The Abominable: A Novel

night. My father’s watch said it was just before four a.m.

“If you do not mind the hour, sir,” whispered Mason as he held a candle, “Mr. Churchill is in his study, just finishing his work, and would like to speak with you now.”

I did mind. I minded not only the rudeness of the hour and being so summarily summoned to the Great Man’s study at his whim, I minded everything. The previous evening’s dinner and conversation had been interesting—meeting Charlie Chaplin had been an experience outside my realm of reality— but no amount of social niceties could make up for the anger and despair I still felt about what had happened on Mount Everest and why my friends had been sent there. My heart was filled with darkness, and I was in no mood for any more witty chatter or social merrymaking. I resolved to ask the Minister of the Exchequer directly and bluntly why he thought he had the power to waste lives such as Percival Bromley’s, Jean-Claude Clairoux’s, Richard Davis Deacon’s, Lady Bromley-Montfort’s, or the lives of the fine Sherpas who’d died and the young Austrian Kurt Meyer, who—I wanted to track down T. E. Lawrence and shout in his face—had been a Jew. And one with more balls than any silk-dress-wearing English-Arab fop I’d ever met.

I must still have been frowning when I joined Churchill in his study. Despite my black mood, I had to acknowledge to myself that the top-floor room was impressive. Being shown in by Mason through a Tudor doorway decorated with what I later learned was called a molded architrave—Mason silently slipped away and equally silently closed the door behind him—I looked around and up. And up. The ceiling had obviously been removed and now revealed vaulting beams and rafters that looked to be as old and solid as England itself. The huge room had broad and faded carpets on the floor, but much of the center part of the space was empty. Built into the high wall were bookcases overflowing with volumes (and I’d already seen that the downstairs library would have been sufficient to serve the reading needs of any mid-sized city in the American Midwest). There were a few chairs scattered around and a couple of low writing desks, including one magnificently carved mahogany desk with a comfortable upholstered chair behind it, but Churchill was standing and writing at a high slanted desk made of old, unvarnished wood.

“A Disraeli desk,” barked Churchill. “Our Victorian predecessors liked to work standing up.” He touched the ink-stained slanted writing surface carefully, as if he were caressing it. “Not Disraeli’s actual desk, of course. I had a local carpenter knock it up for me.”

I stood there, feeling foolish in my robe and slippers. But I’d seen immediately that Mr. Churchill was in his robe and slippers: the robe a silken explosion of green, gold, and scarlet threads. His ill-fitting slippers made a sound—hirff, hirff, hirff—whenever he moved, as he did now to pour a sizable glass of whisky for each of us. I took the glass but did not drink.

Churchill noticed me glancing up again at the high rafters and old paintings on the wall.

“This happens to be the oldest part of Chartwell,” rumbled Churchill. “It dates to ten eighty-six A.D., just twenty years after the Battle of Hastings. I do my writing in here. Did you know that I make my living as a writer? Mostly historical tomes. Usually I dictate to one secretary, who has to be good at her shorthand to keep up. Tonight, since I’m working on two volumes simultaneously, I’ve been dictating to two young ladies. I also had two of my male researchers here helping me. You must have just missed them all on the staircase.”

I nodded but kept silent. We continued to stand facing each other. Churchill sipped his whisky. I ignored mine.

“You’re angry, Mr. Perry,” he said over the top of his whisky glass. His bright little eyes missed nothing but kept moving from side to side, as if staying wary that no one was sneaking up on him.

I gave him my best approximation of J.C.’s Gallic shrug.

Churchill smiled. “I don’t blame you for being angry. But what are you angriest at, young man? The sordid nature of the photographs you delivered to me yesterday or the seeming waste of your friends’ and others’ lives in obtaining those nasty things?”

We moved toward two chairs set near the large mahogany writing desk—the desk’s surface uncluttered and, to all appearances, unused by the writer whose books and manuscript pages were all stacked on the long, high Disraeli desk—but we didn’t sit down.

“I’m wondering, Mister Churchill,” I said, “exactly what makes a turncoat politician, someone who can’t even decide which party he should be in—as long as he clings to power in one or the other— decide that anyone should die for anything.”

Churchill’s head snapped back, and he seemed to see me for the first time. For a moment, the entire household was silent except for a clock chiming four somewhere three flights down. I don’t think either Churchill or I blinked during that interval, much less spoke.

Finally the pudgy Chancellor of the Exchequer in his bold silken robe said, “Did you know, Mr. Perry, that my mother was American?”

“No,” I said, allowing the flatness of my tone to express my total lack of interest in the fact.

“It may be the reason that I have always been rather interested in American politics as well as British politics, not to mention what passes for politics on the Continent. Would you like to know the major difference between politics in your country and in the United Kingdom, Mr. Perry?”

Not much, I thought, but stayed silent.

“I don’t pretend to know who President Coolidge’s cabinet advisors really are,” said Churchill, just as if I were interested. “Perhaps at first he kept on some of Harding’s people after your previous president’s sudden death in California. But I guarantee, Mr. Perry, that after Mr. Coolidge’s election on his own last year, defeating that weak Democrat Davis and that rather interesting Progressive chap, La Follette, Calvin Coolidge has not only become his own man but has, by now, fully surrounded himself with his own men. Does this make any sense to you, young man?”

“No,” I said. I was thinking of J.C. grappling with Sturmbannfuhrer Sigl and the air rushing out of Jean- Claude’s perforated oxygen tanks as both men fell through the snow cornice into 10,000 feet of empty air. I was thinking of the last glimpse I had of Reggie’s and the Deacon’s faces before they turned west and started climbing the last of the North East Ridge onto the snowfield toward the Summit Pyramid.

“What I’m saying, Jake…may I call you Jake?”

I remained silent, just staring coldly at the heavy man with the babyish face.

“What I’m saying, Mr. Perry, is that American parties elect their presidents, but those presidents’ advisors and cabinets change from election to election. President Coolidge even replaced a few of President Harding’s lower choices after Harding’s death…before Coolidge was his own man.”

“What are you trying to say?” I demanded.

“I’m saying that in England, things do not work that way, Mr. Perry. Different parties win and different prime ministers move in and out of power along with their parties but the same basic core of the political class— politicians, you would say— stay in power over the decades. I will be only fifty-one years old as of this coming November, and yet in my few decades of public life I have been President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty…until the fiasco that was Gallipoli…then in the army fighting at the Front for a bit, then back to the corridors of power as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, then Secretary of State for Air, and now Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

I waited. Finally I took a drink of the Scotch whisky. It was strong and smooth. It did nothing to settle my nerves or lower my level of anger.

“A British politician such as myself needs to keep a network of friends—and even foes—tied to him, you see,” continued Churchill, “even when we are out of power. And those of us who have run intelligence operations in the army or navy or ministries of state or war—or, in my case, all four—do not abandon those networks. Information is power, Mr. Perry, and the proper intelligence, however gathered, can mean the life or death of one’s nation and empire.”

“A very impressive resume,” I said, trying to make all four words of the sentence sound sarcastic. “But what does it have to do with a private citizen such as yourself ordering good men and women into harm’s way to steal some…filthy photographs?”

Churchill sighed. “I agree that the entire affair—the entire intelligence effort—of obtaining such images from Herr Meyer was sordid, Mr. Perry. Most actual intelligence work is sordid. Yet at times it is the most sordid elements of life which make for the most effective weapons of war or peace.”

I barked a laugh at this. “You’re not going to convince me that a few photographs of that German…that mustachioed clown and madman…are going to make any difference to the future safety