It had rained a little while they were in the shop. Quinn followed the collector, now clad in a long green bergstock coat and a Bavarian hat with a pinch of spotted feathers pinned to one side, as he quickly led them across the wet cobblestones of the courtyard and out onto the Theatinerhof. To sidestep the snakes of homebound office workers and shoppers slowly moving through the wet, shiny center of Munich, Graf quickly guided Quinn up a narrow side street and on through a maze of alleys and small squares until they arrived at a crowded beer hall.
The huge, vaulted room was filled with such a fog of warmth, food, and people that it made Quinn appreciate how cold and hungry he was from the day’s long ride from Saas Fee to Munich. They took seats at the vacant end of one of the long, crowded tables, and Graf quickly ordered for the both of them, having confirmed that Quinn accepted his recommendation of the spit-roasted knuckle of pork with potato dumplings. Tall steins of weissbier arrived soon after. While Quinn took his first eager gulp, Graf began to talk again. “I was born on the night of November 9, 1938.” He stopped for effect, but the date meant nothing to Quinn. “You might know it better as ‘Kristallnacht.’” He paused again.
This time Quinn nodded, querying, “The night of the broken glass?”
“The very same,” Graf answered. “As I came mewling into my new world, it was, at that very moment, unleashing horror on the Jews of both this country and Austria. That evening the full extent of what the Nazis intended for them was revealed without hesitation or remorse. Many were killed, and thousands more were imprisoned. Synagogues were burned. Jewish businesses destroyed. Quite a night to be born, don’t you think?”
Quinn looked back at Graf and shook his head in what he deemed a silent yet sympathetic reply, but still felt uncertain as to where the conversation was going.
“I will give you further food for thought as we await our meal when I tell you that my father was an officer in the SS, and my dear mother was very proud of him. He was doing well for himself and his young family, which now included me, alongside my two elder siblings.” After an almost preparatory sip of the weissbier, he added, “I have often wondered, when I consider the many sins of my existence, if the biggest might have been that my parents were actually proud I was born during the Kristallnacht. I sometimes try to imagine it: the shattered shop windows, the Stars of David daubed in still-wet paint on the walls, the dead Jews on the pavements, my parents inside, with me—the innocent newborn, swaddled, oblivious to the insidious—”
Graf’s voice was suddenly lost amidst a deafening cheer from a group of soccer fans assembled at a number of tables on the far side of the beer hall. Bedecked in the same blue and white harlequins worked into the designs on the beer hall’s painted ceilings, they all stood collectively toasting success in that evening’s coming game with a clanking of huge, full beer glasses before breaking out into a clapping, call-and-response chant from the terraces. With a look of irritation, Graf waited until they settled and he could be heard again.
“My father was destined to die somewhere in the Ukraine in 1944. His bones must still be there, I suppose, slowly crumbling into the angry ground of that much-abused country. At the end of the war, as the family of an SS officer, we were interned in a former concentration camp. A typhus breakout during that first brutal winter of ‘peace’ took both my brother and sister and crushed what was left of my mother’s broken heart. She had hung herself by the summer. It is still somewhat disappointing to me that my own robust survival was not enough to inspire her to pursue her own.”
He stopped and took another drink.
“I will not depress you further with additional details of my suitably tragic start in this world as it is not courteous to completely ruin your appetite. I only wish you to get a glimpse of why I grew up naturally attracted to the darker sides of life. It is not because I am a diabolist or a Nazi or a pervert. Whilst I will admit to having tried to be all three at various times in my life, ultimately such devotions prove impossible if your horrific early life is a daily reminder of their inherent futility.”
Seeing Quinn’s glass was empty, he called for it to be refilled.
Quinn made no attempt to stop him, content to simply drink and get warm as the collector continued to talk.
“I do, however, admit to greatly envying the single-mindedness of such fanaticisms. They offer an envious simplicity, do they not? Take those soccer dullards, for example, living only for the next game. It anesthetizes them entirely from their unloving wives and spoiled children, their daily disappointments and failures. How pleasant must that be?
“I see it and envy it also in you, Neil Quinn. You are a fanatic for the mountain. You go to it. You start at the bottom. You get to the top. You go down again. You go home. Then you start all over again with the next. What could be a simpler, less-cluttered existence than that?”
Feeling the beer beginning to lift his spirits, Quinn replied, “Yes, well, that certainly used to be the case, even if I am not so sure now. However, like those Bayern fans, I’ll drink to such simple past glories in the hope that it might inspire them to return.” He raised his refilled glass to the collector. “Cheers!”
“Ein prosit der gemütlichkeit, as we say here, Mr. Quinn.” They both drank before Graf continued to speak. “I personally gave up trying to lose myself in cults and creeds a long time ago but strangely my attraction to the items related to them remained. I found that the objects from such worlds were heavy with traces of previous sufferings or sacrifices that, in some cases, were dark enough to better my own. Surrounding myself with such things gave me an unexpected comfort, so I set about amassing a personal collection sufficient to drown out my own inner demons with the screams of their own ancient traumas. It is my pride and joy, at more difficult moments, my salvation.”
