The car turned off the autobahn and descended a slip road into Garmisch where it slowly drove down the town’s picturesque main street. Continuing past an immense red brick barracks garrisoned by the US Army, the Mercedes finally turned down a side street to stop in front of a squat, chalet-style house.
At its door, they were met by Dieter Braun’s daughter, a neat, handsome woman who appeared younger than the midfifties she must have been. She greeted Graf in the Bavarian dialect, seemingly cordial yet formal. The pair talked on the doorstep and, after Graf had glanced a couple of times at Quinn without breaking the conversation, she switched to a simple yet well-structured English, holding his outstretched hand for slightly longer than was necessary. “I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Quinn. My father is in the sunroom. I will show you in. He is pleased you are coming. We do not get many visitors these days.”
She showed them into the immaculately tidy house. Not a single light was on, making it lonely and dark until they entered a bright sunroom to its rear. The room’s main window shone with a spectacular view of the jagged Wetterstein mountains. The Zugspitze massif and the spiky Waxenstein peak pushed up from pine-clad slopes, bleak and savage despite the almost suffocating warmth of the sunroom.
Turning back into the room, Quinn saw an ice axe identical to the one he was holding mounted on one of the walls. It was displayed with a coil of rope, an army field cap, and a tarnished metal plaque of a large edelweiss flower. Dieter Braun was sitting below it in an upright wicker chair pointed toward the window, his legs covered in a blanket. The old soldier looked all of his ninety-plus years. His remaining hair was white, combed back. His face was thin and proud, blue eyes still clear but red-rimmed, the skin a faint cream color, almost translucent. Transparent nasal cannulas were piping oxygen into him from a cylinder on a trolley set to the side of his chair. His breathing was labored, a faint rasp emitting from within his lungs. Quinn noticed that part of one of Braun’s ears was missing but the old soldier didn’t seem deaf. With their first steps into the room, the ancient man had immediately turned in his chair to take in the arrival of the collector with his battered attaché case. A faint smile had come to the corner of his lips as he looked at it.
Braun’s daughter gestured for them to sit and have coffee. She served it to Quinn and Graf from a round glass pot that was placed on the windowsill above a small burner that infused the room with a smell of coffee and methylated spirit. “Please don’t tire him too much. Even Papi is beginning to feel his years now. I have to go and get some things from the shops, his medicine too, so I will leave you to talk until I get back. I think then that will have been enough,” she said to them both. As she started to leave, she spoke somewhat more brusquely to her father, who waved her away with a dismissive, “Ja, ja, ja.”
Graf immediately started talking to Braun until he heard the front door shut; then he stood to remove a new bottle of Stolichnaya vodka from his case. He quickly poured the coffee from his own cup into a pot of geraniums and, taking a tissue from a box on a side table, wiped it out before filling it with the clear spirit. He passed the cup to Braun, who took a long, slow draught. As he did so, his eyes rolled up into his head, and he shuddered. When he opened them again, he stared straight at Quinn and began to speak to him in German. The voice was soft but still clear, broken only by Braun’s heavy breathing. Quinn couldn’t understand a word, looking to Graf and hunching his shoulders a little as if in question.
“Dieter is apologizing that he doesn’t speak English,” Graf responded. “He said that if they had won, you would be speaking German now, which would be easier for an old man like him. He says that a lot of things would have been easier if that idiot hadn’t sent them to Russia.”
The old soldier rolled his eyes at the delay of translation, taking another swig from the cup of vodka before his German filled the room again. He began to talk about the war, Graf’s accented English over Braun’s voice reminding Quinn of a Second World War documentary series he used to watch on TV as a child. When Quinn gave a sideways glance at the fact that Graf was already refilling the cup with vodka, the collector instantly translated the old man’s response to his look of concern: “Don’t be alarmed, Britischer. It won’t kill me. Dr. Graf always brings me a taste of Russia when he comes. I spent ten years in their gulags. A love of vodka was the only thing those bastards gave me that I wish to keep. I have often longed to be able to return the dust of their godforsaken roads and buildings that fills my lungs.”
Braun pointed to Quinn’s ice axe. “That’s an aschenbrenner. You know of him, of course, Aschenbrenner, the man known as ‘Himalaya Pete.’ He left two legacies, disgrace on Nanga Parbat when it was said he skied away from his Sherpas, leaving them to die, and his design for the ice axe, which we all used back then. It was Gebirgsjäger standard issue. I have one up there on the wall.” He raised his shaky hand to point back over his shoulder to the wall behind him. “They worked well in the hills and, with a few modifications, could be useful in hand-to-hand combat, although a sharpened trenching spade was always better.”
