfectly in focus. Please be clear about one thing. We will find you.”

The line went dead.

Sarron ran back into the main street and across the road, dodging traffic as his eyes searched the row of cafés and tourist shops that lined the pavement. Fixing his sight on the Mandala Internet Café, he ran in. Beyond the dim café bar at the front, a neon-bright room to the rear was filled with figures hunched before old computer screens set within individual, half-partitioned chipboard cubicles.

Every computer was occupied. Sarron bit his lip, pacing backward and forward, before noticing that a small, fat Chinese man in an electric blue windbreaker and a face mask was occupying one of the screens furthest from the door. He walked over and gently squatted down on his haunches alongside the truant. When he turned his face up, the man jumped in his seat, his concentration on the naked women on the computer screen shattered by the surprise of someone so close to him. With a look of terror, he jerked his hands from the keyboard to shield his face from the stranger. Sarron stared between the chubby fingers into the small, blinking eyes and hissed, “Fuck off, Chinois, or I will kill you.”

The little man grabbed the effeminate satchel bag on his lap, jumped up, and fled, leaving Sarron free to sit down, clear the screen of Thai pornography, and log into an email account.

The connection was slow.

Finally, he got in.

A new email from the blind account that had been used by Vollmer throughout their deal was listed.

He rushed to open it.

It was a forward of another email from the photographic studio in Switzerland.

Ignoring the reams of text in German, he raced to open the attached photographs.

They took forever to download.

The waiting was interminable. Sarron scraped his fingernails frenetically at the edge of the cheap table on which the monitor was sitting. A piece of the table’s hard plastic veneer split and stuck beneath one of his nails. It stung with a sharp pain and ran red with a rivulet of blood.

He cursed and sucked at the wound to stem the bleeding as the downloading symbol continued to make its snaillike trail across the screen.

His heart pounded.

His head distorted time.

Each second seemed to take a minute, each minute an hour, until finally the first picture signaled its arrival.

He opened it.

It was in black and white, crystal clear.

The image showed a black metal frame taken against the background of a featureless white sky. The frame’s sparse diamond lattice was rigid with only the odd flourish in the metalwork to speak of a blacksmith seeking to impose some small signature of his skill on what was an ugly, brutal piece of ironwork.

The more Sarron studied the photograph, the more he understood that he was actually looking at a gate, in fact, set within a larger metal frame. It was slightly ajar. At its top, two separate metal rectangles were stacked one above the other. Within the rectangles were set letters. They stood out in strict silhouette against the white of the sky:

ARBEIT
MACHT FREI

Sarron had seen the words before, but couldn’t instantly recall where.

Confusion pushed him to the next image.

Putting his hand back on the grimy mouse, now smeared with his blood, he scrolled and clicked.

The next photograph revealed cast concrete posts that stretched lines of barbed wire above a deep trench. The wire curled over at the top, turning back in on itself. The ceramic bobbins that secured the wire to the posts told him that it was an electric fence. They too faced inward. A fence designed to keep people in, not out.

With a growing sense of panic, Sarron opened all the photographs Vollmer had forwarded. One after another the images stacked the screen, photograph after photograph of unspeakable tortures, of human experimentation, of starvation, of death piled high, of ovens—a sequence of horrors dealt as randomly as a pack of cards. Sarron flicked through every image, shock burning his stomach, his left eyelid uncontrollable.

His attention froze on one. It was of a man in a long overcoat wearing a feathered Tyrolean hat standing in front of a large yet simple map that covered a wall. The map was actually little more than a grey shadow, but its shape obviously represented all of Europe. Sarron read the names arranged around the man—Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Wewelsburg, Sachsenhausen, Mittelbau-Dora, Ravensbrück, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, and, at the very tip of the old man’s pointing finger, above a dot for Munich, Dachau. He looked closely at the face beneath the hat. It was the same man that he and Oleg Vishnevsky had killed.

Graf.

The next photo was of a small display panel attached to a wall, the bottom left corner of a larger image showing rows of striped prisoners on parade visible above it. The white rectangle, the legend for the bigger image, showed only a phrase in German with an English translation set below.

Sarron pulled his face in close to the computer, his nose almost touching the hot screen as he read it.

Sarron’s twitching eyes quickly flicked to the English translation below, seeking explanation.

The final picture was of Graf again. He was smiling back at the camera, raising his feathered hat slightly above his head as if in a salute from beyond the grave.

Sarron’s mind exploded like an egg hitting a concrete floor.