The arrival of the waiter with their food broke Graf’s flow. For a while they quietly ate, allowing Quinn to also digest what Graf was telling him. Only when their plates held just a pair of stripped bones did Graf resume his monologue.
“As you can see from my successful shop, I am not alone in my passion. My eccentric collecting has become a profitable business that keeps me well. I am the darling of Munich’s rent boys with my odd tastes and my full wallet, much to the faithful Dirk Schneider’s continual disappointment.” He looked at Quinn as if hoping for an expression of shock. “My shop thrives, Mr. Quinn, because many people now look to the esoteric and the profane to try and explain their increasing confusion with our modern world. They desperately seek lost civilizations, ancient races, alternative religions, alien beings from other worlds—the ‘occult’ in the truest sense of the word, the hidden, the secret, the obscure …
“Some say it is evil, others that it is nonsense; yet they all miss the real point. It is the trend itself that presages the new nightmares yet to come. The very same ingredients I have described underwrote many of the Nazi beliefs that brought the world to its knees and killed more than sixty million people. Despite the benefits my business brings me, I would be lying if I did not say that it worries me that we are starting to walk such a tightrope again. Europe is financially bankrupt, yet the gap between rich and poor grows daily. Its countries resent each other bitterly behind their feint of unity. The religions hate each other even more. People, good and bad, migrate without control. Old recipes for new disasters—wouldn’t you say? Never forget that ‘civilization,’ when all is said and done, is only a thin veneer.”
He waved a slightly crooked finger around the room.
“Look around you at this very pleasant restaurant full of happy, smiling people, full of the gemütlichkeit of my toast to you. ‘Coziness’ is, I think, the correct translation. Munich is famous for it.” The same finger then stabbed up at the ceiling of the beer hall. “You should know, Mr. Quinn, that Adolf Hitler made his first major political speech here, upstairs, in this very beer hall. Think about what happened to the coziness then. Much more recently we saw in the Balkans, not more than a few hundred kilometers from here, how we are all still just fifteen minutes away from anarchy. And anarchy can never be a constant. It is, by its very nature, a lawless vacuum that will soon be filled with extremism of one form or another. Every time we build a pyre of alternative beliefs and kindle it with anarchy, it always ends up burning with dictatorship and racism. History has shown them, time and again, to be very violent flames.”
Graf stopped to draw a breath and stared at Quinn through his sparkling eyeglasses.
“I am lecturing, aren’t I? But, then again, so I must. Despite the fact that you are nearly two meters tall, you remind me of a small boy playing with a box of matches in a hay barn.”
Even though the remark piqued a little, Quinn replied amiably, “Dr. Graf, you are undoubtedly a fascinating man, and you order a good dinner, but perhaps your own experiences are causing you to read more into my climbing and the old ice axe than is really necessary.”
“I disagree completely. Whilst I myself gave up going to the mountains to hide long ago, for me they remain, alongside war and the occult, as a place where I can always find the bleaker dimensions of the human experience. Think of all the people who have died on them and for what? You even call the upper reaches of the very highest mountains, that ghost world above eight thousand meters where the air is so thin no human can survive long without bottled oxygen, ‘the death zone.’ Originally that was a Swiss-German term, die todeszone, which, now I think about it, sounds even more sinister.
“Whatever way you look at it, mountains offer a rich vein of despair and misery; that is one of the reasons they so captivate us. Mount Everest especially carries more than its fair share of desperate memories and, as such, has long been worthy of my particular interest. In fact, its status as the highest mountain in the world means it can easily hold everyone’s attention. So why don’t we play with that idea a little?”
Quinn thought the man was irrepressible, but, despite all his talk of death and destruction, he was actually enjoying listening to him. With a smile, he conceded, “Well, I am sure we are going to, whether I want to or not.”
“It is thus, I am afraid. Do you know, Neil, that one of the earliest Himalayan climbers was none other than Aleister Crowley, the greatest diabolist your country, perhaps the world, has ever produced, the self-proclaimed ‘Great Beast’?”
This was news to Quinn.
“The pioneering Mr. Crowley went to K2, or Mount Godwin Austen, as it was more often called in those days, in 1902 with Eckenstein and then on to Kangchenjunga three years later with Guillarmod. It is hardly surprising, given what we now know about Mr. Crowley, but evidently he was a somewhat disagreeable climbing partner. He carried a pistol with which he threatened anyone who annoyed him. Apparently, on Kangchenjunga he refused to give the porters any boots, saying they were unneccessary as he had protected their bare feet with satanic spells. You should try both techniques on your next trip to Everest.”
“The gun might be useful, but even if the Sherpas are very superstitious, they wouldn’t buy the one about the boots today,” Quinn joked in return.
“I suspect you are right, but remember these were very different days. When, during the Kangchenjunga expedition, the remainder of Crowley’s team insisted on climbing in the afternoon, something our wicked wizard correctly objected to because of the greater risk of avalanche, they fell, and one climber and three porters were killed. Crowley is reported as having said, ‘A mountain accident of this sort is one of the things for which I have no sympathy whatsoever,’ and proceeded to continue sitting in his camp, drinking his tea and writing. An amusing little anecdote, nothing more, and soon after Crowley gave up on the mountains to turn his attention to full-time necromancy and sex magick, to which he was obviously much better suited.”
