At the glass door of Graf’s shop, Quinn braced his hangover for its cacophonous doorbell, only to be startled by the blast of a car horn exactly as his hand touched the handle.
Cursing loudly, he turned to see the collector behind the wheel of a black Mercedes 500SL, the coupe’s long nose poking out from an arch on the far side of the courtyard. The powerful car immediately rumbled out onto the cobblestones, making a circle to stop beside him. The passenger door clicked open, and the collector beckoned Quinn into the car as he got out, saying, “I need to get a few things from my shop before we go.”
Quinn folded himself into the low-slung seat, inserting the old ice axe and his daypack with the Leica camera inside behind it. The sickly sweet sound of Julie Andrews singing “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music surrounded him as he closed the door and waited.
After a few minutes, Graf returned, placing his attaché case behind his seat.
Quinn raised an eyebrow at him. “Julie Andrews? Really?”
“Not a favorite? Oh dear. I thought it might get you in the correct mood to think about mountains and Nazis.”
The collector touched a hidden button on the steering wheel.
The music jumped to the husky voice of Dietrich singing “Lili Marlene.”
“Easier on your hangover perhaps?” he said, smiling at Quinn then pushing another button. The large, multicylindered engine reawakened and the car began to roll forward, wide tires rippling on the stones and crunching on the salt already cast in anticipation of the icy winter months ahead.
“I am impressed that you wanted to make a start so soon after our dinner, if not a little excited, I must say. In the event you did correctly determine that I was only a pretend prince of darkness, I took the liberty of planning a little trip for us to meet someone in Garmisch. I think he will finally rid you of your secret hope that the axe belonged to some brutish Ivan or Chinaman with a penchant for secondhand climbing equipment. You did bring the camera?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We’ll need that this afternoon.”
The sleek Mercedes began to travel quickly through the central Munich traffic.
“Despite my little jokes and tales of the macabre, I feel that I have been very open with my proposition to you, Neil. Now it is time for you to be the same with me. I’d like to hear the full story of the ice axe. We have a while before our first destination, so spare not the tiniest detail.”
Quinn paused and then, pushing through his fatigue, proceeded to tell Graf the whole saga from beginning to end.
The collector listened, quite still, with the attention of a heron studying a pond. As requested, Quinn did not spare anything, telling Graf not only about finding the axe but also about Nelson Tate Junior, Pemba, Dawa, Soraya, and his suspicion that Sarron was on his way to Munich at that very moment. The only thing about which he was deliberately vague was the original location of the axe, being no more precise than saying it was found on the Second Step as things unraveled with the kid.
By the time he was finished, the Mercedes was punching its way down the fast lane of the autobahn, passing all other cars as if they were standing still, the Bavarian Alps rising up in front of them. Thinking on what he had been told for a few minutes, Graf said, “Your story is actually stranger and more violent than I expected but I can’t say that disappoints me. Abyssus abyssum invocat, as they say. Am I right that you mentioned that there was the string of a flag on the shaft of the axe? I don’t recall seeing that when you showed it to me yesterday.”
“It was very weatherworn. I think it came off when Sarron’s thugs beat me with it in Kathmandu.”
“Ouch. It spoke to you of the summit, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So what I was imagining in the beer hall last night is actually possible: a swastika flying over the summit of Mount Everest. It presents a most exquisite irony, don’t you think? The Everest world fixated on finding Sandy Irvine’s body and the camera that could finally prove that he and Mallory gloriously made it to the top in 1924, when you could have found proof of a somewhat different and distinctly less palatable first summit, long before that of Hillary and Tenzing. Beautiful.”
“It’s possible, but as I have said, I only found the axe.”
“But perhaps there is more still waiting up there on the Second Step?”
Quinn pushed his mind back to the gorak cave and his desperate struggle to save Nelson Tate Junior. He saw again that mound of snow and ice rising inside it, the glimpse of something dark within.
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“Well I am,” Graf replied, “and I am taking you to meet someone who might be able to tell us some more about all this. Dieter Braun is his name, a rare individual these days, Neil Quinn, because he is an eyewitness of those times. He must be at least ninety years old, maybe more, but he’s still mentally alert. He says it is only because he is cursed. But his curse may be our fortune.”
“How so?”
“At night he begs for old age to take his memories.”
“And it doesn’t?”
“No, and some of them are very bad indeed.”
“How do you know him?”
“He returned to Garmisch in the late ’50s when he was finally released by the Russians. He became somewhat of a historian for his regiment and their role in the war. He says he owed it to the many who didn’t return. Dieter is not so active now, but occasionally he contacts me with an item he wants to sell or a story he wants to tell. I don’t think he has much longer to live.”
Graf accelerated the car still harder as if fearful that Braun might die before they could get there.
“But then again, he has survived so much. He went into Poland in ’39, followed by the Low Countries and France. He even trained to scale your White Cliffs of Dover until Operation Sealion was abandoned and they were sent to take Yugoslavia through the mountains instead. In the summer of ’41, they arrived at the ostfront, the worst front of all. By the time Stalingrad finally collapsed onto the remains of the one million soldiers that died there, the war was lost, even if Hitler didn’t want to admit it. Braun was one of the few from his regiment who survived the rear guard action all the way back to the mountains of Southeastern Austria. There, they finally surrendered, only to be transported back to Russian prison camps and used as slave labor to rebuild what they had destroyed, easily forgotten by a world that had no desire to remember them. Even fewer returned a second time.”
Quinn said nothing, considering the misty German countryside flashing by, taking in its soft green farmland dotted with small animal sheds like dollhouses, feeling the weight of all the death and suffering that had sprung from such a gentle-looking land. His thoughts drifted on to Soraya, Dawa, Pemba. Involuntarily, he sighed aloud before saying, “But if there really is anything else up there, shouldn’t it just be left alone? Too many people have been hurt already.”
“Perhaps, if we could be sure that sooner or later it would not be found by someone else. You know very well that they are still looking all over the North Face for the body of Sandy Irvine. How long until the searchers arrive at the same place as you?”
“Perhaps, but why are you really so keen to get your hands on it?”
“Because I not only want to possess this discovery for myself but also to keep it away from others, to stop it becoming an icon to people who should receive no encouragement or further inspiration.”
“But are there really that many today?”
“Neil, I have heard it said that here in Germany, one in ten under the age of twenty now regularly visits some form of neo-Nazi website. Maybe this is inaccurate, but even if it is only one in a hundred or even a thousand, surely that is still unacceptable given our past? And it is not only here—Greece, Bosnia, Russia, the Ukraine—they are all experiencing revivals of the far right in some form or another. If certain people within those groups became aware of what we might have, they would stop at nothing or no one to use it to their advantage. If that were to result in the persecution of a single person, then we would hold responsibility for that. Sometimes outwardly insignificant things become difficult to stop. You, of all people, should understand the dangers of rolling a small snowball down a large hill …”