Breitenauer Strasse 21a, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany
September 19, 2009
1:00 p.m.
Visibly tiring, the old soldier directed the collector to more books and albums of photographs stored in a stacked bookcase, requesting that he also turn on a tape recorder on one of the shelves. A marching tune began to play, instantly turning the room’s clock back to a different time.
“Es war ein edelweiss, ein kleines edelweiss,” long-dead mountain troopers sang as Braun, his cup empty once more, began to doze. Fearing the cup would drop from his hand, Quinn put it on the table and then studied the sheer face of the Waxenstein again.
It really is a hell of a climb.
Graf interrupted his contemplation of what it would be like to solo such a wall by passing him a sepia-tinged photograph. “That’s a group photo of all the Garmisch Gebirgsjäger’s noncommissioned officers being officially reissued Nazi Heeresbergführer badges in the spring of ’38. See if you can find Becker in the photograph. There’s a magnifying glass in my case. Next to it, you will also find another batch of my own photographs; they show the different German expeditions that went to the Himalayas in the late ’30s. See if you can then identify Becker in any of those.”
When Quinn opened Graf’s attaché case, he was shocked to see a black Luger pistol lying in the main pocket of the case. Carefully taking out the photos and the magnifying glass alongside it, Quinn began to study the lines of Heeresbergführer arranged in the old photograph. It took some time to match the face to the name from the many listed on the mount below but eventually he found it.
Quinn analyzed the details of the young man that bulged out at him through the thick lens. Compared to the others standing alongside him, Josef Becker appeared to have been quite short, slight even. About twenty-seven or twenty-eight, Quinn thought, but possibly younger. He was fine-featured and tanned, his eyes noticeably bright. A shock of light-colored hair pushed from under the peak of his field cap, which was tilted slightly back off his forehead and combined with a faint smile to give him an irreverent, almost humorous look: the look of the typical, happy-go-lucky climber in fact.
Moving on to the Himalayan climbing team photographs, Quinn finally stopped at one labeled, “Schmidt, 1939.” There, standing at the end of a row of very amateur-looking climbers assembled in front of a building called the Hotel Nanga Parbat, was the same Josef Becker.
“Yes, he’s here with Schmidt’s expedition in 1939.”
Quinn studied this second image of Becker. He was without either his cap or his smile this time. Stood slightly apart from the others, he looked cold and determined, his face thinner, much older than the year between the two photographs.
“So he went with Schmidt,” Graf said. He thought for a moment. “Go back to that original Heeresbergführer photo, find Schirnhoffer and Müller, and see if either of them also made it to Darjeeling with Schmidt’s expedition.”
It took some studying, but Quinn could only conclude that they hadn’t.
“I am thinking that perhaps Becker might have gone to Everest with only that Sherpa you mentioned, just as Maurice Wilson did a few years before,” Graf said as he continued to read from a large, black leather–covered folder. “What an impossible task.”
“Yes, I know. And it killed Wilson. Becker must have known it would probably kill him.”
“But, think about it, Neil. Becker had been caught smuggling Jews. In those days Treason against the Reich meant automatic court martial followed by the death penalty, whoever you were. Normally there would have been no possibility of a reprieve, but maybe someone high up did offer him a deal to climb the mountain instead. As I have said, anything was possible, however horrible it may seem to us today. I have his charge sheet here in this ledger. It lists the family of Jews that Becker was caught smuggling. The youngest, Ilsa Rosenberg, was only seven years old. What a fucking time it was.”
Graf’s use of the expletive shocked Quinn, who had grown accustomed to the man’s considered eloquence. It brought a darkness into the room.
“What would have happened to them?”
“Shot, I imagine. Men, women, children, it wouldn’t have mattered. Maybe they were brought down and sent to a camp. The Bone Mill—Mauthausen, the Austrian concentration camp—opened around that time, although I think that one was more for political prisoners. Whatever, their ultimate fate would have been the same. Death. Talking of concentration camps, we should be going. I want you to see the Dachau Memorial Site on the way back to Munich. If that doesn’t make you understand what we risk with this matter, nothing will.”
The sound of the front door opening set the collector moving quickly to pour a new drop of coffee into Braun’s cup, swill it around to mask the vodka, and then hastily return the now two-thirds-empty bottle to his case with the ledger and the Heeresbergführer photo. After, he leaned down behind the old soldier’s chair to click his oxygen up a notch.
“It will help him sleep a little better,” he said to Quinn, who was looking again out of the room’s wide picture window for a final view of the cliff that Becker had climbed. It was rapidly disappearing, the top already lost in the low cloud that was now pushing down into the valley.
Braun’s daughter seemed disappointed when Graf told her they couldn’t stay longer as they didn’t want to be caught by the snow. It was a thin excuse. Her face dropped its guard for a second, revealing to Quinn a hopeless, faintly pleading look. She was trapped in her duty to her father.
It won’t be for much longer, Quinn thought as she quietly waved them on their way.