The collector drew breath for a moment as if searching for space to conjure his own spell.
“But let’s just imagine that instead Crowley had directed his attentions to Everest, and then through some strange combination of luck and ability, perhaps even with a bit of a push from Beelzebub himself, had actually become the first person to reach the summit. What would that have done to our perception of him, of his abilities, of his beliefs? More importantly, what would it have done for his acolytes? Imagine how it would have inspired them. A ridiculous example perhaps, but it raises an interesting point, don’t you think?”
The waitress served yet more beer, even though Graf’s glass was still mostly full.
“So now, as they say in Italy, I come to the dunque of my little soliloquy. Here I am, Dr. Bernhard Graf, unlimited in twisted fascinations, seeking the dire in everything, including Mount Everest. A person who has always wondered why it took my people until 1978 to put one of their nation on the highest point of the world—a reticence to dominate that is strangely out of character.
“Then there is you, Mr. Neil Quinn, the high-altitude climber who sells me old things he finds high on Everest, who asks me about a German ice axe a few days after he returns from climbing to its summit once again, at the same time feeding alpine forum sites with leading questions, clearly blundering his way toward a story I have long suspected—a secret that, like all the best secrets perhaps, should not be told or, at least, not too widely. A secret that also, if true, would be the pride of my collection.
“I know you will have considered it, so let us imagine another scenario together: the image of a climber on the top of Everest raising a swastika flag. Think of it. Think also of what it could have done before the war. If you need help imagining it, we can actually consider another of your beloved Seven Summits to help. The mountain of Elbrus is in the Caucasus and, I understand, now a sought-after climb as the highest peak in Continental Europe and therefore one of the seven you climbers seek to collect.”
“It is.”
“Well, did you know that during Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s ultimately ill-fated attempt to invade Russia, his elite mountain troops, the very same Gebirgsjäger who, surprise, surprise, bore an ice axe identical to the one now in your possession, climbed Elbrus and planted a swastika on its summit?”
Quinn shook his head as the collector continued.
“Hitler was actually said to be furious when he heard about it. He considered it a waste of effort when the Russian tide was beginning to turn so unfavorably for him at Stalingrad. But a few years earlier, I suspect, it would have made him somewhat happier. Wouldn’t he have greeted them with handshakes and medals as he did the conquerors of the Eiger Nordwand? Surely a picture of the swastika on the summit of Mount Everest would have delighted him even more. It would have been the greatest example of the force of Nazi will imaginable, a tool of incredible power in the hands of Goebbels and his ministry of propaganda. Think further. Imagine what such an image might even do today in the wrong hands. It might not kill sixty million people, but it could inspire further mayhem in certain quarters somewhere out there in our increasingly anarchic world. You need to consider this, Mr. Quinn.”
“But there is no record of such a thing ever happening. No mention, in fact, anywhere. I have looked hard.”
The collector reached down and opened his attaché case. Pulling out a thin file, he opened it onto the table to reveal pages of handwritten notes and an old newspaper cutting inserted in a clear plastic sleeve. Passing the sleeve to Quinn, Graf explained what he was handing over.
“I stumbled on this editorial many years ago by accident. It is the reason why I have always suspected that the Nazi leadership attempted to climb Mount Everest in 1939 and why I too have searched since, mostly in vain, for the tiniest further detail. It is the very reason why I buy old oxygen cylinders from people like you who regularly visit the high parts of that mountain, hoping that it might one day produce another clue, and finally, it did.”
Quinn looked at the old cutting. Through the clear plastic cover, heavy black print was blocked all over the browning newspaper. Even though the text meant nothing to him, it appeared sinister and perverse. In a grainy photo at the foot of the article, he slowly recognized the faces of the two men pictured meeting a stern-faced Adolf Hitler: Kasparek and Harrer, the first to climb the North Face of the Eiger.
“I took the liberty of quickly translating it when I knew you were on your way to see me,” Graf said as he handed across another sheet of paper covered in elegant copperplate handwriting.
Quinn quickly read the collector’s translation of the article, entitled “An Insult of Mountainous Proportion.”
Digesting the contents, he put down the notes and asked, “So you think that Hitler would have listened to an appeal such as this and responded with an attempt on Everest?”
“Hitler? Göring? Goebbels? Who knows? The only thing that I have always been sure of is that by 1939 the Nazi leadership were capable of anything. Lozowick called them ‘the alpinists of evil,’ and I have always suspected it was more than metaphor even if further proof eluded me.”
“Well I’m sorry to disappoint, but the only thing I found was the axe and anyone could have taken that up there.”
“I suspect not, actually, and that is why I have brought you here. I would like to pay you handsomely to go back and retrieve whatever else is there. I am hoping particularly that you might find one of these.”
Reaching again into his case, Graf lifted out a bundle in red velvet cloth and put it on the table.
Opening it as if unpeeling a fruit, he revealed a vintage Leica camera.