Philip Kerr - Esau

‘I don’t think you quite understand,’ he started to say.

‘No, I don’t think I do, Mister Furness. You said yourself, these people save for years to pay for their death ceremonies. But, well, what about the Sherpas who died? What I’m merely trying to determine is what happened to their funeral expense savings.’

It was a good question. Even so. Jack felt himself squirm with distaste. For a moment he imagined that the Exer-Flex was her windpipe and gave it an extra hard squeeze for good measure.

‘Or were your Sherpas just not the prudent kind?’

‘If this Society was concerned with prudence, Miss Harman,’ said Jack, ‘then I doubt it would ever have got started.’

‘Amen,’ said Schaffer.

But Jack was just starting. He threw the chunk of Exer-Flex onto the mahogany table, hoping it would make a mark on the highly polished surface.

‘Death’s a considerable expense in the Himalayas, Miss Harman,’ he said. ‘People get killed in the most awkward of areas. Why don’t you look at these accounts from the upside? We didn’t find Didier Lauren’s body so we saved your company the cost of chartering a helicopter to fly his body down to Khatmandu, the cost of a special casket to meet the requirements of international airfreight, not to mention the flight home to Canada.’

‘Jack,’ said Schaffer, ‘I think you made your point. No one’s disagreeing with your accounts. Miss Harman’s just trying to determine precisely what they mean. Is that so. Miss Harman?’

Miss Harman smiled thinly. ‘Yes.’

She was about to add something when Schaffer cut her off.

‘But we’ll leave it there, I think,’ he said firmly, and collecting the Exer-Flex, stared quizzically at it for a moment.

‘What is this shit, anyway?’ he said, leaning toward Jack.

‘It develops wrist and finger flexibility, strengthens forearms, improves grip.’ Jack shrugged. ‘All kinds of stuff.’

‘Does that mean you’re planning to go back and finish what you started? To climb all the big Himalayan peaks, without oxygen? Didn’t you say you wanted to do the Trango Tower next?’

‘Sure,’ he said, without much enthusiasm — still angry with the way the meeting had gone, with himself most of all. ‘I always finish what I start.’

But even as he spoke. Jack knew that before he could go back to the Himalayas he had to prove to himself that he still had the nerve for the big walls. Never having fallen before — certainly there were few climbers who had fallen so far and survived — he had yet to discover if the avalanche had taken more than just a friend and climbing partner from him. Jack had to find out if he could still put gravity to the back of his mind and climb with all of his former élan and disregard for danger.

Yosemite Valley was Jack Furness’s spiritual home. It was here, high up the western slope of California’s Sierra Nevada, in a granite abyss eleven kilometres long, one and a half kilometres wide, and three-quarters of kilometre deep, that Jack had perfected his climbing technique. With its unrelentingly sheer walls, the valley was the centre of American rock climbing and the kind of place where reputations got made or became permanently stalled. In the twenty-five years he’d been coming to the valley, six of Jack’s friends had been killed there.

Six friends and one elder brother.

In theory, rappelling, or what the Europeans called abseiling, is one of the safest and most exhilarating parts of climbing. The buzz of bouncing down a sheer face in long graceful curves through space, of descending with the acceleration of a free fall and then stopping smoothly on the karabiner under full control.

His brother, Gary, had been rappelling down the six-hundred-metre-high Washington Monument when his anchor sling, frayed by numerous rope pull-downs, broke just a metre or so short of Lunch Ledge, a nondescript platform about three hundred metres up. It was nineteen years since Gary had been killed. But hardly a week passed when Jack did not think of him. When he was climbing he thought of him more often.

These days, Washington Column was considered a warm-up climb for the big vertical walls of the Yosemite, and among them there was none bigger, none more vertiginous, and none more daunting than the famous El Capitan.

Leaving Danville in the late afternoon, the drive had taken him around six hours and he checked into the Ahwahnee Hotel at just before ten o’clock. The Yosemite Lodge would have been slightly nearer El Capitan, but the Ahwahnee was better, if more expensive. There he ate a big, high-protein dinner, went straight to bed, and was up again the following morning just after five.

December, with its cold weather and short days, was not the best time to climb the El Cap. Except that the valley was almost empty of tourists, and Jack, who had made several other winter ascents in Yosemite, was more or less certain that he would have the rock to himself. Besides, the day had dawned as bright and sunny as the weather forecasters had promised, and up on the wall, too hot could be as bad as too cold. In summer the temperatures could make the rock as hot as a frying pan. This looked like an excellent day for climbing.

Before going to El Cap Jack found a hard boulder and got himself properly limbered. There were dozens of well-established routes up El Cap, but you never knew when you were going to have to do some wide stem or something even more bizarre. It paid to be stretched and ready for anything.

Every year the warm-ups got harder. In his twenties he had been so supple he had seemed almost double-jointed. These days, he was putting a lot more trust in his upper body strength than in his overall agility. Maybe Swift had been right. Maybe forty was too old for this kind of thing.

Walking back to the wall, he strapped his fingers with adhesive tape, to help improve their rigid tendon support. Free climbing was hardest on the fingers’ ends, a manicurist’s nightmare. There were climbs Jack had done that left his cuticles so badly broken that the blood was oozing from his tips.

Standing at the foot of El Cap’s clean brown-and-white granite face, it was easy to underestimate its height. Looking up at the ninety-degree wall, you might be fooled into thinking that the one solitary pine growing on the cliff face was no bigger than a Christmas tree and the rock itself no more than one hundred and fifty to one hundred and eighty metres. But the tree, a Ponderosa Pine, was twenty-four metres high while the top of El Cap was a heart-stopping nine hundred metres at right angles to the valley floor.

Unclimbed before the mid-1950s, El Capitan, and the Salathé Wall route — rated 5.13 on the Yosemite decimal system of climbing difficulty — that Jack had chosen, looked less of a sporting challenge than a circus feat. Yet there were an increasing number of mountaineers. Jack among them, who had free-climbed the Salathé Wall. Using spring-loaded camming devices known as ‘friends’ for jamming into cracks, climbing shoes of sticky rubber, and only natural holds for upward progress, scorning the use of stirrups and karabiners. Jack had made a free solo ascent of the wall as late as 1994.

In the cold bright dawn, he covered his bare hands with chalk, and then checked the friends, wire nuts and curlers, and chalk bag that were hanging off the bandolier on his sit harness. The only karabiners he was carrying were the ones he would use to hook on when he needed to take a rest.

Reaching high above his head, he found a handhold and drew himself a metre up onto the wall with one arm. Like an ape. In an hour or two, the winter sun would have warmed the rock, making it easier for the Boreal rock boots he was wearing — Jack didn’t much care for the White Fang stickers he was paid to wear by his sponsor — to get a grip. It would be the early part of the climb, on cold and sometimes icy rock, that would be more difficult and dangerous. Nine hundred and eleven metres to go.