The Abominable: A Novel

Sigl snorts a laugh. “Who on earth cares?”

The Deacon waits patiently.

Eventually Bruno Sigl says, “If you’re thinking that the two fools might have summited, put it out of your mind. They’d been gone from our sight far too few hours to have gone much further than Camp Five…perhaps Camp Six if they’d used some of the oxygen apparatus left at Camp Five, if there was oxygen apparatus left there. Which I doubt. Not as high as Camp Six, I am certain of that.”

“Why are you certain?” asks the Deacon in a reasonable, interested voice. He is still tapping his lower lip with the pipe stem.

“The wind,” says Sigl with total finality. “The cold and wind. It was unbearable on the ridgeline where I met them just above Camp Five. Up near Camp Six, above eight thousand meters and then out onto the exposed higher North East Ridge or bare face up there, it would have meant death to try to proceed. There is no chance they had got that far, Herr Deacon. No chance at all.”

“You’ve answered my questions with great patience, Herr Sigl,” says the Deacon. “I thank you in all sincerity. This information might help Lady Bromley put her mind at rest.”

Sigl only grunts at that. Then he looks at me. “What are you staring at, young man?”

“Your red flags on that wall in that roped-off corner,” I admit, pointing behind Sigl. “And the symbol in the white circle on the red flags.”

Sigl stares at me and his blue eyes are as cold as ice. “Do you know what that symbol is, Herr Jacob Perry from America?”

“Yes,” I say. I’d studied a lot of Sanskrit and the Indus Valley cultures at Harvard. “It’s the symbol from India, Tibet, and some other Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain cultures meaning ‘good luck,’ or sometimes ‘harmony.’ The Sanskrit word for it, I believe, is svastika. I’m told that one finds it everywhere on old temples in India.”

Sigl is glaring at me now, as if I might be making fun of him or of something sacred to him. The Deacon lights his pipe and looks at me but says nothing.

“In today’s Deutschland,” Sigl says at last, barely moving his thin lips, “it is the swastika.” He spells it for me using English-sounding letters. “It is the glorious symbol of the NSDAP—Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. It and the man in those photographs will be the salvation of Germany.”

I have good vision, but I can’t make out the “man in those photographs.” There are two rather small framed photos on the wall under the red flags in that roped-off corner, plus another furled red flag directly in the corner, rising about six feet high on a staff. I assume it’s a flag similar to the two hanging on the wall.

“Come,” orders Bruno Sigl.

Everyone—the Germans, including Hess and the baldheaded man next to Sigl on the opposite side of the table and Bachner and all the climbers on our side, followed by the Deacon still puffing at his pipe—get up as I follow Sigl to the corner.

The rope that sets off this little corner memorial area—it looks like an ad hoc shrine—is simply quarter-inch climbing rope painted gold and anchored on two of those little posts that maitre d’s keep their short velvet ropes hooked to at the entrance to fancy restaurants.

One man appears in both photos, so I have to assume that he—as well as this socialist party with the swastika flag—is the “salvation of Germany.” In the photo below the red flag on the wall to the right, it is just the one man. At a distance one might think it’s a photo of Charlie Chaplin because of the silly little mustache under his nose, but it’s not Chaplin. This man has dark hair parted severely in the middle, dark eyes, and an intense—one might say furious—gaze at the camera or photographer.

The photograph on the left shows the same man standing in a doorway—the doorway of this beer hall, I realize—with two other men. The other two are in military uniforms, the Charlie Chaplin–mustached fellow in baggy civilian clothes. He’s the shortest and certainly least imposing of the three men in the photograph.

“Adolf Hitler,” says Bruno Sigl and looks closely at me for my response.

I have none. I think I’ve heard the name in reference to some of the constant unrest here in the Germany of November 1924, but it has made no real impression on me. Evidently he’s a Communist leader within his National Socialism workers’ party.

Behind me, the great climber Karl Bachner says, “Der Mann, den wir nicht antasten lassen.”

I look to Sigl for some translation, but the German climber says nothing.

“The man we will not see impugned,” the Deacon translates, the pipe in his hand now.

I see now that the red flag with the white circle and swastika on the staff has been torn—as if bullets had passed through it—and bloodied, if the dried brown spots are indeed blood. I lift my hand toward it to ask a question.

The baldheaded, round-faced muscleman who sat silent next to Sigl through the entire discussion at the table now moves quickly to slap my hand down and away so that I don’t actually touch the torn fabric.

Shocked, I lower my hand and stare at the glowering wrestler-type.

“This is the Blutfahne—the Blood Flag—sacred to followers of Adolf Hitler and of Nationalsozialismus,” says Bruno Sigl. “It must not be touched by non-Aryans. Never by an Auslander.”

The Deacon does not translate the word for me, but I can guess the meaning from context.

“Is that blood?” I ask stupidly. Everything I’ve done, said, or felt this evening feels stupid to me. And I’m starving to death.

Sigl nods. “From the massacre of nine November of last year, when the Munich police brutally opened fire on us. The flag belonged to the Fifth SA Sturm—much of the blood on it is from our comrade, the martyr Andreas Bauriedl, who fell atop the fallen flag when he was murdered by the police.”

“The unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch,” the Deacon explains to me. “It started from this beer hall, as I remember.”

Sigl glares at him through my friend’s pipe smoke. “We prefer the term Hitlerputsch or Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch,” snaps the German climber. “And it was not—as you say—‘unsuccessful.’”

“Really?” says the Deacon. “The police put down the uprising, scattered the marching Nazis, and arrested its leaders, including your Herr Hitler. I believe he’s currently serving a five-year sentence for treason in the old fortress prison of Landsberg, on a cliff above the river Lech.”

Sigl smiles strangely. “Adolf Hitler has become a hero of the German people. He will be out of prison before the end of this year. Even while there, he is treated like royalty by his so-called ‘guards.’ They know that he will someday lead this nation.”

The Deacon taps out his pipe, sets it in his tweed jacket pocket, and nods appreciatively. “Thank you, Herr Sigl, for tonight’s information and for setting me straight, as they say in Jake’s America, about my misperceptions and faulty information regarding the Hitlerputsch and the current status of Herr Hitler.”

“I will walk you to the door of the Burgerbraukeller,” says Sigl.

Our train to the border on the way to Zurich leaves the station promptly at ten p.m. Promptness, I’m learning, is a German trait.

I’m glad that we have a private compartment in which we can stretch out on the padded benches and doze, if we choose, before we change rails and trains at the Swiss border later in the night. On the cab ride from the Burgerbraukeller to the Munich train station, I realize that I’ve sweated through my undershirt, through my starched shirt, and into my thick wool suit jacket. My hands are trembling as I watch the lights of Munich recede into the relative darkness of the countryside. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see the lights of any city disappear behind me.

Finally, when I can speak without a tremor in my voice that would match the earlier shaking of my hands, I say, “This Adolf Hitler—I have read the name but remembered nothing about him—is he a local Communist leader calling for the overthrow of the Weimar Republic?”

“Rather the other way around, old boy,” replies the Deacon from where he is stretched out on the compartment’s other long, padded bench. “Hitler was—is, since his trial gave him a national audience for his