Guy’s Hospital, Southwark, London, England
October 5, 2009
6:15 p.m. (British Summer Time)
Martin Emmerich had been a serious challenge to Henrietta, but she prevailed. With every questioning, Quinn had stuck to his “no memory” line, more often than not with Henrietta sitting alongside him as a representative of the British authorities. With a serene smile etched onto her lips, she similarly deflected Emmerich’s every attempt to get to the truth of what Quinn had really been doing in Munich.
Once, in his fury at their constant stonewalling, Emmerich, a patient man, completely lost his temper. Screaming at them both, he pointed out that it was only because of him that Quinn was even alive. “And for that I will be eternally grateful to you,” Henrietta had replied, “particularly, I must say, as it gives me the possibility to kill him in the future, which may well be necessary if he doesn’t stop causing me so much trouble.”
Her comment had only enraged the German police officer even more. Emmerich did not find Henrietta Richards quaint or amusing. He didn’t understand who she was, what she was even doing there. Beginning to suspect that Quinn must be an undercover British operative and she was some sort of handler, he was not particularly surprised to finally receive a phone call from the Federal Police commissioner informing him that there had been a deal with the British and he must let the matter go. Within minutes Martin Emmerich had been standing aside to watch Quinn transferred to London by air ambulance, realizing that he had been totally outplayed by Henrietta Richards at every turn.
That day’s trip home had been long and painful for Quinn. Henrietta had warned him on the way that it was no coincidence that the hospital chosen for his return was in Southwark, fifteen minutes from the MI6 HQ. Preparing him for the fact that they were going to be frequent bedside visitors, Henrietta suggested that the first thing Neil do after their arrival was tell her the full story of the ice axe. Despite being tired from the journey, as soon he was installed in his new private room he did so, much as he’d done for Graf, recounting every twist and turn, leaving no detail out, not even the gorak cave.
Henrietta took the news calmly, listening silently, jotting specific points down in a notebook. Particularly, it seemed to Quinn, those that he had learned from Graf; the Der Stürmer editorial, the recollections of the old Gebirgsjäger Dieter Braun in Garmisch, the fact that Becker had traveled to the Himalayas with Schmidt’s expedition.
Finishing his explanation, Quinn said to her, “You don’t seem so surprised?”
“I’m not, Neil, even if the detail of what you learned with Graf is fascinating.”
“How long have you known?”
“‘Known’ is too strong a word: ‘suspected’ is better. Since the early ’70s, I suppose.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I stumbled across it working in the embassy filing room one afternoon just as my interest in Everest was growing. It was only a few old papers really, marked as transferred to Kathmandu from the British Mission in Tibet, which was fairly hastily abandoned after the Chinese invasion. They were dated to 1939 and one of them raised suspicions of an SS plot to climb the mountain whilst another gave details of a British lieutenant being sent with a patrol of Gurkhas to stop it. Sadly, I made the mistake of casually raising the matter with the ambassador at a diplomatic event the very same evening. Not only did he deny it all vehemently but all the papers had vanished by the time I could return to the filing room.”
“Why do you think that was?”
“I used to think back then that it was because climbing Everest was seen as so exclusively ours. It was a British narrative with no space for mention of any other nation. But actually it was much more specific than that. The British authorities must have known that the Germans, or I should say now, the German Josef Becker, got too close to success for their comfort and became desperate to hide the fact. Even though the papers disappeared, I knew I hadn’t imagined the whole thing because I was able to track down the records of the British Army officer involved.”
“Who was he?”
“A Lieutenant Charles Macfarlane of the Coldstream Guards. There was actually no reference in the regimental archives of him ever visiting Tibet but I did learn that he was demoted to second lieutenant at the end of a secondment to the 2nd Gurkha Rifles in Darjeeling in the summer of 1939. No reason was given. He was killed five years later at Anzio with the rank of acting captain, posthumously adding the Military Cross to a series of decorations won during the course of the war. The regiment’s wartime almanac remembered him as a ‘brave and, above all, utterly honorable man.’ A statement I always thought at odds with the fact that he had once been stripped of rank. From what you have told me we can probably assume that it was as a punishment for failing to catch Becker. And if he didn’t catch him, then Becker may well still be up there as Graf believed.”
