The Abominable: A Novel

“Jake, Jean-Claude,” continued the Deacon, “I’d like to present Mr. George Ingle Finch. You both know that two and a half years ago, Mr. Finch and I were on the expedition that climbed to just above twenty-seven thousand three hundred feet on the East Ridge and North Face of Everest…without oxygen. It was an altitude record at the time. But even though we climbed without the tanks that day, George helped design the oxygen apparatus that Mallory and Irvine were using when they disappeared last June, and he’s been kind enough to offer to take us to his workshop here in Zurich after lunch to show us how it works…and to give us some advice on various aspects of our…recovery expedition.”

The Deacon seemed embarrassed to have used so many words and—most rare for the Deacon—not sure of what to say next. Finch rescued the moment by lazily waving us to the three empty chairs.

“Sit down, please,” said Finch. “I took the liberty of ordering a wine but we can certainly get a different bottle for the table…especially if you’re paying, Richard.” Finch’s brief flash of smile showed small, slightly nicotine-stained but strong teeth. Despite the Alpine Club’s discriminatory insults about Finch, it was obvious that he brushed those teeth more than once a year. “This joint has good food and I can rarely afford to dine here, even for lunch,” he continued in his slightly German-accented British English, “which is why I suggested we meet here when you said you would be picking up the tab.” He casually waved over the headwaiter and—surprising, considering how Finch was dressed—the tuxedoed gentleman responded with alacrity and obvious respect. Perhaps people in Zurich were well aware of Finch’s alpine successes. Or perhaps the waiters simply assumed that anyone who could afford to dine at Restaurant Kronenhalle was wealthy enough to deserve such respectful treatment.

I admit that I was bridling a bit as we all ordered our lunches (I simply said that I’d have whatever the Deacon had just ordered) and while Jean-Claude and Finch conversed animatedly about which kind of wine to order for the table. I was irritated because I wondered if Finch used that “this joint has good food” vernacular because I was so obviously an American and a not-very-successful-looking one at that. (I soon learned that this was not the case; George Ingle Finch spoke many languages and mixed their vernacular into his sentences, even Americanisms, with casual enjoyment. By the end of that day in Zurich, I would see that Finch, though a man of great personal dignity, probably took the fewest pains to impress others with his knowledge, prowess, and personal achievements than any climber I’d ever met.)

The food was good. The wine, whatever it was (and to the limited extent I could judge wine when I was 22), was excellent. And the waiters whom I’d expected to be ostentatious, even Deutsch- Schweizer imperious toward our little group of foreigners, treated us with great courtesy and were all but invisible during their silent delivery and whisking away of courses and dishes. (This idea of capable-waiter invisibility equaling quality service was an opinion I’d picked up from my father: one of the few unsolicited opinions I ever heard him venture other than on the day he and Mother dropped me at Harvard and he took me aside and said sternly, “All right, Jake. You’re a man responsible for yourself from this point on. Try to keep your whiskey bottle out of the bedroom, your pecker in your pants as much as possible, and your head in your books until you get a degree. Any degree.”)

I set down my wineglass and realized that Finch, Jean-Claude, and the Deacon were discussing our plans, such as they were at that point, for our upcoming “recovery expedition” to bring back Bromley’s personal possessions to his mother, or, since we all knew that the odds of that were close to nil, at least return with some clear report about how young Percival had died. The Deacon had assured us that Finch understood that news of our private expedition was not to be shared with anyone else. “And,” the Deacon had added, “there’s currently so little love lost between Finch and the Alpine Club, the Committee, and the entire Royal Geographical Society that he certainly won’t be eager to tell them anything…much less our secret.”

“So you knew Percival…Lord Percival Bromley?” Jean-Claude was asking.

“The first time I met him was when he hired me as a guide some years ago,” said Finch in that rather pleasant educated-British tone with its slight German accent. “Bromley wanted to traverse the Douves Blanches…” He paused and looked at me for the first time. “The Douves Blanches is a spur, Mr. Perry—a sharp, spiky one all the way—off the main chain of the Grandes Dents on the east side of the Arolla Valley.”