He moved the wavering hand to his side to reach for his spectacles, which were resting on a pile of black, leather-bound ledgers on a small table. He put them on with difficulty and then gestured to be given the axe. Passing it across to the outstretched hand, Quinn saw that on his ring finger Braun was wearing a silver ring, the design on it also an edelweiss.
Graf spoke some more to Braun before explaining to Quinn. “I have told him that we want to know if this axe brings back any memories. I said that we think that the ‘99’ on the shaft stands for a regiment, that the ‘J. B.’ on the other side are initials. Also that the swastika dates it to the Nazi years.”
For a while Dieter Braun just held the axe in both hands, slowly rotating the head and looking at it, lost in thought. Then he looked up at the savage mountains that filled his tall window. Outside, it had started to snow, the first hesitant flakes of autumn floating down into the garden.
Braun began to speak again, Graf translating as he went. “The 99th was one of our regiments. I was in the 98th, and with the 100th, the 79th, and the 54th, we made the 1st Gebirgsjäger Division based here in Garmisch. The Americans still occupy our barracks to this day. You passed them on the way here.”
Dieter Braun smiled grimly before continuing.
“I joined up when the 1st Division was formed in April 1938. I was twenty years old, a naive city boy who chose the Gebirgs because he wanted to do some skiing. Can you imagine how stupid that felt a few years later?” He shook his head slowly as if answering his own question.
“But the individual regiments were older than that. The 99th had existed since the Great War. It was a proud regiment, Bavarians mostly, tough mountain folk. They had little time for people like me from the city.”
He studied the initials “J. B.” again by holding the axe shaft almost against the tip of his nose and then pointed the collector to the stack of leather ledgers on the side table, Graf making a comment to Quinn that Braun said he couldn’t remember so many names these days, but the ledgers were old regimental rosters that might help.
The collector began to study the first of the books as the old soldier fell silent, content to drink his vodka and look out at the falling snow, the axe lying across his blanketed lap.
After ten minutes of silence, Graf looked up from the second of the ledgers and asked Braun something in German, conversing with no translation until he finally turned to Quinn. “In October 1938, three Gebirgsjäger were court-martialed for Treason against the Reich. Their names were Kurt Müller, Gunter Schirnhoffer, and Josef Becker. They were all Heeresbergführer within the 99th. A Heeresbergführer is an army mountain guide, Neil. Dieter says that although he didn’t know them personally, he does remember the scandal. It was a huge disgrace for the entire division. SS troops were assigned to their barracks for a long time after to keep an eye on them all. Evidently the three were working for a smuggling ring based in Munich. Whenever they could get away from the regiment, which was often as they did a lot of mountain training, they moved contraband in and out of Switzerland. They did it by going over the highest, most inaccessible mountain paths in the Alps. He thinks there is a detail of their charges in another of his books.”
Braun looked at Quinn and, with a finger, beckoned him to move close. Taking the Englishman’s arm, he pointed it weakly to the sheer north face of the mountain that rose dramatically up beyond the sunroom’s window and spoke directly to him. Quinn followed his raised hand to consider the treacherous wall of rock himself. Even with his experienced eye he struggled to make out a climbable line.
“Dieter says that now that he thinks about it, he recalls that one of the three was an outstanding climber. Not long after he had joined up, he and the other new recruits were permitted to break from their drill to watch the man climb the face he is pointing you to. He did it totally alone without any ropes or support. He says it was an incredible feat to have witnessed.”
“Which of the three was it?”
“I am surprised you need to ask. J. B., of course … Josef Becker.”
Looking again at the sheer wall of rock, Quinn said aloud, “That would be a very extreme climb even today,” before asking, “What were the three smuggling when they were caught?”
“Oh, they were efficient with their time—they were German, after all. Jewish refugees on the way out; mostly foreign currency, some cigarettes on the way back in.”
“What does he think happened to them?”
Graf turned back to Braun, asking the same question in German.
The old man laughed before replying.
“Dieter says whenever the scandal was referred to within the 1st Division, it was always said that the three were sent to put a swastika on the top of Mount Sinai as punishment.”
Quinn raised his eyebrows in question.
“It’s schadenfreude, Neil Quinn. I thought that was a German concept with which you British were familiar. It was their black joke for the fate of the three.”
“Which was really?”
“Either the firing squad at Dachau or the guillotine at Stadelheim Prison for crimes such as theirs. They were never sure which.”
Dieter Braun said something more, as if asking Quinn a question, forcing the Englishman to look again to the collector for translation.
“Dieter says it’s likely that he’ll be seeing them again soon. He wants to know if you would like him to ask which it was.”