“The collector was definitely convinced of that.”
“Well, we can’t be sure until we go back. Don’t forget there is a Tiger Sherpa to add to the picture. It might even be him that’s still up there.”
“Really?”
“Yes. As you can imagine, after the name Ang Noru came up I was intrigued. I asked Dawa about it as soon as he was better. He told me his ancestor Ang Noru was possibly the strongest porter at altitude of his day, but suffered severe frostbite when he climbed on Everest in 1933. Ang Noru blamed the British, who, in return, labeled him a ‘troublemaker’ and never invited him to work on another of their expeditions. After that he only worked for Germans until he disappeared in 1939. At the time most people in Darjeeling said he must have drunk too much one night and wandered down into the valley river and drowned, but evidently there were other whispers that he was killed on the order of the British who wanted him silenced. Dawa, however, doesn’t believe any of these things and suspects that actually Ang Noru went back to Everest one last time.
“I think I would have enjoyed comparing notes on all this with your collector. Although he approached the truth from a very different starting point, his objective sounds the same as mine—to discover it, to protect it, and above all, to stop it from being used for harm. Together I believe we would have worked the whole thing out quite quickly.”
“I think that’s true. He was an interesting character. I was only with him for a few days yet it seems now that I knew him all my life. Is that odd?”
“Not really, Neil. As Graf believed, there is a darker side to the mountains. It feeds on the risk, the ambition, the inherent potential in aspiring to reach the highest summits for failure, for betrayal, for lies instead.” She hesitated, her face momentarily revealing to Quinn a fatigued sadness she normally kept hidden. “Also the extreme loss and sorrow caused by the deaths on those mountains; that never-ending feeling for those left behind of having been robbed by the mountain of something beautiful and irreplaceable to your lifetime. I think Graf manifested something that subconsciously accompanies giving your life to the hills as you have done.”
Neil lay back in the hospital bed, the weight of all the mayhem and suffering that had followed him since his last climb forcing his spirits down and making his wounds from Munich ache. “Well, it doesn’t feel so subconscious now.”
Henrietta ignored the remark. “The only other time I seemed to get a hint about Germans and Everest was somewhere totally unexpected. I always kept an eye open for any stories of Germans in the region dating back to those prewar years in the hope that they might provide a clue. I combed the obvious ones like Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet and also the writings of his colleague Peter Aufschnaiter but there was nothing.
“However in the memoir of a German doctor called Magda von Trier, I thought I did feel a connection to Everest. Her story was one of coming to India and helping its poorest people as a personal amends for the horrors her country had inflicted on the world. She often described herself as feeling like a modern-day Sisyphus and made many allusions to the Himalayas and Mount Everest. This struck me as odd as her work was predominantly in the South of India.
“At first I thought perhaps it was whimsy but the more I read it, the more it struck a chord in me that in some way that mountain had affected her deeply. She died in the early ’80s before I even found the book so I couldn’t ask her why. I wrote to her daughter but got no reply beyond a thank-you for the donation I made to the charitable institute the family still runs in Hyderabad.”
Henrietta stopped for a moment before continuing. “I will dig that stuff out when I return to Kathmandu and have another look at it in light of all this. Anyway enough of that, I need to get you ready for the scrutiny of MI6.”
“What will they want to know?”
“Everything. I want them to see that you are a straight shooter so just be open and honest with them. I will manage the process.”
“What will happen then?”
“We’ll get you back on your feet so you can return to Everest and fix all this.”
“From where I’m lying that doesn’t seem very likely even if I think it is down to me to put this matter to rest once and for all.”
“Neil, if Dawa can now make it up to my apartment unaided to get his monthly money from the fund organized for him, then, with a bit of work this winter, I think we can get you back to your gorak cave.”
“It’s not my cave.”
“Well, it’s time to find out who it does belong to.”