“Yes, I’ve been there,” I said, my voice a shade impatient. I was no longer a novice at alpine climbing, after all. I’d done the Douves Blanches traverse the previous autumn with Jean-Claude and the Deacon.

Finch didn’t seem to have picked up on my tone. Or perhaps he had and didn’t care one way or the other. He nodded once and continued, “Young Percy was capable even then of doing the traverse, but he’d come to attempt what he called a ‘delectable’ series of rather impressive chimneys that split the two-thousand-foot rock wall above the upper Ferpecle Glacier, and he wanted someone on the rope with him.”

All three of us waited, but Finch seemed to have lost interest in Bromley and the conversation and returned his attention to his steak and wine.

“How did you find him?” asked the Deacon.

Finch looked up as if the Deacon had spoken in Swahili. (Which is a bad comparison, I realize, because it turned out that George Ingle Finch could speak some Swahili and understood more of it than he spoke.)

“I mean,” said the Deacon, “how did he handle himself?”

Finch shrugged noncommittally, and that might have been the frustrating end of the discussion, but perhaps he realized that we’d come a long way, and there was a real chance that we would soon be climbing very high on the shoulder of Mount Everest to find Percy Bromley’s corpse, and that we were, after all (or Lady Bromley was), paying for Finch’s meal in one of the most expensive restaurants in Switzerland. Perhaps in all of Europe.

“Bromley was all right,” said Finch. “Climbed very well, for an amateur. Never complained, even when we had to spend a long, cold night on a very narrow ledge, without food or proper equipment, on that steep south ridge just a short but difficult pitch below the summit. Not a good overcoat or bag between the two of us, nor a bump in the rock face to tie ourselves on to. The ledge was about the width of that bread tray…” Finch nodded toward the narrow silver tray. “We had no candles to hold lighted under our chins in case we dozed, so we took turns through the long night sitting watch, as it were, making sure the other didn’t fall asleep and pitch forward three thousand feet to the glacier.”

Perhaps to make sure that we got the point, Finch added, “I trusted the boy with my life.”

“So Lord Percival was a better climber than some others are saying now?” The Deacon was finishing his Tafelspitz—an excellent meal consisting of tips of choice beef simmered along with root vegetables and various spices in a rich broth and served with roasted slices of potato and a mix of minced apples and sour cream combined with horseradish. I always marveled at how the Brits could lift a fork with something like morsels of meat and sauce on the back of the utensil, and make it look not only easy but proper. Eating in England and Europe, I thought, must be like going to China and getting used to chopsticks.

“Depends on which ‘others’ you have in mind,” responded Finch after another significant pause. He was looking carefully at our team leader. “Anyone in particular?”

“Bruno Sigl?”

Finch laughed—a harsh bark of a sound. “That bully-boy Nazi fanatic friend of Herr Hitler?” he said. “Sigl’s an accomplished climber—I’ve never climbed with him but I’ve run into him on almost a dozen alpine ascents over the years. He’s a smooth, careful, competent man on rock or ice—but he’s also a lying Scheisskerl, one who tends to get his younger climbing partners killed.”

“What is this…Scheisskerl?” asked Jean-Claude.

“Brainless, untrustworthy fellow,” said the Deacon quickly, glancing over his shoulder at the hovering waiters. To Finch he said, “So if Herr Sigl told you that Percival Bromley ventured out onto a risky Everest North Face, walking onto an obviously avalanche-prone slab of snow with an Austrian fellow in tow, you wouldn’t believe him?”

“I wouldn’t believe Bruno Sigl if the bastard told me that the sun would be coming up tomorrow,” said Finch, pouring himself the last of our wine.

“Richard, weren’t you one of the first to see the monster’s tracks on Lhakpa La when you led Mallory up to that pass in ’twenty-one?” asked George Ingle Finch between large bites of his creme-covered Apfelstrudel. Jean-Claude and the Deacon were having only thick, rich coffee for dessert. I’d tried a chocolate pudding.

“Monster?” said Jean-Claude, perking up. I’d watched as the heavy Bavarian meal, so unusual for the athletic French mountain guide, made him sleepy. “Monster?” he said again as if unsure of the English word.