The Abominable: A Novel

One photograph was almost impossible to make out—a sprawl of five white, emaciated bodies on the tumbled sheets, connecting and pleasuring each other in so many disturbing ways that my innocent Protestant American mind couldn’t quite take it in. The only face fully visible in that shot was of the adult—the older man. I stared at the face, trying to ignore all the couplings and gropings in the photograph, and realized I’d also seen him before. Once. In a photograph on a poster in a Munich beer hall. The face had been somewhat older, a little fuller, the man in the Nazi poster in his mid-thirties rather than the early thirties that these photos suggested, but the intensity of the dark gaze was the same, as was the ridiculous Charlie Chaplin mustache. At that moment, I couldn’t remember his name.

I put the photos back in the envelope and looked up at Reggie, J.C., and the Deacon. “This is what your cousin died for?” I gasped out at Reggie. “These are what we’ve been fleeing for our lives about…these…obscenities?”

“It is abominable,” Jean-Claude repeated softly, his gaze averted.

“Abominable?” I shouted. “It’s goddamned nuts! I’ve never seen anything like this before and never want to again. But who cares if some German does deviant things with street urchins? Who could give a damn about any of these photographs!”

“The adult man using these children is not German,” said Reggie. “He’s Austrian, although he lost his Austrian citizenship when he moved to Germany a few years ago. And you know that he’s the leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—a very dangerous group, Jake.”

“He’s in jail!” I shouted. “The Deacon and I heard that last November when we met Sigl in that damned beer hall in Munich!”

“He was released last December,” said the Deacon. “While we were buying boots and rope in London.”

“I don’t care if he’s a socialist!” I shouted, standing and pacing around the Mushroom Rock in my agitation. “Who cares about goddamned socialists—we have thousands of them in New York, probably hundreds in Boston where I live. Why would Lord Percival risk his life…die?” I pointed at the corpse at my feet. I noticed the “Douglas Fairbanks mustache” now, as well as dark stubble on the dead man’s cheeks and chin. For a sickening moment that almost made me swoon, I remembered that hair kept growing after a person died.

“…all this for nasty photos of a damned socialist?” I finished weakly.

“He’s not a socialist, Jake,” said Reggie. “He’s a Nazi. The Nazi.” She was fumbling in her rucksack for something.

“Who cares?” I said again. “Even I know that there are a hundred crackpot political factions in Weimar Germany. Even I know that, and I can barely tell a Democrat from a Republican. Why should we climb almost to the summit of Mount Everest…and have that climb ruined by this…and suffer all we’ve suffered just to receive filthy photographs of one sick pederast and his victims? And, for God’s sake, you can see that one of the victims—one of the kids in that room—was young Kurt Meyer. The guy who sold your cousin Percy this package of trash!” In my fury, I held the envelope up into the wind between two fingers and said, “I’m throwing this crap away.”

“Jake!” snapped Reggie.

I looked down at her. She had her 12-gauge flare pistol held steady in both hands and was aiming it directly at my gaping face.

“If you let those photos go,” she said in flat tones, “I’ll kill you with this, I swear to God I will. I love you, Jake. I love all of you. But give me the photos back or I’ll shoot you in the face. You know I will. I did it with the German on the glacier.”

In that instant and that second, I knew she was telling the truth—both about loving me, probably like a brother, alas (or like her dead cousin), and also about being ready to kill me in a second if I threw those photos away. Then I remembered the red flare burning through the gaping mouth of Karl Bachner and the liquid from his eyes running down his cheeks like melted wax.

I carefully handed the envelope of photos and negatives back to Reggie.

“What I’m curious about,” the Deacon said in conversational tones, as if nothing had happened between Reggie and me, “is who took the photos. Not…Bromley?”

“No,” said Reggie. Her voice suddenly sounded infinitely weary. “Although Percival had to frequent some of those…establishments and circles…in his guise as a dissolute pro-Austrian, pro-German British expat. It was Kurt Meyer who took those photographs. With a rather sophisticated little camera that had a time delay. Percy had given it to him for just this purpose.”

All of us shifted our gaze to the body of the dead Austrian. He was so young. I noticed for the first time that a ginger-colored shadow under Meyer’s nose was obviously a boy’s attempt to grow a man’s mustache.

“So Meyer was also a spy?” I said, not really expecting an answer.

“He was on the payroll of British intelligence,” said Reggie. “And Kurt Meyer was also a Jew.” She said it as if that explained everything.

For a moment I thought she was saying that, naturally, Jews were greedier than anybody else and would do anything for money—I’d known no Jews at Harvard or in my Boston social life, of course—but then I remembered that the Nazis weren’t overly fond of Jews, even German or Austrian Jews. But this Hitler bastard had been in bed with a bunch of Jewish boys—everyone in the photos except the adult Nazi had been circumcised. Nothing made sense. Everything was just…dirty. I shook my head.

“Kurt Meyer was also one of the bravest men my cousin Percival ever worked with,” she said. “And Percy had worked with hundreds of brave men, most of them doomed to terrible deaths by their courage.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“Here it is,” said Reggie, who’d continued looking through her dead cousin’s pockets after setting down the Very pistol with which she’d threatened to kill me.

She pulled out a folded piece of green silk that I first thought to be a fancy handkerchief—rather like the one that had been on George Mallory’s body—but, when unfolded by Reggie, turned out to be a three-foot-by-four-foot flag of a gryphon battling an eagle over a gold medieval-looking lance.

I’d last seen that flag—or a larger version of it—flying over the Bromley estate when we’d gone to visit Lady Bromley.

“Did your cousin seriously think that he and this…boy…might really summit Mount Everest?” asked the Deacon.

“Obviously their only choice was to keep climbing higher from their Nazi pursuers,” said Reggie, still rather tart in tone. “With Mallory and Irvine’s expedition’s fixed ropes and camps still intact, it gave them a chance. But the Germans turned out to be better climbers. Still…Percy approached everything he did with more than one hundred percent effort, so perhaps he could have summited this mountain from Mallory and Irvine’s highest camp had Sigl not caught up to them, although that hadn’t been Percy’s intention when he climbed away from the Germans.” She put the folded flag away somewhere in her own layers of clothing. “Now I will climb it for him.”

“No one’s going to climb anything if we don’t hurry,” called Jean-Claude over the wind roar.

While we’d been busy looking at pornography, chatting, deciding whether to kill one another, and so forth, J.C. had taken his binoculars from his rucksack and walked over to the snowy, treacherous south edge of the North East Ridge, looking down and back the way we’d come.

“Les boches are just now solving the Blind Step problem,” he called to us. “They will be here in thirty minutes or less, depending upon Herr Sigl’s climbing skills. I suggest that we finish our business here and leave soon.”

“Leave for where?” I said between terrible fits of coughing. I knew I had to get down, down to where the air was thick enough for me to breathe even with these shards of lobster shells and clacking claws in my throat.

The Deacon turned his head and looked to his right and up—and then up some more—at the looming and impossible Second Step less than a hundred meters away. Not that far above that impossible Second Step—or so it seemed—the summit of Mount Everest looked to be exhaling a twenty-mile-long howling tail of gale-driven spindrift.