Apartment E, 57 Sukhra Path, Kathmandu, Nepal
June 5, 2009
11:55 a.m.
Quinn ducked into the entrance of the old Rana Palace building, shaking himself like a wet dog before taking off his jacket. Ascending the stairs to the third-floor apartment, the taste of Japanese whiskey still on his tongue, the post-climb ache burning in his shins and thighs the higher he got, he slowly left the deluge behind. Arriving on the coconut mat in front of the white gloss-painted door with the brass “E” in the center, it was as if he had also left Asia behind.
The instant he knocked, Sanjeev Gupta opened the door and let him in, taking the soggy jacket from Quinn’s hand in the same deft movement. Inside, as always, the apartment was an oasis of English calm. The flower prints, the shelves lined with colorful mountaineering books, the dishes of potpourri, the stark line of alphabetized grey filing cabinets that ran along one wall, the aloof black cat skulking in a corner, they all combined to make it feel like the headmistress’ rooms at some elite girls’ school in Surrey.
Henrietta Richards looked up at Neil from her upright chair in the center of the main living room, her lap covered in papers. To her side was a table laden with bound notebooks and loose-leaf files. In a corner on a desk, Quinn could see her computer; its screen burned vividly with a report that she and Gupta must have been working on. Observing him over the top of her half-moon reading glasses, taking in his battered and bruised appearance alongside a faint smell of whiskey and rainwater, Henrietta said, “Hello, Neil. Excuse me if I don’t get up, but as you can see, I am rather in the middle of something. You can sit there. Would you like some tea? Milk, no sugar, isn’t it? Sanjeev will do the honors.”
“Henrietta, yes. Thank you,” Quinn said, sitting in the empty chair in front of her. When Sanjeev handed him the tea in a flower-patterned porcelain cup and saucer, it looked ridiculous in his big hands, still calloused and raw from the climb.
“Neil, I’m sorry to drag you here so soon after your return to Kathmandu. I’m sure you need to rest but I have been asked to look into what happened to Nelson Tate Junior by the US authorities in Nepal,” Henrietta said, changing her tone and quickly getting to the point.
“I suspected as much, Henrietta. I understand the need for clarity,” he replied. Setting down his tea, Quinn then pulled out the draft email of explanation from his day sack. He passed it across to her. “I thought it best to try and write the whole damn mess all down.”
Henrietta took the pages. When she saw there were five, all filled with type, she turned to Gupta and said, “Sanjeev, can you pass me a copy of my book?” Sanjeev quickly handed her a thick hardback book. The dust jacket read, “From Picadilly to the Sky: The British Quest to Climb Everest, 1921–1953 by Henrietta Richards.”
She passed the heavy book to Quinn almost as if in return for his note, saying, “Neil, I want to carefully read your email while I have you here, so why don’t you take a look at my latest while you’re waiting.”
Beginning to read, she quickly stopped and looked at Quinn.
“Have you sent this already?”
“No. It’s just a draft at this stage.”
“Good. My advice is to hold it back. From what I am hearing, Nelson Tate Senior is not a particularly reasonable man and anything you send him is likely to be little more than fodder for his lawyers, who are going to twist your words in any way they can. I already know that Sarron is saying you abandoned the boy and I can understand your desire to explain yourself, but you should let it be through an independent source like me rather than directly, however uncomfortable that makes you. Obviously that assumes you didn’t desert the boy, something your note will confirm I presume?”
“Of course, Henrietta. Frankly I would rather it was me still up there, not him.”
“That’s a noble sentiment, Neil, but you’re not, so you need to get ready for the legal onslaught that is undoubtedly going to come your way. You won’t be the first guide to be sued for losing a client on Everest.”
“I know. Ironically I studied law at Bristol University and worked at Peckett, Cross & Avon in London for six months in 1990 before I quit to become a mountain guide.”
