The Abominable: A Novel

rants—famous and much loved for his very far-right-wing views, virulent anti-Semitism and all.”

“Ah,” I say. “But he is in prison for five years for the treason of his attempted coup last year?”

The Deacon has sat up to light his pipe again and opens the train window a bit to reduce the smoke in the compartment, although I don’t mind it. “I believe that Herr Sigl was right on both counts about that…that is, that Hitler will be out before the new year, with less than one year served, and that the authorities are treating him like a royal guest in that prison above the river.”

“Why?”

The Deacon shrugs slightly. “Nineteen twenty-four German politics is far beyond my poor powers to understand, but the extreme right wing—the Nazis, to be precise—certainly seems to be speaking for a lot of frustrated people since this superinflation struck.”

I realize that I’m not really interested in the little man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache.

“By the by,” adds the Deacon, “that bald, round-faced, scowling gentleman who sat across from you at the table and who slapped your hand when you seemed about to touch their sacred Blood Flag?”

“Yes?”

“Ulrich Graf was Herr Hitler’s personal bodyguard—which may be why he took several bullets aimed Hitler’s way during last November’s absurd botch of a putsch. But Graf is a hardy fellow, as you saw tonight, and will probably live to be the savior of Germany’s Nazi hero once again, I am sure. Before becoming a Nazi and bodyguard to their leader, Graf was a butcher, a semi-professional wrestler, and a for-hire street brawler. Sometimes he would volunteer to beat up—or even kill—Jews or Communists without charging his bosses.”

I think about this for a long moment. Finally I speak in just above a whisper, despite the compartment walls around us.

“Do you believe Sigl in his account of how Lord Percival and the Austrian Meyer died?” I ask. Personally, as much as I disliked Sigl and some of his friends, I can’t see an alternative to believing him.

“Not a word of it,” says the Deacon.

This causes me to sit up straight from where I’ve been half-reclining.

“No?”

“No.”

“Then what do you think happened to Bromley and Meyer? And why would Sigl lie?”

The Deacon shrugs slightly again. “It is possible that Sigl and his friends were ready to make an illegal bid for the summit after they heard in Tingri that the rest of Mallory’s team had left. Sigl certainly had no Tibetan climbing or travel permit himself. Perhaps Sigl and his six friends caught up with Bromley somewhere below the North Col and pressed him and this Meyer person to go with him on the climb in the tricky near-monsoon weather. When Bromley and Meyer fell to their deaths—or perhaps died some other way on the mountain—Sigl had to retreat and make up the Lost Boys story of the other two men climbing alone and being carried away by an avalanche.”

“You don’t believe in his avalanche story?”

“I’ve been on that part of the ridge and face, Jake,” says the Deacon. “That section of the face rarely accumulates enough snow for the kind of massive slab-slide avalanche Sigl described. And if it did, my feeling is that Bromley had garnered enough avalanche-avoidance experience in the Alps to know better than to venture out onto such a slope.”

“If the avalanche didn’t kill Bromley and the Austrian, do you think they fell while climbing above Camp Six with Sigl?”

“There are other possibilities,” says the Deacon. “Especially since the little I remember about Percy Bromley would not include the possibility of his being bullied into an Everest summit attempt by a German political fanatic intent upon bagging Mount Everest for das Vaterland.”

The Deacon studies his pipe. ”I wish I’d known Lord Percival better. As I told you and Jean-Claude, I was brought to the estate—rather as nobility would send out for any other commodity to be delivered—to be an occasional playmate for Percy’s older brother, Charles, who was about my age, nine or ten at the time. Young Percival always wanted to tag along. He was—what is your American term, Jake?—a right pain in the arse.”

“You never saw Percival after that?”

“Oh, I’d bump into him from time to time at English garden parties or on the Continent,” the Deacon says vaguely.

“Was Percival really…inverted?” It’s hard for me to say the word aloud. “Did he really frequent European brothels where young men were the prostitutes?”

“So it’s rumored,” says the Deacon. “Is that important to you in some way, Jake?”

I think about that but can’t make up my mind. I’ve led a sheltered life, I realize. I’ve never had any inverted friends. Or at least none that I knew about.

“How else might Bromley and Kurt Meyer have died?” I ask, embarrassed and eager to change the subject.

“Bruno Sigl may have killed them both,” says the Deacon. There is a blue haze between us, but it hovers and then moves for the open window. The sound of steel wheels on metal rails is very loud.

I’m profoundly shocked at this. Is the Deacon saying this for effect? Just to shock me? If so, he’s succeeded beautifully.

My mother is Catholic—a former O’Riley and another stain on the escutcheon of the old-line Boston Brahmin Perry family—and I was raised to understand the difference between venial and mortal sins. Killing another climber on such a mountain as Everest would be, to me, somewhere beyond a major mortal sin. For a climber, it adds a sense of blasphemy to the mortal sin of murder. “Kill fellow climbers? Why?” I manage at last.

The Deacon tamps his pipe out in an ashtray set into the end of an armrest. “I rather imagine we shall just have to go climb Mount Everest and do what we’re supposed to be doing—that is, find the remains of Lord Percival Bromley—to find out.”

The Deacon pulls a tweed hat down over his eyes and goes to sleep in seconds. I sit upright in the clacking train compartment for a long time, thinking, trying to sort out things which simply defy sorting.

Eventually I shut the window. The air outside is getting colder.

Chapter 7

The ledge was about the width of that bread tray…

It is on another train, this one a narrow-gauge railway climbing 7,000 feet from miasmic Calcutta to the high hills of Darjeeling at the end of March 1925, that I finally take time to think back about the busy winter and spring months before our departure.

In early January of 1925, all three of us had traveled back to Zurich to visit George Ingle Finch, who, with the possible exception of Richard Davis Deacon, was the finest British alpinist still living.

And while Finch had been a fellow Everest expedition climber with Mallory and Deacon in 1922, he shared the Deacon’s bad fortune of falling out of favor with the Powers That Be—twice, in Finch’s case, not just running afoul of George Leigh Mallory’s sensibilities, but alienating the entire Mount Everest Committee, the Alpine Club, and two-thirds of the Royal Geographical Society.

Finch had studied medicine briefly at the Ecole de Medecine in Paris and then switched to the physical sciences while studying at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich from 1906 to 1922, then served as a captain in the Royal Field Artillery in France, Egypt, and Macedonia during the Great War, and after the War had returned to mostly Swiss alpine climbing, in the process bagging more first ascents in the Alps than the rest of the chosen Everest expedition members combined. He was much more aware of German and other new European climbing techniques than any of the Everest Committee or other British climbers—but he’d been left off the 1921 roster, officially because of poor results on his physical. The real reason was that although he, Finch, was a British