“Yes, you told me that once before. I suspect it’s not going to be much help. Tate is telling the US ambassador that he is going to be utterly relentless in punishing whoever was responsible for his son’s demise. I also know that Sarron has already filed a report in Lhasa with the Chinese, and, whilst I am unable to get my hands on it, I am sure it is consistent with what he has been telling anyone who will listen—that the responsibility is yours. This whole affair is going to get even messier than it is already, so given that Sarron is really not my favorite cup of tea let me read this carefully now and see what I can do to get to the truth. Have a look at my new book while you wait—it might restore your faith in the mountain a little.”
At first Quinn found it hard to concentrate on the meticulously detailed hardback, distracted by the intensity with which Henrietta was studying his email. With a red pen, she was making notes and marks next to every paragraph, leaving him feeling as if he was having his poorly done homework marked in front of him. Wishing his life was still that simple, he reopened the thick book to the section of photographs in the center.
Quickly flicking through the images of tweed-jacketed English gentlemen backdropped by mountain monasteries or taking tea in the shadow of Everest, he arrived at the final picture to see that it was the classic image of Tenzing on the summit in 1953. As he looked again at the very picture that had started him on his own journey to the mountain, it struck him painfully that his Everest career was over, whatever the outcome of that meeting. The thought made him shut the book and wait in silence instead.
When Henrietta finally finished studying his note she said, “It’s thorough, I’ll give you that. Can you send it to me electronically?”
“Given what you have already said, should I do that?”
“You can trust me, Neil.” Holding up the note, she asked, “Dawa and Pemba will corroborate all this I assume?”
“Yes.”
“Well that’s good, because I will be seeing them also. I must say that the thing that worries me is that Tate Junior’s death is not clear-cut. Do you think that Sarron’s oxygen was defective?”
The question shocked Quinn because he hadn’t mentioned Pemba’s speculation about it in his report, focusing only on the hard facts and the timeline of their climb as best he could recall.
“I didn’t say that in my notes.”
“No, Neil, you didn’t. But that is what they are saying on the street.”
Quinn shrugged his shoulders. “I’m really not sure. Something was wrong with the kid’s system on the summit even if I must say that mine was working perfectly. When we got down to the Glacier Camp, Pemba was saying he thought some of the cylinders were defective but as you’ll have read in my email he didn’t actually use his on the way up, trying for a summit without Os when he wasn’t feeling that well which really didn’t help matters. I rather put his comments down to trying to deflect attention from his own error. Dawa wouldn’t say much on the subject but maybe the Sherpas did talk more about it amongst themselves. You know how they are. Anyway we left the kid’s cylinder on the summit next to my ice axe so there’s no way to get it now and check. Personally, I think it was more a case of one of those days when little things start to go wrong and slowly but surely everything snowballs out of control.”
“Do you think the summit bonus might have clouded your judgment at any point during the expedition?”
There it was again—another thing he had made no mention of in his email.
Quinn began to feel uneasy.
“No, even if Sarron did become slightly obsessive about it, but I suppose it was a lot of money.”
“How much money, Neil?”
“One hundred thousand dollars; Sarron promised me ten percent.”
Henrietta tutted once loudly at him and then very deliberately shook her head.
“Actually, Neil, you are on the low side with that. Tate Senior is a billionaire. The Kathmandu rumor mills, whose sources, I assume, are predominantly Sarron’s many creditors, think that the summit bonus was actually five hundred thousand dollars. Even Pashi the barber could have told you that.”
She watched Quinn as the information sank in. His eyes closed a little, and his face stiffened, revealing to her that only then did the whole performance on the summit finally make sense to him.
“Well, however much it was, it won’t be paid,” Quinn replied with a grim shake of his head. “The kid is dead and I’m sure that Tate Senior is going to want his pound of flesh from all of us in return, as you say. Frankly, I wonder if he isn’t right too.”
Henrietta paused and then angling her head slightly said, “Tell me about that old ice axe you mentioned finding on the Second Step.”
“It’s just an old axe. Lucky for me, I guess, that I found it when I did, but beyond that I can’t see it’s really relevant to the big picture.”
“It’s not George Leigh Mallory’s, is it?”
Quinn shook his head quickly, revealing his disbelief, a little frustration even, that she was thinking about details like that given the greater scheme of things.
The woman really is bloody relentless.
“No, Henrietta. I don’t think it is. It’s just an old axe, anyone could have left it up there.”